Chapter 13: Charged
NugsFan15: It works.
NugsFan15: The gestures are awkward. I almost ran out of MP trying to get them right. I kept having to toggle back and forth between Fire and Earth to avoid wasting Iron every time I screwed up. Also, I had to buy a really small bulb to confirm the effects.
NugsFan15: In the end, though, I was able to produce proof.
After that, Erin linked a video clip.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Open it, already.”
I did.
Erin’s camerawork wasn’t going to win any subscribers to her hypothetical future YouTube channel. Once she steadied her hand, though, I could see what she was pointing her phone at.
A tiny LED light, the kind you might see three of in a keychain flashlight, lay on a wooden board propped on a bed. It connected to a strip of weirdly flat copper wire. I suspected the “copper” was Third Eye “Iron” she’d changed the composition of using Water, then shaped with Earth. She confirmed it a moment later by turning the Third Eye overlay off – no copper – then back on again.
“Let’s try this again,” Erin said.
The camera went wild one more time as she worked at the app on her phone, but when it stabilized, a long rod of Iron floated in the air above the wire.
“Now for Fire,” she said. “I really hope I get it right this time.”
At first, nothing seemed to happen. Gradually, the rod began to glow from the inside out. Heating up. Even Lena’s three Fire only barely softened Iron; Erin’s one certainly wasn’t going to melt it.
She must’ve done something else, because the glow faded. Another reset?
It seemed not, because she said, “Ah!”
The camera angle adjusted as she lowered the rod.
When it touched the wire, the LED lit up.
“Yes!” Erin said in the video.
“Hell yes!” Lena and I both shouted. Lena grabbed my arms and I grabbed hers. We shook each other.
While I dashed off a thank you message to Erin, Lena made for the kitchen cabinets. Over her shoulder, she called, “I don’t think we have any bulbs that small, do we?”
“Probably not,” I said. Most of the light in our apartment came from the various electronic devices we spent our time glued to. Only the ceiling fixture over the counter saw enough use for us to have needed to change a bulb in the time Lena had lived here.
Nonetheless, she popped up with a four pack of LEDs, down one. She fished another out and held it up to the light of its twin.
I looked it over and raised an eyebrow. “That looks like it’s a lot higher voltage than the one Erin practiced with. And we don’t have a way to make a wire.”
“I don’t think we should need the wire,” Lena said. “If anything, putting another Third Eye object in the way might degrade performance. Make it less real, you know? Or less aligned or whatever. I’ll just charge up some Iron and touch the bulb right to it.”
I frowned. “What if it blows up?”
She rolled her eyes. “You just mentioned this bulb being bigger than the one Erin could barely get to light up. The failure state is that I can’t power it at all, not that it blows. Besides, do you realize how high the voltage would have to get to explode an LED?”
“Honestly? I have no clue.”
“High,” Lena said. “Trust me, I squeaked through one whole semester of electrical engineering in college.”
I supposed if she was wrong, her HP would protect her.
Actually, I supposed mine would protect me. “I better hold the bulb.”
She shook her head. “It’s sweet of you to worry about me and all –”
“Who said anything about you?” I got up and held my palm out for the bulb. “Without either Earth or Air, the only way you can get close enough to your own Material to touch it is to shove it against the wall. I don’t want you to burn the wallpaper or short something out.”
She scrunched up her nose and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t really believe you.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
I wiggled my fingers.
She sighed and dropped the bulb into my grasp. “Fine. I don’t know what you’re going to do when you run out of HP and can’t tank for me anymore.”
“Probably something stupid,” I said. “At least I won’t burn down our apartment, though.”
I strode to the window and held up the bulb.
Lena took a position on the opposite side of the room. Between her distance and the window at my back, I felt a chill through my thin sweatshirt.
She stretched out her hand and phone.
In the park, we’d discovered that she could change the kind of energy Fire infused into her Iron.
Despite the progress she seemed to have made getting different effects without the use of gestures, this one did seem to require hand movements. Either that, or concentrating on her hand allowed her to focus her mind correctly. She tucked her index and ring finger in, bent her thumb out to one side, and extended her other two fingers.
It looked awkward as hell, but once she’d gotten it down, she’d been able to “cool off” a plate she conjured and replace the heat with electricity. A different form of energy, but still energized. I didn’t know if she was right about the verb for Fire, or if, better yet, what the Reactants meant was at least partly based on how we thought of them.
What I did know was that touching the electrified plate had given me a painful shock and stripped away a few HP. For combat purposes, it didn’t seem any better than heating the plate up. Both relied on smashing it into the target to do serious damage. Even with the higher MP cost for triple Fire, the explosion seemed more likely to help her beat Matt.
Outside of battle, on the other hand, generating electricity seemed a lot more useful than generating heat. We’d shot a quick video and sent it on to Erin, whose combination of collegiate lab equipment and more varied Reactants made her better suited to testing real-world effects.
Lena looked at the bulb in my hand. She chewed her lip. “This may not do anything, you know? We could run up to the store and buy a tiny LED.”
“Might as well try this one. Unless you don’t want to risk wasting a unit of Iron.” If this ended up being a more productive line of testing, I would switch over to taking more Wood and leave the Iron for Lena. At the moment, her reserves were dangerously low.
“Nah, it’s fine.” She grinned. “If I can pull it off, I’ll get to lord it over Erin.”
“I didn’t realize you were competing.”
“We’re not. But if we were, I’d be winning.” Lena curled the fingers of her free hand and tapped her phone screen with her thumb.
I felt the temperature in the apartment change as she conjured a heated Iron plate in the air between us. She furrowed her brow and adjusted her fingers.
While she changed the energy, I got my own phone out and took the opportunity to admire her –
I mean, to see the effects of what she was doing in Third Eye.
She snorted, so I guess I wasn’t terribly convincing.
She didn’t break her concentration, though, and a moment of painful-looking contortion later, she gave a nod. “I think I’ve got it.”
I reached around my phone and used it to aim the LED’s resistor at the plate. On my screen, they touched. On or off it, I felt the pushback from trying to exert force against a Third Eye object.
I could shove the plate down easily enough if I actually pushed on it, and I wasn’t exactly a bruiser. Still, the fact I felt any resistance should’ve been our first hint that Third Eye could influence the real world.
That influence did not extend to lighting up the LED in my hand.
I frowned.
Lena didn’t. “Okay, that makes sense. This is probably about the same size bulb Erin originally tried and couldn’t get to light up. However much electricity I’m putting into that plate, or at least, however much is ‘real,’ it isn’t enough to turn the bulb on.”
“You’re going to try another instance of Fire, then?”
We hadn’t gone that far in the park. Since the only way we had to test the amount of electricity Lena was imparting was me touching the plate, and by extension, me using up my unreplenishable HP for something that wasn’t even giving her combat practice, we’d decided to wait for Erin’s feedback.
“That’s the plan,” Lena said. She kept her hand fixed in the same awkward position.
“That looks uncomfortable,” I said.
“Is.” Nonetheless, she held the pose while her other hand tapped her phone.
The bulb I held flickered dimly to life.
“Hell yes,” Lena said.
I resisted the urge to pump my fist, which would probably have put my hand in contact with the plate and given me another, worse, jolt. “Looks like it’s just barely powering it up.”
Lena glanced at the light over the kitchen counter. “I’d say it’s at about a quarter of the luminance it’s supposed to have. You ready for me to step it up to a third instance of Fire?”
“How sure are you,” I asked, “this thing isn’t going to explode?”
“The bulb? Totally. Another fifty percent voltage probably won’t even light it all the way up, much less blow it. Which, again, isn’t what would happen to an LED unless you overcharged it so bad it could explode any device.”
I nodded.
“The Iron, on the other hand?” She shrugged. “Let’s face it, we don’t really understand how I get explosions to happen in the first place. I don’t think it should blow, since I’m not pumping a bunch of Fire in all at once. I’ve never managed to explode anything but Wood to begin with. No promises, though.”
“At least if it does blow up,” I said, “you’ve discovered one hell of a weapon.”
“Right?” She flashed a grin, but it didn’t last. “We’re sure that HP is going to protect us from at least one hit, no matter what, right?”
“I don’t know about ‘no matter what,’” I said, “but I don’t believe that anything you or I could do is going to compare to the hits we tanked from the creature. Until we get to its level, I’m comfortable saying it’s safe for both of us.”
“Make sense.” She looked down at her phone. “How loud do you think it would be if my Iron blew up?”
“Why?”
“You know our landlord is just itching to throw us out and get in a tenant who hasn’t locked in a rate,” she said.
I grimaced. “We could do this in the park.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but have you considered that I really want to find out what happens?”
“Which makes two of us,” I said. “Fuck it.”
She echoed my sentiment.
Then her thumb jabbed her phone screen.