Chapter 14: Alternative Energy

I braced myself. I averted my eyes and squeezed them shut. Despite my best efforts, I’m pretty sure I flinched.

Neither the bulb nor the Iron exploded.

When my eyes cracked open, I saw the former glowing at full luminosity. If anything, it looked brighter than its twin over the kitchen counter. Its plastic housing felt hot in my hand. I pulled it away from the plate – instantly, the bulb went dark – and touched the resistor at the bottom of its housing.

I hissed. “Shit! That got really hot.”

The pain faded almost instantly, but when I checked my phone, I saw I’d lost one HP. Third Eye regarded it as a serious enough burn to count as actual damage.

“Weird,” Lena said. “It’s obviously putting more, um, voltage, probably, through it, since the brightness went up, so it’s not like I just put in a mix of heat and electricity. I don’t get why triple Fire would generate so much more power than double Fire, though.”

“Be honest,” I said. “How likely is it that neither of us actually know how the bulb works well enough to test with it?”

“Pretty likely.” She smiled sheepishly. “But only if we were trying to test something more complex. I know at least enough about LEDs to know this one shouldn’t be jumping from not enough to run it to so much it overheats the resistor.”

“How much more do you think that would be?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Four or five times what it’s rated for, maybe? Normally, the only thing you’d see if you screwed up around the house would be your bulbs degrading faster than they’re supposed to, and we’re still talking years. They shouldn’t overheat like this.”

“If you’re right about how much double Fire was putting in,” I said, “that means triple was at least a twentyfold jump in voltage, right?”

She nodded. “Which makes no sense.”

I trained my phone on the plate. However much electricity coursed through it, it wasn’t enough to heat it up to even the faint reddening it got from a single unaltered instance of Fire. To look at it, you’d think it was harmless, inert.

“I think...” I swallowed. “I think I should see how much damage touching it does.”

“If it’s multiplied twenty times every time I put more Fire into it, that’s like four hundred times the damage, Cam.” Lena squared her shoulders. “My HP come back every night. Yours don’t. You need to let me do it.”

“No way I’m letting you touch this to the walls of our apartment, Lena. We have no idea how charged it is.”

“Fine, but it’s – I’m not gonna say too dangerous, but too wasteful for you to keep testing this way.” She cocked her head. “Can you make rubber?”

“With Plastic and Water? I think so.” I flicked to the Third Eye app on my phone. “Why?”

“Because,” she said, “if you make a big sheet of rubber, you can use Air to push my Iron over here where I can touch it.”

My thumb hovered over the screen. “I’m really not comfortable with this, Lena.”

“I, on the other hand, am totally comfortable with the idea of one-shotting Matt and basically anybody else we’ve run into. Get your rubber on already!”

I was pretty sure the terrible accent she tried to put on for her last sentence was supposed to be British. You know, just in case I missed the double entendre.

I chuckled and shook my head. “If you’re going to put it that way, how could I refuse you?”

I set the rapidly cooling bulb down on the windowsill so I had access to both hands. I gave the wiki a quick check to confirm the gestures I needed, then conjured a sheet of Plastic. It unfurled in the air between us, untextured gray, undetailed, but unmistakably present.

“Kinda nostalgic, isn’t it,” Lena said.

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I looked up. “What is?”

“You making Plastic here in the apartment,” she said. “It’s just like our first time.”

Despite yet another double entendre, I knew she meant my first experiment using a Reactant. It felt weird to me to think it had been less than a month. Back then, even something as simple as the way Third Eye’s Plastic looked so realistic, the way it responded to Air, had been enough to wow us. Now we took it for granted. We shouldn’t.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t muster any nostalgia. That experiment had ended when Lena got herself tangled in the Plastic. She’d pretended to choke on it as a prank, it had terrified me, and when she started laughing, we got into a big fight.

Later, we learned that she’d lost a lot of HP while she was pretending. If she’d kept it up too long, or if she’d had less HP to begin with, could she have actually asphyxiated? We didn’t know and sure as hell weren’t going to test.

No, we were just going to test how much damage something that might be charged four hundred times over did to her.

I lowered my phone. I couldn’t see the Plastic, but I knew it would be drooping. “I really don’t want to do this, Lena.”

She glared. “If you don’t, I’m just going to find something that doesn’t look like it’ll catch fire and shove the Iron against it until I can touch it.”

I sighed. “Fine.”

I brought my hands up and curled my fingers. Water changed the Plastic before me, rendering it darker, more opaque, more compact, thicker. When I moved my hand back and forth, it wobbled audibly.

I took a deep breath and switched to Air.

Lena flexed her wings and braced. “Let’s do this thing.”

I gripped her Iron with the rubber sheet. Slowly, I pushed it forward.

If it seemed to hurt Lena, I could toss it away with a flick of my hand.

I trusted – I tried to trust – I could do so quickly enough.

She set her phone on her desk and stretched her fingertip out to the Iron.

“Ow!” She jerked back and I yanked the Iron away.

I pushed it to the side and rushed forward. “Are you okay?”

“I’m good, I’m good.” She spread her hands. That rendered her Iron unselected. It dropped to the floor, slipping out of my rubberized grasp. We heard it clatter. “I sure hope it didn’t stay charged after I stopped selecting it.”

I dropped the rubber and surged across the apartment to grasp her arms. “We can check that in a second. You’re sure you’re not hurt?”

She batted at my hand. “Positive. I mean, I took damage, and it stung, but if how bad it feels is any measure, it wasn’t even close to the shit the creature was throwing out.”

“Good,” I breathed.

She chuckled and tilted her head back. I think she wanted to look exasperated. Maybe if I’d watched her through my phone camera, she would’ve pulled it off. Her avatar was a lot better than she was at looking imperious.

Since I was relying on only my two eyes, her freckles spoiled the effect. I found I didn’t mind. I leaned forward and kissed her.

“All right, worrywart,” she said. “You can tell I’m still here.”

“Nope, not sure. Further testing may be required.”

She kissed me back. “I can think of a few experiments we might run.”

“Your dedication to science is inspiring.” I reached out to embrace her.

She scooped her phone up from her desk. “For instance, we can check my HP.”

I smiled. “I know that’s a good idea.”

She flicked at her phone screen. “Huh. How much did you lose when you touched the charged plate in the park?”

“Six,” I said.

“In a way, that checks out.” She tilted her phone up and waved me over.

I stepped around her and peered at the screen. The awful interface of the Third Eye app, with its gray background and low resolution font, made it hard to read our own status, much less someone else’s. When I squinted, though, I saw Lena was at 982/1000 HP.

She’d lost eighteen from touching the plate after she charged it with triple Fire. Three times as much as me, not the four hundred times we’d feared.

“So that means...” Lena chewed her lip. “Okay, no, I actually have no idea what it means.”

“It makes a kind of sense,” I said. “Back in the park, you wondered if adding extra instances of Fire both made the effect stronger and aligned it more closely with the real world.”

“Oooh,” she said. “In that case, the electricity I generate with just one unit of Fire is probably already way more than it takes to power the bulb. I don’t know what exactly six damage translates into, but enough to hurt. You could run an LED like that off some AA batteries; touching those wouldn’t exactly shock you.”

“That would make it awkward to actually power something using Third Eye,” I said.

She nodded. “Ideally, you’d probably want to get to a hundred percent real, or aligned, or whatever, and then use a transformer to step it down to your needs. Of course, we don’t know how much Fire that would take.”

“You know what we do know?” I asked.

“Hm?”

I touched her arm. “You were right about Fire’s verb.”

She looked down at my hand. Her fingers laced through mine. A little smile spread across her lips. “Yeah.”

“We should let Erin know,” I said.

“You should do that.”

“What about you?” I asked.

Lena stepped back and rubbed her hands. “I am gonna figure out what other kinds of energy I can pump into this shit!”