Chapter 5:
Thundercite
WINTER ARRIVED AND BROUGHT WITH IT cold, dry air. I changed my set of clothes to deal with the chilly temperatures. I didn’t mind it. I found there was something fantastical as well as purifying about it.
Since I was giving Flare a rest, I officially moved on to my next big experiment: lightning magic. There was a reason why I decided to do lightning after fire. In video games, the main types of magic were usually fire, water, wind, earth, lightning, darkness, and holy. Out of these, earth and water were physical objects rather than phenomena, and I didn’t know what to do about darkness or holy magic. That left fire, wind, and lightning.
Judging from my fire experiments, I assessed that mana interacted with it. Wind was nothing more than air, so it already blew against my mana every time I practiced it. I did try sending some mana into the ground and water, but nothing happened. Lightning was my only hope.
I know what you are thinking. Flints create fire by producing a spark—an electric spark, meaning that the Flare technique that I had been calling fire magic was actually a lightning magic of sorts. Perhaps this was why the flint created blue flames.
I arrived at a provisional hypothesis: the physics and sciences of this world did not align with what I knew from Earth. That, or magic simply existed beyond the bounds of those rules. Either way, I presumed that under the principles of magic, the physical phenomena of discharging sparks fell within the category of fire magic.
It may sound like a big assumption, but I was starting to consider that this planet was likely not Earth. I had thought about this plenty of times before, but I had always gotten caught up in logic and commonsense and lost track of an answer. Magic was supposedly pure fantasy, after all.
I concluded that spark discharge equals fire magic. If you wanted to get really technical, both electricity and fire were related to plasma…no, never mind that. I thought that I needed a direct source of electricity to create lightning magic. Part of me feared that no substances other than fire reacted to mana. That would mean that magic in this world didn’t live up to my expectations, and all I could do was pray for another outcome.
Only experiments would tell. I would see what happens when mana is applied to a source of electricity! The only obvious problem? There were no electrical outlets or anything of the sort here. I’d have to make an electric source from scratch.
The simplest way to self-generate electricity was to create static electricity. You could do this by rubbing some fabric or wool material against a rod of metal or glass. My best bet was using metal as a conductor, but for that I’d also need the equivalent of a grounding wire that would absorb and reset the current. For that, I’d need rubber…if it existed here.
Hang on, isn’t glass also an electricity insulator? I felt like I had heard that it didn’t conduct electricity well. Neon tubes would’ve been even better, but of course I didn’t have access to those. They required electricity to be made in the first place. But would generating static electricity in the first place be enough to create sparks with my mana?
Uh, do we have any Hiraga Gennai’s in the chat? Or maybe one of his famous hand-operated generators? But I’d need a Leyden jar for that (I think?). Ugh, I don’t even know where to begin. I wasn’t particularly interested in beginning, either. Especially since I had no idea if the glass in this world, or any of the other substances, would possess the same properties as they had on Earth. I’d need to investigate all of that to find out. If there were electric eels or a similar animal around, all this would be a heck of a lot easier.
Of course, I could research each of these things individually, but that would be pricey. Any custom glassware or metal products would be crazy expensive. Certainly, they would be out of a seven-year-old’s budget, and I didn’t want to cause Dad any trouble.
All I needed was a cheap source of electricity. The most surefire method would be a static electricity generator, but I didn’t have any synthetic fibers or plastics. Even if I had, it would be tough generating a static spark large enough to be visible. I’d heard that historically, static electricity wasn’t something most people encountered in their lives.
How do I do this?
I hardly moved before I bumped into another wall. Maybe Dad would have some ideas. I went to the living room where Dad was resting.
“Hey there, Shion. Do you need any help with your research today?”
“Yeah, kinda. I’m a bit stuck, and would like to hear your thoughts. Are there any tools or animals out there that can create electricity?”
“Electricity? What’s that?” Dad scratched his chin.
Oh. I guess that makes sense, I thought. They didn’t even have a word for it.
“Err, uh, you know, it’s what happens when there’s a lightning strike.”
“There aren’t any animals or tools that make lightning,” Dad said. “Does it need to be actual lightning?”
“I want to touch my mana to it,” I explained. “Of course, lightning is unpredictable and too dangerous. Even if you set up and stood there with a lightning rod, who knows how long it would take.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I get the gist. Still, this electricity thing…I do feel like I’ve heard about something like a lightning strike, but less intense.”
Was he was talking about static electricity? His phrasing made it seem more like he was talking about a natural phenomenon. If the surge was big enough to be seen, then it meant that whatever it generated was a substantial amount of electricity. How did it work?
“Graste has mentioned it before,” Dad said. “All right, should we head for Istria today?”
“Yeah! Please!”
Mom was out for the day, and Marie said she wanted to stay home to practice sword fighting. She never took so much as a single day off. Sure, I had been working on my magic daily, but that didn’t really strain my body. Training with a sword really wiped you out. I couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like to train as much as Marie did.
Mom and Dad were often concerned and cautioned her to rest. She wouldn’t even talk to me about it, not after the goblin attack. We talked normally mostly, but whenever I brought up her fighting, her eyes told me that she had no comment. I hated seeing Marie like that, so I started avoiding the topic. I guess she felt cornered. Still, it wasn’t that big of a problem for now, so I just kept an eye on her.