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Trixie shuddered. Night was coming on fast. At least firewood was easy enough to find, even if she restricted herself to the dead branches she found on the ground. Maybe it was a silly notion, but she didn't like the idea of chopping wood in this forest. Just like everything else here, the trees seemed a little too alive.
Soon enough, she had enough debris for a fire and a thick smoke joined the late evening mist. With the fog came the cold, came the cold. Damp, insidious, creeping under her skin. Trixie huddled closer and swept her mantle around her. To pass the time, she flipped trough her notebooks and pondered ideas for her next show.
Fireworks are FINE, good opener, but we've all SEEN IT BEFORE! Isn't there's anything with a bit more “OOMPH!”?
There was a rumble in the distance as a displeased anvil-shaped cloud came drifting towards the forest. Trixie looked at her note, then up to the giant black anvil in the horizon and back to her note again. A flash illuminated the sky and made everything sharp for a fraction of a second before it went away. Three seconds later, the thundercloud roared from roughly a kilometer away.
In her mind, Trixie pictured what it would look like if a bolt like that got shot straight up towards the clouds as the opener of a show, every eye in town would be fixed on her... but how do you trap lightning in a bottle?
A thick shroud of rain had already enveloped the wagon when Trixie began working on her invention. It was hardly the most well-designed device in the world, but for something that came to her in a literal flash of brilliance, it was a pretty decent job.
The device consisted of an old vase augmented with lead (hard to find, but she always kept some around for basic alchemy) and vitriol (well, she had a lot of that, at least...). A copper wire led from the vase to a kite made from her old cape. As a finishing touch, she put a spell on it that told the laws of physics to go fuck themselves.
A massive flash of light illuminated her from the other side of the window, followed almost immediately by a loud thunder.
“No point in wasting any more time.” She darted out into the torrents of rain that whipped across the landscape. The kite dislodged from her back and the winds dragged it upwards towards the steely-gray sky. Another flash of lighting dashed past her and hit a nearby tree.
“higher, gotta get it higher,” she muttered to herself. “The trees around here are just too tall.”
The air was thick with the smell of ozone and lighting bolts darted from cloud to cloud up above her, just outside of her reach. She risked grabbing the thin copper wire to steer it towards a gust of wind. The kite climbed higher, but kept threatening to crash at any moment. The clouds above her roared. She let go of the kite, only a matter of time now before...
There must've been a flash right beforehand, or so Trixie assumed, but she never saw it. Her vision just turned completely black, she couldn't tell if she had closed her eyes or not until the shroud of darkness dissolved into dancing black dots.
Her ears kept ringing and she could still taste the lighting as a metallic flavour in her mouth. It took her a while to even process what had just happened, and when she did, she simply fell down onto the ground. The world around Trixie was spinning, making her thoughts collide with one another as if in a centrifuge.
“Air... smell... lighting... get inside... Trixie just caught lighting in a bottle... Trixie's awesome!” She drifted into unconsciousness, lost in a mixture of alarm and triumph.
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