The lightning bearer

by Hope

Chapter 2. Liquids

The massive black thunderhead that hovered over the small valley had caught the attention of many pegasi by the next day, as it grew and stabilized. A few weather managers even flew in to check that Rainbow had all the paperwork in order. As Twilight flew a slow circuit around the tower, the silver chain around her neck glittered in the reflected light off of the clouds. The spell had certainly been complex, to control this cloud and to concentrate the energy contained within, and it appeared to be working just as well as the princesses had described.

With sweat dripping off her cheek, Twilight broke off from the edge of the cloud and swooped down to land next to Rainbow, who was assembling a variety of metals on a large flat stone, bundling them all together with wire.

“Why… Exactly… Are you making a sword of all things?” Twilight panted as she touched down next to her friend.

Rainbow chuckled as she propped the bundle of metal rods upright, building up rocks around the base to keep it from falling.

“Come on Twilight, you’ve read the Daring Doo series, don’t tell me you haven’t read her latest work.”

Twilight blushed and crossed her forelegs.

“I may not have had the time, but what… You’re trying to recreate a fictional weapon?” she said, quickly trying to change the topic from the fact that Rainbow had read a book she hadn’t.

“Daring Do is real, or did you forget that we went on an adventure with her?” Rainbow said with a chuckle.

“She is, but her last three books have been actual works of fiction. She’s rewriting ancient tales with a modern twist. Whatever you are trying to create doesn’t exist,” she asserted.

Rainbow spun around and put a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder.

“That’s just what I needed to hear!” she said eagerly.

“It is?”

“Of course! It’ll be even more awesome when I make it real!”

Twilight groaned, shaking her head, but before she could speak, Rainbow took off. She flew up to the top of the cloud Twilight had built, and started to hop up and down on it, pausing every few moments to put an ear to the cloud.

“What are you doing?” Twilight asked from next to her.

“Gah! Warn a filly when you’re sneaking up behind her, sheesh,” Rainbow patted her chest before resuming her work.

“You’re going to initialize the lightning strike, but I don’t think you have good enough control to make sure it’s as powerful as it can be. I’m priming the cloud with pulses of energy so that when you set it off, it will already be at max capacity.”

Twilight, for once, wasn’t sure if she understood a technical explanation.

“I’m charging up the cloud battery,” Rainbow said in response to her dumbfounded look.

“Oh!”

“Yeah. I just want you to show up to the weather factory someday and talk to my boss, you’d be lost,” the pegasus smirked.

Both of them took off and flew back down to the ground, where Twilight examined the metal rods.

“So, you don’t have a binding agent here, when you are welding together dissimilar metals…”

“Yeah, this isn’t welding,” Rainbow told her, as she started dumping sand in around the base of the pile, filling in the cracks of the stones and getting it almost up to the top of the metal rods.

“This is forging, and according to the books I read I am going to be getting the metals hot enough to mix with eachother just by, like, gravity.”

“Okay… I’m not going to be down here, right?” Twilight said nervously, looking up at the black ceiling a few hundred feet above them.

“No, Twi. You’re up at the top, giving it a nice big alicorn sized kick. I’m going to be down here with a hammer, and I’m going to try to get the mass into a sword shaped piece. Who knows, this is my first try.”

“But you’re going to get struck by lightning!”

Rainbow sighed and went over to where her metal hammer was laying, in a good sized hole which she ducked into.

“Bam. No lightning for me. Can we get started now?”

Twilight nodded and flapped her wings a few times.

“Two minute count starts now?”

Rainbow ran over to her hole and put her hoof to the button of a stop watch.

“Starts… Now.”

Both ponies clicked watches, and Twilight took off. Rainbow, meanwhile, trotted back to the nub of metal sticking out of the sand.

“You’re going to be awesome. Just you wait.”

She then flew over to her hidey hole and hunkered down, hammer in the crook of her hoof and metal tongs in the other. She pulled on a heavy apron, and slid goggles down over her eyes. Then she waited.

Comments

[Rainbow87dash]

Then she waited.

Like we await the next chapter.