"Conscious power number three! For real this time!"

"Okay, you can stop doing that. The Infinite Annihilator really killed that for you."

"Yeah, I don't know how to demonstrate this one anyway. Uh. Conscious power number three, forced flow?"

"Sounds like you're forcing the flow."

"The premise is pretty much exactly what you already surmised. I can control electricity that's near me, but the trick of it is, it doesn't have to follow physics. Oh, like, here." I walked up to the corner of the cage and snapped off a piece.

"Watch out for tetanus."

"So if I stick this in the ground, and then make some current in my fingertips, what would happen?"

"I'm going to guess the lightning doesn't go in the wire even though that's what it should do. Because you just told me it doesn't have to follow physics."

"You spoilsport," I said, dropping the wire. "But yeah, that's pretty much it."

She twisted a strand of her hair as she looked at the cage around her.

"Hmm, that's it? No like, lightning speed or anything?"

"No. How would that work? I can't turn into lightning."

"Oh! Maybe...hmm. So, at the end of the day, a muscle is just a spring you can tense or not, right? And what tells it to go is…" she paused dramatically, which was annoying because that was my move for today. "...an electrical impulse delivered by the nervous system! Emphasis on electrical."

"Yeah, that's why when I'm shocking somebody, they become a twitchy mess."

"Well, let's apply that backwards. You said you can electrocute your own heart to keep it pumping. What if you were to send current through your legs, faster than your nervous system would allow. Think you could run super fast then?"

"I...don't know. Mostly sounds really painful."

"That's why we try in a controlled environment. Give it a shot."

She settled in behind her cage, watching intently while I squared up. Okay. Needed to concentrate and send electricity through the muscles in my legs. I closed my eyes and focused.

Damn, there was a lot of different muscles in my legs. Which ones? I knew generally what muscle groups did what; when you work out, the ones you're using are the ones getting sore, so...running. My calves? I guess we'd start there.

Slowly, I built up a charge in my mind, focusing on my calves, but not too big a charge, I didn't want to fry myself. Maybe a little less than I used on my heart before, that really hurt. I took a deep breath and counted. One. Two. Three!

Both my calves hardened and shot taut as energy coursed through them. Involuntarily, I found myself off the ground, as my ankles snapped downwards. My legs burned like I just ran half a mile in an instant, but I was there, I'd done it! I'd made my legs fire off using only my mind!

Half a second later, I landed down on my toes and, still fully extended, like they were cramping, I bounced off them and rolled face-first into the dirt. As I lay there, I finally felt my legs relaxing, to the soothing sounds of Lia laughing her ass off again.

"You just jumped a foot in the air and fell down!" she laughed. "What are you even doing?"

"I didn't do that, that was the lightning!" I shouted back, dusting myself off. "My muscles went off when I shocked them just like you said, but it was just the same as moving it myself. Except more painful, and slower."

To demonstrate, I hopped in place a few times using only my ankles. This made Lia laugh even more.

She rubbed a tear out of her eye. "Not exactly, you definitely got like, twice the height when you jolted yourself. You looked like a dolphin jumping out of the water."

"Well, that's because the whole muscle fired at once, I guess. That explains why it hurts so much."

"Yeah this kind of sounds like a recipe for tearing or hyperextending something. Probably not a good idea."

"It was your idea," I said, glaring at her and rubbing my calves.

"Sorry, sorry. My bad. What else have we got. Hmm. Well, I did have one idea, but I'm not sure you can pull it off."

"Does it involve shocking myself and you laughing?"

"No. But it does involve a lot of physics. Classes I haven't taken yet, so I only have a rough idea how it works. Well, I have the 'net," she said holding up her holo "so I have some idea, I just don't really get it."

"Let's hear it then."

"Okay. As you might be aware, there's no such thing as magnetism in physics by itself. There's only four fundamental forces and everything else is just a by-product of these four. There's gravity, weak and strong subatomic forces...and electromagnetism. So right there in the name, there's one force that rules over both electricity and magnetism."

"Athan, master of the fundamental forces. I like it."

"Focus, ego-man. So I don't think you have it in you to just pop a magnet out of nothingness or change the magnetic properties of things around you, though again, in theory you should be able to do that if you had perfect control of your powers. But you did say you could control the flow of electricity. So, let's make an electromagnet for starters."

"Okay. How do I do that?"

"Pick up your piece of fence and just run electricity around it in a spiral, as dense, fast, and tight as you can. That's really as simple as it gets."

"Sounds easy, I guess," I said, and picked up the stiff rusty piece of metal.

It wasn't easy. Even though it was right in my hands and I could control the flow of electricity, it really didn't want to flow like that. Making a flow just loop around it a couple of times wasn't so bad, but as I tried to add more and more loops and make them denser, I felt like my concentration was slipping off the ones I already had set up, and when I did slip, two or three of my loops jumped together and unhelpfully simplified themselves into a single loop.

Still, I knew I could do this. It wasn't like the swords where I had a block on how to make it go, it was just a matter of distributing my attention as much as I could. It felt like I was trying to use my fingers to hold strings on a table on a windy day, and after a point, I just didn't have any fingers left to hold new ones down. But this was in my mind...there was no hard limit on how many fingers I had, I just had to focus harder.

I worked at it for a couple minutes while Lia sat patiently, probably looking pretty stupid from her perspective, but I was making progress. I had twenty or thirty loops, which seemed pretty good, and focused a little more, pumping up the juice.

Suddenly it was gone with a little 'ping' sound. I blinked and looked around, no idea where it went.

"Not bad, bro," Lia said, with a huge sideways grin. She reached a couple fingers through the cage and withdrew with my little piece of metal in her hands.

It had flown out of my hands and jumped to the metal cage, fifteen feet away, and then fallen to the ground when my powers fell off of it.

"Wow that's cool," I said. "I think I can do it much faster and stronger next time."

"Well, don't make it too strong, or you'll ruin my hard work," she said, pointing at the crappy bent cage. "Also, you'll have a rusty metal wreck chasing after you, and you don't have a slipskin, so you really could get tetanus. But that could be a really neat trick to, I dunno, rip the plating off of an exosuit, or tear a gun out of someone's hands, or something. You can make an electromagnet without the wire too, it just won't be nearly as strong. But, y'know, in case you're ever wandering around without a wire on-hand."

"Also probably not so good to use around Karu or AEGIS," she added.

Oh yeah, good point.

"Well, don't stop now. Any other brainstorms?" I asked, excited by our successes so far.

"Plenty, but I kind of doubt most will work. I do have one more for you today though. Again, not good for around Karu or AEGIS. You've heard of an EMP?"

"Yeah. Electro-magnetic pulse. Lots of EMP grenades and stuff used against robots, and technopaths because they fry electronics."

"Know how to make one?"

"No, I just figured you dump a bunch of electricity on a thing and it goes."

"You're not wrong, but also you're wrong. Technically, whenever you're making lightning...like real lightning, not your swords or any trapped loop of power, when you dump a bunch of energy from point A to point B, that's an EMP. Just not what people usually think of, but it makes sense, right? What bigger 'pulse' is there than a whole friggin' bolt of lightning."

"Sure. I don't...actually know how to shoot lightning at a thing, though."

"Yeah, I noticed when you did your Infinite Annihilator. You made lightning, and then it did what lightning does best. Went into the ground. In order to get lightning to work across your power's radius, you'll need your target to have a very strong electric charge already, and then build up your own strong charge, and also not have anything else in range that's a better target, like this fence, or literally anything metal in or on the ground."

"So basically never going to happen."

"Basically. But that's not the only way you can make an EMP, and while just being able to fry stuff by putting your hands on it is useful, a real EMP will spread and propagate from the site of the origin and scramble or damage circuits it comes across. So it's not limited by your power range."

"Sounds super useful. And it's a blast, so I can use it to knock out a bunch of stuff at once instead of having to go around shutting each down by hand." I thought back to when I was fighting a pack of DOG-Es under AEGIS' control, and how I had to render each one inoperable one at a time. That would have been handy. Or hell, just cleaning cam-drones up out of Karu's room.

"So the trick is, you have two very powerful charges and bring them together all at once. Creates an explosive spike all at once that goes everywhere. Goes without saying, but the bigger the forces, the bigger the boom. Now, this baby," she flashed me her wrist holo "and I'm sure Karu's jetpack and probably any other top-end military gear is going to be EMP hardened. Hardened doesn't mean unbreakable, it just means resists smaller booms. So give it a try, but if you break my holo, I'm gonna be pissed."

"Right," I said. Sounded the easiest of anything we'd done so far. I spread my arms wide, and built up a charge in each, feeling like one of those statues of the blind lady holding the sword and scales out on either side. Slowly I built up a respectable charge in each hand, and then took a deep breath and slammed my hands together.

There was a hot blast, and I felt my hands forced back apart by an explosion of sorts. A shockwave, barely visible, like a dent in the air, surged outwards. Lia covered her holo with her other hand, like that would do something.

In a moment the blast was gone. It was hard to tell it had been there at all. Nothing felt or looked different.

"Aah!" she yelled looking at it and tapping frantically. "You broke it! I told you to go easy! You broke it!"

"I did go easy! I said, running over to look. The holo showed a static image, looked like a site on electromagnets she'd pulled down from the 'net. It didn't respond when she tapped or swiped or anything.

She frantically jabbed at the machine to no avail, until, a moment later, the holo went black.

"Shit," I said.

"Do you have any idea how much this cost?" she growled, turning towards me with teeth bared. "Oh, you are so dead."

My apologies were cut short by a chime and the Ur-Horizon logo on the holo. We both froze, with Lia mid threatening-gesture, and watched. Another half second later and the holo finished rebooting and came right back to life, even loading up the site she was browsing. Hesitantly, she gave it a swipe, and the words scrolled past in a flash.

"You live today," she said, sitting back down and pawing at the device.

"I was serious, that was only like, 30% power. I was trying to be safe."

"Well if that's the case, I think you found your new super-attack. Everything nowadays, from Exosuits to guns have electronics in them, and if you can just fry all that shit in one go…"

"We might have a chance against the XPCA, you mean."

She nodded, looking frightened but excited. She sat quietly for a few seconds.

"So you're going to fight?" She asked, quietly.

"Wasn't that always the plan? Can't run, can't hide."

"Hmm, I wonder." she replied.