Amazon has me spoiled. The engine didn't come yesterday. It didn't come today. Checking on the order showed it isn't coming tomorrow. More like two weeks from now.

So I hauled the desk I'd prepared back into the workshop and thought about what else I could do.

Need aluminum for the frame. That's metal shops to make the parts for me, or scrapyards for buying aluminum odds and ends to smelt, or a lengthy trip for bauxite in Arkansas. If there even are bauxite nodes.

Tsu'na has been having some luck with mylar, though she got distracted with plexiglass. I should talk with her about making a greenhouse with it, especially since the weather's getting cooler. We haven't done anything with gardening yet. Need to add harvestable topsoil to The List to help with hybridizing.

The List does seem to mushroom, doesn't it?

Starting to feel the pinch of time. Even if we weren't working at the diner and the Pit and the library, even if we didn't sometimes spend entire days gathering, we're still at the point where there's more projects than hours in a day. And as nice a job on the workshop that we did (if I do say so myself), it's also nice to see what's outside of it.

It's not like we can have assistants to work on some of this stuff with us. That would involve training someone in Eorzean crafting, which means Eorzean skills, which means enabling someone to be as dangerous as, well, we are. At best, if we can contain some of the aspects of what we do, we can get people to help us with "Earth-accessible" aspects.

Like aether shards. We've got these crystallizations of the essence of stuff; we can use them for more than just crafting. We've tried on occasion...Tsu'na managed to light a campfire with a fire shard by piling wood on it and channeling the aether out of it to activate it. It worked. It singed her clothes and scorched her hand and left threatening sparks on her hair, but it did in fact light the fire.

We've had similar results with other shards. A water shard drenched us and left a mud puddle. A cold shard left my hand stuck to a rock for a minute. A wind shard nearly knocked us on our asses.

So, yeah, the shards are resources that we should be able to draw on. It probably involves building some sort of container to restrict the output (without Cid and his engineering company) and a more controlled and focused way of channeling the aether (without Urianger and his theories, or Y'Shtola and her aetherflow vision). No one taught us this crap in Eorzea; it was all "try this and see" or "talk to X and he/she will provide you with something." And it isn't supposed to work in this world anyway. I think.

So yesterday I got the bright idea of channeling a lightning shard. Lightning is electricity, right? So we should be able to use a lightning shard as a power source or a battery or a fuel cell or something. But given our results with other shards I figured I should think about it before releasing/manifesting/actualizing lightning.

My understanding of electricity is that it's all about flow. Everything on Earth that uses electricity relies on it flowing, like a water wheel relies on flowing water. If it doesn't come in, there's no flow. If there's nowhere for the water to go, there's no flow. So it isn't enough to just have electricity...you have to give it a path to travel. You can't just throw lightning at a TV and expect it to work. You can expect it to melt, but not work.

That's why electric plugs have two wires: one for electricity coming in, and one for it going out. Essentially an entire house works that way, with electricity coming in from the power company and back out. I think a subdivision is a big parallel circuit, with all the houses essentially connected to two big wires.

But everything that talks about electricity also talks about "ground". An electrical ground is supposed to be something electricity can go into and not come out of again...a "sink". I'd always thought it was a jargon term, but no, it actually refers to the Earth, as in sticking a wire in the ground. Still not clear on exactly what it is about the ground that absorbs electricity, whether it's just got so much electrochemical potential, or it's the planet's electrical field (I think Tesla talked about that), or even something about the water table. But it works. You can stick a wire carrying electricity into the ground and that electricity will discharge.

There is in fact such a thing as "single wire earth return", where you're sending electricity to some place in the middle of nowhere. You don't have a subdivision to make up the circuit, so you just have a single wire carrying electricity into the place and a wire coming out of the place and going straight into the ground. Assuming the ground at the place is sufficiently...electrically permeable?...the place has current flow.

So I made a recipe for copper wire (what we called "bell wire" when I was growing up, single strand, maybe a couple millimeters thick, great for kids' science stuff), wrapped it around a lightning shard and stuck the free end into the ground. Then I channelled aether from the shard to release/manifest/etc. it.

There was a bright flash, a pop, and then an arc of lightning between where the shard had started out and what, when it was done, looked like a fulgurite in the dirt. No sign of the wire. It was as if the lightning had simply atomized the wire, but still used it as a good suggestion of which way to go. I tried with another shard and a slightly thicker wire and got the same result.

Tsu'na came out of the workshop to see what was making the noise after I'd vaporized four successively bigger wires. I explained what I was doing, and she watched as I tried one more wire. This one didn't exactly vaporize...it turned bright red before exploding.

We thought it was funny. That is, when the searing pain stopped and the holes in our faces filled in and the little pieces of metal fell out and the skin grew back, we chuckled a little. But before I tried any more wire I threw together a steel barbut with faceplate and a steel cuirass. Because that's what armor is for.

Tsu'na settled on the bench to be entertained outside of splatter distance. I think she was in fact entertained when, on my next attempt, the lightning decided the cuirass' woven-wire sleeve would be a much better path to follow than the wire wrapped around the shard. Since it was just a shard and not something bigger it was like a low-level Thaumaturge Thunder hit. Still an eye-opener, though. I switched to a leather jacket.

I suspect the problem was that I was discharging the shard all at once, like a blasting cap. A battery releases charge slowly over time; if you could get a battery to release all its charge at once it probably wouldn't do the wire any favors either. But this was proof-of-concept work, getting to the point where I could maybe measure how much charge a shard had and figure out how to contain it.

A few more shards later I had a wire (for certain values of "wire"...it was more like a thin rod at that point) that wouldn't explode or melt from the shard discharge. It still got warm, maybe enough to cook on if it had been a sustained discharge rather than a burst. I decided that was good enough for proof-of-concept and called it a day.

I also don't know if a given spot can get "saturated" from too much electricity being pumped into it. And an Earth ground wouldn't be practical for a battery or fuel cell anyway; I'll need a more portable and self-contained version of a "ground".

When I started my bouncer shift at the Pit, I saw Trevor come in and realized I maybe had an assistant. I greeted him, asked Sam to put a beer for him on my tab, chatted a bit about the shed, and made a pitch. "So, I'm working on developing a fuel cell..."

"Fuel cell?"

"Yeah, like a battery except you refill it instead of recharging it."

"Oh, okay. What's it made of?"

"Trade secret."

Sam gave me a look. He probably expected me to say "classified." Fooled him.

I continued, "Working with electrochemical stuff is kind of new for me. I was wondering if you could help me out a bit, take some measurements of power levels, maybe recommend ways to control charge, that sort of thing."

"This a job? You're not gonna try paying me in copper again, are you? That stuff was heavy."

"Well, since we're talking heavy...". I pulled out the barbut and set it on the bar.

Trevor stared at it. He stared at me.

"Like I said, we work with metal."

"Wait...you made this?"

"Yeah, we do armor, weapons, jewelry, all the renfesty stuff. So can I interest you in some armor? Comes with a cuirass."

"Queer-ass?"

"Breastplate. Chest piece. Shirt. You might be the only fullmetal electrician in Oklahoma."

Trevor looked back at the helmet and tapped it with a fingernail. "Well...I mean, yeah...that'd be cool...I guess...not like I could wear it or anything..."

"You can't?"

"Seriously? Wearing a metal suit while working with electrical stuff? That'd be stupid!"

"Oh. Right. Sure." Tsu'na wasn't at the bar then, but I could still somehow see her smirk.

So now I've got Trevor willing to work for armor. As soon as I figure out how to contain the lightning so he has something to work on. If things get too complex I may need to make him greaves too. He might not be able to move by the time we're done.