“I still can’t believe they suspended me my second week into classes!” Harriett exclaimed for the fifth time that day as her and Feron sat in her lab within her family’s basement. Although it was her lab, in all actuality, it was her ‘room’ that she had converted into a ‘lab’. Although surprisingly, instead of magic being the main theme of her lab as one would expect, technology reigned supreme. For while Harriett did in fact lack any type of control when it came to magic, her interest in technology could not be matched.

Harriett sat on a metal stool in the far corner of her lab, her hands working meticulously with a blowtorch over a circuit board that was meant for another one of her great invention ideas. The workbench she was working over was filled with circuit boards, sticks of ram, miscellaneous metals, computers and laptops, and other items she liked to dabble in. For this week’s frustration idea, she wanted to try her hand at altering a magical filtration gauntlet meant to siphon large amounts of energy into contained streams that she had been allowed to borrow from her father’s job. Though when they had let her borrow it, they most likely didn’t intend for a college student to attempt to alter government property. Or rather, perhaps they did and just did not care.

“I mean, it’s not like I meant for any of that to happen!” Harriett continued to exclaim.

“Of course you didn’t,” Feron calmly replied as he casually laid on Harriett’s bed next to the wall to Harriett’s left. His hands were in their usual places wrapped around his head and if he hadn’t still been continuing to answer Harriett, Harriett would easily have mistaken him to be sleeping. “I mean, who could have thought that anyone would want to recreate Jack and the Bean Stalk: The Sequel, but in modern times.”

“Good reference, you should get an award for such an obvious retort,” Harriet chided.

“If there were rewards, you know I’d collect them.” Harriett knew he was right, so she chose to continue focusing on her work. After a few more moments of silence, Feron sat up, scooched to the edge of the bed near Harriett, and placed his feet down on the ground. “You know that although I’m joking, as always, I really do mean it for once. It’s not your fault.”

Harriett stopped her work over the circuit board before her and placed the blowtorch down. Then, she pulled up her goggles onto her forehead before looking at Feron. “Feron, you’ve been giving me the same calming answer for almost 14 years. I think we both know that no matter how much I practice or focus, my magic is always going to keep getting more powerful and more uncontrollable.”

“Come on, you know that’s not true,” Feron countered. “I mean, it takes years for many to fully understand and control their powers. Heck, my father still sometimes blows up mountains when he’s training. You know how much power you need to accidentally blow up a mountain, Harriett?”

Harriett thought about it for a second.

“Don’t do the math,” Feron suddenly added.

“You can’t stop me,” she replied with a chuckle. “And we both know that between you and me, your father accidentally blowing up a mountain pales in comparison to what I could do to a mountain. With my luck, I’d probably unlock some kind of dormant volcano capable of destroying the world as we know it.”

“I think you are being a wee bit dramatic, Harriett,” Feron blandly stated.

“Oh really? Think about it for a second.”

Feron began to consider her words as he cupped a hand underneath his chin. A moment passed, and then another moment passed, until a look of concern finally overtook Feron’s face before he looked back to address Harriett again. “Just to be on the safe side, we had better keep you away from any mountains for a while. So if you have any plans to visit the Alps or the Himalayas any time soon, you might want to delay them.”

“Hmph, lucky for you, I’m more of an inside girl than a nature girl,” Harriett stated before putting her goggles back over her eyes and continuing on with her work. Truth be told, Harriett wasn’t lying in any way. Down in her lab, she could keep the rest of the world safe from her and that was all that mattered to her. Sure, Feron was allowed down, but he was one of the few people able to handle Harriett, both magically and otherwise. But down here, in her own quarters, she knew that she could control not only the safety of others, but her own technological prowess. And that was something that truly mattered to her.

Within a few minutes, Harriett had finished with the welding she was performing on the 2x2 inch circuit board she had been working on. Satisfied with the wiring job she had done on it, she placed the blowtorch down before picking up the circuit board Then, after standing up, she moved over to the far-left corner of her workbench where the black gauntlet was. She began to carefully and meticulously install the circuit board into it just above where its knuckles were. After a few more careful moments, a “wrr” sound emitted from the gauntlet as energy-filled veins came to life from the circuit board and spread all about the glove to every corner of its structure.

“There,” Harriett said as her body quickly followed up with a relaxing exhale of breath since she had been subconsciously tensing up the entire time. She picked up the gauntlet and placed it over her left hand. The gauntlet was a little big for her hand, but she figured that when the engineer who made it had first built it, he didn’t have a teenager’s hand size in mind. She moved over to the back wall approximately ten feet from where Feron was currently sitting where an electrical outlet was. Before trying her own magic on the device, she figured using an energy grounded in physics to be a more applicable test. She picked up a connecting wire specifically for the gauntlet and plugged one end into the outlet and the other into the glove. The gauntlet gave off a second “wrr” sound.

“Excellent”, Harriett stated as she watched the electrical veins around the gauntlet glow brighter. “Alright, Feron,” she stated as she turned to face her best friend, “If this works, then I’ll only have to potentially make a few adjustments before I try feeding my own magical energy into this thing.”

“Are you sure about that?” Feron casually asked as he put his left elbow to his knee and his left hand under his chin.

Harriett was too busy admiring the potential of her gauntlet and so it took her brain several seconds of knocking on her consciousness before Feron’s question registered in her mind. “Huh?” she stated with confusion. “What do you mean am I sure? This is technology we are talking about here. And we both know how I am with technology.”

“I’m not disagreeing with that, Hare, I’m just stating that your techno brain and your magic brain usually don’t get along well within your head.”

“Feron, I only have one brain,” Harriett countered.

“It wasn’t meant to be taken literally, Hare,” Feron reverse countered.

“Oh,” Harriett embarrassingly admitted. “Well… my brain’s in think mode right now. You know jokes fly over my head when I’m like this.”

“But you are always like this…,” Feron replied, drawing a poutful glare from Harriett.

Harriett turned away from Feron and set her sights upon a wooden bullseye target she had ordered online a week ago just for this momentous occasion. “Keep your smart remarks to yourself until after you see this thing in action. I’m telling you I’ve done the math.”

“Yeah, the techno math. But did you do the magical math?”

“Feron!” Harriett exclaimed.

“Okay, okay, shutting up and watching.” And with that, Feron was silent, though Harriett could still feel his judging glare drilling into her right arm.

But Harriett pulled her focus together and set all of her attention on the matter at hand. The gauntlet’s functionality was simple. It would draw energy from the electrical grid of the house, funnel it through the gauntlet and alter its current into a focused stream of energy that was constantly being altered based on the calculations the chip she had just placed in the gauntlet earlier was making. If everything went according to plan, an electrical current would visibly emit from the gauntlet’s fingertips, hit the wooden target and the wooden target only, and perhaps cause a small fire to erupt. Plain, simple, science.

She gripped her fingers together within the gauntlet, which the chip knew was the “trigger” being readied. Then, as she directed two fingers forward, the glove waited approximately two seconds before firing a three-inch diameter electrical beam at and through the wooden target.

“It worked!” Harriett happily exclaimed as she turned toward Feron with excitement flooding her body causing her to raise both of her hands up above her head. Unfortunately, Harriett had not noticed that she had balled her gloved fist up again and then extended all five fingers above her head. And so, both she and Feron were not prepared for the five electrical beams that shot out in five directions about the basement.

One beam hit one of the wires connected to the lights above her, causing the lights to immediately go out. Another beam hit the cement ceiling and dissipated without any damage being caused. Two other beams barely missed another wire upon the ceiling. But the last beam, the pinkie beam (I didn’t name it. I just observe these things.) directly connected with another one of the lights, causing not only for the light to go out, but for the entire house’s electricity to overload and short out.

Together, Harriett and Feron sat in the dark for longer than they cared to admit, with Harriett afraid to find a flashlight and look upon that smirking face of Feron’s that would immediately communicate to her the simple, wordless phrase of “I told you so.”

“Stop it,” was all Harriett managed to say after a few more seconds had passed.

“You can’t possibly tell what I’m doing,” Feron replied.

“Is your face making that same, little smirk that says you told me so and that you are always right wherever my mistakes are concerned?” Harriett scornfully asked.

A moment went by.

Another moment when by.

Halfway through the third moment, Feron simply stated, “You don’t know me,” before a few giggles betrayed him. Harriett didn’t know what she grabbed off the table, but she chucked it as hard as she could towards where she figured Feron was still sitting. Whether it connected or not, Harriett was not sure for the sound of the object hitting the ground was obscured completely as several light blue orbs flew down the stairs on the far wall from Harriett and took up residences in all four corners of the basement. Once the orbs were situated, they began to glow brighter than they already were, so bright that a passerby would have never guessed that Harriett’s house (And the current neighborhood…) were without power.