21. Double Grounded (Pun Intended)
My head is throbbing like mad and I'm momentarily stunned, but I manage to catch the apple before it hits the ground. It feels warm in my hands and on closer inspection, it looks slightly scorched in places. Well, that's kind of cool. But I used a lot of electricity, just to heat it up and burn the surface. Mum walks over and holds out her hand.
"Here," I toss her the apple and she catches it with one hand, before dropping it and crying out in pain.
"What?" She gingerly picks up the apple and gives it a look over, before tossing it back. "What happened?" I ask, as I catch it.
"It shocked me. Either it absorbed some of the electricity you shot at it in the air, or you accidently charged it while holding it. Probably a bit of both."
I shrug. "I do accidently charge things quite often. But I can control it, when I focus hard enough."
She nods. "We need to work on that. But anyway, while we are out in the open..." Another apple comes out of the bag. Oh come on!
She rolls her eyes. Don't worry, I'm not gonna throw it at you this time. I moan. Back to mind speak, are we?
Yes. I sigh.
I'm never gonna get used to this.
You will. Now, instead of blasting electricity in the apple's direction, I want you to try and blast electricity into the apple.
"What, inside the apple?"
Yes, inside the apple. Try and make the electricity seek the apple, like the way lightning seeks the ground to release its energy, or the highest nearby object attached to the ground.
"But doesn't lightning strike planes and other flying things as well?"
Don't argue with me, just try it. I roll my eyes, and Mum throws the apple into the air, in an arc over me. I throw out my hands and fling a bolt of electricity at it, feeling the energy as it strikes. The apple's path through the air is stopped, and it falls to the ground beside me, smoking from a blackened hole in its side.
Again, but with more power. I build up electricity in my fingers first before she throws the next apple. This time it catches alight, still burning when it lands beside me.
Mum throws two up this time and I reach out my hands to both of them, simultaneously striking them with two bolts of lightning. The apples fall down beside me, half burnt and still flaming. Poor apples.
Mum smiles at me. "Well, that worked better than I thought. With enough energy, you could probably even vaporise something."
I grin back. "Now that, would be cool."
Several hours later I find myself lying on the couch, texting Josh and trying not to kill my phone with my only sometimes useful electrical powers. Amy has gone to one of her friend's houses for the afternoon and mum is downstairs, mucking around in the shop.
Oh, and did I mention I'm trying to text without gloves? So far so good, but I'm not sure how much longer my self-control will last. I'm not as bad at it as I make myself sound, thanks to that exercise in self-control that I did about a week back. But it's much harder to keep the energy in than releasing it, like with the apples. It's like my own power is against me, building up the pressure to get out until I can't hold it anymore and have to put the phone down, like now.
I let the floodgates on the electricity in my fingers go, and automatically my fingers start sparking. Seriously? I sigh. I'm sure there is an easier way to do this.
Of course there is.
"Gah!" I cry, jumping off the couch in fright and landing roughly on the floor, banging my healing nose on the not-so-soft carpet. "Mum!" I moan, rolling onto my back and trying to ignore the re-burning pain in my nose. "Please stop doing that!"
"This is probably the reason why I didn't tell you about my telepathy when I first found out that you had stuck your fingers in that light bulb socket. I somehow knew you would react like this." She sighs from the top of the stairs, a broom and duster in each hand.
I groan, and pull myself back onto the couch. "It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't keep on jumping into my head like that." I cautiously finger the bandages around my nose, wincing at the pain. "Oh hell, I didn't re-break it, did I?"
She studies me carefully. "Not that I can see."
"You wouldn't happen to have a healing ability, would you?"
She rolls her eyes. "If I had, I would have used it yesterday."
I sit up on the couch, and watch mum as she puts the broom and duster away in a kitchen cupboard. I look back at my cellphone and feel the energy tingling in my fingers.
"Mum," I ask, and she turns to look at me. "Maybe, when you aren't busy, you could maybe-"
"Help you control the flow of electricity in your hands?" I nod. "I'm not busy. I can help you now, for a bit." She sits down on the couch next to me and thinks, while I look at my hands and try in vain to stop them from sparking.
"Maybe..." Mum pauses while she thinks, "maybe you have too much power built up to begin with. You don't release it very often."
"Yeah, okay. But I can't release any power in here, though. I would probably start a fire or something. And how would I release it without attracting the attention of half the neighbourhood anyway?
"You could... hmmmm, try channel your energy into the ground. Like, what the earth's atmosphere does when it builds up too much electrical energy in the clouds."
"Wait, what? How does that work? In here?"
Mum rolls her eyes. "No, outside. Come." I follow her downstairs and out into our lot's tiny backyard. It's barely eight metres by four metres big and the grass is a dull greying green colour, from a lack of sunlight from the shadows of the high buildings surrounding us.
"Is this even gonna work?" I ask her, looking hesitantly down at the ground. For some reason, this doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Knowing me, I might catch the grass on fire or something by mistake.
"There's only one way to find out." Mum nods and wisely steps off the grass and back into the house. I carefully reach down and touch the grass, placing my hand against the ground. I let a little bit of energy escape and I feel it trickle into the ground. It's a weird sensation, but at least I'm not getting a nasty electric shock or something. I think this might actually work.
"Keep going," suggests my mum, so I do, letting a little more power escape into the earth. That weird sensation I feel is kind of like a tugging feeling, actually. I collapse to my knees and place the other hand down on the ground, letting more electricity leave me and travel into the soil. I don't even have focus on it, now, it leaves on its own, like its returning back where it belongs. I hear a familiar woman's voice in the back of my mind, maybe telling me to stop, but it's too quiet to hear properly so I don't listen, instead focusing on the energy as it leaves me.
After a few long seconds, the current slows down and trickles to a stop, the weird tugging sensation leaving me and being replaced by a strange, empty feeling. I breathe in. The world snaps back into focus around, even though I don't think it ever unfocused and-
"...don't let it all... HOLY... TIM!" I look up to see my mother standing over me. What? Wasn't she standing inside the house before?
"Mum, what are you..."
"Okay," she swears under her breath. "That was probably my fault for suggesting that you try and release the electricity built up in your body. I didn't think that you would accidently release all of it..."
"What do you mean, all of it?" I slowly stand up and hold my hand out in front of me, trying to generate electricity, even just a spark or feel the flow of it in my muscles...
"Oh, crap..." 845Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbM7KEwReWK
