There's nothing wrong with having a good cry sometimes. Getting a weigh off your chest, Misery loving company, Jon loving Hann- Okay, lets not get crazy with this one, shall we? Events unfold including but not limited to: Feelings being talked about, Facts being discussed, and some shocking discoveries are made!

 

“-and then I looked up, and this dome of converging Laylines had formed high above the crater, I was SO scared John! Magic like that could crack the Earth in two if we let it, I didn’t have a choice in the end, I watched as thousands of cores worth of magic started rising up into the Layline streams and I knew that I didn’t have a choice... I thought... I thought I was going to die, John? I readied myself for it, I accepted it, and with everything I had I made SURE that the magic from Arista’s stupid crazy plan wouldn’t TOUCH the earth as long as it had to get through me but... but I was so scared...”

The sobs came back and John rubbed my shoulders a few times as I struggled to get the last few parts out past my trembling lips.

“I woke up on that thick, flat slab of obsidian where Wizard Island used to be, what felt like barely seconds later, and I could hear you calling me. You know the rest from there... it was all too much at that point, I’d been ready to kill, ready to die to protect everyone, not just the people I cared about but EVERYONE on the planet... I wasn’t ready to live through it all afterwards though...”
Slowly the sobs petered out and I was left sniffling to myself slightly as John kept on with his silent but reassuring presence.

“By the time I’d really worked out what was going on we were almost home and I panicked. I panicked so hard and just like Arista, just like all the others you used to call your ‘scared little rabbit’ I ran away from it all and hid as if it would make it all better somehow-”
With one last big sniff I tried to straighten my shoulders slightly to show that I wasn’t about to fall apart again over all of this just because I’d finally told someone what happened all those months ago.
“-I was so stupid...”

A beat of silence fell between us which felt like it had some immaterial ‘weight’ to it, as if I’d just imparted some great fact upon the world which would change the way things worked for all of eternity or something... and then John snorted back a laugh, unsuccessfully I might add.

Within moments I joined him as we both collapsed in a tired, broken puddle of relived giggles at just how stupidly melodramatic that final point had come out sounding.

“I... was, like, SO stu’pid!”
John echoed my own words back in his best attempt at sounding like some sort of vacuous bimbo from the worst acting talent pool a low-budget porno could ever hope to produce through peroxide and an IQ lower then my new, tiny, shoe size.

“D-don’t be an ass J-John-b-boy-”
I couldn’t even get the words out properly past my sputtering laughter, let alone make it sound in any way menacing or dangerous in the slightest.

“Oh, what are ya gonna do, ‘stupid’ me to death?”

It wasn’t funny at all, especially considering the topic we’d just got done discussing, but on the other hand it was hilariously perfect especially in that mocking tone of voice John always used to use in school when we’d quietly discuss just what the more Neanderthal-like members of the football team might be talking about as we watched them from the bleachers while eating our lunches in relative peace and quiet.

“You’re SUCH an ass!”
He just cackled in response and to my shame I joined him too.

It felt nice to laugh at last, things have been far too heavy and depressing lately, after reliving all those horrible moments that scarred me so badly a few months ago it felt good to just cut loose with him like we used to do in the old days.

He knows it all now and he’s not turned on me because of it, he’s not disgusted by me or calling me a monster... he’s just being an ass, just like always...
Stupid John!

======

“So, so you and Sarah aren’t... ya know?”

John blanched as if I’d hit him or something, his arms flying up to wave in front of his face as if it would make my question disappear back into the void somehow.

“We most certainly are NOT, ‘ya know’ing!”
I found myself sniggering at the almost physically ill look that crossed his face as the topic continued on and he started building up to a truly impressive looking rant.
“It's awkward as all hell honestly. We both still don't like each other that much, too much bad blood and Sarah is pretty possessive of you, even now, but we've gotten a working relationship going in the last few months at least as I trained her on how to use her magic properly without hurting herself.”

He sighed heavily and turned his head, rubbing his chin into my shoulder slightly as if that would make this conversation any easier or something.

“The brand is there and it messes with our perceptions of each other sometimes but we're both strong enough to ignore it for the most part, so that’s as far as it goes... I mean, can you IMAGINE me with your bobcat of a sister? She’d kill me within a week!... Besides, I prefer my girls with a sense of humour and I’ve only got eyes f-”

Suddenly his head jerked around and he stared determinately up the empty hallway to our left as if he’d heard something.

======

It took me a few seconds of worriedly watching that same hallway to realise that there really wasn’t anything there and he was just using the movement as an excuse to ‘subtly’ cut himself off mid-sentence.
It also, depressingly, took me a few more seconds to backtrack the conversation enough that I realised what he’d been about to say, making my cheeks flare in a mildly indignant blush as a result.

“So... I've missed a lot, huh?”
John seemed to let out a relieved breath at the easy out I was offering him and his body un-tensed beneath me as he turned back to facing my way again with an amused grin on his lips that felt only slightly forced.

“Honestly... yeah?... Crater lake has been officially declared a ‘death cult’ event, the current story being that they tried to summon a volcano god with explosives of some kind and failed, obviously.” He shifted his legs a little and ducked his shoulders so he could look at me better from our slightly awkward seating arrangement.
“I’ve heard rumors floating around that it might have been some kind of ‘Illuminati’ style ritual instead because of the high level positions apparently held in the normal world by most of the mages working for Arista, but no-one’s really giving that much credit, even if it is kinda closer to the truth than anything else on the table.”

He shrugged a little making me bob up slightly in his lap before we settled down again comfortably.

“On the magical side of things people don’t really know what to think and I don’t think they’ve really had time to work on finding an answer either, considering most of the mages in positions of authority across the globe have all died so suddenly without any real explanation and all.”
He went to shift his legs again and I forced my knees to clench slightly to stop him which drew a snort of repressed laughter from him at least.
“As it is, our magical congress are just barely limping by with assistants and assistants-TO-assistants being thrust into roles they are completely unprepared for just to stop the whole system from collapsing in on itself at the moment.”

A little laugh rumbled up in his chest making me vibrate in response due to our close proximity at the moment but it died off quickly as his face took on a far more serious tone.

“I’m amazed I’ve not been hit by a load of summons daily to come help sort things out really. I assume they’ve just held off on the misguided idea that I might be ‘grieving’ for the loss of Arista or something, but I’m glad they apparently don’t need me at least, it’s a good sign that things aren’t quite THAT bad yet if nothing else...”

I smiled slightly in response and rolled my back slightly harder against his chest just because it felt nice at this point while also giving me a chance to bring our conversation back on track once more.

“Where do we go from here then? I’m clean at last, in more ways than one, but I really don’t know how I’ll be able to cope with your connection with Sarah or Eris’s... just Eris in general at this point really...”
He shifted his legs a bit underneath me and pulled his arms tighter around me reassuringly as he tried to think of a proper response to those rather awkward points of contention.

“For Sarah... well... you and Sarah are connected too, so we should balance each other out pretty well as long as we’re all together most of the time.”
I twisted in his arms and shot him a curious look at that one.

That’s the first I’ve heard of me and Sarah being bloody ‘connected’ somehow?!
I mean, we have our ‘twin thing’ but that’s not REALLY real in a traditional sense.

We just know each other so well that we can kinda ‘skip the boring bits’ when it comes to most conversations while explaining it away with the often nebulous concept of ‘twin speak’ if it ever comes up, but there’s not REALLY some kind of psudo-psychic link between us or anything, that would just be weird!

“You can’t seriously be trying to tell me that you can’t feel it?”
My eyebrow rose slightly higher in response to that one as if the answer should be obvious, mostly because it should be at this point, if he wasn’t such a stupid John.
“There’s a bond between your core and Sarah’s now, easily a thousand times more intense than the one we share, looking at the pair of you with magesight when you’re close to each other is practically blinding now. We used to patrol your realm together, just so I could watch the way your bond intensified as you got closer to Sarah and I’d have a shot at actually catching you when you snuck out to steal more food.”

Son of a-
THAT’S how he found me every-bloody-time I left my workshop on a food run?!

That’s CHEATING! I didn’t even know that we HAD a bond, let alone one so powerful that John could abuse it to track me so easily just by watching it move with magesight!
...I guess it kinda makes sense at least?...
Until recently Sarah’s new core was stuck inside me along with Arista’s one and my Locus point after all.

When you put it that way, it’s only natural that we’re connected; I'd be surprised if we weren't after everything that's happened and all the years ‘our’ cores spent in a connected system with each other.

The sympathetic relationship of a shared core, with a shared identity, and a shared bloodline in a shared lifetime alone would assure that there was some kind of bond tying my Locus point ‘core’ together with her fire one at the very least.

If you factor in us being born as twins, magical twins at that, then it would only strengthen a bond which was already there over time as my power levels grew instead of forming a fresh one in the first place.

I couldn’t exactly drop in and check for something like that over the last few months though, could I?
Until barely an hour ago, my magic has been so broken since Arista’s botched ritual that I daren’t even touch it.

Considering how badly things went wrong in my last attempts to directly access it, leading to my accidental creation of the world’s first ‘zombie plant’ of all bloody things, I was quite happy to work on my runes and use the ambient magic of my realm when a power source was needed thank-you-very-much!

I’ve spent the last few months working with nothing but ambient magic from my, luckily magically rich, personal dimension instead of even TRYING to access my core in the slightest.
Even now I’m kind of worried what I’m going to find if I drop into my lines at this point!

It may just be a Pavlovian response to all the pain I’ve faced from doing just that over the last few months but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to shake off the feeling of dread I have over doing it, even when I know that I should be able to reach my lines and even my mindscape with ease now.

======

“-as for Eris...”

Ah, crap, did I miss part of the conversation?
Stupid brain!

“From what I can tell, from the magic involved with Sarah’s description of things and yours added in, Arista tried to shift Eris's loyalties onto herself with some weird compulsion-based magical signature related system she has in place as part of whatever twisted spell system she’s put together that stops Eris from dying at all.”
He sighed heavily and ran a hand down his face in exasperation before continuing.
“It probably would have worked as she planned; except for one thing she’d overlooked... you were fighting inside YOUR realm at the time... and even when Arista had her in her clutches in an attempt to ‘imprint’ on the poor girl, the very air around them was soaked in YOUR magic instead, making her whole plan a big useless mess to some degree.”

Not THAT much of a useless mess, she still managed to make her forget I exist after all and... and...

As if he could read the direction my thoughts were going in John winced in sympathy and pulled me tighter to himself for a gentle squeeze as his magic ghosted its way across mine reassuringly.

“From what I can tell, while the magical side of things didn't work properly, the mental side did and the compulsions on Eris left her open to suggestion. Like a baby bird she imprinted on the first person who was there when Arista tried to ‘program’ her she saw upon waking up as her 'mother', namely...”

“...Sarah...”

“Yeah... I’m sorry Han. I honestly don’t know how she did it or how to fix things yet but that doesn’t mean we’re giving up any time soon, I promise that we won’t stop until we find a way to bring our Eris back properly at last and undo whatever Arista did to her once-and-for-all!”
My eyes closed heavily as I sniffed back a sudden resurgence of those stupid useless tears once more at the sheer determination in John’s voice as he said exactly what I needed to hear at the moment.

He’s right damn it!

I shouldn’t give up so easily, Arista isn’t unbeatable.
I’ve already proven that more than once and if the bitch wasn’t already dead I’d do it many more times over, just because I could.

I’ll find out what she did to turn MY Eris into HER immortal, programmable doll, and I’ll FIX IT!
I’m Hannah Powers-Damned Cooper and if I say I can do something then I can do it, just watch me!

“G-Guess I'm 'Auntie Hannah' for now then, huh?”
Even I winced at the shaky tone to my voice as I spoke those, at once painful and yet encouraging words, aloud finally.

Ever since the remnants of my ice core exploded in my chest it’s been so easy to let my emotions slide away behind whatever ‘veil’ has formed between them and me in my head.

That veil is still dangerously thin though when it comes to certain topics and people especially.
I’m functioning, I’m surviving at least, but... but while some reminders and conversations can be like taking a Hammer to that ‘veil’ making it ache and wobble when they’re through, others like Eris feel as if someone’s painfully stabbing a sword right through it all and out the other side.

“Until we can fix this, she's alive and she's safe for now, they both are, that's what matters.”
...He’s right...
Wh-why does he always know what to say?... Stupid John!

I mean, what do I know about kids anyway?!
I'm a fighter, not a mother!

Sarah will be way better for her then I could ever be, and he’s right, with them together like this now they can be so much safer.
While I focus on the bigger problems around us, they can look after each other for once in my place.
...Yeah, that sounds about right...

Before I could voice my latest decision, my temporary acceptance of the way things must be from now on, John pulled me in for another tight hug and without any input from me a few more weak-tears fell from my eyes in response.
For a few seconds I tried to fool myself into thinking that they were happy tears, safe tears... not sad ones because I’ve lost my d-daughter to my s-sister an-and..

He squeezed me again and I wrapped my arms tightly around him in response so I could squeeze him back with at least somewhat equal amounts of fervor to match his own warm, accepting grasp.

Stupid John!

The bastard didn't even say anything this time but he still knew EXACTLY what to say when I needed him to...

======

“Ready to face the world again yet?”

I grunted and rolled slightly in his lap, pulling us further apart and sighing lightly as his warmth bled out with the encroachment of some stupidly cold air between our bodies.

“Good. You need some new clothes in that case, I’ve got to make a long delayed stop-off on the way home and you just KNOW Sarah’s worrying herself sick over you at the moment, the quicker we can get everything sorted and meet up with her the better, huh?”

A bitter little snort of amusement left me nose.

I’m okay now. I’m not great, not even ‘good’ really... but just about ‘okay’...
I can survive on ‘okay’, I’ve done more with worse before after all an-
...Hang on a minute, what’s wrong with my clothes?...

Almost without a thought my eye’s scanned down myself with a dawning sense of confusion and surprise which was quickly dwarfed by an even bigger sense of fear.

My clothes are gone!

Well, no, okay... so not ‘gone’ gone exactly?
I’m not naked or anything, but the clothes I had on over my protective suit must have gotten vaporised like the magically un-protected fabric they were at some point during my whole ‘core exploding’ thing and the moments of madness that followed it.

More importantly, and worrying, is the fact that I can see my bloody HANDS!
My feet too, now that I’m paying attention to it all!

The ‘sleeves’, gloves, one skin-tight legging and both ‘sock’ parts of my full body protective suit are just... just GONE...

It looks like I’m wearing a weirdly cut, all black, swimsuit with rather ragged edges more than anything and that... that’s a very, VERY bad thing!

“To be honest I think the look suits you, very ‘bad-assed beach-babe’ in my opinion, but I know what you’re like when it comes to fashion and showing off too much skin these days.”

“John... my suits ruined?...”
He shifted slightly so he could see my admittedly pretty stunned, dazed looking expression a bit better and smirked in response, as if to say ‘Really? You don’t say?!’ without words.
“No, John, this isn’t a joke. My SUIT is RUINED!”

“So? What’s the big deal? You can just make a new one; it can’t be that hard at this poin-”

“John, shut up and LISTEN to me damn it!”
His smirk dimmed slightly as he finally seemed to realise that I wasn’t just messing around but getting seriously scared at this point.
“These suits, I designed these suits to be perfect John... I designed these suits to protect the wearer against the elements, against most firearms or bladed weapons and more importantly against MAGIC!”

He’s still not getting it, I can tell just by the look on his big dopy face.

“External AND internal magic, John! No magic, let alone MINE should have been enough to even make a dent in this suit.”

One of its main purposes was to be a suppressor for when my magic goes out of control again and for the force of my core ‘exploding’ to be so powerful that it did THIS much damage to my suit means... m-means that we might have a serious problem on our hands here, because if that’s how much power my broken, weakened and partly-disconnected core could let off then just how much can my Locus Point itself manage to throw out if it tries?!

He’s not... he’s still not getting it!

My magic’s always been strong, far too strong for my sanity’s sake, and even if it feels so calm and controllable now, you just have to look towards that new ‘oasis’ it made to realise that I still don’t have a complete grasp on just HOW it all works yet let alone WHY it works, which could be SERIOUSLY dangerous even at the best of times.

If my core was THAT powerful and my Locus Point is even half as powerful as it feels like it is when compared to how my broken core was, then this is definitely not a ‘best of times’ situation!

FAR, far away from a ‘best of times’ situation!

======

With a harsh jerk of my body I shot away from John and rolled to my feet, sliding slightly on the wooden flooring until my back hit the hallway wall furthest from John and I could stare at him in fear.

How could I have been so stupid?
Of course my magic couldn’t just WORK for once and be useful without there being a catch!

Compared to anyone else I’ve ever met, even including John, just my normal ‘Golden domes’ of healing power are beyond most of their power levels by a stupid degree.

The ‘Nuke’ I let off when healing John was beyond anything I thought humanly possible and may even LITERALLY have been just that, considering it broke the rules of life-and-death with relative ease at the time.

The blast I let off back in the crater of Wizard Island to bleed power away from the earth was almost purely from instinct alone and it’s not even WORTH calculating the amount of magical power involved because I’m not even sure numbers large enough to work it all out on paper have been given names yet by humanity in general!

I designed these suits to contain and bleed off more than FOUR TIMES the roughly estimated power level of THAT blast into the environment harmlessly... and this latest blast of power managed to vaporise parts of the suit instead.
Even worse it was very specific parts too, ones which contained concentrations of storage, syphoning and control runes, all wiped completely out of bloody-existence!

That can’t HAPPEN, it’s just not real that my Locus point could be THAT powerfu-

======

“Han, you’re sparking?”

My head snapped up and I stared at John in lost confusion as the world started coming back into focus around me from my little introspective moment of fear in the face of my own potential power-levels.

“What?”
...Sparking?...

What the hell does he mean by ‘sparking’?!

Instead of actually answering me he glanced awkwardly down towards my hands.
My eyes followed his down and settled on thick streams of pure electricity, as they arced in almost blindingly bright blue lines around my tightly clenched fists like mini-thunder storms in the process of bringing down the wrath of the Gods upon some poor unfortunate soul.

The moment I realised what was happening a gasp left my lips.
Almost instantly the arcs died out as if sensing my attention upon them, leaving us both blinking furiously to try and clear the light away from our eyes in possibly an even greater state of confusion from just moments before.

With a careful gulp of air I brought my hand up to my eye-level and stared at it hard as if it would provide answers of some sort.

After a few seconds without much progress I tentatively tried to reach out to my magic once more and with barely a nudge it surged forth again, bright blue sparks of electricity shooting between my outstretched fingers for a few moments before being drowned out by much larger trails of lightning which wrapped their way around my hand and partly up my arm like a writhing pile of snakes made of pure energy.

I gulped again as my theory was at least partly confirmed from the sensations I could feel rolling around inside me, and the moment I thought of it the lightning just disappeared once more as my magic obediently returned to its rolling brethren inside my body itself.

“I’m a lightning mage?”
It wasn’t really a question, despite the questioning tone those words slipped past my lips in.
I’m a bloody LIGHTNING mage!

When- How could I- Wha-
What the hell?!

My brain jumped through a billion hoops in seconds as I tried to piece together any kind of scenario where that idea made ANY kind of sense, until finally a pair of often ignored memories from my distant past decided to raise their guilty little hands in response to my troubled search at long last.

The first was from my childhood, the night Dad tried to take me away again in the dead of night and Sarah caught him in the act, the night I panicked because I thought he was going to take Sarah with him too and the next thing I knew he was across the garage against his work-bench, twitching away as if... as if he’d been electrocuted?

The second one was during prom, the night we were kidnapped by Vlad and his vampire cohorts.
He bit me, he was killing me and there was nothing I could do... but during the haze that I fell into through blood-loss, when the MPA stormed the place and the girls screamed in fear behind me, I lost track of the world for a moment and the next thing I knew Vlad was across the room from me, twitching and jerking as if he’d been zapped by... something?

‘I tried to console myself with the fact that I was doing it for you. If you don’t know about magic your safer. I spent the whole night going around in my head about how I was doing it for you and it wasn't my fault... but I knew... I saw what happened in that hall, the same thing that happened to Dad... I KNEW you were a mage.’
Sarah, oh Sarah, I should have bloody LISTENED to you for once!

She knew, she’s always known, but she’s never had any reason or context to understand what that simple observation she made while ranting to me in an empty car-park after our first trip to the Hub together could really mean in the slightest.

I’m a lightning mage.

I’ve always BEEN a lightning mage!
My first awakening suppressed it entirely with Sarah’s fire core, my second with Arista’s ice one, but now they’re both gone and all that’s left is my original ‘core’, my Locus point?

My apparently, lightning element based, Locus point.

Edith’s diversion was set up to tweak the output of ‘my’ core and let me unconsciously manipulate my lines into producing that Golden magic instead of Arista’s dangerous ice... but that cores gone now too.
No core, no diversion!

‘Ba! Ya truly be useless girl, fire ain't a right’un for ya!’

‘Be sayin’ ya be a wrong’n with fire girl but ya not be listenin’ neither. Ice be bett’a but not too right for ya still..’

‘Ya thinkin’ too right-ways, ya need ta think up!’

Think 'up', my ASS Edith!
The stupid little Yoda-wannabe KNEW and she never said anything?!

Part of me is still a little stunned, completely thrown off by the sudden revelation that I’m not what I always thought I was, magically speaking at least.

A lot of early sympathetic magic goes into the reasoning behind and effects of your elemental affinity on you, your personality, your reactions and everything else meta-physical about you as a human being.

...I’ve been running the math wrong...
For years I worked my sympathetic spells and connections on the faulty idea that I was a fire mage and it threw off my calculations in often unexpected ways as a result!

When my core changed over to an ice affinity I didn’t give it much thought, allowing little more than a moment’s pause to think ‘Huh, well that makes a bit more sense at least?’ before carrying on with the rest of the mess that came from my second awakening in general.

I’ve gotten lazy ever since I got my Golden diversion magic, it fixes so many things so easily that I’ve not even bothered to consider alternative methods of doing things half the time.

I didn’t even TRY to use my ice magic to do any kind of sympathetic rituals at all.
If I had, I’d probably have been in for a bit of a shock at the time, metaphorical or literal, because while ice is closer to lightning on the ‘elemental wheel’ then fire it’s still not right and my math would have been WAY off still!

I’m a lightning mage... I’m a BLOODY lightning mage!

At least I can try those battery charging runes out easier now, I guess...
...That’s the spirit, always look at the bright-side of things!...

What are the personality traits most common in lightning mages anyway?
Do I match the profile at all?

When I was younger I always thought I fit the definition of a fire mage a bit too well honestly, but these things are vague and a bit obtuse for a reason I guess.
It’s a bit like the ‘cold-readings’ that ‘psychics’ do with the normals, or ‘horoscopes’ in general, unless their done properly.

Everything is just vague enough that if you look at it properly it can probably apply to any person in any situation most of the time, but those profiles are important, the only reason I managed to find any degree of control over my fire magic was by looking up the profile and... and...

Well... Crap...
I’m such an idiot sometimes!

I read up on the character profile for fire mages, roughly applied it to myself in my head and from then on I ran with it, trying to fit into the personality profile as best I could as time went on.

Self-hypnosis, self-bloody-hypnosis!

I convinced myself it was true and my magic responded to my change in attitude as the fire calmed down in return for my fitting ‘the norm’ of its users a bit better, despite that not being how I naturally am...

What was I really like before my fire magic came along?
I wasn’t brave.
I second guessed myself on everything and I worked so hard to be ‘normal’ growing up, despite being painfully NOT normal in most situations.

Sarah was the brave twin, the fire mage in essence, always pulling us into and back out of danger just for the fun of it all... meanwhile I was... I was...
...Meek?...

I didn’t like being the center of attention, didn’t like responsibility or being forced into situations without a lot of preparation beforehand.
Al, Young Al... would he ever have been strong enough to fight full-blood demons on a daily basis?

The same kid that let his sister boss him around constantly, the same kid that screamed and hid behind the pillows when that same sister put horror movies on at Halloween, the same kid who just went along with things to avoid conflict...

How did I change so drastically over the years without realising it?
The change was slow, I noticed it more in my emotional reactions to things after my change from fire to ice honestly, but the changes were there and there was nothing ‘natural’ about them at the time!

I don’t... I don’t know who I am anymore?
I don’t- I- S-

STUPID MAGIC!

Why does everything have to be so complicated when magic is invol-

======

“Han?”

John’s hand came to rest on my shoulder and I jolted back with a scream of surprise as I was rudely forced out of my own internal moment of panicked realisation once more, back into the real world with a bump as my head met the wall at speed.

Sadly John joined me in screaming a moment later when my magic sparked in response to my emotions and sent more than a few volts through the poor unsuspecting idiot too.

“Sorry John, I... Uh... I, um...”
His hair is standing on end and he looks less than amused.
Even if his magic is telling me quite clearly that he finds the whole situation at least somewhat funny that doesn’t change the fact that I just shocked the hell out of him, in more ways the one.
“Just had a bit of a moment there, ya know?... So yeah, I’m a lightning mage I guess-”
This is starting to get awkward and his hair is still sticking up from the charge too.
“-so uh... ‘Woo-hoo, lightning pride!’ yay for new elements and all that, blah-blah-blah...”

His eyebrow is twitching slightly and I honestly can’t tell if it’s from restrained laughter or just a tick formed by the electrical current presumably still running riot through his nervous system to some degree.

“...I’m just gonna go clothes hunting, as you said earlier...”

Without another word I practically sprinted past him and dived into the first open doorway I could find.
My hand reached up automatically to close the door before pulling back with a yelp when a spark of static electricity shot from my hand to the old metal doorknob instead.

After a few seconds of rubbing my poor hand to get the numbness to go away I huffed to myself loudly and nudged the door shut with my foot instead.

Stupid lightning magic!
As if I didn’t have enough on my plate as it is?

There better be some damn clothes in here or I’m gonna light the world up like a Japanese 'Sparkle-Mouse' having its tail stepped on!