I watched the horizon as the trees began to thin around us and the giant expanse of brown and orange grass opened up in front of us. We were now traveling downhill out of the forest and into the arid grasslands I had been told about. After our repeated encounters with monsters, the caravan suddenly became a lot more worried about how we were handling security. Rather than cooping all of us in one wagon in the middle, each of us rode on one of the wagon coach seats with their drivers to watch for upcoming danger. I had been told that they had taken this route so many times before that they had mostly taken hunters along for camp labor and maybe hunting fresh food along the way. Before Korr'tak had been taken, they had refused to let the contracted hunters ride on their wagons and now they were fighting over which wagon would get which hunter.

  The air already smelled differently as we were leaving the forest. The smell of old leaves and frosty snow was giving way to a more pleasant smell of winter wildflowers that grew off in the distance where the air was a little bit warmer. It wasn't warm, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't snowing either. I was sitting in the second wagon in the group, the owner of this wagon was quite adamant that he have me in particular and I didn't mind much. I couldn't stand the merchant that was in the first wagon but I also wanted to see the landscape as we traveled a little since I hadn't had an opportunity until now. Sitting on the coach seat while we were moving took a bit of getting used to though, the huge beasts that pulled the wagons were much faster than I had expected. They traveled longer than horses at a much faster sustained clip while pulling more than I would expect horses to be able to carry. I later asked Maxwell about it and he said that horses were still used but mainly as singular mounts rather than as a beast that pulls carriages or wagons.

  After we increased our focus on security we naturally didn't run into any more trouble through the forest. Though even the two situations we had found were much more than originally expected. All of the merchants were plenty happy about that and even the coachmen who suddenly had to share their space with the hunters seemed quite happy to have the company after the man in the lead wagon almost died. With only eight wagons and nine hunters to guard them, Luna was the odd one out since she couldn't speak up and warn the coachman she sat next to of danger. She sat in the wagon with Iris and chatted with us through the rings as we traveled. I felt a little bad for our little message runner since she spent most of her time lying around and listening for the whistles with nothing else to do. She never complained about it though and was quite lively during the evening camp meals which improved my initial impression of her.

  I spent the evenings when I was off of watch rotation in the woods experimenting with my new floral king deer powers. I came back with a bunch of fresh spices each time which I could tell made the spice dealer suspicious, but she didn't say anything about it. Pheobe even asked to buy some of the fresh spices I had collected a few of the times. At one point she mentioned that one of the spices I brought back only grows in the summer. I could see the question on her lips but she didn't ask it. I took it as a warning to ask more questions about the spices before using my magic to suspiciously reproduce them. As Luna had theorized, the plants' mana content was largely based on where they were grown but I did have some control over it. If I wanted the plants to have next to no mana in them, that was easy enough, but trying to pump more mana into the plants was much more difficult. Not impossible, but it took a lot of concentration and there seemed to be an upper limit on it. I wasn't sure if it was because of the plants or because of me though. It was possible I would be able to enrich the plants with more mana after becoming better experienced with the new ability I had gained. My mana control wasn't great in the first place.

  When we stopped for camp that night we were fully out of the woods now and we had our wagons circled into a reasonably large ring around our tents. I could tell the mood was more chipper now that the expectation of danger had passed but I was starting to get a bad feeling about something. It was hard to place but something just felt off to me. I may have even not noticed the feeling had it not been in such stark contrast to all of the merchants who were happily joking as if everyone was fully clear of any trouble. Trouble had a way of finding me.

  I pulled Maxwell, Aria, and Luna aside for a moment. Piper was on first watch with some of the others right now so I didn't want to distract her, especially when I was feeling this way. "Guys, something feels off to me. I don't know what it is but I have a really bad feeling. Does everything feel normal to you?"

  Aria frowned and looked up at the sky. "Actually... I wasn't going to say anything because, I don't know, it's kind of a weird thing to notice, but the birds are acting weird. All day they've been flying in only one direction any time I've looked. Even the birds that normally circle have only been going that way," she said pointing south. "It's not a migration thing, these birds don't migrate."

  I turned and looked the opposite way. "Do you think something is happening in the north? Something that's scaring away the birds?"

  "I don't know," she said with a shrug.

  Maxwell looked lost in thought while cupping his chin. After a moment he shook his head. "Sometimes large monsters or swarms of monsters will scare things away but I don't know of anything that would be in this region that could cause this."

  "You said something similar about the goblins and the umber hounds," I noted.

  He sighed. "True, but that just means I don't know what it could be, not that I don't believe something is up. I'll go talk with Valkin's team and see if they have any ideas."

  "Anything to add?" I asked Luna.

  She shook her head. ("No, I don't know of anything either. Maxwell knows more about monsters and where they reside than I do.")

  I turned back to Maxwell. "Wait, could this not actually be about monsters? What if there's a natural disaster coming? I've heard animals can sometimes sense things like that before they happen."

  He frowned. "Could be... but I would have an even worse idea of what to do about something like that."

  Luna looked around for a moment. ("Should we prepare for a thunderstorm?")

  I nodded. "That would explain the birds. Birds can sense the change in..." I turned to Luna. ("Atmospheric pressure.")

  Luna pursed her lips but repeated the words through the rings to the others.

  Aria shook her head. "I don't know what you mean by that. Are you saying they can sense the change in the air before a storm?"

  I nodded. "Yes, more or less."

  "That's more concrete, I can work with that. I'll go warn the others of the potential for a thunderstorm," Maxwell said. He paused for a moment before turning to me. "You might want to take off your armor, Helena. Metal attracts lightning."

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  I chuckle. "I know Maxwell. I'll go do that. What about you?"

  "I will as well after I talk to a few people," he replied before walking off.

  "Do you think we'll be able to do much about the thunderstorm?" I asked the remaining two.

  Luna nodded. ("Some warning will be helpful. We're already camped so we can prepare tarps for the wagons and animals. We'll have to sleep in our wagons rather than in tents tonight, but that shouldn't be too bad.")

  "What about guarding the camp? Are monsters going to attack during the thunderstorm?" I asked.

  Luna tapped her lip. ("I'm not sure. Some monsters do become more active in the rain so it's possible.")

  Aria's expression fell. "We're going to have to do our watch rotation in the rain, aren't we?"

  I looked around the area again. "There's nothing else around us here. The highest point will be the wagons. Do we need to worry about lightning strikes?"

  Aria shrugged. "Well, yes. But what can we really do about that?"

  "What about a lightning rod?" I asked.

  "A what?" she asked.

  I looked over at Luna who looked equally confused. "Lightning always takes the shortest path to the ground. If you put something metal above other things in the air with a path to the ground, it attracts lightning strikes to it. Like a rod of metal connected to metal wire."

  ("Wouldn't the metal rod just be destroyed by the lightning?") Luna asked.

  I frowned as I failed to find all the words I needed to explain this. ("No, metal is conductive and some metals are more conductive than others. If there is a highly conductive metal, like copper, with a path to the ground it would safely just strike the copper rod and nothing else would happen.")

  Luna glanced at Aria before speaking to both of us using the rings again. ("Well, I have no idea if any of that works this way but one of the wagons is transporting metals. We could see if they have a copper rod and try it out. Even if this is just a superstition, there's not much to lose.")

  "We'll need some wire too, it has to have a path to the ground or it won't work," I told her. I chose to ignore that she thought this might be superstition.

  "We have to put the rod higher than everything else? Wouldn't that just mean the lightning would strike whichever wagon the lightning rod is on?" Aria asked.

  I nodded. "It will strike the rod but as long as it has a safe path to the ground it shouldn't affect anything else. We just need to make sure the wire isn't touching anything else conductive and no one is touching it when it's struck."

  The two of us started following Aria to the cart of the person that sold metal and I could already see some of the other merchants pulling out tarps and blankets to cover their wagons and the animals with. The giant cattle things they had pulling the wagons were taller than most of the wagons standing, they might be the most likely target of lightning if something happened. That or the wagon that we were heading to.

  "Copper?" the feline beastkin woman asked after our explanation. "I can show you what I have but I don't know anything about trying to catch lightning with it. I know that lightning tries to hit metal but collecting a bunch of it right before a thunderstorm seems like a stupid idea. Not that I can really judge considering my wagon is full of it."

  "Don't worry, I know what I'm doing," I confidently told her. In reality I only kinda knew what I was doing. But the idea of being out in a storm with a bunch of wagons with no lightning protection scared me. I was from a place that had some pretty severe thunderstorms in the summer so I knew how bad they could get.

  I found a pair of nice thick spikes made from copper along with some copper cable. I wasn't sure how thick it needed to be so I went with a bit more than I would expect to need. I was also unsure of how pure this copper was compared to what we had back home so the extra thickness should help I think. All things considered, the metal wasn't all that expensive, it had been mined in the hills near Fallow and was being brought to Ironcastle to be sold and swapped out for iron to bring back with them to Fallow. Next, we went to another wagon and bought a long wooden beam to mount the thing on.

  "You're going to put it on a wood pole? Are you sure this thing won't just light on fire?" Aria asked me with trepidation.

  I hesitated. "Ehh... Not entirely but it would still be better if this pole got struck by lightning than any of the wagons right?"

  Luna looked interested but also pretty skeptical of what I was doing. She didn't argue with me though at least. I was pretty confident I had the theory correct, it was just the practical matters I wasn't sure about. I tied one of the spikes to the wooden rod with some extra copper wire, attached the copper cord to the first spike, and tied it to the beam as straight as I could before attaching it to the second copper spike that I hammered into the ground a little ways away from the pole. We set the thing up in the middle of our ring of wagons. Hopefully, it would be close enough to the wagons to protect them. I wasn't sure how wide of an area the lightning rod would attract lightning from, but this had to be better than nothing.

  It was just as I had finished mounting it and reinforcing the wooden beam from the wind that we heard the first rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning in the distance. The nostalgic smell of rain touched my nose and all of us sat in our wagons and prepared for the coming storm. Most of the wagons and giant cattle were covered with huge thick canvas tarps to protect them from the rain. The merchants had heeded Maxwell's warning and all of the wagons were protected by the time the downpour started.

  I looked up at my makeshift lightning rod and hoped for the best.

  P.S. Do not attempt to build a lightning rod on your own. I thought this was a fun idea to introduce into a fantasy novel but I am not a scientist and it is very possible that I made a mistake that could hurt someone if they tried to imitate the story. I tried to do a bit of research on the subject to make it sound convincing but attempting to play with this kind of thing is dangerous. I hope that I don't have to say this, but please do not try this at home!

  ideas have! A lot of innovation is simply coming up with a working idea! Merely bringing the 'solved' idea into another world can be enough to trigger innovation in the smart people around the main character. I do not know the precise mechanics behind how an airplane works, but I know some of the basics of how it's shaped where some of the pieces go. If I was transported to a fantasy world, even if I didn't know why a plane is shaped the way it is, it is still a very good starting point for someone to recreate it. Especially since (assuming physics are the same) I know that the desired outcome is possible. I think this is one of the things a lot of people who write in this genre underestimate.

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