It started with a mud cake.
Not a metaphorical one. An actual, fist-shaped clump of dirt, sand, and imagination, carefully molded by a six-year-old with too much curiosity and not enough supervision.
"It's my new capacitor," I told Mira, who blinked at me with the wide, unfiltered enthusiasm only she could weaponize so effortlessly.
"It looks delicious!"
"Don't eat it. Please."
She giggled and stuck a daisy on top. "Now it's a magic capacitor!"
I sighed. One day she would accidentally enchant a goat with her optimism. Until then, I had mud and theories.
My latest obsession was storing mana.
Not using it—not yet—but the idea of keeping it. Holding a charge. Releasing it later. It had haunted me since the market trip, when I'd seen a glowing stone etched with symbols pulsing faintly in a merchant's stall. The man had claimed it was a storage rune. Of course, he also claimed it was made from phoenix teeth, so his credibility was questionable at best.
Still. The idea had taken root.
If mana flowed like water—or better, like electricity—then it stood to reason you could collect it. Store it. Reuse it.
All I needed was proof.
"Leo, I need your slingshot."
"I just fixed it."
"Exactly. Now I need to break it scientifically."
Leo frowned. He had a permanent case of puppy-love confusion, which meant he handed over most things I asked for while simultaneously turning the color of a boiled beet.
"Will you at least... I don't know... say thank you?"
"Thank you, Leo. Now let me make it explode."
Mira clapped in delight. "Yay! Science!"
We rigged a crude test platform behind the barn. Mira had brought sticks and ribbon for "aesthetic flow." Leo provided the slingshot and the wide-eyed worry of someone who just knew this would end in minor property damage.
I etched what I hoped were containment glyphs into a chunk of fired clay, then fed it a single drop of mana from a pulse stone I'd managed to convince my mother was a decorative rock.
It shimmered. Just slightly. Barely.
But it was enough.
"We have voltage," I whispered.
Mira beamed. "Do we get cookies now?"
Leo scratched his head. "What's a voltage?"
I didn't answer. I was too busy grinning like a lunatic.
Not all tests were successful.
Our next capacitor—made of chicken bone and wishful thinking—caught fire.
The one after that vibrated so hard it cracked the foundation of Leo's chicken coop.
Eventually, I figured out that denser materials held a charge longer. Stone worked better than wood. Fired clay better than raw. Metal? Too conductive. It leaked mana like a sieve.
Still, the progress was real.
Every time a rune glowed brighter, held longer, or sparked instead of fizzing out, I felt a rush. A thrill.
I was building something. Learning something. Becoming someone.
Even if everyone else still thought I was just a precocious little girl with messy hair and a weird fixation on chicken bones.
"Elara, sweetie, do you want to wear the blue dress today? It matches your eyes so well!"
My mother, Malia, smiled gently, already holding up the offending garment like a flag of war.
"Does it come in pants?"
"Dresses are so much more elegant."
"So is a good wrench."
She laughed and dressed me anyway.
Mira, of course, swooned when she saw me. "You look like a princess!"
Leo tripped over his own feet and fell into a bucket.
I seriously considered faking a fever to escape.
But the dress stayed on.
And so did the spark.
By the end of that week, we had assembled what could generously be described as a prototype: a tiny windmill with a clay base, runes etched on each blade and a stone socket in the center.
It didn't work. Not at first.
The windmill spun. The runes flickered. But the core stayed inert.
"Maybe it needs a better focus," Mira suggested, chewing on a blade of grass.
"Or a goat," Leo muttered. "Goats make everything worse."
"You're thinking of geese."
I shook my head. "No, it's the vector angles. They're wrong. Mana flow is directional. We need a catch rune here—see this? The triangle needs to open toward the rotation."
Leo stared at me. "You sound like a tiny professor."
"Better than sounding like a tiny disaster."
He flushed. I immediately regretted the joke.
But the next version worked. Not much. Not well. But enough.
A faint glow. A shimmer in the core. A pulse, held for a single breath before it vanished.
"We did it," I whispered.
Mira clapped. Leo just stared.
We did it.
Later that night, I lay awake in bed. My hands still smelled like clay and chicken feathers. My fingers ached from drawing runes. My brain buzzed with potential.
And yet... all I could think about was that dress. The way Mira had twirled me. The way Leo had looked—like he didn't know whether to laugh or run.
This body. This beautiful, absurd, delicate body. It was mine. Fully mine. Soft skin, long lashes, bright eyes.
And I didn't know what to do with it.
The world saw a darling little girl.
Inside, I still remembered fixing servers at 3 AM with a cup of cheap coffee and a headache.
But here, now, I had mud, and runes, and friends.
And a windmill that glowed.
The next morning, Mira showed up with ribbons. Again.
"Hold still! Your hair's getting too long to leave like this."
"Scissors exist for a reason."
"So do bows!"
Somewhere in the distance, Leo sighed.
I let her do it. Mostly because she was humming, and I didn't want to ruin the moment.
Besides. She was right.
My hair was getting long.
And the bows? They looked kind of... nice.
Damn it.
Later that week, I tried storing a charge in a piece of slate. It worked better than expected. I could actually release it on command with a second rune etched beside the first. I scribbled furiously in my little notebook, full of diagrams and notes written in a self-invented shorthand. Mira had taken to coloring in the margins. Leo occasionally added doodles of exploding goats.
"This might actually be a battery," I whispered.
"A what?"
"Something that holds energy until you need it. A mana jar."
Leo nodded slowly. "So... like a lunchbox for magic?"
Mira gasped. "Can we decorate it?!"
So yes. We made our first mana battery. Decorated with stars and hearts and labeled in Mira's best cursive as "Elara's Zap Jar."
It held a charge for nearly ten minutes.
I almost cried.
Progress. Real progress. In a world that didn't even have running water in most houses, I had just taken the first step toward magical infrastructure.
And I did it while wearing a pink dress with embroidered ducks.
Life's funny like that.