DISCLAIMER: I do not own Dr. Stone! :)
To my awesome reviewers (01/05/20): Hello, Ruby890, Evelyn (9001668), karin150301, Lu-chan 16Love, Phantomfray, LunarButterfly121423, Shiraneko-chan, pika pika, Le055Li0n, and Guest! ^_^ Thank you so much for reviewing the nineteenth chapter of No Stone Unturned! I love this couple, too! :) Sadly, this kind of thing is Senku's weakness! XD There are many meaningful moment between Senku and Kohaku, and I look forward to writing about them all! :D Kohaku was very strong to be able to do that! The manga has a lot of good hidden moments, doesn't it? :D I'm glad we have the same opinion on their slow burn! :) My fanfic will be completely canon-compliant! With that said, I also plan on writing scenes that we didn't see in the manga, but COULD have happened and the manga just didn't show us :d I have some wonderful scenes in mind for future chapters! Uh-oh, you don't want get head lumps like Chrome, do you? XD That manga panel of Senku being carried was just one panel, but it was still really cute! :) Gen will be sticking around for a while, until he has to go back to Tsukasa :) Yay, I've updated! I hope all you enjoy this new chapter, and thank you again! ^_^
Chapter Twenty: (S01 E09d) Catching Lightning
Being carried up a mountain by the scruff of his coat, as if Senku were a little kitten, was undignified – but it yielded good results, and Senku always respected results. Kohaku kept a firm hold on him as she deftly jumped from one rock to the other, not being slowed down by Senku's weight in the slightest, unwavering despite the loud crashes of thunder that reverberated throughout the fields and mountains as well as the droplets of steady rain that could have made her lose her footing.
But Kohaku didn't.
It was only when they were very near the top that she set him down on a particularly large rock on the side of the mountain, and after waiting a few moments for the others to catch him, Senku and Chrome climbed the remaining feet side by side as Senku told him about Peter Wasilewski, the man who conducted countless experiments to create magnets from lightning.
Today, thousands of years later, Senku and Chrome would continue their fellow scientist's work.
"Chrome," he murmured, trying to catch his breath as he looked sideways at the other man, "what we're going to do now will be the fruit of your ten years of exploration!"
"Awesome!"
After they finally reached the top of the mountain, Chrome quickly untied the pack he had carried up the mountain on his back and handed Senku the iron bars they had created as well as couple of the wooden poles, taking two poles for himself as well before abandoning the rest as they urgently scanned their surroundings for a place to set up a lightning rod.
After trying, and failing, to jam their wooden poles into the stony surface of the mountaintop, they both knew it was an exercise in futility.
"We won't make it in time!" Chrome exclaimed in distress, his brow furrowed as he glared at the lightning. "There isn't enough time to make a tower!"
We have lightning, but we don't have a lightning rod, thought Senku, frowning. We're here with two iron bars, but no lightning rods to make them into magnets…
Kohaku, who had been watching their efforts worriedly, muttered to herself, "We need something long… something we can stick into the ground… something with a sharp end… OH!"
Guessing that she had somehow come up with a plan, Senku turned to Kohaku – only to be puzzled by the distinctly feline look of mischievousness on her face.
What is she-
"No! Noo! Anything but my spear!"
After hearing Kinro's distraught cry – and wondering at the back of his mind about who was guarding the village, since the two people charged with the important task had chosen go mountain climbing – Senku felt Kohaku grab the two iron bars from him right before she performed a type of cartwheel that allowed her to kick Kinro's spear into the air.
And after a second leap, during which she seemed to have used her impressive eyesight to quickly judge the angle of the spear's circular movements so that she could grab the middle of the weapon's shaft, Kohaku, clutching the spear, was high up in the air, far above the humans beings and the stones on the bald mountain.
An impressive feat, to be sure – but extremely risky during a lightning storm.
Despite lightning itself moving very quickly, the process that led to its creation always began quietly, when the combination of heat and air formed clouds in the sky. It was only when clouds merged to form bigger clouds that rain formed, and when some of that rain was swept back into the cloud, the cold temperature turned them into ice crystals, and later on, hail.
That hail crashed against each other inside clouds to the point of dislodging electrons, resulting in positively charged and negatively charged hailstones. The hailstones then separated into two groups, infusing the cloud with electricity and creating lightning.
Even though it was dangerous, only small amounts of lightning, at least relatively speaking, ever made contact with the Earth. Ninety percent of lightning bolts stayed in the atmosphere, raging mostly harmlessly inside clouds. But the remaining ten percent added up to ten million individual bolts that actually hit the surface of the Earth, with more than one hundred lightning strikes taking place every second.
Before the petrification of the world, those ten million bolts killed thousands every day with lightning strikes that were less than an inch thick, but miles and miles long and hotter than the surface of the sun. They could strike at any time, even on a clear summer's day, which was why while standing on top of a bald mountain was bad enough, leaping into the air and grabbing a long object was even more dangerous.
High up in the air, Kohaku quickly used one hand to untie her hair and then wound the short length of rope around the end of the spear and the iron bars, using her teeth to tug the rope in order to make sure the two iron bars would stay bound to the spear.
As she fell to the ground, she clutched the spear with both hands and one leg, putting as much of her weight on it as possible in order to drive the sharp, golden end of the weapon into the ground, and Senku watched as Kohaku jumped out of the way just in time…
…before a white-hot bolt of lightning crashed violently from the clouds down onto the makeshift lightning rod, infusing with raw electric energy the first real magnets the world had seen in three thousand seven hundred years.
(End of Chapter Twenty.) (01/05/20.)
I. My personal comments: Hello, everybody! I got these lightning facts from a documentary, but if I got anything wrong, I hope you'll tell me! :) I wanted Senku to recognize the risk Kohaku was (unknowingly, but still) taking for him, but without putting too much emotion into it (because that would have been out-of-character). And since Senku knows a LOT about so many different scientific topics, it made sense to me that he would know very specific things about lightning, too :D
II. Question of the day: What do you think of Senku's lightning knowledge? :)
III. A tiny request: Thank you for reading my fanfic! :D If you've read this far, I hope you'll consider taking an extra minute to leave a review for Chapter Twenty ("Catching Lightning")? :D Reviews really mean a lot to me as a fanfiction writer, and all kinds of positive, negative, and/or constructive reviews are very welcome! ^_^ Even if it's the year 5738 or something, I would love to hear your thoughts on this chapter! :D (By the way, I'm "fireflyhwufanficwrit" on Reddit and "firefly-hwufanficwriterrrrr" on Tumblr :D)