"No idea. It's not a power source exactly, but I can sorta..." She holds her hands apart, a little spark of electricity pops between them. "Make lightning do my bidding!" Pitiful sparks are barely sufficient to cross the distance between her hands. "Or at least I could if I weren't out of juice."

"How much juice can you store? We've got a pretty decent generator back at the base, I bet we could get you hooked up to the mains for a hot minute if you think you could handle it."

"I don't know how to measure it. I definitely reach a point where I'm full, but I don't know how to translate that into units. But I haven't been hurt by electricity yet."

"Interesting...it's a bit of a detour from the skylands exploration, but would you be interested in testing that out? Depending on how big a charge you can keep bottled, we might not even need to fill up your Bevin with batteries!"

"Yeah, I've been wondering about it, let's do it." She pokes Lion again and the two of them end up back in the Rim.

It doesn't take long for them to find and convince other sosei-shita of the value in testing this. Then it's just a matter of finding (or putting together, really) the equipment to let Strawberry safely tap into the electricity without risking blowing out the wiring of the complex sector she's in and potentially frying herself if it does manage to overcome whatever capacity she has to store it. It's ultimately not that much of a project, given the whole place already built to be pretty modular, and soon enough they've found that her capacity is somewhere in the range of a hundred megajoules. That's in the same ballpark as an electric car's battery, which is actually a pretty decent chunk of charge. They also learn so more about how quickly she charge and discharge (the latter of which does end up blowing a breaker in the sector after all).

After taking all those measurements, and maybe an hour of heated brainstorming and debate, figure that the easiest method to develop that takes full advantage of Strawberry's abilities is to, approximately repeatedly shoot herself out of a railgun.

That's more than a bit of an exaggeration, but it captures the gist: load up her Bevin with a couple batteries and a bunch of ballasts, each of which is composed of a rail, and a sled that she can buckle into. There's a clearly labeled port on the sled for her to dump power into, causing the sled and any rail that it's been slid onto to separate with what they're pretty certain won't be a harmful amount of force, propelling Strawberry higher. Then once she's at the apex of her arc, she can jump back to her Bevin, get out of her sled, load in a new rail, buckle back in, then repeat the process.

Overall, they're pretty certain this should only need to be repeated five or six times, assuming each sled gives her even half as much height as they think it will. They're also quite certain just her own internal power storage should be sufficient, a couple times over even, and the extra batteries are just in case she needs to fully discharge to scare off a pterosaur or something.

It'll be a hot minute before they have the first rail and sled ready for testing, though. Is there anything Strawberry wants to do in the meantime?

The hour they spend brainstorming is an hour she spends looking at her hands. She makes electricity arc chaotically between her fingers, she can feel it conducting through her hand, a bright sensation that didn't cleanly map to anything she ever felt before. Making electricity arc between two specific fingers was simple and intuitive, it felt a little like controlling a muscle. With a little practice she could turn any part of her body into a circuit, making the current run circuitous routes around her body if she wanted to.

One hundred megajoules. She summoned a length of wire with a bare end terminating in a plug, her "charger", she had spent minutes holding the end and absorbing power, thinking that that had to be a significant amount. After a little math she had been helpfully been informed that a standard plug from Earth from Fib's Earth would take over fifteen hours to fill her up completely.

Being full was a weird experience. It didn't hurt, like she expected, instead lightning seemed to "leak out", arcing into the environment around her. It was like putting a hose in your mouth and trying to hold it all in there, no matter what you did it would come out one way or another.

Ah, ok, the plan is to shoot me out of a railgun, of course.

I have a good life.

Well, if I have some free time I should contact Cean. She asks, and she is handed a phone, presumably there is a mirror nearby. "Right."

"Hello? I'd like to speak to Cean? My name is Strawberry, I am a Conduit."

A pleasant sounding voice answered her. "Ah, yes, please hold." A classical piece that felt vaguely familiar started playing, a crushingly mundane activity that contrasted so violently with the circumstance of being on a ringworld with dinosaurs that her vision swam for a split second before shaking her head to banish the sensation.

"Hello, Strawberry?"

"Yes?"

"Consul Ceanothus is not available at this time, but we're always interested in peaceful contact with other Conduits. I can refer you to someone who's authorized to negotiate trade or arrange visits if you're interested."

Consul Ceanothus. "Right, ok, sure."

The many species of the Rim fill the air with a rich soundscape, almost familiar in texture, like something that could've existed on Earth had things gone differently.

A discussion, negotiation and a tentative agreement pending the approval of the Consul later and Strawberry hung up the phone. "Well that was pretty painless." She muttered.

"Alright, I'm ready." She walks back to where Lion and the others were working.

The engineers haven't actually finished the prototype of the rail and sled by the time Strawberry is ready, but it's not a long wait until it's done.

The rail is more or less a pair of poles of conductive metal clamped to a plate of well-folded orichalcum. The sled is a chair, seemingly cannibalized from a truck, affixed onto another orichalcum plate, with an orichalcum nose cone pinned above the chair, some orichalcum fins  and a pair of metal rings to mate with the rail towards the base. There's one contact for her left hand and one for her right, if she flows power out through one and back in through the other, the rail and sled will be repelled from each other, and thanks to the big plate on the bottom of the rail, that should push her upwards more than it throws the rail downwards.

Here's the lever to pull to eject the seat out of the sled, and here's the button on the chair to deploy the parachute once she's clear of the sled, just in case things go really bad. But hypothetically if there is an issue, she should just be able to go to her Bevin, separate the chair from the sled, then come back and deploy the parachute at her leisure.

And now it's all set up, a safe distance from the base so that nothing gets crushed by the falling rail. She can buckle in and count-down to blast-off whenever she's good to go.

"Ok." She sits down, starts buckling herself in. She feels the probes to her sides. Absolutely fucking absurd. Fired out of a rail cannon repeatedly to get to space. "Let's do this." I'm really going to blast off like Team Rocket. "Blasting off in T minus ten, nine..."

Everybody (or, everyone gathered here, which is maybe a dozen sosei-shita) watches with bated breath as Strawberry counts down.

There was some practice, earlier, to let her get a sense for how it feels to let out a specific amount of power from her store of electricity, back when they were testing her capacity. Too much power means she'll accelerate too hard, which could knock her out or even kill her on its own depending on how far beyond the safe limit, so it was worth making sure she could nail the right amount pretty reliably, even while experiencing the acceleration she's making.

So, when it feels like she's slammed into her seat like she just jumped onto a rollercoaster already in motion as she starts the flow, it is not exactly surprising, even if it is physically jarring. She retains a tight control on her electricity, though, after just a second of hard acceleration, her is free from the tall rail, traveling at around the speed of a race car, albeit pointed upwards rather than towards the horizon.

The wind is tearing, and cold, at this speed, but the nose cone keeps the worst of it off of her. It also...doesn't last all that long. After maybe ten seconds, the sled is stalling, and in just a moment will start falling back to the Earth.

If she looks down, she can see she's only maybe 400 or 500 feet off the ground, and that there appear to be another argument breaking out amongst the engineers.

"Woo! Ha hah!" As her rise comes to an end she goes to her Bevin, ejects the seat from the sled as instructed, then leaves, popping the parachute as she falls. There's a lurching moment of fear while she's in freefall, she lets out a breath when her parachute catches on the wind. She lands some distance away from the launch site. She teleports out of the seat in lieu of unbuckling, then does her best to collect the parachute. Are parachutes made to be disposable? No, they can be reused, right?

She takes a few minutes to bring it over in what she hopes is not a hopelessly tangled pile. "How did we do?"

One of the engineers (a big, burly one named simply "White" in accordance with her ghost-white hair and significantly pale-blue complexion) receives the chair and parachute and starts reloading the latter into the former. It seems be a somewhat involved process that involves slotting in a crank into the back of the chair and then slowly and carefully winding the tethers of the parachute back while making sure that the parachute's main cloth folds correctly as it's pulled together.

"Somebody," Lion begins, looking at one of the other engineers, "dropped an order of magnitude right at the end and made us all think that 20 meters of rail was going to be enough for one stage of the flight. It's not. We need 200 meters of rail for one stage, which is...more than we easily put together right now, alone figure out how to fold up into your Bevin." Lion slumps a little as they let out a disappointed sigh.

"Ah." Impractical, then. "That's a shame." Well shit. "I can still jump there, it would just take a while." I could try empowering myself with Azoth, would that let me pull more Gs? No, that would take too long. "So what's the plan now?"

"It'd take ages, especially Rim-side. Hm..." Lion replies, considering.

A moment later, the same engineer (who's brain as been in overdrive trying to think of something to come back from this enormous mistake) exclaims, "Wait! Strawberry, you can put stuff back in your Bevin, right? What if, just before the sled left the rail, you put the rail back in your Bevin? That'd mean both parts are reusable, and we wouldn't need to figure out how to fit 50 rails into your Bevin!"

"Uhm, Well... wouldn't the rail then crash into the Bevin floor? It would have to do this repeatedly, and if I mess up even one time and fail to send the rail back it would plummet out of my reach. I'd have to practice, at the very least."

The proponent of the idea deflates a bit. "That is true..."

"The rail should be able to handle the impact, it's going significantly slower than the sled after all. The floor of the Bevin might get kind of beat up, though, and if it's going back into the Bevin to be reused then the rail has to actually fit inside, not just expand after being deployed..." another adds.

The discussion expands from there along a few different lines, but Lion is able to pretty quickly ascertain and convey to Strawberry that they're probably not going to actually be landing on a skyland today after all, and apologize for getting ahead of themselves.

She looks up. Frontiers yet unexplored present themselves to her, being unable to reach it now is almost a relief. It is an opportunity to explore later, when she is better prepared.

Five Conduits that she knows of, including herself. So far they seem friendly, but that's not something she can rely on. It's a big multiverse and sooner or later they will encounter a bad actor and everything could go to shit. Anybody with her teleportation powers and a handful of grenades could do horrendous damage given the opportunity. Who knows what terrifying combinations of powers exist out there. She has to get stronger.

She walks back to where Fib was conjuring orichalcum.

It is a bit of journey, though maybe not all that long of one.

She finds him as he was before, praying (though detectably more weary than before). He's evidently already conjured a couple times, and the engineers he's working with have take the plates and affixed them to the skeleton train engine.

Just a moment after she arrives, a familiar block of orichalcum appears and lands on the floor with a thud, and Fib begins sculpting it. He's focused enough on the work that he doesn't immediately notice Strawberry's return.

She waits for him to finish with his current piece. It's almost hypnotic, watching him manipulate metal like something between water and clay. Shame I don't have a camera, Groundskeeper should see this. 

She approaches after he looks finished. "That's still ridiculously cool."