Fire tornadoes follow her, and Ruby seems to have more aerial manuerverability - and more ability to actually hide in the flames.

Still, Ellie gets a few blows in, between Ruby's return slashes.

Fighting in the sky: more fun.

Ruby seems to agree, by how much she's laughing and doing entirely unnecessary aerial tricks. They can get quite high up, too, since Ruby keeps trying to get the higher position.

Ellie will encourage this; she's curious if they have a height limit.

They hit cloud height well before any limit -

There's an awful lot of electric potential up here.

Thunderstorm time? Thunderstorm time.

Thunderstorm time!

Ruby gets caught in one of the flashes and has to flip back to human briefly, laughing all the while. She rockets up, trying to get above what's clearly Ellie's domain.

Ehehehe. She won't make that easy.

The thunderstorm Ellie's building is massive - it spins out as she builds it, growing in size horizontally as well as vertically.

She hits Ruby a few more times - Ruby's going fast enough to break free in about a minute and a half, which is plenty of opportunity for Ellie to surround her with layers of lightning.

Dimly, she wonders if she should really be letting it get this big. On the other, stronger paw, this is fun and she wants to see how big it gets before she loses control entirely.

Fortunately baffling meteorologists doesn't seem to get her instantly struck down by mystery masquerade police.

She doesn't have a reference for a cloud's natural size, not by feel, even if she could remember the technical specs - lightning cares a lot less about distance than legs. Still, this feels big, big enough she's having trouble keeping track of everything, and the core she's manipulating is creating its own weather systems at the edges.

Ruby also seems to be continually accelerating -

The limit Ellie hits first is height. The air's too thin, eventually, to support a thunderstorm or natural lightning, and thin clouds of ice crystals don't seem to be in her domain.

Bah.

Well, if Ruby wants to keep playing, she can come back down.

Ruby circles around a bit, laughing -

Then rises, higher and higher -

And breaks the sound barrier on her dive.

Right on a collision course with Ellie, too.

Yikes. Time to see if lightning is faster than thunder-

Definitionally so.

Ruby pulls out of her dive as soon as she misses - though it's close, the shockwave building up in front of her clipping Ellie.

It takes her a moment to correct from the knockback. But now Ruby's back in her thundercloud! Zapping time.

Bzzz!

And Ruby soars back up - then cuts sideways at speed.

Where's she going?

The nearest edge of the thundercloud, apparently, though she's also curving her flight path a bit weirdly.

Is she trying to... manipulate it somehow? Stir it up?

After her, loyal lightning bolt minions!

Ellie's able to keep up with her, especially following in the thundercloud - Ruby avoids most attacks, and returns with fire some, but is having trouble overwhelming Ellie as long as Ellie stays out of the upper atmosphere.

Ruby circles back eventually - her movements seem frustrated, actually.

Victory?

It's hard to communicate up here. If Ruby lands, Ellie will follow her down.

Ruby seems fairly intent on landing, especially once she speeds up enough to get past the edge of the thundercloud.

Down we go.

Ruby turns back into a human when she lands, stretching. She doesn't seem too upset by having given up.

"I couldn't figure out how to get you in there without creating a stupidly big firestorm, and I didn't feel like waiting you out," she says with a shrug. "Sticking to the thundercloud was smart."