Redirecting lighting to make a fire? If there were gods watching over Cilen right now, they would surely be giggling amongst themselves in amusement at this goblin that was attempting to get himself killed. If this wasn't overkill, Cilen didn't know what was.
Drawing a deep breath, and exhaling slowly to calm his pounding heart, he concentrated.
"You can do this."
"It's just a little fire and nothing can go wrong."
Reciting the words like a prayer, Cilen slowly sent out a stream of energy to the Lightning Source.
"Crap."
Instantly, as soon as he made a connection, a streak of electricity capitalized on the link, and slammed itself into his chest, flinging him like a rag doll across the open clearing.
Luckily for Cilen, the clearing mostly consisted of soft grass so when he landed, he mostly felt a little pain and that was it. If what he landed on were something like a rock instead, Cilen possibly could have broken all of the bones in his spine, ending his little adventure for good.
"I hate this."
A little figure could be seen amongst the tall grass, struggling to get up. He was a little disgruntled, but mostly fine. Although his little experiment ended in a spectacular failure, Cilen could still say that he had gained a little more insight into this strange energy thing that he had going on.
First of all, it couldn't interact with anything but electricity. So far. He had tried it sending it out to other things, like the grass, the soil, and the water from the lake. Although it could reach those objects, it just couldn't form a connection as he did with the electricity in the Lightning Source. It was like almost like he had a telephone that couldn't go through no matter how many times he dialed. Only when he dialed a specific number, would he successfully establish a connection.
Second, from the two times that he "played around" with the lightning, his stream of energy seemed to act like a channel for the electricity to run through. It began from the source and arrived straight to Cilen. Instantly too.
Third, after a channel has been established, he could not redirect the flow of electricity. Or rather, he assumed that his reaction speed was not fast enough to respond to the flow of electricity. After all, electricity moves at the speed of light, and light does not move slowly.
If these three speculations were true, it would make sense why he had failed to redirect the electricity that was already outside of the lightning source. It simply too fast. Unless he had a pre-established channel, it was simply impossible to harness the power of lightning.
Dusting the specs of dirt and grass of his clothes, Cilen's thoughts wandered to the applications of his newfound power. He remembered from his time on earth in his mandatory biology classes, that all movement in the body was the result of electrical stimulation from the brain. And if his memory served him right, an electric current in the form of an external impulse would be able to interfere with the impulse sent from the brain causing muscles to move in a way they weren't intended to. Like way stun guns were used to incapacitate people on Earth.
Cilen wasn't interested in stunning people or making them do funny things with their arms.
Yet.
He needed something that could help him now. Something that would prevent him from becoming some monster's lunch and he couldn't be hoping that in every dangerous encounter, something as life-saving as a Lightning source or a thunderstorm would randomly appear. Though, thinking about it again, even if he was lucky enough to get a timely thunderstorm, it wouldn't help much as there was no way of directly linking the lightning with his energy.
"Great," he grumbled.
The only way for him to defend himself was to lug around a giant battery and electrocute things. It was better than nothing. But not that much better.
If he could directly control electricity...
That, on the other hand, was a power he could get behind. Images of controlling lightning orbs and throwing down lightning bolts like a diety popped up in Cilen's mind. Not to mention that the brain used electrical signals to communicate... he shivered at the thought.
There was no point in lamenting about his misfortune. At least he gained some information from all that thinking. Infomation that made Cilen want to kick himself for his stupidity earlier. He just needed to disconnect himself from the channel in order to avoid being electrocuted.
Before he attempted to electrocute himself again, Cilen ran some tests, in order to determine the full parameters of his newfound power. Extending the channel, he found that the maximum distance it could extend to from his body was around two meters and he could maintain it for around thirty seconds before his energy was depleted by half. If it was disconnected, he had a three-meter sphere of influence in which he had full control of the channel. Controlling the channel had also rapidly drained his energy, at which he found out, regenerated at a rate of around 1 percent every fifteen minutes.
With the basic numbers figured out, Cilen marched to the floating lightning ball, eager to try his luck again.