Three hours later, James and I were sitting on the eastern shore of the island, notably not building a magic sailboat. Instead, we were both staring at a shattered coconut shell sitting atop the remains of a recently doused fire.

  “I’ll have to revise my previous assertion,” I said solemnly. “It turns out that coconuts do explode.”

  James didn’t say anything immediately, pressing a hand to his head as if to suppress his frustration. His enthusiasm for the scientific process had waned significantly over the past few hours, and it seemed to be all he could do to keep his own skull from going the way of the coconut.

  He sat down on one of the rocky protrusions characteristic of my island’s outer edge, taking a deep breath.

  “Can you carve a bit of rock out of the ground here?” he asked wearily. “We can try that next. If the rock cracks too, I’ll try just lighting a fire next to one of those splash pools and putting some kind of tarp over it to direct the steam.”

  James seemed pretty desperate for a way to boil water. His explanation had something to do with a bunch of microscopic blob monsters that would grow and overwhelm his James goop if he didn’t stay as clean as possible. I knew bacteria existed thanks to my mana network, but I’d never paid much attention to the stuff before meeting James. Creatures that small couldn’t hurt me. I had to focus pretty hard just to notice them.

  James didn’t have any magical defenses though, and was thus in danger of falling victim to exponential growth no matter how small the individual predator.

  He’d spent most of the day so far trying to set up a rudimentary fire spit. First, he’d insisted on trying to tie it all together with twisted leaves instead of my silk. He’d managed to get the sticks standing eventually, but had to ask for my help tying a coconut shell to the thing.

  From there, he’d gone through a few dozen fire starting methods, but couldn’t manage to produce more than a trickle of smoke with any of them. His final attempt involved carving a wedge into a chunk of wood, stuffing the end full of kindling, and rubbing a stick through it as fast as he could. He relented to letting me pour some mana into the process after that one failed.

  With the fire going and the coconut full of water, the first test was finally in motion. Then the coconut had snapped in half just as the water inside started to bubble, dousing the fire and leaving us in our current predicament.

  James was doing an impressive job of containing the stress raging through his mind. I didn’t really understand what the problem was. I’d been piecing together a sizable raincatcher while he was messing around with all of these experiments, so it’s not like his survival was dependent on success here.

  For my part, I found the entire process fascinating. The raincatcher was a pretty monotonous project. I’d started by loosely weaving a bunch of tree bark into a five foot diameter bowl shape, and now I was just lining the inside of the whole thing with crystalline silk. So far as I could tell, it was a far simpler and more practical task than what James was up to, but his thing apparently involved blowing things up.

  I had wondered what would happen when you filled something flammable with water and tried to light it on fire. I figured it might not go well for the coconut, but I’d been half expecting it to melt.

  I expected no such thing from the rock. Rocks weren’t flammable. If you put water in a rock and tried to set it on fire, the rock should heat up, and the water should boil, right? James seemed less sure as we set up the next experiment, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. In retrospect, it’s probably because he comes from a place where everyone cooks things in stuff a lot harder to procure than coralline limestone.

  What I’d expected to be the most likely point of failure for the coconut was actually my own silk. It was as fireproof as I could make it and threaded through a hole in the very top of the empty shell, but I’d still been worried about its integrity. With the rock, I just found a vaguely bowl shaped chunk with a natural hook and carved it out of a low cliff face. It wouldn’t hold much water, especially given that it’d hang at an angle, but I figured it would work just fine.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  James watched in chagrin as I shored up his little stick construction to take the weight of the rock and got the fire started again. He shuffled behind a tree as our experiment got under way.

  “You should probably back up a bit,” he said as I hovered over the makeshift bowl, watching for the signature bubbles.

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s not like the rock is going to explode.”

  “Would you be able to defend yourself if it did?” he asked nervously.

  I hesitated for a moment, glancing his way. He was peeking out from behind a tree, ready to duck to safety at a moment's notice.

  “What kind of explosion are we talking about?” I asked, picturing something on a scale from fire cracked coconut to mana burst coconut. An array of tiny bubbles was just starting to form along the base of the bowl.

  “If I just say the word ‘explosion,’ does that give you an idea of the range I can imagine?” he asked.

  I sprang away from the fire as if shot out of a gun, clearing the distance to the tree line in a single leap and frantically shoveling up a wall of sand between me and the fire.

  My frantic efforts slowed slightly as I caught the bemused look on James’s face. I had to fight the urge to throw up my forelegs and hiss at him.

  “How the frick are you still alive?” I asked frantically as an apocalyptic nightmare slowly faded from the forefront of my mind. Given my relatively poor understanding of where James came from, his idea of an explosion had seemed to me to level a city the size of Colorado. I wasn’t yet aware of smaller subdivisions like ‘Denver.’

  “An explosion that destructive would kill a dragon at full strength, and you don’t even have any mana,” I said, wondering if perhaps I’d severely underestimated James’s tenacity. “People can’t see explosions that big and live.”

  James chuckled. “Sure they can,” he said. “You see an explosion far bigger than that every single day.”

  Somehow sensing the confusion in my silence, he casually pointed straight up. I didn’t have to follow his finger to know what he was pointing at. I had all of the… light shield… eyelid… sunglasses things on my secondary eyes closed to keep them from getting fried. Of course, it wasn’t a problem for my primary eyes because those are a bit more like what you’d be used to... I think. Nobody here has come up with scientific names for this stuff yet. I should probably get on that before this happens again.

  Anyway, I have semi-transparent eyelid things that protect the eyes that can’t adjust from especially bright light, and they were all closed to block out the midday sun beating down from the heavens, which is what James was pointing at. I started asking questions about it in a way that no longer feels like it would fit well with the last few sentences, and he started to respond when the rock exploded, sending a jagged chunk of limestone flying over my head at about a million miles per hour.

  Gah, my flow is all ruined. Who’d have thought writing a semi-autobiography having never taken an English class would be this hard? Curse this uncivilized world for not having all of the words I need! Think people will notice if I just make some up? Whatever.

  So James and I stared at each other in awkward silence for a moment as our second fire crackled down to a smoldering heap. He seemed to have calmed down a little bit, but he was still clearly unhappy with how these experiments were going.

  He chatted with me a bit about the sun as he went about setting up the next one, explaining how it was this massive fusion reaction four hundred times further away from the Earth than the moon with enough mass to keep all the planets from hurling off into an endless void. He tried to explain gravity by asking me to imagine that three dimensional space was actually a two dimensional plane with bits of mass plopped down in the middle of it, causing those bits of mass to get pulled towards one another because of something like, well, gravity.

  I hardly understood what in the heck he was talking about, but the conversation seemed to help him avoid thinking about whatever had him upset.

  By the end of the day, I was about done with the raincatcher, having had to recharge my mana twice to produce all of the necessary materials. Meanwhile, James had managed to set up a triangular tarp over a puddle of salt water, with the tip hanging over another empty coconut husk. He had another fire going next to the puddle, and this experiment was actually something of a success. Steam rose from the puddle, condensed on the large end of the tarp, and drained down into the coconut. It produced about two drops of fresh water an hour.

  It rained that night. A small storm kicked up in the early hours of the morning, filling my raincatcher to the brim by sunrise and utterly demolishing James’s primitive steam still.