I struggled with this prompt because I’ve had a slight headache all day and also I can’t write characters who are smarter than me very well BUT HERE IT IS.

A quick explanation of the OCs here: Ambrosia Resonance belongs to a friend of mine. She is a dragon with great psionic power, is nine feet tall, and full of rage. Jade is a human scientist who… well, her defining character moment is she once tried to install a miniature spaceship laser weapon in a toaster. Silver, who is only referenced here and doesn’t actually appear, is Jade’s only real friend and he likes to fly spaceships and he also likes not existing near Jade’s experiments.

So. Uh. Let’s go let’s goooo?

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“This is going to end badly, and you should know that,” Ambrosia glared at Jade, watching her type away at her computer and continuing to ignore the warning signs. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Ambrosia!” Jade turned to look at her with a wide smile, eyes sparkling with what Ambrosia felt were even more bad ideas. “This is absolutely going to work!”

“Is it really?” Ambrosia questioned again, realizing that Silver had already fled the lab. Yes. That was very promising, indeed. “Are you aware that Silver left?”

“He just doesn’t know how to handle my greatness,” Jade replied with a shrug. “Not to worry, when this does work, he’ll be back.”

The small human’s confidence might have been endearing to Ambrosia if it wasn’t so tragic. But Jade hadn’t been listening to Ambrosia since this began, and when it inevitably blew up in her face… well, Ambrosia didn’t mind being the one to say “I told you so”.

Ambrosia gave Jade’s machine one last look. It had been cobbled together from pieces of metal that Jade had found lying around, making the fact that it was supposed to house a volatile source of energy all the more unsettling and frustrating. Ambrosia didn’t blame Silver for running while he had the chance.

“You really shouldn’t turn that thing on,” Ambrosia warned Jade one last time, seeing that she was already typing in the command. “That energy you’re trying to harness is UNSTABLE. You’re MAKING a BIG MISTAKE!”

Jade activated the device, turning her head to look over at it, watching the outer ring spin around the orb of purple light. Ambrosia watched the light suspiciously, as the rings spun around it, sparks flying from it and striking the metal like lightning the orb grew in size. She could sense the fractures that lined the glass of the containment unit, it was going to…

“Oh, no, that’s… that’s not good,” Jade looked back and forth between the screen and the orb, realizing all too late that things were not, in fact, going the way she had thought they would. She tried typing a command to make it slow down, another to make it stop, but it only grew more intense, the glass cracking as the light grew brighter. “Uh… I think you were right, Ambrosia…”

A bolt of purple lightning struck through the glass, breaking one of the rings in half and causing the other to spin ever faster. The orb pulsed like a heartbeat, or more accurately, a ticking bomb.

“Now?” Ambrosia threw her head back, staring at the ceiling and letting her ears and wings droop dramatically. The room began to shake violently, lights and screens flickering off and on. “NOW you LISTEN to me?”

“…Can we forget that part and get to the part where this doesn’t blow us both up?” Jade asked nervously, backing away from the orb. No wonder Silver had fled the second he took one look at it.

Ambrosia stared at her, and then looked at the containment unit, the remaining ring spinning so fast she couldn’t even really see it anymore. Fractures climbed up the walls, to the ceiling, as the orb pulsed faster and faster until-

Ambrosia surrounded the broken containment unit with a forcefield of her psionic energy, her eyes glowing as she concentrated on enveloping the orb. Within only a few seconds, the orb exploded like a star, contained within Ambrosia’s forcefield and then flickering out, the shaking of the room stopping soon after.

“There,” Ambrosia said, letting the forcefield fade away, the containment unit in ruins. She looked over at Jade, who was staring at the remains of her experiment in a mix of sorrow and confusion. “Do you understand now? You can’t control a power like that!”

“I know exactly what I did wrong…” Jade said softly.

Ambrosia’s ears perked up. “You do, huh?”

“Yeah, I do,” Jade replied with a solemn nod, her lips curling into a grin. “I need a bigger containment unit.”

Ambrosia screamed.

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Will Jade ever learn? Science says no.