The Storm Arrives

A genius, at least that's what his professors called him. Levi had grown up knowing he was smarter than most, and to prove that he took his final school exams four years early, and is one of the youngest people to hold a physics degree from either Oxford or Cambridge.

Science is his life, the theory his work, but the experiments are his passion. With inspiration from the likes of Tesla, Newton and Einstein, he wanted to make Levi Magnus one of the greats in science, and he was well on his way there.

It was high time at the age of seventeen that he started his own experiments. Energy was his focus. Where it came from, where it went, how to harness it from exterior sources, and how to reduce human energy consumption on things like fossil fuels. With one of the greatest minds of his generation, he had the ability, know-how, and the desperate hunger to discover something new.

While studying late, a thunderstorm was crackling outside. He could see the bright flash of light and then seconds later hear the sound of the thunder. Unconsciously, he habitually counted the seconds to know his distance from the storm. The next flash sparked a lightbulb in Levi's brain, it had been tried before, but never successfully, could it be done? Surely.

The next time Levi looked outside, dawn had broken, the sky was a deep orange and the cockerels had finished their morning songs. His notebook had pages and pages of hastily scribbled notes and detailed, annotated drawings.

Barely containing his excitement, he animatedly proposed his idea to his most trusted professor. Initially his professor said: “it's been done before, there's a reason it's not been done”, but after reading the notes, he stated: “Nobody has thought of it that way, this could actually work”. That very evening, on no sleep, Levi started working on building his energy harnesser, his Lightning Energy Voltage Implicator, or L.E.V.I for short.

Two months later, Levi had borrowed a pickup truck, and with L.E.V.I on the back, he'd driven to the centre of a flat field. He'd picked a day that a storm was coming in, and he could already see the dark grey clouds rolling in from the west.

The lightning splintered through the sky like cracking glass, the time now less than two seconds between the sight and the sound, it could only be minutes before...

The lightning struck no less than 10 metres from Levi, sending him spinning through the air. Levi looked around, not believing what he was seeing. The lighting struck directly onto L.E.V.I causing an unexpected explosion, opening a rift in the floor. The ground on the other side of the rift started to rise, twist and rotate. He recognised what could only be a portal opening in front of his very eyes, and Levi Magnus, the scientist, the atheist, the young man destined for the history books, had nothing left to do, but pray he survived.