He stared at the little tendrils of electricity writhing out from the ball in the center of the sphere. He put his finger up to the ball and touched it. Countless tiny tendrils of electric current combined into a thicker, more focused beam of plasma and danced around his finger.
The ball had inspired Pung to research lightning harvesting. One night he had
noticed that if he touched the ball with all of his fingers clustered together around a single point, a thick arc of electricity jumped out to meet his fingers. But when he separated his fingers slightly, that single arc split into several thinner arcs. That led Pung to think that maybe the same thing could be done with a bolt of lightning.
All you had to do was split a bolt of lightning into multiple bolts, and you could more easily and efficiently store the energy it produced.
Of course, splitting a bolt of lightning would require a significant buildup of
energy to begin with. The negatively charged current in a plasma ball dissipates
throughout the ball randomly, having no strongly positive charge anywhere in or outside
of the sphere to cause a single concentrated arc. But when a positively charged finger
touches the glass of the plasma ball, the negatively charged ions emanating from the
metal ball in the center gravitate towards it, like water flowing down a drain. Lightning works basically the same way. So, all one had to do was concentrate positively charged particles along the ground, and one could not only control where lightning struck, but even how it struck, splitting a single lightning bolt into multiple bolts.