You lock the door of your Personal Library and stomp up to your desk, pushing all the papers and jars off of it. Rolling up your sleeves and loosening your tie, you figure it's time to get serious. No more playing around, no more Orb experiments until you can actually control them. You saw what they could do uninhibited in The Well. Their tendencies towards mischief need to be curbed, or at least channeled into something useful.

You had originally been reading books on material science, trying to understand what the Orbs were made of, you had schematics of their roundness, shape and colour, water jugs to feed them and test resistances. You were treating them like inanimate objects, as a raw resource. But you've realised they are living beings. Useful, yes, but also ones that possess their own wants and ideas. There needs to be a certain amount of bargaining here, a way to get them to do what you want, while keeping their interests in line.

But that wasn't your forte.

You were an engineer, not a politician or a cattle wrangler! You solved practical problems, and these Orbs were far from practical in their mentality. So your struggle began, with a few successful attempts at commanding them to different corners of the room, but most times, they would just drink and spit water out at you, or engulf various items just to drop them on the floor. By the end of your training session with them, you're out of breath. Hair soaked in coffee and water, labcoat just a little tattered and tie fully off. You take your goggles off are fling them across the room in frustration. The Orbs catch it in a bubble shield.

Maybe it wasn't meant to be, you think. Perhaps, while you could understand their properties, they would never be of use to you. Hands supporting your figure looming over your workshop table, you look up, and in the swinging overhead light, catch a glimpse of your water pump design pinned to the opposite wall. It is crude, now that you think about it. Lots of redundant parts and definitely more inefficient than it could be. But nevertheless, you're still extremely proud of it. You had pulled that idea out of your mind at an age with no formal training, where you probably didn't even know all your times tables and yet, you created something extraordinary.

You wonder if you still have it in you.

Rounding the side of your worktable, you carefully unpin your namesake design from your wall, wondering where all that creativity had gone since then. Now you could only work to the goal of saving your people, and destroying others, there was no more creating for the sake of it. You wonder if you miss it, you wonder if you're even capable of missing things anymore.

With a fresh piece of graph paper down, you begin to sketch what a theoretical improvement of your water pump would look like. Maybe just to take a break from the Orbs that continue to destroy your Personal Library in the background. As you take away any parts you didn't need, and implement more streamlined piping, you realise that you could actually make this water pump a lot smaller than you had imagined at eleven.

Depending on how much water it had to supply, it could even be as small as your forearm.

Would be useful perhaps if you needed a handheld fire extinguisher. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of fires happening in Libraries recently.

As you tidy up your improved schematic, you see that one of the Orbs has sunken into the last intact coffee cup on a winder sill. It sucks up the liquid, as usual, then proceeds to zip out of the cup at high speeds, changing into various mundane objects along the way.

You look back at your water pump, then the coffee cup.

And a brilliant idea strikes you.

You grab some spare materials from around your Personal Library and begin to assemble a prototype of the pump, working from your new schematic. What if you could give the Orbs an incentive to unleash their powers, then create an outlet where they can only unleash their power on a specific target. Perhaps the problem now was that they were aimless balls of energy, operating at the highest state of entropy with no direction. Maybe to command them, you would need to confine them.

Confine them in a state where they could stay alive. It's like having a hamster run on a hamster wheel to produce energy.

And the Orbs were the hamsters, with endless potential for purpose.

You construct a canister from the jam jar you used to contain the Mother Orb at one point, connected to a pump system which then connects into a large water bottle filled with coffee. You capture a few orbs and shove them into the canister, then through manual motion, pump coffee from your reservoir into the canister using a simplified version of your water pump. As the coffee get soaked up by the orbs, you see them buzz around with a potent energy, bouncing off the walls of the canister.

Then, just when their speed is at its highest, you unleash the Orbs through a small opening in the top of the canister, right onto your body. Crashing into your skin, they immediately flatten into sheets of force field, that eventually morph together to form a shield around you.

You've done it.

You hold your hands out and point the canister towards you, letting the over energised orbs hit their own force field and expand it until it is all around you.

“Up dammit!” You yell.

Slowly, the bubble starts to rise, and feel yourself lifting off the ground to the ceiling of your Personal Library. As you hear the clank of the force field hitting the light, you close your eyes.

“Ok now down, SLOWLY!”

“Slowly!” The Orbs collectively repeat as they lower you down not unlike Gilda in Wicked, floating down in her magic bubble.

As they do, you open the top of the canister once more, and all the Orbs collapse to float with zeal back into the jar, hoping for another hit of caffeine.

You look at them buzzing about in the pump connected jar, a wave of relief washing over you. Finally, order. Control in a way that benefits both you and them.

After shuffling as many orbs as possible in the jar and testing it a few times, you realise that you can now reliably form either partial or full shields around yourself, as well as float up and down for short periods of time through the bubble Orbs form. In exchange for coffee of course.

In your final design you put in a few tweaks, maybe a strap so the jar can fit on your hand with the bottle of coffee around your leg, and an opening in the Jar that triggers upon reaching a certain amount of pressure, to ensure that the Orbs can burst out automatically at their highest energy levels.

You look at yourself in your dark windows, a shadow of the man you once were, with all this gear strapped on, you almost look like some sort of superhero.

You squeeze your hand, triggering a few fl oz of coffee to flow into the canister on your arm, you see the orbs powering up. You nod triumphantly as you think:

It's Orb time baby.