[B]“There is little we do not know Michael Faraday…You have the potential to shape a great war, we seek to understand why.”[/B]

"Ditto," he muttered, seeming to share the stranger's curiosity for his own reasons. "Well, the first part anyway." He shrugged his shoulders, temporarily accepting the mystery as he said, "Who [I]knows[/I] what war [I]I[/I] could shape. I'm about as clueless as you buddy. You came at me with lightning n' stuff, so I'm gonna assume that you're probably not looking to play checkers or something."

As the electric skeleton spawned an aura of dark lightning that surrounded himself and encompassed the entire area, Michael activated the torch's charge, emitting a radiance that battled against the coming darkness. Where the floor of the beach had been shrouded in a blanket of blackness, it now began to glint with an unpigmented shine. And the sands were not the only thing that had begun to change, the light seemed to reach out and surge across the surface of the sea beside them. Despite the intense luminescence, the light seemed to dodge the shadowed one altogether, as if cowering away from the darkness.

The wave of electric energy raised the hairs of Michael's companions. They all spread their eyes in amazement at first, gasping and sputtering in shock of the sudden burst. But they quickly regained their composure before they too began to pick up their items from where the campfire had been. They quickly clothed themselves and grabbed their belongings before they awaited Michael's command.

Realizing that they were waiting on him, Michael shouted the one thing that made sense to him. "Attack!"

It was at that time that Michael stopped staring at the brightness of everything and instead began to do battle. Shoving both his hands forward, in the direction of the stranger, he launched his fireball forth, splitting his hands in a one hundred-eighty degree angle. The fireball cut the distance quickly, sparking along the way as the 2 foot thick sphere bursted along a collision course with the skeleton's core.

As soon as the ball left Michael's hands, his companions began a charge on the skeleton. Two young men and two young women approached carrying umbrellas, beer bottles, and a knife used for flaying fish.