Stormcatchers

Day One - The Strike

... A pale woman in the water. Long flowing red hair haloed her head. She called me over with her sweet, melodic voice and delicate hands, beneath a shimmering ray that peered through the surface of the seemingly endless body of water where I was submerged, illuminating her skin.
I tried to swim closer to her, to see the part o her body that was too clouded to make out: her whole bottom half was difficult to see. I couldn't move at all, and the water seemed to be making my lungs tempt to give in more with every single second.

I finally gasped for air as I came to my senses, throwing my arm forward with the impulse my body had held in while I was waming up. When I sat up in bed, I opened my eyes to see Rory clenching his stomach, groaning from pain. "You asshole! I thought I was drowning!" His pained moans quickly turned into laughter. Just to muffle his laughter a little, I hit him in the face with a pillow as I got up.
Roughly an hour later, we were out on the deck. We had all enjoyed our first meal of the day and greeted the night-shift workers, who were just going to their quarters to start getting used to their new sleep schedule.
When all of the thirty people had walked out into the main deck, confused as to where the captain was, we heard a door slamming itself open from a slightly higher level. Captain Barley practically sprung from his office with a distinct excitement, making all of us jump with a small fright. He stared us all down for unending, tense moments. "I hope you all know that you are now embarking in the first - and hopefully not the last - journey that will make your hard studying worth it. You are the best, brightest and most apt students of the Valley, and you will now commence scrubbing floors for the six following months." The deck roared with laughter for little over a couple seconds. "I'm your captain, Jonathan Barley. But you may call me Captain, Sir or Love if we get a little intimate." We all laughed once again in unison, this time accompanied by the hearty chuckle of Captain Barley. "Men!" he shouted suddenly to bring silence to the ship. "Reel in the anchors, throw out the weights! We're taking off!"
The movement was uncanny. As Rory and I pulled in one of the anchorsafter it'd been unhooked by the Sky Port crew, I watched the men scrambling to throw out the several sacks of sand around the ship that kept it grounded and balanced, and the other anchors being pulled in. Captain Barley went to the helm of the ship to start powering it up, and we felt the navigation ascending. I stepped back to appreciate the sun burning the clouds near the horizon. The sunrise looked astounding as we went up. It wasn't long until we passed through the clouds. It was just like very thick fog. Humid and cold. It was very cold up there. The air was thin and everything felt slightly lighter.

We had been chatting on-deck for a few long hours when the sky beneath us started to look a little darker. "That's a storm approaching, boys and girls! Time to do as you were trained to! I want the wings out in five or under. Corviell, Petra, Treval and Young take the right; Thorne, Altair, Woodland and Hawk take the right!"
The wings were the most essential part of a storm-catching ship. They were metal web-like contraptions that wouldattract and direct the rays of lightning into the ship's system so the energy could be stored inside the containers in the hold. We pulled in unison on the rigs to extend the front pair of wings: the easiest ones and the smallest. The middle pair were larger in diameter by  15 inches, and the third pair at the back larger than that one by another 20.
The wings were locked steady into place to begin collecting energy when Barley, noticing my excitement specifically, told me to climb up to the crow's nest to estimate when we'd reach the center of that storm. When I climbed up, I immediately gaped. The imposing figure of a cumulonimbus, like a menacing wall of dark, thundering doom, was approaching the ship at a maddening pace. "Everyone inside! We're hitting a wall in less than ten!"
It took a while for my now-shaking hands to undo the hook on the hatch door that kept me in the crow's nest, and I started making my way down the ladder I'd climbed so quickly before, but my fear of falling now was greater than it had been on the way up. The deck was nearly clear two minutes after the captain ordered the crew to enter, and I froze as I noticed we were heading into the cloud with increasing velocity.
I heard a deafening boom, saw a flash of bluish-white light and felt a shocking heat course from my right hand through the rest of my body with an immense pain. I remember nothing else from that day.