The Electrical Storm
The horizon flickers. Not lightning - something else. A pale, bluish-white strobing that pulses across the sky in sheets, illuminating the underside of clouds that weren't there an hour ago. The air smells of ozone and hot metal.
Your skin prickles. The hair on your arms stands up. An electrical storm - rare in the waste, and dangerous in ways regular storms aren't. Metal conducts. The desert is full of metal.
Elecciones
- 1
Drop anything metal you're carrying and get low. Wait for it to pass.
sin requisitoÉxitoYou shed your gear, crouch behind a rock, and wait. The storm rolls over in fifteen minutes - blue-white flashes, a deep humming in the ground, and a single strike that hits a rusted antenna tower a hundred meters away. When it passes, your gear is fine and your teeth have stopped vibrating.
FracasoYou drop your gear and crouch, but the storm lingers. For forty minutes you sit in the open, flinching at every flash. When it finally passes, your muscles ache from tension and your gear has a fine static charge that makes everything stick together.
- 2
Keep moving. The storm is high altitude - ground strikes are unlikely at this distance.
sin requisitoÉxitoYou gamble that the storm is too high to ground-strike and keep walking. The odds are in your favor - barely. The storm passes overhead without incident, though the static charge in the air makes your skin crawl for an hour afterward.
FracasoA bolt strikes the ground sixty meters to your left. The concussion knocks you sideways. Your ears ring for the rest of the day. You're alive, but only because sixty meters isn't zero meters.
- 3
The strobing pattern and ozone concentration tell you the storm's trajectory and duration.
ÉxitoThe pulse frequency is increasing - the ionization layer is descending, which means ground strikes are imminent but the storm is moving fast. Based on the wind-shear pattern in the clouds, it'll pass your position in under ten minutes. You secure your metal gear in a low depression, ground yourself against a rock face, and wait exactly nine minutes. The storm passes overhead with three ground strikes - all behind you, all in the area you would have been walking through if you'd kept moving.
FracasoYou estimate the storm's trajectory and conclude it's moving parallel to you, not toward you. You keep walking. Then the wind shifts. The storm turns. You end up scrambling for cover as strikes land within a hundred meters. Your trajectory calculation didn't account for the wind shear. Meteorology from the ground is a humbling discipline.
UUID