Feather Falls on Tallahassee Power Plant, Knocking Out Electricity for Miles
Since the start of the fall semester, residents of Tallahassee have dealt with severe damage to electricity lines thanks to multiple storms, a car crashing into an electric pole and their roommate Greg not paying his share of the utilities. The city is facing its most serious situation yet as power has been knocked out again. The culprit this time? A feather from a migrating mallard that gently grazed upon an electricity tower, creating a domino effect that has left the city without any functioning electricity.
“One second, I was live tweeting my hashtag original and hashtag important opinions about hashtag The Walking Dead, then out of nowhere the lights went out. I already had to deal with one cliffhanger at the end of last season; now I don’t even know how the first episode of that shitfest ends,” yelled Cristina Valdez while painting red hand marks on the wall in a last ditch effort to have some fun. “I’ve spent the last hour tweeting out ‘Can anyone bring me some water? #TheWalkingDead,’ ‘Don’t know if I can survive much longer #TheWalkingDead’ and ‘Never thought I would die before Carl #TheWalkingDead,’ but I think the fandom might see my tweets as cosplay.”
Sources close to the mayor say that every option is being explored. Tommy, one of the three kindergarteners in a trenchcoat that makes up Mayor Andrew Gillum, suggested having a large plant of fuzzy hamsters powering the whole city by running in cute hamster balls of various colors. Another, suggested by Anthony, Tommy’s friend from recess whom he hired as Tallahassee’s head of utility, was to steal a bunch of potato-powered clocks from local science fairs and figure out how to use them to power an interconnected grid of buildings, machinery and traffic lights.
“We really thought we finally had an electricity system worthy of a state capital after the last hurricane, when we upgraded the whole system to be resistant to thicc leaves and gusts of wind faster than 5 MPH,” explained plant manager Bill Plaggens as he tried stuffing a AAA battery into the audio jack of his iPhone. “Who would have guessed that a bird’s feather would just fall down from the sky and knock out a whole damn tower? We’re humble workers of the state capital, not a science engineer from the science capital.”
As the power remained absent from the dorms, apartments and houses of Tallahassee, residents found comfort in traditional forms of entertainment. Many have banded together to form a commune against the shackles of social media, video games and the 24-hour news cycle by deciding to live in the forest, just as their great ancestors, or the ancestors of someone did before they were brutally whitewashed and colonized once did. Abandoning a 21st century lifestyle for that of a nomadic hunter and gatherer is no easy feat, but is certainly the most logical option when one has not been able to post to their Instagram story in more than two hours. Following this trend, reports have come in from all around Leon County of psycho bird hunters hitting pigeons out of the sky with blow darts and their feathers knocking out all power stations within a 35-mile radius.