Jimmy Payan
Honors Literature
Mrs. Jackson

==================== Stormy 13th Hour ======================

The world would never forget the time that it faced its biggest threat. Not a scorching
asteroid, but more of a stormy storm. An ominous, flaming lantern, which looked like a big, eerie
orbiting fire soaring around the sky. Every day, it would break into a horrendous knifestorm,
raining unstoppable doom for anyone unlucky enough to get caught in its deathly blades. Anyone
who was trapped there would soon be hoping to reach cloud 9 and forget it all. Why, you ask,
well, it’s a puzzle to me. But what was really a mystery to everyone was where the smoking heap
of evil had come from. It was seemingly unstoppable, a hellfire across the entire horizon. During
the morning’s glory, you could see the darkblaze from miles away. When it was sunset, all you
knew was that there would be death at dusk soon enough. The only places where it never
traveled were in the blizzardy storms up north, where instead of the roaring eldritch flame, you
had to worry about frostbite, and stay warm by a pile of wood which held the burning flames that
kept you warm and alive. Up there, the only ways to entertain yourself is with radio, but the only
stations that are up there are playing the songs from the early 80’s, the Miami Nights channel. It
seems horrible, but many people would rather face the ancient eldritch which streaked across the
sky all the time than suffer a slow death by disco.

At the north and south poles, there were people who were on nostalgia trips, and it felt like a time warp back to the 20th century. The disco beatdowns lasted for days on end. Eventually, a resistance formed, tired of the sunbeams being blocked out by the unrelenting demonflame. They didn’t want the sun to be blocked out until it was simply a neutron star. They grouped up together, and began to think of a plan. Their brains were so overclocked with ideas that they thought that they might begin to have memory leaks.


Eventually, though, they thought of a plan. They began to construct a huge machine, from all the
nuts-n-bolts they had lying around. It started small, and they still needed at least a kill-a-watt of
energy to kick start the machine. But, using their electrostatic knowledge, the great minds of the
world created a tesla coil, and used it to send a power surge to the machine. To their shock, it
began to start, and turn on. The ancient, galactic codex of knowledge that they had tapped into
was truly from out of this world, father even than the farthest of our orbiting planets. The
machine started drawing in a green energy from the earth, and was steaming softly. Eventually, it
got hot enough, and began drawing in purple energy from the nebulas in the farthest reaches of
outer space. But the people were running out of time. The hellish inferno above had began to
develop a strategy to get past the ice. The people knew, however, that the machine was not
powerful enough to destroy the poisoned shadows just yet. Eventually, the machine started to
ooze out a roboactive substance, and they knew it was time to fire. The mega strike created from
the machine obliterated the cloudy moon, and the only thing that was left was a floating misty
skull.

Unfortunately, the aftermath of the machine was a horrible, green black hole in the farthest
reaches of the galaxy. The people were safe, for now. They threw around purple and green
confetti, celebrating the defeat of the demon. The world would remember these people’s heroic
acts during that Stormy 13th Hour.