Pass by Catastrophe
No Dreams of Orgonon post this week. I’ve been preoccupied with finals and a move. Here’s a short story I wrote for a class and revised for Eruditorum Press.
Iran annexes Ukraine | Entire US Cabinet Found Dead of Lead Poisoning | Immanuel Kant Cloned | Rabbit Kills 70
Wednesday, 6th of May, 20 _ _
The Pedagogic Courier
PASS BY CATASTROPHE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE METZGER UNIVERSITY NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE
Reni Abbasi
As Metzger University resumes operation in the aftermath of its nuclear explosion, the university’s administration is working hard to earn back its students’ trust. The families of the deceased have been offered compensation fees of $20,000 per casualty, plus a partial tuition refund for both deceased and living students. Metzger has asserted student loans are not forgiven under any circumstances). All students have received automatic 4.0 GPAs, and adjunct professors have received a 6% raise in their salary. The university has embroiled itself in a bout of some controversy over the 56% salary increase its administration has given itself. “With an unprecedented catastrophe like this, we felt Metzger University owed its students some financial support,” says University President Charles McDonnell. “And with their recent efforts to boost student morale, the board figured they owed themselves a reward.”
The catastrophe occurred at 2 PM PDT on the 17th of November, when Metzger University sent its student body emergency text messages, alerting them that the college had triggered a nuclear bomb and all faculty, staff, and students would have to be 50 miles off campus by 2:10. Over 15,000 students, academics, and manual workers scrambled to leave the building, causing many to be injured and some to be fatally trampled. Evacuation was further slowed by fifty philosophy majors who beat each other to death in an eschatology debate. In the parking lot students leaped into the windows of moving shuttles, often breaking ribs in the process. One mass of people managed to tip over a shuttle in motion and forced it into the side of another shuttle, as attested to by the university director’s personal security camera. At 2:09, a blinding flash and a mushroom from hell obliterated the landscape, instantly claiming thousands of lives (exact numbers have fluctuated, as estimates vary from 30,000 to 170,000). Buildings were decimated and forests burned for days. The governor called a state of emergency, martial law, and bypassed constitutional law to declare himself dictator of Transylvania. Shortly afterwards, security footage obtained by the New York Times showed the governor screaming at an aide about goblins under his desk. Institutionalization is being considered for the governor by his family.
As entire counties burned, governments, universities, and news channels debated the details of the nuclear explosion. A federal investigation was launched into the cause of the detonation, but it seems to have been inconspicuously concluded. In a rare public appearance, Harold Camping visited the destroyed Metzger campus. He has since been quarantined with radiation sickness despite his insistence that he has been cured.
Getting witness accounts from corpses is difficult, so pinning down a cause for the event has proved difficult.…
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As it’s come up a few times and I’ve thus far only said it on Twitter, I figured I should make a quick statement on the site. Short form: I have decided going forward that I will no longer be covering Big Finish material on the site or in my books. There are a handful of existing obligations I’ll still fulfill. I’ve promised Andrew Hickey I’ll cover Doctor Who and the Pirates in the revised Volume 6, and while I’m going to swap out one or two of the mooted 7th Doctor Big Finish essays for things on other topics, there’ll still be a few of those. And I’m not going to go around deleting already written Big Finish essays. But starting with Volume 8, none of the new essays added to any of the book collections are going to be on Big Finish material.