Cohesive Multi-Prompt Response

Five years ago, back on May 24, 2019, when I was in the habit of writing posts that were responses to multiple prompts, I wrote And So It Begins, and I decided to share this post again for Fandango’s Flashback Friday.

The sky looked like ink, no stars, just black; that’s how it began.  Life on Earth would never be the same, as we were entering a new stone age.  What was so different about this comet?  Usually when a comet approaches our Sun, the intense glare of solar radiation sublimates ices into gas that escapes into space or causes the comets to crack apart.  Well, this particular comet Hailstorm 88 was big enough and it also passed close enough into our Sun’s atmosphere, such that the steep fall into the Sun’s gravity accelerated it to more than 500 miles per second.  At that speed, drag from the Sun’s lower atmosphere flattened the comet into a pancake right before it exploded in an airburst, releasing intense high-energy ultraviolet radiation and X-rays that caused solar flares along with coronal mass ejection, giant bubbles of gas and magnetic fields, containing several billion tons of charged particles that traveled several million miles per hour till this knocked all our satellites out of orbit.

It was like a bomb was exploded on the Sun, and the momentum propelled by the comet made the Sun ring like a bell, causing sunquakes that echoed through the solar atmosphere.  When this explosion occurred on the Sun, it produced billions of radioactive isotopes that were ejected into space, and many made their way to Earth putting all human life in jeopardy.  The chemistry involved in these radioactive nuclides was unstable, thus they dissipated excess energy by spontaneously emitting radiation in the form of alpha, beta, and gamma rays and all this radiation began to surround our planet.  Radiation was causing people to develop cancer and it was also producing memory loss and my brain was becoming so fuzzy that I no longer felt it was safe for me to drive.

People all over Earth started to grow mustard, amaranthus, cockscomb and sunflower plants to absorb the excess radiation.  It wasn’t really a second stone age, but the internet was gone and many power grids were down.  Some good may even have come out of this as a lot of people turned to reading books again when they were not able to watch TV anymore.  I had to change careers and I became a baker.  I started to make a butter cream cakes, which if I have to say so myself, they are delicious.  It was a white cake which I made out of flour and baking powder, which created the bubbles to make my cake rise.  I covered it with chocolate using my spatula and I was making more money now than I did as an engineer.

Written for Sheryl’s Daily Word Prompt – Surround, for the Daily Spur prompt – Chemistry, for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie First Line Friday hosted by Dylan, for FOWC with Fandango – Jeopardy, for Ragtag Community – Memory, for Paula’s Three Things Challenge – sunflower, spatula, raise, for Rachel Poli I Read I Write I Create – Time To Write Creative Writing prompt – Drive and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Fuzzy.