Fried assignments. (Solo)

The computer screen threw a ghostly tinge across the room. Jack rolled his eyes from where he lay curled on the foot of the bed, the whites of his eyes bright for a moment in the darkness.

The clock in the bottom right corner of the screen and the eerie green numbers of the bedside clock disagreed as to the time; one proclaimed it to be 4:03, the other insisted 4:07. Either way it was far to late, or early, to be struggling with assignments and Verdy’s eyes were more often drifting off the page than on it. Still, the assignment was due the next day (or rather, at a more reasonable hour of that same day) and she was determined to finish it. The wordcount hovered tantalisingly close, only another hundred words and it would be complete, she could sign off for the night and try and sleep off the haze that mixed words together and squished phrases into senseless mush. Placing ‘very, very, very, very’ before certain words was becoming increasingly tempting and the thesaurus’ translation of single words into two or better, a phrase, had almost run dry.

Her concluding paragraph became slightly heavy, as she deposited the spare fifty words she couldn’t cram anywhere else strategically in with those she had already written. She sighed and wriggled her way out of the groove in the chair and onto the bed, careful not to kick Jack with feet still shrouded in shoes. She couldn’t be bothered to take them off, nor unbutton her jeans. She crawled up to the pillow and collapsed onto it.

~~~

Elsewhere in the mansion a young mutant tossed in his bed. The lava-lamp in the corner transformed from a gentle red glow to an overpowering light. The globs of wax floating and sinking in the liquid became smaller, faster, until the water was so hot the they no longer rose and fell as single entities, but congregated in the top of the glass, swelling as a whole and gradually beginning to bubble as the water boiled from the excess energy coming from the bulb.

The light got brighter and brighter and the power point around the cord began to spark and crackle as the energy of the lava lamp sucked too much power from the simple outlet.

Suddenly the boy cried out, the climax of the nightmare jolting him awake.

His cry was the first sound, then the shattering of glass, no longer able to hold the pressure of wax and water and the sickening ‘thwock’ as the water rushed down the cable and drenched the powerpoint. For an instant in the surrounding rooms bedside lamps glowed brighter, some bulbs popping into defeat by the surge of energy, then the power to that whole section of rooms went out. Clocks reset to midnight, and the computer glowing in the corner of Verdy’s room went deathly black. Jack whined and she shifted in the bed, but didn’t awaken.

The boy decided the darkness was merely a continuation of his dream and returned his head to the pillow to sleep once more.

~~~

The power took almost an hour to reset, the damage cause by the wax-mutant’s dream effective in putting one section of rooms into a total blackout until the socket dried, and the trip allowed the power to return. With all the mess of muddled clocks and wiped computers to deal with.