Author notes

323 - Approval

El Cid

on May 30, 2020

And on that cordial note, the sex scene is officially ended. Yes, regretfully, the story must go on. I wonder if they have some sort of Roomba type robot that skitters about cleaning up all the fluids they leave behind?

In the upcoming scene, we'll finally be introduced to the fabled Death Bog, where you can infer bad things will happen. This is as good a point as any to warn the readers: This chapter has, up to this point, been relatively tame when it comes to bloody imagery, however the upcoming scene does feature some harrowing moments. I don't think it's all that bad (by my standards, at least), and it's a good story overall, but still it's worth taking note. Nothing good happens in the Death Bog.







What would be just the most unluckiest of unlucky ways to die? Plane crash? Eaten by a bear? Surviving a plane crash, only to then be eaten by a bear?

How about being struck by a meteorite? That's up there; you're WAY more likely to die in a plane crash than being killed by a space rock. A study by Tulane University found for a given year, your odds of being fatally struck by a meteorite are 1 in 250,000… meaning you would need to live 250,000 years for that to be a reasonably probable cause of death for you. Putting that into perspective, your odds of being killed by lighting are 1 in 135,000.

But it does happen, on occasion. The best recorded incident of a meteorite striking a person is the 1954 Alabama case of Ann Hodges, who suffered a nasty bruise when a softball-size meteorite crashed through her living room ceiling one night and struck her as she was sleeping on her couch. She was not seriously injured.



This story lends itself to some incredulity due to a lot of our preconceptions of just what a meteorite is, and what a meteorite impact should look like. In the movies, meteorites are always big flaming balls of destruction which obliterate everything in the vicinity in a fiery apocalypse when they come crashing down. There may be some accuracy to this when it comes to very large impact events, but for your typical everyday meteorite, this is just Hollywood fiction. Meteors do often create a fireball when they first strike the atmosphere, and this is what we observe when we see a “shooting star” in the night sky. However, by the time they reach about 15 to 20 km above ground, they've slowed down to a point where they're no longer glowing. The meteorite's journey then enters a stage known as “dark flight,” in which it will decelerate to a terminal velocity (the point at which its acceleration due to gravity is offset by air resistance) of somewhere between 200 and 400 mph, and eventually strike the Earth. In most cases, the meteoroid won't even be hot, as the air will have cooled it down to the ambient temperature by this point.

Now, getting struck by anything moving 200 mph can't be pleasant, but it's not necessarily going to be lethal. Professional baseball players get hit by balls moving nearly half that speed all the time, and it doesn't prevent them from finishing the game. There are reports of people being struck by pebble size meteorites and walking away with just a minor welt, such as the 1992 Mbale meteorite in Uganda, and a 2009 incident when a German boy was struck in the hand.



Some people aren't so lucky, however, and there are occasional reports of people being killed by meteorites. The earliest known record of such an occurrence is a 1677 account of a Milanese friar struck and killed by a meteorite which pierced his thigh. In 1888, a shower of meteorites struck a village in what is now Kurdistan, killing one man and paralyzing another. In 2016, an unidentified blue object fell from the sky in India, killing a man who was struck by the resulting debris… however, this may have been a case of manmade space debris falling back to Earth, rather than a natural space rock. Still, regardless of its origin, you need to be extremely unlucky for this sort of thing to happen to you.