...Or Maybe Midgets 6/10

[ffutures]

Here's the next part of my BtVS / Time Bandits crossover. Actually had to do some research for this one!




6 - Tunguska, 1908

"I wish that my husband..." The woodcutter's wife begins. Anyanka's expecting something nasty involving putrid sores, but before she says more a portal opens in the sky. Seven small figures hurtle down into the trees.

"I wish that my husband," she repeats, inspired, "I wish the sky would fall on him... and his precious trees!"

"Wish granted," Anyanka says angrily. Reality shifts. The meteor that would have hit Moscow, granting hundreds of wishes, changes its orbit infinitesimally. When it hits the Earth months later a woodcutter will be the only casualty.

D'Hoffryn blames Anyanka, of course. She blames the midgets.



Author's note: So far as is known the Tunguska meteor did only kill one person. If it had arrived minutes earlier it would have hit much further west and killed millions.

Comments

[dsample.livejournal.com]

The "couple of hours earlier" only takes the earth's rotation into account, but since the Earth is orbiting around the sun at over 18 miles a second, if the comet (/meteorite/black hole/hunk of antimatter/exploding UFO) had been as much as 7 minutes earlier or later, it would have missed the earth entirely. About 2 minutes earlier, it would have hit near Moscow.

(And hey, when I looked up Tunguska in Wikipedia, I found this: "The 1995 Forgotten Futures RPG adventure The Fist of God, by Marcus Rowland, set in the word of Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories, assumes a human cause for the disaster." in the "Tunguska event in fiction" section.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I know - I put it there when I was researching Tunguska... ;-)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say thanks for the orbital info - think I'll vague up the author's note a bit, that ought to fix it.