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Thursday, September 7, 2017

Microstory 664: Hailstorm of Love

This is one of those taikon that make you scratch your head. Hailstorms, though not the most common weather phenomenon on planets, are too frequent to ever be considered as having any level of rarity. Hail is formed when updrafts are strong enough to lift rain back into the air long enough for it to freeze, possibly several times over. Even the stranger variants of hail have their place in the galaxy, with many planets known by their extremely intense storms, or particularly large hailstones. The passage in the Book of Light that addresses this taikon speaks mainly about love and friendship, and does not much mention hail. A number of special events came together last minute in the hopes of triggering the taikon, nowhere more than in locations experiencing hail season. An untold number of people died, actually, in the belief that being struck by the hail was a requirement, despite the passage not mentioning this at all. There was one gathering, however, that stood out above the others. While the taikon must be realized in their foretold order, the Sacred Savior’s predictions say nothing about when in time any one of them will occur. There is nothing in the text, for instance, preventing the next taikon from being fulfilled in twenty years. The understood belief is that they will happen in quick succession, but a lot of that has to do with home, and now with trends. It is this uncertainty that led a friend matching company to schedule their large mixer on what would come to be not long after the slaughter of the unfaithful. They did not know this at the time, and in fact, began accepting applications before the taikon had even begun. It just so happened to fall on the right day, to no forethought of the organizers. This is as it should be, because most taikon cannot be generated artificially.

A stipulation for the get-together was that no one was allowed to attend who had so much as made the acquaintance of someone else who was going. Applications started coming in long ago. As soon as someone was accepted—first come, first serve—anyone that person had ever met was summarily disqualified. This ensured that the party would be completely fresh. Any attendee who encountered another would inherently know nothing about them. Celebrities, and other prominent figures, were automatically disqualified as well. As the Sacred Light would have it, this would become the sixty-fourth taikon, and it would have absolutely nothing to do with weather. Sotiren Zahir was very clever, and knew how to arrange his words to make you think what he wanted you to. The term hailstorm did not refer to ice pellets, but to salutations. The entire purpose of the gathering was for the attendees to introduce themselves to each other. They spent the first half standard hour of it doing nothing but greeting everyone they could find. Of course, even if the event organizers had figured out what the Sacred Savior had truly meant, there was no way they could have known the first sixty-three taikon would be achieved just before theirs. Even if they had, it would be a miracle unto itself. It’s too bad for those people who committed suicide by hail. They could have instead attended the most important party in galaxy history.

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