Blackout

Eurydice blinked a couple of times to see if it changed anything; no change. She stuck her hand out in front of her and tried to bring it close to her face till she could see it; she couldn't see it even when it was a mere centimetre away. Eurydice started panicking.

``Help! Help! I... I think I've gone blind!''

``Eurydice? Is that you?'' A familiar voice shouted from across the room.

``Allen? Where are you? I can't see you!'' Eurydice shouted back in what she thought was the general direction in which the sound come from.

``I have no idea. I think the power tripped in the whole city all at once on a moonless night, which explains this pitch darkness that I have never seen before,'' Allen shouted back as he made his way carefully through the house towards the place where he thought he last heard Eurydice's voice. ``By the way, stay still and shout replies at me periodically---I'm trying to find my way towards you.''

``Oh Allen!'' Eurydice cried out in happiness. ``I'm so glad that it was the power trip instead of me going blind. You know how fearful I am on the glaucoma susceptibility that I have been told since I was young.''

``Yes, yes,'' Allen replied as he corrected his heading using Eurydice's voice. ``I know that you are afraid of that. But this can be a whole lot worse than getting glaucoma though.''

``Why is that so?'' Eurydice shouted back, her mind too shocked to be thinking carefully about the words that Allen said.

``Think about it, Eurydice. The city is powered using nuclear power plants, and there are spare diesel generators that feed into the grid if and when the nuclear power plants reduce in their generation capacity. They do lots of redundancy testing each week. Yet we are facing a city-wide black out that has lasted for nearly thirty minutes. That doesn't sound right to me.''

Eurydice fell silent, her mind starting to crank and process Allen's words now that she was starting to calm down. He had a point---there was no reason for such an extended blackout time; the spare generators should have kicked in within three minutes of a power drop from the nuclear plants and the site engineers should have been troubleshooting the reactors and they should also have brought everything back on line within twenty minutes. That none of those had happened was starting to get worrisome.

``Eurydice dear, are you still there?'' Allen shouted out in a questioning tone. It was hard to triangulate positions in the dark when there was no consistent audial source for echo-location.

``Oh! I'm still here! Sorry I forgot that you need my voice to figure out where I am.''

``It's alright,'' Allen said, his voice a whisper and yet sounding really really close to Eurydice. Without warning Eurydice found her waist wrapped by two powerful hairy arms, and her back was in contact with a familiar torso as her right ear felt playfully nibbled on.

``Oh Allen! You are such a rascal!'' Eurydice said as she giggled sophomorically.

(Based on an exercise generated by WriteThis - 14-May-2014 23:20:04)