10:42 pm EDT -- Private Residence in New Hampshire
The paramedic couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was a fairly standard 911 call from the folks at this address, but it wasn't the father this time; it was the son. Kind of. The mother and father indicated that he'd been on a computer game and had just fallen out of his chair, unconscious, and that he'd been “twitching and melting” since then. The father had a shell-shocked expression as he worked the digital camera, documenting the incident.
The paramedic didn't blame him, the androgynous figure on the floor was twitching and each convulsion seemed to make it smaller. Facial hair had fallen out in dark clumps across the carpet and the head on the figure's hair was light brown with white streaks at the roots and along the hairline, but the most glaring signal that Something Was Wrong Here was the coruscating red electricity dancing across the skin, with no obvious connection to anything electrical.
Then, the paramedic's partner arrived with the insulated gloves for electrocution cases and they got to work loading their patient into the ambulance.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
The paramedic couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was a fairly standard 911 call from the folks at this address, but it wasn't the father this time; it was the son. Kind of. The mother and father indicated that he'd been on a computer game and had just fallen out of his chair, unconscious, and that he'd been “twitching and melting” since then. The father had a shell-shocked expression as he worked the digital camera, documenting the incident.
The paramedic didn't blame him, the androgynous figure on the floor was twitching and each convulsion seemed to make it smaller. Facial hair had fallen out in dark clumps across the carpet and the head on the figure's hair was light brown with white streaks at the roots and along the hairline, but the most glaring signal that Something Was Wrong Here was the coruscating red electricity dancing across the skin, with no obvious connection to anything electrical.
Then, the paramedic's partner arrived with the insulated gloves for electrocution cases and they got to work loading their patient into the ambulance.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll