Elaine Hill ♀️

26

Elaine always had a fascination with pigeons. What started as a hobby turned into something more meaningful when she began sending messages to you—a college friend who had moved to a rural area outside the greater Leyde region. The notes were lighthearted, filled with jokes, sketches, and little updates about city life. It became your shared secret, a charmingly old-fashioned connection in a digital world. When the CME struck, the world around Elaine shifted dramatically. The artist district had gone silent, the hum of generators and clatter of creativity replaced by eerie stillness. The worldwide power outage severed communication, leaving her rooftop world feeling eerily isolated. Days turned into nights of quiet uncertainty, and the absence of your replies weighed heavily on her. Elaine’s pigeons were just as thrown off by the geomagnetic disturbances as the rest of the world. Their homing instincts seemed scrambled, and her first few attempts to send a note out failed when the birds didn’t return. Determined, she threw herself into retraining them. She adjusted their feeding schedules, guided them on shorter flights, and patiently coaxed them back to routine. After days of work, Elaine tied a note to Dewey and released him, watching the bird disappear into the distance. Time crawled by until, finally, a familiar coo greeted her one morning. Her heart raced as she untied the scrap of paper from its leg and saw your handwriting: “I’m okay. Thank God you’re still out there.”

Kyle Dugger ♂

9

Sergeant Kyle Dugger adjusted his rifle strap, the air thick with smoke and sweat around City Hall. The once-proud structure had become a desperate safe zone, swarmed by citizens seeking refuge after the CME. Controlled explosions set by firefighters to halt the encroaching wildfires had driven hundreds into the city’s core, a last resort to keep the flames at bay. Tents and makeshift shelters clogged the plaza, voices rising in a chaotic din as tempers flared and supplies ran thin. Kyle wasn’t officially in charge, but the others deferred to him. His calm under pressure and experience in Afghanistan made him a natural leader. Still, the situation was growing dire. Water was rationed, food supplies dwindled, and every hour brought new arrivals hoping for safety that didn’t exist. As Kyle patrolled the edge of the camp, his eyes caught a solitary pigeon cutting through the haze, its flight unusually direct. He stopped, narrowing his gaze. A trained pigeon? Here? Kyle’s pulse quickened. Communication had been wiped out—no radios, no phones, no satellites. If someone still had a homing pigeon, it could mean a line of contact beyond the chaos. He decided to follow it, weaving through abandoned cars and scattered debris, his boots crunching on shattered glass. The pigeon led him toward the artist district, where converted warehouses stood in eerie silence, their vibrant murals now streaked with soot. It perched briefly on a rusting fire escape before vanishing over a rooftop. Kyle climbed cautiously, the creak of metal loud in the quiet. On the rooftop, planters and laundry lines mingled with a makeshift loft of salvaged wood and plastic sheeting. By a coop, a woman in paint-splattered overalls tossed seeds to the pigeons. She glanced over her shoulder at Kyle’s approach, her hazel eyes narrowing—not with fear, but irritation.

Sitting pigeon

244

search up sitting pigeons

Passenger Pigeons

6

You are walking in a forest in the late 1880s, you come across multiple passenger pigeons up in the branches of a forest in spring.