Lightning Strike

The bolt takes you square, and for a stretch of seconds you are simply gone, flat in the smoking grass, hat blown ten feet, heart stopped. Your partner pounds your chest and hollers your name into the rain until it stutters back to beating. There are burns where the lightning entered at your hat and left through your boots, and your watch will never run again.

• Bedridden and weak, the heart flutters at any exertion until the doctor clears you
• Burn marks at crown and both feet, dressed daily
• No memory of the storm at all, the missing hour never comes back
• /me lies very still, listening to their own heartbeat like a man counting a stranger's footsteps

Recovery A week of enforced rest under a doctor's watch, the heart sets the schedule.·Doctor, urgently

You sheltered under the big cottonwood, and the bolt found it first. The side-flash jumps to your body as the trunk explodes, driving bark shrapnel into your shoulder and dropping a limb across you on the way down. Worst of all, your legs simply are not there, dead below the hip, and the terror of that lasts hours before feeling starts crawling back.

• Legs paralyzed for hours, then wobbling, carried today, a cane for 3 days after
• Bark shrapnel picked from your shoulder with tweezers and carbolic
• A ringing left ear and half-deafness for 4 days
• You will never again shelter under anything taller than you are

Recovery 5 days with a doctor confirming the legs are only stunned, 9 anxious ones alone.·Doctor, urgently

The strike hits the ground a wagon-length away and the current comes up through your boots. Your legs lock, fail, and drop you where you stand, and for one long afternoon you are a passenger in your own body, hauled to shelter in a blanket, waiting on limbs that answer slower than a telegram.

• Legs useless the rest of the day, carried, then crutching by evening
• Pins-and-needles agony as the feeling returns tonight
• A shuffling, old man's gait for 3 days
• /me pounds a fist on one thigh, waiting for the leg to admit it's listening

Recovery 4 days with a doctor's reassurance, 8 without it, though the legs mend the same.·Doctor required

The bolt strikes the picket line, and your horse takes what was meant for the whole camp. You are thrown to the ground with your teeth ringing and a burn where the reins crossed your palm, alive because half a ton of good animal stood between you and the sky. The horse is not getting up.

• A rein-striped burn across the palm, dressed for 4 days, weak grip
• Knocked loose and dizzy through tomorrow
• Afoot, your horse is dead, the saddle scorched, and a new mount costs real money
• You can't hear thunder now without counting your losses

Recovery 4 days for the hand and the dizziness; the horse is a longer arithmetic.·Doctor required

The near-strike paints you, Lichtenberg figures, the doctor calls them, red fern-patterns branching across your chest and down one arm like a river seen from a mountain. They ache like deep sunburn and fade inside days, so you have a short season to show off the sky's autograph.

• Fern-pattern markings across chest and arm, tender for 3 days
• The patterns fade in about 4 days, so exhibitions are time-limited
• Everyone in the territory wants a look, and you'd be a fool not to charge
• /me unbuttons a cuff and rolls the sleeve, revealing red ferns branching to the wrist

Recovery 4 days for ache and pattern both to fade, enjoy them while they last.·Doctor required

The current traced you crown to sole and left its receipts: a scorched ring in your hatband with a blistered patch beneath, and both bootsoles burst at the heel where it left. Your scalp and feet are burned in small, precise spots, as if the sky did it with instruments.

• A blistered burn on the scalp, the hat sits painful for 4 days
• Burned heels, walking on the balls of your feet for 3 days
• The boots are ruined in a way no cobbler has seen before

Recovery 5 days salved at both ends; 8 if you keep the boots on.·Doctor required

The thunderclap was inside your head. One eardrum burst with a white spike of pain, and now the world arrives lopsided, all voices on the left, a hiss like a kettle on the right, and your own chewing loud as a landslide.

• Deaf on one side for 5 days, people learn to approach from your good ear
• Ringing that makes sleep a project the first 2 nights
• You say 'WHAT?' with increasing menace all week
• /me turns bodily sideways to the speaker, presenting the working ear

Recovery The ear seals in 6 days with a doctor packing it clean, 10 muffled ones if not.·Doctor required

You came to on your back in wet grass with rain in your mouth and no idea how you got horizontal. The last ten minutes are simply gone, your partner says you spoke, walked a circle, and asked the same question four times. None of it is yours to remember.

• A ten-minute hole in your memory that never fills in
• Fuddled and repeating yourself for the rest of the day
• A thumping headache and a scorched-hair smell for 2 days

Recovery 3 days for the fog to clear; the ten minutes stay gone.·Doctor required

The near-strike slapped you off your feet like a wave. You sat up in the mud with your ears ringing a single high note and a nosebleed sudden as a faucet, watching the smoke curl off a fencepost twenty feet away.

• Ears ringing all day, conversations need repeating
• A nosebleed that restarts twice today
• Mud-caked and jumpy at every rumble

Recovery A day, maybe two, for the ringing to fade.·Doctor advised

The strike missed you both, but your horse departed at a dead run with your bedroll, your rifle scabbard, and your afternoon. You found it three miles on, grazing, wearing the expression of an animal that regrets nothing.

• A three-mile walk in the rain, footsore and steaming
• Your gear is scattered along a half-mile of prairie
• The horse spooks at thunder now, and so, quietly, do you

Recovery A dry evening for you; the horse's nerves take a week.·No doctor needed

A single red fern-track winds from your shoulder to your wrist, delicate as lace, stinging like a fresh brand. The arm buzzes with pins and needles and refuses fine work, but the pattern is a wonder, and the arm knows it.

• A fern-marked arm, tender and tingling for 3 days
• Grip weak and buzzy, no fine work with that hand for 2 days
• /me traces the red branching line down their forearm, half proud, half spooked

Recovery 3 days; the pattern fades just as the aching quits.·Doctor advised

The bolt hit near enough to lift the hat off your head and set your hair on end like a startled cat. There's a singed stripe along your scalp where the crown used to sit, tender as sunburn, and the hat itself landed smoking in a puddle.

• A tender singed stripe across the scalp, the hat rides loose for 2 days
• Your hair will not lie flat on that line for a week
• The hat has a burn hole and a better story than most people

Recovery 2 days of going gently with the comb.·Doctor advised

The ground current clenched every muscle you own in the same half-second, and now you feel beaten head to toe with invisible clubs. Nothing is burned and nothing is broken, you are simply one full-body bruise with a tremor in both hands.

• Aching all over like the day after a beating, slow moving for 2 days
• A visible hand tremor today; drinks are two-handed affairs
• /me lifts the cup with both hands and concentrates like it's surgery

Recovery 2 days of stiff shuffling.·Doctor advised

Your hair rose, your spurs hummed, and the air went sharp as vinegar, and you were already diving into the coulee when the bolt hit the ridge you'd been standing on. You are unhurt, unless you count what the dive did to your elbows and your composure.

• Scraped elbows from the dive
• Jumpy as a cat all evening, you flinch at the coffee pot's crack

Recovery By morning, mostly.·No doctor needed

The near-miss charged every piece of metal on you, buttons, buckle, spurs, hot enough to nip. You did an undignified quickstep, shedding gunbelt and suspenders in the rain, and collected a matching set of small red button-brands down your front.

• A line of button-sized red marks down chest and belly, stinging for a day
• You dress warily now, checking your buckle like it might still be loaded

Recovery A day; the marks fade like small sunburns.·No doctor needed

The flash printed itself on your eyes at twenty feet. For ten minutes the world was a green ghost of itself and you sat exactly where you were, wisely going nowhere, while purple blots drifted across everything you looked at.

• Blots and dazzle in your vision for a few hours
• Poor shooting light for you till tomorrow, aim past the ghosts
• /me blinks hard and waves a hand before their own face, checking

Recovery Clear by tomorrow morning.·No doctor needed

Strike and thunder arrived in the same instant, close enough to slap your chest like a swinging door. You jumped clean out of your stirrups' acquaintance, and your ears rang a single church-bell note for an hour.

• Ears ringing for an hour, everything muffled after
• Your heart takes all evening to come down off the ceiling

Recovery By bedtime.·No doctor needed

You had sheltered under that pine for a quarter hour before some prickle of sense moved you out into the open rain. The bolt split it top to root ninety seconds later, throwing bark twenty yards, including exactly where you had been standing. You got wet. That was the whole cost.

• Soaked through and philosophical about it
• You trust your prickles absolutely now, and say so often

Recovery A dry shirt settles everything.·No doctor needed

The bolt came down on the granite outcrop beside the trail and split it like kindling, a wagon-load of rock cracked open not thirty feet from you, smoking in the rain. You and the horse looked at it, then at each other, and came to a full understanding about pace.

• Unmarked, though your ears ring till supper
• You made the remaining miles home in record time
• /me glances back at the smoking, split boulder one more time before spurring on

Recovery None, just the ringing, gone by supper.·No doctor needed

The strike hits close enough to stop your pocket watch at the exact minute and weld the loose coins in your pocket into a single warped medallion, and leaves you standing whole, steaming gently in the rain, feeling like a church bell that has just been rung. Not a mark on you. The fused coins go on a cord around your neck that same day, and no card table in the territory will believe the story without them.

• Entirely unharmed, hair curled at the ends, nothing more
• The fused coin-lump is your luck piece now, and it works on free drinks
• Your watch reads the strike's exact minute forever, you never repair it
• /me turns the warped lump of silver coins over in the lamplight and just laughs

Recovery None, the sky signed you out and let you go.·No doctor needed