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// 2 - Meteorite 
// Story: Out of Context Nightmare 
// by LordBucket 
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"Since time immemorial, humanity has been fascinated with the beauty of space. And nowhere is that beauty more evident than during a lunar eclipse. Unlike its cousin, the solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse occurs when the earth passes between the sun and moon, with the earth casting a shadow to create the beautiful spectacle you're seeing now."

Twenty feet away, the cameraman snickered.

"But any moment now, the first light of the sun will peek out from behind the earth. Any moment, and...there it is. The first glimpse of a crescent moon, soon to be an entire moon once again returned to us by virtue of light from the sun having passed through a fantastic eight minute voyage through space. I don't know about you viewers at home, but this moment gets me every time."

"Reporting live from Los Angeles, this is Mark Durnham."

"And that's a wrap," the cameraman sighed. "Gotta say Mark, I don't know how you do it but somehow you manage to make these things sound not completely boring. How many times have you given this same exact 'oh yay an eclipse' report?"

"I don't know," the reporter shrugged, adjusting his earpiece. "Maybe twenty or thirty, over the years? They all kind of run together. It's just one of those things we have to do when it happens."

"I guess. Anyway, we're done here, right? Shall I pack it up?"

"Yeah, I think we're -" Frowning mid-sentence, Mark suddenly put his hand to his earpiece and listened for a moment, then frantically waved an index finger at the camera, which promptly resumed filming.

"Thanks for the tip. We'll take a look."

Mark turned to the sky, and the camera followed, settling on a glowing ball of white in the sky growing slowly larger. Shocked, but ever the professional, he resumed his reporting.

"As you know, a 'shooting star' is the informal name for a meteor, a ball of rock or ice, that's lit up by friction with the earth's atmosphere, generally leaving a bright trail across the sky until it burns up."

There was a moment of silence while Mark waited for the silent response from the studio.

"No, right," he continued. "And the fact that we don't see the trail probably mean that it's, uhh, headed directly towards us. We don't see it from our vantage point because the trail is on the far side where we can't see it."

Again, Mark waited for a response from his companion in the studio. But this time, instead of silence, there was the dull roar of a swiftly passing body burning through the air in the distance. On the camera, the ball of white fire had grown visibly larger.

"I would if we could, studio," Mark swallowed. "But I don't think we have time. Reporting live from Los Angeles, this has been Mark Durnham, signing off."

In the next second, the object smashed into the ground. Whether directly on top of the reporter, or half a mile away, no one could say. The ensuing blast converted slightly less than a gram of the ground into energy, disintegrating everything and everyone at ground zero, and converting the smooth pavement and dirt beneath it into a crater of glass. Further away, buildings collapsed while cars and trucks alike were thrown hundreds of feet through the air, leaving their drivers dead or dying when they came back to the ground.

At its height, the mushroom cloud could be seen for hundreds of miles.

A few seconds later, after air had rushed back in to fill the vacuum created by the initial shockwave, Luna inhaled a comforting breath of fresh air at last.