The night was quiet. Luna shone bright white across the world as all of Fazia slept calmly. Even at the Olisdale Observatory, it was faintly quiet as the night shift workers minded their own business and monitored the skies. Markus leaned back in his chair, reading his favorite book. He looked over to his buddy sitting across the security room to see that he had fallen asleep a while ago. At that moment the alarms began screeching and the facility started strobing red.

Bruno was jostled by the noise and shouted, "W-What's going on???" Both their eyes darted over to the monitors on the table as the earth rumbled. The monitors were blaring out a warning message, "ATTENTION! CLASS D THREAT INBOUND! AFFECTED PROVINCES: FAZIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY, WEST AND EAST NEW LONDON, LIGMAR, AND FAZMURY. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!" After a few seconds, the shaking ceased, the alarms shut off and the monitors displayed that nothing was wrong. A Text-to-Speech voice started to speak: "False Alarm! Please disregard the warning and return to your typical tasks. Thank you." Markus and Bruno stared at each other, petrified. Shivering, Markus began to speak, "Hey, Bruno.. What do we do when something like this happens..?" Bruno pulled out his phone and gestured to it. "Call. Goddamn. NASA..."

*     *     *

As the government began to try to figure out what happened that night, the citizens began to theorize and discuss the news.

"Hey Fred, did you hear?"

"About the space thing? Of course. That's all anybody's talking about on twitter."

Fred opened twitter and faced his phone toward Edward. "Look at this, everyone's freaking out," he said, scrolling through his feed. Taylor walked into the room and switched on the TV to a Cruxic news channel. She looked over to the two of them with a concerned expression. "This must be a huge issue. When was the last time the world reported on a single event in which nobody knows anything about it?" she said with her slight slavic accent. Edward grabbed the remote and switched the channel to one in English. Right as the channel was switched, the anchor said, "Breaking news coming from the Olisdale Observatory today. Representatives of major space agencies from around the Atlantic are meeting in Lorad tomorrow to debate on what occurred on the night of July 24th. Stay tuned throughout the weekend to stay updated."

The tension in the room only further increased until Fred broke the silence, "Okay guys, let's just finish up the day without any distractions. We got the weekend to look forward to," Fred clapped twice, "let's go! Let's do this!" As everyone scurried off, Markus came into the pizzeria. "Markus? What're you doing here?"

"Sigh, I just need a place to cool off," Markus slumped down on the couch, "after what happened, international media won't get off my back." Fred sat down beside him.

"It's alright. You can stay here as long as you need to. Don't stress yourself out over all of this."

"Yeah, you're right. I'll be here until 6, then I'll go home."

"I'll take him," a voice across the room said. Fred and Markus turned to face the voice and saw Nancy standing in the doorway. "If international news wanted to keep asking you questions I'm sure they'd know what your car looks like. The media can find out anything they want. I'm free at 6 so I'll be happy to drive you," she concluded.

"That's a really nice offer but I assure you-" "I-I insist. Please," she cut him off. Markus reluctantly agreed. "She's really convincing, lemme tell ya," Fred said.

As 6pm came, Markus and Nancy got into the car and left. On their route, they passed by a large crowd preaching the end of times. Markus leaned the seat back to prevent from being seen. "I've never seen the city like this before. I don't even wanna know what it's like in Olisdale."

"Well, it's much worse than here. Protests, looting, vandalism... the city authorities can't quell the crowd. Luckily for me, that's all happening in the city center."

"This is such a scary time to be living right now... I hope that you guys can figure out what happened quickly so this all calms down-" "aaand there's your problem. Even when we do figure it out and notify everyone there'll still be a large group of people who won't believe us," He interrupted.

*     *     *

When the day came, the 6 employees, the space agency representatives, and the president all met up. The president was the first to speak, "Welcome representatives to the Olisdale Observatory of Fazia. You're all gathered here today to formulate a hypothesis on what occurred at this facility on July 24, 2016. Here we have the 6 employees that were present at the time of the incident, so I will be passing the speech over to Markus Darwin."

Nervously, Markus stood up to present. "Greetings everybody, my name is Markus. At the time of the incident I was in the Observatory's security room with my friend, Bruno. There was no warning at all when at 3:46:04 AM local time our systems picked up abnormal signals coming from space. As I've been told, this signal was picked up by observatories in Western Europe, Western Africa, and the Americas. So, I'd like to hear what each of you have to say about the signals."

NASA's representative began to shuffle some papers and began to speak. "Our observatories picked up a surge of energy less than a second after it was detected in Fazia. We haven't nailed down what kind of energy it is or what element would have caused it, but it was strong enough to cause the entire eastern seaboard of the United States to experience a magnitude 4.5 earthquake. Seismic stations in California also picked up a small increase in magnitude, but we can't say for certain whether it's related to the incident."

Following this, the other representatives gave their story of what happened in their country. Overall, they narrowed the incident down to a comet exploding after colliding with another comet. The meeting finished after 4 hours of discussion and everybody went home. Markus was having trouble believing that the issue wasn't very big anymore. After all this stress, he took a vacation to visit a friend.

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