A friend of mine is running a Star Wars RPG and we meet Thursday nights at the Michigan Union. Last week we didn’t play… The GM and several of the players were probably stuck in traffic, but that didn’t matter because the building was closed because of the blackout anyway. My Fiancee and I hung out for a while, with my sis and my friend Donald, waiting for people to show and for the traffic to clear up. Then this kiosk across the street started making a horrific howling sound and venting steam out of its top…
It was a truly awful sound. If you want to try it at home, get four whistling teakettles and get them all boiling at once. Now have your friends play a couple dozen slide whistles, all slightly off key from each other. Do this next to an enraged chickadee the size of a schoolbus. Now ask an army of long-nailed Nosferatu impersonators to scrape their six inch fingernails down a mile-long chalkboard while shrieking a falsetto rendition of the theme from “A Summer Place.”
Now do it louder.
I think that, when the power cut out, the campus central air conditioning system built up pressure until it popped some safety seals and started venting into the steam tunnels…