Kiri— Aerstelle City

It’s night and Kiri is excited to listen to the new radio program about the Grenski city crash. The hype for this program has been wild, with banners up on all of the airbuses and announcements interrupting all of the other radio programs. You’d think that the citizens of one flying city wouldn’t want to hear about the catastrophic crash of another flying city, even if it did happen thirty years ago. That’s what you get for playing with nuclear energy, Kiri’s dad says.

Kiri isn’t afraid to listen to the details. Technically, if Aerstelle were to ever crash, which it never will, but if it were, she would be fine. She’s got Deea, her little orange dragon to thank for her ability to fly. Not everyone has a tiny dragon, of course. In fact, less than 5% of the population does, but… What they don’t know about, doesn’t hurt them, right?

Deea appears long enough to give Kiri a judgmental look as she tries to get the clearest radio signal. She shoos her away and Deea spits fire at her hand, which is annoying, even if it doesn’t hurt her. She finally gets the exact perfect signal…when the electricity cuts off, plunging their little house into darkness.

“I’m so glad you got us an electric radio!” she calls in the darkness. She hears crashing in another room in response.

Kiri lights up the palm of her hand with a little flame and finds her stash of candles. “At least we never throw anything away in this house,” she mutters to herself as she places the candles around the room.

Sivam, her brother, enters with something metal in his hands. He ignores her and uses the light of her candles to study the device. She recognizes it as one of the old-fashioned windup light bulbs they used to use before electricity started being a thing. He winds up the little gear and light flickers into the bulb.

“See, this is why I don’t throw things away,” he states, holding up the windup bulb proudly. Kiri rolls her eyes.

“It still wouldn’t hurt to clean your room once in a while,” she says with another roll of her eyes.

“So no radio?” he says, ignoring her comment completely.

“No radio,” she confirms, sadly.

The front door clicks open and she hears Deea screech angrily. They see a small blue dragon zip around the room.

They meet Kiri’s boyfriend in the living room. He holds his own windup light bulb. He looks at the dark radio with a frown. “So no radio?” he says.

“Nope,” Kiri repeats. “No radio.”