5
Ziggy was an intelligent man. He was also very broad minded. He liked to have fun, especially with his friends. But what he wasn't, was a patient man. He was the kind of guy who didn't like hanging about one place too long and seeing the same sort of things too much. Hell, he couldn't even stand repetitive floral wallpapering. So, the fact that everything this grey morning seemed to have been happening around the McDonalds was starting to get up his nose. In short, he wanted something big to happen.
So, in a strange sort of way, he was quite pleased when on his way out an unidentified falling object came screaming down from the sky, in flames, and embedded itself into the ground just after making a short pit stop through the hood of his car. Not only did it mean that something interesting had just happened but it meant that he could replace his car without having to double back on the point he tried to make when he first bought it, thus saving face. He loved it when things worked out this well.
He got out and noticed a host of startled faces staring at him and his personal disaster area. A young woman, who had been nearby and was now considerably concerned, approached cautiously. They seem nice, he thought, eyeing them in multiples of four.
Dizzily, he walked round the front of the car only to find that there wasn't really a front left and that he had just fallen into the small crater which had replaced it.
As he slid over the dust and concrete rubble his mind switched strategies. His ethereal self simply began to ignore, on the whole, everything going on outside. He began to feel as if he could take on anything in his stride as the dopamine levels in his brain surged. So what? He missed his chance of being in a Ridley Scott movie. Never liked Alien anyway. He had to play chicken with a man in a decent car in a fast food resaurant drive through. He nearly got his head sent through the ground by a meteor and he's just fallen in the crater. So what? Happens all the time. He passed out.
Stress can lead to some odd side effects for some. It affects different people in different ways just like it affects materials differently in the scientific field of plasticity. If you keep applying greater and greater stress onto say, a tea cup, it would display behaviour unique to the material it is made of before, inevitably, going insane. Ziggy is a ceramic tea cup. He can stand up to a surprising stress load before cracking up and spilling his Earl Grey everywhere.
She slapped him again, 'Wake up! Are you okay?'
He opened his eyes. It was the nice woman, she had come to see this crazy man lie in a ditch. He focused.
Oh God, she's hot. Oh God, say something funny or cool or a one liner before dying dramatically. He passed out again.