1999: The Day the Lights Said No

On August 1st, 1999, Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs experienced massive power outages after a brutal thunderstorm tore through the region during the hottest day of the summer. Over 70,000 residents lost power, and for hours after the skies cleared, homes, businesses, and traffic lights remained eerily dark.

The Commoner faithful remember it with reverent discomfort as:

The Day the Lights Said No.

It began with whispers from abandoned light fixtures. Forgotten neon signs in shuttered storefronts flickered out Morse code in dreams. A soda machine in Lakewood reportedly burst into song.

The Inanimae of Cleveland—many long-sleeping or dormant, others reduced to passive slumber by Banality—awoke in protest. The hottest day of the year, the city’s electrical grid stretched to its limits, and the waking spirits of the infrastructure refused to be complicit any longer.

A temporary coalition of Inanimae and chimerae, rooted in streetlamps, fuse boxes, vending machines, and city sewer systems, disrupted mortal electricity flow across the region. Some changelings claim they were "teaching a lesson.” Others whisper it was an accidental surge of Glamour, released by an attempt from an overzealous Nocker motley to awaken the “electro-dreamheart” buried beneath Cleveland’s power grid.

“All we know for sure,” says an old Boggan who was there, “is that you don’t treat a Dreaming spirit like a dead machine and expect it to thank you.”

Mortal engineers blamed wind and heat. The Gray Voice, in their drier moments, calls it an “urban tantrum.” But ever since that summer, the lights at the intersection of Carnegie and East 14th blink an extra three times between green and yellow, as though they’re still deciding if they're ready to forgive.

Legacy

• Old Inanimae have been known to refer to the storm as “The Dimming.”
• A few young Changelings had their Chrysalis during the blackout, including one now-famous Satyr guitarist whose Glamour burst while strumming in the dark.
• A sleeping chimerical entity, the Stitch-Wired Saint, is said to still dwell inside the Main Control Room of the East Cleveland Power Substation. They dream of better urban planning.