"Like a Bird," 2024
Breaking from Wellton, the city which made the ostensibly eco-friendly decision to outlaw all direct(!) use of gasoline, gas or unrefined oil as fuel or for the purposes of generating power and/or electricity.
I say ‘ostensibly’ because the people of Wellton quickly figured out a loophole in which gas-powered cars and trucks and other motor vehicles are used as a sort of middleman between the gasoline that powers them and item(s) that gasoline is required to power. Instead of fueling generators directly with gasoline, for instance, generators are rigged to cars which themselves contain gasoline, which somehow makes the whole thing totally legal. Because the gasoline isn’t being directly used. But of course what this also means is that citizens need to sacrifice their cars and trucks if they want any power, meaning the people of Wellton are totally stranded and can’t leave the city bounds even if they wanted to. The environs surrounding Wellton are completely unwalkable, and people who try are known to be eaten by rodents the size of elephants, which is just absolutely horrifying as I’m sure you can imagine (just picture staring into the gaping maw of a ginormous rat and smelling its shitty breath and knowing that this is the last sensory moment you’re ever gonna experience).
But so this brings us to Flynn Teefwood (pictured, sort of), who recently engineered an amateur wingsuit (schematics on second slide) to surprise the girl he liked and, presumably, provide a way to glide them both over the rodent-infested danger zone. Like a ticket to the rest of the world, kinda. Tragically, the test run didn’t go as planned: the wingsuit only carried Teefwood around twenty meters before it malfunctioned, sending him careening towards the ground, where he fell to his death in front of hundreds of spectators, including the girl he liked.
I’m sorry you had to see this.