The storm came out of nowhere, catching everyone by surprise.

When it was first noticed it was already large. It measured 30 miles across and was still growing. A tremendously strong updraft pulled moist air into the storm, and the cloud bank reached more than 8000 feet high. The base of the cloud was unusually low, and this mass of rolling water vapor was bristling with lightning. It moved towards north America at 40 miles per hour and was picking up speed.

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LA county never sleeps, there is always someone awake, working, playing or committing crime. Half of its 10 million residents gets up long before the sun rise to commute to the city by car or using the Metro’s buses or trains. The morning news concentrated on the approaching storm. Meteorologists were puzzled by the way the storm behaved. It was moving at 70 mph and was on track to make landfall somewhere on the Baja peninsula, when it suddenly turned north-east. Impossibly, it looked like it was changing direction deliberately. It has also grown and was now 75 miles across. Large enough to cover the 44-mile-wide city of Los Angeles.

The storm was examined using radar. Several weather balloons, equipped with measuring equipment, were released to follow the path defined by the still powerful updraft. The radar revealed nothing, and the weather balloons were struck by lightning and destroyed.

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When greenish lightning bolts flashed inside the clouds, and occasionally arced between the cloud base and the horizon, the endless speculation on television about the nature and power of the storm intensified. The speculation caused many residents to panic, and they all tried to flee the city at the same time, resulting in gridlock. Many people were stuck outdoors, in their vehicles, unable to move.

The storm made landfall over the LA port and started to slow down, causing even more consternation and concern. Green tinted lightning could be observed running along the bottom of the cloud base, making it hard to look without squinting your eyes. As the massive storm came to a stop, the green lightning appeared to retreat into the clouds, and panic ensued when those green flashes revealed huge shapes inside the clouds.

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The storm seemed to settle above the city of Los Angeles, and for a while it just hung there, blocking out the sun. The updraft caused powerful winds across LA county, and the center of the storm was showing rotation. Every flash of lightning highlighted the things riding the storm, their outlines etched by the green lightning.

The presence of these objects in the cloud caused fighter jets to be scrambled from San Diego. The radar on the aircraft was also unable to detect these objects. Video recordings revealed they were shaped like very large whales. They had many rows of illuminated points on their sides, and strange patterns could be seen playing across these lights. For a while the storm just hung over the city, slowly rotating, with the constant crash and rumble of lightning shaking everything underneath.

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Human beings are curious creatures. When nothing happened for long enough, they emerged from their homes and cars, and congregated on sidewalks and rooftops, chattering amongst themselves about what this all means. This same morbid curiosity is responsible for rubbernecking, that most irritating and obscene behavior where people risk more injury and damage because they must see the suffering of others.

Out in Santa Monica Bay, dozens of whales congregated, all facing the storm. Drone footage showed their bodies forming an image that resembled that of an accordion fan, like the ones used by eastern cultures. Usually whales like to talk, but these were quiet. They just hung in the water and occasionally breached for air.

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The lightning in the clouds stopped abruptly, and whale sounds could be heard coming from the clouds. The congregating whales in the bay joined in. Egg shaped things fell from the clouds, and on impact broke open revealing spiderlike creatures. These creatures were shaped like hockey pucks with long thin legs. Their puck shaped bodies also had rows of light-emitting dots, scrolling through a set of patterns that reduced in size as time passed. It was a countdown.

When the lights reduced to a single point these spiders moved with incredible speed. They used their long legs to jump fantastic distances, flying through the air and attaching themselves to the heads of people. Once attached a tube-like protrusion entered an eye socket of the person it was attached to. These people fell to the ground convulsing and seizing. People ran in all directions in a panicked frenzy, but the spiders were faster. They punched through windshields to attack the occupants of cars and entered buildings looking for more victims. It was not possible to hide from them, they must have had some way of sensing people, and they broke through concrete and metal to reach their targets. Millions of people died before these spiders jumped back towards the storm, extended parachute like canopies, and were carried into the rotating center of the cloud mass. When the last spider made it home the storm started moving east.

***

The cloud formation changed and became elongated to match the path of the San Andreas fault, with the large bodies inside the clouds orienting themselves accordingly. The lightning intensified and leapt down to the ground, entering the fault line and creating open crevasses. Something was dropped into these openings, and the earth shook with explosions below the surface. This continues for an hour before the spiders were dropped into the exposed fault line. Within minutes the fault opens along its entire length.

Normally the plates of the fault line move north and south, slipping past each other, only causing quakes when they get stuck, slip and jump forward, releasing large amounts of energy. Here the fault is forced open east to west along its full length with devastating consequences.

Most of California is pushed away from the continent. The landmass is shoved away from north to south, with the southern part remaining attached, creating a new peninsula. Water flowed into this void from the north, and sea water rushed over the land as this sliver of America was violently pushed towards the ocean. The resulting earthquakes are off the chart and destroyed most buildings and infrastructure on the new peninsula, and for hundreds of miles inland. Thankfully Yellowstone remains slumbering, but Old Faithfull stops shooting hot water into the sky. The tectonic landscape of the Americas has been altered, and only time will tell the effects.

A tsunami formed that completely engulfs all islands west of America, washing it clean of life and buildings. A tsunami does not lose its energy as it travels across oceans. This 200-foot tsunami, travelling at 500 mph, caused complete destruction when it reached the lands in the far west. Even though the time of the tsunami was calculated, and evacuations were underway, millions died, and landmasses in China, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Papa New Guinea were transformed forever.

After the fault line was forced open, the green lighting flashed down and pulled whale-like creatures, with rows of lights flashing complex patterns along their sides, from the newly formed gulf. Sea water was pulled towards these beings, creating clouds that engulfed their bodies. These new clouds merged with the storm, and the still elongated storm moved back towards the ocean with its new passengers.

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As the storm moved back over the newly formed peninsula, it released a multicolored rain that washed over the destruction, and when lightning hit, everything covered by the rain turned into mush. This mush later dried to become the most fertile soil on the planet. People fought and killed for ownership of this virgin land for decades afterwards.

As the storm passed over the congregating whales something was dropped into the ocean. The whales swallowed these objects and swam into the new bay where they shoved themselves into openings in the rocks at the bottom of the bay.

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Hours later the storm evaporates, the beings that used it as a cloak swimming back to the Mariana Trench with the new additions to their slow growing family. New eggs were deposited into the ocean, and the whales swallowed these and took them to the bay of New California. These eggs will hatch, and the larvae will consume the whales before they burrow into the earth. In another thousand years, give or take a few decades, they will return to welcome them into the world.

Until then small earthquakes will occur from time to time as the babies grow.