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Both Jessika and the Gus had Taurus Rising in their birth charts. This was more often than not a depressing condition in the world of Big Fun. In the kitchen, dishes and windows seemed to break on a daily basis. Out in the yard, cool and fully operational electronic stuff salvaged from the trash was routinely destroyed for the punk rock jollies it gave to the likes of Morgan Anarchy, Matthew Hart and Jesse.
The most devastating occurrence to ever befall the Taurus Rising tendencies of Big Fun, however, was the enormous expense of heating the house. It was not only big, drafty and heated mostly by electricity, but it had very little insulation and the door was difficult to keep shut.
The Winter of 1995-96 was a particularly harsh one. At Big Fun, pipes froze, the downstairs was often abandoned, and people huddled around electric space heaters, covered in layers of clothes. Yet still the electric bills piled up. The bill for February alone was over 700 dollars. By the time Spring rolled around and the cicadas emerged from the ground, the bill was well over a thousand dollars. Electricity at Big Fun was cut off in late April '96 for lack of bill payment to Appalachian Power.
Immediately, Big Fun reverted to medieval conditions. The big difference, though, was that the suburban kids living at Big Fun had little experience coping without electricity. And they had no infrastructure designed for the pre-electrified age.
So the residents resorted to defecating in the fields or in a hole in the back. The guys all urinated off the porch and it began to smell like a Boston subway station in a few places. Water for washing dishes had to be obtained from Peirce and Nelly's on the other side of Fairview Farms. But washing dishes with small amounts of water and a perpetually clogged sink proved impossible, so the dishes piled up, slowly overwhelmed by mold. The smokers continued their habit of using any and all dishes as ashtrays despite the dish washing crisis.
Jessika's Taurus ascendant prods her continually to discover new and ever more interesting means of securing free stuff. When you're used to living in the modern age, and you don't have electricity because it's too expensive, free electricity starts looking real good. Throw in Taurus Rising and you have fertile ground for an attempt to pirate electricity.
The Gus tends to be more practical than most in the world of Big Fun. He doesn't take insane risks and he doesn't do things that have an extremely low possibility of success. But after examining the meter box, he figured out a way to get the juice to flow from the set of terminals entering the meter around to the set of terminals leaving the meter. What he needed was some thick wires to carry a whole house worth of electricity.
Some weeks before, Matthew Hart had received an electric clothes dryer from his mother. The dryer had one fatal flaw: it would not shut off automatically. On one of its first uses at Big Fun, the dryer ran for hours and made charcoal briquets out of a load of Matthew's laundry. It also filled the house with acrid smoke. The dryer was ruined and thrown out in the back.
The Gus took one look at the dryer and knew he could get some use out of it still. The thick grey wires of the power cord going into the back were exactly the sort he would need to jumper electricity around the meter and into the house. He immediately made two jumper wires, each about a 30 cm in length, and stripped the ends to expose about 2 cm of stranded copper wire, which he twisted into points. Then he turned off all the circuit breakers.
Once he'd rigged up the jumpers, the Gus snapped on the water pump. It could be heard pumping away. Next he turned on the refrigerator, the stereo, and all the other necessities of life in the 90s. Soon enough, not only did Big Fun have flushable toilets and running water, it also had hot showers. It was all a free service of Appalachian Power because now the meter didn't even turn. Taurus Rising rejoiced!
The free electricity lasted about a month, then Appalachian Power came out and turned the juice off at the top of a nearby pole. The Gus investigated the situation and could see how the the wire had been disconnected from the transformer. He figured out that a very long plastic pole could possibly reposition the transformer wire back onto the high voltage line. He, Matthew Hart, and Morgan Anarchy all tried to reattach the wire, using all sorts of poles. The task proved impossible. Medieval conditions resumed and persisted from then until the end of Big Fun in early July of 1996.
In an attempt to restore modern conditions, Raphæl bought a $300 generator in June, but it could only produce 120 volts, thus it was only capable of running the lights and stereo. The refrigerator went septic, the field resumed its role as bathroom, and the dirty dishes once more accumulated, slowly filling with cigarette ashes and mold.