A loud boom sounded, shaking the entire house followed shortly by every single light in the place winking out at once. This was followed by the sound of everyone cursing as they found themselves unexpectedly in the dark.

“Everyone okay?” Harry shouted out into the house, as he began to do his best to sort out what had happened with what little information he had (and maybe figure out where his boots had wandered off to since they had the unfortunate habit of doing just that during actual emergencies despite his putting them in the same place every time. If things were as bad as he feared they were - that is, that there was a major power outage rather than just something as simple as them somehow blowing a fuse - then there was a very good chance that he’d be called in to help deal with the increase in medical emergencies that there would no doubt be).

“I’m fi... OW!” Neville shouted back as he managed to bang into... something... he misjudged the location of.

One by one, they began to emerge from their various rooms and make their way - carefully - to the living room. Ron had the easiest time of it. He just ‘cheated’ and activated his quirk, using Tabletop to create a miniature chess board (his go to when he was using his quirk but wasn’t focusing on a specific game or scenario) on top of the first book he’d grabbed. As Tabletop manifested as something between a holographic and hard light projection (in that it was solid enough that it had a physical presence but was transparent enough to be seen through), it gave of a gentle glow that, while not enough to really see by, at least meant that he had a better chance of not walking into or tripping over something he hadn’t been able to see because of the darkness. Percy immediately went to get a torch so that they’d have some sort of light to see by while Draco made his way to the window to check on the rest of the neighborhood. 

“Looks like it’s a proper blackout.” Draco commented as he looked out at the darkened street. 

“We should still check the breaker box just in case.” Percy said, turning on his torch to do just that. 

“I wonder what happened.” Neville asked as he helped Ron dig out their emergency supplies from the closet they kept it in. 

“It could’ve been a lightning strike.” Ron pointed out as he tried to figure out where the bowling ball he was holding came from since none of them actually bowled (probably Draco’s. The blonde had a habit of bringing home the oddest things; like he was some strange oversized magpie. At least he was good about not bringing home so much stuff that they’d have to stage an intervention for his obvious - to them - hoarder problem), “We all felt and heard the thunderclap after all.”

“Was it though?” Draco questioned. “I mean we all heard and felt something. But was it a thunderclap or something else? Because I’m not seeing any rain.”

“Just because it’s not raining here, doesn’t mean that it isn’t raining somewhere else.” Ron pointed out.

“You would think that a thunderclap as close as that would’ve had to be given how loud it was and the fact that we were able to feel it would be close enough for the rain to hit us.” Draco countered.

“While it is rare, dry lightning storms do happen.” Percy interjected as he came back, “Luckily none of the fuses blew, so we should be fine once the power’s restored.”

Neville emerged from the depths of the closet triumphantly with the emergency supply bag. He carefully made his way over to the coffee table while Ron began to put back everything they’d ended up taking out while they were looking for their emergency supplies. Once Neville reached the coffee table, he began to methodically empty the bag. Harry grabbed the emergency radio as soon as Neville had taken it out and began to wind it up so that it would have enough power to work once they’d turned it on. Neville turned on their battery operated lantern for light.

“I’m still not convinced.” Harry confessed, “As weird as it is to say it, it just doesn’t feel like it was lightning.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time some drunk or high idiot’s managed to take out a substation.” Draco pointed out as he finally turned away from the window and began to make his way back to where everyone else was gathered, “And that’s not taking into account any idiot who’d do it stone cold sober just to make some stupid point or another.”

“You would need to have the right quirk for it though.” Ron said as he cancelled the chess game he’d created earlier for light once he’d found out that the power had been knocked out. He quickly set up a different board on the coffee table, this one a mockup of a street map with a square clearly designated as an electrical substation. Small dots of various colors lit up and began moving around the map, “Not that that would be too difficult if you really think about it. You would think that someone would either need to have an explosive quirk or one that allowed you to create and detonate explosives, but really any quirk that affected the physical world would work. The main issue is knowing how and where to apply the quirk in order to ensure that the substation was destroyed enough to cause a disruption of service.”

“You’ve sure thought about this enough. Is there something you’d like to tell us?” Draco snarked goodnaturedly. 

“It’s kind of my job to think about these kinds of things.” Ron shot back, “I’d be pretty rubbish at it if I couldn’t come up with a bunch of possibilities for any one scenario.”

“It also assumes that the problem is that a substation went down. It could always be a downed line causing a cascade of outages as other lines try to take over the load and fail due to the power load ending up being higher than they can actually handle. Or there could be an issue with one of the power plants higher up the line.” Percy said, “The sad fact is that we just don’t have enough information about what happened to do more than speculate. And we won’t know more until the details are made public - which could be days from now. If such details are ever made public in the first place.”

“At least we won’t have to worry too much about food or water even if it takes a few days to restore power. We’re probably going to end up having to toss most of what’s in the fridge, but we have plenty of canned and dry goods to last us a while - plus there’s everything in the garden. A lot of the vegetables are coming in already so I wouldn’t even need to really encourage anything to ripen.” Neville said calmly.

“Do we even have enough food in the fridge to really worry about it going bad?” Draco asked, “I know that we needed to do a grocery run sooner rather than later...”

“I guess it depends; Things like the eggs, butter, and condiments should be fine even if it takes a few days for the power to come back. It’s more the things in the freezer that I’m worried about than anything in the fridge itself; it is fairly full right now since we recently put up a bunch of precooked ready meals for the days when we don’t really have that much time to cook.” Percy said, thinking it over.

“Be a bit of a waste to toss all that out - especially since we don’t know when we’ll be able to properly restock it. But needs must and all that rot. At least we’re not stuck with a useless electric cooker and we do know how to cook; that’d be a royal pain sure enough. Imagine having to eat a tin of soup cold or being stuck with nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because you had no way of heating food up. Not that there’s anything wrong with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; I just don’t think I could eat that and only that for however long it takes to get the power back on.” Ron said. 

“Like that would ever happen.” Draco snorted, referring to Ron’s mention of there only being peanut butter and jelly sandwiches being available, “Between your, Harry’s, and Percy’s insistence on disaster preparedness, we’ve got enough Emergency Food Rations stocked up to last a month stranded in a forest with nothing else but. And we still have that camp stove that we’ve never used.”

Ron shrugged, “As my mom liked to say, better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Me and Harry’ve seen what happens when someone’s not prepared for an emergency; it isn’t pretty. Hell, sometimes it’s even the difference between surviving an emergency and not. And Percy’s... Percy.”

“While I might not see the results of a lack of preparedness as directly as you and Harry, I still do have to deal with them at work. It doesn’t take that much extra effort to ensure that we are well prepared, and when you consider the alternative...” Percy pointed out. As far as he (and Harry and Ron) was concerned, it was only sensible to be properly paranoid and prepare for it.

A knock on the door interrupted them. Harry answered it to find one of his coworkers standing there. He’d kind of been expecting something like this to happen; nighttime conditions plus traffic lights being out meant that there were going to be a number of accidents because way too many people didn’t know how to drive in emergency conditions like this and had a sad tendency to just keep going on like everything was normal - which meant that they wouldn’t treat intersections with traffic lights like they had all way stop signs instead (although to be fair, way too many people simply just treated stop signs like they were suggestions - for other people).