[ WP ] Water is generally viewed as an element of life , of healing , with fire being one of destruction and death . I 'd like to see a world where the opposite is true .

*NOTE: I see n't it. * 
 
 It was an ugly day, that much was for sure. The weatherman said that was going to be raining ash and sulfur for most of the day, and that it was n't even going to make 800°C, and by the feel on his handsome charred skin, Erg did n't think that it would even make 790°C today. Everybody in the media seemed to be hyping global cooling, driving the desire to pump chemicals in the atmosphere to warm up the planet, but Erg did n't know anything about that. 
 
 You see, Erg was empty on the inside. Sure he had a nice home in Lavaside overlooking the great Magma Sea with all of it's crashing waves of orange and black. And sure he had a great civic posting to Lavaside's Lava department, but he just could n't forget the crushing memory of the Great Volcanic War of 3972. The war was going very well, relatively speaking, for Yatakang. The Yatakang and her allies had defeated the evil Yurp empire, who had warred on surrounding countries for nearly a generation. The final bastion of axis strength lay in the fierce, distant island nation of Trobokistan. The Yatakang had jumped from small occupied island to small occupied island, inching closer the final magma assault on the Trobokistani homeland. For the fierce and proud Trobokistani, every battle was a fight to the last man, their ancient god of the solar wind had decreed it in the *bukaki* code. War estimates for the number of dead in the final battle for Trobokistan somewhere in the million range possibly. Erg strained his magma chamber brain for how high that number would be. Was a million 4 or 5 Lavasides? 
 
 Erg wetted a cigar as he let the memories flow. Scraag was his copilot and sometime lover ( that old flame did n't last long ). They were to fly their obsidian blimp, *The Scorched Cutie-Pie*, to Taka-Tuka, the fourth largest city in Trobokistan with a new weapon that the Yatakangian government spent years worth of blood and treasure discovering. They called it'water balloon', and it was supposed to end the war in one shot. 
 
 Scraag and I were skeptical. We had been pounding Trobokistan with squirt guns for weeks now. Some of its largest cities had been turned into black, steam-y places, the residents reduced to warm mud. I nervously chomped on my moist cigar while Scraag drank a scandalous carbon magma shake as the lorry took us to *The Scorched Cutie-Pie*. The next 4 hours of flight were uneventful, but Erg felt the adrenablaze kick in when he saw the winking fires of Taka-Tuka come into view. Scraag lined up the bomb sites on the designated target, an old, squirt-gunned obsidian factory with a distinctive shadow, and let the'water balloon' loose. We counted the seconds as it fell shrieking towards the fires of Taka-Tuka. And then we heard it... the *SSSSSSSSSSSSssssssssss* of a thousand souls being washed away. Erg could n't believe the sight, as a wall of water rolled through Taka-Tuka extinguishing everything it touched. Above the carnage an enormous cloud of steam formed so suddenly that Erg's own blimp was nearly caught in its smothering, deadly embrace. So many lives lost. Erg retired from the military a month after that flight, and has been constantly hounded by the media and the public every year since. 
 
 `` Was it worth it?'' 
 
 `` You're a monster!'' 
 
 `` Why'd you go through with it you heartless person, you?'' 
 
 `` Fuck all that,'' thought Erg, as he sipped a little more on his Cinder and Tonic.
