Lonny, the giraffe, was worried about lightning. Lightning, Lonny knew, seeks the shortest path to the ground, and therefore tends to strike the tallest thing around. Lonny, being a giraffe, was often the tallest thing around. This worried him.
And so, when thunderclouds appeared in the distance, Lonny would bend his great long neck to the ground and wait anxiously for the storm to pass. Lonny was kind and friendly and generally well-liked, but when storms came and Lonny put his head down in the grass and stood quivering, unable to move or engage in friendly conversation, it made the other giraffes nervous and confused. In their nervousness and confusion, they would tease him and then run off to play in the pool or with large metal poles which they would hold in their mouths and compete to see who could raise their pole the highest. The other giraffes did not understand lightning.
So it was that on this particular Tuesday, Lonny found himself quite alone in the savannah being pelted by fat, heavy raindrops, as thunder rumbled all around, face-to-face with a crocodile.
"Hello," said Al. "I'm Al."
"Pleased to meet you," said Lonny, who was in no way going to be so foolish as to share his name with any crocodile, and especially not this one who had scuttled up quite sneakily, and especially not in this rain, and especially, especially not on a Tuesday.
"Likewise," said Al, well aware that Lonny had violated the customary exchanging-of-names part of a civilized introduction, but content enough to read Lonny's name tag. It was just for lunch, after all.
"Lonny, I need your help," Al continued. "In an attempt to better understand the principles governing lightning, I was flying my kite just now in the storm. Alas, the kite has become stuck in the branches of that tall tree. My small crocodile neck prevents me from reaching it. Lonny, in the name of science, would you be so kind as to retrieve my kite?"
Lonny cautiously lifted his head an inch off the ground to look at the tree. Indeed, there was a kite tangled high in its boughs, flapping in the wind wildly, yet weakly, rather like a lanky animal flailing in quicksand. Al's story seemed plausible, but crocodiles, Lonny knew, are a shifty bunch. He needed more details.
"What's a crocodile studying electromagnetism for? Besides, don't you know that Benjamin Franklin did the whole kite thing already?"
This is one well-educated giraffe, thought Al. The gig was up.
"I'm no crocodile!" he said as he peeled off his fake pointed snout, revealing a rounded one underneath. The name Al, was, of course, short for Alligator.
"Aaaahhh," exclaimed Lonny. His fear of lightning was suddenly replaced by his fear of alligators. Lonny's neck sprung upright.
Unfortunately, his head's rapid change in altitude caused the blood to drain from his brain, and Lonny, overcome with dizziness, toppled over into the adjacent pool of quicksand. As he sank, he writhed wildly, yet weakly, rather like a certain kite.
The quicksand had just reached his shoulders when a blast of lightning cracked nearby, so close that Lonny could feel its heat. He yelped and ducked his head. Unfortunately, the ducking turned into more of a plunging, a plunging into the oozing quicksand, which happily swallowed Lonny whole.
Al, feeling dejected about his unconvincing disguise, his failed - and apparently unoriginal - science experiment, and his now absent, deceased, and swallowed-whole lunch plan, scuttled home, dropped out of his PhD program, and succumbed to alcoholism, just as his mother had always feared.
Now that the rain had stopped, the other giraffes, meanwhile, were being devoured by a group of vultures who were beginning to wonder if they could maybe capture the wild power of lightning and channel it into some sort of cooking apparatus with a timer, heating coils, and different crispiness settings. Charred giraffe tastes so much better.