ARLINGTON, VA - Americans were able to breath a sigh of relief today after April Fools’ Day 2015 ended without a single Prank in a major population center. Experts are reporting April Fools’ Day 2015 to be the single lowest-casualty April Fools’ Day since 1986 when all Fools worldwide spontaneously converged on the North Pole, most likely in response to the disastrous 1985 Christmas.
Morning was mostly peaceful, with only a single Fool manifesting before late in the afternoon. Evansville, Indiana was the first town hit, at 11:44am, when a potential Fool was sighted crouching behind the bleachers in a local high school. The building was evacuated and local Department of Necromancy, Mutilation, & Bone Ritual staff confirmed the sighting. Few students were harmed, as the Fool remained dormant until the evacuation was complete. At 1:23pm all biomass in the building was replaced with a thick, toxic sludge, the building’s doors fused shut, and local gravity was increased by a factor of 50.
The building has since been condemned and the students it served led away in shackles to the education pits they have been assigned until a new high school can be built.
A more serious Prank occurred in Layton, UT at 3:22pm, when all roads within city limits became temporarily frictionless. Although experts cautioned that the change in the roads’ physical properties could also be due to local cult activities, it was confirmed as a Prank when local officials reporting a Fool hovering in a local DMV, surrounded by the impaled bodies of the employees. The incident caused a relatively low 227 fatalities, not including those directly killed by the Fool, most of whom were merely drones of the DMV hive mind. The Fool was eventually dispatched by sustained rocket fire.
The most deadly Prank occurred at 4:17pm in Ashland, OR, when thousands of British soldiers clad in Elizabethan-era armor swarmed from the Ashland Theatre and proceded to madly hack at residents, while shouting lines from famous Shakespeare plays in an exaggerated Cockney accent. The onslaught was stemmed after a slavering police horde ripped the Fool from limb to limb, and the remaining soldiers were quickly devoured by larval-stage constables. Manhunts to ensure none escaped the slaughter are ongoing. The final death toll in Ashland, OR reached 2,400, with many more seriously wounded.
Experts noted that the soldiers’ accents did not match what would be expected of lower-class British citizens from Elizabethan England.
Four more minor Pranks occurred in Whitefish, MO; Norfolk, VA; Santa Maria, CA; and Davenport, IA; each leading to a death toll of less than 100. The White House sounded the all-clear at 9:30pm, indicating that the box of magic teeth traditionally passed from one president to another had ceased all radioactive emissions, indicating no more Fools would manifest.
While millions of dollars in damage were done to housing and infrastructure, affected cities predict a relatively easy recovery. “I don’t deny our residents are shaken,” said Layton, UT mayor Bob Stevenson, “but we’ve made it through much, much worse. And you know, for a town unlucky enough to get a Fool dropped in our laps, we sure made out better than Corpus Christi did last year,” he added, referring to the 2014 April Fools’ Day Prank that melded residents with any piece of furniture they happened to be sitting on and left them screaming in agony until a nearby flamethrower brigade could begin mercy killings.
And Ashland mayor John Stromberg agrees. “Honestly, there’s a silver lining in all this,” said Stromberg. “Yes, we lost thousands of our citizens to the horrifyingly blunt blades of maddened Elizabethan infantry, but it’s given the Shakespeare Festival an air of authenticity that will be sure to benefit the city in years to come.”
Dr. Damocles P. Roberts is Approved News 6's terror correspondent. Famed for the international reintroduction of waterboarding and the modern terror probe, Dr. Roberts holds a number of patents in fear-based technologies and improvised explosive devices, and her name strikes terror and revulsion in the hearts of thousands in Eastern Europe. She lives in an ominous fortress built from the rubble of New York City with her girlfriend Sam, a small mercenary army, and her Yorkshire terrier Scruffles.