you're a tourist here.

#1: Think of the most deafening sound you can imagine. Describe it in great detail, and have your character hear it for the first time at the start of a story.

She saw it first. A gray cloud ascending up the sky like a cough blowing from the ground.

And then the sound.

It was a rumble that started in the ground and then an explosion of heat, as if the sun itself had found a voice and screamed. Her ears rang, turning moist and she wondered absurdly as she collapsed into the ground and clutched at her head whether it was possible for her to bleed out from her ears.

Against the lancing pain in her head, her knees stubbornly straightened, as if she could outrun the light of explosion and the rumbling stampede of noise and poison. But it stayed in her ears, ringing and ringing.

The earth had awoken, had crashed into another floating rock, had turned itself inside out. Her thoughts frantically flew from one hypothesis to another until they kneeled behind the sheer noise. Just the noise. Until the silence of her pain and her shock became deafening.