Prompt of the Week - Week 95

TAGS: Perspective Flip (HAH!), Hyper Logistics, Airports

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The prep team had just gotten off the last flight when the alarm went off again. To their credit, they had, for once, decided against waiting outside the staff room; the last time they were stuck wondering whether or not they should that they didn’t get a moment’s rest before the next special passenger showed up. Granted, they barely had half an hour, but it was enough to recharge their batteries some… that, and brew some coffee for the incoming deluge of work.

Three technicians, all of them under the employ of Gargantua Airlines, all of them with the suspiciously inconspicuous title of “Assisted Engineering Specialist”. The name was entirely nondescript, and deliberately so; no airline wanted to write down what they actually did in anything that would have to be discussed in a board meeting, nor did they want to explain to any inquisitive shareholder why they had multiple people hired to perform a job that most of them would proclaim to be “unnecessary”, if not something even more ignorant.

But with the increased number of cases spreading across the globe, it became clear that transportation companies had two choices: either adapt, or perish as others surpassed them. Unfortunately for everyone in the business, adaptation was easier said than done, considering how no one had any real clue as to how to address the… unique issues that arose from those sorts of passengers. The best they could do was throw ideas at the wall and see what stuck, but given the non-zero chance of it backfiring horrendously, corporate space became oddly dominated by high-level espionage and backroom backstabbings for quite a while before the first “best practices systems” were made public, for everyone’s sake.

For GA in particular, and in that airport specifically, this meant keeping a small team of highly specialised technicians who’d been hired some time prior to perform “delicate customer relations”, along with other, even less indicative terms; everyone involved already knew what the job was about, so covering their bureaucratic rears was the name of the game. Anything to avoid having to admit that they were engaged in those sorts of practices, as prudishness had yet to catch up to modern circumstances.

To the three techies, however, it was less a question of it being seen as embarrassing and far more them being constantly overworked. Operating off a large, international airport was already stressful enough with regular flights; having to then adapt things for those passengers suffering from Acute Hypertrophy Syndrome made it a living nightmare, out of the sheer workload if nothing else.

No one else but them were allowed to directly interact with those passengers with confirmed AHS. Safety considerations, insurance premiums, all manner of nonsense made it so that the only people who were even remotely qualified to handle such special needs were those trained exclusively in the sort of multidisciplinary engineering needed to make sure flights weren’t disrupted because one of the passengers within was… extra-large.

In practice, however, this meant that their shifts were spent running from one plane to another, especially now that the number of cases worldwide was rising to considerably worrying levels. No one wanted to suggest the obvious, but they all knew; there was a good reason why the company had hired more techies to fill the gaps during the night shift, and why they were selling more AHS-accessible seats on their flights. Alas, this still came at a personal cost: sleeping in intervals of thirty minutes played merry hell with one’s ability to function without being interminably cranky.

The trio had come to dread the sound of their radios blaring with the same words coming out of the comms tower: “Alert to Engineering Team Seven, AHS-accessible flight departing”, along with information on where, when and how that particular plane needed to be readjusted to help deal with the passenger. Initially, they were even called when already working on a flight; the three had to shut their radios off to keep themselves focused before the command tower was given orders to shunt all requests to secondary engineering teams so long as the first one was occupied.

Three people, entrusted with making sure that the one person with AHS allowed on the plane didn’t end up causing something bad to happen. “Something bad”, on account of it being damned-near impossible to predict what would take place, given that no two hypers were guaranteed to be similar, let alone identical. Each one was their own challenge, and part of the job description was being able to improvise and come up with workable solutions on the fly, given that the manual was still being written and pending approval by the NTSB.

All three techies, groaning as they rose from various stage of shallow sleep, brought the radios up to their ears and requested more information, as the first round had been “garbled”; no one wanted to talk about the unfortunate reality of overworked engineering technicians, so the control tower was nice enough to make it clear a second time: a passenger with AHS was to board on Flight Seventeen, bound for the West Coast with a layover midway through, and needed assistance getting on the plane.

There was no more information, which was, by itself, perplexing and dreadfully terrifying. Normally, there not being any clarification on what the passenger required was a sign that either the correct paperwork wasn’t filed, the control tower just didn’t have it, that the requirements were so absurd that going through them over the radio would be a waste of time, or, in some rare cases, an unholy combination of all three.

None of them wanted to be the first out the door, but with no further options left to them, it was either that or risk getting fired when something inevitably went wrong. It wasn’t as if the rest of the ground crew wasn’t trained to deal with such passengers; they absolutely were, and needed to be for the sake of avoiding lawsuits, but the specificities and… lengths to which things had to be stretched to accommodate for them required a more delicate, specialised touch that only they could provide. Of course, it was still a headache whenever a “hard” case showed up, but that’s why they were being paid ridiculous sums of money to effectively be glorified chaperones.

The rest of the airport had no idea what was going on. When the technicians left the staff room, joining a small group of other workers who emerged into the main building proper, everyone simply carried on doing their assigned duties as if things were normal and nothing out of the ordinary was taking place just a couple hundred yards away. To them, it was still just a normal day, at a normal airport, with nothing for them to worry about; for the trio, it was literally anything from a minor inconvenience to a multi-hour-long delay.

Spin the wheel.

It started going wrong right when they approached the baggage handling station and saw no one there… well, no one apart from a very clearly flustered security guard and the employee behind the desk, both looking like they had their faces painted red and their fur drenched in sweat. No questions were needed; indeed, none would be answered if asked, so best move on and pretend like it was okay, like those two poor souls hadn’t just gone through an ordeal that would follow them home and haunt their dreams for weeks to come.

Looking down, there were no footprints on the floor, which was definitely out of the ordinary. Even if the tiling was resistant enough not to be cracked, usually those with AHS had a tendency of leaving a very clear trail wherever they went, their body weight enough to leave indentations on whatever surface they walked upon; if not that, then something like a sweat trail… or a trail of other, far more conspicuous fluids that stretched the bounds of imagination.

With the complete lack of any of these, however, it was up to the technicians to radio in and ask where the passenger even was. The near totality of cases were asked to wait at baggage handling so the specialised crew could helped them onto the plane, so with no obvious special customer in sight, the number of options was, to put it mildly, extremely reduced, and not at all the sort that those three wanted to consider.

“Engineering Team Seven, be advised,” the radio crackled back to life, “we have an unruly passenger attempting to board the aircraft without authorisation, please respond as quickly as possible, thank you.”

Of course. If there ever were words that should never be uttered, it was those ones. Alas, they were there, and being there they couldn’t be taken away; such was their plight, that the moment one of their special customers decided they wanted to receive a treatment just like everyone else, everything inevitably went to hell, back, then to hell again to take a double dip in the lakes of fire. Already the techies could hear a commotion from one of the gates further ahead in the terminal, already they could see a small crowd gathered around… someone, presumably. And already they could tell it was going to be a pain and a half.

No word were exchanged while on the way; saying anything at all was a surefire way of guaranteeing that whatever they didn’t want to happen not only did, but did so in the worst possible way as to make as big of a mess as possible, before anyone had a chance at damage control. They knew how it worked: the moment they tempted fate, fate would slap them back hard enough to leave them spinning.

However, as they came closer to all the ruckus, it slowly dawned on them, even as they removed their rolls from their belts and straps, that things weren’t at all what they initially seemed. Sure, there was plenty of commotion there, clearly centred around someone, but rather than the usual scene of small-scale devastation that arose whenever a hyper-sized passenger threw a fuss, what the techies saw was, instead, a large group of concerned faces all looking at them like they were their guardian angels.

“Oh thank heavens, finally!” an elderly, almost comically-wrinkly swan let out, approaching the trio while waving a sodden piece of tissue paper in her hand, “We’ve been waiting for you for so long I didn’t think you were coming! Come, come, come, we need your help, this young woman’s had an accident and none of us can fix the machine!”

Not words any of them, once more, wanted to hear. The crowd parted, making way for the engineers to see what they had been hiding from the rest of the terminal, and the reason why they had been called in the first place. Their first impression was that calling it an “unruly” passenger was frankly insulting; there was nothing unruly there, merely an unfortunate set of circumstances that, honestly, could happen to anyone in that situation. Their second impression was that they were definitely not cleaning all of that milk without a hefty bonus at the end of the month.

Sitting at the very middle of the crowd of passengers, on the floor, looking like they wanted to be just about anywhere but there, was a young woman, no older than twenty-five. An otter, her form was definitely one warped by AHS: over nine foot tall at the very least, even higher when sitting owing to a frankly oversized rump, and a bust of such immense proportions that, frankly, it was entirely unsurprising that she needed to carry around a mobile milking pump wherever she went… one that, judging from the broken tubing, the occasional sparks, and the overabundance of spilled dairy, had stopped working at some point in the close past.

The poor otter looked up at the technicians approaching her, her face a mixture of bright scarlet and vivid regret, and for a moment, it did genuinely look like she was going to apologise; unfortunately, it was too much for her to bear, and so her hands rose to cover her face, the young woman just barely avoiding breaking out into open sobbing as she tried to explain what had happened.

A series of miscalculations, along with traffic having delayed her arrival at the airport, left her with with a milking pump that was woefully unprepared to handle her full productivity by the time she arrived at the terminal and it was provided to her. She still tried her best to make it work; stuffing her engorged nipples into the suction cups, the otter managed to get all the way to the baggage handling line before the first signs of failure… but, by then, it was obvious the pump she had on wasn’t going to be enough.

When questioned by the ground crew as to why she didn’t ask for a replacement, the young woman reported that the thought just hadn’t occurred to her… and, in the embarrassment that ensued, her body unfortunately reacted to the increased emotional activation by doing what it did best, and the rest was history. Plentiful apologies did, eventually, ensue, where the ott went to great lengths to assure the techies that she’d pay for clean-up, repairs, and whatever else was needed to get things back on track, only to be left stunned when one of them shrugged and simply replied “Nah.”

No point dawdling: the airline had a whole chunk of the budget set aside for incidents like those, and, in all honesty, spillage was the least of their concerns. The flight wasn’t technically delayed yet, so just as long as a replacement pump was found in time, then everyone could get on the plane, the ground crew could help the otter into her seat, and they could all go do whatever they had to do while forgetting that little unfortunateness happened.

Plus, fixing it was so simple that it barely amounted to an emergency at all; in fact, were it not for the spilling of milk, this would’ve been one of those situations where the three engineers would go back to the staff room to complain about how the rest of the crew could’ve handled it themselves and they had no reason to be disturbed. Alas, ‘twas their lot in life, so while one of them went to fetch one of the cleaning machines, the other two went to work fixing the milking pump.

It… very quickly became apparent that overflow was the obvious culprit. The machine had been rated for an amount of output far below that which the otter was very clearly capable of, likely as a result of simple miscommunication. Easy enough to solve too: just phone the folks over in maintenance and request a new one, then wait there for the clean-up crew to decide to show up. Enough of a change of pace and tone that everyone around the engineers was left reeling somewhat at it; surely that couldn’t be it.

“It’s quite standard,” one of them had to explain, “we just need a new machine to be rolled in and we should be golden.”

“In the meantime, please avoid stepping on any of the lactic produce,” the other added, shooing someone for a section of the milk puddle, “we cannot confirm whether or not it’s contagious, and Gargantua Airlines will not be held responsible for any transformative effects that may or may not result from exposure to tainted lactic ejecta.”

There was a moment of confusion.

“Step off the milk.”

Nodding all around, sounds of agreement and the one obligatory “Of course, I knew that,” spoken aloud by someone who failed their willpower check. All in a day’s work, in all honesty; if anything, this was the sort of “emergency” the techies lived for: easy to handle, easier to forget, and it bought them enough time before the next one that they might actually have enough time to take a proper nap once they were back in the staff room.

Indeed, after the third member of their little group returned with the automated mop, there wasn’t much left for them to do there apart from reassuring everyone things were, indeed, under control, and they didn’t need to worry about anything thank you very much. Just get on the plane and forget about anything that happened, airline would provide compensation as needed, yada yada, the usual spiel; a more personal touch was reserved for the otter, whom the the techies spent some time informing about what sort of machine they called for, proper installation instructions, as well as the mandatory reminder that she wouldn’t be held accountable for any damages.

In the end, the young woman once again looked on the verge of tears, albeit of a much different variety from the first time. It still took a short while for her to get back up on her feet, even with help from some more of the ground crew; not much she could do before her breasts were drained properly, but the plane still had to take off and she wasn’t about to force a delay, not after the embarrassment by the boarding line.

Once this was resolved, however… nothing more. The three techies stood staring at the door leading into the boarding hallway and just… stood there, waiting for things to happen. Once again they were stuck in the unenviable position of not knowing whether or not to stick around and wait for the next emergency, or head back to the staff room to catch some sleep while they still could. A conundrum, however, easily solved when one of them proclaimed “Fuck this” and made their way back up the stairs to the baggage handling line.

It would become a recurring element of their team dynamic, and one none of them were willing to throw away. Even if the person saying those two words changed, said words had to be used; otherwise, they might never get any rest.

The next call was probably due in seconds anyway.