Prompt of the Week - Week 49

TAGS: Hyper Neck (?), Macro/City Macro, Mind-Melting Revelations, Unlikely Anatomy

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It was, perhaps, the office’s greatest mystery, yet simultaneously the most obvious thing in the world, so much so that most people were content with simply accepting that it was a thing and moving on with their lives without giving it too much thought. For Sam, however, the question of where the giraffe was held took up such a large part of his mental processing power that he often found himself wasting time during work hours trying to finagle some sort of solution to the dilemma, even when he knew he should be doing something more productive, or at least not wasting his time with something that wasn’t even his business to begin with. But, as with many other things, it was just stronger than him, and he couldn’t help it; especially for a rabbit such as himself, who had to deal with being significantly smaller than most of the other folks at the office, being shown someone like Clara only to then be given a shrug whenever he asked how exactly she worked was… too enticing for him not to think about too much. In all honesty, he couldn’t really be blamed for wanting to know more; it was only overexposure that caused everyone working in the building not to constantly question where and how exactly that giantess fit into the floorplan, even more so given how her actual body was never seen, per se. The only part of Clara that anyone caught glimpses of was her neck, and even that was enough to take up multiple floors and still need to bend around a few times above their heads during group meetings, the one time of the week where anyone got to see her face at all; for her part, the giraffe was nothing if not polite, and if not for the fact that her neck was so unbelievably colossal, she might’ve passed as just another person working there. But when one went up multiple flights of stairs with the sight of the towering series of brown and yellow splotches always present just a few inches away, when one dipped into multiple corridors only to find that damned neck was still there, when one walked into the meeting room and somehow it was coming in from the outside, with Clara’s actual head taking up a significant portion of the empty space available above the meeting table, then it was impossible not to ask questions… and ask questions Sam did, because as much as he recognized that it was rude to treat one of his coworkers as a thing to be studied, the question of how she managed to operate in a standard building was one that he couldn’t help but think about, even after he was told by management that he really shouldn’t worry about it; in fact, being told it wasn’t all that important just made him want to know about it even more, in a childish sort of way, which wasn’t at all helped by when he managed to scrounge up enough courage to ask Clara herself and got a very sheepish non-answer accompanied by a blush before she retreated through an empty elevator shaft and vanished from sight. In a way, it felt more like the neck was some sort of serpentine entity, moving around with such fluidity that it either had no bones inside of it or some sort of multiple jointed spines arranged in some bizarre, alien amalgamation; whatever the case, Sam was determined to get to the bottom of it, even if it meant having to waste company time trying to figure it out. The first step was trying to map the full length of the neck, which was made extremely difficult by how malleable it was to begin with; it was no secret that Clara often changed the direction that it was pointed at, especially when she had to be somewhere in particular in completely different parts of the building, but seeing as how the structure of the office itself was immutable, that meant the number of access points that could be used, as well as tunnels, shafts and corridors available for neck storage, was inherently limited. Thus, Sam thought to himself as he sneaked away from his cubicle, if he only tried hard enough, he could probably find some sort of pattern, or at least a stable “base” from which every other position varied from; after all, no one actually saw the giraffe move in or out of the office building, and as far as anyone knew, she was the first one in each morning and the last one out every night, suggesting that she was either housed on-site or accommodated close enough to it that she might as well be. This told the bun that her body, whatever it may be, must be somewhere below ground in the lower levels, which seriously reduced the number of locations that the neck could emerge from: there were only a couple of staff-accessible doors leading down to the parking garage, as well as a single service elevator and a handful of maintenance corridors used primarily by subcontracted personnel that never showed up when they were actually needed; seeing as the giraffe was nowhere to be seen next to the collection of cars in the first two underground floors, and how the service lift never shared its shaft with the giraffe’s neck, this would then point towards Clara using the maintenance tunnels in order to weave her enormous body around the bottom parts of the building without being seen. This also handily explained how she inexplicably got into one of the elevator shafts which had been emptied out just for her, despite her neck never going through any visible door, conveniently giving Sam a direction in which to go. If he was right, then this meant that the giraffe’s neck mostly remained immobile until reaching the work areas up above, at which point she would move around as needed in order to get her head wherever it was required, while down below her body was forced to use whatever cramped accessways were left behind when the building was constructed for whenever maintenance personnel had to do repair work. Already the bun was cringing at the notion, feeling genuinely sorry for Clara that she had to go through that sort of experience; it couldn’t possibly be anything remotely pleasant, and it only made him respect her perpetually cheery attitude even more. Being a hyper on her scale felt like more of a curse than anything else, and yet the giraffe somehow found it in her to always have a smile on her face and a kind word to anyone who may ask, even when she must be feeling extremely uncomfortable on a second-by-second basis. Or at least, that’s what Sam envisioned as he tried to open one of the maintenance doors, which had quite conveniently been fitted with a heavy steel padlock that he didn’t have the key to; quite mercifully, however, a cursory examination of the nearby service lift storage dump revealed that one had been left hanging from a random nail driven through the wall, with a post-it reading “PUT SAFE PLACE” left next to it. The bun couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity, right before remembering that he’d done far worse, and seen even more egregious violations of basic work security on a regular basis; at least this way he could get through the door with minimal hassle, though what he saw on the other side very quickly got rid of this optimism and replaced it with sheer, unbridled shock. It wasn’t terrifying, nor even remotely scary, but something on such grand a scale that the bun couldn’t but mouth three very rude words as he stared down the maintenance corridor, realizing that it was far, far bigger than he had expected it to be; in his head, he’d imagined it would be just like any other he had seen before: narrow, cramped, just big enough to fit whatever piping needed to be run underneath the building itself, with just the right amount of space for someone to squeeze through, get work done, and then get out before it got too hot and uncomfortable. Instead, what he saw was a comfortably wide hallway stretching out in front of him, so long that he couldn’t even make out what was at the end of it, with a solid concrete wall on one side, piping on the other… and the giraffe’s neck on the ceiling. There was no mistaking it, that was definitely Clara he was looking at, with a secondary, vertical access shaft directly above the bun’s head just inside the door marking the spot where said neck bent upwards, presumably towards the empty elevator shaft or some hidden maintenance closet that no one knew about. Truly, Sam had been expecting his coworker to be enormous, but to finally see it like that, laid out in front of him, was surprisingly daunting, almost overwhelming in an existential sort of way; it made it clear just how insignificantly tiny he himself was, even when he already knew that to be a fact, and put just about everything he thought he knew about Clara in perspective. Just spending a few seconds looking at her neck made it clear whenever the young woman moved up above: the bun could see her muscles shifting slightly, with part of her body moving one or two inches to one side in order to adjust what were probably several bends up above; he could even hear when she shuffled around more than usual, with the sounds echoing down what sounded like multiple stretches of empty pipe, along with the occasional “Oop, sorry!” that normally came whenever Clara accidentally bumped into someone. Still, he’d come all the way down there to find out where the giraffe was being held, and it wouldn’t be confirmation of his biggest case scenario that stopped him, so with with a renewed spring to his step, the bun marched onwards down the corridor, intent on finding out what awaited him at the very end. Ultimately though, this would turn out to be a lot harder than he had expected, for the hallway was significantly longer than he had originally though; in fact, it was so long that by the time he actually saw the end of it, he was convinced that whatever he’d spotted back at the entrance hadn’t been it, but rather the very curvature of the Earth blocking his view of the other side. The bun had never been in a tunnel long enough for this to be the case, leaving him so utterly flabbergasted and disoriented that, when he got close enough to what looked to be an access elevator, he refused to look back, believing that if he did so he might very well end up tripping over himself in his confusion. It was hard enough to parse what he was even seeing, as it appeared that the giraffe’s neck was coming up from an even lower level before bending towards the ceiling, only then twist back vertically to head to the rest of the office building; curiously, the hold in the ground next to the elevator door was padded, presumably in order to keep Clara as comfortable as possible without having to spend ridiculous quantities of money in pillows for every inch of the ceiling that she had to use… and seemingly indicating that he was very, very close to the end of the neck, and the beginning of whatever body the giraffe giantess might have. As he called up an elevator, the bun found himself having to shake away nonsensical notions of a bodyless neck, the idea that Clara didn’t actually have a torso or anything below the collarbone, being just one long semi-serpentine giraffe neck with a head attached, a mental image that was just as hilarious as it was terrifying. It was only after he got into the elevator itself, which turned out to be mostly comprised of clear glass panelling, that the bun realized just how wrong he was, and how much even his wildest expectations turned out to not even begin to approach the true scale that he was working with there. As he stepped through the heavy metal outer doors, only to find that the elevator itself had sliding glass ones on the inside, he was suddenly surrounded on all sides by a frankly ludicrous amount of light, almost like he’d stepped into outdoors; this was obviously impossible, and yet after the artificial gloom of the long maintenance hallway, it was enough to force him to shield his eyes to step the momentary pain. It took him nearly a minute to get accustomed to it, at which point, after he took a good look, he truly wish it hadn’t, for what he saw was so out of his ability to process, so far removed from whatever frame of reference he might’ve had, that the one thing he could think of was how much he couldn’t understand it. On a purely physical level, it was quite easy to grasp, in that he wasn’t looking at any sort of eldritch not-thing that shouldn’t be, but rather a person (or rather, many persons) whose presence was perfectly comprehensible, albeit at a distance that made it hard to make out any detail (bar one, obviously). No, the main issue was how he had just gone from an incredibly drab, concrete corridor into what appeared to be an absolutely gargantuan open space underground, so wide that it probably encompassed most of the city’s downtown area, which was obviously impossible; most of the city would’ve sunken into this vast, cavernous opening a long time ago if it were actually real, especially considering how there weren’t even any support struts in the middle of it, only steel panelling on the walls, the colossal walls stretching all the way down to the distant floor below. Catwalks criss-crossed the air around him, filled with workers using uniforms bearing his company’s logo, none of which the bun had ever seen before, most of which eyed him suspiciously as the elevator came down; he was presumably not allowed in there, given his complete lack of clearance, but if that were the case, then why wasn’t the lift locked to an ID card system of some sorts? Especially since it held what had to be the company’s greatest secret: Clara’s body. It was hard to parse, in the sense that its scale was so vast that Sam convinced himself that he had to be dreaming, and the entire sequence of events that led him to this end point was some kind of extremely realistic lucid dream; after all, it was impossible for anyone to be that big, impossible for any one person to be so positively titanic that they would put most hypers to shame. But above all, it was impossible for any one person to be that big, and yet still not justify the sheer size of the neck that they had attached to it, which played merry hell with both the bun’s perception and ability to think coherent thoughts; the one thing he could be certain of was that he was looking at a body, the real existence of which was debatable, which definitely belonged to a giraffe, and happened to be big enough that it could most likely compete with most of the downtown area’s skyscrapers in sheer height, to say nothing of its mass. Said body was surrounded on all sides by a myriad of support structures arranged in such a way that dozens, potentially hundreds of attendants could have easy access to the giraffe herself, who was sitting at what looked to be a supersized, upscaled model of Sam’s own cubicle, albeit without the walls. At a distance, it looked as if she was just doing regular office work, though the longer Sam looked at it, the more the sheer perspective of it all made his head hurt, especially when he started thinking about what kind of computer system had to be built just so someone of that size could use their workstation properly; it didn’t occur to him that the tower itself might be the same as his own, with it being the monitor that was upscaled to the point of absurdity. He was just too busy trying to process what he was seeing to truly comprehend it to begin with, a process that wasn’t even remotely begun by the time the elevator reached its first stop, a good hundred feet or so up in the air; unthinking, the bun moved out, not noticing that there were several people already waiting for him on the catwalk, some of whom looked incredibly irritated at having to deal with a trespasser. Sam said nothing as he was asked a whole slew of questions regarding what his business there was, why he had decided to come downstairs when he clearly didn’t have clearance, or what he was planning to do with the information; instead, he just stared ahead into the middle distance, occasionally managing to focus on Clara’s body, and how much space it occupied. For the people trying to question him, it quickly became clear that they were dealing with someone who’d never seen the giraffe in their full splendour before, and after waving their hands in front of the bun’s eyes yielded no results, they resorted to just carrying him off towards what was most likely some sort of holding area. As for the bun himself, he couldn’t bring himself to care really; his eyes were drawn to the impossible, to the vast, to the fact that even at that titanic scale, the giraffe’s neck was still oversized and unbelievably malleable; perhaps the funniest part about this entire misadventure was that, ultimately, Sam hadn’t actually managed to find the answer to the biggest question, that being to explain the neck, but was certainly left with several more that only punched further holes into his understanding of the world.

Alas, this would have to be left for another day; the holding cell didn’t have windows on it.