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Portalocity Office | 13 Griffin Way | Wednesday

Officially, Sam had told Emily that she'd most likely be in the office on Thursdays. And in a perfect world, that was when she would be here. Unfortunately, as it happened, she had been in the office no fewer than six (6) days this week.

The good news, at least, was that she wasn't even aware that most adults here in Fandom tended to only work one day a week. If she had known that, she might have been a bit bitter that she was spending this sunny afternoon sifting through paperwork about the fees associated with taking a portal with different kinds of pets.

Why were dogs so much cheaper than cats (unless the departure city or the destination happened to be a universe populated by talking cats)? Why was the fee so alarmingly low for dinosaurs but so high for dragons? Why did squirrels travel free? Sam might never know.

Actually, she had an idea about the squirrels. But the others were complete mysteries.

Portalocity was open!

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Know who didn't work only one day a week either? Éponine. Which was fine, really, since it kept her busy and therefore out of too much trouble. (As for the bitter part . . . she usually was, just not about work.)

Too much being the key phrase there, because she didn't actually care if she wasn't supposed to wander off and do whatever she felt like doing in the middle of her delivery route. Case in point: right now.

"Oh, hello," she said in her low raspy voice, wandering in with her mail bag still slung over her shoulder. "I thought I might check in and see if you had any mail to drop off, save you the trouble."

Which was a lie, though she'd run with it if she had to. She'd just wanted an excuse to be ~~nosy~~ curious.

Sam wouldn't have minded even if she hadn't offered the excuse. Studying pterodactyl portal fees was not her idea of a fun activity, so the interruption was appreciatedE. ~~Especially since, you know, Samantha Barks.~~

"Oh, thank you," she said, surprised, as she began searching through the piles of paperwork on the desk. "As it happens, we actually do most of our mail electronically, but there are some universes that predate that technology and still require receipts, if I can just find the pile... ah. Here."

She scooped up the neat stack of envelopes -- the top one was addressed to "Hut on a Rock, Pacific Ocean" -- and leaned over the desk to hand them over to Éponine.

"Oh, d'you have that problem too?" asked Éponine as she took the envelopes, pausing to laugh briefly at the address. "Well, I don't envy the poor bastard who gets tasked with delivering that one -- it's a nightmare, isn't it, all these different rules?"

"It isn't too bad," Sam said, but that was obligatory face-saving, and her tone indicated that she wasn't quite as undaunted as she would have liked to come across. "Though I'm amused to recall that I thought the technology of this job would be the difficult part."

Ahahaha. Aww, Sam. No.

"Are you new to your position as well, then?"

"Fairly new." Éponine tucked the envelopes into one of the mailbag's pouches, humming to herself as she did. (It was a fragment of a One Direction song, but it wasn't as if she knew to be mortified by that. She didn't even know where she'd heard it.) "Just a bit over two months now, but I don't recall seeing you around until quite recently."

She glanced over her shoulder, apparently distracted by something outside, before seeming to remember the question she asked next. "Oh! So it isn't the hardest part of the job for you after all, then? I still find the computers and things dreadfully confusing, but then you see, they don't exist yet where I'm from."

Sam did recognize the song, as it happened -- not that One Direction was still popular in her time, because it certainly wasn't, but she'd been doing her pop culture research -- and she approved. She thought 1D was quite catchy!

"Ah, well, my time's rather the opposite," Sam said. "It's nearly two centuries ahead, so we've got computers, but... a bit more advanced than what they've got here. My technological difficulties are more along the lines of struggling to figure out why these modern computers won't do what I'd like them to."

Which was annoying, but not overly so. Even 2013 had search engines.

"Really, the tricky bit is acclimatizing to all the logistics and regulations of Portalocity itself."

Well, someone approved of the music choice at least.

"Are they as bad as the postal rules?" To tell the truth, Éponine sounded annoyed about that in large part because she couldn't get around the damned rules. "Good God, the piles and piles of papers one has to fill out just to send a damned letter to some places. It's absurd, is what it is."

"Perils of a multiversal nexus, I suppose," Sam said sympathetically. "I find customers get quite irritated when they call and I have them read off their universe ID number, but I need to know in order to book their transit!" She hadn't gotten defensive with any customers yet, but it was probably a matter of time. "It's all a little unwieldy."

Éponine -- who hadn't given any customers attitude yet either, but that was only because she managed to pawn them off onto the other employees first -- snorted, a sarcastic and thoroughly inelegant laugh. "Just as long as I'm not the one having to run these letters from one end of the universe to the other end of another, I suppose, but heavens, the kind of questions some people will ask about why, exactly, one intends to ship a great big toy duck to a friend overnight!"

Why would you want to know? Honestly?

"Oh my," Sam said, wincing a bit. "No, it's best not to ask about that."

Because... really. It was best not to know.

"You have my sympathy," she said. "That just leads to customers overdeclaring their package contents, and... I don't much want to know about the contents of people's personal packages. That can't lead anywhere good."

"Oh, it's not terribly interesting most of the time, unless they're lying, and I wouldn't blame them if they did sometimes," Éponine replied casually, because of course she read the forms. If people were going to be that honest on paperwork that they were handing over to her, then she was going to read it, because she could. "Of course, now I do wonder just a bit about this one, since the customer took one look at the paperwork and ran off without writing down a thing, and now I'm stuck with a great big yellow duck doing nothing but taking up space."

Maybe she could take it home with her, brighten up the otherwise mostly-empty warehouse.

"Oh, he didn't even want to keep the duck for himself, then," Sam marveled, sounding appropriately impressed by that level of weirdness. "My military background has me wondering if there might be something dangerous about it -- but if he simply left it at the post office and ran, I suppose it's more likely sexual."

Ew.

"Well, it's been there since yesterday and no sign of anything odd," Éponine said in a matter-of-fact tone. "And I suspect you're probably right. Lord, what people will get up to."

Whether she realized that was a double entendre was not so much the question as whether she cared if it was. (She didn't.)

"As much as I wish I weren't," Sam filled in. "Eugh. So far I haven't had anyone come in here for overtly... personal purposes, but I realize I've likely just condemned myself to exactly that."

"Or likely they simply aren't mentioning it." Not helping, Éponine.

One corner of her mouth twisted up into a sarcastic mockery of a smile. "After all, some things just aren't meant to be mentioned in polite society."

It was easier to pretend they didn't happen that way.

Sam was generally pretty okay with that rule of society, personally, but she understood that it wasn't for everyone.

"As long as I don't have to hear about it, I can live with the knowledge that it might be a possibility," she settled on. "And appreciate that they aren't sharing the details of their private lives with me."

Éponine couldn't help thinking that the old Gorbeau tenement would not have been an ideal place for this woman, in that case.

"Yes," she said, a bit distantly. "It's silly to pretend as if people don't have needs, but at the same time it's nice not to have to know those things, isn't it?"

"Specialist," Kaidan greeted. He wasn't getting another assignment until probably the weekend, and so he'd decided that 'looking after his one subordinate' was... well, it was the best course of action. "Morning."

"Morning, Commander," Sam said, springing up and saluting. "Can I help you with something?"

"Just looking for a sitrep," Kaidan said casually. "How's the job going?"

Fortunately, Sam's desk wasn't as untidy as it had been before Éponine had come by -- which hadn't even been all that untidy, really -- so it actually didn't look like she was completely failing at her job.

"Not too badly," she reported, shifting some papers around. "I'm, ah, studying up on pet transportation fees. A woman called this morning asking about her varren, so I thought I'd review the policies and post them on the extranet site."

"You're going to want to be careful about transporting varren," Kaidan said. "They can get pretty vicious."

And never mind the uses some people had for them. Ahem.

He glanced over her desk, making a note of the state of it, because yes, he was That Guy.

"That's what I told her," Sam assured him. "There are approved pet carriers for them, but apparently one needs a license in order to even be trusted with one." The woman on the phone hadn't been thrilled with that regulation, but.

"Bringing one into another universe-- that's probably not a good idea," Kaidan said, once he'd decided the office was up to his standards. He wasn't so sure it was a good idea in general for the Alliance to open up Portalocity to tourists, but what was he going to do with it? "What's the guidelines say about that?"

"For interdimensional travel?" Sam began ticking items off on her fingers. "No dangerous pets -- so that's a no to the varren, then; no civilian firearms; no first-time interdimensional travelers who haven't had a check-up by a Portalocity-approved physician within their planet's equivalent of a year..."

Edited 2013-04-24 18:42 (UTC)

Kaidan's eyebrows climbed up. The Alliance really got a lot done for him, didn't they?

"How many people are travelling down from our universe?" he asked. "I mean, mostly tourists, or Alliance personnel..."

"Not too many overall," she shared, fiddling with the computer at the desk for a moment before pulling up a graph of the quantitative Portalocity usage over the past few months in her and Kaidan's universe, color-coded to differentiate between civilians and Alliance personnel. Predictably, the bars representing Alliance customers were quite a bit larger than their civilian counterparts, but still not all that large; only a small sample of the population seemed to be using Portalocity at all.

"It's such a new technology for us, and the Alliance is being so careful with it -- rightfully so, of course -- that not too many people are taking an interest just yet," she explained. "The... varren woman seemed to be an exception rather than the rule."

"Guess we're going to have to figure out how to deal with crazy," Kaidan said. Though honestly-- he was relieved. Letting in large amounts of people like that...? They had no idea what stuff laid out there, and he was pretty sure the dungeon was only the start of it.

"Eventually," Sam agreed -- and she didn't sound super-excited about that, surprise surprise. "But we learned our lesson from First Contact, Commander. I think we've got the message that leaping through gateways to who-knows-where without proper regulation isn't wise."

Technically, that lesson dated all the way back to the Rachni Wars, but humans had missed that lesson.

Humans had missed a lot of lessons. It was sort of a boon, at least in the sense that they weren't as terrified to try something.

Kaidan shot her a sideways glance. "You think?" he said. "Trust me... as a species, we haven't quite figured that one out. And we might never do."

Sam paused. "Hmm." She might have been giving humanity too much credit, especially since -- "I... probably shouldn't pass judgment about the competence of our entire species just because I would be too afraid to jump through an unknown portal, I suppose."

"I've served with a lot of people who enjoy jumping through unknown portals," Kaidan said. "Might've jumped one or two myself."

Damn it, Conduit.

"And that's why I shouldn't judge the whole human race by standards of my own cowardice, Commander," Sam said -- lightly enough, though the self-deprecation hit home a little more than she cared to acknowledge. "In any event -- all that I meant was that it's for the best that Portalocity is so heavily regulated. At least for the time being."

"It can't be a bad thing to have someone around who stops and looks before leaping, Specialist," Kaidan replied lightly. That wasn't an attempt at comfort, honest. (Okay, it was an attempt at keeping up morale.) "But I agree. We don't need civilians running into potentially hostile territory."

"Right," Sam said, with finality. She began shuffling some papers on her desk, though considering how neat all the stacks were, this was really more for her benefit in terms of not having to make eye contact with Kaidan than it was for the sake of neatnesss. "In any event, I'm doing what I can to initiate a company-wide system of clearance levels for the more dangerous universes, especially during periods of war, though some higher-ups in the company seem to think that that's undemocratic. But we'll see how it works."

Aww, I love it when I see gifs of the same breed of dog as my puppy:

Edited 2013-04-24 14:16 (UTC)

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Portalocity Office | 13 Griffin Way | Wednesday

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