Postcards - Melissa at Work

Hi, readers, it’s Melissa again. First of all, thanks for all the messages and comments from the various dimensions where my letter got published. Second, I now realize that I had things a little wrong. I’m more of what you’d think of as a mega sized person than a giga sized person. Size in my world exists on a spectrum and we tend to use comparisons to material objects and each other along with boring old empirical measurement units instead of various classes and categories to describe our various heights. I’ve also noticed that some of the other folks participating in this program have been a lot better than me at the whole brevity thing.

Last time I let you in on a little flake of my private life, today I’m going to fill you in a little on what I do for work. I’m a public safety officer, and I’ve heard that it’s a job that’s been mentioned in a couple of the other letters. Let me lay out the basics for you.

Every person in my particular neck of the interdimensional woods possesses a number of so-called auras. These auras increase exponentially in size and power the bigger someone is. One of these auras is an aura of protection. That means that the larger someone is, the more people around them are protected from damage and injury. Non-living objects get destroyed and obliterated, but the people in and around those objects remain safe and uninjured, the result of the giant’s aura interacting with the smaller person’s. There is also an aura of, shall we say, desire. When a smaller person comes in direct contact with a bigger person, both feel a deep desire to be in close physical contact with each other. That’s why it’s so pleasurable for a bigger person to surround themselves in tinies, as I did in the bath that I described last time. It gives the little folks being squished and enjoyed great pleasure too. A good time is had by all. Other rarer auras exist as well, but I don’t know much about those.

Public safety officers like me take advantage of these effects to keep smaller people safe. We stand around watching the ground for any potential disasters or safety risks. If we spot something amiss it’s our duty, and a pleasure, to stomp out the area at risk. When we’re sure the danger is over, we move our feet, or whatever other body parts we needed to use, and let the smaller size members of the team move in to extract people from the wreckage and provide any medical help that might be necessary.

A typical team for an average size city consists of a few dozen smaller size units stationed throughout the city, five to seven giants my size for precision strikes on smaller disasters, and one or two “giga” sized individuals to deal with larger scale issues, or anything that threatens to harm us smaller giants. Bigger cities use bigger teams of course, in every sense of the word. Smaller communities spread out of much larger areas in the countryside tend to have just two or three giants for this job, but those giants are among the biggest of the “giga” sized folks able to spot and take care of trouble from miles and miles away. Once you get much larger than that you tend to join the truly gigantic who provide transportation and cargo hauling services across the space ways.

I’ll tell you a little about the work I did yesterday. After getting a shower, just water this time of course, and some breakfast, I put on my uniform and took a portal to the meet up spot. Normally we go barefooted on the job, to better make sure our auras interact with the little peoples’ auras and protect them. Yesterday, because it was rainy, we wore our special thin, but insulating socks that protected us from the wet while letting enough aura through to protect our charges. On a rainy day we “megas” must be particularly observant. A typical “giga” sized person is so tall that low rain clouds tend to obscure their vision. If something too big happens for the smaller giants, we need to be able to radio in accurate coordinates for our bigger colleagues to know where to stomp. We also have some air support from smaller officers, but they need to be well clear once us big folk spring into action.

It was a pretty typical day. I stomped out a few near car accidents, stopped one mugging I spotted (I swallowed the offender who would stay there until the next time I used the bathroom, when he would be ported to a holding facility.), and kicked in and crushed a house about to have a falling tree land on it. The family inside was so happy I helped them that they insisted on getting my mailing address to send me a thank you. Once they’d taken a few selfies with their rescuer, they got a hotel voucher from the smaller safety officers, and a rebuild order went out to one of the many quick building crews in the city. They work around the clock to mitigate the destruction and demolition that naturally follows from a world populated by people of such various sizes, who get such great pleasure from the destruction.

After a typical eight hour shift, with a couple breaks and an hour long lunch, we traded out with the swing shift crew. Most of the crew went out to a multi-size bar for after work drinks. Sometimes I go to be sociable, but to be perfectly honest, I prefer a little me time after working a long shift serving the public. After getting home I eat dinner, watch a little TV, see if anything I did made the news, and, if I’m in the mood, port in some friendly little folks to have fun relaxing activities with, like the bath I told you about before.

Then it’s off to bed for some rest before another day of keeping the streets safe for adorable little tiny folks.