This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at
More Odds than Ends is from AC Young:
The landing spaces are too small for my pegasus.It suggested a light, whimsical story. With the extra word prompt of ROBOT and the image prompt of a bunch of space-suited figures looking up at UFO's, I decided to go for a setting reminiscent of
The Jetsons.
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Pegasus Landing
It was just another ordinary day for Robo-Rita TS257-F. At 6AM she undocked from her charging station, collected her data package with her prescribed route and updates on parking regulations throughout Intellidyne City, and headed out.
The first three hours of her shift went smoothly. Most private vehicles had enough onboard intelligence to know when they were being directed to put down in a place where they could not legally park, and would move accordingly. Thus the bulk of her work was dealing with the multitude of dockless rental bikes, scooters and hoverboards that got left at inappropriate places when their users were finished with them.
Already she'd tagged a bike, three scooters and a dozen hoverboards that had been left in front of emergency exits or in fire lanes. Although renters were getting better about leaving their rentals in appropriate places, some still acted like it was the old days when they could abandon their rides wherever with impunity.
There had been a huge fight a few years ago between the City management and the companies that operated those rentals. The City wanted rental information so they could go after the renters who'd violated parking regulations, and the companies howled about privacy – so the City levied the fines on the companies and told them to sort things out with their customers.
Her pathway took her up to the rooftop flitter landing spaces. Flitter licensing was stringent enough that most pilots wouldn't dare risk a citation. But you always had a few who couldn't be bothered, usually the scions of the wealthy and powerful, for whom a fine was effectively a fee for doing as they pleased.
As she emerged, she was astonished to see a most highly improbable event. If her visual processing module wasn't glitching on her, that was a a winged horse, with someone riding on it.
The flying horse backwinged and put down in one of the flitter spaces, its flight feathers brushing against the flitters parked on either side. It snorted in disgust as it folded its wings, and its rider dismounted.
Although at a distance he looked human enough, Robo-Rita could now see how his ears rose to delicate points, how his figure was a bit more gracile than a human's. An elven prince straight out of one or another fantasy novel, somehow come to life?
“I must protest.” His voice was ringing, musical, at once both beautiful and inhuman, straining the ability of a robot's microphone to fully apprehend it. “The landing spaces are too small for my pegasus to put down properly.”
“They are designed for a standard personal flitter.” The speaker behind Robo-Rita's mouth grille carefully modulated her voice to sound deferential without crossing the line to servility. “If you wish to lodge a complaint, you may do so at the Office of Public Parking, Level 22, Seventh Diagonal.”
The elven prince blinked, took a closer look at Robo-Rita. “What is this place? How far is it from Eorallyon?”
“This is Intellidyne City. I have no location reference for Eorallyon.”
The elven prince's expression went from haughty annoyance to alarm. His stride was not quite a run, but he wasted no time getting back to his steed and into the saddle. “Aloft, Coriyon. We had best be away from this place.”
Somehow the flying horse managed the initial downstrokes to take off without striking the flitters on either side of him. As swiftly as he'd come, he was gone, leaving only a pile of brownish lumps as proof that he had been real, and not a glitch of her optical and auditory processing systems.
Nothing to do but put in a call for a litter removal robot to clean up the mess. It was unlikely their elven prince would be back, so a ticket for littering would be unfeasable.
Right now, she had other work to do.
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As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.