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Nobody ever thinks about the people who make stuff happen. Or in this chapter, the ones who keep it all going. 0_o
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Hungary, mid-afternoon
They were on the ground, inside the huge cellars under the abbey. It was where Abi's craft sat whenever it wasn't in use here. It was where a lot of the maintenance happened.
Ouna stood near the end of a long passageway deep inside, waiting for the ground power to be connected and turned on. Not needing a whole lot of light ordinarily, she stood staring at banks of servo controllers, trying to guess which of them had failed just by looking.
One of the horizontal stabilizer sections had been fluttering. It wouldn't have been a problem in some of the atmospheres where they flew. But it had failed in the sky over the Pacific Ocean. Earth's upper atmosphere was no place for control surface flutter. Then it had just locked up and stopped responding.
She needed power to test and put the likely culprit through it's diagnostic routines.
With no power, everything was dark and there was no way to tell which was what other than by looking at their dark shapes. Ouna gave up the game then and leaned back from the racks to wait for some light and power. Both came on a moment later.
"THAT'S IT!" she bellowed back along the corridor so that her best friend would know - in case she didn't - that she'd turned on the right things.
Ouna sighed and she leaned in again, looking for the controller on the right side of things craftwise, and she tried to find the first bank. After the failure had been noticed, the pilot had switched to the first-level back-up and they'd finished the flight on that. The failure report had been made out and now Ouna and Pob were here with a job to do.
Since their regular pilot was now off on an assignment to train another pilot, it had been the demonlord himself who had experienced the failure.
It put just a bit more urgency to things.
The little indicators on all of the devices in what seemed like the miles of racks twinkled brightly to her wherever she looked. There still wasn't quite enough light here for her to see the identifier markings clearly, since they were in a bit of an overhang below the cable trays above, so she placed her hooves a bit apart and leaned the top half of her tall body forward after seeing safe places for her large hands. The posture was a bit strange, but she could see better now.
She just had to be mindful of her horns.
Ouna had started out as a trooper and she was built for that role, but she'd never liked the job very much. Too much dead time waiting to be called and drilling and practicing, weeks and weeks of it. She'd switched to tecking after a lot of training and loved it, though her muscular build could be a problem sometimes. She was a rather big girl in this not-so-big-world back here and she was oftentimes faced with the problem of having to get into the tighter, smaller places.
She glanced down, remembering her breasts this time and she made sure not to lean in any further. The control power here wasn't too bad and would only sting if it bit you, but some of the output signals, ...
Whoa...
There was an almost-silent flutter in the air at the other end of the corridor as the other tech demon banked in her flight and sailed around the corner.
Pob was a very bright and also very skilled higher order imp, and as such, she was quite the opposite of Ouna in a lot of ways. Her name was actually 'Pobsha', but if she liked you, liked the look of you, liked the idea of liking the look of you - or if you just told her that you liked her little ass, then you were in the 'Pob' club, because she didn't like the longer form of her name anyway.
Both of them were very intelligent, Ouna being given to logical troubleshooting procedures; step by step and by the book, whereas Pob was much more intuitive and she sometimes seemed hasty to Ouna.
By contrast, Ouna sometimes seemed plodding and slow to the imp, but they were best friends who loved to watch old Hollywood movies together. Old movies were about the only notable artistic achievements that the human race had ever done of any significance at all in their combined opinion. It influenced the way that they spoke to each other, each one trying to fit a cinematic reference in where she could. Pob could do a really good impersonation of a young Shirley Temple. Most times, it sounded absurd, but that was half the fun.
The big girl had long, straight, dark brown hair which she kept tied back only when she was working, and while she could look as though she could be ... well, formidable in a bar fight – and she was on occasion, she was normally a little reserved and rather friendly, a large and well-built ex-soldier demon with long, lovely hair.
Pob was flighty – in everything, not only flying. Her wild and wavy, never-completely-tamed black hair even reflected that tendency in her, getting in the way and hiding her small breasts when it wasn't hiding her pale little ass. She flew almost everywhere when they were here on the ground with no one on board since there was less chance of sailing into somebody's face. Besides, it saves a lot of steps for an imp.
She had the sort of face which just spoke of what she was, though on her particularly, the wide face was required to hold her huge wasp-like eyes and it tapered down to a small point of a chin. She could be snide and almost brassy sometimes, but the truth was that she was always a little afraid of being stepped on if she walked very far, so she was a little quick to make her presence known with an often saucy remark. She only came up to Ouna's hip if she stood on her clawed toes.
Ouna had wings too, though they were almost always kept hidden since there was seldom the space to open them even a little. She walked everywhere, often with Pob on her wide shoulders if the passageway was crowded.
If the imp was walking and somebody knocked her down, they'd often feel themselves being lifted straight up and having nowhere else to look but into the cold glare of Ouna's eyes as she stood holding them up with her other hand drawn back into a fist until the apology was spoken – and it had better not be long in coming, either.
Ouna never made much of Pob's diminutive size, but she looked out for her without a word being said.
Pob looked ahead and saw Ouna. The way that the statuesque beast looked to her like that, bent forward with her majestic dark ass displayed so wonderfully and the way that those long legs were spread like that, ... well, it was asking a lot of her to keep her thoughts out of the gutter.
But then, the act of breathing was often asking a lot to keep her thoughts out of the gutter as well. She landed and stared. After a moment, she thought back to when they'd begun.
They'd laughed and joked about it together ever since it had happened, but besides being worlds apart body-wise, they admitted to each other that they were the strangest pair of lesbians that there just had to be anywhere. Both of them had always been straight, without ever having a single thought of being anything but. Well almost, anyway. Down deep, they'd had a few thoughts, but then, doesn't everyone at some point?
But one of the downsides to being a tech type was that you were here when nobody else was. The job could have absolutely shitty hours if something major was wrong, and nobody gave you a thought unless things had gone down the drain and they needed you. Even then, they only hoped that you wouldn't be too long in getting things fixed. Then they forgot about you again.
So they'd been straight, supremely bored, and above all, very sexually frustrated. One night when the craft sat stood down in the cellars and they were alone on it, Ouna had brought a little contraband booze on board and since they'd been told that for certain, they wouldn't be needed for at least a day; the two friends had gotten a little snockered together in their shared cabin.
The subject came up and after a lot of grumbling and whining to each other as they compared notes over how long it had been for either of them, they found themselves almost in tears from their frustration as they admitted the facts to each other. They were stuck in a demonic existence which was populated by many demonic males who lived on a different timeclock and anyway, they hadn't seen even one with a brain worth speaking to.
To girls as bright as they were, they would have liked to find one who was just a little smarter than the rest, though they agreed that they wouldn't quibble and they'd take what they could get if they really had to. But their jobs kept them on or near the craft most often. And most often, it was on the ground somewhere and deserted.
With neither of them having the even the slightest prospect of a half-decent fuck on their horizons, things just looked bleak.
Pob had made the bitter joke that they were so horny and so unlike each other, that they might as well become lovers, just to see where it went. "You never know, we might accidently do something right."
After the laughter, Ouna leaned forward and laid down a gold piece, challenging her friend to put her money where her mouth was and kiss her, if she was that needy.
Pob had taken another pull on the bottle, belched, fished a coin out of her hair from behind her pointed ear, and told the large female that she was on.
That led to three minutes of silent staring between them.
"I'm gonna pick up your coin if you don't do something soon," Ouna warned, "and good luck trying to get it back."
"Yeah, well gimme a second, ok?" Pob grumbled, "Kissing something like YOU takes a bit of thought first."
"Why? 'Cause you think I'm ugly?" Ouna chuckled, "You should have thought of that before you opened your little yap."
"No," the imp replied with a deadpan expression, "If you hiccup in the middle of it, I'll be trapped until you drop your next load in the shitter. I don't want to risk losing a friend over this. I'm choosing my moment, alright?"
Ouna laughed her ass off and told her that she was just chicken.
But Pob shook her head, "It's not that at all if you want the truth. I always call you 'horseface', but I never mean it. To me, you're more like Black Beauty, but you're a girl. I happen to think you're lovely. I always have, Ouna. But I was thinking that if this stays a joke, then I'll feel even worse. I've got this notion that you and I are each other's last chance. That's why I said what I did. So hold the phone, ok?"
