Prompt of the Week - Week 127 (Patreon)

TAGS: Author's Choice, Hyper Hotel (TM, Registered, Donut Steel), Unconventional Framework

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As he grabbed the mop and bucket from the closet nearest to the lobby, Mark made a mental note to install a rack with some towels next to it, precisely for situations like those.

Turning the key and opening the lock wasn’t difficult; the worst part was that he kept trailing a variety of bodily fluids whenever he had to use that closet, and while that was what the mop was meant for, he’d rather reduce the amount of work he had to do rather than add onto it. Besides, being covered head to toe in whatever the latest guest happened to have in excess wasn’t fun when it happened several times a day on a daily basis.

It was already bad enough that management refused to help pay for the hydrophobic treatment on his uniform, stating that it was an “extraneous, unnecessary addition” and that he should be happy they didn’t apply disciplinary punishment for him altering his work uniform in such a manner. For Mark, however, it was less a question of maintaining the sanctity of a set of attire, and more not wanting to feel like he’d just taken a dip in a vat of whatever every other hour.

Plus, it saved a lot of time on cleaning and drying bills, so it ended up being worth every penny after about a month or so. He just wished he didn’t need it in the first place, but alas, beggars and all; he was chosen to work the lobby precisely because management knew he could take it and still keep a smile, and not a day passed that Mark didn’t curse his almost pathologic need to keep the hotel’s customers happy even throughout the worst of indignities.

He couldn’t blame them though. While he himself wasn’t a hyper (in fact, as far from that), he was around them enough to know that, for the vast majority of cases, they just couldn’t help it; the best they could manage was preemptive containment, and even then that was asking too much of some of them, considering how productive they were. He had a few examples in his own family, and just the lengths they had to go to in order to keep their homes dry bordered on the terrifying.

He was lucky he hadn’t inherited any of those genes, though of course he ended up working at a hotel catering for hypers anyway, because why not? It seemed like he would be stuck with them regardless of where he went, so he might as well settle for a position that paid relatively well for the work that he was meant to do; he couldn’t complain about some very high five figures when all management asked was for him to be the receptionist.

Granted, there was a lot of janitorial work involved as well, but that was just an unfortunate necessity; couldn’t be an establishment for hypers if there weren’t regular spills. Milk, cum, sweat, some kind of combination of all three and others he didn’t even know, it was all par for the course; hence why he was grabbing the mop and bucket, grumbling all the while.

There never seemed to be a shortage of customers either. His boss, whenever they bothered to show up, often made passing comments on how there was “never an off-season” for a “service like theirs”. Worse yet was that Mark couldn’t really disagree with that; he’d been in his fair share of hotels before, even those that offered higher-priced packages for hypers, and none of them quite reached the level of the one he worked in.

The whole place was designed from the ground up to cater exclusively to clientele with the hyper gene, and while they didn’t refuse anyone with regular proportions, very few bothered to make reservations beyond the mere novelty value; either that, or they were working as a representative for someone so big that they required an assistant to handle their daily tasks.

Built in the outskirts of the capital, most of the grounds seemed to be innocuous parkland, meticulously curated and maintained by a team of gardeners and custodians working around the clock to maintain as much of a natural look as possible. The hotel’s external structure itself was designed to blend in with the surroundings, adopting an unnecessarily pre-Rennaissance look to sell the notion of being “palatial” to those who cared about such things.

Oddly enough, it was actually done quite well. Mark recalled hearing about this before applying to that job a couple of years prior, and feared driving up to a McMansion when he was asked to attend an in-person interview. Instead, he would describe the place as… “rustic”, but in a good sense, like the kind of historical inn one would find in a remote Alpine village, where the only recipes were the ones the owner had cooked up themselves.

It also helped that the building itself wasn’t even that large… on the outside, at least. Three stories total, with most of the space above ground being reserved for storage, staff quarters, and assorted rooms meant to host more formal gatherings or the occasional conference. In fact, if one were to count the total number of actual rooms that existed at or above ground floor, the place could hardly be said to deserve its (apparently) stellar reputation; that, however, was because the visible portions of the hotel were not meant for use by the customers themselves.

The original designer of the building and its associated substructure, the one who sold the idea off and vanished into the Caribbean to live a life of luxury, had realised that any establishment built exclusively for hypers could not be allowed to contend with gravity. The amount of space needed to maintain all the machinery required to cater to that sort of clientele, not to mention all the necessary amenities, would lead to such a gargantuan floorplan as to be wholly impossible. Considerations for logistics, construction permits, metal flexibility, and just plain safety would make vertical construction a nightmare; similarly, an horizontally sprawling complex wouldn’t be novel enough to be worth the investment… that, and there were plenty of hyper resorts in better places anyway.

No, if the establishment was going to set itself apart as something new and exciting, it had to be built in such a way as to be thoroughly revolutionary. Spreading out the facilities around a larger outdoor area was a tired concept; besides, it was far too simple for the man who envisioned the hotel, who wanted future customers to experience something unlike anything they’d seen before. The solution, as it turned out, was surprisingly simple… at least, in concept.

Vertical construction wasn’t an option, and a large outdoor resort was too boring to try and replicate, which left only one option: underground. Through an extensive process of trial and error, the original designer eventually came to create what would later become the basic floor plan for the hotel’s true facilities: a large, self-contained, below-ground mega-complex, capable of operating entirely independently of the outside world.

At its inception, the very concept seemed absurd. State-of-the-art geothermal generators would power this 200-room hotel, along with all associated facilities: from its very own hydroponic farms and meat production laboratories to provide for only the best food possible, to every form of entertainment under the sun scaled up to allow for hyper-sized customers, the entire facility was built to last even if everything else outside of it ceased to be. Just as long as the core of the planet remained even halfway hot, then the hotel would keep running.

And for the longest time, no one wanted to take the bait. It was ludicrous to think that it could be made, let alone operated; no one, that is, but the current owner of the hotel, a rich trust fund baby who just happened to occasionally throw around their money at ideas that somehow worked. It was the sort of luck that made others less jealous and more dumbfounded, constantly waiting for the first shoe to drop; yet, it never did.

Mark remembered the first time he was shown the underground section of the hotel, as well as the vast network of maintenance tunnels criss-crossing its entirety. Service elevators fit for multi-loan loads helped to keep the restaurant and bar area fully stocked, while freight lines carried the raw material from the automated manufacturing facilities, where produce was processed into proper cooking ingredients and high-class drinks. The fox could barely comprehend how any of it was supposed to work, only that it did… and that the whole place would take at least three days to fully explore, hence why it employed a crew of over two thousand.

In between the service and wait staff, the engineers and technicians keeping the machines running, and all the agricultural and chemical experts whose job was to ensure a steady supply of high-quality food for the guests, the operation was kept afloat purely because the cost of a single night’s stay made it inaccessible to close to ninety-nine percent of the population. In between renting out the above-ground rooms and the ludicrous prices paid by the actual guests though, it somehow remained afloat: its very own self-contained microcosm of excess.

And Mark found himself having to scrub the floor with a mop and a bucket.

It would’ve been hilarious if it weren’t such a pain in the neck to have to rinse milk, cum, and other assorted things from the carpeting. Hell, the carpet could’ve gotten hydrophobic treatment, but apparently that wasn’t in the original plan for the hotel (somehow), and it was paramount to “preserve the vision of the artist”, as if his boss really cared. So off he went, mopping up the latest spill of the day, putting on his best smile to whoever happened to be nearby.

He might complain (and indeed did, quite a bit), but it was still probably the best job he’d had… considering how much he was paid for it. Besides, despite all of their cliente being part of the upper one percent, they were all unfailingly polite; presumably, having to deal with bodies that required ludicrous amounts of maintenance had taught them the basics of humility, even if occasionally they forgot about how other people didn’t necessarily have to deal with the same issues.

Really, it was just how comfortable they all were that sometimes threw Mark for a loop. Outside of his work hours, he was just a regular person: he got up, he ate food, he went to the bathroom when necessary. He had hobbies, things he hated doing, a schedule for his groceries, and, on very rare occasions, a colourful friend he brought home whenever he felt like being alone would be a waste of his time. There was nothing extraordinary about him: he was one of billions.

So for him to go to work and see those people walk through the front door acting like they, too, were just as normal as he was, left him wondering if he was missing something. The smallest person he’d ever helped was at least three times his size and had tits bigger than his entire upper body; to think that they all just carried this weight as if it were nothing was… hard to process.

He put himself in their position, and just couldn’t think of any way he would be able to handle it. Just the thought of having to dedicate part of his day to being hooked up to a milking pump was enough to make him start questioning some very grounded assumptions he made about himself; to say nothing of some of the self-care routines the bigger customers had to undertake, routines that he was intimately acquainted with on account of having to write them down for the service staff down below.

For the fox, it was a constant struggle between his genuine attempts at understanding how it was that these people could act like their size wasn’t an issue, and having to stamp down a few certain thoughts that he knew were best left untouched. It would be unprofessional of him… not to mention silly, because that would never happen; genetic treatments were decades away from even getting remotely close to those sorts of shenanigans.

But he had very little else to think about during the day. What else was he meant to do, if not ponder over the daily lives of the people that helped get him a paycheck at the end of the month? He was being paid to perform the best possible service for them, and as such, it only made sense that he try his best to give the guests the most personalised service he could; that way, each and every one could feel as welcome as they deserved to be. At least, that was how Mark rationalised away his frequent daydreaming and the odd line of questioning that left his coworkers with raised eyebrows.

He couldn’t help himself though: it was just too intriguing not to spend time thinking about. What was it like to be so big that something as simple as a door stopped being simple? He’d seen the way the hotel was built below ground: the smallest, narrowest opening was still wide enough that he could have himself and at least two other clones standing side by side and they’d still be able to walk through it without difficulty. He’d seen the milking stations, and not just the rooms either; placed strategically throughout the hallways linking the various guest areas were wall-mounted apparati, designed for “emergency relief”, as the staff called it.

And while for him this was just part of the job, for their guests, this was how they lived their life on a day to day basis, and try as he might, Mark just couldn’t wrap his head around it. Maybe it was because he was working backwards: he was imagining himself as he was then, but transplanted into another, completely different body. He was picturing how he, Mark, the person that actually existed, with his own life history, would react if suddenly he had tits bigger than a car, or an ass fat enough to crush a locomotive if he sat down wrong.

He’d never considered what it would’ve been like to have just… always been like that. For most of his guests, their hyper genes kicked in during puberty; while not exactly the best time of their life for such sudden changes, it gave them some time to learn how to adjust during a period of greatest turmoil, and most came out of it with perfectly adaptive strategies. For them, it wasn’t something so out of the ordinary that they had to constantly be thinking about it; it was just what they were, who they were, and about as normal and ordinary as breathing in air.

Mark guessed he would never be able to truly understand it; the only way to do so would’ve been to have the hyper gene to begin with. The best he could do was find a best-case approximation and go from there, then try his best at extrapolating whatever he could. At the very least, it was enough to keep him from growing irritated and resentful of the guests whenever he had a few gallons of spunk dropped on him; the apologies were enough, but the understanding that it was often entirely out of their control helped Mark keep his head screwed on straight.

Still, it was… an experience. Years of working in that place had left an indelible mark in the fox’s mind, one that, even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to scrub off. Back when he had first started, he told himself this wouldn’t happen: it was just a job, he was just there to make a paycheck, and that was it. He wouldn’t go down any mental paths that were likely to cause ideas, he would just clock in, do the best he could, then clock out.

But it was hard. Not impossible, just… hard. He could’ve put some effort into it if he really wanted to, distanced himself from his job on an emotional level, kept it all boxed up somewhere the rest of his mind couldn’t reach. Alas, this just wasn’t part of his nature: Mark wanted to relate to the customers, wanted to try and be as friendly as he could, wanted to feel fulfilled and happy with what he did. And for that, he had to emotionally invest himself at least to some extent.

Was it a constant, low-grade annoyance to have to go and grab mops to clean up after spills in the lobby? Yes, and he knew it would never stop being so; no matter how many times he told people apologies weren’t needed, it wouldn’t get any easier to rinse the carpets. But was it worth sacrificing what and who he was just for the sake of making it slightly easier to forget about once he clocked out? Hardly.

Besides, him being invested meant that the customers were more likely to tip him, and given he got to keep all of his tips, he could rationalise this as an “objective motivation” for just wanting to be friendly towards people. Nevertheless, the thoughts were always there: the wondering, the questioning, the fantasizing, the odd moment of depersonalisation when his mind raced ahead of his body and someone had to tap him on the side of the head to knock him back to reality.

He could handle it though. For better or worse, if he couldn’t have it, then he could at least be surrounded by it, and while it definitely wasn’t the same… it helped. Plus, if he did well enough on the next performance review, he stood a good chance of being promoted again, this time to become personal service staff below ground; one of the proud few who were trusted with handling guests on a more individual, case-by-case basis.

And somehow, that felt enough.