Never having seen a dead body before, and not knowing the usual protocols for testing whether they actually were dead or not, Laila decided to take the safe option and find the longest piece of driftwood she could find on the otherwise pristine beach, crashed plane, (possible) dead body and her footprints notwithstanding, and proceeded to poke the body of the pilot from a respectable distance. Nothing happened, so she decided to poke the pilot several more times before the pilot sat bolt upright, causing Laila to shriek, drop the driftwood and try to run, only to trip in the sand and fall flat on her face. Her shriek of terror soon changed to a howl of pain as she landed on her arm.
"Oh, for god's sake!" The pilot groaned from somewhere behind Laila. "Why couldn't I have just died?"
A moment of silence passed as Laila rolled onto her back, clutching at her arm and failing to stop more tears from flowing. Tears of pain, this time, so she could at least justify that if there were paparazzi in the jungle, just waiting for the right picture and enjoying her suffering in the meantime. Then a shadow fell across her and she felt strong hands lifting her up.
"Stop struggling! I need to ... look! Stop slapping me!" The pilot swatted away Laila's flailing, still working, hand and gripped her head, turning it side-to-side. "You'll be alright. I just need to put your arm back in the ... I'll tell you one last time, stop hitting me! Hey, isn't that your ex-girlfriend?"
Laila couldn't help herself but look. If Boo-Baby was here, it meant two things: rescue and the possibility of a reconciliation in time for both their new albums, which would certainly spike sales and ... The pain made her scream and almost pass out as the pilot yanked at her damaged arm, but then the pain became little more than a dull throb, and her arm didn't look quite so weirdly out of place. And then the pilot had gone, lifting herself from the sand and walking right past Laila without even a hint of apology.
She tested the arm and though it wasn't going to stand up to a good session on stage, it certainly felt better than before. She flexed her fingers, glad that her microphone holding hand was fine but, on occasion, she did need the other hand while she blew kisses to her adoring fans. If nothing else told her she would get out of this mess, it was that. Her fans would never stop protesting until Laila got rescued and back on stage.
Now, however, she needed to get this pilot to do something and get them out of here. Or fix the radio. Or find the cockpit, and the radio, fix it and then get them out of here. The woman just needed someone to give her orders. Laila knew these kinds of people. They'd simply sit around doing nothing unless someone made them earn their pay. She forced herself to stand, turned, opened her mouth to start berating the pilot and found herself all alone on the beach, yet again. She closed her mouth and scowled.
The pilot was nowhere in sight. Laila turned, looking the other way in case the pilot had snuck away to laze around on the beach again, but she wasn't behind her. She turned in a circle, her frown deepening even more and causing her to wonder if she could find her skin cream in the wreck of the plane. Even moisturiser would do, what with the glare of this Sun beating down on them. And why was it so hot! Had the island never heard of clouds? A sudden thought hit her and she reached her good hand to her hair and almost wailed again. She needed an emergency brush, a mirror and some straighteners before everything became a disaster she could never fix.
"Hey! Pilot girl! Woman! Thing!" The pilot would know where her things were, if only Laila could find her. She took a step forward, the direction didn't matter. "Look, I demand you get back here and look after me!"
"Listen up, princess." The voice came from behind Laila, causing her to shriek again and pity her vocal chords. The pilot moved around, trying to grab her arm again. "I'm no 'thing' and if you refer to me as that again, I'll slap you. If you hit me again, I'll slap you and if you make demands again, I'll really get annoyed. Give me your arm. Give me your arm!"
Laila wasn't certain, but she got the impression that the pilot was not joking about slapping her. She had that look about her. Short hair, feathered across her forehead, too many piercings in her ears, which surely must be against some piloting regulations, and taller than Laila by a good few inches, which was already a strike against her before all the talk of slapping. And muscles, too? Why would a woman want muscles? Pressing against the sleeves of her white pilot's shirt. She should wear her jacket at all times to cover those bulging things up.
Reluctant, Laila allowed the pilot to lift her injured arm, bend it and place a blue sling over it for support, but the blue did not go with Laila's outfit at all and she almost said so until the pilot looked up and Laila saw her eyes. Brown eyes so dark they were almost black, with the longest eyelashes Laila had ever seen and that simply wasn't fair because everyone knew Laila had a fetish for dark eyes and long lashes. That wouldn't stop Laila from putting this woman in her rightful place as the hired help, not as a nanny.
"Once you've done that, pilot, I want you to find the cockpit and radio us out of here." She lifted her chin and nose, imposing her authority on the menial fastening the sling. "Then I need you to find my luggage. I have a pantsuit that will go better with this sand and my products bag. My fingers are already starting to pucker."
"Princess, for all I care, you can pucker off and find your own things. Do you see that?" The pilot pointed at the remains of the plane. "If that's here, and we're here, then the cockpit should be here. We were in the cockpit, remember? Besides, we need to find the others first. Well have a better chance of surviving if we're all together."
"Others?" Laila frowned again, then tried to stop frowning but that only made her frown more. Her skin would need a full therapy session when she got back.
"The others? Your PA? The flight attendants? Your manager?" The pilot looked at Laila with ever-widening eyes as she reeled off the people, but Laila couldn't see why. "They were in the plane with us! You don't even care, do you? Unbelievable!"
The pilot threw up her hands and turned away, heading back to the remaining section of the plane, muttering to herself in some weird language that Laila didn't understand, probably German, or Japanese, or something. For some reason, the pilot didn't seem to understand that the most important person stood right here. Laila could always get a new PA, and Genna didn't exactly go well with Laila's image anyway, what with the hair thing. And Toby, her manager? Well, little did he know but she'd been seeking out new representation. Toby had started to get greedy. She had no idea what flight attendants were.
"I'm sure they're around. Somewhere." Laila leaned over, trying to see why the pilot had clambered back into the rear half of the plane. "You just have to do your piloty things and get us home. That's all. Once I'm safe, they can come back for the others. Pilot? Pilot? Pilot!"
Several things came flying out from inside the wreck and Laila jumped back, even though those objects didn't come anywhere close to hitting her, but she preferred to remain careful. Curiosity, however, got the better of her and she continued to edge back to see what the pilot was actually doing. As a bag pinwheeled and tumbled through the air, before dropping to the sand and flopping a further foot or so onward, Laila opened her mouth once again.
"Let us get one thing straight, princess. I am not called 'pilot', yes?" The pilot dropped, once again, to the sand and started gesticulating with her hands, causing Laila to blink. "I have a name. I am not one of your vapid fans, or your sycophant employees. This? This was my plane. I owned it. I ran my own business and I am not, nor was I ever, your employee. The only reason I took this flight was because your manager offered me four times my charter fee, yes?"
"I only ..." The pilot's wagging finger swished in front of Laila's eyes several times.
"No, no, no. Thanks to you, I have no plane, my business is ruined and I'm stuck here. With you. My name is Maria Consuela Carballo, not 'Pilot', okay? And, before you ask, I am American." The finger swept outward and then back in to prod the pilot, Maria, in her chest as she leaned forward, eyes blazing. "My great-grandparents were American, my grandparents and my parents, okay? American! Don't you dare start that immigrant thing with me!"
"Why would I?" After that tirade, Laila's voice would sound quiet even if she hadn't spoken so low. "Am I supposed to think otherwise?"
It had never occurred to her. She saw that many different people while touring the world that all the different ethnicities really meant nothing to her. All the borders of countries only meant bureaucracy and, sometimes, bribes. What people looked like, where they were born, didn't even come into her way of thinking. She classed people in one of three groups. Fans, who were obviously the best and brightest. Not-fans, who were basically human, Laila supposed. Employees, who were passably acceptable because they were useful. Laila preferred her fans over everyone else.
"Yes. Well. I just thought we should get it out of the way." Maria coughed, breathing in, puffing out her chest and pulling up her pants before wiping a finger under her nose, using the movement to point Laila's way. "You look like the type that would say something like that."
"I'm a type?" Laila didn't want to be a 'type'! She was Laila! She created types! "Well, let me assure you that that sort of thing doesn't matter to me. Tell me, though, are you a fan?"
"Of you? Ha!" The laugh was a bit much. Especially as it went on for a while before Maria finally composed herself, shaking her head. "No. Not at all. Not that I think you are bad, or anything, I wouldn't really know, but it's not my kind of thing."
So, in the 'Not-fan' category, seeing as she firmly established she was not in the 'employee' category. Pity, but not everyone had good taste. Still chuckling to herself, Maria began to lift several packages from the back of the ruined plane and carrying them away, up the shore to drop in front of the tree line. She made several trips and never bothered to ask Laila for help, which was probably for the best, because she had only had her nails done the day before and ... she looked at her fingernails and almost wailed again. Ruined. Just like everything else on this tour.
As Maria carried something that looked like a parachute backpack over one shoulder and a tray of what looked like frozen meals to the growing pile, Laila picked up a neck cushion tossed onto the sand and struggled to keep up with the pilot, who had a name and was quite definitely American, apparently. Before she could say anything, Maria had already turned back to the plane, forcing Laila to choose between following and deciding where to put the neck cushion. She held on to it, just in case.
"Look, Maria, I'm sure you'll be surprised to know that I don't know what to do to get out of here, but I assume you had training for it? Do you need training to be a pilot? Probably. Anyway, the thing is that I'm sure this is something important, this moving things from one place to the other, but shouldn't you, you know, be trying to get us out of here?" In the now-churned up sand, Laila found herself almost tripping up several times trying to keep pace with the pilot. Then she had a flash of her usual brilliance. "Flares! I'm sure there are flares in there. Somewhere. That should catch someone's attention."
Maria stopped moving things for what seemed like the sake of moving things and leaned an elbow against the plane, looking at Laila as though she looked at the single most stupid animal in the world, making short shakes of the head. She waved a finger in the vague direction of the sea.
"Go ahead. Flares are in the flight attendants' cupboards. Fire up those flares." She hooked a thumb to the back of the section of plane and Laila leaned over to look. "But it won't work."
"Why? I'm pretty certain I've seen it on tv, or a movie, or on social media. Somewhere." Laila mimed firing off a flare. "Pop! Flare goes in the sky, people find them. Easy."
"Princess, there's no-one out there to find us. No-one. This? This is a tropical island, yes? Land of some kind, yes?" Maria lifted a box of bottled water from the back, thought about it and handed Laila a bottle. "When my plane went down, thanks to you thinking you knew better than the FAA, we were a thousand miles from the nearest land. There was no island we could have crashed on. I don't know where we are, but we're nowhere near people. So, until we find fresh water, just take sips of that."
Maria's finger tapped the plastic bottle in Laila's hand and carried on moving things from the ruined plane to the growing pile of supplies alongside the trees, leaving Laila to ponder what the pilot had said. A thousand miles from anywhere? No land. No islands. Nowhere near people? It was certainly something to think about, and reject.
The woman was obviously an idiot. People were everywhere.