There was a common misconception regarding astronauts.

People assume they are trained to deal with every potential situation that could arise on a spacecraft.

It was, admittedly, not an assumption made without merit. After all, they were among some of the best and brightest people the world had to offer, and their training was as extensive as one would expect. It covered everything from basic repair and maintenance, to procedures should things start to go catastrophically or fatally wrong for them. Yes, the training was an extensive, time consuming process.

It just didn’t include what to do if an arcainine half the size of the planet started batting at the station.

It had actually taken the first of the crew a solid minute to comprehend what he was seeing actually was real. Then another half-minute to realize he needed to alert the others and figure out what they were going to do about it.

However, as more and more of the crew were finally brought up to speed, it rapidly became clear that no one really had any idea what they could do. The thing dwarfed entire continents, and -- while the station hadn’t been damaged -- none of them were willing to try and move it and risk crashing into one of those impossibly massive paws.

Then, while someone started to rattle off a complex plan involving the supply of dehydrated food and some experiments from the lab, the final crew member (one who had only entered the program a few months before launch), floated over to the window with a smile and a shake of the head.

“Now, Katie; you know you’re not supposed to do that while I’m working up here.”

She actually waggled her finger at the massive creature, and spoke like it could here her. And, even more shockingly, it seemed to do just that! Its enormous ears drooped, and its expression turned plaintive; half the crew swore they heard it whimper.

“Don’t give me that look, we had an agreement, remember. I’m sorry I forgot to call and leave a message for you, but I’m allowed a few skip days on that. You can’t upsize every time I don’t call.”

The arcanine whimpered again, turning up its puppydog expression, until the woman speaking to it sighed again. “Okay, you can stay that size for half an hour, but only that long, or I don’t buy you those treats you like.”

This time, everyone heard the thing’s happy bark as it’s titanic tail thrashed about, covering another portion of the planet in floof.

It wasn’t until they contacted mission control for the debriefing afterward that they got the whole story from the woman.

‘Katie’, the arcanine, was a stray she had picked up some years ago, with a very odd ability:to grow or shrink at will. Katie usually kept it under fifty feet, but they had yet to find an upper limit, especially after this. The woman was supposed to call and leave a message every night so the arcanine could hear her voice. But, in the excitement of her latest experiment, she had forgotten to make the call, and Katie had panicked.

The area she’d grown in had been mostly uninhabited, and even then, Katie’s fur was so soft it was hard for her to damage things even at sizes like that. While certainly shocking, her growth hadn’t done any harm.

Well, save for the station crew getting a new landscape to look at until Katie’s owner went home, but there wasn’t much to be done about that part.

Not like it was a bad view, after all.

:Writeup by   NMR

A nice big Arcanine's pawing at the satellites.   NMR kindly wrote up his interpretation of the picture on in this one, so I decided to include that above.