It was the holiday season. Alyssa was flying home for Christmas. Thoughts of meeting her family had made her quite cheerful, even though the initial flight she had booked had been canceled for no perceivable reason. Thankfully, she had been reassigned to a new flight pretty quickly.
She arrived early at the gate, relieved to be reassigned at all. The terminal was crowded, humming with restless energy, families sprawled across chairs, children half-asleep on backpacks, holiday music drifting faintly from somewhere overhead.