Summary: A young man sets out to become a superhero. Only problem is, he has no powers. But after a run in with a size-reducing villainess and a controversial, 'celebrity' Superheroine, he may still have a shot -- being someone else's 'subhero' sidekick.
Categories: Adventure,
Entrapment,
Feet,
Footwear,
Growing/Shrinking Out of Clothes,
Humiliation,
Insertion,
Instant Size Change Characters: None
Growth: None
Shrink: Doll (12 in. to 6 in.)
Size Roles: F/m
Warnings: Following story may contain inappropriate material for certain audiences
Challenges: None
Series: None
Chapters: 9
Completed: No
Word count: 32254
Read: 20590
Published: May 22 2022
Updated: July 31 2022
1. Chapter 1: Exam Night by Zerda
2. Chapter 2: Trick Question by Zerda
3. Chapter 3: Visit from Venus by Zerda
4. Chapter 4: The Detective and his Beautiful Daughter by Zerda
5. Chapter 5: Night Watch by Zerda
6. Chapter 6: Samira Rockwell by Zerda
7. Chapter 7: Feeding time by Zerda
8. Chapter 8: The Billionaire's Birthday by Zerda
9. Chapter 9: by Zerda
Chapter 1: Exam Night by Zerda
Author's Notes:
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
She was
different. It didn't matter a single iota what I was; it didn’t matter to her.
If you
passed a Super on the street, you'd never know. They look like us.
One people, One power...
I had to
admit, it had a nice ring. It’s an idea that made me take the leap and apply,
after months of agonizing uncertainty, and imposter syndrome.
We were the
same.
The Paragon
Academy believed so, too; they had a special intake stream for people like me –
‘category Z’. Sure, the stats were dire for Z’s; over 86% failed to graduate,
and of those, 93% did not survive the first year post-graduation. But her
effusive mantra kept sounding in my head as I read through the intake
application forms. And then, again, when I finally received my acceptance
letter.
“ONE PEOPLE! ONE POWER!”
She had
hovered onto the grounds of the packed Hammerhead City stadium and declared
this mantra to an additional home-viewing audience. Her diaphragm was so strong
she did not need a microphone. I was watching on the TV, swearing she was looking
down into my eyes, saying it directly to me, including me in her gated-off
world. Then the moment broke as she did some mid-air aerodynamic twirls and
spins -- like a gymnast on an invisible rope – which the social media
commentators dubbed ‘space flipping’, and the stadium broke into cheering. Snapping
the hypnotic hold she had over the stadium, she accelerated into the sky so
fast it was like she’d been sucked up by an alien tractor beam moving in fast
forward – but faster. And of course, there was the signature departure sound, a
sharp spurt like a bottlerocket. The internet called it the ‘shuf!’ (like
‘shook’, not ‘shut’) and it spawned memes, which she at first said was ‘cute’
and later confessed irritated her, on a talk show:
“I’m still mystified that shuf! got the
traction it did – I love those old retro comic text bubbles as much as anybody
-- but for a little while it defined me and definitely had me questioning
myself when I got up in the morning, my vocational choice, whether people were
making fun of me, and brought on this deep, searching kind of identity crisis.
Shuf! was on memes and t-shirts and everywhere but I realize now, I am not shuf!
I am so much more than shuf!
At the Hammerhead
City stadium, ‘shuf!’ caused a sonic boom, sending the TV broadcast to a
ringing test pattern for ten minutes.
***
Outside,
the sun hadn’t yet risen. My breath came out in a mist. Good thing I had
grabbed a padded jacket last minute before leaving the house; I was wearing my
Paragon-issue jumpsuit underneath, and it did little to shield the cold. These
things were designed to vent body heat during physical exertion – glorified gym
clothes – not get you through a cold winter.
A black
Chevy rolled up and stopped in the driveway of the house next door, and an
older man got out, with a dark crew cut. He’d moved here about a week ago. He
was physically fit and I wondered if he was maybe a PE teacher or something.
This time
he actually spoke to me:
“You live
by yourself, Steve?”
He walked
up to the dividing fence and leant an arm across it.
I wondered
how he knew my name.
“Just me,”
I nodded. “I haven’t been here that long, either, about a month.”
“I thought
so. The neighbors didn’t seem to know who was living here.” He smiled. “I never
caught you, but I knew there had to be someone because earlier this week those
gadgets mysteriously appeared on your roof.”
He motioned
up at my rooftop, where an array of outlandish aerials and satellites were set
up. And what I used them for was even more outlandish.
When I
didn’t say anything, he speculated:
“You must
be able to pick up secret broadcasts from North Korea on those things. Unless
you’re trying to talk to aliens.”
I always
affected a projection of confidence when I talked about dangerous or sensitive
subjects. Deflect suspicion with bravado or a joke. The problem was I relied on
this strategy so much I was starting to create a very not-me alter ego. I answered non-committedly:
“Possibly one
of those, yeah. But which one? Am I paranoid or am I crazy?”
“Well, kid,
you tell me.”
He offered
his hand over the fence, and I shook it. His name was Brandon Vega, and he was
a forensic detective, a CSI cop. I wouldn’t have guessed, he didn’t seem like a
cop. He seemed surprisingly patient and soft-spoken, and quick to smile. A real
life Friendly Neighborhood Cop.
“This ended
up in our mailbox by mistake,” he said, voice strangely hushed as if shy, as he
handed me a letter. “It’s addressed to you.”
I did a
double take. The letter was addressed to ‘Master Occupant’ and was indeed my
address, and, alarmingly, had the Paragon seal. If Brandon was a detective, he
would have known what it was.
“What a
puzzle. I have to check with the post office. Looks like a mistake.” I stuffed
it in my pocket.
Brandon
just smiled, shrugging it off, but his eyes were very intelligent ad scrutinizing.
It was obvious he didn’t believe this, and I immediately felt ashamed for
trying to dupe him with such a dumb lie.
“Look, it’s
the crack of dawn and I just got off my shift,” he said, mercifully dropping
the subject, “and you look like you’re going somewhere, so we’re all out of sync.
But if you’re free sometime, we have to get you on in for a meal – what do you
drink?”
I imagined
sitting around his dining table with him, probably his wife, as I tried to keep
the conversation dancing around and around the Paragon thing, which he now
knew, and I knew – and his wife probably knew – and it would be just another
shameful dupe to pretend I didn’t know anything about it, while struggling to
refuse beer or anything that would make me talk more freely.
“Water,” I
said.
“So, you’d
probably find us too boring,” he said ironically. He looked at me like he was
reading my mind, in fact I sensed he knew more about me than I knew about him.
And that wasn’t so far-fetched; he was a detective.
“Well, you
know I talk to aliens,” I said quickly, “so you basically know all about me.
I’m pretty boring myself, to be honest.”
“We’re
boring too, so we all get along. You’ll be okay for dinner,” he reassured me. “And
then there’s just my daughter,” he looked me up and down, “she’s about your age.”
Daughter? I thought. But I already had a girl in my
life, and I didn’t want to do a thing to jeopardize it.
He carried
on:
“It’s just
a seat at the table, you don’t have to spill your guts. We’re not big talkers,
either. Well, my daughter can be quite outspoken if she likes someone.”
“Okay,” I said,
now stuck in my false projection and doubling down, forcing enthusiasm to
breaking point. “Let’s do it!”
Pleased, he
headed back to his front door.
“Catch you
another time, Steve. And if you want to bring something, don’t. Just bring
yourself.”
He waved a
goodbye salute and shut the front door behind him.
*
The theme
park was lit up against the red evening sky. Show crowds bustled under the neon
signs; all the Natural kids enjoying their end of school year, high-fiving that
final exams were done.
And we
happened to have just started ours. We were about to step in and put our pens
to the paper.
I parked
the Academy-hire car on the other side of a line of carny vans, close to the
exit. Before switching off the ignition,
I checked the fuel gauge. The car was gassed up in case we needed to flee. I
turned to my associate, Summer.
She was a
studious, even brooding blonde with brown eyes, and was a ballerina from age
five, going on to win multiple Ballet competitions, until finally being
disqualified from an adult show when the judges discovered her arabesque
allongé had no anatomical limit. A family doctor certified that she was a
Super; a super-contortionist, she could stretch and twist her body like rubber.
She was a Flexer.
The Academy
stuck us together as assignment partners, and we immediately clicked, being
both high achievers and power-shy. I loved her policy of secrecy and that she
had never, ever asked me what my power was. Purely businesslike, she assumed
that when the time came, my power would manifest naturally for the correct job.
We weren’t show-offs.
Now, we sat
in the car, taking a couple of minutes to collect and prepare ourselves. The
radio was jabbering: commentators offering their views on snippets of a speech
delivered at the UN by a visiting Miss Venus.
Summer
listened and then all of a sudden spluttered with laughter.
“What?” I
said.
“Oh,” she
sighed disdainfully, “those little microphone crackling noises you hear before
the speech are the stilettos. The UN,” she repeated dubiously. “The shockwaves
from her stilettos as she walked across the hall. Of the UN Assembly.” She said with mock grandiosity: “Could you
imagine? Our newest Ambassador elect: Captain ‘choice footwear’.” Her voice got
low and disinterested, “She dropped in from some arts and fashion festival.”
“Her glutes
and quads would be made of steel to make those stiletto landings,” I pointed
out, trying to appeal to Summer’s hobby, and added, “You have to admit, it’s
very graceful.”
She
countered a little testily:
“You don’t want
steel pylons for a graceful landing. Steel can’t deform under pressure.”
I conceded:
“Okay, so you
don’t follow her on Twitter.”
She gave a
small sigh.
“She has
this grand vision of ideal society where the rules are inverted. It’s called
post-feminism and means trashy equals chic. I don’t follow that.”
Summer came
from at least four generations of hardline, no-nonsense, drab-costumed,
strictly utilitarian, ‘power-on-only-when-necessary’ Supers, and the new wave
of post-Millennial showiness and increasingly skin-baring costumes seemed to
quietly rub her the wrong way.
“She knows
what she’s doing,” I suggested. “It’s clever. She’s so good at what she does, she can afford to wear a mini-skirt for a
costume and not take herself seriously. It’s a calculating move to trick the
adversary into underestimating her.”
She shot
back:
“You mean
she’s good at what she does? She’s
the bouncy, cringey commercial break before the arrival of our next great
Super.”
I winced
inwardly and looked for a distraction. Luckily, the theme park provided many.
“Go time,”
I exclaimed, unclipping my seatbelt. “Power ready!”
It was our
last assignment before graduation, upon which our final grade hinged. I was
practically trembling with excitement. I couldn’t help myself. The goofy,
cavalier alter ego didn’t need compelling; it was coming out on its own from
the excitement.
Summer on
the other hand had nerves of steel (though her nerves were, literally, more
like rubber) and merely scoffed.
“Leave the
catchphrases until we get our grades. If we receive the top grade – as I
anticipate we will – I will personally come up with a catchphrase for us. And you can figure out the cheer dance
routine.”
“’Us’,” I repeated, catching her eye askance.
“Are you possibly suggesting that after we graduate,” I swallowed, trying to
sound casual and cool, like my ultimate Hero idol, Superblazar, “you want to
team-up?”
“Let’s see
you in action tonight, cadet,” she was being tongue-in-cheek since she too was
only a cadet. “And then, if you impress, maybe there is a future for us working
together. Wait until I make Captaincy,” she added coyly, “…and then hand in
your application as my honorary sidekick.”
I
remembered our mid-year exam, where I’d tried dismally to karate chop a gun, failed
to disarm the actor-playing-bad-guy and almost got a dummy round blasted at my
chest, when Summer – my exam partner – Inflated her body like a shield to catch
the round (rubberizing herself made her almost invulnerable), saving the exam,
and then shot me a very serious look that said ‘Why the hell didn’t you power-on?'
Back then,
the incident felt very sour. But now, on reflection, it made me feel pride that
she was my partner. Her response had been so fast, so reflexive, that maybe she
wasn’t just trying to salvage our exam score…maybe she genuinely felt something
for me, and was keen to save my skin or my feelings. She didn’t have to catch the bullet.
I replied:
“Honorary
sidekick…” I repeated slowly, feeling for the sound of the phrase. “So, Captain
Sagittarius and Cadet Rockwell.”
“Summer,”
she said smartly and nodded at me, “Steve.” She pushed open the door. “Come on.
Time lengthens…”
We got out
of the car, both wearing our ordinary ‘civilian’ clothes. We wouldn’t get our
official Superhero costumes until the grad ceremony. I’d had my measurements
done and my costume was finished and waited impressively in the Academy
showroom. I had designed it myself.
This was
the first part of the test; get in fast. In a real life crisis, hostage lives
were on the line. If we bought a ticket and waited in line we would have failed
the exam.
Around the
side, we stopped at an unmonitored barred fence away from the crowds, hidden around
some tall bushes and below the metal scaffolding of the great serpentine ‘Booster’
gold rollercoaster. As fluid as water, Summer went thin through the bars, and
twisting elegantly to reappear, reformed on the other side of the fence.
“While the
sun is still up, Steve,” she said.
My brain
was going a mile a minute. If the fence wasn’t barred I could probably have
taken a running leap and ‘parkored’ up, but if I tried that here, my hands and
feet were going to slip through the gaps.
“I know, ‘specialist’ power,” she drawled,
reciting the excuse I’d given her so many times before. “I’d love a
demonstration before graduation. The suspense is killing me. Literally, killing
me.”
She was
usually gentle, and kind of shy, but she was so grade-driven that exam settings
turned her into a different person. But this was our last exam, then we could
relax again.
The Booster
rollercoaster clanked and hissed above, rounding with a chorus of screams.
Below,
Summer’s legs stretched until her head appeared over the fence, while her arms
‘spaghettified’, arcing over the fence and coiling tight around my chest in a
bear hug. My cheeks went hot, and not merely from having the air squeezed out
of my lungs. I grabbed her arms for stability an instant before she gave a
powerful, elastic full-body jerk to vault me at the fencetop. The top bar
struck my abdomen, stopping me half over. Gasping, I pulled myself over and fell
onto the ground.
Meanwhile,
she was already hurrying into the park.
“Up and at
‘em!” she called back, giggling with nervous anticipation. The bubbliness was
an act; she was trying to fit with the crowd. It was also really cute, unusual
for her, and made my heart go faster.
I jumped to
my feet and scraped the dirt off my hands. My hands were red and stung; she’d
given me rubber burn.
Past the
wheeling arms of the red ‘Tornado’ pendulum ride, there was a painted warehouse
into a ride that was closed for maintenance. It used to house the purple
‘Phantom train’ ride, but the ride had been dissembled now, most of the ride
parts and machinery hauled off site. Now the entry was roped off and a sign
said:
Testing Zone 4A
Premises closed while testing in session:
X15SS; Z68SR
Those codes
were our Paragon Academy student usernames.
“Summer, stop!”
I called her. She doubled back, saw the board, and grinned.
“Nice find,
Rockwell!” she said genially, clapping me on the shoulder.
I glowed.
We rushed
past the testing sign, and a standing placard that said: You must be this tall to ride, before reaching the warehouse’s
double doors, which was padlocked.
Summer cast
a quick look around – the throngs of people moved briskly past us as we stood
in the warehouse’s shadow – and in the time it took to blink, Summer stretched
one finger very thin and picked the lock.
We cracked
the door open and went into the building, where big ride props and machine
parts stood in shadow.
“I think my
back-up’s arrived,” a man was saying into a walkie-talkie. He was wearing a park
maintenance outfit. “Uh, something weird is –” He came out of the dark and got
a look at us. “Hey! You’re not allowed in here!”
One of
Summer’s arms had already begun snaking around behind him. Lucky it was dark,
her arm could flatten and trace the shadows. Her forearm lifted and made a sudden
snapping motion, like an elastic band being released, which brought her fist
into the back of his head. He made a small groan and crumpled forward onto the ground.
“Hey, not
good!” I said, trying not to panic already. “How do you know he was a bad guy? He
might be park staff! He might be a hostage sent as a messenger!”
Summer
swept a hand impatiently over her brow, as if to neaten up her hair.
“Steve,”
she tutted, “stop overthinking this. They’re not trying to slip us up. He’s a
bad guy,” she nudged his shoulder with a foot. “This whole building is exam
zone. They’re all actors.”
She
beckoned me ahead.
“He came
from that way. Come on!”
We passed
the shelved ride parts and equipment to another locked door. A couple of voices
murmured on the other side, a man and a woman. They must have been the actors
playing the criminals we were supposed to take down, and probably guarding the
actors playing hostages.
Summer
turned her back against the door and stared at me.
“Last exam
question, Rockwell: who handles the bust, and who pulls off the rescue?”
We’d talked
about this earlier: one of us would go in and power-on create a distraction,
give a signal command, and the other would follow, to confuse the bad guys.
I did
everything possible to keep my voice assertive and level:
“I can go
in.”
Literally,
I could go in, but I would probably
run into a bad guy with a dummy gun stationed across the other side of the room,
and I had nothing up against that. It wouldn’t kill me but it would be
humiliating as hell to drop before saving even one hostage.
Summer’s
lips pressed together, seeing something in my expression. She was so
businesslike and level-headed it was intimidating, but I felt another rush of
gratitude she was my partner, even if she played loose with the rules
sometimes, she always owned her decisions, and never panicked.
She was
already picking the lock.
“No, I’ll go,” she said. “You take too long
to do a perimeter sweep. It’s a criminal head count, not a rote memorization
test. I know you want to check all the boxes by the book, but you have to learn
to move first and then stop and think later.”
“We’ve got
to move exactly according to plan,” I countered, “otherwise we’re going to
surprise each other.”
“Try to be
more flexible, Steve. Learn to improvise.
Come in after me and we’ll finesse the plan as we go. And don’t be afraid to
get power-happy, there’s no use-penalty in the grading criteria. Let’s start a
small riot.”
She went to
open the door.
My chest
went tight. Desperate, I let out:
“Summer, wait…I
don’t have one.”
She
blinked.
“You don’t
have a plan?”
“Power,” I
said quietly. “No power. I don’t have one.”
Outside, the
rollercoaster car clicked and rattled down the track, riders screaming. We both
tensed, and relaxed again once it passed. Or, she relaxed. My tension didn’t lift.
She
pronounced very slowly:
“Oh, you’re a Natural,” and looked at me as if she’d never met me before. “Hmmm,”
she said under her breath. There was no heightened emotion in her voice, which
was usual for her, but now it seemed oddly lacking. “I guess…that makes sense.
I wondered why you kept going over the case studies so many times, like you’re
terrified of making the tiniest mistake.” But she still looked puzzled as her
eyes scanned my face. Her brows pinched above icy blue eyes. “How did you even
get into the cadetship program?”
“I went
through the category Z stream,” I said, stomach twisting into knots.
I had never
planned to tell her I was a Natural, and now it just came out in panic like
sand pouring out of a split sack. But if I hadn’t told her, we would get into
another situation where I got into danger and she had to save me. This wasn’t a
preparatory lesson, this was the real thing: the final exam. I couldn’t let
that happen again. It was more important we were totally on the same page with
each other, and that mean telling her the truth. If she thought I was keeping
secrets from her she’d never trust me enough to let me work with her.
“The what category?”
“Z. The not X or Y category.”
Supers were
admitted into category X for people with ingrained ability. Z stream was for
people with no ability. There was also a Y stream for a rare slice of the
Natural population who had been exposed to Super power, which had even less
intake than Z stream, even more stigmatized as the bucket ‘dislocated’ students
were dropped into because they didn’t fit into X or Z. The Zs and Ys made up
such a tiny proportion of the student body the were practically invisible and most
Super students just assumed everyone was
X stream.
“Oh yeah,”
she remembered out loud. “Holy shit,” she emphasized, sounding morbidly
fascinated. I couldn’t understand it; she wasn’t
angry. It seemed to be…okay.
“You wait,”
she restated, in a kinder, maybe even pitying tone, “I’ll give you the signal,
and…um…you do your thing. Honestly, two bad guys – what the heck examination
board? Set us such a chill job. You’ll be fine.”
“Right on,”
I said weakly, but she had already gone in, moving down a dark corridor,
turning a corner and was out of sight.
Chapter 2: Trick Question by Zerda
I waited
outside the door.
Some
shuffling noises echoed down the dark corridor. My heart thudding in my chest, I
moved closer, as the sounds went from shuffling to feet scraping. No signal
yet. Then a bang, like someone striking a wall.
“Summer!” I
called under my breath. My steps began to speed up, down the dimly lit hall,
turning a corner to an ajar door. Someone
was running over the floor, feet pounding. The door banged open and a bizarre
sight emerged.
“Steve, get out of the way—!” Summer yelled. She
never screamed when she was scared, she yelled.
She burst
out of the darkness, completely naked, and pushed past me. Her legs stretched
like elastic to take her further, faster. I’d never seen her run like that; she
looked like some alien entity and in the dim light it looked freaky – and not
helping was her lack of clothes. One second she was a speeding, stretching pale
blur, the next second I was struck into by her fast moving Flexer body, like
being body slammed by a huge basketball. I knocked into the wooden floor. The
world went black and felt like it was still moving even after I’d stopped. She
kept going.
I didn’t
want to believe she said what she did. I wanted to believe she said ‘get out!’
and I had imagined the rest. Her voice must have echoed weirdly in the hallway,
creating the illusion of extra speech.
She turned
the corner and footsteps carried on over the floor, before the door to the
corridor opened and then slammed shut again.
As I
groaned and rolled over, a broad shadow descended over my body. I scrambled to
get away, but a burly hand scrunched around each of my wrists and began
dragging me into the darkness that Summer had just escaped from.
I was slung
over a man’s back and carried into another, smaller room of the warehouse. A
dirty fluorescent light strip buzzed on, the main light source apart from some
dirty perfectly circular windows which glowed an eerie blue from the moonlight.
There was broken glass around the floor, dirty used coffee cups, flecks of
black dust and stubbed cigarettes, and a pile of Summer’s clothes. She must
have stretched out of them.
I was dropped
into a chair, my arms were wrenched behind me and tied with tape, and then my
ankles were taped to the chair legs. My thoughts were going like a bullet
train: I was worried for Summer; trying to work out why she’d bailed out of the
exam like that. Performance anxiety? She’d never gotten it before. She must
have seen something she hadn’t studied for. Would the board penalize her for
aborting? She’d have to re-sit with another partner. Unless I deliberately
failed, too, and we could re-sit together. That seemed like the thing to do –
the only thing to do now. Except I
was tied up.
The man
appeared at my front. This guy wasn’t wearing a suit, but jeans and a hoodie,
with the hood on, and underneath a mask, and weirdly, a backwards baseball cap
underneath. The cap’s visor must have been cut off to fit.
“I’m sorry,
but I’m not able to continue,” I announced. “My partner left the exam, so we have
to reschedule.”
The man
blinked slowly.
“Gonna to try
something?” Then he bent in my face and roared: “Well, DO IT!”
I suppressed
a flinch.
“Excuse me?
Look, I just said that—”
A
big-knuckled fist came flying out of nowhere and socked me hard in the face. My
head snapped to the side and a blur of stars rushed past my eyes. The pain dug
into my skull about a second later.
As the man
slid a chair right up in front of me and dropped into it, a pair of pumps clacked
across the floor.
When my
vision sharpened again, a woman had appeared in the room behind the man, a
woman I’d only seen on the TV news: a real life Stepford wife with a trim
figure, flawless styled hair and dress, like some investment banker’s young
wife at a luncheon.
It took a
second to sink in.
She was a Reducer. Her name was Lucy DeLuca, and
she had no place being here, in a supervised exam setting. The only place she
should have been was behind bars in the high security Fangelburg Super Penitentiary.
I stared
back at the broad-shouldered masked man, making the connection. The guy was also
a Super, and Lucy’s henchman, Rodney the Reconstructor.
According
to the archive of extensive case files I kept on my PC, Lucy and Rodney had
been solo Supervillains until Rodney had a run in with Lucy’s husband, after a
bar fight over gambling debt, Rodney had snapped and reconstructed him into a dollar
bill and spent him. As revenge, Lucy had Rodney’s wife kidnapped, reduced, and
put into a tiny world inside a glass bottle, blackmailing Rodney for visitation
in exchange for being her henchman. She also implanted him with a special
device to control his reconstruction ability. They were now on-off dating.
“Just
listen, sweetie,” the prim woman held unblinking eye contact, “before you commit
yourself to something you’ll regret.” She steepled her manicured hands in front
of her face and her voice went down to a firm strain:
“If you
have the Flexer deformity, like that girl, it’s time to drop the act.”
“What are
you talking about?” I cried, “I’m not a Flexer! Let me go!”
Where was
the test? Where were the crisis actors? Where was Summer? She must have
recognized the villains. Rodney must have tried to subdue her and she stretched
out of her clothes trying to escape. I’d never seen her do that before.
Lucy
watched me for what seemed like a long time. Then murmured to her male henchman:
“Run the
litmus test.”
Rodney jumped
up and punched me in the stomach.
“No reflex,”
he concluded, as I choked for breath.
The woman
paced around my chair, heels clacking, but always keeping herself stationed
safely behind Rodney’s bulk form.
“Then what do you do?” she sniffed down at me.
“Why would
you want me? I’m just a Natural.”
Her look of
puzzlement slowly turned into a smile that showed too many perfect teeth.
“Well, young
man, I have a secret,” her voice simpered like I was a well-behaved child.
“I hate Supers. “Her mouth was smiling but
her eyes were glassy and hard. ”They’ve watched all our traditional societal
family values crumble and they won’t do anything about it. They stand back in
the shadows, letting their powers grow dusty on the shelf. And ultimately, who
pays the price? You Naturals pay for
it, because the Super state has no interest in taking the reins from Natural
leaders and trying to remake a better Natural world for them. If you want to
know why your Natural society is such a disgusting, delinquent mess right now,
you only have us to blame. Anyway,” she turned away, fussing over her hair.
“You’re free to leave.”
I stared
between her and Rodney, waiting to be untied.
She
continued:
“Yes, there’s
a very special way out of here. We have a little house for you down in my
developing project neighbourhood, Locketopia. A little size-jigging and your
new home could be anything from a condo to a castle. And best of all, no
Supers. All your neighbors will be perfect, ordinary, law-abiding little
Naturals. Your world has so many social problems but my development is crime-free.
It’s just a slight scale adjustment, and it’ll feel l like home.”
“Where is
it?” I said. All fear had left me since Summer had run out. The memory stung
more than Rodney’s punches.
She lifted
her necklace, showing off the locket.
“Locketopia,”
she explained.
I didn’t
understand, at first.
“That’s too
small.”
“Don’t be
fooled by the current dimensions. It’s small to you now,” her voice rose and fell with mounting glee, “but wait ‘til
you’re even smaller, then it’ll seem
like a kingdom!”
Her pumps
clopped closer and closer.
Unless she
was totally deranged, she couldn’t really mean that the village was stored
inside the locket itself. You’d have to be microscopic to live in a village
that fit in the locket. Invisible to the naked eye, completely lost and
forgotten to the normal size world.
You can’t shrink a person, I thought desperately. At least, you can’t shrink them all. You
can reduce the body but the person inside stays the same. But my consciousness
would be trapped in whichever micro hell my body occupied. My consciousness
would be trapped somewhere tinier than a grain of sand. And the biggest insult;
it would all belong to Lucy.
And who
knew if the neighborhood inside the locket was truly perfect? It might have
been a wrecked dystopia. There was no prove it wasn’t; no way for Lucy to know.
My voice
came out in pure reaction:
“Fuck your
tiny town! I’d rather die!”
Lucy gave a
very thin-lipped smile.
“So be it.
It’ll make us both better off, I suppose. Locketopia is an oasis from reality;
there’s no room for problem-starters.”
Swishing
around, she barked at Rodney:
“He’s a
walking crime scene now. Make him a bug.”
One her
polished pumps grinded over the floor in preparation.
The
henchman grumbled:
“Enough
bugs! Let me make him into a bubble and send him out into the park’s tot
playpen.”
There was a
good reason Lucy kept Rodney on a metaphorical chain. A Reconstructor was so much worse than a Reducer; not only could he change my size, he could transform me
into whatever he wanted, person, animal, and inanimate object, and possibly
worse of all, my new form would retain my consciousness.
This drew a
darkly interested look from Lucy.
“I hate
having to strangle plan A in the cradle, but that’s an awfully tempting plan
B.”
“He’s not
going to exist very long,” the man plunged on, bolstered by her compliment.
“The kids are gonna try and snatch him. They might try and blow him around for
a little while, but some kid’s gonna poke him and…pop.”
Lucy got to
the point:
“And
there’ll be no evidence, just a droplet on a child’s finger.”
The man
suggested:
“Or
tongue.”
Lucy’s
explosive laughter rocked the air. She was definitely deranged, I decided.
The sound
shook me as much as the thought of being popped. Would it hurt? Would I die or
would my consciousness carry on as a speck of water? – and then what? Would I
get absorbed into the skin of whoever popped me, or would I get swallowed? …And
would I still be conscious in the stomach, maybe being turned into a digestive
bubble forced through the intestinal tract? Just how long would my ordeal go
on?
“Just let
me go,” I strained, feeling utterly defeated, “I won’t tell anyone.”
Lucy’s face
downturned over my head.
“Lying
isn’t good for you, honey,” she barbed, having lost all patience and interest
in me now that I had no further role in her vision. “It might even stunt your
growth. Our little talk was fun. Now, Rodney’s going to get you fixed up.
You’re going to feel very wet and fragile, then we’ll open up the window and
let the draught do the rest. You’ll get sucked out into the grounds and we’ll
take bets on the winner of ‘puncture the bubble’.”
Rodney
stood over me, cracking his knuckles. I threw myself against the tape until my
shoulders ached. Suddenly she stopped.
“It’s a
shame,” she considered aloud. “I don’t want to hurt a Natural. I wish we could
make the Flexer girl into a bubble instead.”
She thrust
a cell phone onto my lap.
“Call her
up and invite her back in.”
I continued
to strain against the tape. The phone slid off my leg and clattered onto the
floor.
“You want
to leave, yes?” Lucy grated. “Give us the Flexer, and you can. Call her.”
“She
doesn’t have her phone,” I snapped. But she might, if she’d returned to the
Academy van, where our phones were.
She spun
away from me, pumps rapping as she passed over the wood floor.
“Rodney,”
she commanded, “our guest needs to retire and have a little think. Pull up a
house for him.”
The man
pulled a cigarette out of his pants pocket and bent to place it on the ground. As
he pinched it between his fingertips, the white stick expanded rapidly into a
white block. Windows and a door appeared. When he stepped back it was a standing
dollhouse on the floor. He extended one finger and gave the front door a poke,
causing it to swing inward, revealing a miniature room inside.
Now Lucy
was stepping over to me.
“You’re so
confused,” she simpered. “Clear your head and get back to me when your priorities
are straightened up. I’ll give you a couple of minutes.”
I stared at
the ludicrously small house with a gradual dawning sense of realization.
“Don’t do
this,” I cried, jerking myself against the chair.
She
hesitated, but not in sympathy.
“I’m not as
promiscuous with my power as Rodney,” she said. “He’s something of a hypnotist,
too, you know, and I suppose I’m a magician. He’s going to put you into a deep
sleep now, while I do a little magic trick.”
Lucy’s
pumps traipsed back and forth, skirting me, while Rodney stepped around behind
me.
Something
smacked into the back of my head and all the lights went out.
Chapter 3: Visit from Venus by Zerda
I was in a
white box, cloaked in shadow. A bedroom and I was lying on a plastic bed frame
and cheap mattress that had no padding, just a hard board like a table top.
Lucy’s suffocating, flowery perfume clung to the walls, though she was nowhere
in sight, and the wispy trail of acrid smoke. My clothes were gone and I felt
drunk.
My body was
tight and cramped. It felt like someone had hammered little screws all over my body
and wound them too much. It must have been from lying on this hard bed. I stood
up and stretched but the feeling didn’t budge.
The light
switch on the wall didn’t work. It was a painted plastic bump that didn’t
switch. The glowing circular light in the center of the ceiling wasn’t in the
ceiling. It was a hole, through which outside light shone through…from a much,
much bigger light, the droning fluorescent bar.
A sound
burst over the house: Clack-clack-clack-clack, like a steam train running right
over the roof. Then the whistling screams of teenagers like an oncoming cyclone.
It was like an earthquake rocking the house, but it was actually the
rollercoaster passing by, but now loud like it was right out the window, or
magnified by speakers.
And then a murmuring
voice trembled through the walls, high and feminine and disdainful, but with
dinosaur volume:
“…could
have made a wonderful little citizen for my collection but he would have needed
to be broken in…”
It was Lucy,
but if she was trying to murmur, it was coming out at a shout.
I staggered
over to the window and pushed, and the entire pane popped out. It was plastic;
I was surrounded by plastic.
Shakily, I
leaned out and stared around at the outside world, and it was a thrilling mix
of familiar and strange.
My
perception was stuck on the floor. I was viewing the dusty, dim warehouse room
from the perspective of a shoe, gazing up at a cavernous interior, expanse as a
multi-storey indoor mall complex. Each wooden floor plank was as wide as a car
parking space, and seemed to elongate into a distant, blurry horizon on the
other side of the room.
The two
Supervillains stretched to the ceiling and were filled out . Lucy paced over
the floor; every step one of her shiny, thoroughbred-sized pumps launched
through the air and tapped against the wood panels, sending vibrations long the
floor, all the way through the dollhouse.
Rodney’s
even bigger dirt-stained sneakers squeaked as he rocked his weight back in
boredom. His pant legs went up like tree trunks, sighting anything higher
caused my neck to hurt.
I wasn’t
tied to the chair anymore, but I was still trapped – possibly now even more trapped. Making a sprint across the
floor could end in either of them stamping me flat under a shoe.
I was only six
inches tall. My head spun. The air crackled again as Lucy’s megaphone-charged
voice carried on:
“…but he’s
different. He says he’s a Natural, but he was running around with a Flexer. He
knows things about us. It might be catastrophic to let him loose in Locketopia
and poison their innocent ways with outside Super culture.”
Her eyes
wandered the room, until she picked out my face in the window. A smile
stretched across her face.
“Hello, pygmy.
What stellar diet results! I bet you didn’t know you could lose so much weight
while you were sleeping. You see, I started shaving you down, and then I guess
I just got carried away.”
She laughed
down at my patent confusion.
“Don’t even
think of trying to get away, or my heel is going to ‘reconstruct’ you into the
floor.”
Her pumps
seemed to leap-frog each other as they pounded over the floor to me, and with
each seismic shudder, carrying her monstrously tall, thin figure way over my
head. I took steps away from the window, wanting to gag in dread. It was
impossible to look at her red lips pout and flex as she spoke, and not realize
I was small enough to fit between them.
“Have we reached
an understanding, minion?”
“You want
something from me?” I said, in no doubt she was in full control of whatever
happened to me now. My voice was a puny, feathery trill compared to her
blasting commandment. “Are you serious? What could I possibly do for you like
this?”
One of her
giant heels slammed down right outside the window and held there, dimming the
dollhouse room from outside. A floor draught carried the scent of sweating
leather into the plastic, miniature room, and with no ventilation, it sunk
there until I felt like I was practically inside the shoe, pressed into the
scent.
“Quit the self-pity
babble! ” The giant shoe lifted and stomped the floor right outside the window.
“You demean my work only because you are so ignorant! The reduced body is
beautiful, pure, innocent. It minimizes mess and waste and consumption. It
simplifies logistics. It makes humankind manageable and orderly. Who do you think you are mocking, little man?”
Her pump
lifted a second time, but this time it didn’t lower. The roof of the dollhouse made
a squeaking sound in the corners as the plastic grinded into itself. Her shoe
had parked squarely on the roof, and she was pushing down.
I ran to
the open window again, only to be met with her other pump, which was standing right
outside. I had a vision of climbing out the window and being stomped by it. But
in the meantime, the dollhouse was about to collapse…
“I’ll help
you!” I cried at the top of my lungs.
The leather
heel creaked as her weight shifted. There was a metal click and smoke wisped
into the dollhouse . She’d lit up a cigarette as she meditated on my response.
Her pump rested on the dollhouse roof.
“Your first
assignment,” she waved the cell phone in her hand over the roof of the
dollhouse, now the size of a body board, “is to invite the Flexer girl back in.”
A cloud of
cigarette stirred angrily in my tiny delicate lungs until I felt dizzy. I
coughed.
“I don’t
know her. She’s not my friend.”
Now, there
was a weird vibration from another part of the warehouse, vibrating sensitively
through my bones and growing. It felt like the rollercoaster swinging back
around for another loop over the building. But it kept building and building
and no track clacking noise, and no screams—
The shiny
heel outside the window swished around, storming with its identical partner across
the floor, and Lucy’s furious voice blasted over the top:
“When you
work for me, the very first thing you
need to learn, is that you are not running
the production. Your job is to take
orders.”
The air
pressure in the building kept shifting, until the ceiling began to groan. In
another room, a door slammed from a fierce draught, a shelf buckled and dropped
its contents with a shimmering crash. Something struck a wall. I wondered what
humungous theme park ride was starting up so close to the warehouse to do this.
Lucy shook
her head at the disturbance, then stopped and turned from across the other side
of the room and pinned me with a glare. I fought to not react, even as my
insides were shrivelling up.
“Never you
forget, my little underling, I’m the
star of this show.”
With a crackling
whoosh of air like a cap lifting from a giant soda can, a human-sized missile
came bowling into her from behind, sending her flying across the room. I dove
out the dollhouse window an instant before she crashed into the entire structure,
smashing it to bits. As I hit the wood floor, chunks of painted plastic snapped
over my head.
Rodney jumped
up and tackle-rushed the intruder. The room burst into light as a hot pink
laser cut across the wall like a knife. Then it was gone again, and Rodney’s
head banged onto the floor, still wearing the cap, and then his body. The smoke
of cauterized flesh wafted in the air, and metal tang of blood.
Then, odd
silence. The air pressure disturbance had levelled out again, Lucy was a
crumpled heap and made no sound.
I began
sprinting at the door, cold draught flapping past. The sheer size of the floor
created so much empty, airy space to cross, but I was light and agile now, on
legs that felt more like precise springs. I was smaller, but still had a body
that was built to support itself against a much greater gravity burden, and being
so light now, it was like running on cheat mode.
But I was
still not fast enough.
A stack of
polished leather slapped the floor, closing the directly in front. I stared in
wonder. It was a humungous black go-go boot with a fearsomely tall chunk heel. It
was so close it seemed to fill the world. I skidded and face-planted into the toe
section.
As I
scrambled to my feet, the shoe lifted off without concern, covering the ceiling
with its dark tread, before clapping down at my back, jingling my bones. Both the
shoe and its mate carried on over the floor, like heavy duty machinery
pistoning up and down, sending sharp pulsations through the wood floor.
They
stopped at a pair of red-tinted shield sunglasses, which must have come off in
the collision with Lucy, and skipped over the floor.
Then a
voice filled the room, one I’d only ever heard carried through radio waves and
from behind a screen. But now it was real-time, a bright electric burr that was
smoky underneath.
“A small
fashion mishap,” And a toned, feminine silhouette dove and lightly took back
the sunglasses, as her back dipped, her butt calmly pushed out to full breadth,
each globe with unbelievable size and volume, “but I had the purest
intentions.”
Her shoes
squeaked as she twisted around to face me. Of course, she didn’t literally face me; her awareness floated in a
faraway space toward the ceiling, while I was swished by the cold sweeps of air
lifted by her calm saunter around the room.
My eyes
were gravitated up the boots, up to a beautiful woman with dark hair in
literally windblown waves that framed high Tatar cheekbones and icy violet-blue
eyes. She wore a shimmery armored black bodice and skirt with red and blue
racing stripes and white stars. Over that, a little incongruously, a red,
hooded puffer jacket.
She put the sunglasses back in their natural place over her
blue eyes, which tinted them red. Now she was watching me. I quickly covered my
groin, half wishing to be back in the privacy of the dollhouse, or even for the
great black tread to lift over the ceiling again and cover me up from view. I
never wanted to meet her like this.
“You rolling
with them?” she inquired.
“No,” I charged
out. The pink laser had burned itself into my mind. Were the media accounts
wrong? They never warned she would just…do
that. I looked past the towering black boots to the humped form of Lucy,
amidst the dollhouse rubble, and it came out without thought: “I was just going
to take these guys into custody, but now you’re here, it could save time if we
pooled our talents.”
She waved
her finger as if running it up and down the length of my body.
“And what
about this..?”
I squared
my shoulders.
“I’m a Reducer. I had to hide from them, so I
reduced.”
One boot
tip landed on Lucy’s glowing-tipped cigarette and twisted the ember out. The
final gasp of expiring smoke made my chest tighten.
“I see,”
she replied. “Biding your time for the ankle bum-rush.”
She took a
steady, unthinking step closer. But if she was trying to move closer to see me
better, the problem wasn’t distance. I reflexively took a step back.
Her gaze
seemed to be filtering out everything that wasn’t me, questioning my entire
existence but in a way that didn’t seem unfriendly, “…very comfortable down
there, aren’t you? You know how small you are?” Her eyes flashed past Lucy,
“Are you completely insane?”
Her
attention sat on me, so heavy it took effort to keep my head up to meet her
eyes. She was so gigantic her gaze easily spanned me and more besides, keeping me
prisoner by surveillance alone. There was no pretending I hadn’t noticed her,
or nonchalantly escaping her notice. She could capture me entirely in direct
view and still enjoy a lot of peripheral surrounding. She had a perfect visual lock-on
of not only me, but a sweep of every surrounding place I could move to. I felt
like a chess piece and she’d already figured me out three moves ahead.
I frowned
up at her.
“I had
this,” I said firmly, “I was luring them both into an elaborate trap.”
She stood
over me with hands on hips. I forced my legs to not shake.
“Who are
you?” she demanded, “tell me, before I elaborately trap you inside my boot.”
Her boots
were so tall I’d never be able to climb out again. I forced out:
“Try
anything and I’ll reduce you.”
One arm
dropped from her hip, and she cocked her head at me.
“Big balls
for a tiny little man. The whole world will ask where I went. What are you
going to tell them?”
“You
tripped and fell into the Bermuda Triangle and never came out.”
She seemed
to be having an increasingly hard time containing her amusement.
“If you
want to reduce me, you have to get closer.”
I didn’t
move.
“You’re
safe today.”
She gave me
a smug look. She wasn’t threatened by me whatsoever, I thought. She was playing
with me.
“Who is
this new Reducer storming the district, anyway? Care to introduce me?”
“It’s
Steve,” I replied.
In response,
she drew herself up, placing a hand on her hip and giving an elegant flourish,
and declared:
“Zamira
Venus. No middle name.”
“I know,” I
chirped.
“Steve,”
she repeated. “I’m going to have to insist you at give me a little pose.”
I uneasily ignored
this. No wonder Reducers were so power-shy, and rarely became Heroes, and no
wonder they had a high incidence of going insane. I was starting to feel their
pain. It was so hard to be taken seriously.
“No
posing,” I replied, “I aim for efficiency in everything. Now I have to get this
woman to jail.”
“Size up,
Steve,” there was a flirtatious edge to her voice, “you’re just teasing me
now.”
I couldn’t
‘size up’. I was trapped, tiny, naked. Then I remembered, with a sinking
feeling, Summer’s change of tone after she’d learned I was actually a Natural,
and wondered why I was playing this same make-believe character all over again.
Pretending to be Super is what got me into this fiasco.
The words
came out like air leaking out of balloon in small sharp spurts.
“Okay,
look, I’m a Natural. I was reduced.”
Zamira studied
me under the low, buzzing fluorescent tube. It was getting darker outside and
she was starting to give off a faint blue glow.
“That’s
very strange,” she murmured.
“Yeah,
strange. I definitely feel very strange.”
Her
eyebrows drew together in concern.
“Alright,
Steve Natural. I’m going to take a look at what she did to you.”
It was a
vision out of a surreal dream, her giant boots were clomping closer and closer,
steadily expanding in view until they seemed to touch the walls. She was a
walking skyscraper, and coming for me. I began to run to the door again, but my
speed was pitiful compared to hers.
“Wait,
careful!” My voice was nothing but a tiny, awestruck whine. “Stay back! I’m too
small!”
Sensing my
distress, she unplanted completely from the ground, hovered the last few feet,
and snatched me up. It was like being nabbed by a giant eagle talon and taken
up into the clouds. I writhed in her weightless hand, unsure where
the ground was anymore. Her fingers curled and pulled tightly around my torso
like a snug full body harness. The soft skin of her palm surrounded me all over
like a sleeping bag.
My head
poked between two bent finger joints, which hugged my ears, keeping my head
fixed in place. I was brought in very close to the giant armored black bodice, sculpted
suggestively over the projecting twins, each separately trumping my diminutive
size.
A little
higher, and suddenly her face was too close, and enormous. Her breath billowed,
warming my face, which was the only thing sticking out of her hand. I tried to
time my blinks to avoid getting what felt like a hairdryer blast into my eyes.
“This is
going to sound pretty stupid,” she murmured, her eyes running down my body with
appreciation, “but I’ve never actually seen a reduced Natural before. Because—”
she emphasized as if it was so obvious it didn’t need stating: “—Reducers are
so good at hiding them, or…making them disappear.”
Her fingers
uncurled slightly as I was gently shifted back and forth, and squeezed. She
turned my head to the side, then tugged and rotated my limbs. Her cool touch pushed
about, her nail delicately poked at each of my ribs to check for damage, then
her thumb ploughed into my stomach, jiggling to search my insides for
irregularity, which was so ticklish and uncomfortable it literally took my
breath away. I felt like an inanimate object.
I began to
struggle in her grip, and without thinking, her touch began drifting around my
torso with loving strokes to calm me. I stopped moving, but only because there
was no escape from her intimate, curious probing. A drop from her hand would
seriously hurt, or worse.
“I’ve never
seen you before, either,” I said,
feeling dumb but unable to think of anything else to say.
“Well then,
eat me up while you can,” she said with a glint in her eyes.
This seemed
to erode some kind of flimsy barrier between us. For her, much faster than for
me. Her thumb lowered, making a sweep of my hips before it began to bury around
between my legs. She pushed against my penis, and then lifted it out of the way
to examine my balls. Then I was flipped over while her powerful thumb worked
against my back muscles, and followed my spine to my butt. She pushed against
the backs of my thighs, and then flipped me over again.
“I have a
small problem, Steve,” she said, stroking my stomach thoughtfully. The burn of
her red-lensed stare was sending all the blood between my legs.
She rotated
in mid-air to face the two pieces of Rodney lying on the floor. Her voice
became oddly hushed. “He wasn’t supposed to die. It’s so bizarre for it to ever
even happen, but sometimes I’m in a rush, I’m not exactly thinking, the beams
slip out, and these damn glasses…” she groaned, “…because I skip a fitting and
buy them right out of the factory one time this
happens.” She looked me in the eye. “How bad is it?”
I sighed.
“You just
made a mistake.”
“Yes,” she
said, somewhat eagerly. “It was an accident! But there’s too many damn people
out there who are going to run away with this.”
“It was
very fast and he was intimidating. Just be honest about how you felt.”
She shook
her head, disappointed.
“Talking
about my feelings, oh, that’s just what I need.” She implored, “Make a statement
with me, Steve. Back me up on this.”
“I’ve got a
problem myself,” I replied, shifting in her hand uneasily.
“Gamma
General could fix you under my plan.”
The Gamma
General was a big Super hospital, and they did hair-raising tests and
procedures on Supers which would maim and seriously injure Naturals.
“I’m not
covered.”
“Mmm.” She
realized aloud, “Right.”
She was
roaming my body as she spoke, pushing and poking. There was something nervous
and excited in the friction of her fingertips. She kept rubbing and spanning
her fingertips against my flesh, making it stretch, and the skin was starting
to tingle and burn. She glanced down at me again, and one polished, crystalline
fingernail traced my jawline in what seemed to be a reassuring gesture. The
spiky tip flirtatiously stroked my lips.
“Steve,”
she said in a honeyed tone, “just help me walk out of this clusterfuck. Can you
do that?”
I wasn’t
even sure how I was going to walk out
of here when I could barely cross a single room without almost getting
flattened or swept up in a hand.
Her touch kept
shifting around my body, inconveniently searching for the softest parts of me
to sink into. I looked up into her red tinted eyes, long lashes batting, and my
insides turned to soup. She wasn’t going to let me go unless I had a very good
response.
“I want to
help you,” I said.
She gave me
a dazzling smile and scratched my chest affectionately with her thumbnail. All
this easy tactile contact and I was starting to feel less like a person and
more like a little animal she was training for obedience.
“If you
don’t want to talk for me, then let’s keep this simple,” she instructed. “Don’t say anything. I’ll manage it up
front, and you just keep your head down.”
I swallowed
and looked up at her giddily.
“Uh…Miss
Venus? Can you – you know – give me an autograph?”
The
charming façade dropped; she grew quiet for a moment, and I held my breath, reading
to be politely dismissed.
“I have
something honest and unique for you, Steve, to help you remember what we said.”
I breathed
an inward sigh of relief.
“Okay. What
is it?”
“It might
hurt a tiny bit—”
“Wait,
what!?” I squawked.
“—But if
it’s too much,” she went on, ‘I have this secret power where I’ll give you a
fuzzy little brain wipe to make you forget it happened. But you get to keep the
souvenir.”
“Do what?” I yelped, “Brain wipe?” My case
notes on her didn’t record anything like this.
“Let’s find
out if you need it, shall we? What’s your favorite color.”
I was so
dazed that for a second I didn’t know the answer.
“Radioactive
blue. Cherenkov light. Why?”
She nodded.
“Like
Rigel.”
As she said
this, in her smooth, light patter, she jammed her nail into the back of my
wrist and it was like liquid ice being injected into my vein. Her nail had
turned so icy bright, like a welding torch flame, it burned my eyes. I helplessly
looked away, up into her eyes. The pain was so great it felt like my arm was
being melted down from inside out.
The air
suddenly seemed too thin to be breathed, it went in and out of my lungs rapidly
without sustaining me.
Then her
nail lifted. There was now a glowing blue star system imprinted on my flesh. I
stared at in fear and wonder, as the culprit of all that pain, and trying to
work out how I felt about being used as a canvas for her UV glo artwork.
“Uh…” I
nodded dumbly, “…what is it? What did
you do to me?” I rubbed the mark in alarm. “Did you make me radioactive?!”
She thumbed
my head, a little roughly, to get me to settle.
“You’re so
jumpy, Steve. It’s just your autograph. I keep a tight circle, but now you’re
practically an initiated Venusian.” She laughed. “But seriously, once this
whole thing goes away…I think I might owe you.”
I was feeling
like I was going to pass out. There were icy rings of pain still radiating out
from the mark.
She read it
right off my expression.
“That bad?”
All the
tension had escaped my muscles.
“One of the
most painful things ever. Is my arm still attached?”
He lashes
dropped but her pupils fixated as if trying to memorize my face for later.
“Close your
eyes and I’ll do my best to work a little magic spell over your mind, and if I
get it just right, hit the sweet spot in your brain, it should make you forget
everything…”
I felt so
pale and tired my eyes closed naturally, without compulsion. The dark behind my
eyelids was overpowering; I had to squeeze my toes firmly to keep from fainting
completely.
The dark
got bigger, deeper; she seemed to bend over me, or take me up to her face. Warm
air washed over in rhythmic thrusts…in, out…Her breath battered my skin, driven
by her famously powerful diaphragm, and I was nothing but a sheet of paper held
up in hopeless resistance. Held between her hands, I began to tremble, and now
my eyes were closed I was too afraid to open them. My eyeballs would only get
lashed by each disarming exhalation.
What was
she doing? Was she…trying to look at me in extreme close up? Another burst of
heated air that broke over my head like a stormy current, and rumbled my ears.
It dried up every last particle of moisture from my face, including my lips and
the insides of my nostrils. Her breath was so strong it got everywhere; the
back of my throat and sinus cavities tickled from dryness. I couldn’t swallow;
my throat seemed to stick and ache. Each pounding exhalation pushed my
eyelashes down flat.
Her head
was poised right in front of mine, now I had to be so close, any closer and my
face would be on her lips—
Something
big and warm and soft captured my face and pulled with such desperate suction
my whole face was scrunched up. An ache ran through my skull like my head was
being fed into a compressor. Then, with a sharp wet squish, the tension popped
free. But my head was immediately captured and reeled in all over again.
She was
kissing me.
Zamira
Venus was kissing me.
She had to
be, but it felt like she was trying to eat my head without using her teeth. Her
munching, sucking lips flexed and stressed the muscles around my temples and
jaw.
Her lips
parted to take in more of my face, and my own lips were bumped and nuzzled by
what felt like a squishy wet fist, which sent a couple of playful flicks into
my nose, before pushing my head back and forth, trying to powerfully roll it.
The constantly shifting ‘fist’ broadened into a wet carpet that slithered under
my throat to support my head from below, and continuing to play with my head. Stroke
after stroke of the ‘fist’ kneaded my face over with sticky film. It was like
being painted over with a roller, but instead of paint it was her saliva. There
was so much power in her oral muscle my head strained against its brutish
insistence. Terror started to well up inside my chest; my head was practically
stuck inside her mouth like a baby dummy and I couldn’t unplug it. With a
little extra pressure from her tongue, it was within her ability to squash my
head with a single lick. Trying to endure the battering affection of her tongue
took marathon patience.
When I was
drawing on the last reserves of my breath, it ended.
“There,”
her lips twisted with an ironic smile. “All wiped.” Hard to believe lips so
freakishly strong were also capable to produce such a soft, tender expression.
And only a moment ago, my face had been plastered on those same plush lips.
“Never said
it was a Super power,” she admitted.
To my
surprise, she then tore off a corner of the black costume skirt and wrapped it
around me like a towel. It was soft but tough and stretchy, warm from her body
heat and infused with her perfume.
Absurdly I
was about to ask her to take me with her. I couldn’t go back to the Academy
like this. The Admissions Head took a risk letting me into the Z stream. On the
statistics, it wouldn’t shock them that a Z streamer crashed and burned, but I
didn’t want to go anywhere near the campus for fear of running into Summer. It
would be excruciatingly embarrassing at normal size. And I wasn’t normal size.
Where was I supposed to go now?
She didn’t
answer that question, but put me on the ground and went over to haul Lucy’s
unconscious form out of the dollhouse rubble with ease, flopping the slighter,
blonde woman in her arms like an oversized ragdoll.
“I have a
little space left for you, Steve.” She gave me a foxy grin that shook my
insides to soda fizz.
“Your hands
are full,” I pointed out. Unless there was a pocket inside her puffer jacket.
“I’ll slip
you inside my boot; you can choose: left or right?”
I
swallowed.
“I’ll take
my chances on the floor.”
Then she
spun on her heel and accelerated out of the room, making the walls groan with
the air pressure shift. The bluish fluorescent light bulb burst and the room
blinked into darkness.
Time
stretched as I paced over the floor in shock, five minutes, ten minutes, I lost
count.
It broke
over me like a cold wave; I suddenly felt ridiculous and sad. The idea she’d
flirt with me over Rodney’s dead body seemed insane. She’d captivated me and kissed
me without a lot of intent. She’d kissed me practically the way an older
sibling would kiss a baby, because in the shock of being shrunk, I was tiny,
obsequious and offered no pushback. Now she was gone, Summer was gone, my size
was gone, and the exam was over.
The police soon
showed up. Naturals just had police, it was the Supers who had Heroes.
End Notes:
Note: To avoid confusion, Zamira is not literally from Venus. 'Venus' is just her last name, and 'Venusian' is a moniker given to members of her fanbase/supporters. What Zamira is exactly, is an upcoming plot development.
Chapter 4: The Detective and his Beautiful Daughter by Zerda
My arm
glowed blue up until the police flashlights hit the room, the direct light
cancelled the blue glow, and the star system went dark.
Dazzled by
the skipping flashlight beams, I ran across the floor, trying to avoid the
rapid passage of their massive shiny shoes as they congregated around Rodney’s body.
As they radioed in, one of them noticed me and yelled.
The long
beams of flashlights were like the pursuit of helicopters. Suddenly cops were
diving for me; one of them pinched my chest and I was being winched up into the
air. I gripped the scrap of black fabric around my waist like it was the only
thing keeping me alive.
A voice rumbled my eardrums:
“Hey, look
at this – he’s tiny!”
Zamira said
she’d never seen a reduced person before. The Natural cops had never conceived of a reduced person. Reduced
Supers went to Gamma General to be resized, and Reduced Naturals were
‘disappeared.’ I was an anomaly; to Supers, ‘strange’, to Naturals, a complete
alien.
A police
flashlight trained on my face like a stadium floodlamp.
“Put me
down!” I yelled, clenching my eyes shut and thrashing against the muscular
fingers that bound up my limbs. I had no hope of escaping when even the man’s
pinky was thicker than my arms.
A pair of
softer hands encircled my torso and the flashlight beam left my eyes.
“Okay, easy
there, little guy,” a feminine voice came from above my head. It was a young
female cop.
While the
others hung back in the warehouse, taping off the scene, I was slipped into her
pants pocket, where all was mercifully dark. A couple of empty gum wrappers crinkled
around my feet.
It felt
like being inside an upright sleeping bag that hugged her thigh. In the
dark, the stars on my arm glowed blue again. Then something whumped down and
patted my body from outside. It was the cop’s hand, checking I was secure. I
resented being treated like her wallet or phone.
For a long
time I was rocked and slammed upon the meat of her thigh, like a tiny basketball being dribbled in time with her steps. Her powerful walk took us away
from the warehouse and back through the park. There was a sick plunging
sensation every time her foot dropped to the ground, and sent a tremor through
my entire body as it landed. I shifted and braced myself against every bumping
footstep, never getting used to it.
From outside, the theme
park rides had been powered down and the crowds had dissipated. Some
bone-shaking footsteps later, insects chirped and car engines grumbled past, which
meant we had reached the vicinity of the parking lot. I wondered vaguely if
Summer had returned the Academy car.
“What do
you say I get you out of here?” the cop said, getting off her phone and giving the outer pocket another gentle pat which swept over my face, chest and genitals.
She pulled
open the door of her squad car, and made a hair-raising transition from
standing to sitting, pulling me onto my back and downwards sharply before
bouncing against her hip. In sitting position, her tight pants tightened even
more around her waist, squashing me against her muscular thigh, fixing me in
place sideways.
Then the
world seemed to whirl into motion as the car ran. Every crack in the road
recoiled through my spine. I swallowed back my car sickness. Maybe I was being
rescued but it felt like kidnap.
A call
buzzed over the radio and she explained the
situation to someone, and then someone else; a dispatcher and then another
officer. Her voice calmed me somewhat.
"Excuse me!" I called, remembering suddenly. "Lucy reduced a bunch of people and is keeping them inside a locket. She might be still wearing it."
The officer paused and then dialed the Hero Custody Center Lucy had been taken to for processing. She asked me some questions and relayed what I said to them.
The car stopped in a street right on Hammerhead’s border. A wide glittering
black river spanned to the lit skyline of the neighboring city, the more 'Super
friendly', Ankylorhiza. That was where Zamira lived; she might have already flown back to her Fortress of Investigation, the 'Satellite Park' building to file a Hero incident report. I knew the process; I'd written hundreds of practice Hero reports at the Academy. Still, no amount of reporting ever prepared me for being the subject of one.
Once again, my body was bumped and pushed by the officer's fingertips to check where I was. Then her hand ventured in to fish me out, two of her probing fingertips
accidentally bumped my head as they slid down to grasp my chest and tug me free.
I resignedly let her yank me out, and came into the cool night air. We stood at
the end of a driveway of a familiar street.
“This is your address,” she checked.
I stared up
in despair at the imposing, magnified façade of my house, feeling unwelcome
like I'd just been evicted. There was that dual sense of familiarity and
strangeness again. It crashed on me in an instant: I was six inches tall, my
house was too big to live in anymore: I couldn't open the front door, or any of
the interior doors, I was too short to work the door handle, too weak to open
the refrigerator to feed myself, too small to turn the shower on to wash
myself, possibly too small to climb into bed to sleep.
“Well, Goddamn,”
said a voice from behind.
The officer turned, bringing me in front of my neighbor, Brandon Vega, who had just come over from his place.
“Detective,”
said the officer. “You were briefed? We found this little guy scurrying around on the floor at BizarroWorld."
Brandon
looked me over with only the vaguest surprise, no more than if I’d gotten lost
and the officer was escorting me home again. He must have been told what happened.
“What’s it
look like down there?” he asked. “You sure he’s the only one?”
“Units have
been called in to assist with securing the scene. We only found
him so far, but another four UTL. You think they're going to get you down there?”
“Awaiting
the call,” Brandon sighed. “You know we can’t take anything or do lab work
because this is a Super scene, they’re going to get their own Scanners to walk through and run the
thing before it goes red ball. Or next level: Foundation.”
The female officer lifted
me up in front of Brandon as if presenting me to him as some biological curiosity.
“And if they want to scan this guy? Should I take him back to the Station?”
Brandon
shook his head gently.
“Let’s not displace him any more
than necessary. If the Super Squad want to follow him up, they can locate him
at the normal address.”
Then Brandon
reached down and ruffled my hair. It was extra gentle but still, the
strength in his touch pushed at my head and made me feel childlike. This was the same soft-spoken man I’d waved to earlier
that morning, now he was a muscular giant with very firm touch.
"Hello
there, Steve,” he said, in a voice too bright and sharp for nine pm at night, “It’s
Brandon, remember? Sure, you’re a little smaller than last time I saw you, and
I’m probably a lot bigger…” rather than finishing the thought, he said: “I
think you’d better come back with me.”
I eyed his enormous features nervously, my body pulsing with dread.
“Where are
you going to take me, sir?”
"My
place,” he said. He gestured across the road. He chuckled. “And boom,
we’ve arrived.”
He didn’t
wait for my reply. His huge hands circled my torso so just my head, arms and
lower legs were sticking out. His thumbs dug into my ribs with accidental
pressure and my chest protested. I writhed until he got the message and
loosened his grip, spreading around my body to distribute the pressure equally,
instead of just applying it in one place. Now my legs swung free with nothing
to stand on. It was unnerving; I was flying through the grainy darkness, the
cool night air over my skin.
Leaving the
female officer behind, we headed across the road to a modern, shallow-rooved style house,
and small relief, it looked nothing like the antique white dollhouse. I tilted my
head back and took a deep breath, trying to expand my lungs in spite of the
pressure of the detective’s thick, muscular hand surrounding my entire torso.
Far above, the night sky was the only thing that looked familiar anymore, the
stars were the only things that didn’t look any bigger or smaller.
The porch
light flicked on and Brandon dialed a code into the security system. The lights
were on inside and the house spread all around, with room for miles. It seemed
to extend out from every corner, like a panorama, except it didn’t just extend
out lengthways, but every way. We went down the vast length of a creamy white
hallway, before another light switch flicked to bath a living room in warm
yellows. I accepted that I couldn’t see everything and stopped trying to twist
my neck to catch up. Being carried was even a little fun if I gave my sense of
body up totally.
I was put
down on a sofa seat. As his hand released, cool air slipped in. I wished I was
inside his warm hand again. My little body had fit inside the curvature of his
hand so snugly I was beginning to feel attached to it, like a glove.
Embarrassed at my dependence, I pulled the torn skirt strip tighter, feeling
naked again. Brandon
paused to click the remote and put it down next to me, before leaving the room.
The TV jabbered on, shuffled through channels, and then stopped on a news
broadcast. My attention snapped to the screen showing images of the crime scene
taped off warehouse, as a reporter said:
“--News just coming in as to the body of an
unidentified man found dead at the BizarroWorld theme park. Cause of death
still awaiting autopsy result, however it’s believed the man may have attempted
to cross the ‘Booster’ rollercoaster while a ride was in session and was struck
by an oncoming car. Believing him to be ride prop, a park staff member may stored
his body in a disused ride warehouse—”
Brandon
re-entered, moving purposefully towards the door. Meanwhile, I suddenly had an
idea. Or, not an idea, a desperate itch to not be out of the Super loop just
yet.
“Sir?” I
said. But my voice was quieter now, and easily drowned out by the TV. The
detective interrupted me:
“Just
Brandon.”
“Brandon,
can I use your internet?”
Distractedly,
he swooped me up from the sofa and put me down on the living room table in
front of a laptop. Then he said:
“I’m sorry
to dash on you, kid, but I have to head out on a call. I think you know the
one.”
As he left
the house he called back, “Just sit tight.”
And he was gone. Car noise came from the garage before fading down the street. Whether he
meant it or not, ‘low down’ seemed like a pretty succinct summary of my
situation now.
Desperate for a distraction, I logged
into a special sign-in page on the laptop, and coordinated instructions to the
TV via WiFi. I just hoped Brandon’s TV picked up the signals from the
satellites on my roof. The news broadcast went to black.
It was not
actually ‘black’. There was a menu screen in infra-color – wavelengths of light the human eye could not see. Neither could I. In order to navigate the
invisible prompts, I had to go by memory: press down four times, then press ‘okay’.
Right three times, down, okay. Right four times, down nineteen times, okay. My friend Tripp, a Waver, taught me how.
The news
returned.
I pumped my
fist.
“Yeah!”
It was a
different news program than before, and a channel that had probably never
played on Brandon’s TV. The newsreader was a different person; his eyes tracked
oddly, like an android, his pupils shone too bright when they looked straight
into the camera, and sometimes they flashed red like a camera themselves. I
remembered his name was Kirk, and he seemed to have had way too much plastic
surgery. And not just plastics, but silicon, circuitry and a lot of controversial
internal programming.
He
announced:
“A Reducer felon has been arrested and charged
for attempted kidnap of two Paragon Academy students during a standard test. Lucinda
deLuca hijacked the students’ final cadetship exam and performed a reduction on
one of the students, Steve Rockwell. The other student, Summer Sagittarius
managed to flee the scene unharmed. Captain Zamira Venus, arrived on the scene
to arrest deLuca, however, deLuca’s accomplice, Rodney Vock, died in the
conflict. Miss Venus claims Mr Vock rushed at her, and in self-defence she
performed a complex, high speed airborne manoeuvre, however in the confined
space this backfired and resulted in Mr Vock’s death. Shortly following the
incident, Miss Venus was quoted:
”The man came for me, and, you know,
I’m a Soarer; I do what I know, which is fly. When I landed, the man was down.”
Foundation has declined to investigate further,
sparking protest by some critics.
This is not the first time the self-proclaimed
‘Aero-Yogini Queen’ has generated reaction for her public appearances in
Natural spaces. Previously she drew accusation of gratuitous ‘power-flashing’ to
a Natural congregation at Hammerhead City stadium. Political commentator, Milo
Matheson, who unsuccessfully petitioned against the UN’s invitation to Venus to
give an opening address at its recent Assembly, posted ironically on social
media:
"She declares unity and
equality with Naturals. She reminds them she can fly and they can't."
Suddenly I
regretted changing the channel. The Lux Network was the biggest media station in town, and it was pure, unfiltered bias. It loved to pile-on Zamira, as it did anyone who was colorful and outspoken. I turned
down the volume.
What was
left was the quietness of the vast house. And the aloneness trickled in.
Had Summer
tried to contact me? Maybe she was embarrassed about what happened – I sure
was. And something told me I wouldn’t be resitting the assignment. It was
painful to think I might not have a place at the Academy anymore, but even more
painful that I might not have a partner anymore.
Most
lifelong Super partnerships were forged at the Academy, and graduates tended to
melt back into society, pretending to be Natural. Almost every Super pretended to be Natural. It then became extra difficult
to seek out other Supers, go on some assignments together, see if you were
compatible. And for someone like me, who wasn’t even a Super, it would be
practically impossible to convince a Super to accept me as an equal partner, or
even something marginally less.
While I
sunk into a meditative stupor, the door swept open with a cool fan of air, and
then was quietly shut. In a few bounds a humungous shape descended on the room.
Still in a mental fog, I automatically thought Brandon must have returned.
Not
Brandon. It was a girl.
I went into
alert mode. The house was no longer a secure space. It had become dangerous
territory. Someone else’s territory.
I jumped to
my feet, eyes bouncing around the room, from object to object, trying to find
an escape. My nerves were still elevated from the shock and I wasn’t thinking
clearly. Being seen by strangers at diminutive size was still new and
terrifying and embarrassing.
The girl
turned her back as she moved to the kitchen area.
Seizing my
chance, I ran to the edge of the table. My brain was still in ‘normal size’
mode, thinking the distance from the table to the floor couldn’t be that high.
Now, a
choice: Either take a flying leap onto the corner of the rug, to soften my
drop, or slide down the table leg, or drop onto a seat, and then drop again
onto the floor.
But I was
already on hands and knees, dropping my legs out over the edge, trying to hug
them around the table leg. My legs slipped and then I was falling.
“Oh fuck!”
I yelled.
The landing
was hard and booted the air out of my chest.
The kitchen
went quiet. She must have heard me.
I lay on my
back with the light too bright in my eyes. My ears rung and the floor was
tremoring rhythmically into my spine like a truck was passing by. Then the
light was shaded over by the girl’s silhouette. She was looking right at me.
“Steve…?”
she said. Her voice was too loud, just like everyone else’s. A primal instinct
in my brain was still commanding me to run, but with my whole body twanging, I
stayed put.
Suddenly
the air seeped back into my lungs and my muscles were sharp again. I snapped up
and sprinted over the floor, and then commando crawled under the sofa.
“Uh, okay,”
the girl said. Surprisingly, she was not surprised. In fact, she looked
completely unimpressed. “What are you doing?” Her voice seemed to circle the
ceiling, and shiver through the sofa, and run through the floor, like a
surround sound speaker system.
Only her
sneakers were visible; platform sneakers. As if she needed extra platform. The
treads were white, the very bottom faintly grayed by dirt. The sneakers paced
along the floor, only to be kicked off and shunted to the side, in a gesture
that turned each shoe into a lethal missile if one had hit me. Now, unfortunately,
traces of sweat and worn shoe odor floated in under the couch.
Now, a pair
of socked feet approached the sofa, and slowly the rest of her came into view;
first her hands, stabilizing against the ground, and then as she got down onto
her stomach.
The sight
of her brought a knot in my stomach. Dark liquid eyes staring out from beneath
heavy lashes, wavy brunette hair spilling down her shoulders. She had
expressive looks, the type that transparently showed her emotions.
And she was
attractive. Big fucking problem.
I found
myself being studied by her big expressive eyes as if she was trying to figure
out what species I was. It was almost as if she had trouble figuring out the
reason for my outburst of terror.
Simple:
her.
“You want
to come out?” she said.
“How did
you get in here?” I said in a tiny voice, staring out at her in wonder.
In return,
she gave me a very easy smile that made me feel as exposed to her as if she’d
lifted the sofa clean off my body. Maybe she was just trying to be friendly but
body language on the giant scale was so captivating, and oppressively intimate,
it was almost painfully self-conscious. I didn’t feel like I was being looked
at, but looked into, examined,
mentally weighed and measured. In one look, the girl got a greater eyeful of me
than I her, and as with Zamira, I got the sense she could capture my entire
being in one evaluative visual sweep. She was so big and blown up, and I was
fully in the spotlight of her attention, with no way of easily getting myself
out from under that spotlight. But less a spotlight, more like a microscope.
“Well,” she replied, bringing the volume of her voice down to match mine, “…I live here.”
Past her
head her body sprawled out with amazing breadth, not ‘fat’ but a very sensual,
sexy kind of ‘cuddly’, widest at her jugs and hips. Her chest alone seemed a
hazard, if one of those big puppers sunk on me, they were capable of easily
squooshing me. I felt much smaller and tighter just trying to wrap my eyes
around her magnificent girth.
“Did you do
this so that we can’t spy on you anymore?” she joked, nodding at my diminutive
size. “Cause you’re a lot harder to see now.”
“You spy on
me?” I said, prickled.
Her
response was only a slight, incriminating smile. Then she murmured:
“You can
come out, I’m not going to hurt you.”
Her batting
lashes and was sending a warm glow into the pit of my stomach. Feeling kind of
stupid, I began to pull myself towards the edge of the sofa and stood. She
moved back and rose to her knees.
“Welcome to
our house, I guess,” she giggled. “I’m so unfair because I already know you a
bit, Steve,” she went on, “and you don’t know me at all.”
Her folded
thighs were boulderously large and seeming to burst out of the skin tight
pants. It was painfully awkward that my eyeline seemed to hover around her
hips. I forced my head up to meet her face. The lights haloing her head seemed
too bright and I was looking at her hips again, and then the ground. My
forehead was sweating.
“Your dad’s
Brandon,” I deduced aloud.
“You little
Einstein, you got it!” she enthused, sarcastically. “I’m Vittoria.”
“Vittoria
Vega,” I repeated. “You could be a Super with that name.” I said it before I
could help myself, and she rolled her eyes, making me feel lame immediately. The
traditional Super naming conventions – leaning to the fantastical or
alliterative – were getting out of vogue these days, like calling your kid your
name and tacking on ‘Jr.’
She brushed
it off.
“I like Tori…it’s
shorter.” She poked me in the chest really fast, as if to see if she could get
away with it, “Like you.”
End Notes:
Ankylorhiza
is pronounced Ank-eye-lor-eye-zah
Chapter 5: Night Watch by Zerda
With her
warmth, dramatic flair, and overblown proportions Tori was like a curvy modern Disney
princess giantess. Looking up at her, it felt like my larynx was in a vice. My
voice was trapped. It would have been nice to meet her on any other day than
the most humiliating day of my life.
I managed
to get out:
“I think I
need to go home and rest.”
She laughed
as if this was a joke. My eyes
dropped to the floor, and I twisted my hands. Realizing I
was serious, she intook a sharp breath.
“My dad
will kill me if he thinks I lost you!”
“I’m sure
he won’t. I can take care of myself.” I resented being equated to a belonging
that needed to be looked after. But just thinking this, I realized I couldn’t
use the toilet.
She got
over it quickly.
“Suit
yourself, you rebel.”
Before I
could react, her hand snatched around my waist and hefted me into the air. I
yelled in surprise, even as the warm inside of her palm felt so good on my
naked body. She rose from the carpet and went to the door.
Her thumb
was on my chest and it was really big, feeling more like a foot resting there. She
had black painted nails, but the polish was starting to chip, like streaked
obsidian. Her other fingers were wrapped around my side, hugging me from every
angle, but for a little extra grip, the tip of her pinky had hooked behind my
butt and rested between my legs. The pressure against my sack sent shivers down
my spine.
I sensed her
gaze on me, but when I glanced up, she was scanning the night sky.
“So…” she
squeezed me nervously without realizing, “…what happened out there?”
All I could
think was the pink beams, the silent electric snap of the lasers in my ears,
and the smoky copper tinge of blood in my nostrils. The phantom smell was so
strong I sneezed.
Tori
giggled and bopped me on the nose.
“Nothing.” I said this a little too quickly. There was a
beat of silence, before I added: “I mean, nothing happened because Zamira Venus
got in and shut everything down pretty fast.”
“Superstar.”
She said this in a dismissive, weirdly ironic way. “She just left you like
this? I mean, she couldn’t take you to a shrinking doctor?”
Back before
I’d enrolled in the Academy, I’d been this naïve about power reversal, too.
Supers were policed by a different system than we were. An invisible system
with its own rules, and its own invisible lawkeepers. Sometimes Supers
protested it, mostly they obeyed it. Or else.
“You need
an active Increaser,” I explained. “‘Active’ is the hard part. There’s this
thing about power use… like if you stripped naked and walked down the street.
You might not be hurting anyone – maybe you even have a good excuse why you’re
doing it – but you’re going to attract the police for causing needless alarm.
Same for Supers but ten times worse. They attract the Hypers from Foundation and Paradox; the Super
police, and that’s…really bad.”
“Yeah, well,
it’s also royally effed-up. If it meant you grew again, I would strip naked for
you in a heartbeat.”
I didn’t
reply. All of a sudden she seemed twice as big.
She gave an
unapologetic laugh.
“Okay, calm
down,” she said quickly, “I know what I said.” She shook her head as if I was the one who said something risqué, but she was blushing. “Anyway,
can’t they just explain to the Super police they were trying to help you?”
“It’s complicated,”
I replied. “There’s a whole legal and licensing thing with power use.”
“What is a Hyper
anyway?”
“A Meta Super. Shadow people.” I shrugged.
“I don’t know, exactly, I’ve never seen one. But we know they’re out there.”
“Whoa.
Deep.” The curiosity had left her voice. “I saw her today, too, you know.”
“Zamira?”
“Zamiraah, darling,” she said in a fake Mid-Atlantic accent. “Yes. Captain Venus. Why do you call
her that?”
“It’s her
name. Anyway, you saw her?”
“On a
cosmetic poster in the mall.” She laughed.
“Oh.”
"She just
loves Hammerhead doesn't she?"
"Hammerhead
loves her even more, and she just gives it back."
"Still
waiting to see it on the big Welcome sign when you drive in: Hammerhead,
officially adopted by Captain Venus."
I didn’t
laugh. The word ‘adopted’ brought a flash of memory: being scooped up a giant
hand with polished crystalline nails. The silence deepened. Tori could tell I
was uncomfortable now.
Then we were at
my front door. It might as well be a towering wall to me, since I couldn’t use
the handle. Tori tried the front handle but it was locked.
“Check the
gargoyle,” I said. There was a small gargoyle statue in the front yard, and the
spare key was kept underneath, buried shallowly in the soil.
Tori dug it
out and unlocked the door and switched the foyer light on. Then she hesitated
on the doorstep, holding me.
“Nice
house,” she said, pretending to admire the place. It seemed to dawn on her how
big things must be compared to me. “You live alone, right? What are you, uh, doing
for the rest of the night, Mr Rockwell?”
Coming from
such an unsubtly dramatic personality, her attempt to sound casual was such a
fail it made me laugh out loud.
“Settling
in,” I said. “I just need some privacy.”
“I
think…you could still be in shock,” she babbled. “I mean, what if? Maybe you
shouldn’t be alone.”
She had a
point, but I didn’t want to admit it. Particularly as part of the shock was
from her boob being so close to my head, and dominating it in size.
“Goodnight,
Tori.”
“That’s it,
huh,” she sounded spurned and didn’t hide it. She very clearly wore her heart
on her sleeve.
“Look, it’s
just…Your dad should have warned you, I’m pretty boring.”
“Ya-uuhh,
obviously,” she scoffed, gently putting me down, and my bare feet planted on
the bare, cold tiles. “See ya.”
Awkwardly, I disappeared into the house. With the
giant forms of furniture parked around, walking through the house was like
walking through a yard of Mack trucks in the dark. I couldn’t believe I was
supposed to live here. The shadowy
floor stretched on and on, until I crept into my study.
“Open SciLab,”
I called out.
An
automated voice played out: “Denied.”
Frowning, I
repeated.
“The Lab!”
“Denied.”
“What’s
wrong?” I said. “Diagnostic.”
The AI voice,
‘Blue Sky’ replied:
“Input does
not match authorized copy.”
But my voice was the authorized copy; if I
couldn’t get in, no one could! I puzzled over this for a second before reaching
the unhappy realization. Being shrunk must have changed the sound of my voice,
and the program didn’t recognize it anymore. Like everything else, my vocal
chords had been reduced, so it must have been higher, or lighter, or softer.
Tori had
blushed and fluttered earlier, while Zamira had picked me up and kissed me. It
was all starting to make mortifying sense. My voice must have sounded cute.
Lucky I had
a failsafe in case I got locked out somehow. But I always imagined this would
be due to a glitch with the AI, not me.
“Soon comes
Mr Night,” I said. This was the ‘master key’ password phrase.
A wall
panel slid away to reveal a doorway down stairs into a basement room. The
lights automatically flicked on as I began to hop down each step, trying to
marvel at the depth of each single stair, not even thinking how I might get
back up again.
Each small
drop lower it got slightly colder, until I was at the bottom, and staring up
hopelessly at my work desk and PC, my ‘home security’ workshop.
“PC on,” I
commanded, and the PC monitor flashed into life. “Run intel database. Update on
Captain Zamira Venus media presence.”
Blue Sky
responded:
“Matrix
probe activated. Rebuilding knowledge cache. Synthesizing results. Outcome:
Remaining discrepancies.”
“List them,”
I said.
“Virtual
interrogation report: A scan of most recent news-based interactions of subject,
ZAMIRA VENUS, finds irregularities in oculomotor activity and speech patterns.
Does User wish to be provided analysis log?”
Blue Sky
was suggesting Zamira had been dishonest on recent news media. The ‘analysis
log’ recorded every little facial muscle twitch, pupil dilation, and a waveform
tracking odd jumps in vocal pitch, and breathlessness, along with the AI’s percentage estimates of falsity. Usually
I scanned this, but right now, for once, I really didn’t feel like seeing
Zamira’s face blown up on the monitor. Particularly not with Blue Sky politely telling
me she might be a big, flying liar.
Everyone
kept saying things about her behind her back, and I’d always stood up for her.
Was I the idiot here?
“No. Pend
for approval,” I said, deciding to make manual updates of the file I kept on
her. “New entry under powers: Beamer.
Confirmed. Painter. Unconfirmed—”
I stopped.
What about
the way Zamira had sped out of the warehouse room?...Well, what about it? If
she was a Soarer she was merely using a trick known to every other Soarer above
age 5, combining forward flight propulsion with running to make it look like
she could run super fast.
Except she wasn’t every other Soarer. Tonight had
made that clear.
I went on:
“—Racer. Unconfirmed.”
A Super who
could race and fly and beam and…? – and what else? Even Blue
Sky implicitly agreed; this was getting ludicrous. It said:
“New
entries under power: denied.”
It only let
the power section contain a single entry, but if my observation said otherwise,
it was the program which had to change.
“Override it,”
I commanded. And then, added hastily: “For the Venus file.”
“Overridden.
Receiving inbound call. Connecting—”
“No calls!”
I wailed. The last thing I felt like right now was chatting on the phone to
someone. I was standing on the floor below the desk, and my PC camera couldn’t
even pick me up.
The monitor
flicked over to a face cam view of the caller, a guy with metal studs in his
lip and eyebrow, my friend Tripp.
He was a Waver; he could manipulate the
electromagnetic spectrum. But his power gave him seizures and he had to drop
out of the Academy. He was obsessed with ‘Fits’ (Super slang for Cybernetics)
and had invented Blue Sky, then something weird happened since he dropped out
of Paragon and started working at the infra-news station, Night Watch, under
boss and editorial director, Miles Matheson (the Zamira critic). Tripp became a
conspiracy nut. He decided he didn’t like Cybernetics anymore, and Miles
apparently had no objection to Tripp clouding the waves with half-ranting
accusations of Fits being ‘bot boxes’ installed into Supers. I saved Blue Sky from
almost being permanently disabled by Tripp, and ‘adopted’ it for use myself.
From the
cam, it looked like he was in his home. His voice crackled in:
“Steve, are
you there?”
“Hi Tripp,”
I said, resignedly.
“Huh? Check
your cam, I’m not getting a face.”
I sighed as
he tinkered with his display.
“I’m definitely
here.”
As I
scanned the room for something to help me climb up onto the desk, he suddenly turned
his head and called out:
“Honey, Lucy
shrunk my friend! But I think he’s microscopic; come over here and help me find
him!”
I shouldn’t
have been surprised he already knew what had happened, he was better connected
than I was.
Then a girl
leaped over, practically falling onto Tripp’s lap, wrapping her arms around his
neck and peered into the screen. She had golden brown hair and very red lips. Tripp
always seemed to be with a new girl every time I saw him. The girl was cute but
was one in a line of previous pretty girls that no longer seemed to stun Tripp
by looks or otherwise. And I was a little peeved at her sudden appearance; what
happened to privacy?
“Hello? Steven?”
she said, scanning all over the screen. “Can you hear me?”
“Laura is a
Projector,” Tripp explained. “We’re
seeing each other.” Obviously. He then
said to her quietly, “Can you check on him? I’ll give you a shunt to his side.”
“Oh are we
doing this?” she giggled as if he’d put on some Karaoke and asked her to duet
with him. Her voice also hushed, as if she didn’t think I could hear her. But at
small scale, my hearing was much more sensitive now.
While Tripp
concentrated on the screen, Laura sunk against him into a trance.
They were emerging.
It meant combining
their separate powers to create a new ‘emergent’ kind of power. It was very
rare; you had to find a Super with a power that complimented your own. Emerging
with a lover must have felt amazing, a highly stimulating Super version of playing
a duet, or having sex. A little sadly I realized I would never be able to
experience it, I was Natural.
“Don’t move
little buddy!” Tripp said. “Laura could find you if you were standing on a
pinhead.”
The world
turned steamy; light curled and bent in the corners of my eye. Unbearable
pressure injected throughout my body, causing a tingling numbness to creep down
my extremities. I could no longer stand, but something was holding me, keeping
me upright, like I was being gripped. Paralyzed. My head felt like it was about
to burst.
Steven, Laura’s voice was in my head, firm but calm, Thatta boy. Don’t fight me.
She sounded
like she was trying to tame a mustang. From far away, Tripp said, unhelpfully:
“She’s harmless, dude.”
I was just
about to pass out and could no longer hold the growing dimness back. I gave in,
but instead of passing out, the pressure subsided and there was a giddy
calmness.
That’s when
it got weird.
A wave of
sensations battered over me: shock, then relief, then a kind of warm, curious
friendliness. These weren’t my feelings, they were hers. The feelings morphed
seamlessly into a cavalcade of rapid-fire thoughts:
My God so cute he’s a doll oh I just want to
pick him up and squeeze him and oooh okay calm down—
The
sensations evaporated and the world was clear and sharp again.
On the
monitor, Laura was out of her trance. It was strange to see her on the screen
again and remember she hadn’t actually been in the room with me.
Of course
Laura had to be weird, I thought ruefully, she was Tripp’s girlfriend. So many weird things had happened to me today it was
starting to all wash together and my brain was accepting it all without
question.
She laughed
and said to Tripp:
“Oh, he’s little
but he’s not microscopic!”
Tripp
groaned with relief.
“You called
me cute,” I said without thinking. I was still dizzy from her jumping inside my
head.
“You called
me cute,” she parroted mischievously.
Only, she meant it. With shock I
realized when I had read her thoughts, she must have read mine.
Laura
tilted her head into Tripp, keeping her eyes on the screen, on me, watching
thoughtfully.
“Exactly how
big are you now anyway?”
“Six inches,”
I said.
“Your height, Steven,” she reiterated, giving me
a quick wink that Tripp did not see. Ever the flirt it seemed. “Be honest.”
Rather than
argue, I decided to show them directly. First, I had to climb up my desk, using
the drawer handles as hand-holds. This was easier than expected; by standing on
one handle I could pull myself up onto the next one. Finally, the monitor
showed their faces in one window, and a twin window showed me, utterly dwarfed,
standing on the desk like an action figure, red faced and panting.
They both
stared with their mouths open. I was the first real ‘reductee’ they’d ever
seen.
“You met
Captain Venus looking like that?” Tripp burst out. “You’re smaller than a shoe,
man!”
I stood
right on the edge of the desk to keep them both in view.
“And you
know how tall her boots are," I said.
At this, Tripp
was reduced as well, to laughter, while Laura buried her face in his neck and
giggled sympathetically.
He groaned
as if the laughter was painful, and said:
“That is so
awkward, dude!”
Laura said:
“That is so
cute!” She leaned forward until her
profile on screen blocked out most of Tripp’s, and her face was bigger than
ever – but only a taste of how big she actually was. “Steven...creep in a little. I
wanna see your face better...please?” her brows drew in ”—wait, are you
wearing a skirt?”
Tripp
grabbed her shoulders and eased her back.
“Okay, babe, enough. Last thing he needs right now is for you to
flirt with him. He’s smaller than your tit.”
His sleazy
tone made it clear the two of them were past the honeymoon phase.
“I heard
about your exam glitch,” he said seriously. “So the flying fire truck Shuf!fed in, and then…? The reports are
saying she neutralized a Reconstructor.”
My mind
raced. Tripp might have been younger than me, but he was smarter than he acted.
It wouldn’t be unlike him to ask a deceptively simple question while already
knowing the answer, like a good police interrogator.
“It all
happened in a split second,” I said.
“So what
did you see?”
My brow
scrunched up.
"Look
at my point of view!” I gestured at myself in a self-explanatory way. “I was
hoping you’d know more.”
“My theory?”
He said. “She's stashing a whole black-market of illegal powers.”
One of Laura’s
eyebrows rose, and she tugged her hair self-consciously as if suddenly
embarrassed to find herself sitting on his lap.
“Tripp, even
for you, that’s insane.”
“Eh, you’re
right,” Tripp reconsidered. “Not multiple powers. Fits. She’s a fembot!”
“I’m with
Laura,” I said. “You’re crazy.”
"She's
a fembot. And one day we're going to tear her face off and show the world
what's underneath: a metal skull with glowing red eyes."
Glowing red
eyes. Smoky smell. Copper tang of blood.
I uneasily swept the thoughts out of my head.
“I just
remembered,” Laura said suddenly. “She once asked me to be her partner. I said
no.”
“What?” I
said.
“Well, she
was novice and, also, I thought she was trying to ask me out.” She looked
between Tripp and the monitor, at me.
“Honey, you’re novice,” said Tripp. “You’ve
never not been novice. You dropped
out of Paragon after one week.”
“Zamira
never even went to Paragon,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t
know who she was back then!” Laura said: “It was before she
started dating Ben Flint.”
“Superblazar,”
I said.
“Total
power couple,” Laura nodded and then added, somewhat acidly. “Oh, except now they hate each other.”
Tripp shook
his head.
“Enough
about them. Right now, something more urgent is going on: Miles is talking a
deal with Lux Corp to buy us. Night
Watch is going to become a subsidiary of Lux.”
“What’s the
problem?” I volunteered. “You might get a budget increase.”
“Well,
there’s a rumor the Andromedas are planning a big takeover of Lux.”
The ‘Andromedas’
were the major shareholders of the biotech RightFit,
which produced tech fittings and implants for Supers, comprising
dad-and-daughter-duo CEO, Aaron Andromeda, and socialite, Alexandria Andromeda.
Tripp
emphasized:
“If they
get a hold of us, we’ll become a press shill for RightFit and then we can’t report anything critical about Cybernetics.”
“Okay then,”
I said. He must have heard the disinterest in my voice. On one hand I was for
freedom of the press, too, but Tripp’s anti-Fit position stretched the
‘freedom’ to breaking point. Fits rehabilitated disabled Supers; it was tone-deaf
politics to question the Fit business motive. Not to mention the aspect the mainstream
press so loved, the poignant irony that the Andromedas weren’t even Supers, they
were both Naturals. It was like a modern day, fairytale Super-Natural alliance.
What Zamira meant when she said ‘one people, one power’, the Andromedas were doing, real time.
“There’s going
to be a party,” Tripp said. “Alex’s 23rd birthday at the Grand
Cheval Hotel. One of our reporters is allowed in to write a gossip column piece, but
he can’t make it. Now I’ve got a better idea.”
“What?”
“Well, I’m
thinking you could go instead, find out if the rumor is true.”
“Me?”
“You could
pretend to be our reporter. No one knows what he’s supposed to look like.”
Tripp chose
not to mention the obvious, so I finally said:
“I’m tiny.”
His eyes fixed on me knowingly. The idea was expanding in his mind now.
"Exactly. Do you
have a girlfriend, Steve?”
“No, why?”
“Then think
of all those bored, rich girls looking for a distraction.”
“Wait, how
would I get in?”
“Catch a
cab to the building and I’ll get a contact to meet you.”
I thought
about it. A billionaire’s birthday party. A real undercover job. Even if I didn’t agree with Tripp’s
position, it could be interesting, and potentially supply a truckload of insider intel I could feed to Blue Sky. Maybe it would help the AI clean up some of those outstanding 'discrepancies' in its records.
Laura
leaned forward to see me better.
“You really
don’t have a girlfriend, Steve?” she pondered aloud.
I stared
back at her, nonplussed.
“Yeah...I
don’t.”
Her eyes
narrowed.
“Then who’s
that girl in the room with you?”
“What?”
On my camera
window, there was a figure coming down the stairway.
“Steve?” It
was Tori. “Dad said – whoa, what is that—?”
“Blue Sky, disconnect!”
I said. “Security protocol!”
I turned
but forgot I was standing right on the edge of the table. Suddenly there was no
tabletop anymore, just air, racing all around my body—
Chapter 6: Samira Rockwell by Zerda
Author's Notes:
I just found out there’s a character called ‘Victoria (Tori) Vega’ on a TV show called
‘Victorious’. In case of any confusion, the character is not related in any way, or meant as reference or homage, etc.
The ceiling
light was like a bright sun.
I shut my
eyes again.
My head was
gently tipped back for something to try and wedge into my mouth. Cool liquid
poured down my throat, tanging with electrolytes. When my stomach started to fill, I coughed and
shook my head, and the liquid accidentally dribbled down onto my chest, quickly
covered and wiped away with a tissue. I relaxed.
Warmth and
light crept in under my eyelashes. It wasn’t the basement, or my house anymore.
On the opposite wall, between the blind slats over the window, it was still
dark. The window was a fraction open and the low buzz and hum of passing cars
crept in. I dropped my head back, trying to not imagine how big cars
were compared to me.
Something
gave me a gentle prod. I curled in. The air resonated with Brandon’s voice,
only a mutter, but with cinematic vibration:
“Where is
that girl? She dump you on your door step?”
I was
picked up and carried through the house. It was familiar but as overwhelmingly
vast as before; like a basilica. A wood panelled floor that expanded out like a
football field; white walls that rose to the heavens. Not to mention ogre-sized
furniture: immense chairs that I had no hope of climbing up to sit on; a coffee
table big enough to house an entire tea party; dining table that I could have
comfortably sprinted across; a potted bamboo houseplant that looked like it
belonged in a pine forest.
But my
house was no smaller, I reminded myself.
It was
Brandon’s steady stride took me past more rooms and corridors until I found
myself looking at a white panelled door that opened to reveal a bedroom,
femininely styled, in pastel colours.
Below, smoky carpet stretched in every direction, half
covered by a shag rug that was lime green, imitating grass. Against one wall a
white wooden desk like a cliff-face; even the handles of the desk drawers
seemed to resemble the hand-holds of a bouldering wall. The desk held an array
of hyper-size stationary straight out of a novelty gift store. It was strewn
with crumpled gum papers the size of scrunched A4 paper. The back panel of the
desk housed a row of books as tall as doors. There was also a corkboard tacked
with study-related memos and a couple of photos. Beside the desk was a small plastic flip-top
trash can.
The green
shag stopped at a swimming pool sized bed, showing up the faint dents from
knees, legs, palms or a butt, like Tyrannosaurus footprints compared to me.
It took a
while to take in the surroundings. It was obviously Tori’s room.
I slowed
as I drifted through the room, scrolling over the shag rug, passing the bed,
before being lowered onto a stretch of grey carpet with a small thud that
jumped up through the soles of my feet like a shudder.
Now Brandon’s
pant legs utterly dwarfed me.
“Tor?”
Brandon called out.
A pause.
Then heavy
padding racing up the hallway. A tall, shapely figure appeared in the doorway
and stormed into the room like a restless pony. From my perspective, two bare
legs flashed past, casting their shadows long over my head.
“Dad!” Tori
groaned. “Get out of my room! Now!”
Her
bellowing assaulted my tiny sensitive ear drums. Watching her feet rage over
the carpet, I drew my body in tight.
Her figure passed us in a flash, going straight for her bed,
where a book – a diary – was open on the quilt. She snatched it up and slid it
under her pillow.
“That’s no way to address me, young lady,” came Brandon’s
taciturn reply.
The girl’s bare feet stood evenly spaced apart, black
glossed toenails digging stubbornly into the carpet. I couldn’t see her arms,
but I could imagine they were folded.
“Why you home so early?” she sniffed.
“And she calls this ‘early’. Teenager. The case was transferred. Patrol wrapped. So, no trouble
back here?”
Tori gave the singsong reply:
“How would I know? Juuust in the bather-room straight-en-ing
my haaaair…”
“You know what I call that, kiddo?” He nodded at her. “Arrow
straight hair.”
“Dad, duh, I know that,” the younger girl drawled, giving
her tresses a disdainful flick. “I want wavy hair.”
“Well, I’m not an expert but as your sole parent I have to
know a couple things outside my expert zone: don’t you use a curling iron for
that?”
“I want wavy hair
not curly hair. Like really really
slightly wavy. Like…messy.”
“Go to sleep and in eight hours, I give my word, you will
wake up with your dream hair.”
“Sexy
messy, not gross messy. Daddy, just stop. You will never understand that this beautaaayyy
does not happen by magic.”
“Why do you
need to style yourself up so close to midnight, Cinderella? You weren’t talking
to Prince Charming on the phone when you should be studying?”
“No, dad,
of course not, and news flash: the only Princes at my school are all Princes of
stupid and it’s none of your business anyway.”
“Young
lady,” Brandon said sternly, “enough of that tone for tonight. I’m going to
shower. Finish up in the bathroom, and then serious dad-to-daughter time.”
“Okay,” the
girl sighed, and skipped out of the bedroom again without so much as a look in
my direction. As she’d pranced back and forth over the carpet she hadn’t even
seen me. Was I that small? I blushed and felt my chest tighten and sink in.
Brandon
shuffled towards the door after her. He stopped in the doorway and glanced at
me.
“Take five,
Hero guy. Or a nap if you want. I get it.”
The bedroom
light flicked off as he left.
Motionless in the dark, I heard the steady pounding of his
shoes recede back down the hallway. Meanwhile, the sound of a door thumping
shut as Tori must have secluded herself in the bathroom again.
Now I was alone in the dark in the vast bedroom, and it was
very quiet. The low murmur of the TV floated in from the living room, trembling
my eardrums more than producing noise, like audio leakage when standing just outside
the cinema after the film has started. The murmuring drone of deep, grainy TV voices
was soothing…why did characters always murmur their dialogue in tense dramas…?
….
Brandon’s voice came down the hallway:
“—Careful, Tor. Focus on your studies. And then…” his voice became a hesitant shrug,
“eh…maybe you wouldn’t be worrying over who to take to senior prom.”
My head
jumped up off my chest and my eyes snapped open. I was sitting with my back
against the wall. Still dark, still surrounded by a teenage girl’s shadow-draped
lair, a street-sized landscape populated by furniture-shaped buildings. I was
like a discarded doll. Maybe when I awoke in Lucy’s dollhouse, on some level I
never really left it. The thought that I’d been turned into a doll seized me so
completely I pinched myself to remember I was a person.
The
conversation was still playing quietly, blissfully removed from my plight:
“I’m not worrying,” Tori sounded mortified.
“There’s a
good kid out there who will go with you. We just need to find him and borrow
him for one night.”
“Sappy, dad,” she said flatly. “Sooo not talking about this right now.”
A chair
squeaked and then the sound of footsteps plodding and swishing over the floor,
getting louder as they cut a rapid path to the room.
The door
creaked, the bedroom suddenly ablaze with light. I blinked rapidly and drew my
legs up as a great long shadow dropped over the floor as the girl must
have stepped closer, cooling me slightly, or at least my skin broke out with
tiny bumps.
A big pair of fluffy white bunny slippers faced me.
“Huh?” Tori
exclaimed. And then let out a laugh. “Oh, just you. Crazy, I forgot how tiny
you are.”
The floor
creaked as I got sight of her shapely ankles bowing in front of me, her long
legs bending in two as she crouched down. She was now wearing nothing but a pyjama
tank top, panties and the bunny slippers.
Her curiosity
peaked, she peered into my face. At least she didn’t seem upset, but somehow her
interest in me was demeaning. If I was normal sized surely she would be horrified
to find me in here without permission. It was like I was a kitten that had
stumbled in here by accident.
“So …” she
said casually, sliding her pointer under my chin to tilt my face up at hers “…why
are you in my bedroom again?”
For an
instant my brain was jumping ahead, trying desperately to reconcile that this
was what my life looked like now. Being toyed with by the casually dominating
curiosity of a teenage girl.
The floor
trembled with close footsteps as Brandon emerged into the bedroom, stopping and
inclining his head down at me. Tori glanced as he entered, keeping her
fingertip poised under my head. My stomach curled with embarrassment.
“Why don’t
I give you two a proper introduction?” he said, reaching past her.
Before I
could react, his enormous hand thrust at me. My back instinctively pressed
against the wall before the hand was upon me, wrapping securely around my
middle, pinning my arms to my sides.
I yelped as
I was lifted off the floor, wrenched into the full view of the two of them,
under the warm lights of the expansive bedroom.
Tori jumped
to her feet.
Once again
face to face with Brandon’s teenage daughter, I felt a powerful rush of
different emotions: nervousness, indignity, fear.
I felt like
I was being presented before her, in the way a boy might ask a girl to a dance,
and wait nervously for her approval. This was ludicrous, as there was no
equality between us: I was an Academy graduate, whereas she was still high
school age. Not to mention our outrageous size disparity. In that moment, I had
less in common with a guy propositioning a girl for a dance, than I did a guy
propositioned as sacrifice for the giant King Kong.
“Dad!” she
shrieked. “Why do you keep doing this! Why do you keep barging into my room!”
“Tor,
listen. It’s been a tiring day. Can we just do the happy family thing tonight?”
He went to sweep his arms around her.
“Okay, dad.”
The blood drained
out of my face as the girl’s giant figure expanded at me like an oncoming
truck. I was a hair’s breadth from being crushed between the two enclosing
bodies, before Brandon smartly swung me out of the way, bringing his arm up and
around the great hump of his daughter’s bare shoulder.
Then my
face became tangled in the dark, downy curtain of hair flowing down her back,
and Brandon adjusted his grip around my torso, pressing into her upper spine. I
tried not to move in order not to become even more tangled, while doing my best
not to inhale hair strands. The thick strands oozed with the aroma of whatever
fruity shampoo the girl had recently used.
The two of
them pulled back again and I was returned to my position suspended in front of Brandon’s
chest. He trapped me on one side, and she faced me on the other, and combined
their focus was a laser beam on me.
His voice
thrummed:
“The little
guy here is Steve, our neighbor.”
Tori shifted
her weight from one side to the other, and pulled a face.
“Yuck. It
doesn’t suit him.”
“His name?”
“He needs a
new one. Steve is blah.”
Her eyes
narrowed in close study of my face, as if testing names in her head.
I shifted
in Brandon’s grip uneasily, but was still paralysed by its constriction, as
helpless as a doll. His fingers, curled around my back, kept my arms pressed
into my sides. Then the carpet rose up to meet me, the soft but slightly worn
and flattened fibres pressing gently under my bare feet as he placed me on the
floor. The two of them both gave me a look to check I didn’t try to run off.
Being on
the ground was even worse than being held. With the two of them towering over,
I felt vulnerable and too exposed, too afraid to move. My immediate company was
Brandon’s huge lace ups, blocking the path to the door. Tori had swished over
and dropped back onto her bed.
“Why is he
such a little ‘fraidy cat?” she said. One fluffy white rabbit was planted
firmly on the carpet, with the smooth shaven leg rising like some great
monument. The other leg lifted and crossed at the ankle. The suspended bunny
bobbed up and down. Then she pulled the slippers off and threw them across the
room.
“Play nice,”
Brandon said, putting his hands on his hips. “He’s Samira Rockwell’s kid. So
you can bring the attitude down a couple degrees.”
My mouth
dropped open. Then I remembered he would know, he was a detective.
The girl
had snatched up a nail file from her bedside table and was scraping it back and
forth against her nails somewhat boredly. Her head tilted at Brandon.
“Who’s Samira
Rockwell?”
Brandon
explained.
I never
knew my mom but I knew she loved to boat on weekends. When I was a baby she had
taken a kayak out on a remote flatwater lake. The kayak was recovered on the
shore, but there was no trace of my mother anywhere. Authorities suspected
suicide, but if so, she left no body, as if she had just become one with the
sea foam.
The story
about my mom had sobered Tori a little. Still, unimpressed by his daughter’s
stubborn air of teenage disdain, Brandon proceeded to give her a parental
lecture: study, be courteous, etc. She was leaning sideways, propping herself
on one palm. Her head nodded vaguely, but her eyes kept flicking from her dad’s
face down to me, standing at his ankle.
I missed
half of what Brandon said. Tori’s foot on the floor was pointed at me, the long
slender toes scrunching against the carpet in a slow deliberate way, barely
concealing her restless excitement. The toenails were like slabs of streaked
obsidian, and the surface of her big toe’s nail was large enough for me
to lay my head upon. Because her feet were so comparatively big, the sight of
her polished toes committing these rhythmic muscular motions was hard to drown
out. Like a kind of private performance outside her dad’s view, sent directly
to me. I stood still as a statue, as my stomach seemed to float untethered
inside my torso, and felt warmth radiating throughout my body. Feet were things
all in themselves now, and moved almost with independent will. Looking at a
pair of feet now took up my entire attention, the rest of the body – especially
someone’s face – seemed miles away.
It didn’t take long before the daughter noticed me looking
at her foot. The ghost of a smile crept over her face as she began twirling the
big toe of her lifted foot in big arcs, while wiggling the other toes as if to
entertain or distract me. The measured way she was waving her foot back and
forth, it was like she was trying to hypnotize me.
There was a growing firmness between my legs. I couldn’t
believe it. I was getting turned on by a teenage girl’s foot. This was the lowest
point in my life. Flushing madly, I forced myself to look away, anywhere else.
I gazed up, searching for Brandon’s face, somewhere way up, eclipsing the
bedroom light. I was trying to work out how to ask him to pick me up again; my
chest was starting to become tight with dread of being vulnerable on the open
bedroom floor. But caught myself. How to explain to him that the source of my
unease was his own teenage daughter?
Without warning she uncrossed her leg and extended it. Quick
as a flash, she traced the perimeter of my face with the soft swipe of her
toeprint. I got an unwelcome whiff of the natural aroma of her foot, before
jumping back, startled. The girl stifled a giggle at my expense, and crossed
her leg again.
I moved back until I was out of reach of her foot, and
forced my eyes elsewhere.
Brandon
finished his sermonizing, to his daughter’s relief.
“Enough
chat. Come out for dinner when you’re ready.” He was talking to Tori, not me. “It’s
the best kind: incredibly lazy but tasty.”
He gave me
a small salute.
“Rocky.”
His pant
legs swished by and the door shut softly, and the doorknob would require a flagpole
climb, I couldn’t open it again.
*
On the same
day Samira Rockwell had gone missing, in the small country town of Marston, a
childless farmer called Marcus Venere stepped out of his barn and looked to the
twilight sky, where the final fiery rays of sun were bleeding out to violet,
and the first stars just beginning to wink into sight.
He was
superstitious and used astral phenomenon to make predictions about upcoming
seasonal patterns. What appeared to be the planet Venus, a pinkish-white dot,
was in levitation just over the darkening horizon. As Marcus stared, it seemed
to expand in size, and the twinkling bloomed into a pink flare.
“Mother of
God!”
The spark
of light flickered with a white halo like a welding torch before the parallax
kicked in and the light, now dominating the night sky, bent at the ground and
impacted with dull boom like the footstep of a fairy-tale giant.
When the
farmer went over to investigate, he found a crater in the bare tilled earth,
now emitting curling tendrils of dust and smoke. In the center was a big hunk
of obsidian rock, but cut super fine. It was a very strange looking meteorite.
Coming
closer he realized it wasn’t a meteorite. It looked like some kind of black
time capsule. There was an engraving on the front, in some Latinised print like
an inscription on a stone tablet in a museum, and somehow out of place on this
futuristic space metal.
It said:
Under its
glassy dome there was a baby, with its eyes shut. As Marcus stared in
disbelief, the baby curled its toes and made grabby motions with its hands.
When he placed his hand on the glass dome, a laser flashed over his palm and
the air pressure lock disengaged and the glass shield (there was a little sound
like someone let off a soda can lid, Marcus later recalled)
The Veneres
rushed the baby to the hospital to consult a paediatrician, who confirmed the
baby was a she and completely healthy. Then the paediatrician made a small
painful cry. The baby had grabbed her finger and squeezed – very hard – and had to be plied away
with a toy before she let go.
The Veneres
never wanted kids, and the will outlined the farm would go to their nephew. But
Marcus took the baby as a superstitious augur and insisted they would raise it.
He thrust a scribbled note into the Latin-versed doctor’s hand and she
hesitantly decoded the capsule inscription from its archaic “Ancient Greek
gibberish” to English: Ibidem Samira.
It made no
more sense to the Veneres. Nevertheless, an awed, superstitiously-inclined
Marcus announced the star-sent baby’s name would be exactly as inscribed on the
capsule: Ibidem Samira.
The doctor
chuckled at what she saw as Marcus’s bumpkin ignorance, and told him that, in
her scholarly experience, ‘Ibidem’ wasn’t a proper name. Embarrassed, Marcus’s
wife, Sandra, chided her husband, and finalized the baby’s name herself.
When they
returned to the farm, some strange people from out of town had taken the
capsule away. The stablehand said they were special cops from some ‘Foundation’
but otherwise he was too spooked to say any more. So Sandra never saw the
inscription on the capsule herself, only Marcus’s scribbled recollection, in
which the Sigma was around the wrong way, and so what she ultimately wrote on
the infant’s birth certificate was Zamira Venere.
Chapter 7: Feeding time by Zerda
With
Brandon’s departure down the hallway, the house turned quiet.
I looked to
the closed bedroom door with rising dread. The door handle was located
tantalizingly some tens of feet out of my reach. And even if I could climb up
there somehow, my puny pencil-thin arms were too weak to operate it or pull the
door open.
This
morning – so, so long ago – my biggest worry had been passing the Academy
final. Now I was reduced to being thoughtlessly trapped inside a teenage girl’s
bedroom. The change was crushing.
The only
person who had the power to let me out of the room was sitting on the bed,
twirling her foot lazily. As she meditated on what her dad had just said, her
eyes wandered over and gave my unimpressive height a condescending examination.
What had
happened to the warmth, the gently mocking Mid-Atlantic accent? She looked at
me with distance greater than her stunning height, as if we'd only just met,
and even the hint of a mischievous sneer. All because I told her I didn’t want
to hang out? She had taken it to heart – deeply – and now wouldn’t let me
forget it. Lesson: never stoke the spite of a teenage girl.
I took a
deep breath, hugged my bare chest and tried to get my thoughts together. So I
couldn’t escape, I couldn’t navigate the house on my own. And if I did, I
wouldn’t get far down the street anyway.
Brandon
seemed like a nice guy, how could he do this to me? Maybe he was too nice. So
nice that he was right in his daughter’s lap. Parents could be the most blind
to their kids’ indiscretions.
Sure, I’m reduced, I thought indignantly, but I’m not lesser. I was still a person, the exact same person as
before. All my Academy training was
intact, if my height wasn’t. Still, my heart pounded in my chest from shock.
The bed
creaked as Tori shifted.
From my
vantage point on the carpet, the view made me breathless. A prodigious vision
of precocious womanhood half-reclined on the bed like a Homeric siren on the
rocks, unbearably irresistible and ominously dreadful at the same time.
The foot
that was in the air now dropped onto the carpet with a muted crash. I flinched.
She leaned forward and –her eyes on me the whole time—extended one finger to
beckon me. Her lips smacked with a kissy noise.
It wasn’t
an attempt at flirtation–not a deliberate one—but a gesture that resembled a
girl trying to win the favor of a mistrustful puppy.
But I was
smarter than a puppy to not fall for it. My feet remained rooted to the spot.
She showed
no sign of offence. But snapped to her feet suddenly, towering over me like a
stone golem.
Letting out
a thin shriek, I jolted into action, attempting to run across the carpet, with
no plan, no idea what I was doing. Under the bed was the most obvious choice,
but she stood between me and the bed.
Pushing on
madly, I found myself faced with blank walls bordering every side.
Cool air
whisked at my back. I jumped around and surrendered to the most basic instinct
left at my disposal; cowering as her grasping hand rained down and closed
around my middle—pinning my arms to my sides, as Brandon had done—and hefting
me into the air. It was not a comfortable or dignified way to be picked up.
“This time,
you stay right where you are.”
I was awash
in her warm breath that fanned against my cheeks as I was moved right up in
front of her face. It was so unexpectedly degrading my chest quivered.
“Don’t act
like you can’t understand me.” Her voice played my tiny ear drums like
timpanis. She grinned. “Sure, your brain got reduced to the size of my thumb. Doesn’t
mean you can pretend you have no idea what I’m saying!”
She pivoted
on her feet, causing the bed to rotate back into view.
“I wanna
see just how teeny you are!”
For the
next several minutes there was a fervor of inexplicable activity as she went
around the room collecting various sized objects in the bedroom and gleefully
placing me or holding me against them, observing the size comparison. Anything
on hand within reach was employed as a quick measuring tool just for the fun of
it.
She stood
me upon the wood surface of her titanic desk, snatching up a pencil and holding
it upright against my side. One fingertip rested squarely on my forehead,
keeping my head affixed to the pencil. Embarrassingly, the sharpened lead point
went over my head. It was a standard 7.5 inch. I was only 6 high.
All my
strength went into peeling myself away from the stick. A hair’s breadth from my
eyes, the pencil shaft was dented with a couple of big chew marks. The
moon-shaped dents suggested teeth the size of honeydew melons. On the upside, the
way her soft lips broke out made me feel giddy inside. On the downside, her
smile was provoked by my humiliating stature. That pulled me back down to
earth.
Next, she
stacked me up against her smartphone. This comparison didn’t offer much more
than the pencil, being that her smartphone was pencil-length, but the width of
the flat screened phone dwarfed my width at least twice fold.
Barely
having time to process the phone, she then fished out an object from the
wastepaper basket on her desk. An eaten apple core, 4 inches tall. It must have
been eaten a while ago, the remaining chunks of apple pulp were stained brown.
Without hesitation she pressed me up against it. I cringed at the stale apple
aroma, and the feeling of the dry scratchy leftover pulp poking my skin.
Seeing the chunks that had been ripped out of the apple gave me appreciation of
the frightening power of the girl’s jaw.
You know my friend’s dad eats the core,” Tori said casually,
either to me or maybe no one. “How weird is that?”
I wish she
hadn’t said that. It was too visceral to imagine. People could fit cores in
their mouths. And that meant people could fit me in their mouths, at least my
head and chest. Nausea flashed through my system. Every person on the planet
had an entire moist cave inside their head that could function as a prison for
me. I felt like the guy in the Ray Bradbury story who is terrified to realize
his body contains its own Halloween decoration.
With a jolt
of urgency, I wrestled against her grip vainly. She just clenched her hand more
firmly around my middle.
“You can’t
fight me with those widdle chicken wings,” she said, giving my bicep a couple
of little squeezes between her pointer and thumb.
There were
more demeaning size comparisons. She lay me on
my back on a piece of paper and – keeping my chest pushed down with her
fingertips, ran a pen closely around my outline, which tickled a little.
She was Natural, and people didn’t just get reduced
everyday. I guess to her I was like some little fairy person and she was still
caught up in the giddy whirl of disbelief that I existed. I was like some
astonishing magic trick and her curiosity was anchored on me, trying to figure
out how I worked.
But the
reduction was still so fresh and bizarre for me, it was like salt in the wound,
rubbing in my face how diminished I was compared to normal people. I wasn’t
really a ‘Natural’ anymore, nor a ‘Super’, but something in between, what the
Academy called a class Y person. Tori probably didn’t even know what a class Y
person was, or seen one in real life. Maybe she’d never even seen a Super in
real life.
And I
didn’t like being her learning tool. She confined my waist in a pinch to shift
me on the paper. I began to struggle against her domineering hand, as the pen
tip rounding my foot and starting running up my thigh, trying to close the gap
between my legs as tightly as possible. I felt the pen delicately shape my
groin onto the paper.
Done with
sizing me up, she dropped back into a sitting position on her bed. Dumping me
on her lap, she me onto my back so I was looking straight up at her enormous
face. Her eyes danced over my form, keeping me transfixed. It seemed like she’d
had a change of heart and was keen to win me over again.
Then Brandon’s
muffled voice trailed through the house.
“Tor!” he
called out. “Dinner.”
“Oh!” she
jumped to her feet, and put me back down on the bed. “Back real soon!”
She disappeared out the door, closing it softly behind her,
leaving the light on, and me engulfed in her bedroom.
For a little while I paced around on the surface of Bianca’s
bed. My weight was so negligible, the soft quilt barely depressed under my tiny
feet. Then I dropped back onto the bed and lay staring up at the ceiling.
What to do now?
One thing was certain, I definitely couldn’t live in my
house on my own. Disturbingly, the Vegas seemed to have no interest in helping
me there. Or Brandon, realized what I had, he was too uncomfortable to say it
out loud.
But even if I had an idea about how to escape, I was too
tired at the moment to carry out plans. I got down into a reclined position,
propping my head up on one hand. But before long, my arm started to slacken, my
head going limp and sliding forward.
Then I pulled myself up into a cross-legged position,
grabbing my ankles. If my eyelids dropped too much, I pinched the skin of my
ankles. Still, my head began to nod…
It was difficult to tell how much time passed, as my
perception of time was interspersed with jolts of micro-sleep. I estimated half
an hour went by…and then an hour…
What was taking them so long. Maybe the girl had finished
eating dinner and now she was watching TV, or doing her schoolwork downstairs…
Then again, was I so eager for her to return? Not really; I
enjoyed the rest and peace and freedom away from the probing study of giant
penetrating eyes.
Not that I had a lot to use the spare time for. There was
nothing to do on the bed except rest, and I didn’t feel confident about trying
to climb down the side of the bed, which was over a storey tall. Even if I
managed that, where would I go? The bedroom door was shut.
I briefly considered hiding under the bed. The girl would
not easily be able to retrieve me. But what if the girl leaped on or stood on
her bed, and the frame buckled slightly, smashing down on me from above. It
freaked me out too much to try.
Plus, there might be all sorts of ways the girl could try
and get me out from under the bed. She could send a vacuum cleaner nozzle under
there and suck me out.
I resolved to stay on the bed until one of them returned.
*
Rapid footfalls thudded up to the room. I started into
awareness, uncurling myself from my lying position on the bed.
The bedroom door swung open gently, and Tori’s enormous face
peered inside. Making sure I wasn’t on the ground immediately before the door,
she then stepped inside, shutting the door again.
She was holding a small plastic tray in one hand, and
crossing the carpet, she placed it down on the ground next to the bed. Curious,
I crawled over to the edge of the bed and looked down.
The tray carried some upturned jar lids with small piles of broken
up food inside. One contained what looked like cooked mincemeat, another torn
up pieces of bread, and a third contained some thinly shredded lettuce.
Before I could react, she reached across and snatched me up;
her fingers curling under my front and the pressure of her thumb between my
shoulders. I found myself flying through the air like a little wingsuit glider
– her hand being the wingsuit – before coming to a rest, upright on the carpet
just before her feet.
“What are you waiting for?” she exclaimed, getting onto the
ground and crossing her legs. “Eat up!”
The meat looked like brown popcorn, and smelled undeniably
enticing. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch time that day. I had no idea what
time it was now, but it must have been past nine ‘o’ clock at night.
As I ate her finger brushed my hair and her sing-song rung
out above me:
“Mmmm, yummy! So good!”
But she quickly grew bored and started tugging on my hair
until my scalp began to tingle. I tried to eat faster.
Once I had finished, her pointer finger darted out at me to
poke my stomach. Refusing to be degraded again, I successfully dodged it, but
she chased me, and there was nowhere to run to. As it came for me again and
again, I vaulted over it and smacked it away. In frustration, she snatched my
hair and had me effectively locked in place by the most fragile part of my
body. The power she had over me took my breath away.
I’d started to become cagey about speaking up. That was
ironic. I was so small my voice was simply not powerful enough to get the
attention of a normal sized person, unless I yelled out, or they brought me
right up to their face or ear. Which only reinforced my helplessness. If I was
standing at ground height I had no way of communicating to anyone normally.
Tori was getting sick of my silence.
“Say something! Say ‘That was nummers. I’m just so in love
with you right now!”
“That was nummers.”
“Say it properly! The last part wasn’t my words.”
“That was nummers,” I said tonelessly, “I’m just so in love
with you right now.”
My scalp prickled and stretched as she twisted my hair with
unbearable affection as if trying to bend my head around her fingertip.
“Ouch.”
Her voice bloomed with excited volume.
“Your voice is so funny! Okay, fine. Good boy. Fine, fine,
fine.”
Triumphant, she poked my stomach to gauge how much I ate,
then, taking the tray up, left the room again.
My posture slackened in defeat. It seemed like my status in
the household was reducing faster than my height.After she left my eyelids closed for what seemed like only a
moment, but in reality must have been over half an hour. It was the weird
feeling of knowing time had passed without knowing how I knew.
The ground shook. I blinked my eyes open to see Tori’s
enormous smooth creamy feet, launching through the air towards me.
Her voice filled the room.
“Sorry I was gone so long, Rocky. But you know – ice cream
at room temperature. Once you start it doesn’t mess around waiting.”
Before I knew it, there was a twinge of pressure around my
middle and I soared into the air.
“Too bad for you; we don’t have any tiny beds! – so we have
to be creative!”
She placed me down on her bed so she could search the room
for some appropriate size bedding. Cupboards, drawers and cabinets were opened
and rummaged through, before the girl returned to the bedside. A fuzzy white
sock was in her hand. She waved it in front of my face. Seeing my proposed
bedding flap around in the air with ease made me feel dizzy.
At my look of uncertainty, she said:
“You’ll fit in this for sure.”
That was true, but it didn’t make the sock any more
appealing to sleep in. With a flicker of distaste, I noted the large gray
smudge marks – sweat stains – as well as some balding patches caused by a
combination of rubbing and sweat. By the looks of it, she had worn this sock
frequently for school athletics, and I felt offended she couldn’t offer me
something better.
“All my socks are in the laundry,” the girl shrugged
blithely. “So you gotta sleep in this one. I wore it to school today, though.”
Without hesitation her huge hand splayed out at me,
capturing me in the fist, and I was launched into the air.
She went and opened the tall sliding door near her bed,
which revealed a dark walk in closet, filled with clothes on hangers. The
bottom of the closet was lined by a row of shoes, including sandals, strappy
stilettos, chunk heels, tall leather boots, slip ons, and sneakers. Some of
them looked almost new, while others looked ratty and worn.
There was a small bare patch of carpet in the corner of the
closet, next to the first in the row of shoes: a shiny pair of stilettos which
seemed astonishingly adult for a teenage girl.
Before I could react, I was zooming forward, deep into the
closet, and placed down on the bare space in the corner, next to the stilettos.
There was a faint trace of shoe leather and sweaty feet that
hung in the air, trapped inside the insulated closet and left to fester. Maybe
the girl was so used to it she didn’t notice it, or maybe the smell didn’t
travel high up enough to reach her; if so, it was concentrated at ground level
– exactly my height. And this smell was going to accompany me all throughout
the night.
“I can’t sleep on the floor!” I raged, balling my fists.
“Guess you’re right,” she said, turning away.
To my right, a big fluffy white bunny slipper went thump on
the ground.
“This is your bed tonight,” the girl said happily, dropping the
worn white sock down next to me. “And that’s your sleeping bag.”
I looked up at her plaintively. Her towering frame was in
silhouette, filling up the entire closet opening, blocking the bedroom light,
but I could just make out that her head was tilted down.
“No!” I cried.
“This is my room, so I say so!”
“It’s gross, you just wore that slipper.”
“And you’re gonna wear it now, and all night!”
“No way!”
“Looks like I have to tuck a guy in,” she chided. “Is that
what you’re waiting for?”
Her hand surged down and ensnared me in her powerful fist. I
was lifted up out of the closet and into the bedroom light once more. The sock
opened like a mouth and began to swallow my body. She pulled the opening up to
my throat and then observed me with satisfaction. It was new sock with intact
elastic, and held around my form snugly. My arms were wrapped at my sides and I
looked a little like a mummy but with my face exposed.
She stopped and chuckled.
“Wait…” she said after a moment of consideration, “…I almost
forgot to kiss you goodnight!”
My heart sunk as her huge smiling face came into direct view
as it lowered to meet my tiny imprisoned face. Her smile ballooned into a cushy
pink pucker as she impatiently ran my face into her lips. Her hand was
scrunched around my torso and I couldn’t turn my head away before it was
handled by the buds of moist flesh, which pressed my head tight like a pair of
firm palms trying to mold clay.
There was still some ice cream coating her tongue. The tight
seal of her lips parted slightly, a mass of wet muscle budged into my face,
painting it with saliva and the melted ice cream that coated her tongue,
slightly soured from mixing with remnants of dinner.
A wild burst of arousal ran through my manhood. I breathed
deeply, trying to keep it under control, but it thickened into a steel rod. As
her hot, sticky breath rushed downward over my groin, tickling my thighs, the
proximity of her warm lips and my member was too intense to ignore.
Then her firm hands pulled my body like she was trying to
remove a sticker; with a sloppy wet smooching sound, my head unstuck from her
big lips. My sock-bound body was quickly slipped into the opening of the bunny
slipper, gulping up my body up to my head.
Then the slipper rested in the corner of the closest, with
my head poking out.
“Night, Rocky,” she called happily as she slid the closet
door closed.
In the dark, I rested my head against the back of the
slipper. The sock’s fuzzy texture surrounded my body. It was slightly moist
from perspiration. There was a faint wet squelching as my weight shifted along
the slipper’s sole.
The fumes of the closet were beginning to make me feel
dizzy, so I shut my eyes and tried to breathe through my mouth.
Chapter 8: The Billionaire's Birthday by Zerda
It was graduation
day at Paragon Academy. But no time to celebrate at the grad ceremony, I had
work to do.
I got up and
went out through my backdoor pet flap into my backyard, through the hole in the
wood fence, across the Vegas’ backyard and through the backdoor petflap into
their laundry room. Brandon had installed the pet flaps.
Tori made a
bath in a small food storage container, and put it on her desk. I bathed in it
while her shower ran in the next room. Finishing, I dried myself with a hand
towel and put on my new Paragon-issue Hero Cadet costume, sent in a regular
sized envelope. I wondered if they reduced my existing one, or had one re-made.
Across the
room, a glass front cabinet showed my reflection in it. My costume was
utilitarian, a pure white jumpsuit with black accenting, like a slim-fitting
astronaut suit, to be worn under my dinner suit.
Most cadets’
costumes weren’t very original, but every imaginable design had been done
before. Junior costumes tended to borrow designs from idolized Heroes: red like
Carnotaurus, blue like Polaris, gold like Octane 99, black like the Flying Fox,
white like Superblazar.
All male. For
some quirky reason, female cadets costumed in feminized versions inspired by
the costume of a bigger male Hero (except outright super fan favourite – and
Superblazar’s mentor—Galetrix, but she had been MIA and legally dead, for
several years now). Even Zamira’s costume (‘v2’ at least, v1 consisted of a
cutoff crop top, Adidas trackpants and a baseball cap) borrowed from
Superblazar’s red and blue racing stripes.
“I wish I
was seven again so I could play with dolls. How random, right?”
Tori’s bare
legs filled up the doorway. She was wearing a dress that pulled around her hips
and a big grin. I tugged at my close-fitting costume and self-consciously
noticed how it outlined my bulge.
Her stifled
giggles came out at the sight of me.
"You're
not supposed to laugh,” I said uneasily.
She strode
past me, nudging my stomach with her big toe on the way to her closet.
"You
are cuter than a l'il bunny! And I have the
best idea, I just—”
“He’s on a
case.” Brandon’s voice reverberated from the end of the hall. “You’re not going
with him, Tor.”
She spun
around and put her hands in the air.
“Never said
I was! I was just…going to offer him a ride…Dad, he’s a spy, this is a top
secret communication– stop listening in!”
“What part
of it is secret? You told me five seconds ago you were going to go ‘deep party’
with Steve at a Hotel. Alexandria’s birthday, right? I’m sorry, sweetie, but that’s
not happening. You were heading out with your friends tonight. Still are.”
She groaned
at the ceiling.
“I’m just going
to give Steve a ride to the Hotel. That’s it. Ya happy?”
“Jubilant.”
Tori’s huge
foot stamped in front of my face as she spun on the spot and glowered down at
me.
“Did you
tell my dad about the party? – why?!”
“Why did
you have to tell her, Steve?” Brandon lamented. “This is what happens.”
“I didn’t
tell anyone!” I cried out. “Your daughter interrogated my artificial—read files
on my pc—and compromised my plans.”
Tori rolled
her eyes.
“I did not tell my dad. Promise! I was telling
my best friend on the phone and dad overheard me! – and I only said I was going
to the Hotel for a totes bourgeoisie ball! I didn’t say why.”
“I figured it
out from there,” Brandon quietly. “Sorry, Hero guy.”
*
That evening,
Tori’s bike was idling in the driveway when I went over to their house. It
growled impatiently as she sat astride, waiting for me, her helmet on. Her
party dress was covered up under some loose pants and a leather jacket.
I walked up
to the grumbling monster sized bike, the wheels alone stretched over my head,
and was impatiently snatched up. Her nails were done and dug a little into my
diaphragm – the pincer of her fingertips always seemed to accidently find the
softest parts of my torso – but then everything went black as I was tucked into
a zippered breast pocket on the inside of her leather jacket. She kept the zip
down, exposing her cleavage and also my face, so I could look out.
The bike
vibrated into motion and her tremendous boobs jiggled against my spine as the
street scrolled by in a whoosh of cool air.
From my
house, Ankylorhiza was a twinkling pixelated grid. Across the bridge, it
engulfed us as a shifting tablet wrapped in advertising, neon lights and faint
haze.
As the
bridge and the Harbor zoomed away, we passed a cluster of powerhouse corporate
buildings: one for the news, Lux
(where news anchor Kirk worked), the R&D hub of RightFit (where Kirk’s optics were designed), the Museum of
Xeno-Archaeology, and then, for a brief instant, a modern chrome tower, the
‘Satellite Park’ or ‘SatPark’ building. On one of those floors was Zamira’s
office.
A block
down from the Hotel, Tori jumped the curb and cut the engine. As I stood on the
motorbike seat, she stripped off her jacket and pants, revealing her ‘party’
clothes, a sleek dress, plus a pair of heels from her backpack.
Still warm
and half squashed from the ample spread of Tori’s butt, the motorbike seat
gradually reformed under my feet. Then she swooped me up again, and I felt
light as a feather. I was flying like a Soarer – I just needed a giant hand to
provide the lift.
With her
hand tightly around my middle, she took the street to the Hotel. The traffic
flickered past in a stream, and then a congregation of chatter called even
before the Hotel came into view.
In pairs,
guests in suits and gowns were filtering into the tall building. Laughter
spilled out, while finely dressed people stood outside, puffing on cigarettes.
Tori stopped
to eye the Hotel. She was a high school girl and this was an adult party.
“Wow.”
A stranger
emerged from the stony portico.
“Hello,” he
said. He wore a suit. “I’m Frankie. Tripp told me you were coming. Bruno Warne,
right? Intern with the Night Watch gang.”
I repeated
the totally made up name in my head before realizing it was supposed to be my
alias.
“Yeah…” I
said. “That’s right.”
Meanwhile,
Frankie bent forward and took in my entire length against the span of his
outstretched thumb and pointer, which were pressed to my forehead and feet.
Then he chuckled and straightened again.
Frowning, I
gestured at Tori and added:
“This is—”
Frankie
interrupted me, now gazing into Tori’s eyes.
“And you are…ravishing.” He took her hand –
the hand holding me, turning me sideways – and kissed it. Her hand grew warmer
and without meaning to, her thumb rubbed my chest. She made a sound of
amusement while my insides were curled by her tightening grip.
“Georgina
Bardot,” she said.
“I – uh – ”
I stuttered. “Yes.”
Then Frankie
interlinked his arm with hers; the one holding me – I was jerked a little – and
guided us towards the entrance.
“Well, Miss
Bardot – here’s hoping you’re a ‘Miss’ anyway – for the next zero-two hours,
prepare to be dazzled. While we let Bruno do his thing.”
I pulled at
my jacket sleeve to cover my Hero costume underneath.
Frankie
glanced down at me for a fraction of a second.
“So you get
paid to attend these.” His voice sparked with the faintest envy. Then his eyes
locked onto the crowd and he was hostlike again.
“My guy,
look at all these beauties.”
He nodded
towards some girls in rhinestone chain dresses with plunging necklines, fixing
their makeup before going on in. “But –shame! – you don’t see the beauty right
in front of you.” He gave Tori another appreciative look. I narrowed my eyes.
A couple
picked him out of the crowd. He waved and then we were striding over.
“Let me
introduce you to Lux’s newest intern.
Mr Bruno Warne. A cute little picture, ain’t he?”
“They have
an…interesting hiring policy,” the
man said.
“Actually,”
I said, “I work for Night Watch.”
“A tiny
joke, Bruno,” Frankie slipped in.
“Of
course,” the man remembered aloud, “Lux want to eat up your ‘little fish’
company. And if the Andromedas have their way...Which they always do...”
My mouth
had dropped open. The man didn’t finish.
“I hear they
haven’t even arrived,” the woman said. “They’re coming from a UN
CyberFit-Rehabilitation fundraiser.”
The man
mumbled, shaking his head:
“This
thing’s going long into the night.”
The woman looked
down at me and gave me a lofty smile.
“So, Mr Warne,
you say? My, aren’t you just a tiny sweetheart.”
I forced
out:
“Nice to
meet you.”
She reached
down and unashamedly touched my face. Her fingertip trailed my hairline and
brushed my cheek. It wasn’t flirtatious but as if she was checking that I was
real, and not a talking toy. She seemed to want to say more, but the man was
already ushering her towards the building. Her hand swept down again and
quickly petted my head before they left. A pit grew in my stomach.
Inside the
Hotel it was a fusion of ancient and modern, Roman, Renaissance, and
Futuristic, domed ceilings and Venetian marbled surfaces with chandeliers, but
also glass columns and steel arches with lasered inscriptions. The Andromedas
owned the Grand Cheval and decorated it according to their own tastes, which
were postmodern.
“That
woman,” I said. “She… patted me!”
“She didn’t
exactly lie.” Tori said.
Frankie chuckled:
“The Kleines
are so wealthy they could practically buy him if they wanted.”
Past an
archway, the foyer opened into a low lit hall casually arranged with some white
clothed tables and leather sofas. Guests were still flowing in, and mostly
stood, working the room.
I felt like
I was floating around the foyer like a tiny ghost, or strapped into an on-rails
ride that was slowly taking me around the premises. Frankie greeted some more
guests, and many of them mistook Tori for his girlfriend, and me as Frankie’s
eccentric Reducer friend who liked to power-on at a party for no apparent
reason. And there were more head pats.
I listened
for names and some kind of close business association with the Andromedas. Many
weren’t even friends, but friends of friends of friends, much less business insiders.
We drifted
across the room in increments, and into a darker area, lit by tabletop candles
and LEDs projecting lava lamp patterns on the wall. A waiter passed by with a
lifted platter of glasses and snacks, and Frankie took a glass. Tori put me
down on a table to try some snacks.
“Have
anything in size for my friend?” Frankie asked.
“I’m not
hungry,” I said. “And I don’t drink. Not on a job, anyway.”
The waiter
was already gone. Frankie knocked his drink back and then bent to my head
level.
“Here on
business, Mr Warne,” he whispered just to me, “you have to go native. Do what
the Romans do. And the Romans drank wine. Over there, she’s making eyes at you.
Don’t look.”
Over the
sound of laughter, I glanced over. There was a man and two women on the sofa.
The man was chatting and flirting. Red lava light oozed behind their heads,
turning purple and then blue.
One woman
was painstakingly outlining her lips with red lipstick. Her friend, a beautiful
woman with strawberry blonde hair, had her arm comfortably along the low backrest.
In the shadows her eyes were a blur of darkened eye makeup, but – Frankie was
not mistaken – her gaze had wandered onto me. She leaned forward slightly and
then seemed unable to tear herself away.
I felt as
warm as the blushing lamp light. At normal size, I had never been looked at
like this before. It was objectifying.
And beauty was different now. Women were different. They weren’t less beautiful
but rawly, powerfully beautiful. And they could walk up to me and seize me if
they wanted.
Feeling
uneasy, I looked away.
“It’s just
your imagination.”
Frankie shook
his head. Tori was getting curious.
“What are
you guys talking about?”
When I next
looked, the strawberry blonde had vanished from her seat. I wondered if she
wanted to come over and pet my head too.
“Let’s keep
it moving,” I said anxiously, hurrying over the table to keep close to Tori.
She automatically swept a hand around me. We didn’t know each other well, but
in this entire Hotel, we only knew
each other.
Frankie’s
phone began to vibrate and he answered it. I fidgeted on the table, trying to
avoid more accidental eye contact.
Lowering
the phone on the table, he said:
“Your
editor.”
As the
phone was pushed towards me, Tripp’s voice emanated:
“Agent, this
is your handler reaching out for a status update.”
“I’m inside,”
I replied, kneeling next to the phone speaker. “No leads yet. So what now?”
“Lay low
and listen in.”
“I’m tiny,
not invisible. People have noticed me.”
He ignored
this.
“Laura said
if you have any trouble talking to people, she’ll talk for you. I’ll shunt her
down the line, but she might make you giggle and flirt.”
“I’ll handle this,” I said firmly.
“Offer
stands. Base out.”
While I was
talking, Frankie had been making eyes at Tori over my head. Taking his phone
back, he adjusted his tie and gave me a small poke in the chest.
“Don’t mind
if I steal away your lady, Brooster?”
I glowered.
“I’ve got a
job to do. So, I guess not.”
Tori gave a
snort of feigned offence.
“Come with
us, Bunny!” She reached down and wiggled my nose with her fingertip. I swatted
her hand away.
“Bruno.
Just Bruno.”
“Fine!”
Without
warning Frankie picked me up and I was floating hurriedly across the room. Then
the firm surface of a bar counter formed beneath my shoes. Frankie placed his
hand on Tori’s arm, gently steering her from the table.
“All stand
clear. Let the reporter do his job. Show ‘em a knock-out for the Pulitzer. And
I’m going to take this knock-out and show her a good time.”
They went
on past some pushed-together tables to the back of the room. I watched them.
They stepped out onto a wooden patio viewing the river, as black as the sky,
and the glimmering lights of the entire Hammerhead city strip. Tori giggled and
gripped Frankie’s arm.
Her snort
of offence had not been play-acting, I realized.
Live band
music started up from another part of the hall. With no hope of overhearing an
important conversation, I would have to talk to someone.
I sized up
the woman waiting at the bar. She wore a shimmery chain dress with a V neckline
that plunged to her navel, and boobs with almost too perfect projection, like
boxing gloves. Maybe they were Fitted.
This part
looked easy. It was just talking. People were mega-sized now, but they were
still people.
Pushing out
my chest, I launched forward, following the length of the bar and stopping at
the woman’s folded arms.
“Hi,” I
said, “I’m Bruno Warne, a reporter for Night Watch—”
Her head
dipped to take in my tiny face, and one plucked eyebrow arched.
“You are?”
“—I’m
writing a color piece on the party, featuring the Andromedas. Do you know them?”
“Another
gatecrashing reporter,” she yawned. The warm air fanned my cheek.
“Well, my
company was personally invited.”
At this, she
switched gears seamlessly.
“Tell me about
the Warnes, are they all Reducers, too? The family reunion must be hilarious.”
She reached
for her tumbler of scotch, too eagerly, and her hand accidentally swept past
me, knocking me off my feet. I got up and dusted myself off. She seemed to have
had too much to drink.
Several
more guests passed by the bar. More failed interviews and I started to realize ‘oh no, another reporter…’ was an act to
make guests sound more important than they actually were, as if reporters had
swamped them the entire night.
An
important looking man approached. I walked up to him, preparing to ask a
question. He pushed me aside with a giant palm to lean over the bar and take a
bottle.
“Heads up,
tiny.”
The woman
in the fur scarf giggled and gave my shoulder a light tap. Then something big
and fuzzy swept around my body. The woman had lassoed her fur stole around my
neck and, holding either end, started reeling me in. My shoes slid over the
polished bar surface. Her puffed up breasts were imminent.
“Mr Warne. I
might have what you’re looking for…” a smile spread slowly over her face, “…for
a price.”
“How much?”
“Guess
again.”
Her lips blossomed
into a pucker. When I didn’t reply, she smacked them.
I tried to
ease myself. At least Frankie was distracting Tori.
“Okay.”
With the
scarf holding me, she moved right in and gave me a big drunken smooch. Her
moist tongue muscle swished around my lips, determined to enter into my mouth,
but only the tip fit.
A voice called
over. The woman drew back suddenly, swishing her head. I jumped away before her
wave of hair smacked my face.
“Javier is crushing
your boyfriend!”
I was
snatched up and the party swirled by. Then my feet were dumped on wine red
cloth. A poker table stretched around me in a circle, with piles of chips like big
stacks of books. Some of the piles were taller than I was. Three hills bordered
the edge of the table, the shoulders of the three guys playing, all clean
shaven and suited, probably the kids of magnates and politicians.
One of them
laughed.
“The pot
just grew…by about six inches.”
The woman
met her boyfriend’s eye, giving me a sidewise look.
“Win him
for me.”
“Is this a
joke?” said a man with a shaved head sitting at the poker table. This was
‘Javier’. A woman stood behind him, massaging his shoulders. “If not, I’m
down.”
There were
two other guys playing. One of them was the boyfriend of the woman who’d put me
on the table, and he looked miserable.
While I
stood around on the table, they played another round and took draughts of their
drinks while a live singer crooned along with the band. I waited for the alcohol
to kick in and the gossip to pour out, but the air stayed tense. So I started
reading their faces for ‘tells’.
Blue Sky
could have scanned all these guys’ faces and told me who was lying. But since
being reduced, people’s faces were bigger, and I made out detail others missed.
I wasn’t as good as Blue Sky, but with a newly expanded view of faces, it was
easier. Expressions were projected big like on IMAX.
Javier
occasionally smiled for no reason; small tight smiles which flickered on and
off like a faulty light bulb. As I stared at him, I realized.
His eyes had
a look of overconcentration. His pupils didn’t contract muscularly like normal
eyes, they calibrated like machines. Maybe he was on drugs, but he seemed too
lucid. Maybe he had stayed up all night, but he seemed rested.
He had to
have optic Fits like Kirk.
Now he was
studying the backs of their cards for longer than he looked at his own…like he
could see through to the other side. A Fit which handicapped Scanning ability
would be capable of that. Scanners
could detect wavelengths of light Naturals and other kinds of Supers could not,
including waves of irradiated particles which passed harmlessly through
objects.
He was
cheating. No wonder the boyfriend was so down.
The piles
of chips stacked up as the bets ran large. Javier’s girlfriend was acting as
dealer and bank, her huge manicured hand huge came in and pushed me back and
forth over the table to make more room for the chips.
The woman’s
boyfriend’s forehead shone with sweat under the focused lights. Suddenly, he
put his cards down and got to his feet.
“I’m done
here.”
His
girlfriend wrung his arm.
“Get. Back.
here!” she wailed.
The
boyfriend stormed off. She threw me one last look of anguish and then chased
through the crowd after him.
Now it was
between the three remaining guys. I tensed up.
I began
striding towards the table edge. Javier’s girlfriend grasped the back of my
collar, jerking me off my feet.
“Where are
you going, shrimp?”
One of her
fingertips slipped in beneath the back of my jacket, and ran up my spine. “Too
bad you don’t have a little off switch under here.” I was hovered back onto the
middle of the table and dropped amidst the piles of chips.
Javier
listed off on his fingers:
“I’ve won a
car. I’ve won a date. I’ve won a Rolex. I’ve won a lot of gold jewellery. I’ve
won a woman’s shoe. Panties. Bras. And I’ve won a pet dog.” He thought for a
fraction of a second. “I’ll win a person. Hot damn.”
“Excuse
me.” A fiery, feminine voice projected over the party noise.
She parted through
the crowd. I caught a glimpse of a vision of golden tan skin, flaring hips and
breasts in a shimmery white cocktail dress before she slid into the remaining
seat at the table and glanced at everyone under piles of strawberry blonde
hair. It was the same woman who had been watching me earlier, only now the focused
lighting sharpened her features. Her brows and lips were thick and sultry and
offset her blondeness, and she had amazing blue eyes, as radiant as a cloudless
sky.
“If it’s
all the same to you boys, I’d like a hand in this round.” She was already dealing
herself cards.
The men
grunted.
“You chose
the wrong game, darlin’,” said one. “Javier’s out for blood tonight. Gunna make
you bleed like your time of month came early.”
“You
gentlemen better hope not,” she said calmly. “You wouldn’t like to see me on my
time of the month.”
“I’m
Javier,” said Javier, giving her a generous eyeballing. Over his shoulder, his girlfriend was also
staring at the woman, and turning her lip up. “And I hate to tell you, but the
moment your fine ass hit that seat, you already lost.” Javier’s lopsided smile
grew. “The little guy’s in my pocket. Just watch how it’s done.” He nodded and
grinned down at me like I was some dollar bills in a roll.
I turned
away from his leer and found the woman observing me silently, as if deducing how
much I might be worth for resale. I caught her eyes lightly travelling from my chest,
down my stomach, and stopping at my bulge.
Then she
looked up at Javier.
“Give me
your best.”
The next
round commenced. At intervals, someone came by to refill the glasses. The men
accepted. The woman politely refused. She kept fixing her hair, or running her
fingers around her bustline to adjust her bra. As she tugged the fabric, her
full breasts jumped and her black strapless brassiere peeked out. My eyes got
stuck on her chest. As I stared, she lifted her inky lashes from her cards and
our eyes locked. Her bee stung lips curved sensually at me. I swallowed hard,
trying to focus.
Javier kept
raising. One of the other men folded. Then the other. Then there was just Jaiver
and the woman left, and Javier’s bank girlfriend, hovering at his shoulders,
massaging his neck even though he shown no outwards signs of stress.
Neither did
she. Her coolness was unnerving. I was beginning to sweat. If she only knew…
With my
back turned to Javier, I made eye contact with her and subtly jerked my thumb
in his direction, made an ‘X’ with my fingers and pointed to my eyes.
Her mouth
and eyes went hard. There was only a one in ten chance she was a super, and
would understand what I meant. But if she understood, she didn’t show it.
I mentally ran
through my SciLab records on Scanners…Light was radiation, and radiation was
blocked by lead…
“Excuse me.”
I gazed up at her. “Do you have any red lipstick or eyeliner?”
She blinked
up from her cards.
“Both – of
course. Why?”
“Isn’t it
obvious…? I want to give you my number.”
“What do
you need to do that for?” Javier leered at me. “Since you’re coming home with
me.”
A shiver
went up my spine. I hurried away from him.
“Shucks.
Hate to disappoint.”
“Not to interrupt,” his girlfriend said, staring
daggers at the back of Javier’s head. “But you know I’m standing right here.”
“You’re
still my queen of hearts,” he reassured her. “But I know you like your toys.”
Her cheeks blazed
pink. Then her hand flew out to slap him, but he caught it, lightning fast.
“Save that
kinky stuff for later,” he tutted her.
Someone was
tapping on my shoulder. I spun to catch a glistening fingernail drift up from
my face.
The
strawberry blonde was passing a tube of lipstick into my hands, comically
oversized. Actually, I was the comically undersized one.
Standing on
the red cloth before her upper figure was crushingly objectifying. My view was
totally unnatural, like a surreal dream. The bottom half of my world was
swallowed up by the entire table, so I had to crane my neck up constantly to
see anything, and a player loomed like a broad hill. The piles of striped chips
inescapably reminded me how tiny I was.
I dropped
to my knees and hastily began scrubbing red lipstick over the backs of her
cards, particularly the corners, where the numbers and letters would be, and
where the faces of royalty would be.
“Hey,”
Javier barked through clenched teeth. “Git him away from there.”
“You should
stop that, little man,” she said down to me. She didn’t understand, and tried
to brush me away with a hand. I raced to the next card and scrubbed faster.
“They’re
fine,” I said. “You can still play with them.” Finishing with the red, I
grabbed the eyeliner wand, wrenched the top off and began scrubbing again, in
black.
“You have
to be kidding me.” Javier shifted around in his seat, his mouth twisting with
concentration. He was trying to see through the woman’s cards. He leaned to the
side, tilting his head, grimaced.
“Quit tampering with the game you little
sonofabitch!”
High heels
clomped around the table and then my head was encased in pressure and darkness.
Javier’s girlfriend grabbed my head up like a tennis ball and tossed me. I
bounced over the center of the table, feeling a sting and a small whoop of
relief. The woman’s cards were lead shielded. Now all Javier had at his
disposal was memory. And judging from the empty tumblers of liquor framing him,
he couldn’t rely on that anymore, either.
She surveyed
him through narrowed eyes.
“Now who’s
tampering with the game?”
“Game?” he
said sarcastically, looking around as if searching for something. “I don’t see
a game around here. Oh, you mean this?” He slapped the table with both hands.
The tremor ran through my feet. “This is a con. Your helper monkey is in on it.
He saw my cards somehow and wrote ‘em on the back of yours.”
She leaned
back.
“Really, he
didn’t,” she said flatly. “See for yourself.”
Javier
didn’t move. Only his girlfriend wandered over to look.
“He just drew
a little on the back there.” Her posture relaxed again and she returned to Javier’s
side of the table. “We're safe, Jav.”
She didn’t understand;
she didn’t know, I realized.
“Felicity.
The principle of it: I refuse to play
a crooked game with a crooked fake blonde wigged out gitano slut.”
“You fold?”
the woman inquired.
Javier
stood and tossed his cards.
“Oh, suck a
dick.”
I watched
him and his girlfriend stride away. Then turned to face a hand zooming at me,
unnaturally fast for something so big. There was a tightening in my chest as it
was captured and lifted from the poker table.
The party
swept past as the woman headed for an empty table covered in a trailing white
tablecloth. She took a seat and brought her hand closer to her magnificent face,
as I stood on her cupped palm.
“So you
came to run a story?” She inquired. She knew more about me than I realized.
While I was standing around trying to eavesdrop, I didn’t consider other people
might be doing the same.
“Yes,” I
replied. “Night Watch. My name’s Bruno Warne.”
“Well,
that’s interesting because I know all the reporters here. Why haven’t I heard
of you?”
I met her
piercing eyes for as long as I could stand.
“What’s
your name?” I asked.
She broke
the contact to gaze across the room.
“Dia Amir.”
A single
outstretched finger lined up with my chest. I wrapped both hands around her
fingertip and shook it. Her fingernail was perfectly glossed and cut. Catching
the sleeve of my jacket with her polished nail she peeled it back, just enough
to show the white sleeve of my costume.
“Miss
Amir,” I launched on, yanking my arm back and shaking the sleeve down, “there
was a Fit fundraiser earlier," I noted. "Did you go?"
"I
did."
"Well,
I saw you earlier. You must have got here fast."
She leaned
forward over the table edge to hear me better, and a strand of hair at her
temple fell down. Her hand shot to the side of her head and swept the strand
back delicately, as if anxious to prevent messing up her hair. It had to have
been expensive to get done.
"I left
early,” she replied, distracting herself for a moment to fix her hair with one
hand while I was standing in her other. She took out a small mirror from her
bag and began to touch up her cosmetics as she carried on speaking, giving me
quick distracted glances.
“You're not
the only one here on business," she said.
"What
do you do?"
She gave a
vague shrug.
"Well,
I guess...if the guests feel relaxed and looked after, thank me."
"You're
a hostess."
"Not
quite.”
The mirror
was put away and she shifted me from the table. There was a glimpse of her toned,
tanned thigh through the slit in her dress before my feet touched the floor.
“You were
going to tell me what you do, Mr Warne,” she prompted.
“I already
did.”
The white
tablecloth bunched and one of her feet pulled out from under the tablecloth,
wearing a heeled sandal with straps that criss-crossed up around the ankle. Compared
to me, her foot had the breadth and brute strength to rival a muscled bodyguard,
in a slender womanly package. Tiny stones winked from silver toe rings around
her second and fourth toes.
The foot
lifted and rested the tip of its big toe into my chest.
“How are
you feeling right now? Relaxed and looked after?”
As her foot
retracted, the nail tip briefly flicked my chin. Probably by accident.
“Hey,” I said, startled.
“Oops,” she
murmured, sweeping the offending foot aside. “So clumsy.”
Meanwhile,
the skin of my jaw tingled where her nail had touched.
The live
band music pattered through the floor and fired relentlessly inside my chest. I
had to fight to speak over it, although the woman seemed to have no problem
hearing me.
“So, then,”
I said, eager to keep the interview on track, “you might have seen the
Andromedas at the fundraiser.”
I was
looking straight up at her, bathed from the floor light, as if she was the
moon. My neck twinged.
She nodded.
Her fingertips curled loosely around the table edge and once again I noticed
her shining nails as they silently tapped. Then she reached down deftly shed
the strappy sandal, leaving her foot bare. A dizzying wave of shoe and foot
scent flushed through my senses, but unnoticed by anyone over a foot tall.
“They’re
really improving Fit accessibility,” I went on, “and more people need…um, you
know, understanding, because there’s still a lot of uneducated pushback.” I
waved my arms vaguely. “What they really need, I think, is a broader media
exposure, to normalize it.”
She was
silent, seeming to think this through. Maybe even on the cusp of letting
something slip. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath.
Her big toe
gave my shoulder a friendly jostle.
“Speaking
of exposure,” she inclined her head, “You’re running hot, Mr Warne. Let me
conceal you.”
I stared up
at her, puzzled. Dia reclined in a shady corner of the room and no one seemed
to be looking our way.
“Keep
talking,” she said reassuringly. I had gone silent and was trying to recollect
my thoughts. She must have also perfumed between her toes; it mixed with an
earthy perspiring foot odor sat ripe and thick in my lungs. If she was at the
fundraiser she must have been wearing those heels a long time before now.
Damned if
I’d let this woman dazzle me and twist the interview out of my control.
“Done
talking. Miss Amir, would you like to dance?”
Her bright
blue eyes held on my face for an indecisive moment. Then the corner of her
mouth tugged with a humoring smile.
“I have to
warn you, I’m a pushy dancer. But I’ll do my best not to tread on you.”
My hand was
at my side and something was brushing it, like a comb. I looked down. She’d
turned her foot in at my side and her bulbous big toe was scratching my hand
with the white tip of its impeccable nail. I stared at it in disbelief.
“Let me
practice some footwork with you first.”
In that
brief instant, her foot lifted and lined up against me, as if comparing my
height to the length of her foot. Her toes opened as wide as possible and
inched closer. Then the space between her big toe and second toe was quickly
filled up with my head.
My voice
came out in a whoosh:
“Hey,
what—?!”
Her toes
clapped together firmly around the circumference of my skull and I went silent. My temples were given a soft but inexorable
squeeze, and suddenly the ground dropped away from my feet as she held me
comfortably up by my head and moved me in under the table. The tablecloth was
dropped all around, keeping me hidden in shade below her legs. While I dangled,
stunned, her other foot approached.
“You’re not
a reporter, are you, Mr Warne…?” she murmured knowingly.
Her toenail
played around my chest for a moment before drawing its tip down my belly, and
rested the soft pad over my groin. Then the pressure shifted downward again as
her toe snuck under my balls and lifted them, testing their weight. And then
caught the bulge of my pants and began to massage it, trying to tweak it away
from my body. I could barely focus as she lifted my arousal to near
agony using the smallest of touches.
She took my
leg into the clasp of her toes and began pinching my thigh, gradually running
down to my foot. Then she took the other leg and repeated the process. The hot
crush of her toes around my head was making sweat break out on my forehead.
Finished
with my lower half her toe ran back up my body, pushing and prodding every step
of the way to satisfy her relentless curiosity. There was a flare of perfume as
the flat underside of her big toe bumped my face briefly before returning to my
torso, as if by accident, before continuing its exploration.
Outside the
tablecloth, the sounds of the party floated around obliviously, laughter, the
chime of glasses and the relentless passing stamp of shoes on the floor, back
and forth teasingly, without knowing I was right there, captive under the
table. With me safely stashed beneath the tablecloth Dia had complete freedom
to subject every inch of my puny, immobile body to an intimate foot probing,
and my dick was so painfully stiff she could have used it to floss between her
toe spaces.
My body was battered around all the soft parts of her foot. A line of
toes adeptly swept my arms aside to pat in under my armpits, tapped my ribcage
up and down, and pushed at my chest and stomach.
Her toenail
glided around and traced at my back, making ticklish digging motions as if
searching something. It systematically went down my back, checking everywhere,
before landing on my butt. A toenail then swiftly wedged between my legs,
separating my legs a little to nudge around between my thighs, and brushing my
ballsack as it did so. As it was carelessly tickling my balls it inadvertently
gave my balls a sharp poke, momentarily causing me a flash of blinding pain.
Caught despairingly between her toes, my skull began to throb.
“You’re a
plant," she said. "But who planted you?”
She was
patting me down for concealed objects, I realized. Probably searching for
bugging devices.
The woman
wasn’t a guest or a hostess. She had to be counter-intelligence on the
Andromeda side, or possibly even a ‘honeypot’, oozing feminine charm to trick
me into revealing myself. She must have heard something compromising about me.
But how? Maybe Frankie slipped up while en route to the bathroom.
If I was
normal size I would have left the party, but that wasn’t an option. My skull
was caught like a stone between her toes, which even rolled my head slightly to
turn my body.
“Dia…” I
said weakly.
Her toe
stopped probing me. But it turned out some other guests had come upon her and
stopped to chat. I couldn’t see them, but their shadows shifted around the
bottom of the tablecloth and the air shimmered with their voices. It sounded like
a couple of men. It didn’t sound like they knew who Dia was, but they liked
what they saw.
While the
three of them talked, I was held aloft the entire time. It was not even
marginally better than being poked and rubbed; I felt like a shoe that was being
dangled from the end of her toes. Sometimes she wiggled my head without
thinking, or fed my temples with a series of tiny squeezes.
The
conversation sounded casual, all three flirting. I tried to listen in, but
Dia’s toes were also pressing against my ears, partially blocking my hearing.
Then the pressure lifted. She seemed to have successfully fought them off. Now
her attention was solely upon me again, hanging from her toes.
“What’s
your objective?” she demanded.
I took a
deep breath.
“Okay. You
win. I’m not a real reporter. I’m just here for the champagne and strawberries
and gossip like everyone else.”
“Steve.” She paused to let this sink in,
“I’m giving you one last chance to come clean with me.”
I thought
quickly.
“Or what?”
She waved
me back and forth, and in little circles, in a mesmerizing way, enjoying the
power she held over me.
“I’ll take
what I want from you whether you like it or not.”
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.