“Surprise!” Roxy cheered as she plopped onto the bed where her brother Allen was lying down on his back, half asleep in the breeze of the whirring ceiling fan above.

            She snapped her fingers and began rapidly whispering a few unearthly phrases under her breath.  Instantly, the ordinary teenage boy before her shrunk down to eight inches tall.  Allen barely had time to wake up to witness his visitor’s arrival in his bedroom and notice his newly reduced height.

            With a smirk, Roxy brought her bare right foot down to rest on top of her brother’s reclining form until she had managed to bury his entire body under her smooth sole, from the tip of her slender toes to the end of her soft heel.  Slowly, she began compressing down on him just hard enough to keep his arms and legs from rising off the bed.

            Gently, then, she laid her toes across his head, allowing him to gaze up between two of her long digits, up the length of her smooth shin, and past her knee to her adorable grinning face, adorned with her silky chocolate brown locks that reached just past the ends of her shoulders, a single bright purple highlight glistening amongst the rest of her hair.

            “Happy to see me?” she giggled, wriggling her toes joyfully.

            “Hey Roxy,” Allen grunted up at his gigantic sister, managing a smile despite his sudden lack of motion range, as well as the addition of weight along the length of his shrunken body.  “What are you doing here?”

            “Oh, you know,” she drawled, batting her long black eyelashes and rocking her foot back and forth across Allen’s body on the sleight weight of her heel and the ball of her foot.  “You can only handle so much college before you wanna blow your brains out from boredom, so I thought I’d come home for the weekend.  God, I missed you…”

            “Yeah, missed you... too,” Allen grunted earnestly, turning his head to the side as his older sister’s toes began playfully tapping themselves lightly against his face.  He wrapped his arms around two of Roxy’s toes, the nails painted a sharp black as they so often were, and hugged them together to keep them from writhing so aggressively.  As he did, his tiny fingers unintentionally ran through a few globs of toejam leftover from the black knee socks Roxy had pulled off only a few minutes before, but he shrugged this off.

            Roxy arched her sole over Allen’s legs, kneading the rounded ball of her foot into his chest just hard enough that he had to slow his breathing down to keep up.  It wasn’t anything he wasn’t used to.

            “How’s school?  Being big man on campus for a change, and all that?” Roxy wondered aloud down to Allen as she continued batting her toes gently at his cheeks.

            “It’s pretty nice.  Got all the classes I wanted for senior year,” he answered cheerfully, suddenly wrinkling his nose.  The potent wallop packed by the billowing stench of Roxy’s recently shoe-confined appendage was starting to take its sour toll on Allen’s nostrils, particularly with his face embraced by the underside of each of his sister’s lithe toes so affectionately.

            Obviously, she hadn’t bothered to let her feet air out before bounding up the stairs to place them on top of her soon-to-be shrunken sibling.  Roxy even seemed to notice Allen’s discomfort with the odor, but this only made her hug her toes more possessively against Allen’s head, who seemed too sheepish to do anything but take it quietly and cough under his breath.

            “You’re lucky, though,” the witch insisted, her eyes wandering around Allen’s room.  “You don’t know how easy you’ve got it with high school teachers.  They don’t expect much more than bullshit busywork from you.  But now, in college?  Like, wow.”

            “So I’ve heard,” Allen replied, finally having wrestled his sister’s probing toes into submission, though it was really only because she had let him.

            “I’m serious.  My GPA is gonna go down the tubes if I don’t figure out what it is these psychos want from me!”

            “Why don’t you just put a spell on them?” Allen teased.

            “Oh, you’re just hilarious, aren’t you?” Roxy answered, rolling her eyes and trying not to laugh, pressing her naked foot down just a little harder on Allen’s body for the briefest moment.  “You know, mom only made a thing out of that back in high school because you told her about it.”

            “You were cheating, though,” Allen said.

            “Was not!”

            “You said some magic words and got your teacher to give you an A-plus when you were barely passing the class.  I think that counts as chea- mmmpphh!” Allen insisted before having most of his face covered by Roxy’s big toe, which she quickly shifted over to stop him from finishing his statement.

            “Yeah, I know, maybe I overplayed it a little.  Maybe A-minus would’ve been more plausible,” she considered as Allen slapped at the side of the massive big toe bunched up against his nose and mouth, cutting off his airflow.  “It doesn’t matter since Mom put that restriction hex on me.  Now I can’t even make the professors levitate a few inches off the ground, let alone give me the grade I deserve.”

            “And by deserve, you mean want because you can’t study hard enough to deserve it?” Allen piped in, finally managing to slide his face out from underneath the controlled pressure of his sister’s toe.

            “Oh, shut up.  You’re just jealous because you can’t do any of that stuff yourself,” she snarked.

            “I don’t need that stuff.  Sometimes doing stuff the real way is best.  Plus, I know how to read,” Allen challenged playfully, wrapping his hands around Roxy’s toes again to keep them from moving.

            “Oh yeah?” Roxy chuckled, raising an eyebrow.  “You can read, huh?  Then read this.”  She snapped her fingers again, causing the words “BITE ME” in delicate blue letters to appear tattooed on the underside of her toe print, hovering above Allen’s face.

            “Well, I would read it, but the handwriting is kind of crap, so I can’t,” Allen deadpanned before finding the toe bearing down on his face again.

            “How did I know this was going to happen, all those years ago?” Roxy asked, rippling her toes over Allen’s chest and shoulders, wrestling with his tiny slapping hands.  “Literally, when you were two, and Mom and Dad were adopting you from that place, they were all “Be nice to him, Roxy.  He’s a human, and he can’t do the same things you can.  Meh, meh, meh!”  But I knew you were gonna be mean to me, either way.  I just knew it.”

            “Can I come out from under here now?” Allen asked when the barrage of toe taps on his body had ended, feeling the weight of his sister’s gargantuan sole splaying itself down across his body like an oversized mattress.

            “That depends.  Are you gonna play nice?”

            “That depends too.  Do you deserve me playing nice?” Allen retorted.

            “Apparently not yet.  Maybe I’ll just make you say uncle.”

            “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” he said daringly.  “I’m a little too used to your tricks now.”

            “Oh, yeah?  Then I guess we’ll get creative.  If you wanna come out, you gotta kiss my toe.”

            “Kiss it?  Please, there are children present.”

            “And not just a peck.  A big wet one.  Like a grandma kiss.”

            “Roxy, you’re a witch, and this is really the best thing you can come up with?”

            “Sometimes doing stuff the real way is best, Mr. Smarty Pants,” Roxy drawled, crossing her arms and keeping the pressure on Allen’s body constant.

            “I don’t think you’ve made me do this since I was like fourteen.”

            “C’mon, just do it, you’re starting to make it weird.”

            “Yeah, I’m the one making it weird,” Allen smarmed as he rolled his eyes.  With a sigh, he puckered up and planted a kiss on the underside of Roxy’s toe print with a dramatic enough smack that it was heard loud and clear by its recipient.  He could still taste the rubbery aura of Roxy’s favorite green Converse shoes on his lips, as well as the tainted salty aftertaste flavor from her tight black socks.  However embarrassing it was, there was something ironically nostalgic about it, probably having to do with some long-forgotten kids game.

            “Good enough, I guess,” Roxy groaned, finally lifting her foot off Allen’s body.  “For now…”

            “I don’t suppose that token also bought me a one-way ticket to being five-foot-eleven again?” Allen asked as he shifted himself onto his haunches.

            “Don’t you even start.  You’re five-foot-ten on your best day,” Roxy responded, leaning forward over her still-reclining doll-sized brother in defiance of his lie.

            “Hey, I’m just trying to think positive.  That’s how us humans have to do everything.  So can you make me five-foot-ten-and-a-half again?”

            Roxy shook her head, whipping her silky hair back and forth above Allen like a streamer display.  “Not so fast, buster.  I’m only home for the weekend,” she said, a sly smirk crossing her lips.  “We’re gonna have some good old-fashioned fun first.”

“I’m pretty sure this is technically a hostage situation right now,” Allen commented calmly.  He continued lying on his bed at eight inches tall with his adoptive older sister Roxy sitting cross-legged in front of him and leaning so far over him that her torso filled most of his plain of vision, her dark brown hair hanging down like a silky canopy over his head.

            “It can’t be a hostage situation if you like it, and I’ve shrunk you enough times in your life that I’m almost positive you don’t hate it,” she retorted.

            “Well, that’s a comforting assessment.  “I don’t hate it.”  Any jury impartial or otherwise would let it slide and make it official legislation.”

            “Stop using big words, you little nerd.  You’re not in school right now; nobody’s impressed,” Roxy complained, sticking out her lower lip out for dramatic effect and prodding her brother in the chest with a massive pointer finger.

            “I could be a big nerd instead of a little nerd if you grew me back to normal,” Allen said hopefully, holding up his hands in front of his torso defensively to stop the poking.

            “Not yet, I said.  We’re having some fun first before I go back to campus on Sunday,” Roxy reminded him, pressing down on his little hands with her pointer finger and eventually letting up once satisfied with his level of effort.

            “You can’t have this kind of fun with your big ol’ college friends?”

            “No,” groaned Roxy, rolling her eyes.  “You know how it is.  It’d be way too complicated to try to explain this to someone who didn’t already know about witchcraft.”

            “There aren’t any at your school?”

            “Oh, there’s a couple.  I asked a guy I know from a warlock clan out west if he’d let me shrink him.”

            “Did you really?” snickered Allen, burying his faces in his hands with amusement.

            “Yeah!  Don’t make fun of me…” Roxy said in a huff.  “It was worth a try, anyway.  He just looked at me like I was crazy and told me to leave him alone.”

            “You sure it wasn’t the punk girl get-up that did it?”

            “Hey, this look is in right now!” defended Roxy, gazing down at her t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of her favorite band, Kranktrap, and at her faded jeans, which were commercially shredded in the knees to denim confetti.  “It doesn’t matter anyway.  I don’t think any of the others will let me do it either.  You’re my only one.”

            “Given that you just kind of walk in and shrink me whenever you feel like it, I’d say “letting” you is maybe a little bit of a stretch,” Allen said.

            “Shut up.  I take your inability to stop me as consent, okay?”

            “That is… literally… why this is a hostage situation.”

            “Oh, stop it with your fancy complaining.  I’m just keeping you like this until we’ve hung out for a while, and then I’ll make you boring sized again, if you insist.”

            “That’s kind of important, though.  I need to be boring sized, as you put it, to get all my homework done so I can go to college, too.”

            “Again, shut up.  You’ve already got like eight scholarships to places, and you know it.  Screw your homework,” Roxy decreed to her shrunken subject, crossing her arms again.  “By the way, where the hell are mom and dad?”

            “Gone for a few days, at least.  Said they had to go help take a curse off a guy who turned into a minotaur-hybrid-thing in New Zealand.”

            “Bummer for New Zealand,” Roxy said simply, leaning in closer and closer to her eight-inch-tall adopted brother.  “And bummer for you, too.”

            “Why’s that?” Allen asked, wincing involuntarily as the warm, spearmint gum haze of Roxy’s breath wafted stickily over him.

            “Cuz it sounds like we’ve got the whole weekend to ourselves,” Roxy giggled, licking creepily along the length of her lips for effect.  “Nobody to save you now.”

            “Do you ever stop and take a second to realize how exactly like a hostage-taker you sound?” Allen peeped.  “Besides, I could just call them and tell them you shrunk me as a hostage.”

            “Well, first of all, no you wouldn’t, because you’re having fun right now,” Roxy commented truthfully.  “And second of all, I could very easily stop you from getting near a phone or the call stone now that you’re fun sized.”

            “Oh, so that’s what the opposite of normal… I mean, boring sized is?”

            “Now you’re getting it,” Roxy chuckled, winking at her brother.  “Plus it weirds me out that you’re taller than me now whenever you’re boring sized.”

            “I do have you beat there.”

            “Yeah, well, as long as mom and dad aren’t here, you are not bigger than me.  You are as big as my shoe.  Clear?” Roxy demanded through playfully gritted teeth, before hushing her tone dramatically.  “And probably smaller than that, too, depending on how I feel later.”

            “How you feel, huh?  This is awfully one-sided, if you ask me,” Allen admitted.  “Am I just your puppet, then?”

            “Don’t sell yourself short.  Like I said, nobody else will let me play with them tiny.”

            “That’s because everybody else you could ask can stop you…”

            “Look, you little wuss, you are just begging to have my foot pinning your weak little self down again.  Isn’t that something you want to avoid?” Roxy asked.

            “Yeah, probably,” Allen said wryly.  “I think I’ve had my fill of your foot already today, after that little greeting you gave me.”

            “I was just saying hello, Mr. Whiner,” Roxy taunted.

            “Maybe, but considering I was asleep and woke up to find a foot as big as me laying on top of me, I’d call that overdoing it slightly.”

            “Okay, that’s it!” Roxy bellowed jokingly, her hand shooting forward.  Her fingers wrapped around Allen’s waist and plucked him from the bed like a ragdoll, allowing his legs to dangle a few inches above her thighs as she examined him face-to-face.  “I’m getting sooo bored of you being a crybaby.  So I’m gonna put you down to run.  Then I’m counting to fifty, I’m gonna come find you, and when I do, you’ll be sorry.”

            “I figured I was already at that stage,” Allen insisted, resting his little forearms on his sister’s long fingers as they wound themselves tightly around his abdomen.

            “Counting!” barked Roxy, releasing her fingers from around her brother’s body, allowing him to plop into her lap in a heap.  “One.  Two.  Three.  Four.”

            “No fair, you didn’t even give me a head start,” Allen complained as he clambered across his sister’s crossed calves and proceeded to crawl over the edge of the bed sheet to the carpet, before dashing toward the door to find a hiding place.

            “Sucks to suck!” she sang.  “Five.  Six.  Seven.  Eight.  Nine.  Ten…”

            “…Forty-seven.  Forty-eight.  Forty-nine.  Fifty!”    

            Roxy hopped off Allen’s bed and sauntered purposefully for the hallway, her eyes darting from shelf to shelf in his bedroom, just in case he had been foolish enough to not even leave the immediate area for his hiding place.  She listened for any kind of rustling or hushed breathing, but the room was completely silent.

            Satisfied, she entered into the room next door, which happened to be hers.

            “Any little nerds hiding in here?” she whispered into the dark room, flipping the light switch on for a better look around.

            With about forty seconds to go, Allen had crouched down by the top of the stairs and then, taking a deep breath, begun sidling down each one along his stomach, one after the other, in rapid succession.  It wasn’t the most ideal of ways to move, and he knew he was losing serious ground by choosing to go downstairs, but he knew his sister would be hunting mostly upstairs, thinking he had skipped over this very possibility.

            Once he’d reached the bottom floor, he took off running again.  He passed by the doorframe that led into the living room.  There were couches and chairs to hide under, but he figured once Roxy realized he wasn’t upstairs, those would be the first and most obvious places to check downstairs.  Thinking quickly, Allen sprinted across the worn carpet and onto the cool tile of the kitchen floor.  With the bright light of the miniature chandelier glowing over every conceivable hiding place on the floor, he knew there wasn’t much to choose from.

            “Gonna find you!” Roxy threatened loudly from upstairs with an over-the-top cackle.  Her gleeful voice echoed through the halls of the house as she wandered aimlessly past doorways.  “And when I do, I’m going to stand on you, and we’ll test how durable you are when you’re my little Raggedy Andy doll.”

            Knowing she was, at most, 60% kidding on that “standing on him” concept, Allen shrugged and pressed himself against a countertop, waiting breathlessly to know if the coast was clear.  He heard his sister’s heavy footfalls as she practically skipped through the upstairs hallway toward the guest bedroom.

            Good.  He was right.  She was passing by the stairs, having assumed he’d stayed up there.  Now he had a little longer to find someplace to hide.  The laundry room by the door from the garage was the most obvious place to consider next, as the light had been turned off, and given how messy the floor usually was, it was ideal for hiding.  His breath catching in his chest with anxiety, Allen darted out from behind the countertop and made the treacherously exposed journey across the tile.  He made his way under the kitchen table, vaulting over the low-hanging wooden bars lining the legs of the structure.  With a final adrenaline-fueled sprint, he ducked into the darkness of the laundry room and pounced onto a small wrinkled pile of t-shirts requiring a wash.

            Allen couldn’t help but smile and snicker silently to himself with amusement as he sat up in the pile of clothes.  He had forgotten the little rush he got from this particularly dire brand of hide and seek with his towering sister.  It had probably been at least five years since they’d done this.

            With some secret disappointment, he had supposed that the pair of them had simply outgrown those kind of games, though in the back of his mind, he had never stopped enjoying them.  Evidently, he had severely underestimated how creatively juvenile Roxy could be when she was in the right mood.

            The trick now was finding somewhere unexpected to stow away.  The pile of shirts he had landed on when dashing into the room seemed the most obvious place to pick once Roxy gave up on the top floor and made her way downstairs to continue searching.  Other piles of shirts and jeans littered the floor carelessly that didn’t seem to be any better as hiding options.  There was also a bench he could duck under, but it was too obvious.

            Allen couldn’t help but smirk to himself at the sight of the mess.  His parents, despite all their immense sorcery, had insisted on raising Roxy in an environment that at least partially prepared her for interaction with humans, and required that she wash her clothes in a machine.  He had a feeling this floor wasn’t going to look any cleaner in the coming days, though, if her past propensity to use magic to get out of chores was any indication.

            It was at that moment that, in the dim view of the darkened laundry room, Allen caught sight of his sister’s favorite green Converse, well-worn and well-loved, the fabric lip fraying with threads and streaks of dirt clotted around the rims where the treads ended.  Not really knowing what it was he had planned, he scampered across the floor for a closer look at them.  It was strange to be standing before them like this, with the back white lip rising up to about the height of Allen’s waist.  It had been a long time since he viewed shoes from this angle, with the bulk of them comprising the size of a hefty rowboat to him.  After a few seconds of curious observation of these preferred adornments of Roxy’s, Allen noticed they weren’t alone.

            Hanging out the top of each opening of the shoes was a black sock, rumpled and partially tugged inside out from being so recently shorn from the warm, slender feet of their owner.  Having been breathing as shallowly as possible out of nervousness at being found too soon, Allen realized that he had been missing the signs of their presence the whole time, and began breathing normally again, inhaling the atmosphere of the room.

            He was instantly greeted by the familiar downy, earthy stench that always clouded so potently from his sister’s socks whenever she wore them for more than a few consecutive hours.  The air was also flavored with the fleshy tenderness of her soft skin, and the additional odiferous shot of soggy toe jam and salt only made it all more potent.

            Those black socks had been a weird sticking point for their parents and even some of Roxy’s friends, all telling her how strange they looked and how much they clashed with her outfits and look.  She being Roxy, of course, hadn’t listened to a single one of them, and Allen was glad.  They were part of what made Roxy so uniquely herself.

            Grinning to himself cunningly, Allen realized that tricking Roxy into giving up on finding him was going to take some real doing.  After all, they had played this game innumerable times in earlier years, and she knew all his favorite and most predictable hiding places.  In fact, he could only recall two occasions where he had actually managed to remain concealed to the point of Roxy’s forfeit, and after that, she had those places covered.  The only way he was going to win now was to play the game in a way she would not see coming, and to use the most twistedly obvious place he could think of.

            Hearing Roxy’s steps pounding on the floor up above, indicating she must’ve finished her search of the bedrooms, Allen wasted no more time in pondering his odd choice.  Clambering over the lip of the left shoe, he grasped the ruffled rim of the sock in his hands and began burrowing his way inside it like a gopher.

            At his size, his body was going to fill up most of the shoe, and so he quickly had to begin scrunching himself into a fetal position in order to make it work, though once he got moving, he found it very easy to wiggle his way deeper and deeper into the darkness of the sock, the heavy fabric folding downward around him to conceal him further until he had backed himself as far as he could go into the shoe.

            The aroma became all the more intoxicatingly drug-like as Allen settled into the deepest round of the sock’s toe section.  Each breath filled his lungs with the omnipotent musk of skin, sweat, and dirt: spicy and persistent in its every wild taste.  Coughing in the first few breaths of it, Allen quickly got himself accustomed to the festering, organic odor that rapidly seemed to take on a life of its own within his throat and nostrils.  This was what it took to win against a witch.

            Roxy would for sure want to have a good, mocking laugh over his choice of hiding place, though even she would have to concede his brilliance once she inevitably gave up, and that was far more important to Allen as he waited smugly for new sounds beyond the walls of the shoe.  It was difficult to make out much, with both a layer of cottony sock fabric and a rubbery shoe acting as sounding boards, and after the footsteps from upstairs had ceased, Allen could hear no more.

            He slowed his heart rate and meditated cheekily in waiting.  No way was he going to be found.  No way.  He’d really shown her this time.

            The force of the sock being yanked from the shoe and rocketing into the air would’ve hurt Allen’s neck, had he not been surrounded by the squishy and buoyant fabric that caught him like a full-body trampoline.

            The mouth of the sock unfolded and Roxy’s gorgeous green irises peeped inside, laugh wrinkles instantly appearing around them.

            “Well, this is a new one,” Roxy commented triumphantly, not bothering to hide the smirk on her lips.

            “New is probably a little hyperbolic here.  Seriously, do you ever buy new clothes, or do you just wait for them to disintegrate?” Allen corrected earnestly, coughing again for show.

            “Oh, look at Mr. Man, being all hilarious and stuff, and totally forgetting that he’s the one in the bottom of my sock, which I’m now holding way high above the ground,” Roxy mocked back at him indignantly.  “What do you think of that?”

            “What do I think of what?”

            “That I’ve got you right where I want you, weirdo.  You seriously couldn’t do better than this?  Look how vulnerable you left yourself.  I could just drop you right now.  You’d probably break a few bones on the way down.”

            “You could’ve done that with anything I chose to hide in,” Allen smarmed.

            “True,” Roxy shrugged, biting her lip thoughtfully.  A sly glint appeared in her eye, and she added: “Of course, I could also just slide my big ol’ foot back in there, put the shoe on, and walk on you for a while.  How does that sound?”

            “Again, you could’ve done that no matter where I hid,” Allen stated, though at her words, his heart simultaneously fluttered nervously in his chest.  Such a thing sounded fairly extreme, even for someone with a semi-sick sense of humor like Roxy.  Given how much fun she seemed to be having with him right now, though, was it something she was actually going to try?

            “You’re missing the point, nerd,” Roxy chuckled.  “You did all the work for me!  You chose to put yourself in a place where all I have to do is aim for you while I get dressed again, and bam, you’re in a pickle.”

            “Well, somebody’s got to give you a pointer here or there, or you’d never learn to do it yourself,” Allen drawled innocuously.

            “Oh, shut up,” Roxy instructed playfully.  “You talk big now, little guy, but you are not even going to believe how good of a kiss you’re going to have to give my toe later as an apology.”

            “Oh, I’m sure I will believe it.”

            “I said shut up!  Now…” Roxy drawled.  “That was a pretty good round, I guess, for a beginner player.  You’re a little tuckered out now from running all the way downstairs only to get caught after like five minutes of me looking, huh?”

            “Totally.”

            “Thought so,” Roxy agreed, shaking her head.  While her hand had been underneath the sock to support Allen’s lithe weight at the bottom like a guinea pig, she slowly released and began sliding her fingers back up the rows of black fuzzy fabric toward the lip of the sock.   “I could probably just leave you in here for a nap, but as it happens, that would be pretty boring for me, so we’re gonna pick something else to do that you aren’t quite as crap at.”

            With this, Roxy’s fingers began fishing down into the fabric tube and coiled around Allen’s sides so she could lift him out.  His face became buried in the fuzzy ridges on the way out as she roughly peeled him away from the smelly article of clothing.

            “Seriously, you better not fall asleep on me like this.  I’ll conjure up an entire snowstorm into the kitchen right now and freeze you back awake,” Roxy grumbled as she held her eight-inch brother out at arm’s length, her fingers wrapped around his back.  With her free hand, she brushed the purple streak in her hair back behind her ear.

            “Can I help it if I put effort into my day?” Allen yawned, resting his forearms comfortably on his sister’s firm thumb where it crossed over his chest.  “Besides, Mom would throw a fit about the damage if a pipe burst and you didn’t notice until the basement flooded.”

            “One time that happened, when I was eight, and anyway, I seem to remember a certain selfish little someone begging me to make snow inside so we could make angels and snowmen because it was too dark to play outside anymore,” Roxy corrected with a smirk.  “And I think I delivered, to say the least.”

            “Yeah,” Allen admitted, letting his sarcastic façade fall for just a second as he recalled this fond memory all those years ago of his sister happily creating a tiny winter wonderland in the kitchen.  Not only was it impressive, but it had made him feel incredibly special to have someone so powerful create something just for him, because he had asked her to.  It had been perfect until enough damage was caused that it would’ve made a mechanic’s fiscal year, if not for the expert restorative magic of their parents that set things in order within minutes, and even then, Allen didn’t regret a second of it.  He had a feeling Roxy didn’t either, despite the scolding she’d received.

            “What, don’t say you want it to snow in here again?” she chuckled, noting the nostalgia evident in his tone.  Her fingers squeezed a little more around his shoulder blades.  “Getting a little old for those kinds of games, aren’t we?”

            “Says the twenty-year-old who just made me play freaking hide-and-go-seek,” Allen retorted, sliding easily back into his previous teasing demeanor.  He wrapped his arms underneath Roxy’s thumb for better support and kicked his legs awkwardly in the open space.  “Hey, could I get a little support here?”

            “Okay, okay, hold up there cowboy,” Roxy said with a roll of her eyes, and brought her palm underneath her brother’s swinging legs so he could stand in her hand for support, though she still kept the fingers of her other hand wrapped firmly around him for balance.  “So what do you wanna do, then?”

            “Um…”

            “And FYI, there are wrong answers to that question.”

            “Oh, great.  Mind letting me know what they are?  Because I’m pretty sure I’m about to say them,” Allen smarmed, crossing his arms and shifting his weight from one leg to the other, now that he could actually stand on the malleable surface of his sister’s palm.

            “Wrong answers would include requests of any kind for me to make you bigger yet.  They also include any requests for me to give you money, or make you taller in general,” Roxy informed with a stiff upper lip.

            “That seems awfully restrictive,” Allen groaned.

            “Hey, I don’t make the rules, I just… oh wait.  I forgot.  Of course I make the rules.  What am I even saying?” Roxy continued with a self-deprecating laugh, then abruptly returned to the falsely serious expression she had before, raising her eyebrow.  She drew her arms in until she had her brother hugged against her stomach.  “So what’s it gonna be?  What’s the next game?”

            “I can’t believe you’d trust me with something so important.”

            “Yeah, well, don’t get too used to it.  If you pick something dumb, I’m choosing everything we do for the rest of the evening, and you’re gonna have to pretend really hard that you’re not having so much more fun than if you’d been doing your boring homework at your boring size,” Roxy said gravely.  With her index finger, she reached up to the top of Allen’s head and began roughly patting his hair down.

            “Believe me, I don’t think I’ll have to do much pretending.  Almost anything would be better than that stuff,” Allen admitted with a shrug, gripping the soft fibers of Roxy’s Kranktrap shirt for support as she clutched him lightly to her torso.

            “Ah-HA, so you admit I know what’s best for you then?”

            “Well, I wouldn’t want to say something so extreme as that, but whatever makes you happy,” Allen shrugged.  “I figure you’re gonna do that no matter what I say.”

            “Actually, what would really make me happy would be if you’d quit stalling and tell me what we’re playing before I get too bored of your peanut gallery commentary and just choose something myself,” Roxy said as she leaned against the kitchen counter.

            Allen grappled awkwardly with the fabric of his sister’s comparatively enormous t-shirt, face-to-face with Kranktrap’s rubbery logo, and hummed dramatically.  He prodded at the stylized illustration of the four members screaming out lyrics, their craggy faces dotted with stage paint.

            “We could go down to the store and find you a less obnoxious shirt?”

            Suddenly, he felt his sister’s fingers pulling away from around his chest and pinching at the back of his shirt.  Her other hand disappeared from below, leaving him dangling again as she pulled him away from her stomach and brandished him at arm’s length.

            “Okay, buster,” she growled.  She waggled a disapproving finger at him, even bopping him lightly on the nose with her pinky.  “That does it.  No more choosing privileges for you.”

            “Dang.  All I’m saying is, you could do better.  You look like a forty-year-old roadie in that,” Allen chuckled with a shrug, impeded somewhat by the fact that nothing was holding him up but Roxy’s fingers clenched on his clothes.  “Can I stand on your hand again?”

            The girl shook her head emphatically from side to side.  “Nope!  You lost that privilege too.”

            “You sure do run a tight ship here, don’t you?”

            “You have no idea,” she whispered threateningly, biting her lip to keep back a revealing smirk.  “I think you have an apology to make?”

            “To who?  Kranktrap?” Allen snorted.

            “Don’t you go making sarcastic jokes like you’re not in the hands of someone who can make anything she wants happen for real!” Roxy warned playfully, her hand swinging gently back and forth, causing her eight-inch brother to follow the same swaying trajectory.  “Don’t you forget who’s holding who.”

            “So what then, you’re gonna warp us into Kranktrap’s studio and give them a surprise visit so I can apologize for a terrible t-shirt they didn’t even have anything to do with designing?” Allen asked.  “They’d boot you right out of there.”

            “Well, I could always bring them here, you know.  Then you’d be in trouble!  Except Stan.  He’s the only warlock in the group, so he’d probably block me somehow.  But I’d get everybody else!”

            “I thought it was harder to warp people to you?”

            “It is, but I’ve been practicing at school with a couple people.”

            “Yeah, I’ll bet.  Kranktrap lives halfway around the world.  I bet you’d only get them halfway over the Pacific and then accidentally let go, and then you’d drown your tone deaf gods,” Allen said, crossing his arms and actually moving his shoulders in the direction of each arc as his sister continued swinging him back and forth.

            “Mmmkay… now you’ve really gone and done it!” Roxy grunted melodramatically, furrowing her brow as angrily as she could manage. She sunk to the floor, bracing herself against the counter, until she could stretch her legs out on the hardwood.  Reaching forward, she plopped Allen down on top of her foot so that he was awkwardly wrapped around her left ankle.

            “Oh, wow, I said something else, so you let me go.  Great.  Should I say they’re all ugly next, too?” he laughed, rolling off to the side and standing next to his sister’s jean-clad calf.

            “Nope.  You’re gonna say you’re sorry to me.  Like you did before,” she said with resolve, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow expectantly.  She pulled her right leg in closer, but arched her foot against the floor, pivoting on her heel, so that the pink bare toes could wriggle freely in Allen’s direction.

            “You’re kidding.”

            “Nope!  Give ‘em a kiss, Mr. Know-It-All,” she instructed.  Her big toe poked roughly at his stomach, nearly knocking the wind out of him.  Then, arching higher, she nudged the row of digits right under Allen’s chin.

            “Wow.  This again?  Honestly I just can’t imagine what it’s like to have all that power, and at the same time, so little imagination,” he grunted as the toes pressed gently against his neck.

            “Shut up and get it over with already,” she giggled, then snapped her fingers.  “Hold up one second, actually.  Don’t do it yet.”

            “Oh, I can barely hold myself back,” Allen said with a roll of his eyes, pressing his fists into the ball of his sister’s foot in an effort to push it back a little, but to no avail.

            “This should do it,” Roxy said.  She blinked her eyes and grinned from ear-to-ear.

            Suddenly, as if rumbling up from the floor, was the pounding baseline of Kranktrap’s third-best-known song that was permanently etched in Allen’s mind like a cult tattoo thanks to Roxy’s borderline-psychotic obsession with it three summers ago.  Guttural screeches from the lead vocalist led into it and confirmed the tiny teen’s fears as he realized his sister had essentially turned the entire kitchen into a concert hall speaker.  His bones rattled with the crackling energy of musical metal.

            “You’re joking,” he mused in disbelief.  “Really?”

            “Do I ever joke?”

            “Almost always.”

            “Okay, maybe about most things, but not about the greatest musical act to ever walk the planet.  Or fly over it, in Stan’s case,” she retorted.  Her toes drummed quietly against the floor, causing her whole foot to vibrate even more as Allen’s breathing automatically synchronized to the beat.

            He groaned.  “You know, we are actually, right now, crossing the line from really sick prank to legitimate abuse,” Allen informed her, resting his cheek against the thick ankle.

            “Come ooooooon,” she sang playfully at the same pitch as an electric guitar solo that had started up in the song.  Her opposite foot, still curled toward her brother, bopped him in the back and nearly knocked him off his fleshy perch.  “Take much longer and we’re gonna hit Randall’s solo.  Growl vocals for three minutes and thirty-two seconds straight.  Your call.”

            “All right, you win, you heartless cretin,” Allen grumbled in defeat, hiding a joking smile as he pressed his lips back to the bulbous surface of Roxy’s big toe.  Puckering, he kissed it again.

            Open air had definitely helped cleanse it of the warm, rubbery flavor her shoe had provided, only to be replaced with the downy hint of carpet fiber mixed with rarely lotioned skin.  Not wholly unpleasant, if a little degrading, but what did he care?  At least no one was here to see it.  A tiny dot of soggy sock fuzz brushed his lip and he recoiled back again, wiping his mouth aggressively.  He could feel a dab of moisture on his skin.

            Roxy blinked and the music shut off.  She straightened her legs back out, satisfied with the gesture, and splayed her toes back against the floor.  Her palm laid over Allen’s back again and she plucked him off her ankle, drawing him closer to her shirt again as she stood back up with the cabinet for support.

            “Not bad.  Better than the last one, anyway,” she commented.  She grinned snidely, rippling her fingers around Allen’s body and giving him the feeling of momentary weightlessness, then added facetiously: “Use a little more tongue next time and you’ll be all set for the first time you can convince a girl to make out with you.”

            “Honestly, it’s incredible how much material you give me that I could so easily use to build a case against you with a Ranthbarl Court hearing,” Allen groaned, his eyelids drooping with boredom.  “For that comment alone, I bet they’d take away your warping for at least a week.  This is just making a mockery of your entire order.”

            “Oh, what do you know?” Roxy snarked as she sauntered out of the kitchen and into the hallway.  “If you had powers, you’d just be using them to look at brain cells all day or something.”

            “Exactly.  I’d be doing something useful with my time instead of pretending I’m the queen of the world.  I’d be-” Allen insisted, but was interrupted from further commented by the massive thumb of Roxy’s opposite hand, which the girl had pressed handily over his mouth.

            “…and that’s just about enough out of you for right now,” she sighed.  She stopped in her tracks in the foyer and tried not to laugh at the sight of her toy-sized brother with his arms crossed defiantly and a long finger blocking his complaints.  “Don’t look so grumpy.  I could’ve just stuffed you back in that sock you seemed to think was such a genius hiding place.  Now, seeing as you’re not going to be making suggestions for the next few minutes, I guess I’m picking the next activity, huh?”

All things considered, Allen had spent far more boring afternoons in his life.  As it turned out, after the impromptu jam in the kitchen, Roxy was tired of finding ways to make humiliating jokes at his expense and resorted to something they could participate in equally.

            Or, at least as equal as the young witch was willing to make it.  Her favorite video game system was stored in a shoe box under a pile of jeans in her closet, not touched since she left for college, and she’d apparently been feeling an itch for it ever since.

            “I can’t believe you never took this out to play it while I was gone at school,” she commented as she unpacked the controllers onto the carpet in her bedroom while Allen looked on from a plush green pillow she’d conjured for him.

            “As if you’d have let me use it if I asked.”

            “Yeah, that’s true,” she agreed.  She gave a twist of her fingers in midair and the proper cords secured themselves telekinetically into the TV’s ports.  “By the way, just for future reference, there’s a hex around my closet that-”

            “…activates if anyone tries to open it without saying the password.  I know,” Allen grumbled.  “It took Mom like fifteen freaking minutes to erase your fancy magic bubble that popped up around me.”

            Startled, Roxy dropped the controller she was holding and snorted with laughter.  “Oh.  Well, that’ll teach you to try and take stuff out of my closet.  What were you doing in here, anyway?”

            “Mom was trying to mix up some elixir-thing for Grandma and wanted me to grab some box of dark-whatever-twigs that you keep stored in there,” he said, crossing his arms with disdain.

            “Oh, relax, the bubble doesn’t hurt you at all.  It’s just real tough to get off.  I’m surprised Mom did it so fast.  I spent all last summer learning how to make it that strong.  You can’t even use magic once you’re inside,” Roxy explained proudly.

            “That’s great.  Real great.  Maybe use it on people that aren’t just trying to do their chores next time, though, hmm?” Allen said, lying back on the pillow and staring up at the ceiling high above.

            “Hey, next time Mom needs something out of there, you get to tell her to find it herself!  I’m getting you out of your chores,” Roxy said haughtily, turning back to the TV and switching the game system on after inserting a disk.  “You’re welcome.”

            “Thanks, I guess.”

            “Shut up with your whining and get ready to play Zolermandia,” Roxy ordered, swiping her hand through the air so that a controller was levitated onto Allen’s pillow.

            “You know I hate this one,” he groaned.  “This is like bottom-of-the-barrel fantasy RPG.”

            “You’re just saying that because you suck at it,” she taunted, sticking her long tongue out and blowing a raspberry that managed to fling a few flecks of spittle onto Allen’s face.  She was already scrolling through the introductory menus of the game.  “Are you going to sign in with that controller, or what?”

            “How do you expect me to play like this?” he responded, puts his hands on the buttons of the enormous plastic contraption like it was the command center of some futuristic hyperspace vehicle.  As he was still only eight inches in height, it required some maneuvering to hit everything he would need to play.

            “Darn well is how.  I’m not letting you screw up my stats because you’re so painfully untalented at everything fun.”

            “Okay, well, unless you want digital trolls eating us in the middle of a quest because I can’t reach the R-button, then you might want to give me some inches back.  Or all of them, even.”

            “Fine, fine,” Roxy sighed.  She snapped her fingers, whispering the incantation under her breath, until Allen had swelled in size just enough that he could access all the buttons on the controller without pulling a muscle.

            Of course, he still wasn’t particularly big, and looked more like a teddy bear size than one of Roxy’s childhood dolls.

            “What is this?  You gave me back like four inches.  That’s nothing,” Allen complained, slapping at the back of his palms.

            “Excuse you, but you’re eighteen inches right now, and you’re lucky to get that,” Roxy snapped as she started up her game file.  “Believe me, the second we’re done playing this, you’re going right back down to fun size.”

            “I guess I should be happy I’m tall enough to look up and see you geeking out over outdated graphics,” he said, lugging the bulk of the controller onto his lap.

            “Don’t push your luck,” Roxy murmured, half-smiling.  “If I find a use for you shorter, then that’s where you’re spending your weekend, so don’t give me any ideas.”

            “Wouldn’t even know how to,” Allen retorted quietly as their respective characters appeared onscreen.  Roxy didn’t bother to answer, as she’d already become engrossed in looting some treasure chests in the immediate starting area of the game.

            The next hour was spent in near-silence, save for the dramatic fantasy music and occasion metallic foley as Roxy slashed enemies and Allen followed obediently behind, mostly sticking to the corners every time they’d enter a new fortress or cave.

            “You know, you could be trying to convince me to keep you this size more often by actually contributing something to this quest,” Roxy said as she took down the last enemy in the area.  “Right now, I’m figuring I might as well let you wrestle with the controller at eight inches, because you’d be just as much help.”

            “It’s not my fault you played this every waking moment that one summer,” Allen said.  “My guy will get clobbered by most of these people.  Especially that last thing you killed.  See, I’m already almost dead from those archers you missed when we came in.  I don’t even remember which button is the shield.”

            “You don’t have a shield, you have a deflector pulse, you nerd,” Roxy grumbled.

            “Oh, right, I’m the nerd.  You with your deflector-whatevers…”

            “Hey, it’s not easy remembering how some of this stuff works,” she defended.  “Especially with how much of it they get wrong.”

            “Get wrong.  Of course,” Allen said with a roll of his eyes, having literally forgotten in the middle of their discourse that much of the game’s fantastical world was, in some way, a reality.

            “Yeah, it’s like nobody at this dumb production company is a witch or warlock.  Or at least nobody that gets to make creative decisions.  This is just sloppy.”

            “Maybe they think their game world is more interesting than the real world,” Allen said snidely, knowing it would get a reaction.

            “Bull.  Shit,” Roxy spat with feigned shock.  “I think the real world would blow their minds if they tried to make an actual game out of it.”

            “Okay, so what’s something they got wrong?” Allen said.  His knowledge of witchcraft and sorcery was obviously infinitely more extensive than the average human, who didn’t even know of its existence, but the teen still wasn’t privy to everything.  Often times, that was just how he liked it, except when his curiosity was piqued.

            “Well, in here, you don’t even have to crossover through any other realms to see the other races, they’re all just kind of… chilling out together,” she explained.

            “Ah.  Right,” Allen said.  He supposed this was to his benefit.  Running into a troll or that minotaur-hybrid thing his parents were off stopping in New Zealand probably wouldn’t end well without any kind of magical aptitude.  He’d still had vivid nightmares up to the age of ten of Roxy explaining the appearance of one of the Others to him.  Even today, her grotesque descriptions were enough to make him shudder.  “What else?”

            “Um… well, they make it seem like you can only do, like, four things with magic before you need to eat bread or something else stupid,” Roxy said condescendingly.

            “I assumed that was just to help balance the classes.”

            “Uh-huh.  Or they’re just calling us fat.”

            “So is that all, then?”

            “No way.  Like, look at these giants!” Roxy said as her game character dashed into an underground cavern, where three enormous and goiter-faced humanoids were already advancing.  “By the way, get out your freaking sword and help me.”

            “I think you’re on your own here.  If I get stepped on just once right now, I’m dead.  You didn’t even give me any healing things after I got hit with those arrows.”

            “I’ll heal you when you deserve it,” Roxy said as she engaged the club-swinging giants.  “And anyway, they designed them like gross gorillas in this game, but the real ones just look like… really, really tall people.  It’s probably good none of the real ones have access to video games, because they’d probably want to boycott this one.”

            “I’ll bet,” Allen said honestly, finally trying to attack a giant and getting swatted aside immediately.

            “Not all of them are real polite, I guess, but still,” Roxy wheedled.  “They deserve better.”

            “You’re still sore about that one time, aren’t you?” he snickered.  “What was her name again?  Elisara?"

            “Hey, I was like seven, so I could barely do anything to protect myself yet, and that girl just grabbed me by the ankle and started dangling me like forty feet over the ground!” the witch mumbled.  “And she started laughing and twirling her fingers through my hair, like some kind of-”

            “-personal doll?” Allen droned.

            “Shut up, this is different.  You’re having fun, so you don’t count,” Roxy answered without missing a beat.  “But anyway, she did that for like five minutes straight, just holding me upside down and letting all the blood rush to my head, before my parents and hers came back in from that land treaty or something they were signing and made her put me down.”

            “Give her some credit.  She was only like six years old and as big as an oak tree,” Allen shrugged.  “It probably wasn’t even that high for her.”  Though he was too young to recall the event himself, he’d heard this story recounted numerous times, usually with his parents cackling uproariously at the recollection, while Roxy groused with embarrassment in the corner.

            “Yeah, but then she just laid me right back on her foot, which I might add, is always bare because the giants don’t wear shoes unless they’re just… weird, so it was all covered in mud and… ugh!” Roxy said.  With a final magic attack onscreen, she cast down the last of the giant enemies in the game.

            “Wow, that must’ve been so terrible for you, I can’t even imagine,” Allen deadpanned with the knowledge and experience of someone who had lived through this nearly-precise scenario innumerable times.

            “Again, shut up, you don’t count,” Roxy snapped as she led the way out of the digital cavern, having scooped up all the reward points and leaving none for Allen.  She added smugly: “Luckily, I was a pretty tough kid. I told her off pretty good after that, and she let me alone.”

            “Oh, really?” Allen snarked as his game character followed Roxy’s out of the tunnel.  “Because the way Mom always tells it, you started bawling as soon as she put you down, and then Elisara started crying too because she thought she hurt you, and then she picked you back up and held you like a baby and combed your hair until you stopped.”

            “Well, Mom doesn’t know everything!” the young witch fired back, clearly caught in her lie, and shrugged.  “Whatever.  The point is, most of ‘em are pretty okay.”

            “Except for Elisara.”

            “Except for Elisara,” Roxy repeated back sarcastically, then jolted, her attention returned to the screen.  “Hey, check it out!” she gasped excitedly as her game character opened a large treasure chest tucked discreetly behind the corner of a statue.

            “What, even more XP for you to gloat about?”

            “Nope.  No, this is… something way better,” Roxy promised as her character pulled a comically large purple bottle from the metal containment unit and proceeded to chug its liquid contents.

            “Hey, I’m the one who needed more health!  You barely have a scratch from that giant fight,” Allen complained.

            “It’s not a health potion, nerd,” she said with a grin.  Suddenly, a green aura emanated around her character, and in a flash the digital female warrior was expanding, up and out, higher and further, until she’d grown to a size at least five times the scale of Allen’s avatar.

            “Oh, bullshit,” Allen moaned, releasing his grip on the controller and flopping back onto the pillow to gaze at the ceiling again.  “I literally give up now.”

            “Cool, because I wasn’t planning on letting your guy walk now, anyway,” Roxy teased, tapping a few buttons on her controller so that her character leaned over and scooped up the weakened form of Allen’s inexperienced soldier into her digitized arms and pulled him in close.  “So I guess there is at least one thing the designers basically got right about reality.”

            Happily, the witch tilted her control stick so that her overpowered being bounded forward over the graphically represented hill with Allen’s character helplessly trapped in her embrace.  “All right, now where was that other side quest we were gonna do?”

            “Okay, I’m serious this time.  It’s going to work!” Roxy insisted angrily as her hands hovered over a circular metal tray on the kitchen counter.  “And then you’re gonna be real fricking annoyed that you had to pay for it yourself.”

            “Yeah, maybe, but at least I’ll be the one without food poisoning,” Allen said as he fumbled awkwardly with the leather folds of his wallet a few feet away, having been reduced back to eight inches as soon as their gaming session was ended, as promised.  “That pizza guy is gonna be here any second.  Are you going to make me big enough to answer the door, or what?  Because unless they just happen to be a witch, too, we may have a lawsuit or something on our hands.  Not to mention Mom and Dad throwing a fit.”

            “No.  If this… doesn’t work, again, I’ll answer the door and pay for the pizza myself,” Roxy snapped.

            Allen tried to hide his grin as he shoved his wallet closed again.  As competitive and demanding a personality as she was, Roxy was a hopeless gambler when she was too positive about being right.  Often, this carried with it pleasant benefits that saw Allen getting his way when his sister was forced to play out promises made in the heat of the moment.

            “Okay.  All yours, then, champ,” he said encouragingly.

            Roxy ignored his sarcasm and set to work.  The girl’s lips quivered, the words of the spell mumbled under her breath.  This gave Allen further cause to chuckle, though he kept it quiet enough not to distract her and risk blowing this chance for free food on his sister’s dime.

            The girl was a talented enough witch by this point in her life that most casual spells barely required a flick of her wrist or a batting of her eyes, yet this, a simple little conjure of a large pizza for their dinner, was giving her immense difficulty.

            It wasn’t that she was incapable of crafting something that looked like a pizza, though whether or not she could make one that didn’t taste like paint thinner and rat carcasses was an entirely different story.  Food conjures that were actually edible had been nearly impossible for the twenty-year-old since she first received a lesson on magic in her youth, and it had been a source of great humor in the entire extended family for a long time that a girl who could turn inanimate objects into animals or juggle boulders in midair couldn’t snap up a cupcake.

            Sure enough, in a small flash the empty pan was occupied by what looked like an admittedly lovely pizza with a well-browned crust and bubbling cheese on top.

            “Who’s the champ now?” Roxy asked snidely, tearing off a hunk of the pie and chomping on the corner.  For a moment, she chewed away, smiling as widely as possible, then finally gave in, hacking the masticated bite onto the countertop so that the disgustingly sauce-and-saliva slathered thing bounced toward the corner, stopping just a few inches in front of Allen.

            “Um… probably the pizza guy is?” Allen said helpfully, wrinkling his nose at the sight of the balled up monstrosity.

            “Why don’t you try it?  It’s really good.  I just didn’t want to steal it all for myself,” Roxy grumbled, not even bothering to try hiding her bitterness, as she crossed her arms in defeat.

            “So what was the flavor this time?  Skunk butt?” Allen asked, kicking the gunk ball away so that it rolled off the edge of the counter and plummeted into the trash can below.

            “I think I got a little hint of dish detergent in there?” Roxy opined thoughtfully.  She grabbed a glass from the countertop and filled it with water from a bat of her eyelashes before chugging it to wash out the aftertaste.

            At that moment, the doorbell rang, and the young witch roared out an impassioned groan, throwing her head back dramatically and slamming her hands in a partially fabricated rage onto the surface next to her sibling.

            “Thanks for dinner, sis,” Allen said, giving her thumb a reassuring pat.

            Too irritated to acknowledge the act, Roxy wordlessly swept off into the front hallway and begrudgingly honored her bet.  She seemed to be rushing through the transaction as rapidly as possible to limit the humiliation.  Less than a minute later she returned and whomped the steaming box onto the countertop.

            “Wow, I don’t believe it, it… it smells like something you could eat without getting a stomach virus!” Allen gasped elatedly.  The teen pulled up the cardboard flaps and whipped it open to let the delicious aroma waft out into the kitchen and help replace the lingering stench of his sister’s horrid concoction.

            “So are we watching a movie, or what?” the witch snapped, obviously hopeful to move on from the topic of cooking before she became too embarrassed.  Her finger twirled around the purple-dyed locks of her hair, and the bangles on her wrist seemed to jostle a little harder than normal.  Seeing her beaten was a rare sight for her human sibling, and it filled him with guilty amusement.

            “Yeah, I guess, sure,” Allen agreed, crouching down to swipe up a bite of the cheese from the pizza.  His eyes shifted into the center of the pie and onto the small white tripod used to keep the box from collapsing on it.  “I guess we’ve already got a table right here, huh?”

            As soon as the words had escaped Allen’s lips he wanted to slug himself.  That foreboding snap of Roxy’s fingers had sounded in his ear drums and moments later the seventeen-year-old had dwindled down until the low-hanging lip of the pizza box was at eye level.

            Looking around at the suddenly gargantuan cavern of a kitchen, he supposed he wasn’t much more than a single inch in height.

            “Couldn’t have said it better,” an irritatingly smug voice resounded somewhere above.  Allen gazed upward just in time to witness a cluster of slender curled fingers advancing on him from on high.  Sighing, he didn’t even bother attempting to duck out of the way as Roxy’s thumb gingerly squeezed into his torso, pinning him comfortably against her index and middle fingers before plucking him up into the air.

            Soaring upward for just a moment, Allen hung in the vice of soft flesh before his sister’s laughing green eyes, and didn’t even need to see her mouth to know a pompous grin was spread over her lips.

            This act might’ve once caused his stomach to turn inside out with the weightless feeling pulling at his dangling feet, not to mention the dizzying drop if her fingers should part, but she’d been doing this to him ever since he was twelve years old, before she was exactly precise with her adjustments to his height, and the sensation was starting to feel bizarrely familiar.  He wasn’t going anywhere.

            “Haven’t you ever heard of the concept of, like… jokes?” Allen wheezed with annoyance at his helpless height, squirming a little between the firm yet gentle grip of his sister’s digits.

            “I told you to not give me any ideas,” Roxy tsked, waggling a finger at him and shrugging.  She lowered him into the open palm of her other hand, cupping it to ensure he couldn’t try to crawl out.  “Don’t beat yourself up.  I was already starting to think the same thing, anyway.  I was just gonna wait until we were sitting down to do it.”

            “How am I even supposed to pick up a slice now?” Allen moaned.  “What, am I just supposed to tear chunks off?”

            “Shut up.  Mom and Dad’s crummy TV will look like a movie theatre one now,” Roxy ordered curtly.  “You’re welcome.”

            The rest of the evening was, even Allen had to admit despite the looming specter of homework and college applications, a much better use of his time than he’d been planning before Roxy showed up earlier.

            Sure enough, thanks to his corny joke, the tiny plastic pizza saver was pulled from the mess of cheese and deposited onto a napkin for him to use as a table.  The edges were still greasy, but Roxy had flatly refused to pull a piece out for him until he spent at least sixty seconds pretending to wait for a server in a pizza parlor.

            “You ordered the greasy ball of cheese and marinara, I believe?” Roxy intoned with falsified etiquette, swirling her finger in midair so that a large hunk from the center of a slice floated out of the box and over to Allen’s makeshift table.

            “Actually, I ordered a normal slice for a normal-size person, but whatever you have, I guess,” Allen sighed.

            “So glad to see my customers happy,” the girl said in the same voice, smirking broadly and plopping the ball of food onto the table before scooping up an average-proportioned triangle for herself.  “Eat up, and be sure to tip me well, or I might spit in your drink.”

            Once he’d gotten to scarfing down the bite of pizza, Allen did have to realize the benefit of his needing so little food at this size.  There’d be plenty of leftovers in the morning now, and God knew Roxy wouldn’t have plans to fix him any alternative breakfast.

            The movie selection process had gone as Allen suspected: Roxy picked one first, some goofy sci-fi comedy she’d seen a million times and came very close to making Allen’s ears bleed with its puns, and then he got to pick one, though of course not from the list he’d have preferred, as his sister would literally give up her powers willingly for the rest of her life before sitting through a documentary about the War of 1812.

            “You know there were way more interesting wars going on in that same year, right?” Roxy had scoffed as she held her inch-tall sibling close enough to the movie shelf that he could pick one out.  “Like, the one where the elves in the UK were having this big-long thing with a dwarf clan from Greenland and then it ended because the elf heir secretly got married to the dwarf princess.”

            “I think dad showed me a picture from a book of that couple once.  But I thought it was an elf princess and a dwarf prince?”

            “Nope, elf prince and dwarf princess,” Roxy corrected.  “The prince just had really great cheekbones and the princess probably could’ve beaten up a manticore with her bare hands.”

            “Wow.”

            “Right?  That’s what they should’ve call the War of 1812 instead!” the witch chuckled.  “It’s so… presumptuous.”

            “Hey, don’t try to discredit humanity.  That was a pretty important point in history for us.”

            “Dragons,” Roxy insisted loudly, breathing heavily enough with the effort that her warm breath fogged against Allen’s face.  “The elf-dwarf one had dragons.”

            “All right, all right, fine, so maybe that one should’ve gotten the name,” Allen relented.  “So if you’re not looking to expand your mind with human history, how about the thing that won Best Picture last year?  You know, the one in sepia that only has five lines of dialogue?”

            “I’ve got news for you, nerd.  Here are the options.”  Pinching him back between her thumb and ring finger, then, Roxy hoisted Allen up to a higher shelf and set him on the wooden surface.  Of course, she’d placed him on a level that only contained sci-fi and fantasy films.  Beaten, Allen rapped his fist against a random one he’d never even heard of.

            “Perfect choice,” Roxy said.  “See, picking stuff isn’t so hard when you don’t pick terrible things.”

            Roughly an hour into the second movie, Allen was seriously regretting not doing his research, because as it turned out, the plot revolved partially around a hapless human character who was hit with an alien beam and reduced to a few inches in height.

            “Hey, I didn’t know you were in movies!” Roxy would snark practically every time the character would appear onscreen, nudging her brother in the shins with her pinky finger as he rested on the shredded threads of her jeans.

            The end of that one couldn’t come soon enough for the inch-tall audience member, and the evening had hardly begun.

            Four movies in and Allen was beginning to nod off on his sister’s knee, though he was jolted back to wakefulness every time something loud would happen on the screen or Roxy would laugh maniacally at a joke, shaking her entire body.

            “I don’t suppose you’re gonna let me go to sleep now?” Allen groaned.

            “Huh?  Yeah, sure.  I’ve had a loooong day,” Roxy drawled.  She blinked, shutting the TV off, then scooped her fingers down to her knee and let her brother slide into the center of her palm.

            “Did you even go to a single class at the university today?” he demanded with a snort, pulling himself onto his haunches on the tender terrain.

            “As a matter of fact, I did!” she retorted as she leaned back on the couch cushions.  She tipped her fingers against her other hand, allowing Allen to roll awkwardly from one to the other.  “Just… skipped a couple of the boring ones.”

            “Ever the scholar,” her sibling mumbled with a knowing smile as he was transferred back to her other hand with a soft plop.  “By the way, is there a point to whatever you’re doing to me right now?”

            “No, not really,” she sighed, doing it once more and catching him this time on the very tips of her fingers before letting him tumble down them like a carnival slide, where he was stopped against the plush heel of her hand.  A long yawn lumbered from her lips.  “All right, ready to tuck in?”

            “Can you put me up to normal again?”

            “No,” she informed him, and slowly her fingers began to fold downwards, forming a ceiling of flesh above him in the warm center of her hand.

            “Eight, even?”

            “What, and risk you escaping in the morning to do fun stuff without me?”

            “I guarantee you I’m not doing fun stuff by myself in the morning.”

            “I know you’re not, because you’re still gonna be where you are right now.”

            “C’mon, seriously?  What if you… you know, drop me, or…”

            Roxy batted her eyelashes, and Allen felt an involuntary stiffening of his sister’s muscles under the soft skin as she hexed her appendage into a temporary state of painless atrophy.

            “There.  Now you’re not going anywhere,” she said, satisfied as she yanked a quilt up onto the couch from its folded position across the footrest.

            Allen squeezed his way up between the thumb and index finger of his sister’s cocooned hand, and opened his mouth to make one last protest, but was greeted to the sound of Roxy already snoring, her head tipped back against a pillow.

            Shrugging, then, the miniscule human wormed his way back inside the admittedly comforting environment of Roxy’s toasty fist and cuddled himself against her palm, drifting off after a few more minutes.

“So then she just goes and calls Cathy a bitch while she’s still walking out of the room, like she can’t hear it!” Roxy exclaimed incredulously, gesturing wildly with her milk-dribbling cereal spoon as she balanced on the back of the couch.  Shaking her head, she dipped the utensil back into the sugary sludge in her bowl.  “Unbelievable.”

            “Did you say anything?” Allen asked, trying not to laugh.

            “You mean to her face?” the witch snorted.

            “Yeah,” he answered, knowing such a thing would not at all be out of character for his sister.

            “I was about five seconds away from it, but then I just…” she sighed, then quickly pressed her lips together, silencing herself.  “…you know, let it go.”

            Lifting a disbelieving eyebrow and crossing his arms as he bobbed idly in the milk of Roxy’s cereal, still at just an inch tall, Allen stared up at the twenty-year-old’s straight face to see through the hysterically obvious lie.

            The day his sister actually learned to let something go would be an early sign of the end times.

            “Don’t give me that look,” Roxy smarmed.  Pinching her fingers daintily around the metal spoon, she stirred the milk, causing a small white whirlpool to sweep Allen around the rim of the bowl.  In response, he threw his arms up as though on a roller coaster and let his body sway in circles.  As he passed a chunk of marshmallow, he snatched it up and chewed on it while the towering young woman continued swirling him around the contents of her breakfast.

            “Not judging.  I’m just saying, you’re the same person who turned some girl’s cheese sandwich into grasshoppers when you were nine,” Allen commented, shrugging as the milky rapid ride came to a slow end.  He wrapped his arms around a puffy cereal chunk, using it to help stay afloat so he could concentrate on giving Roxy his most condescending smile.

            “And don’t turn that around on me!” the girl snapped playfully.  She pulled the spoon from the bowl in a massive spritz of liquid that blotted out her brother’s vision for a moment and pointed the object accusingly at him, as though considering jabbing his fragile inch-tall frame with it.  “I only did that because she took a pair of craft scissors and snipped a huge layer off the back of Margo’s hair when she wasn’t looking!  You don’t just do that to a girl and get away with it.”

            “So I’ve noticed,” Allen chuckled.  “Like I said, not judging.”

            “Whatever,” Roxy said with a roll of her eyes.  “So maybe I didn’t let it go right away.  But I did later.  Right after I-”

            “Turned her into a grasshopper?”

            “No,” Roxy growled, then averted her eyes and smirked, tilting the cereal bowl from side-to-side like a tilt-a-whirl.  “It crossed my mind, obviously, but then I had to think about whether or not I’d be cool with mom and dad putting a bind on me for the rest of the year, especially for doing that to someone who can’t fight back.”

            “Yeah.  They really do hate it when you put people without magic in compromising positions, don’t they?” Allen groaned with emphasis as he was rocked from one edge of the rim to the other, splashing through numerous clusters of marshmallows and sugared corn puffs along the way.

            “For the fifty-millionth time, you don’t ever get to count yourself when I’m making these examples,” Roxy said, narrowing her eyes.  She drove her spoon forward again, stirring her brother and nudging him back into the furthest curve of the bowl with her utensil.  “I swear, you just never learn, do you?  Even with all your fancy Dean’s List posters mom and dad hung up in the other room like you’re hot shit.”

            “I really don’t see how I’m not relevant in this situation,” he protested, tumbling backward over the rounded metal bubble of the giant spoon.  “Seeing as you kind of just stuck me in here without a warning or anything.”

            “Hey, it was gonna take way too long to let you make your own breakfast.  Did you even think through that part?” Roxy retorted, raising an eyebrow.  “Just picture it.  You, trying to drag a cereal box around big enough to be a house for you.  Then trying to pour the milk with your itty bitty hands.  It would’ve been a joke.”

            “And I guess it was out of the question for you to grow me big enough to just make it myself?”

            “Obviously.”

            “Right,” Allen sighed pleasantly, shaking his head as Roxy’s spoon came back around once more to propel him through the pond of breakfast sludge as playful penance for his egregiousness.  The ride was a little wilder this time, as the witch scooped under her brother just low enough that she could move the inch-tall human about the liquid course with more speed and precision.  As a result, several thickened swallows of milk made their way down Allen’s throat as he was tossed beneath the off-white surface several times by the force of his sister’s tilting hands, though he managed to cough them back up.  Righting himself after doing an undermilk backflip, he coughed them back up.

            Roxy noticed this unsanitary act and instantly created a few more lashing ripples through her bowl, shaking it around and knocking Allen right back under the surface with a surprised sputter.  “Hey.  Remember the breakfast rule?  If it goes in your mouth, you have to swallow it.  I don’t want your sick-o germs.  You didn’t even brush your teeth last night or this morning!”

            “Yeah, maybe because I’m the size of the toothpaste cap now?” Allen suggested.  Several soggy crumbs had lodged themselves in his hair, and with a shrug, he set about picking them out.

            “Technicalities,” Roxy scoffed.  Her spoon descended a final time, clacking against the basin of the milky reservoir, and then rose again, directly under Allen such that he felt several marshmallow chunks as well as himself ascending from the bowl as his sister selected what was apparently her next bite.

            There was a moment of peculiar silence between them, as though they were daring one another to burst out laughing first, and both were determined to win.  The spoon rose higher and higher as the witch’s powerful fingers, steady as ever, drew the end of it closer to her milk-stained lips.  Allen crossed his legs in the center of his sibling’s humongous circular cutlery, folding his hands in his lap as though about to settle into a yoga pose.  Roxy, meanwhile, kept an expression of cool placidity plastered on her face.

            Strict, unblinking eye contact was rigidly maintained as the witch’s lips parted, her tongue lowering itself into the base of her mouth to make room.  A low hum emanated from the back of her throat, as though she was having her tongue depressed at a doctor’s appointment, and the call beckoned Allen inside.  The metal slid quietly against the bottom row of her teeth as Roxy passed the bite of food, as well as her brother, into the steamy hovel.  Neither had flinched, and “uncle” remained unsaid by either of the competitive pair.

            There was a pause as Roxy held her jaws wide open, the spoon still resting on her tongue and separating her writhing taste buds from the still-serene Allen, who stared at his sister’s wide gullet and her dancing uvula as it glistened from the kitchen lights behind him.  Two small droplets of frothy saliva plopped from the red roof of her mouth, landing on the teen’s shoulders, but still he didn’t move.  He watched the wet metal fog rhythmically in the heat.

            And then a shift.  The young witch’s fingers curled, tilting the spoon downward so that Allen and the milky contents were tipped out of the curve of the utensil and, finally, deposited with a squishy splash onto the sticky surface of her tongue.

            As the white droplets snaked their way between the taste buds, the rippled muscle seemed to come alive again from the sweet flavors, and fresh spit began to leak down the curve of the undulating cheeks.  The gummy liquid filled in under the tongue until the inch-tall visitor to his sister’s mouth found himself wading in her warm, bubbly saliva, his hands becoming coated in it no matter where he tried to lay them.  Light seemed to disappear slowly from the moist air.

            At last, Allen broke the silence.

            “Well,” he yelled out loud enough for Roxy to hear, shrugging to himself.  “I definitely hope the breakfast rule isn’t the same for you as it is for me.”

            A snort of uncontrollable laughter overtook them both, churning the milk and cereal bits into a frenzy and tossing the human occupant against the buoyant surface of Roxy’s cheek, nearly knocking his ankles against her molars.  Seconds later Allen felt gravity taking hold of him as the tongue slurped him back into its control.  It spilled him off the tip of the pink organ and back between the wet lips as his titanic sister literally spit him out like a spoiled grape.

            As though he’d done a cannonball off a diving board, Allen plunged back into the cereal bowl, right where he’d been aimed, and thrashed about in the milk for a few moments to regain his bearings.  Before he could even resurface, though, he felt his legs being pinched gently between Roxy’s thumb and forefinger, and suddenly he was rocketing back out of the liquid, spraying drops every which way.

            “All right, all right, I’m willing to give that round to you,” Roxy sighed as she dangled her tiny, sopping brother upside down in midair before lowering him into her palm, allowing him to right himself at last.  She didn’t bother to hide an amused grin.  “I figured you’d crack before I even took the spoon out.”

            “Really?” Allen chuckled, squeezing the milk out of his hair as effectively as possible and peeling his soaked shirt off his stomach, unwilling to consider how much of the sopping substance was milk and how much was his sister’s saliva.  Judging by how much heavier it had become after his trip into her mouth, he suspected the latter was in high quantity.

            “Yeah, really, nerd,” she laughed.

            “I thought I had at least a fifty-fifty shot of you actually just swallowing after I said that,” he admitted sheepishly, clearly worried about his explanation leading to an enactment.

            “Nah, you don’t have to worry about being eaten this weekend,” Roxy giggled, purposefully letting her purple locks fall over one of her eyes to establish ominousness in her whispered words.  “I’m watching my diet.  No more junk food.”

            Another moment of pseudo-morbidity was established as the pair stared each other down, Allen sitting motionless in his sister’s hand, but this silence lasted a far shorter time than the previous one as each nearly doubled over with side-splitting cackles.

Allen hunched over the desk in his bedroom, restored to his full height again as he tapped away on his laptop keyboard, hoping to complete as much homework as he could with this brief respite in his sister’s bizarre conception of quality time together.

            Roxy, apparently running low on her trendy Kranktrap apparel, had insisted on a meandering trip to the only clothing store in the mall she was willing to set foot inside.  She’d at first insisted on hiding Allen in her satchel and buying them frozen yogurt as reward for his keeping quiet while she perused the racks of dark t-shirts and shredded jeans, but her eight-inch brother had quickly dispelled the appeal of this possibility with his promise to bug her incessantly for the entire trip, frozen yogurt or not.

            There were, of course, silencing spells she could perform to get some peace and quiet, but after some persuasion, Roxy was at last convinced to leave Allen behind and return him to normal so he could complete enough of his schoolwork for the weekend that their parents wouldn’t get on the twenty-year-old’s case about impeding her brother’s scholastics.

            “Just work fast, okay?” Roxy groaned as she begrudgingly waved her hands and fluttered her lips to perform the spell that brought Allen back to his original height, or at least as close to it as she was willing to allow.  When the spell was complete, he’d stopped at just over four feet tall, which still put him well below eye level with the witch: just how she liked it.  “Because as soon as I get back, you’re going right back down to fun size.”

            Roxy placed her hands on her hips and gazed down at her schoolchild-sized sibling with a triumphant grin.

            “C’mon, please?  Normal size?  You’re not even going to be around to see me being taller than you,” Allen said, punching his sister playfully in the denim-clad thigh.  His hair was still sticky with dried milk from his earlier swim in Roxy’s cereal bowl.  “Plus, I really need a fricking shower, and I can’t reach the head like this.”

            “Fine, fine,” she grumbled, giving a final snap of her fingers that tacked on another foot and a half to Allen’s stature, which still put him just below eye level with her.

            “You know, if someone rings the doorbell and I have to answer it, and it’s someone we know, they’re going to notice this!” Allen protested, standing on his tiptoes in an effort to climb the final few inches that would return him to normal at last.

            “So don’t answer the door, squirt,” Roxy replied good-naturedly, patting her still-shorter brother’s hair before drawing back with some revulsion.  “Eww.  Yeah, you really do need to wash your hair.”

            “Glad you finally noticed,” he shrugged, moving past her and heading for the stairs to make his way for the bathroom.  The topic was obviously closed as far as his sister was concerned.

            “I’ll be back before you know it!” Roxy sang.  She closed her eyes, focusing her energy until a soft glow emanated around her body as she began to warp away.  “Use this privilege wisely.”

            “Privilege.  Of course,” Allen groused with an irritated snicker.  He paused near the stairway railing, eying what appeared as a decorative paperweight with a blue gem on the coffee table.  From this vantage point, he could just barely make it out as it rested in the other room.  “How do you know I won’t use the call stone to get mom and dad to come home and save me?”

            “One, because you know they’re probably still working on that minotaur-hybrid-whatever, and two, you’re having too much fun,” Roxy commented, correct on both counts as she disappeared into the light.  Allen rolled his eyes but smiled all the same.  “Now hurry up and do your boring not-fun-size crap while I’m not here to see it.”

            And so he did, after a thoroughly refreshing shower that washed away the remaining sugary gunk from his dip in the cereal bowl.

            Allen had to admit, he did feel sharper now and more prepared to tackle his required tasks after a break for the past day.  Despite his parent’s gentle objections, he often never gave himself real breaks from his studies, perhaps out of some inherent desire to prove himself as a significant individual without the use of magic, though if asked, the teen would’ve just insisted he was simply dedicated to the work.  As grabby and immature as she could occasionally be, Roxy really was the only one close enough to the cusp of his human world and the other to know just how to ease this part of him.

            Barely forty-five minutes had passed in his solitude when, as Allen shoved the laptop away to take a breather from his essay, he felt the familiar tingling inside, and instinctively wrapped his legs closer to his body as he was rapidly reduced, instantaneously shrinking into the center of his now-enormous swivel chair.

            He sighed.  It wasn’t as long as he’d have liked to work, but maybe that was still part of his problem.  He had to start letting go of those impulses to never rest, and just have some fun, or he was going to start losing it, as Roxy was insistent on reminding him at regular intervals.

            “You’re back sooner than I thought.  So did you buy twenty more of the exact same Kranktrap shirt, or just ten?” he snorted with playful derision, still not turning around, as the back of his seat would’ve blocked his view of Roxy anyway.  If his sister felt the need to surprise-attack him with her shrinking spells like this, it seemed the only correct response to suck the fun right out of such an empowering act and pretend like it didn’t bother him.

            For a moment, there was no answer.  Glancing around his environment, Allen frowned to realize the sheer scope of his desk before him.  He hadn’t expected it to rise quite so high, yet there it was, like the overhang of an office building.  The fraying tufts of his swivel chair cushion seemed wilder, the threads stretching longer, and with surprise, the teen realized just how small he was at this moment.

            It was hard to be sure, as he was steadily becoming convinced that he’d never been shrunken this small before, but by his best estimation, he barely registered at half an inch tall.

            This was peculiar, to say the least, as Allen continued standing in the slightly unnerving silence.  Ordinarily it wouldn’t have taken Roxy more than a few seconds to snatch him up in her playful fingers and deposit him into her palm after shrinking him, usually with a cheeky taunt accompanying the transfer.  Even then, if she did have plans to make him anywhere near this small, she always began at a height of around eight or ten inches, as it was an easier transition to make, so the change was never quite so jarring as this.

            Allen was thoroughly used to having his height reduced just for his sister’s amusement by this point in his life, and as a result hadn’t really felt fear or anxiety from it in years.  But now, going directly from his ordinary height down to the length of a person’s thumbnail, horrendously dwarfed by the world around him, created a twisting sensation of discomfort in his gut.

            Roxy made her jokes and always had her way, but she was always, always gentle with him, ensuring his safety first and foremost.  No matter how much he might’ve complained about her magically induced choices for him, Allen would’ve admitted this without hesitation.

            This, now, just felt… different.  A little wrong, even.

            “Roxy?” he called out after more than a minute of pure silence had passed, padding cautiously across the buoyant surface of the chair cushion toward the back.  “H-Hey?  Anybody there?”

            Giggling resounded through the entire room, booming not just from the volume created as a result of his reduction, but from sheer uninhibited joy.  Cheerful as it was, it gave Allen cause for hesitance.  Something about it made him recall a feeling, like an old memory he’d tried to forget.

            And then it hit him, even before her bright blue eyes were beaming at him, even before he had to look up to those bouncy golden locks or the smugly glistening grin of the sixteen-year-old intruder.

            Grace.

            He’d only been in the same vicinity as the headstrong prodigy of a witch twice in his life at group dinner gatherings arranged by his parents and several other magical families.  In some overheard gossip before the meal, he’d learned a little of the girl’s staggering accomplishments: how she was knocking her early examinations out of the park, how she had mastered spells meant for witches and warlocks with at least five years on her, and how incredibly powerful she was as an entity.  She certainly didn’t look it, with her admittedly cute face and doe-eyed expressions of glee that made her look like she would’ve fit in on a high school homecoming committee more readily than her almost-assured position in one of the more respected covens someday.

            Once dinner was served at the first meeting, when Allen’s parents happily introduced him to the rest, he’d been warmly greeted and offered salutations by the kind members of the local magic community.

            Only Grace’s face was different as she looked on him, a thin smile on her lips as she became aware that he was the only non-warlock in the house.  Later on, he’d noticed her moving through the clustered bodies slowly, making her way towards him.  Roxy, noticing this, had shepherded her brother to a different room and begun making loud jokes, which seemed to discourage the girl from coming any closer.

            There wasn’t much explanation, but Allen knew he could trust his sister’s generally critical instincts on people, and his impression, partially from Roxy’s recommendation and especially from the hungry look in her eyes as she gazed at him, was that Grace was one best to keep distance from.

            And now here he was, reduced to the size of a snail, alone in his home while one of the most powerful young women in the world stared down at him, her hands resting on her knees as her pretty countenance loomed overhead.

“Hey there, little boy,” Grace said as sweetly as possible, brushing a curl over her ear.  She was garbed simply in a pink tank-top and white shorts that hugged her slightly curvy upper thighs with a degree of appreciative display.  “Whatcha doing here all by yourself?”

            “I’m, uh…” the half-inch-tall Allen mumbled, stricken dumb by the unblinking gaze of those humongous blue irises.  “J-Just doing my homework.”

            “Ohhh,” she drawled with revelatory feigned interest.  “Homework, huh?  Such a good little boy, getting good grades and stuff.  You’re pretty smart, aren’t you, Allen?”

            “I d-don’t know.  I guess I try,” he said, placing his own hands on his knees to steady the wobbling he could already feel in them.

            “You don’t have to be so humble.  You should be proud of yourself, knowing so much, even for a human,” she declared with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm.  Her right hand suddenly began to move forward, slow enough that Allen wasn’t startled, but with purpose all the same.  “You know, I’m pretty smart too.  The thing I just did to you?  I learned how to do that two years ago.  Most people can’t do it for another year after that at least.”

            “Oh,” Allen mumbled, hardly managing words now, as his attention was primarily focused on the girl’s enormous hand and soft fingers, parting tenderly as they neared, reaching out for him like an invading spacecraft.  He’d never had to examine a body from this close at such a pitiful stature.  Roxy’s fingers used to intimidate him when they were his same height.

            Grace, however, despite being on the shorter side for her age, now towered over her ungrateful host with a hand seemingly expansive enough to grip a house in her palm, with powerful, peachy fingers each wider than an oak tree.  Her index finger extended, the tip of it drawing ever-closer until she tapped Allen in his tiny stomach with barely any force.  Of course, the mere shock of coming into contact with a portion of her pliable digit was enough to send a visible tremor down Allen’s spine.

            A low rumble drummed in the back of the young witch’s throat: a barely concealed chortle of pure delight.  Her thumb, which had previously been curled into her palm, extended as well, nearing until both chubby-tipped fingers were within reaching distance of their presumed prey.

            Allen fought to swallow the lump in his throat as he stared at those massive fingers, each one far larger than him and capable of flinging him to his doom if either one flicked into his torso.

            This was, of course, a thought that never crossed his mind when his sister’s gigantic hand neared, but somehow this situation seemed to call for a revised understanding of himself as a vulnerable and entirely breakable organism.

            “I bet your sister couldn’t shrink you back then, could she?” Grace questioned after another silence.  The curved pads of her thumb and forefinger inched themselves to Allen’s sides, still not squeezing with enough pressure to pick him up, but patting his sides, as though testing his resilience.  The boy winced with every touch from the titanic digits.

            “I guess not,” he answered, unsure of how to proceed, but at last formulating the closest thing he could create to a plan in the face of this mighty teenaged enchantress.  “Listen, I don’t mean to sound funny or anything, but, um… do you think you could make me big again so I can keep working?  It’s just that I’ve got a lot to get done this weekend, and well, you know… can’t exactly change myself back, can I?”

            He laughed nervously, and earned a pity grin from his visitor, whose fingers showed no intention of growing him back to normal, or of removing themselves from his personal bubble as she continued tapping his hips.

            “Wanna see a new trick I’ve been learning, cutie?” she whispered, obviously resolving to completely disregard any statements that weren’t of spellbinding interest to her.

            Miraculously, her fingers drew back from Allen’s sides, leaving only her pointer, which hovered borderline-threateningly over his head.  He shuddered as it touched down, pressing the tip against his hair, and held just firm enough to ensure he couldn’t try to walk away.

            Grace closed her eyes and sighed deeply, and suddenly Allen felt an alien sensation, as though he was having cool water poured into the center of his brain through an invisible spigot.  It wasn’t painful or even necessarily frightening, but given its novel quality, even worse than having the giantess’s fingers playfully stroking at his legs, he knew he wanted it to end immediately.

            It lasted less than a minute, and then Grace opened her eyes again, pulling her finger back as though repelled from Allen’s body.  She nodded knowingly, parting her soft lips to speak again.

            “I guess you couldn’t tell what I was doing to you, huh, little boy?” she suggested, placing her hands back on her hips, where Allen much preferred them, though he still wasn’t remotely comfortable with his position, staring roughly at knee level with the towering teen.

            “N-No…”

            “Well, I guess I’ll just tell you so you’ll believe me,” she shrugged.  “I can see into people’s heads if they hold still enough to let me focus.  Memories, feelings, things like that.  Most people can’t even do it, but I’m already trying it.  I’m not great at it yet, but then again, I’m never great at stuff until I’ve had at least a couple times to practice it.”

            Taken aback by what was probably the closest thing Grace could manage to actual humility, Allen flinched again, feeling more violated than if the girl had simply decided to forcibly peel his tiny clothes off his body and stare at him naked.  It certainly was scarier to comprehend, and that was saying something.

            Could she really see inside?

            “Roxanne just doesn’t give you a break, does she?  Making you play hide and seek when you’re trying to work,” the witch observed in remembrance, answering Allen’s unspoken question for him.  It chilled him to the bone.  “Then making you watch her weirdo geek movies and sleep in her hand, like a little baby pet mouse?”

            Allen had no response.  He wrapped his hands together as tightly as he could manage.

            “I guess I’m not the only one who thinks you’re so much better when you’re itty bitty, huh?  It looks like you had a fun morning, too.  Going for a little swim in Roxy’s cereal, huh?” Grace giggled.  “It looked pretty fun.  Well, for her, anyway.  To be doing that to someone.”

            In his unease from Grace’s words, Allen had hardly noticed her hand creeping back down from her hip and onto the chair again, her fingers parting slowly as they returned to his sides, this time pinching together just enough to pick him up.

            He flailed for a moment on the rapid ascent, trying to focus his attention on the creased wall of Grace’s palm flesh just ahead, even as the world around him whipped by in a flash of colors, until he seemed to be floating over a carpeted canyon between the mountainous teen’s supple body and the swivel chair.

            “Easy now,” Grace shushed, pressing a finger to her lips even though Allen hadn’t spoken.  “I’d think you were used to this happening by now.  I could feel your little feelings, too, remember?”

            Allen gulped, squirming uselessly between the thick pads of flesh that contained him on either side between the girl’s greedy fingertips.  He certainly hadn’t forgotten this idle comment from earlier.

            “I could tell you aren’t… afraid of being tiny.  Even being this tiny.  Or afraid of magic.  Normally, anyway,” Grace said contemplatively.  “But I could see how you feel about me, too.  That you’re… afraid of me.  And you are, aren’t you?”

            The boy didn’t feel the need to nod in confirmation since Grace had obviously seen this fact for herself, though his muscles had atrophied in terror already, so it was a moot point as he got lost in the searching blue eyes of the girl’s billboard face.  Allen mentally cursed himself for leaving the call stone all the way downstairs: his only means of contacting his parents, wherever they were on the other side of the planet right now.  Though he knew that even if he’d left it on the desk, it wouldn’t have made a difference as he fell down to this insignificant height.

            “Now tell me, little boy, why…” Grace sighed dramatically.  Her tongue slipped from between the cushy seal of her pink lips, gliding precariously from one corner to the other, before slurping back inside her mouth.  “…would you be afraid of little ol’ me?”

            Allen’s trembling jaws were far beyond the point of an easy response.

            “I guess I can’t blame you for feeling nervous, can I?  After all, I made you itty bitty, and… neither mommy or daddy or big sissy is here to help you out of a jam, huh?” Grace said in a measured pace as though explaining the situation to a toddler.  “So maybe we got off on the wrong foot.”

            “Maybe,” Allen managed dryly.

            “See, you’re telling the truth!  We’re being better friends already,” Grace snickered cheerfully, her tongue lapping at the side of her mouth again demonstratively.  “And I think I know a great way to make us even better friends.”

            “W-What?”

            “I think you humans have something sort of like it but less fun called… a trust fall?” Grace hypothesized as though she hadn’t already planned out this entire conversation to her satisfaction.  She tilted her head, pretending to ponder.  “But that would be tough since you’re so little.  I’d probably just squish you even if I did trust you to catch me.  And anyway, people like me don’t really do stuff quite like that.  We do things called trust swallows.”

            Grace snapped her fingers in the morbid silence that followed, and the puny human realized a bubble like an astronaut’s helmet had formed around his head.  Breathing became easier, despite the claustrophobia inside the translucent little magic bulb, and in bittersweet horror, he realized its functionality as a breathing apparatus qualified her playfully spoken words as more than just a joke.

            He couldn’t be certain, being privy only to certain elements of the magical world, but Allen would’ve been willing to bet his life savings that “trust swallows” weren’t quite the fad Grace was making them out to be.

            The fingers drew ever nearer to the girl’s lips, which puckered slightly as if preparing for a kiss, before curling into a broader, teasing smile that seemed to stretch on too far for the boy to make out without rotating his neck.

            Allen struggled to come up with the impossible words that might get him out of this rapidly deteriorating situation, but the longer he looked at the young witch’s gently contorting mouth as it prepared to receive its snack, the less convinced he was that there existed a single phrase in the English language that could convince the prodigy to stop doing something she had set already her mind to.

            And, indeed, as her tongue licked a final time across her lips before they began to part, displaying the spit-coated oblivion that was the cavern of her gaping red maw, she seemed firmly set on putting her powerless prey inside regardless of whether his rhetoric was up to snuff or not.

            “Grace?” Allen muttered, too sapped of courage to manage anything about a tiny muffled syllable.  The vice of her fingers slowly passed between her lips, leaving only the gateway of her glistening white teeth for him to bypass before he was fully inside.  The air grew hotter, stickier, even as the magic bubble around his face continued offering oxygen.  “G-Grace?”

            “You don’t have to be nervous, little boy,” she uttered without fully closing her lips again.  “All I wanna do is show you that you can trust me.  That bubble is all the air you need, and I won’t let you go too deep on the first time.  Just a little down into my throat.  After that, you’ll see how easy it is, and then we’ll go further.”

            “I… I d-don’t w-” he sputtered, pleading in his tiny tone.  He felt the cold sweat forming on his back, his limbs practically disconnected from his body in the adrenaline-surging fear high.  The powerful fingers squeezed into his sides began to loosen as he felt his miniscule feet touching down on the slimy terrain of the girl’s monstrous, slippery tongue.

            It writhed about in the saliva-pooled base of her mouth as she took him in.  An instant later it tubed possessively around his body, caking him in her gooey juices and binding him down to the surface of her taste buds as her fingers parted at last from his body.  Grace’s fingers slurped a final time against the walls of her mouth as they exited, as though she were some kind of theatrical gourmet, appreciating her newest morsel to the fullest extent.  Her lips began to close together, sealing out the light, and trapping in her victorious giggling, along with the half-inch human himself.

            “N-No…” Allen sputtered meekly beyond the point of being heard, lost in a haze of confusion, terror, and the warm, palpable air that he could feel literally consuming him as he careened down a miasmic, rippling serpent of a tongue and toward the shadow of Grace’s waiting uvula.  He struggled to move his limbs, to fight toward the molars for something to grab onto, but he soon was almost entirely submerged in the girl’s generous saliva that weighed him down like bubbly quicksand.  The final destination was only just below, and already the boy could feel his feet sinking down into the undulating tunnel of the teen’s eager gullet.  “NO!”

            The boy had already partially resigned himself to this torture, but it seemed as though the universe had heard his final appeal for aid, because in a flash, he was rocketing back toward the entrance of Grace’s cruel lips.  Light flooded in, and saliva sprayed outward as Allen was launched like a post-Heimlich projectile into the air.

            A nauseated cry erupted from the witch’s lips as she hacked up bile from her throat, stumbling to the ground immediately after her treat was expelled, but this was lost on her intended treat as he soared through the air.  For a moment, Allen’s stomach twisted inside itself as he watched the distant ground spinning below, spelling instant extinction if he continued on this trajectory.

            Instead, he felt himself plopping onto soft and familiar ground, warm and vaguely scented of fabric softener and ratty Converse laces recently knotted.

            The newly returned Roxy closed her titanic palm tenderly around her half-inch nearly-trust-swallowed brother, while her other hand remained clawed in Grace’s direction and spurting with strobing orange light as she completed a particularly potent vomiting spell on the intruder.

            “Sorry, Gracie,” the older witch snarled as her victim cowered on the ground, yucking up the contents of her last meal.  “But that joke’s only funny when I tell it.”

Still trembling and globbed with Grace’s warm saliva, Allen breathed a heavy sigh of relief to feel his sister’s giant fingers closing protectively around his half-inch body.  In another moment, he sensed something that felt like cool suntan lotion spreading electrically over his skin.  Blinking, he realized it was a defensive barrier, taut against his body, to prevent him from harm as Roxy regrew him to eight inches in a flash of light and sat him down on the desktop.

            “Sorry about the stains, nerd,” Roxy sighed, eying the pooled vomit on her brother’s bedroom floor that resulted from her surprise assault spell on Grace.  She looked with disdain back to their uninvited guest.  “It’ll come right out with some of that spray like they use for when your dog makes a mess.  Or a spell, I guess.”

            At last recovering from her sickness, a revolted and visibly infuriated Grace stumbled back to her feet, wiping a hand across her lips and patting her disturbed bangs back into their previously pristine locations.  With rosy cheeks puffed, her stormy blue eyes narrowed in on Roxy, who was already glaring with a particularly venomous bent.

            “Hey, you’re back just in time to play, too,” Grace giggled with false sugar.  She was obviously seething from every pore.  “I saw you guys did that earlier.  It just looked like so much fun.  I mean, come on, could you really expect me to not try it myself?”

            “What did you do?  Just waited around for me to leave once you knew our parents were gone so you could come in and pick on someone who can’t do anything to stop you?” Roxy scowled, standing between her still-reduced sibling and the recuperating intruder.  “You really are a little vulture, aren’t you?  All that fancy shit you can do, and still nothing constructive to use it for.”

            Allen could hardly recall occasions like this where his sister didn’t insert a joke between every other word.  He rarely witnessed her in this kind of cold calm. 

            “Now, now, there’s no need to be such a bitch, Roxanne,” Grace taunted with a grin, knowing the witch was only called her full name by her mother and loathed its every utterance.

            “It takes a bitch to know a bitch, Gracie,” her opponent snapped.  “And trust me.  Everybody knows you’re a bitch.”

            “Uh, Roxy?” Allen peeped anxiously, not quite on board with antagonizing someone as powerful as Grace.  He was comforted by the shield his sister had formed around his body, but all the same, he didn’t like feeling this vulnerable.  “Please…”

            “You heard him,” Grace snickered, taking a well-appreciated step back from the pair.  “Maybe you should give your little brother a growth spurt, hmm?  He could really use the confidence boost.”

            “First I’d like it if you left and didn’t set a single fucking foot back in our house again,” Roxy said icily, taking no prisoners.

            “Yeah?” Grace grumbled.  She shifted her weight to one leg, tapping her sandaled foot against the carpet and pivoting on the axis of her squat big toe.  “Or what?”

            “Or I guess I’ll have to ask you the nicer way.”

            “Nicer?  Nicer than what?”

            “Nicer than what I’m already asking you,” Roxy answered through a gratingly gritted smile.  “Nicer for me, obviously.  Not for you.”

            “Roxy?” Allen pleaded.  He certainly wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially after his sister had saved him from an almost definitely nightmare-inducing ride down into Grace’s digestive tract.  But by now, the tension was too thick for even a cursed blade to cut through it.  “Please…”

            “Uh-oh, I think baby brother’s gonna cry, Roxy,” Grace teased, pantomiming a wringing of tears on her cheeks.  “Maybe you should do something before I just feel too bad for him and have to help him myself.”

            “You lay another finger on my brother…” Roxy spat, her tone cold enough to quell a dying star.  “…and you’re gonna have a nice big spider where your head used to be.”

            Allen froze, too daunted to summon any further words.  It seemed his sister was intent on this happening, whatever it was, and though he was just as frightened as before, he realized it was more than just personal pride driving her now.

            Grace’s eyes flared, as even with all her bravado and power she couldn’t go unaffected by words such as those.  At last, she plastered on another smile, and stepped closer to Roxy, who drew her hand behind her back with fingertips glowing purple in preparation for a retaliation.

            “Not sure I’d be so into that,” Grace sighed with some boredom, as though discussing the state of the weather.  “I mean, I don’t have anything to wear that would look good with a bunch of hairy legs hanging off my head.  What would people say?”
            “Probably roughly the same things they say now,” Roxy retorted instantly.  “You know, if anyone even noticed the difference, obviously.”

            Another stinging pause followed as the younger but more powerful witch looked the college student up and down, sizing her up with a wrinkled upper lip.

            “All right, all right, I guess you and I got off on the wrong foot too, Roxanne,” Grace said.  “Maybe we should ask your little brother for suggestions, since he didn’t seem to like our trust swallows very much.”

            Without warning, Grace’s hand thrust forth, not toward Roxy but Allen, who recoiled at the very sight of her fingers coming for him again and flopped onto his back.  Double-taking, Roxy turned her head for just an instant, the rare sight of real concern raw in her face as she saw her brother had been strangely untouched by whatever the other witch had done.

            That was when Grace’s other hand slapped itself into Roxy’s stomach instead, crackling with thunderous energy that caused the lights overhead to dim momentarily.  In a flash, she had the twenty-year-old in a bind of luminescent plasma that seemed to course down her entire arm and through Roxy’s body, and swinging around with all her might as though tossing a discus, she flung the older witch across the room and into the wall with a spray of sparks and light trailing behind.  The force of the throw whipped papers into the air as Roxy careened directly through the wall and landed with a thud on the other side, shrouded in a cloud of rising dust.

            “ROXY!” Allen cried, lunging forward to the end of the desk and throwing himself off of it, knowing the watery shield around his body would protect him.  He landed awkwardly on his feet with no pain despite the drop and scrambled forward, but suddenly felt a pair of fingers closing around his back and lifting him up.

            He dangled awkwardly, batting his limbs as Grace’s fingers wrestled, preventing him from following after his sister through the hole their attacker had blown in the house.

            “Not so fast, little boy.  This is kind of a girl-talk thing we’re having here,” Grace scolded, then proceeded to plop Allen onto his bed with an uncaring flick of her wrist.  “Or maybe just more of a witch-talk.  Stay put while the big people sort stuff out, okay?”

            Realizing the fruitlessness of trying to act while Grace was watching him, Allen looked through the plaster-crumbling opening in his bedroom wall and was filled with relief to see a dust-coated and more thoroughly pissed-off Roxy standing back up, none too pleased for the opening blow of the encounter being the dirtiest kind of sucker punch.

            “I’ve seen you throw people around when they had a ten-second head start on you and a barrier already put up,” Roxy commented pleasantly.  “Little scared I’ll give you a run for your money without the cheap shots, huh, Gracie?”

            “No, don’t be silly, Roxanne,” Grace giggled.  “I was just making things even after all your bullshit you were puking all over me earlier.”

            “Better than actually puking, you have to admit,” Roxy snorted with a sly half-smile that earned another grimace from Grace.  She raised a hand that was already radiating from palm to fingertips with emerald light.  “You know, my mom’s gonna have a cow about that wall.  I hope you know some good reconstruction spells.”

            “Obviously I do,” the younger witch laughed as green sparks began to spill from her palms in equal readiness.  The room darkened as the unlikely battlefield warmed from the wrathful energy pulsing through both powerful bodies.  “And it’s a good thing, too, cuz your face is gonna need it big-time after this.”

            Both Roxy and Grace roared as they cast their spells simultaneously in an explosion of colors and dancing streams of light that made utter confetti of the loose papers and bed sheets alike.  Flashes of open flame, bitter snow flurries, and every possible shade of electricity blasted from the fingertips of each young enchantress and into all corners of the room, forming a violent tapestry of bolts and unfurling energy.

            Allen dove away from the direct line of fire and into the mattress, burrowing under blankets.  He covered his head, knowing how little of a difference this would make, and watched as the two squared off with all their might.  The possibility of racing through the conjured carnage to reach the call stone downstairs crossed his mind, but as the volume of dancing sparks increased, it occurred to him he’d be cut to ribbons or possibly transformed into an amphibian if he attempted to pass the line of fire.

            From both witch’s lips poured a limitless tongue-twister of varying spells and curses, or at least all the ones that could come to mind.  Grace’s declarations were screeched rapidly, almost sloppily but were made up for with power, while Roxy’s were more patient, quieter, and formulated conscientiously.  The latter’s emerald eyes glowed so brightly Allen could hardly stand to look in her direction, and Grace, in turn, seemed to have the sun blaring from the back of her head as she coiled her hands into fists and swung them about in air, sending a barrage of smaller crackling orbs between the ever-burning streams of the binding curses.

            These all popped like fireworks against Roxy’s legs, and though she flinched in pain, she held firm, smacking her hand to the side as though slapping her foe.  Instantly Grace reacted as if she’d been dealt a blow to the face with a block of wood, staggering backward and nearly delivering a serious case of whiplash as her head was forced to the side.

            That was when Allen, even through the blinding crossfire of rebounding curses, witnessed the twitch in Grace’s eye.  Something oddly familiar and bizarrely human to see glinting in the prodigy’s countenance.

            Doubt.

            There was a crack in the smug brat’s armor of unflinching confidence.  In a flash the younger enchantress had turned back to face her opponent, casually swiping aside a crackling follow-up bind that Roxy had instantly sent after the slap.  A grimace clawed its way into her lips, her carefree attitude jostled enough to let a little more of the real Grace come to the forefront.

            And that was when her fingers suddenly reached out for Allen, tethering him around the waist with a warm green light that made the eighteen-year-old mortal more tired than he’d felt in years.  He flopped over like a ragdoll as the girl pulled him from his defensive barrier of blankets.

            “Let go of him, you BITCH!” Roxy snarled. Slashing her clawed hand through the air, the tie between Grace and her miniaturized victim was easily severed, but this momentary distraction was all the powerful witch required as she released her grip on what was clearly intended as a dirty move rather than an actual attempt to retake Allen.

            Grace thrust her fist through the sputtering energy field.  Light cut across the space through all their ricocheting spells and buried itself in Roxy’s torso with an atomic light that forced Allen to avert his eyes.

            Crying out in surprise and loss of air, Roxy was flung backward into her room again, where she was slammed against the back wall and crumpled to the floor.  This time, she didn’t rise again.  Allen’s blood turned to ice.

            “Oops.  Hope that didn’t hurt too bad, Roxanne,” Grace gasped with feigned concern.  Turning back to Allen on the bed, she pressed her palm to his chest, scooping him back up and hugging him to her stomach as she clambered over the hole in the wall into Roxy’s bedroom next door.  “Especially since I kinda want you still awake and stuff for whatever I do next to you and your baby brother here.”

            On the ground, the purple-streaked brunette was struggling to reopen her eyes as she laid on the ground, still working through the full brunt of the prodigy’s walloping assault: clearly a specialty for the power-drunk sixteen-year-old.  She whimpered wearily.  A few lingering beams crackled like inchworms across Roxy’s tired body as she remained slumped in a heap next to her closet door.

            Allen felt such a mélange of rage, fear, and worry that he could hardly open his mouth, though the option was quickly put aside as Grace’s fingers snaked their way up higher onto his body, purposefully covering up his lips to prevent vocal rebellion as she tapped an index finger against his forehead again.  The shield around his body was siphoned away in the intervening seconds as she broke through to make him susceptible to her psychic tricks once again.

            Oddly, Allen could feel her hand quivering, as though she’d just been carrying a great deal of heavy weight.  Despite being the one still standing, she clearly had poured her all into that last cheat of a spell to put Roxy on the ground.

            An improbable but nonetheless faintly possible gambit of a move crossed Allen’s mind as Grace began to invade it once again.  A faint hope to get out of this with some of their dignity intact.

            The same cool, earthy sensation flooded his skull as the witch peered into his fragmented memories and emotions: a skill she herself admitted to not having mastered yet.  Focusing as never before, Allen blotted out all other senses of the world and began to create something.

            “I hate to leave the lil’ boy out of the games for too long, though,” Grace commented down to Roxy, who was watching helplessly as her brother was probed again for information by their attacker.  “So we’re gonna go to him for ideas this time.  It’s sort of like the humans’ lottery, except it ends with me playing with you both, and probably neither of you liking it very much.”

            Allen, for perhaps the first time in his life, allowed himself to break completely from reality, imagining something not only vividly, but with the absolute understanding in his own mind that it was real.  That nothing else was the truth.

            “Hmmm,” Grace sighed as she cycled through his brain, at last stopping on this newest emotion of determination that had fought through the others.  A smile crossed her weary lips.  “Clothes, huh?  For my dollies.  Right in there?”  Her eyes darted to the bedroom’s closet doors as she considered this invented option of Allen’s, unaware of its fiction.

            Roxy’s gaze whizzed between her brother and the doors.  Without changing her expression, she gave the tiniest nod of recognition in his direction, and flattened her palm unassumingly against the ground.

            “I think giving you two a nice little makeover will be the perfect place to start,” Grace simpered as she stalked toward the closet, her hand outstretched for the handle.  “Maybe we’ll finally put a nice skirt on Roxanne so she’ll look like a girl for once.”

            Rather than pulling the door open with a spell, Grace chose to do so physically: another sign, Allen could tell, of her weariness in this moment after the clash with Roxy.  His heart pounded, and he willed himself to think of one single image with ultimate clarity.

            The doors opened, and there was a blinding flash of white light as though a stun grenade had gone off in Grace’s face.  She yelped, defensively throwing herself back from the door, her hand releasing from around the doll-sized and unprotected Allen.  He tumbled through the air toward the ground below, but rather than meeting a messy impact, was caught on a materialized green pillow as Roxy grunted with the effort to simultaneously catch her sibling and give Grace just enough of a push to topple her into the engulfing trap spell Allen’s counterfeit thoughts had fooled her into activating.

            Forced to the ground under the weight of the all-encompassing magic bubble that had once innocently entrapped Allen in its claustrophobic and enchantment-free zone, Grace screamed, pounding her fists on the floor in hopes to break out.  Roxy’s immaculately plotted spell remained resilient, though, leaving her down for the count at last.

            “Good thinking, nerd,” Roxy breathed with exhaustion as she scooped her brother up and hugged him to her shoulder, running her fingers over his cheeks to ensure he hadn’t been harmed in the fall.  “Literally.”

            Unlikely as it was after the violence they’d just witnessed, Allen managed a relieved chuckle, and relaxed in her grip, hanging onto the purple-dyed strands of her hair for better support.

            Grace had given up on outright screaming, as the bubble dampened her voice anyway, and seemed merely to be sulking inside, attempting spell after exasperated spell only to find none of her skills were of any use in the older and more experienced witch’s defensive measures.

            “Is it okay if I request we don’t try to do anything else to her on our own?” Allen sighed as he and his sibling silently watched their fallen foe inside her wobbling blue energy cage.  “Not that I don’t have faith in your fancy pants moves, obviously, but if any more walls get knocked down today, Mom and Dad are never letting us leave the house again.”

            “Yeah, agreed,” Roxy deadpanned.

            “The call stone is down in the living room,” Allen said, not entirely sure of the proper protocol in situations involved magically-charged criminal activity.  Dialing up the police didn’t seem quite the correct option in these circumstances.  “Who do we call?  Just Mom and Dad?”

            “In a little while,” Roxy said after chewing it over.  She held out a hand and mouthed a spell, causing the gem-plated call stone to hover up the stairs and into the ravaged wreckage of a bedroom, where it plopped into her open palm.  “I think I have an even better idea first.”

            “Un-be-lievable,” Grace’s mother uttered as she glared down at her daughter where she still cowered on the ground, entrapped in Roxy’s magic bubble thanks to Allen’s double-crossing mind games.  Her husband, scratching at his beard in attempt to work through the humiliation of his child’s cruel antics, stood behind his spouse and nodded with her every exclamation.  “Absolutely unbelievable.”

            The elder witch and warlock had shown up within minutes of Roxy using the call stone to contact them.  Grace, exuding far less confidence and autonomy now, had literally begged with her hands clasped together for Roxy to reconsider, insisting that everything had all been in good fun as useful practice of their skills, and that her threats of “playing with them” as “her cute little dollies” was, in fact, just simple teasing.

            Her opponent had, of course, taken the opportunity to pretend she had been swayed from calling, before using the stone anyway and conjuring the people who were probably most effective at corralling their out-of-control teen.  Allen, despite his desire for this whole situation to be brought to an end at last, couldn’t help but smirk at this particularly pathetic exchange as Grace even broke into tears.

            When they’d arrived, it had hardly taken much explanation to catch them up to speed.  To Allen’s surprise, as well, there was almost no convincing needed that their daughter was completely at fault for the invasion of their home.  As Roxy ran down the list of Grace’s crimes, there was a look of bitter resignation in the eyes of both parents that made Allen relieved, if not a bit sympathetic to the guardians of the powerful brat.

            “Mommy!  Daddy!” Grace moaned, dripping with melodrama as she reached out a quivering hand, as though she was on the verge of death, despite Roxy’s defensive bubble inflicting no actual pain on her.  “Please help me.  Can’t you see they’re lying, they’re-”

            “That’s enough out of you,” her father had snapped angrily, then looked back up to Roxy and Allen, who the former had agreed to regrow to his full height for this uncomfortable debriefing, though it had noticeably taken several seconds longer than usual.  “I’m… so sorry about this, you two.  Truly.  Both of us are.”

            “Thank you,” Roxy said, seeming to recognize the authenticity of their apology for something that wasn’t even necessarily their responsibility.  “We didn’t mean to pull you away from whatever you were doing, but-”

            “No, this… had to happen eventually.  We both knew it.  I just regret it had to happen in the house of a family we admire so greatly,” Grace’s mother said, stroking her long platinum-blonde hair to soothe herself.  “You see, we’ve only recently become aware of some of Grace’s… behavioral problems.”

            “MOMMY!” Grace screamed, probably less upset now with her defeat than with the fact that she had to lie on the floor and listen to them all discuss her as though she wasn’t still present.  It was a kind of degradation the mighty young woman was entirely unaccustomed to, and it stung like nothing before.  “DADDY!  PLEASE!”

            “Enough,” her mother ordered with a skewering glare that effectively silenced Grace without a single spark of actual magic, as well as the captivated Roxy and Allen, who were feeling far more comfortable with this whole conversation than they’d been expecting.

            “We’d been hearing a few things.  Just whispers.  Then… the Richardsons… you know, their son Jay?” Grace’s father explained, earning a nod of recognition from Roxy and Allen.  On the floor, Grace seemed to shrivel into herself even more at the mention of this name, realizing it truly was curtains for her now.  “His curse, as I’m sure you’re aware, renders him nearly powerless, and he’s struggled with it his whole life.  Recently, it’s gotten so bad, that his parents, in their distress, sought guidance and… well, it led back to Grace, and how she was…”

            “Tormenting the poor boy,” her mother scowled with disgust, then closed her eyes, clearly in a great deal of distress herself over her daughter’s transgressions.  “It… it isn’t worth going into now.  The point is, we… understand.  And something is going to be done about it soon.”

            “What is it?” Roxy asked, knowing it was probably a painfully sensitive subject for the pair, but feeling all the same that she and Allen deserved assurance after Grace’s escapades.  She assumed the answer would involve Grace going before a Ranbar Court for her acts, especially those against Jay, who didn’t even have the benefit of remotely comparable skills to resist her toying.  Grace was a little younger than most offenders who had to face this particular brand of mortifying scrutiny, but then again, the girl was a little too ahead of the curve in other ways.

            “Caroline,” Grace’s father said solemnly, and every young pair of eyes in the room instantly widened.  “She wishes to speak with Grace personally.”

            Fighting to keep his jaw from falling slack, Allen gulped and nodded, seeing a similar reaction on his sister’s face.  This was really all they wanted to hear, and was far more reassuring than hearing about Grace going before a court.

            Roxy had only once even seen with her own eyes the queen of the witches and guardian of every living thing in all realms.  Allen just had to go off the numerous storybooks on the immortal woman kept in their home, though these were more than enough to leave a sizeable impression.

            As much a part of myth and legend as she was of corporeal flesh, Caroline was one of the few immortals: a being who could conjure protective bonds strong enough to cradle the entire planet and then halt the onslaught of war with a single word, both of which were, in fact, documented events in magical history.

            To have a personal audience with her was ordinarily, in Roxy’s mind and Allen’s by association, the highest honor that could be bestowed on a living creature.  Except, of course, in this particular scenario of theirs.

            The other object of Grace’s torment, Jay Richardson, who was born with a lifelong curse that would never allow his abilities to develop past those of a child warlock, just happened to be the great-great-great-great grandson of a man who had long ago faithfully served Queen Caroline in preventing a major battle between the humans and a rebelling faction of the Others, and the family had been lending their magic ever since to their queen and her Union Council.  Roxy suspected this connection in particular granted the queen extreme interest in correcting any wrongdoing as swiftly as possible.

            “If you wish to speak further on the matter, you know how to contact us,” Grace’s mother said to Roxy, then turned to Allen as she and her husband prepared to leave.  “You too, dear.”

            “I do apologize as well for the mess she’s made here,” Grace’s father said, crossing his arms with contempt as he surveyed the damage, as well as the blown-out wall.  He waved a hand across the dusty wreckage, causing all destroyed and damaged items to knit themselves back together in a matter of seconds as papers, threads of carpet, and drywall all danced through the air until everything was back in its place.  “Neither of you are hurt, are you?”

            Roxy gave a confirming glance to Allen, who shook his head.  “Nope.  We’re… good, I think,” she said hesitantly.

            “I’m sure your parents will appreciate having this confirmed, even if they don’t yet know of Grace’s deeds,” said her mother, standing as well and using a hovering spell to stand her sixteen-year-old heathen-child to her feet.  “Please let them know we will speak with them in due time in attempt to make some kind of… amends for our daughter’s actions.  And as you two were made unfortunately to be involved in these things, we will ensure to let you know the outcome of it all.”  Roxy nodded in agreement.

            Whimpering in utter defeat as she was shuffled along with her parents, Grace hung her head, too embarrassed and knocked down far too many pegs to manage eye contact with anyone now.  There was a cold and terrified stoicism locked in her face.  The mere mention of her upcoming meeting with the queen had been more than enough to silence her for the foreseeable future.

            “Take care of yourselves, you two,” Grace’s father said warmly with a final apologetic wave as he took hold of his wife and daughter, warping them through a beam of light and out of the house.

            Slumping over in a beanbag chair with utter exhaustion, having been too embarrassed at her efforts to show this side to Grace’s parents, Roxy sighed and kicked her Converse off, then peeled the black socks off and flung them across the room, wriggling her black-painted toes against the carpet.

            As he looked down, Allen realized with a start that there was a cut several inches long on Roxy’s right foot just starting to bleed.  He frowned and shook his head at her silly pride getting in the way of help from the two apologetic beings who’d just left.  Noticing his reaction, his sister tried to shrug it off.

            “It’s cool.  I really am just fucking worn out right now,” Roxy explained slowly, closing her eyes to rest them, though she still seemed to cringe from the small wound as she shifted her legs on the floor.  “That’s nothing.”

            “It doesn’t really look like nothing,” Allen remarked.

            “It’s just from one of the bitch’s spells.  It’s a zilcrist curse, basically it… actually never mind, I’m too tired to explain it right now.  The short version is it’ll go away as soon as I remember the counter-curse.”

            “Well, you keep thinking.  I’ll be right back,” Allen said, turning and exiting the room.

            “For what?” she scoffed with surprise.  “Come back.  I don’t think we even high-fived or anything after all that, and this is a very limited time offer.”

            “In just a second,” Allen called from his room.  There was a slam of a desk drawer, and then he returned, a small ovular strip of white pinched in his fingers.  “Okay, back.”

            “What is that?” Roxy grumbled, squinting at the tiny slip as Allen unpeeled it and approached her.  He crouched before his exhausted sister and revealed a band-aid he’d acquired from his bedroom, which she couldn’t help but snort at.  “You’re kidding me, right?”

            “Nope,” he said seriously as he brandished the leathery adhesive.

            “Right.  Okay, so you’ve definitely just earned yourself an end to normal-size time,” she laughed.  Her arm quavered a little as she cast the spell, and it was clear she had to focus more than usual to pull it off, but an instant later her human sibling was flashing back down to eight inches and kneeling before her suddenly significantly enlarged appendages.

            Unabashed at his change in stature, and even comforted by it in the oddest of ways for its familiarity, Allen clambered overtop his sister’s toes to lay the bandage’s little gauze patch over the bleeding cut on Roxy’s foot.

            “Why?” she grunted with a disbelieving smirk, patting her foot against the carpet to playfully jostle her brother.  In spite of the bandage’s lack of magical properties, she seemed to flinch less already.

             “Just taking back the advice that you stole from me yesterday.”

            “Which was what again?” she chortled as her head sunk deeper into the beanbag chair.

            “To remember that sometimes doing stuff the real way is best,” he said simply.  Lowering his face, then, Allen lightly kissed the wound just below the band-aid, like a parent trying to calm a crying child with a gesture that had no hope of sealing the wound, but ended up most effective all the same.

            Even Roxy was at a loss for snarky comment in this one moment as the pair of siblings flopped onto their backs in the brief silence, reflecting wearily on the entire day it seemed like they’d had crammed into a single morning, the enchantress on her beanbag and the mortal on his pillow.

            “All right, whatever,” the witch groaned at last.  “You can be pretty cool for a human sometimes, nerd.”

            “You too, sis,” Allen said, taking zero offense from a phrase he recognized as the most heartfelt offering his sibling was capable of making.  “For a witch, of course.”

            “Of course,” she agreed sarcastically, and the pair snickered for several more minutes at their respective jabs before well-earned naps numbly overtook them both beneath the rays of the noon sun through Roxy’s bedroom window.