I was in a white box, cloaked in shadow. A bedroom and I was lying on a plastic bed frame and cheap mattress that had no padding, just a hard board like a table top. Lucy’s suffocating, flowery perfume clung to the walls, though she was nowhere in sight, and the wispy trail of acrid smoke. My clothes were gone and I felt drunk.

My body was tight and cramped. It felt like someone had hammered little screws all over my body and wound them too much. It must have been from lying on this hard bed. I stood up and stretched but the feeling didn’t budge.

The light switch on the wall didn’t work. It was a painted plastic bump that didn’t switch. The glowing circular light in the center of the ceiling wasn’t in the ceiling. It was a hole, through which outside light shone through…from a much, much bigger light, the droning fluorescent bar.

A sound burst over the house: Clack-clack-clack-clack, like a steam train running right over the roof. Then the whistling screams of teenagers like an oncoming cyclone. It was like an earthquake rocking the house, but it was actually the rollercoaster passing by, but now loud like it was right out the window, or magnified by speakers.

And then a murmuring voice trembled through the walls, high and feminine and disdainful, but with dinosaur volume:

“…could have made a wonderful little citizen for my collection but he would have needed to be broken in…”

It was Lucy, but if she was trying to murmur, it was coming out at a shout.

I staggered over to the window and pushed, and the entire pane popped out. It was plastic; I was surrounded by plastic.

Shakily, I leaned out and stared around at the outside world, and it was a thrilling mix of familiar and strange.

My perception was stuck on the floor. I was viewing the dusty, dim warehouse room from the perspective of a shoe, gazing up at a cavernous interior, expanse as a multi-storey indoor mall complex. Each wooden floor plank was as wide as a car parking space, and seemed to elongate into a distant, blurry horizon on the other side of the room.

The two Supervillains stretched to the ceiling and were filled out . Lucy paced over the floor; every step one of her shiny, thoroughbred-sized pumps launched through the air and tapped against the wood panels, sending vibrations long the floor, all the way through the dollhouse.

Rodney’s even bigger dirt-stained sneakers squeaked as he rocked his weight back in boredom. His pant legs went up like tree trunks, sighting anything higher caused my neck to hurt.

I wasn’t tied to the chair anymore, but I was still trapped – possibly now even more trapped. Making a sprint across the floor could end in either of them stamping me flat under a shoe.

I was only six inches tall. My head spun. The air crackled again as Lucy’s megaphone-charged voice carried on:

“…but he’s different. He says he’s a Natural, but he was running around with a Flexer. He knows things about us. It might be catastrophic to let him loose in Locketopia and poison their innocent ways with outside Super culture.”

Her eyes wandered the room, until she picked out my face in the window. A smile stretched across her face.

“Hello, pygmy. What stellar diet results! I bet you didn’t know you could lose so much weight while you were sleeping. You see, I started shaving you down, and then I guess I just got carried away.”

She laughed down at my patent confusion.

“Don’t even think of trying to get away, or my heel is going to ‘reconstruct’ you into the floor.”

Her pumps seemed to leap-frog each other as they pounded over the floor to me, and with each seismic shudder, carrying her monstrously tall, thin figure way over my head. I took steps away from the window, wanting to gag in dread. It was impossible to look at her red lips pout and flex as she spoke, and not realize I was small enough to fit between them.

“Have we reached an understanding, minion?”

“You want something from me?” I said, in no doubt she was in full control of whatever happened to me now. My voice was a puny, feathery trill compared to her blasting commandment. “Are you serious? What could I possibly do for you like this?”

One of her giant heels slammed down right outside the window and held there, dimming the dollhouse room from outside. A floor draught carried the scent of sweating leather into the plastic, miniature room, and with no ventilation, it sunk there until I felt like I was practically inside the shoe, pressed into the scent.

“Quit the self-pity babble! ” The giant shoe lifted and stomped the floor right outside the window. “You demean my work only because you are so ignorant! The reduced body is beautiful, pure, innocent. It minimizes mess and waste and consumption. It simplifies logistics. It makes humankind manageable and orderly. Who do you think you are mocking, little man?”

Her pump lifted a second time, but this time it didn’t lower. The roof of the dollhouse made a squeaking sound in the corners as the plastic grinded into itself. Her shoe had parked squarely on the roof, and she was pushing down.

I ran to the open window again, only to be met with her other pump, which was standing right outside. I had a vision of climbing out the window and being stomped by it. But in the meantime, the dollhouse was about to collapse…

“I’ll help you!” I cried at the top of my lungs.

The leather heel creaked as her weight shifted. There was a metal click and smoke wisped into the dollhouse . She’d lit up a cigarette as she meditated on my response. Her pump rested on the dollhouse roof.

“Your first assignment,” she waved the cell phone in her hand over the roof of the dollhouse, now the size of a body board, “is to invite the Flexer girl back in.”

A cloud of cigarette stirred angrily in my tiny delicate lungs until I felt dizzy. I coughed.

“I don’t know her. She’s not my friend.”

Now, there was a weird vibration from another part of the warehouse, vibrating sensitively through my bones and growing. It felt like the rollercoaster swinging back around for another loop over the building. But it kept building and building and no track clacking noise, and no screams—

The shiny heel outside the window swished around, storming with its identical partner across the floor, and Lucy’s furious voice blasted over the top:

“When you work for me, the very first thing you need to learn, is that you are not running the production. Your job is to take orders.”

The air pressure in the building kept shifting, until the ceiling began to groan. In another room, a door slammed from a fierce draught, a shelf buckled and dropped its contents with a shimmering crash. Something struck a wall. I wondered what humungous theme park ride was starting up so close to the warehouse to do this.

Lucy shook her head at the disturbance, then stopped and turned from across the other side of the room and pinned me with a glare. I fought to not react, even as my insides were shrivelling up.

“Never you forget, my little underling, I’m the star of this show.”

With a crackling whoosh of air like a cap lifting from a giant soda can, a human-sized missile came bowling into her from behind, sending her flying across the room. I dove out the dollhouse window an instant before she crashed into the entire structure, smashing it to bits. As I hit the wood floor, chunks of painted plastic snapped over my head.

Rodney jumped up and tackle-rushed the intruder. The room burst into light as a hot pink laser cut across the wall like a knife. Then it was gone again, and Rodney’s head banged onto the floor, still wearing the cap, and then his body. The smoke of cauterized flesh wafted in the air, and metal tang of blood.

Then, odd silence. The air pressure disturbance had levelled out again, Lucy was a crumpled heap and made no sound.

I began sprinting at the door, cold draught flapping past. The sheer size of the floor created so much empty, airy space to cross, but I was light and agile now, on legs that felt more like precise springs. I was smaller, but still had a body that was built to support itself against a much greater gravity burden, and being so light now, it was like running on cheat mode.

But I was still not fast enough.

A stack of polished leather slapped the floor, closing the directly in front. I stared in wonder. It was a humungous black go-go boot with a fearsomely tall chunk heel. It was so close it seemed to fill the world. I skidded and face-planted into the toe section.

As I scrambled to my feet, the shoe lifted off without concern, covering the ceiling with its dark tread, before clapping down at my back, jingling my bones. Both the shoe and its mate carried on over the floor, like heavy duty machinery pistoning up and down, sending sharp pulsations through the wood floor.

They stopped at a pair of red-tinted shield sunglasses, which must have come off in the collision with Lucy, and skipped over the floor.

Then a voice filled the room, one I’d only ever heard carried through radio waves and from behind a screen. But now it was real-time, a bright electric burr that was smoky underneath. 

“A small fashion mishap,” And a toned, feminine silhouette dove and lightly took back the sunglasses, as her back dipped, her butt calmly pushed out to full breadth, each globe with unbelievable size and volume, “but I had the purest intentions.”

Her shoes squeaked as she twisted around to face me. Of course, she didn’t literally face me; her awareness floated in a faraway space toward the ceiling, while I was swished by the cold sweeps of air lifted by her calm saunter around the room.

My eyes were gravitated up the boots, up to a beautiful woman with dark hair in literally windblown waves that framed high Tatar cheekbones and icy violet-blue eyes. She wore a shimmery armored black bodice and skirt with red and blue racing stripes and white stars. Over that, a little incongruously, a red, hooded puffer jacket.

She put the sunglasses back in their natural place over her blue eyes, which tinted them red. Now she was watching me. I quickly covered my groin, half wishing to be back in the privacy of the dollhouse, or even for the great black tread to lift over the ceiling again and cover me up from view. I never wanted to meet her like this.

“You rolling with them?” she inquired.

“No,” I charged out. The pink laser had burned itself into my mind. Were the media accounts wrong? They never warned she would just…do that. I looked past the towering black boots to the humped form of Lucy, amidst the dollhouse rubble, and it came out without thought: “I was just going to take these guys into custody, but now you’re here, it could save time if we pooled our talents.”

She waved her finger as if running it up and down the length of my body.

“And what about this..?”

I squared my shoulders.

“I’m a Reducer. I had to hide from them, so I reduced.”

One boot tip landed on Lucy’s glowing-tipped cigarette and twisted the ember out. The final gasp of expiring smoke made my chest tighten.

“I see,” she replied. “Biding your time for the ankle bum-rush.”

She took a steady, unthinking step closer. But if she was trying to move closer to see me better, the problem wasn’t distance. I reflexively took a step back.

Her gaze seemed to be filtering out everything that wasn’t me, questioning my entire existence but in a way that didn’t seem unfriendly, “…very comfortable down there, aren’t you? You know how small you are?” Her eyes flashed past Lucy, “Are you completely insane?”

Her attention sat on me, so heavy it took effort to keep my head up to meet her eyes. She was so gigantic her gaze easily spanned me and more besides, keeping me prisoner by surveillance alone. There was no pretending I hadn’t noticed her, or nonchalantly escaping her notice. She could capture me entirely in direct view and still enjoy a lot of peripheral surrounding. She had a perfect visual lock-on of not only me, but a sweep of every surrounding place I could move to. I felt like a chess piece and she’d already figured me out three moves ahead.

I frowned up at her.

“I had this,” I said firmly, “I was luring them both into an elaborate trap.”

She stood over me with hands on hips. I forced my legs to not shake.

“Who are you?” she demanded, “tell me, before I elaborately trap you inside my boot.”

Her boots were so tall I’d never be able to climb out again. I forced out:

“Try anything and I’ll reduce you.”

One arm dropped from her hip, and she cocked her head at me.

“Big balls for a tiny little man. The whole world will ask where I went. What are you going to tell them?”

“You tripped and fell into the Bermuda Triangle and never came out.”

She seemed to be having an increasingly hard time containing her amusement.

“If you want to reduce me, you have to get closer.”

I didn’t move.

“You’re safe today.”

She gave me a smug look. She wasn’t threatened by me whatsoever, I thought. She was playing with me.

“Who is this new Reducer storming the district, anyway? Care to introduce me?”

“It’s Steve,” I replied.

In response, she drew herself up, placing a hand on her hip and giving an elegant flourish, and declared:

“Zamira Venus. No middle name.”

“I know,” I chirped.

“Steve,” she repeated. “I’m going to have to insist you at give me a little pose.”

I uneasily ignored this. No wonder Reducers were so power-shy, and rarely became Heroes, and no wonder they had a high incidence of going insane. I was starting to feel their pain. It was so hard to be taken seriously.

“No posing,” I replied, “I aim for efficiency in everything. Now I have to get this woman to jail.”

“Size up, Steve,” there was a flirtatious edge to her voice, “you’re just teasing me now.”

I couldn’t ‘size up’. I was trapped, tiny, naked. Then I remembered, with a sinking feeling, Summer’s change of tone after she’d learned I was actually a Natural, and wondered why I was playing this same make-believe character all over again. Pretending to be Super is what got me into this fiasco.

The words came out like air leaking out of balloon in small sharp spurts.

“Okay, look, I’m a Natural. I was reduced.”

Zamira studied me under the low, buzzing fluorescent tube. It was getting darker outside and she was starting to give off a faint blue glow.

“That’s very strange,” she murmured.

“Yeah, strange. I definitely feel very strange.”

Her eyebrows drew together in concern.

“Alright, Steve Natural. I’m going to take a look at what she did to you.”

It was a vision out of a surreal dream, her giant boots were clomping closer and closer, steadily expanding in view until they seemed to touch the walls. She was a walking skyscraper, and coming for me. I began to run to the door again, but my speed was pitiful compared to hers.

“Wait, careful!” My voice was nothing but a tiny, awestruck whine. “Stay back! I’m too small!”

Sensing my distress, she unplanted completely from the ground, hovered the last few feet, and snatched me up. It was like being nabbed by a giant eagle talon and taken up into the clouds. I writhed in her weightless hand, unsure where the ground was anymore. Her fingers curled and pulled tightly around my torso like a snug full body harness. The soft skin of her palm surrounded me all over like a sleeping bag.

My head poked between two bent finger joints, which hugged my ears, keeping my head fixed in place. I was brought in very close to the giant armored black bodice, sculpted suggestively over the projecting twins, each separately trumping my diminutive size.

A little higher, and suddenly her face was too close, and enormous. Her breath billowed, warming my face, which was the only thing sticking out of her hand. I tried to time my blinks to avoid getting what felt like a hairdryer blast into my eyes.

“This is going to sound pretty stupid,” she murmured, her eyes running down my body with appreciation, “but I’ve never actually seen a reduced Natural before. Because—” she emphasized as if it was so obvious it didn’t need stating: “—Reducers are so good at hiding them, or…making them disappear.”

Her fingers uncurled slightly as I was gently shifted back and forth, and squeezed. She turned my head to the side, then tugged and rotated my limbs. Her cool touch pushed about, her nail delicately poked at each of my ribs to check for damage, then her thumb ploughed into my stomach, jiggling to search my insides for irregularity, which was so ticklish and uncomfortable it literally took my breath away. I felt like an inanimate object.

I began to struggle in her grip, and without thinking, her touch began drifting around my torso with loving strokes to calm me. I stopped moving, but only because there was no escape from her intimate, curious probing. A drop from her hand would seriously hurt, or worse.

“I’ve never seen you before, either,” I said, feeling dumb but unable to think of anything else to say.

“Well then, eat me up while you can,” she said with a glint in her eyes.

This seemed to erode some kind of flimsy barrier between us. For her, much faster than for me. Her thumb lowered, making a sweep of my hips before it began to bury around between my legs. She pushed against my penis, and then lifted it out of the way to examine my balls. Then I was flipped over while her powerful thumb worked against my back muscles, and followed my spine to my butt. She pushed against the backs of my thighs, and then flipped me over again.

“I have a small problem, Steve,” she said, stroking my stomach thoughtfully. The burn of her red-lensed stare was sending all the blood between my legs.

She rotated in mid-air to face the two pieces of Rodney lying on the floor. Her voice became oddly hushed. “He wasn’t supposed to die. It’s so bizarre for it to ever even happen, but sometimes I’m in a rush, I’m not exactly thinking, the beams slip out, and these damn glasses…” she groaned, “…because I skip a fitting and buy them right out of the factory one time this happens.” She looked me in the eye. “How bad is it?”

I sighed.  

“You just made a mistake.”

“Yes,” she said, somewhat eagerly. “It was an accident! But there’s too many damn people out there who are going to run away with this.”

“It was very fast and he was intimidating. Just be honest about how you felt.”

She shook her head, disappointed.

“Talking about my feelings, oh, that’s just what I need.” She implored, “Make a statement with me, Steve. Back me up on this.”

“I’ve got a problem myself,” I replied, shifting in her hand uneasily.

“Gamma General could fix you under my plan.”

The Gamma General was a big Super hospital, and they did hair-raising tests and procedures on Supers which would maim and seriously injure Naturals.

“I’m not covered.”

“Mmm.” She realized aloud, “Right.”

She was roaming my body as she spoke, pushing and poking. There was something nervous and excited in the friction of her fingertips. She kept rubbing and spanning her fingertips against my flesh, making it stretch, and the skin was starting to tingle and burn. She glanced down at me again, and one polished, crystalline fingernail traced my jawline in what seemed to be a reassuring gesture. The spiky tip flirtatiously stroked my lips.  

“Steve,” she said in a honeyed tone, “just help me walk out of this clusterfuck. Can you do that?”

I wasn’t even sure how I was going to walk out of here when I could barely cross a single room without almost getting flattened or swept up in a hand.

Her touch kept shifting around my body, inconveniently searching for the softest parts of me to sink into. I looked up into her red tinted eyes, long lashes batting, and my insides turned to soup. She wasn’t going to let me go unless I had a very good response.

“I want to help you,” I said.

She gave me a dazzling smile and scratched my chest affectionately with her thumbnail. All this easy tactile contact and I was starting to feel less like a person and more like a little animal she was training for obedience.

“If you don’t want to talk for me, then let’s keep this simple,” she instructed. “Don’t say anything. I’ll manage it up front, and you just keep your head down.”

I swallowed and looked up at her giddily.

“Uh…Miss Venus? Can you – you know – give me an autograph?”

The charming façade dropped; she grew quiet for a moment, and I held my breath, reading to be politely dismissed.

“I have something honest and unique for you, Steve, to help you remember what we said.”

I breathed an inward sigh of relief.

“Okay. What is it?”

“It might hurt a tiny bit—”

“Wait, what!?” I squawked.

“—But if it’s too much,” she went on, ‘I have this secret power where I’ll give you a fuzzy little brain wipe to make you forget it happened. But you get to keep the souvenir.”

“Do what?” I yelped, “Brain wipe?” My case notes on her didn’t record anything like this.

“Let’s find out if you need it, shall we? What’s your favorite color.”

I was so dazed that for a second I didn’t know the answer.

“Radioactive blue. Cherenkov light. Why?”

She nodded.

“Like Rigel.”

As she said this, in her smooth, light patter, she jammed her nail into the back of my wrist and it was like liquid ice being injected into my vein. Her nail had turned so icy bright, like a welding torch flame, it burned my eyes. I helplessly looked away, up into her eyes. The pain was so great it felt like my arm was being melted down from inside out.

The air suddenly seemed too thin to be breathed, it went in and out of my lungs rapidly without sustaining me.

Then her nail lifted. There was now a glowing blue star system imprinted on my flesh. I stared at in fear and wonder, as the culprit of all that pain, and trying to work out how I felt about being used as a canvas for her UV glo artwork.

“Uh…” I nodded dumbly, “…what is it? What did you do to me?” I rubbed the mark in alarm. “Did you make me radioactive?!”

She thumbed my head, a little roughly, to get me to settle.

“You’re so jumpy, Steve. It’s just your autograph. I keep a tight circle, but now you’re practically an initiated Venusian.” She laughed. “But seriously, once this whole thing goes away…I think I might owe you.”

I was feeling like I was going to pass out. There were icy rings of pain still radiating out from the mark.

She read it right off my expression.

“That bad?”

All the tension had escaped my muscles.

“One of the most painful things ever. Is my arm still attached?”

He lashes dropped but her pupils fixated as if trying to memorize my face for later.

“Close your eyes and I’ll do my best to work a little magic spell over your mind, and if I get it just right, hit the sweet spot in your brain, it should make you forget everything…”

I felt so pale and tired my eyes closed naturally, without compulsion. The dark behind my eyelids was overpowering; I had to squeeze my toes firmly to keep from fainting completely.

The dark got bigger, deeper; she seemed to bend over me, or take me up to her face. Warm air washed over in rhythmic thrusts…in, out…Her breath battered my skin, driven by her famously powerful diaphragm, and I was nothing but a sheet of paper held up in hopeless resistance. Held between her hands, I began to tremble, and now my eyes were closed I was too afraid to open them. My eyeballs would only get lashed by each disarming exhalation.

What was she doing? Was she…trying to look at me in extreme close up? Another burst of heated air that broke over my head like a stormy current, and rumbled my ears. It dried up every last particle of moisture from my face, including my lips and the insides of my nostrils. Her breath was so strong it got everywhere; the back of my throat and sinus cavities tickled from dryness. I couldn’t swallow; my throat seemed to stick and ache. Each pounding exhalation pushed my eyelashes down flat.

Her head was poised right in front of mine, now I had to be so close, any closer and my face would be on her lips—

Something big and warm and soft captured my face and pulled with such desperate suction my whole face was scrunched up. An ache ran through my skull like my head was being fed into a compressor. Then, with a sharp wet squish, the tension popped free. But my head was immediately captured and reeled in all over again.

She was kissing me.

Zamira Venus was kissing me.

She had to be, but it felt like she was trying to eat my head without using her teeth. Her munching, sucking lips flexed and stressed the muscles around my temples and jaw.

Her lips parted to take in more of my face, and my own lips were bumped and nuzzled by what felt like a squishy wet fist, which sent a couple of playful flicks into my nose, before pushing my head back and forth, trying to powerfully roll it. The constantly shifting ‘fist’ broadened into a wet carpet that slithered under my throat to support my head from below, and continuing to play with my head. Stroke after stroke of the ‘fist’ kneaded my face over with sticky film. It was like being painted over with a roller, but instead of paint it was her saliva. There was so much power in her oral muscle my head strained against its brutish insistence. Terror started to well up inside my chest; my head was practically stuck inside her mouth like a baby dummy and I couldn’t unplug it. With a little extra pressure from her tongue, it was within her ability to squash my head with a single lick. Trying to endure the battering affection of her tongue took marathon patience.

When I was drawing on the last reserves of my breath, it ended.

“There,” her lips twisted with an ironic smile. “All wiped.” Hard to believe lips so freakishly strong were also capable to produce such a soft, tender expression. And only a moment ago, my face had been plastered on those same plush lips.

“Never said it was a Super power,” she admitted.

To my surprise, she then tore off a corner of the black costume skirt and wrapped it around me like a towel. It was soft but tough and stretchy, warm from her body heat and infused with her perfume.

Absurdly I was about to ask her to take me with her. I couldn’t go back to the Academy like this. The Admissions Head took a risk letting me into the Z stream. On the statistics, it wouldn’t shock them that a Z streamer crashed and burned, but I didn’t want to go anywhere near the campus for fear of running into Summer. It would be excruciatingly embarrassing at normal size. And I wasn’t normal size. Where was I supposed to go now?

She didn’t answer that question, but put me on the ground and went over to haul Lucy’s unconscious form out of the dollhouse rubble with ease, flopping the slighter, blonde woman in her arms like an oversized ragdoll.

“I have a little space left for you, Steve.” She gave me a foxy grin that shook my insides to soda fizz.

“Your hands are full,” I pointed out. Unless there was a pocket inside her puffer jacket.

“I’ll slip you inside my boot; you can choose: left or right?”

I swallowed.

“I’ll take my chances on the floor.”

Then she spun on her heel and accelerated out of the room, making the walls groan with the air pressure shift. The bluish fluorescent light bulb burst and the room blinked into darkness.

Time stretched as I paced over the floor in shock, five minutes, ten minutes, I lost count.

It broke over me like a cold wave; I suddenly felt ridiculous and sad. The idea she’d flirt with me over Rodney’s dead body seemed insane. She’d captivated me and kissed me without a lot of intent. She’d kissed me practically the way an older sibling would kiss a baby, because in the shock of being shrunk, I was tiny, obsequious and offered no pushback. Now she was gone, Summer was gone, my size was gone, and the exam was over.

The police soon showed up. Naturals just had police, it was the Supers who had Heroes.