Oh…

Oh…

Seeing him, there, on stage… it was his element. He looked more at home than a bird could appear to be in the wide, blue sky, or a spider upon its silky web. A fish in a, uh, fish tank or something. Even in the absence of an audience he commanded the arena with poise, grace, an implacable charisma.

It was enough to make Elsie weep. He… Gabriel… was so vibrant, radiant, the proverbial and literal star of the show. Maybe it was his flashy Renaissance-era outfit painstakingly crafted by the costume department, or maybe it was the spotlight from on high coating him in an angelic halo. Maybe it was his melodious voice, at once powerful but gentle. Whichever the case, Gabriel seemed to collect attention, praise… and in Elsie’s case, a not-so-secret instance of unrequited love.

It was during one of the middling soliloquys. Gabriel was gesturing and gesticulating with aplomb, sure to give each wing of the mostly barren auditorium a sample of his immaculate voice. Tech engineers were making sure the sound gear worked. Occasionally, the theater teacher might stop him and give him some notes, but it was mostly perfect. Beyond perfect in Elsie’s unbiased opinion. Magnetic. And when Gabriel turned to her and flashed a pure, sweet, innocent grin… Elsie couldn’t imagine that grin being for anyone else. It was destined for her!

It made Elsie’s knees weak. She wobbled and wavered.

Too much, this was too much.

So she ran, ran backstage. Elsie’s heart was a strong, throbbing organ, and left unchecked it threatened to make her do things she preferred to do out of sight. Elsie ran blind until she hit the dressing room hall, just behind the black box. She prepared to enter the women’s changing area… but stopped. And considered.

So strong was Elsie’s love for Gabriel that she would do anything for a chance to be close.

Anything.

Save just, well, talking to him, that is. And when the school sent out a casting call for their annual spring theater show, the shrinking violet felt a yearning in her heart, and loins, which enticed her to toss her hat into the ring. The competition was fierce, and there were dozens of pretty girls in the running. Elsie practiced, she found talent and emotion she didn’t know she even had, she balled them up and unleashed it all in an audition which was nothing short of spectacular! Only the best audition imaginable would permit her rendezvous with Gabriel.

The judges must’ve felt similarly, thus earning Elsie the prestigious role of the main female lead!

…’s understudy.

Some might consider being so close to their goals a net positive in the long run. For Elsie… it was beyond demoralizing. Heartbreaking. It tore her apart that she had simply grazed her sun starling, only to fall back into the loveless void of outer space. It broke her.

But Elsie rose from the depths. She pieced herself back together. And she decided… there was no longer any room for error. Elsie would have her prize.

Elsie steeled herself, and she marched into the men’s changing area. After a quick once-over she decided it was empty enough, though that didn’t soothe the churning of Elsie’s stomach. The various fitting rooms were marked by the backpacks of their owners. Most were simple hues of blacks and blues. Gabriel’s, Elsie knew, was a ruddy red with black trim. It had its share of pins which adorned the straps most likely purchased at anime cons and Hot Topics. She’d spent enough time watching him from afar to know that. She approached the backpack like a holy artifact, stroked it gently, and she entered the booth.

There. His clothes… It was only a plain white T-shirt and pants, and… underwear? He’d changed out of his underwear for rehearsal? Oh, it was enough to make Elsie faint once more. She wanted to take a break from all this and bury her face in these holy raiments.

No! No, Elsie! She chastised herself. She had a job to do.

Elsie reached into her pocket and extracted the vial she’d found from the internet. If the description was accurate, this would be the key to unlocking her desires. The key to make Gabriel hers.

She read the vial. Warning! Do not breathe in directly. Apply to clothing of target and leave area. Potency reduced after 8 minutes.

This was it. Elsie unscrewed the cap… within lay a powdery, clumpy substance that looked not dissimilar from cream of tartar. She tipped the bottle over, and it came out in a translucent mist that seemed to dissipate into the air. Elsie wanted to peer in closer to make sure it was adhering to the clothes, but the warning seemed rather stringent.

“What do you think you’re doing!?”

“AAAAIIEE!!!”

The vial slipped from Elsie’s hands and plunged into the slack slacks. Elsie hid her hands behind her back. There was only one member of the production with a voice that sneering, that domineering, that high and mighty. And when she turned, and saw Tatiana Trinity leaning against the frame of the fitting room. Her arms were crossed, and she was dressed in the regal adornments befitting her role as the main female lead.

“I-I-I–”

“I knew you were a creep, Els… but sniffing Gabriel’s clothes?” She pushed past Gabriel in the small space and swiped the pants-underwear combo. Instinctively, Elsie took a deep breath, her legs jiggling and itching to carry her away.

“This is a new low. I mean…” The vial dropped out of the pant-leg. Tatiana’s cheerleader reflexes caught it before it fell to the floor, but she was flummoxed as to what it was. “What the hell is this?” She brought it to her nose and took a massive whiff. Elsie was sweating bullets, and she took a massive breath and held it as a precaution. “Some sort of… what?” Tatiana began to stumble. “I… feel…”

Elsie watched. She saw her romantic rival waver, lean against the wall of the fitting room for balance. Elsie felt like she had to do, well, something. But the only thing she knew how to do – aside from buying sketchy jars of white powder on the internet – was run. Blue in the face, she made a mad sort of hobble out the fitting room, almost crashing into the entourage of cheerleaders and jocks who followed Tatiana around religiously. They reckoned her with odd faces before Elsie collected herself enough to navigate to the nearest exit.

The athletes heard an odd noise from the fitting room. They streamed inside.

Not long after, a few bored, wandering technicians heard a few odd screams from the fitting room. They streamed inside…

***

Gabriel was always a bit hesitant to greet the technicians before dismissal. They tended to be the abrasive type, and they weren’t too happy about sharing space with a creature that might inadvertently harm their precious gear on accident. So, when he noticed most of them had left already, he breathed a sigh of relief. What he really wanted to do was greet Elsie. There was just something about her that made Gabriel smile… why did it seem she always ran away when he did so in her direction? Was he that unappealing?

Maybe Elsie only liked masculine men, and while Gabriel was comfortable in his own skin, he never seemed able to shake exuding a femininity that set him apart from his peers. If that were the case… that would be nothing short of a bummer. But nothing to worry about. Gabriel was who he was.

These were his thoughts as Gabriel entered the empty dressing room. He thought he smelled a little something on the air… nothing potent, but… traces of something. And beyond that, his clothes were not as he left them. They were disheveled, in fact. Gabriel reached down and plucked his pair of underwear from the black slacks, and he sniffed. The white garment was a old, and quite faded from repeated washes. Yet he detected nothing wrong with it or any of the other articles on the floor. And so, Gabriel shrugged and disrobed, removing his tunic, girdle, and codpiece, and reequipping his casual attire. He stepped into the holes of the underwear and pulled them up, sliding along his thighs growing thicker with altitude, finally snapping about his waist. Gabriel squeezed his own package affectionately as it bulged from the underwear. That, at least, was one detail about him that was completely, unabashedly oozing with manhood.

He continued to dress.

Deep in the throes of his underwear, so small that even the mere fibers of the fabric became a tangle of ivy and brambles impossible to navigate, there was an entire brigade. Students, former theater members, even a couple of understudies… young men and women, all of whom reduced to impossibly small sizes by the work of forces they had no familiarity with. All of them were screaming. All of them enduring the most unreal, over-the-top, terrifying experience any human could go through, as they looked up at the boy who had so nonchalantly collected them all into his unknowing possession. The students’ distribution throughout the surface of the underwear almost seemed mathematically uniform and consistent, as though forces beyond them insisted that every inch of this boy’s pelvis offer its boons to the suffering youths.

And suffer they did. The SNAP of the waistband was the first maneuver to take victims; those who were stuck along the rim of the underwear were offered the unexpectedly prodigious distinction of being the first to die. It was quick, and it could be argued to have been painless, though one wonders just how painless being slapped at Mach speeds into paste against the toned waist and hips of a trained actor could be.

Gabriel bent down. He giggled, waggling his perky derriere to a throng of imaginary onlookers as the grip his underwear had upon the buttocks tightened. For those trapped within the garment, this destroyed the tinies’ mobility, especially those souls unlucky enough to be spread where fabric met buttcheek. The tension grew, grew, and sand-sized students spread eagle between an increasingly restrictive fabric felt the pressure as they were rolled and kneaded against the milky skin, still impossibly without blemish or flaw, of Gabriel’s rear end. Until…

The pressure stopped. Gabriel pulled up his pants. He straightened to height. He put on his shirt and jacket. And he untied his silky brunette hair and allowed it to slow free just above his shoulders. The costume was removed, and Gabriel had returned to the form of being a normal student.

There is no objective way to measure the power of as abstract a feeling as “relief”, but it must’ve been flowing in gigawatts around Gabriel’s person. He had finished dressing, and with that he was done contorting his body in forms that could crush the pitiful students against his clothes. Nobody else had perished, and the students were safe… somewhat, for now.

Gabriel grabbed his pack and found his way out of the weirdly silent auditorium.

His body fell into a rhythm. Like the beating heart of a flagship on the high seas, this rhythm was steady, slow, but filled with tremendous force. It was Gabriel’s walk cycle, and experiencing it inside his undies was different for everyone. Some who managed to survive the waistband incident were rewarded for their trauma, and little change aside from the smooth bobbing sensation. Some still adhered to his buttcheeks were a bit less lucky… the sun was dipping below the horizon, but the walk to his home was long, and it gave more than enough time for his sweat glands to unfurl and transform the asteroid-sized surface of his rear into a murky, moist, swampish burrito of a place. And then there were those who had slipped into the crack of his buttcheeks, who were certainly being subjected to an all new level of discomfort.

Those captured beneath the dividing section of his rear and his genitals were… surprisingly? They were doing quite well! Gravity did them a service, and though Gabriel’s bumskin was near-flush with his underwear, it was not an unlivable constraint. The group had the freedom to somewhat stretch, squirm, move, ever so slightly. A few, on that expansive, dark, dismal layer between heaven and earth, were even able to locate one another. So few of the minuscule youths knew at all that they weren’t alone; the confusion of the shrinking left little room to analyze exactly what had happened in that fitting room and who was affected.

Tatiana Trinity was one such student, spread as a five-pointed star along the central bridge-like fabric strip of Gabriel’s underwear. At such a size, she could smell years’ worth of sweat, dead skin cells… even masturbatory sessions that this undergarment had been privy to.  And there was so much more history held within these trousers. But, Tatiana didn’t want that. Despite her affection, nay, erstwhile love for Gabriel… she was not so obsessed that she couldn’t see this situation for as batshit crazy as it was. Now, there was no place on Earth too horrible. She wanted to be anywhere but here, in her crush’s underwear.

So, Tatiana preferred to be prone than supine… because just behind her – or, depending on one’s perspective, above her – was the source of all musk. The fat, meaty taint of this beautiful youth. Despite being the liminal connector between two different parts of his anatomy, it seemed almost a unique, independent creature on its own, the pores of sweat that spritzed out warm, humid, salty practically visible at sizes like these, if Tatiana dared to turn and look.

Generally, she didn’t.

Gabriel evidently kept his crotch area quite shaven, a rarity for a boy his age, and yet a boon for Tatiana and the other survivors. Imagining having to brave the tangled wastes of vine-like overgrown pubic hair was a horror she refused to even entertain.

How had this even happened?

It was the question on all their minds. Mostly unspoken – those who had the capacity to speak, or speaking partners at all, preferred to yell, bark out pleas for help, or scream laments to whatever deities they chose to worship before that role had been so cruelly and abruptly filled by the veritable boygod upon whom they’d been granted passage. Nevertheless, it was a relevant question. The rumors existed, true, but there was no cause to believe shrinking was a thing. And why here? Why now? Why Gabriel? Why…

Why Elsie?

That was the connector, thought Tatiana, and she gasped. Then she gagged as some of the cotton fabric entered her mouth. But it had to be Elsie and that weird powder shit she’d been sprinkling into his clothes. Was it her plan to shrink the drama department? No, of course not. Could her plan have been to shrink Gabriel? Well, unless Tatiana’s read of their location was extremely wrong (and in fairness, it could easily have been), Gabriel seemed quite fine and dandy. Up and well enough to walk the one and a half miles to his home at least, wheresoever that might have been.

The bustle of streetcars and buses was hard to block out, even amidst the thick and goopy blood-rushing sounds of Gabriel’s biorhythms as it coursed through his veins. The tinies knew this boy was traveling home. What awaited them there, they had no clue. Within Gabriel’s underwear each minute felt like a day. Each second was an agonizing wait, unsure if the next move their new god made would be one that killed them all. But perhaps that uncertainty was preferable to whatever fates were in store for them once their unwitting captor reached his destination.

They had little else to do but wait.