“…we need to talk.”

In a cavernous bunker-cum-war-room, Concordia City’s leaders huddled over a large mahogany table, surrounded by the steady bustle of staff and first line responders, and facing a huge bank of paper-thin video screens mostly displaying multiple angles of the encroaching Brobby girl projected from the city’s many cctv cameras and surveillance drones.

They had heard the girl’s ominous words boom out both over the wall-set speakers and through the very walls themselves. Despite being many feet underground, and the bunker being built to withstand a full-on Gulliverian assault, they could still feel the walls of concrete and steel vibrate beneath her tread, and could see a disturbing amount of dust drift down from the high ceiling from the power of her voice alone.

Perhaps in some misguided attempt to make herself heard, the titaness had leaned out distressingly close to the city as she spoke, multiplying the impact of her voice and nearly deafening the inhabitants below. Reports were already filtering in through the bunker’s myriad emergency lines of people who had crowded rooftops to see the strange and fantastic sight of a real, live Brobdingnagian only to be blown clean off in a hurricane-force gust of sweet, warm breath. And this on top of the hundreds of windows shattering and walls cracking from the vibrations of her speaking and the force of her words.

In the equally deafening silence that followed her proclamation, General Atwood was the first to speak up.

“Well, clearly there’s only one choice. Complete and decisive military response,” he began gruffly. He continued, his volume and bluster increasing with every word, “We must call up the Gulliverian reserves at once and deploy the full might of Concordia’s defensive units!”

Though Lilliput’s various settlements and cities typically belonged to one “national” federation or other, the often-vast distances between them and the capacity limitations of their portals meant that out of necessity they were, in many ways, self-sufficient in matters of defense and other functions of state. It was, therefore, not atypical for each city to have its own military chief of staff, and General Atwood, decorated veteran of the last Gulliverian War, had served Concordia City for years, with the scars to show for it.

“Thank you for that opinion, General.”

Governor Mattison had been the candidate of change, the one to lead Concordia into a bright new future. Young, handsome, brilliant, he knew he would be the first leader to fully step out of the literal and figurative shadow of the Gulliverian incursions and guide this shining beacon of Lilliput to ever higher heights. His focus was marketing, not military strategy, but nevertheless he did what he always did -- project the utmost confidence. “And what weapons systems do we have in place that could deter someone of her size?”

 “Our directed energy cannons can neutralize a Gulliverian half a mile off!” Atwood proclaimed with obvious pride.

Mattison nodded thoughtfully, tenting his fingers under his chiseled chin.

 “That girl is no Gulliverian,” nebbishy Secretary of State Miller whimpered, notes of desperation and panic in his voice. “Did you see what she did to the Boundary?”

Immediately, a heated argument broke out over who was responsible for failing to raise the Boundary shields, all completely neglecting the fact that the shields were, in reality, controlled by the city’s automated defense system.

As it died down, a slightly tentative but clear voice could be heard, that of the sole woman at the table, Councilwoman Brewer, chair of the City Council. “Maybe she just wants to get home…?” she offered.

“Nonsense,” Atwood scoffed. “She’s already destroyed a square mile of Concordia City property, demolished vital military technology, and not to mention caused what appear to be dozens, if not hundreds of civilian casualties. She’s clearly a threat.”

This set off a new round of bickering and aimless discussion, until the most powerful voice of all, the auburn-haired beauty projected on twenty different screens at the front of the room cut in, silencing everyone instantly.

“I’m still waiting.” There was palpable frustration in her projected and omnipresent voice, increasing the drifting ceiling dust noticeably. “You know, my mom always said that you Lillis were a shifty bunch, but I would’ve thought kidnapping for a business deal was beneath even you.”

On the screens they saw her smirk, “And you know, at my size, there’s not much that’s beneath you.”

“Oh fuck.” A voice down the table moaned. Secretary of Commerce Lee had his head in his hands. “I know who she is,” he finally said between clasped fingers. “She’s Susan Chapman’s daughter.”

“Who?” 

“Susan Chapman, she leads Brobdingnag’s largest conglomerate, Chapman Industries. We’re currently negotiating our largest ever trade and investment deal with her.”

Lee looked up searchingly at a row of blank faces. “If she’s anything like her bitch of a mother, we’re all screwed.”

Councilwoman Brewer’s eyes rolled, none of the men noticed.

Governor Mattison knew he needed to get control of the situation. Project authority. “I want options, people,” he said, banging his hand on the table and putting on his best chief executive voice.

Instead, he was greeted with silence.

From the back of the room, heads turned as a reedy voice belonging to a slight-looking communications tech wearing the bars of a lieutenant called out, “I might have an option.”

Ava was getting impatient.

She had made her simple request forever ago, and still nothing! Her knees and legs, not to mention her shoes were getting sandy from this desert dirt, this whole kneeling thing was getting uncomfortable, and, oh yeah, she was being kidnapped!

Before this whole ordeal, she had always been fascinated by Lilliput, the realm of practically microscopic people hidden away in another universe or locked in secret, inaccessible chambers in corporate headquarters across the city.

She had devoured the stories about their history, what little of it had reached Brobdingnagian sources. She learned of their long struggle with the much larger Gulliverians, who used to kidnap their kind by the hundreds to do with as they wished. She learned how the Lillis had eventually triumphed over the seemingly impossible size difference with ingenuity and technology. How they now even employed Gulliverian mercenaries to defend their cities against their own countrymen.

Her mother, on the other hand, just found the residents of Lilliput to be a source of endless frustration. When Ava had been in high school, she always knew that her mom had been in a Lilly negotiation when, on returning home after a long day, she would pour herself an overlarge glass of wine and huff, “You know, if I were ever able to get over to that godforsaken universe for even 10 minutes, they’d see who’s really boss.” It had become such a refrain that it was practically an inside joke in her family.

Nevertheless, when Ava found herself unexpectedly transported to what was clearly the Lilliputian realm, she was wary. Would these crafty microbes send out massive suits of mechanized armor to subdue her like something out of the cartoons she’d watched as a kid? Would they vaporize her with one of the energy beams she’d read about on that one internet forum?

And yet despite her fantastical worries, there was nothing of the sort. In fact, standing at her full height (which, admittedly, was exceptionally tall, even for a Brobby), the patch of raised crystalline structures that she knew to be a Lilliputian city looked basically empty. As she knelt to better communicate with this puny metropolis, she could finally start to make out what looked like vehicles and maybe even people, but she really wasn’t sure. It was all multi-colored specks moving down a grid of miniscule threads that must be what they used as roads.

Thinking, not for the first time, on what to do next, something unusual caught her attention. A swarm of thousands upon thousands of black dots was rising from the city and seemingly flowing towards her.

Flies? she thought, before dismissing that as obviously ridiculous.

The black dots seemed to arrange themselves several inches in front of her nose in a closely packed, thin sheet maybe a couple inches across, just hovering there unsettlingly.

Suddenly the dots began to flash bright red, the flashes seemingly random before resolving into what appeared to be letters, appearing one by one slowly across the sheet-like dot murmuration.

“LEAVE,” it read, before the red flashes scattered and the dots turned black again. Quickly the flashes re-started. “NOW,” it displayed.

“AWAIT. ORDERS.”  

Seriously? What the fuck, Ava thought, annoyed. The gall of her kidnappers to order her around like that.

 Suddenly, ten-ish streaks of grey rocketed into position on all sides of the black ‘screen’ before resolving into somewhat larger specks, similarly hovering at face height. Though she could barely make them out, she somehow intuitively knew these to be military in nature.

Almost simultaneously, Ava heard a very faint rumble behind her, and on instinct turned to see the source.

Charging through the desert, kicking up a small (to her) cloud of dust, a column of what were clearly mottled, brownish green vehicles – each of these a few inches long -- streamed towards the city and her. They looked just like the toy tanks her brother used to play with as a kid, and were roughly the same size, if not smaller. She watched them wordlessly as they stopped a number of feet from her and, after a pause, sent up a green flare.

The implication, and the threat, was inescapable.

Ava turned back towards the city and her hovering retinue and grinned slightly, her mother’s words ringing in her ears.

“Yeah, no.”

Lieutenant Hardy’s plan, with some modifications of Mattison’s own, had been a good one. Great, even. By combining clear diplomatic outreach and a motivating show of force, Mattison could satisfy Lee and his need to not offend a potential trading partner, appease Atwood and the military, and also show the strength of conviction that any good leader needed to project. Clever compromise, it was what he was known for.

Brewer seemed unhappy with the idea, but who cared what she thought.

Yet now, he watched horrified as all his brilliance was coming to naught. Despite the floor-to-ceiling screens, the zoomed in cameras failed to convey just how immense this girl was. On the screen it simply looked like a pretty girl raising her hand to brush away an irritant, but from reports Mattison knew that each of those immense extremities was nearly half a mile wide.

With that simple, lazy swipe of her hand, she obliterated tens of thousands of drones and the 15 strike fighters of Alpha and Beta squadrons without even trying. She moved so fast there was nowhere to go, billions of dollars in military equipment dashed against long, elegant fingers that didn’t even register their impact.

Mattison, poorly hidden anxiety increasing, turned towards his fellow leaders, looking for their counsel, and instead he found no one would even meet his eyes.

On the screen before him, the girl raised her hand once again.

David had just moved into a high-rise in Concordia City’s mid-town. Selling his business and his suburban house, he had ridden a surge of modest success to move to the city from Sycamore Heights hundreds of miles away. He had longed to be closer to the water and to seek his next big idea in one of Lilliput’s leading tech metropolises. And he had found this beautiful apartment and fallen in love. Sure, it didn’t overlook Concordia Beach like the toniest spots in town, but it bordered a lovely park and was situated in a bustling cluster of similarly luxe high-rises, shops, and restaurants.

Now, in the penthouse of 52 Central, he was, perhaps, regretting his decision.

From his west-facing perch on the 91st floor, he had been able to see her coming as soon as she arrived in that blinding flash of green in the desert. Rising not even to the level of her ankles, it was hard to take her all in, such was the degree to which her sheer presence dominated the horizon. But she was far enough off, and the cloudless desert sky clear enough that from his balcony he could just see the full length of her long, toned legs, rising like marble towers miles into the sky, along with the generous swell of her jeans-clad hips, and the tight white top needlessly accentuating a bust that, even at a normal size, would make heads turn. Her fair, lightly freckled face framed by long auburn hair neatly spanned the line between cute and beautiful, and those bright green eyes seemed to look right at him as they peered into the city.

He was transfixed by her beauty, even as the enormity of her remained inconceivable. And the way she casually brushed back a stray lock of fiery hair as she stood there almost made her, even at this immense size, seem like the normal young woman she was.  

That all changed when she began to move. Even at a distance of miles, her casual steps shook his building like an earthquake, and David struggled to keep his balance on the balcony, gripping the rail with white knuckles as tastefully arranged glassware and newly hung artwork crashed to the floor behind him.

When she paused her onslaught (which was really two short steps), he breathed a sigh of relief. Far below, he could see people running into the streets from the buildings around him, struggling to unlock parked cars or streaming into the park nearby. As if there was anywhere they could go that would be out of reach of the living mountain before them. Looking back out to the edges of the city where the Boundary once stood, he saw cute toes the size of cruise ships and painted a sporty white wiggle happily within their leather confines, and while he now struggled to see her face so far above, she seemed wholly unbothered by the panic she was causing.

David had been told this high-tech building was earthquake-proof, and he wasn’t dumb, he knew there was really nowhere to go – he had even heard on the news that even the portals were out. So, he resolved to stay put. Besides, she might be big, but this harmless-looking girl wasn’t going to do anything to hurt them was she?

 He questioned this conclusion as she began to kneel. Dashing inside the glass sliding doors of his balcony so as not to be thrown to his death, David glanced behind him to see miles of creamy white leg descend slowly but surely towards the edges of town. Two knees each larger than a city block came into view as she continued her descent, and he swore he could actually feel the sheer tonnage of her presence lowering itself onto the city from above.

He dove behind the massive, stylish black leather couch occupying the living room, hoping its weight would anchor him as he braced for impact. And the impact was brutal. Earthquake-proof or not, his apartment shook as if it was going to be torn completely apart. The 75-inch flat screen on the wall across from him fell with a mighty crash crushing the console beneath it.  The hard bare wooden floors heaved and rose up to meet him as he was pinned to the ground. Over the deafening boom of her explosive descent, he heard his brand-new furniture sliding and windows cracking from the force of the shockwave ripping through the city. He looked up just in time to see a wrought iron chandelier plummeting towards him, ricocheting off the couch in front of him, and rolled to his left mere seconds before he was impaled underneath.

He lay panting in the ruins of his new apartment, and continued to lay still as he heard, or rather felt, the one-sided dialogue between the Brobby girl and some unseen interlocutor, the volume of her words battering the already shaky building.

Finally, as he listened to sirens continue to wail, and now the roar of powerful engines overhead, he roused himself to see what might be happening outside.

His shoes crunched over the broken glass and plaster covering the floor as he approached the balcony. The balcony door was bent and ajar, and the floor-to-ceiling windows were laced with spidery cracks, but he was able to force his way out. As he looked out on the now much closer giantess, his sense of wonder returned. On her knees she should have perhaps seemed smaller, but she in fact seemed even more massive than before, as her overwhelming presence now fully overshadowed the city. Her knees and massive bare thighs rested a few miles away on his scale, but she seemed so close, he felt like he could touch her and that jeans-covered crotch covering miles of city outskirts beneath it as she sat on her heels. He now couldn’t see her face past the shelf of her massive breasts, but he heard the echoing thunder of her words.

“Yeah, no”

Suddenly a colossal hand, previously resting on a soft, smooth thigh raised and swiped lazily at something in the air above him, and he heard a series of explosions ring out. Seeing something that massive move so quickly was both frightening and exhilarating all at once.  

But it appeared she wasn’t done. She began to lean forward, those mountainous endowments lowering until he could see a veritable canyon of cleavage encased in thin white fabric, large enough to swallow a good-sized town whole with room to spare.  

Her face came into view next, a mischievous look dancing on those delicate, pretty features. He wondered vaguely what they were in for, but stayed still, his ever-present fear overcome by his curiosity (or maybe it was shock).

Her eyes narrowed, and even more than before it truly seemed like she was looking right at him, piercing him with her powerful gaze. She grinned again, and he saw that same right hand, now returned to her side, begin to raise, a single, elegant finger extending as if in accusation at their very existence.

As it came closer and closer, he could see that her finger alone dwarfed every structure in the vicinity. 52 Central was clear and away the tallest high-rise in the area, and he guessed that the glossy nail with its white tip alone would overtop many of the other buildings by far -- a single finger the size perhaps of three or more Gulliverians stacked on top of each other. His own building failed to even reach the silvery ring that adorned her first knuckle.

Still he didn’t run. Why wouldn’t his legs move? He watched as the prodigious digit continued to fly forward and approached the sizable park across the street, nearly matching it in width and dwarfing the leafy canopy of trees that shaded the grounds inside.

Not seconds ago, he had seen people run for shelter from crumbling buildings into that park, and his breath caught as the delicate fingertip inexorably descended. He couldn’t tell if it was his imagination or not, but he swore he heard a cry rise up from the unseen people under the trees, only to be silenced as she made contact with the park itself.

Again he felt the ground quake beneath him as her finger touched down, and he gripped the balcony rail once more. Within the park, he saw mighty oak trees crunch and shatter and the grassy green beneath buckle under her slightest touch. The power, amazingly restored after her initial incursion, immediately cut out again, and he could see stoplights all along the street go dark as her fingertip must have severed some line below as it plunged without resistance into the earth.

She paused, as if enjoying the feeling of the grassy lawn turned to dust beneath her. But then he heard a rumble, and without lifting the fingertip began to move, sliding its way through the ground directly towards him, glossy nail glinting in the sun and tearing through the earth beneath it like a till through soil. It was wider at the knuckle than his building and the one next to it put together, and the immense digit moved slowly, but surely through everything in its path. David watched the dark iron, old-timey gates and brick walls of the park burst apart as the colossal digit plowed through effortlessly. Hapless drivers stuck on the road between his building and the park – those who hadn’t already abandoned their vehicles – pulled desperately at seatbelts before they were plowed under her mighty fingertip without pause or seeming effort, cars flattening and the road itself buckling and breaking in her wake.

David knew this was the end, and just when he was getting started too! Her pale long finger swallowed his entire view as it approached his building and with a crash he felt the walls around him shatter as she continued her lazy motion. For a second, he felt like he was falling, and then, nothing.

Mattison watched as twenty different camera angles showed the sheer devastation wrought by a single fingertip. She had lazily dragged that finger through nearly a city block, but what probably just seemed like a few inches to her.

The emergency lines flashed a continuous red as the reports and casualty numbers poured in. Dozens of buildings had crumbled under her mere touch, their walls shattering against her, offering this lowest of extremities no resistance whatsoever. In its wake, all that had been left behind was churned earth and debris. A dark brown scar across the city.

She seemed to look at him then, or at least at whatever camera was focused on her that moment, and the room went quiet once again as through the speakers and the walls they heard her speak with resounding force.

“So here’s my counteroffer. You send me home right now, and I won’t keep playing with your puny little city? Hmm?”