Shiro's target should have been an easy one. He'd been in there once, months ago, long before he even thought about robbing the place: a back-alley clinic in Yongen-Jaya, with no security to speak of and a lock that made for easy pickings. Better still, he'd learned by chance that the place wasn't operating legally; slim chance of the owner, a Doctor Tae Takemi, drawing attention to herself by calling the cops.
It was that which had convinced him to give the place a business visit. He doubted he'd find any cash in there after closing time, but at the very least he could nab some drugs and pawn them off to whoever was buying. Wouldn't net him much, but every yen counted, and with so little risk involved there was no reason not to try.
Shiro stole into the clinic without issue and after a look around he went straight for the doctor's drawers. They were locked, but they was every bit as easy to pick as the door had been. As soon as Shiro opened the top one, he heard a soft click and a hiss. Something sprayed him in the face, smelling bitter and metallic. Coughing, he slammed the drawer shut and stumbled away. His legs managed only a couple steps before buckling at the knees. Shiro was unconscious before he even hit the floor, floating in a void of chaos until light called him back to the waking world.
A bump half the size of his hand throbbed right on his forehead, but most of the pain was coming from inside his head. The light hurt his brain, and the sounds, and the faint medicinal smell clinging to his nostrils and souring the back of his throat. He tried at least to swallow that last one away, but his mouth was dry as dust. Standing up very nearly made him throw up, but Shiro knew he couldn't stay here any longer. Though his vision still swam, he could tell it was dawn already. Opening hours weren't far off, and Dr. Takemi must be on her way.
But something was off, and when his eyes came into focus, Shiro saw what it was. Wherever he looked, everything seemed unnaturally huge, as though it had grown a hundred times larger overnight. Was it a dream, or a hallucination? He didn't have time to wonder it before jingling keys brought his attention to the clinic door. The keys turned in the lock, then the door opened and a blue-haired woman in a lab coat stepped inside.
Tae Takemi was as overgrown as everything else he could see, stomping inside with her big platform heels. Shiro thought he could feel the earth shake with her steps; when she came closer, covering hundreds of feet with each stride, he found that he really could. It was like an earthquake when her feet came down to either side of him. His knees gave up on him, and left him sitting on the floor, craning back his head to stare at the young doctor.
When last he'd seen her, Tae Takemi had been a short woman, even with those shoes of hers tacking on an extra few inches to her height. A slim one, too, without much meat on her bones. He remembered thinking about how easy it would be to overpower her back in that first meeting; not it seemed a joke to think that words like “small” and “petite” could ever be applied to such a monster. She was big as a skyscraper, and the sight of her leg muscles shifting around when she adjusted her stance, not to mention the tremors that accompanied it, told him she was solid as a boulder from her head down to each massive toe.
Shiro was shaking. He wanted to run but he didn't dare, not when there it risked catching her eye. He watched as the colossus pulled open her drawer just a tad, then slipped a hand inside and presumably disabled the trap before pulling it open the rest of the way. She had to know, right? There was no way she wouldn't notice that the door and drawer had been unlocked.
Dr. Takemi shut the drawer again and turned her eyes further and further down, until they fell on Shiro. Weak as he felt, he still got up as soon as he saw Takemi crouching him, and ran like a frightened deer away from that colossus.
THUD! Her hand fell in front of him before he knew it. He bumped into her pale skin and fell back, scrabbling to get moving again, but fingers like mighty tree trunks seized him, and stole his breath with how quickly they ferried him into the sky.
Even when he hung a couple hundred feet in the air Shiro still fought against her grip, preferring the fall to whatever she might do to him. It was all futile, though; he had a better shot at lifting a car than he did at escaping those fingers, and when he saw her huge brown eyes locked onto him, he lost the nerve to try.
“Don't hurt me, please! This is all a misunderstanding! I'm innocent, I promise! Lady, you have to believe me!” The words spilled from his mouth so quickly that he wondered if the doc had understood any of it.
Tae arched an eyebrow at him. “You're awfully eager to say you're innocent when I haven't even accused you of anything yet.” She spoke in the same soft, almost sultry voice he remembered, but it blared in Shiro's ears and rumbled in his chest as if coming from a loudspeaker. “We both know you're not innocent, so you can cut the crap. Now, are you going to tell me who sent you, or am I going to have to squeeze it out of you?” Tae stood and settled in her chair, resting her elbow on the desk while holding him up.
“Who... sent me? W-what do you mean? Nobody sent me, miss. I'm telling you, I didn't do anything!”
“Oh? Then what are you doing in my clinic?”
“I was just passing by last night when I saw a guy sneaking in here. I thought he looked suspicious so I followed him in. To stop him, I mean. Then he pulled that drawer open. Something sprayed on us and knocked me out. Honest, that's all I know! The other guy, the one who broke in here, maybe he's still around. You should try looking for him, but please, you gotta let me go, miss.”
“Still playing the innocent card, are we? Well, much as I'd love to sit around listening to you repeat your story ad nauseam, I do have a job to do. For now, I'll leave you somewhere you can reflect and hopefully figure out that you're better off telling the truth.” Tae dropped Shiro in her palm and closed her fingers over him. When she opened her hand again a minute later, she picked him back up and grabbed his arms, slowly moving them over his head. “I suggest you stop resisting, unless you want to end up with a broken arm, or a dislocated shoulder. I promise I won't harm you in any permanent way, as long as you cooperate.” Shiro gave up on resisting after that. When she had his arms how she wanted them, Tae pulled out a bit of grey string and bound his wrists together with it, then did the same with his ankles before putting him on like a ring around the last joint of her pinkie finger.
Shiro screamed. He and the string were pulled so tight around her flesh that it felt like his arms might pop out of their sockets at any moment. Hadn't she promised not to do this to him? He strained every muscle in his body trying to keep himself together, all while she just smiled and wagged her finger up and down. He could have broken down crying tears of thanks when she took the ring off, if she hadn't slipped it on around her second toe right afterwards, with Shiro's face pressed to its underside. “There,” she said, splaying her toes apart. Her flesh shifted behind him, bulging against the string and his body alike and threatening to tear him apart until it relaxed again. “I would tell you to be quiet, but I doubt anyone will be able to hear you no matter how hard you scream, so shout all you want. I'll check back on you once I'm done working. We'll see if you're ready to talk by then.”
The hours to come would be hell on Earth for Shiro. The constant pulling at his arms and legs would have been bad enough on its own, but it was the least of his suffering in that time. It wasn't too long before he got used to it and realized that it probably wouldn't be enough to tear his body in half. It probably should have been, just like the weight of Tae's toe alone should have been enough to crush him slowly and painfully underneath her, but somehow it seemed he could survive it fine. No “permanent harm” would befall him, just as the doctor promised, though that didn't lessen the pain.
Worse than the weight or the string always pulling at him, though, was the movement of Dr. Takemi's toes—stretching, splaying, curling, and wiggling on and off for hours on end. Sometimes she did it on purpose, like between patients when she asked how he was doing and curled her toes over him, totally smothering him in skin and heavy flesh. Other times she didn't say a word to him for hours on end, and Shiro thought he must have slipped her mind. She still toyed with him then, maybe without realizing what she did. He might as well have been a ball of lint for all the attention she gave him, but she didn't need more than that to dominate a pathetic little thing like himself. Even her pinkie toe would have been more than enough.
Shiro tried the whole time to free himself. Sometimes he worked quietly at the knots that bound his arms and legs, trying to find or make some looseness he could exploit, but when it all became too much to bear he strained against his bindings like an animal, twisting and wriggling as much as he could while pulled taut under her toe. Tae chuckled when he did so while they were alone, and lifted her toes as if teasing him with the sight of freedom, putting them back down only when his strength was exhausted and he fell back into his quiet struggles.
Hours later he was sobbing and shaking, and praying to the gods for help, when a strange sensation came over him. It heightened in intensity until, suddenly, he started to shrink. The string that bound him pulled at his limbs more firmly at first; after a few seconds it released him and he fell on the doctor's insole, still dwindling away.
Shiro had always thought that his shrinking would wear off sooner or later. Now he wondered if it would ever stop. Would he just keep shrinking until he shrank away to nothing? That thought terrified him even more than Takemi did. He needed to get her attention now, before he got too small for her to even see him. Too sore to stand, Shiro reached up to the surface of her toe, poking and clawing and squeezing until a twitch left him smothered under all that flesh. He shouted and struggled, even bit her salty skin, until Tae raised her toes to peer down at him.
Her face showed surprise when she looked at him, and in just a second she had fished him out from there and dropped him on her open palm. “Lie still,” she said, and dropped a fingertip right beside him, its flesh bulging over the right side of his body. “Still shrinking. That's strange. This never came up before. I wonder if...” She stopped and shook her head. “Not the time for speculation. Tell me what you were really doing in here last night; now, while I can still hear you.”
Shiro didn't dare to lie anymore. When she held him up to her ear, he told her everything, then broke down crying, begging her to forgive him and to grow him back. “Just a petty thief? Not at all what I expected. But I guess it doesn't matter,” she said, pulling him away so she could look at him. He was less than half a centimeter tall already, and still dwindling away. “Sorry to disappoint you, but there's no antidote. I still haven't made a working one. I have no clue how long you'll keep shrinking, either. At this rate you'll end up microscopic soon enough. I'd better get you somewhere safer. Hopefully you won't shrink so much that I can't keep you as a test subject.”
Tae fetched a Petri dish from one of her drawers and dropped Shiro inside. The walls of the dish were taller than him already, and still bigger was the giant hand holding it up. Shiro didn't even want to think about what it might look like when he became microscopic. He would shrink that small, wouldn't he? He couldn't imagine any other outcome, not after what the doctor had told him—not unless she was lying about the lack of an antidote. He sat in side the dish and looked at her, silently begging her to confess that it was all a big prank. If he could just go back to normal, he would never even think of stealing from anyone ever again. Please, this couldn't be the end of him. He wasn't a good person, but surely he'd never done anything to deserve a fate like this.
But his shrinking never stopped, and Tae never produced that mythical antidote. Soon Tae had to place the dish under the microscope to keep observing him, switching to stronger and stronger lens as he got smaller and smaller. He couldn't fathom how far away the walls of the dish were to him now—and what did it even matter when another minute from now they'd be twice as far? Of Tae's size he had even less of a notion, but he knew she was enormous beyond compare.
“Well,” she said, putting down the pen she'd been writing her notes with, “you're almost too small to see even with the microscope, and it doesn't look like you'll stop shrinking anytime soon, if ever. It's a shame; I would have loved to keep you as a test subject for the antidote, but I can't even do that much if I can't even see you.” She took the dish from the microscope, and held it under her gaze. Her face spanned the whole of heaven, and her eyes seemed celestial objects in their own right. How many millions, or billions, could drown in either one of them?
Shiro's world was rocked simply by her holding on to it, the micro-movements of her hand magnified a million times over to the would-be thief. Even the pulse of her fingers was like a series of endless earthquakes. Then he felt like he was falling as he was lowered down, down, down, to the very pits of hell. The impact of the dish against the floor was worse than anything else yet, and the sharp clack that followed almost deafened him, but he forgot about it as soon as he picked himself up and saw Tae's foot slip out of her heel and come to hover over the dish. “its toes curled down towards him. “Maybe this will kill you, or maybe you'll survive on my foot. I wonder which you'd prefer? Either way, I'm sure it'll be better than staying in that dish. Good-bye, now. I hope you get what you want.”
Her foot descended onto Shiro, filling his sight with the labyrinthine pattern on the bottom of her big toe. She applied only the lightest touch, but to Shiro it was as if he were being crushed by all the weight of a mountain. The pain was indescribable, and then, all of a sudden it was gone as Tae dragged her toe back a fraction of an inch along the plastic surface and ground him down to a tiny red smear on her skin, his remains to be found except by the bacteria crawling on Tae Takemi's toe.
Giantess World
Author's Chapter Notes:
Been trying to write this story for a couple months but for some reason I never could write anything satisfying for it until now.