Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

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Blinding white slowly dissolved into cloudy vision as my ears pulse through a high-pitched buzz. I winced from the pain and blinked repeatedly to try to focus on my surroundings.

Where…? I didn’t remember a thing about how this happened. I regain some more focus and try to lift my arm. No… My arms are already in the air. I concentrate and look up, a few strands of my red hair falling in my face. Chains. Tight chains. Chains even I couldn’t break out of, or even move. They were suspended in place. I glance down. I’m vertically chained to a wall, I realize.

The floor below me seemed to be hundreds of feet away, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what this place was. However, I’m not simply dangling there; a small platform supports my feet. I assume that my capturer didn’t want my arms to dislocate.

I started to get a better look at my surroundings. Both the floor and ceiling where bathed in a pulsing white light. The room was not very wide; I could touch the wall in front of me, but the length seemed to go on for miles. The walls were a sleek silvery color, some kind of piercing metal I guessed, which painfully reflected the blinding light into my eyes along all directions. I also studied myself. I had different clothes on as well. Urgh, did they really have to? If my capturers were human, I couldn’t imagine their trouble trying to do that. I now wore black pants that went down to my ankles and a matching shirt with sleeves ending just before my elbows.

My head nearly stopped throbbing, and my vision was almost clear now. I no longer suffered the painful ring in my ears. While it seemed like minutes had gone by since I woke up, it was probably mere seconds. Everything had gone in a blur.

I glance in front of me and I’m extremely surprised to notice something that I hadn’t before, even though I’d looked in that direction multiple times now. A very small set of chains, identical to mine, held another creature in front of me.

I squinted to see his facial features more clearly. He was a human. That’s right, I wasn’t a human. I was a giant. There’s a big surprise. Our two races were allies in the distant past, but this changed as the humans grew more independent. Time itself covered up all remains of our partnership and my race, while not even populous before, began to falter. Hardly many giants were left, and the ones who did suffered the stereotypical hatred from humanity. Some of us acted on our impulses and tried to take advantage of the humans, but this was a minority. I can’t really blame the humans for being afraid, but did they really have to assume it was all of us?

Humans became pretty racist over the years. They fought many wars with the elves, nearly causing the poor buggers to go extinct, even though the elves were allies to the humans at one point as well. Stereotypes we thought died as our alliances formed came back quicker than we could have ever expected. These stereotypes were especially bad for us giants.

Once again we became the monstrous towering brutes that crushed buildings and swallowed people alive. No, no, don’t gape at me like that; hardly any of it was true. Sure, some of us went off and did horrible things, but like I said earlier, that was the minority.

Anyway, back to the present. The human looked like he had come to consciousness not long before me. Humans were tiny compared to us. This little guy might have been around the size of my little finger. He wasn’t even an arm’s length away from me, so I was sure he could feel my breath on him as I looked at him. He was as evenly placed in front of me as he possibly could be, but a tiny bit lower. He would be near my neck-area if I were closer.

His breaths came fast and if I didn’t know any better I’d say I could see his heart thumping at a quickened pace. Honestly? I didn’t think his reaction was out-of-the-ordinary. Most humans didn’t even believe giants existed anymore, even though they had so many documents and stories about us. I was sure they’d all heard that, but to actually see how massive one of us is? Shocker. He must’ve felt like he was in an enormous situation. Yeah, yeah, my size jokes could use some buffing; quit laughing.

I looked at this little man and smiled. What else could I do? His eyes were wide and his dark hair contrasted with his pale skin. He looked like he might be screaming if it wasn’t for how exhausted he was after being here. I knew the feeling. Why the hell were we even here? Me and some random human chained to metal walls in who knows where?

If you expected something exciting to happen now that we were both awake, it didn’t. We stayed chained to the wall, and I stayed staring at him with a bored expression on my face. His, of course, was still full of shock. I quickly grew tired of this.

“Hey,” I began, unaware of the volume at which I was speaking, “close your mouth before you start drooling.” My words were laced with sarcasm.

Unfortunately, my voice reverberated loudly around the room, and he looked even more frightened under the power of my voice than he did before.

I sighed and began to speak in a whisper. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He remained silent and his expression didn’t change. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I state plainly, “it’s not like I’m even able to.” I nodded toward the chains around my wrists.

I think I saw him relax a bit, but it might have been my imagination. I didn’t know if he was going to say anything or not, but he didn’t get a chance. A loudspeaker filled the room with sound, and a masculine (yet monotone and computerized) voice spoke.

“Good evening. This is a test of your sanity. It is a test of your willpower. It is a test of your emotions. It is a test of your psyche,” It paused for a few seconds, presumably to let us dwell upon the situation before it continued. “The two of you will be forced through trials. There will be others. There will be deaths if you are too weak-willed or too slow to act.” I swallowed hard. It spoke the word ‘deaths’ like it was the most natural thing in the world. Well, yeah, it’s natural, but you know what I mean.

“There is a way to solve everything without failure,” it continued. “The ultimate penalty is death. You will need to be cunning and trustful to get everyone home alive.”

Suddenly, the floor beneath us began to rise. The floor was padded, to my surprise, and I didn’t get long to wonder about why. The human’s chains unsnapped and he fell, yelling, to the padded ground. The ground was high enough that I could see him, but he was on the ground, rolling in pain from the fall.

My own chains made an audible click as they unlocked, and my mind whirred into motion. I was going to fall right on top of him! I quickly glanced over to my right and, just as the chains unsnapped, I forced all of my body weight to the right of him. I slammed into the metal floor with a loud 'BANG!' and I was sure I caused the entire narrow passage to violently shudder.

Since my body was too large to land in this position, my head slammed against the wall that the human had been chained to, leaving a small dent. I felt a warm liquid rolling down my forehead and after rubbing it off, I wasn’t surprised to look down at my hand and see thick blood smeared across it. The human was not too far from me now; I could have reached out to grab him if I wanted to. He was shivering and approached me cautiously, but I think he realized that we had to do this screwed up test together.

And that’s when the walls started closing in. They were slow, but the passage out was immense. Immediately I stood up and, much to his disapproval, I scooped the human up on my palm, closed my hands around him for what safety I could provide him, and shot off down the passage.

You may or may not have noticed, but I don’t hate humans. Sure, they have an awful big ego for their size, though I knew a lot of them were simply ignorant because their elders had unfairly spread it to them. I don’t mean to brag, but giants live longer than humans. A human will only live to around 70 while we usually live to around 150. This isn’t as much as you were probably expecting, I know, but it filters out a lot of stupidity that a generation could potentially pass on.

However, obviously you probably care more about my wondrous escape, so we’ll get back to that. Right. I sprinted as fast as I could toward the end of the hallway, trying not to shake my little friend around too much. It wasn’t long before the walls were starting to press against my shoulders. This was insane! By the end of this little adventure, I was squeezing through the two walls sideways. It was a close call. I made it. Though even here I knew, this was going to be the start of something horrible.

I slowly moved my left hand away so that the light wouldn’t burn my human friend’s eyes. I called him my friend, but I was sure he hated me. After my left hand was away, he lay curled up into a ball in my right palm. The sight, I must admit, tugged at my heartstrings. He was terrified of me, even though I hadn’t done anything to make him think of me badly. I felt horrible about it.

He didn’t move from this pitiful position, so I gently poked him with a finger. His body quivered and I began to wonder if I accidentally hurt him during my run. I looked at the miserable scrap, unsure of what to do. I hadn’t ever come this close to a human before.

I looked around and came to the conclusion that this small area at the end of the passage wasn’t going to start shooting at me or something, so I sat down. If this ‘test’ was all about trust, we weren’t going to get very far.

“Look,” I began softly, “We’re both in a bad position, I know. It’s not going to matter who trusts who if you don’t start getting used to me and we just fail this completely.”

No response. “Can’t we talk about this? I do recall humans being able to speak, or was I wrong?” Still nothing. I decided to try a different approach. “Don’t you have family? They’ll—“

The tiny man mumbled something, but I didn’t understand it. “Err… What? I can’t understand you with you being curled up in a ball.”

He slowly moved out of his sulking position, and I brought him closer to my face. He sat down on my palm. He looked up at me and instead of fear, sadness laced his expression this time. I realized just how small he was as my hand completely dwarfed him. It would be so easy to think of him as insignificant, but I wasn’t like that.

He finally spoke. “The people who run this disgusting place…they took my sister. I tried to save her, but that’s when they knocked me out too.” He looked up at me blankly.

I now understood why he had been acting so depressed alongside his fear of me.  His sister was being taken away, and in his attempt to stop them from kidnapping her, he fell into their grip as well. It was strange. He could remember what caused him to end up here, but I couldn’t recall a thing.

I looked at him with genuine concern.

“I’m sorry…” It seemed his sense of fear had returned after he was able to get his little rant off of his shoulders. He started to back off of my hand, but I quickly curled my fingers up as a small barrier so that he wouldn’t just walk right off.

His back pressed against the wall of flesh and he glanced around. “J-Just put me d-down…”

I shrugged and lowered my hard toward the ground. He was out of my hand like a bullet, though he didn’t run too far. In fact, he had only run down to my ankles, since my legs were stretched out in front of me. I think he didn’t realize the fact that running in that direction wasn’t really going to get him away from me. His line of vision moved up to my feet, which completely dwarfed him in every way, and I playfully wiggled my toes. He took a few steps away. His line of vision trailed the entire length of my body before he met my emerald-green eyes. I gave him a smile, and I wasn’t surprised to see that he didn’t return it.

Not that I could see his face clearly from his distance away. Either way, I knew we would have to keep going forward.

“We should move on. Wouldn’t want to keep our hosts waiting, would we?” I sneered as I said the word ‘host.’ No reply, of course.

I stood up to my full height and looked down at him. He looked ridiculously small as he stood there with his head craned upwards, taking in my sheer size. I couldn’t help but stifle a laugh. I stepped over him, my foot lingering as it was above him, and I heard a shriek. I quickly put my foot back alongside the other as I heard this; the force of it colliding with the ground caused him to fall backwards.

My heart sunk and I silently cursed under my breath. I kneeled down above him, my form towering and leaving him in my massive shadow.

“God, I didn’t mean to scare you that bad.” I paused for a few moments as I contemplated what the best thing to say would be. “I wasn’t really going to step on you.” The words didn’t come out as well as they sounded in my head. Oh, sorry, I wasn’t really going to crush you to death beneath my foot? What was I thinking?

Gingerly, I picked up his shivering body and dropped it on my palm before standing up again.

“Might be better if you’re up here with me, hmm?”

I finally continued down the hall. If you wanted to see some breathtaking part about how I avoided swinging axes and jumped over pits of lava, you’re going to be awfully disappointed. There was no Indiana Jones-style action scene here. Quite the opposite, frankly. It was a large open room with the same silvery metal walls, ceiling and floor as the other room had been, only this one was bigger by far.

Okay, there was one difference I noticed. As I stepped in, cold air bit into my skin in a contrast from the previously warm hallway. The entry-way behind me suddenly slammed shut with a piece of the metal, causing me to turn around in surprise.

The voice immediately began to speak over the intercom, “Because we are interested to see the results of this test when you are at your pique of alertness, we are courteous enough to allow you this room to rest in for the night.”

“I’ll show you courteous.” I scowled under my breath.

The lights began to slowly dim, but they didn’t go off all the way. I placed my tiny friend on the ground and he immediately moved away from my feet, running to one of the corners of the room. I sat down and rested my back against the wall.

I don’t know how long I sat there. It must’ve been at least two or three hours, but they passed completely uneventfully. Sure, I was tired, but I wasn’t really inclined to sleep on this cold metal floor in a completely foreign area. I looked over at the human. At his size, the cold in this room would have been horrible. I saw him curled up and running his hands along his legs, trying to warm himself up.

I grew tired of watching him suffer, so I went over and scooped him into a palm, bringing my other hand above him. No, I wasn’t trying to squish him. I was allowing my hands to trap my body heat inside so that he could get warmer. After a few minutes of standing there, I laid down on my back with my head propped up against the wall.