Scott held his arms at his sides as he was bathed in the excruciatingly green luminescence of the PMRD barrel.

            He stood on the carpet of Maggie’s bedroom a few inches away from a discarded pair of azure flip-flops, so long-loved that the plastic toe thong was only hanging on by a few fragments of material. After a few seconds of the device’s imparted sensation, the height of the shoe’s foam insole descended from roughly shin height all the way to Scott’s ankles as he rose back to his maximum allowable size of twelve inches.

            “Somebody’s growing up so fast,” Maggie commented with a snarky giggle as she gave the trigger of the ray one last squeeze with her index finger. She lifted the barrel to her lips and feigned blowing away a puff of smoke, as if she’d fired a magnum slug into her brother instead of altered the physical size of his body at her will. Somehow, reality was still much scarier in that way.

            Scott leaned against the cloth backdrop of Maggie’s bedsheets, draped down to the floor from her mattress. He plucked at a stray piece of Sylvia’s mealy toejam that had become entangled in his hair, but found it was just a little too tightly coiled to grab without the aid of soap and water.

            “Looks like they had a lot of fun with you, huh?” the girl asked. For once, her tone didn’t mock at the very mention of Scott’s usual trials under the soles of their mother’s cronies. If anything, it indicated pity, if not also a confusingly contradictory sense of jealousy.

            “Yeah, pretty much.”

            “Were you three inches the whole time down there?”

            “Yep.”

            “But you’re not too tired to do a good job on me, right?”

            “Uh…” he sighed. He knew there was only one correct answer after she’d already willingly made him one foot tall, which probably went against every natural fiber of her queen-like being. He watched her toes wriggling hopefully against the carpet fibers, eagerly anticipating their service. “Nope.”

            “Good.”

            He looked up toward his monolith of a sister just in time to see her squatting down, her peachy palm bearing toward him.

            Her index finger and thumb hooked smoothly beneath her doll-sized sibling’s shoulders, cupping his chest against her palm as she hoisted him with the usual feather-weight ease. She gathered him up against her chest as she crawled atop the bed. The embrace found Scott somewhere between what could’ve been bizarrely characterized as a protective hug but still a restrictively domineering claim, as if he was a stray puppy she’d found wandering the streets and claimed for her own.

            Even as he wasn’t being squeezed against the mounds of her chest, he could feel her fingers coiling tighter into his back than was necessary. She could most likely feel his heartbeat against the gridded pad of her hand.

            Watching his sister’s soccer-hardened bare leg swing up and trounce into the plush cushioning, punctuated by the thump of her heel landing heavily by the foot of the bed, Scott allowed his head to loll against the downy fabric of Maggie’s shirt as she clutched him into the cradle of her arms. If he was being honest, there were worse positions to be in, after the exhausting afternoon on the patio. Not that he’d ever tell her such a thing, of course.

            “I’ve just been sooo sore after the last couple games of the season,” Maggie explained. She held Scott out at arm’s length now as she addressed him, letting his legs dangle over her outstretched thighs. “And my poor toes have missed your little hands on them.”

            “I bet.”

            The seventeen-year-old snickered one last time before setting Scott down in a burrow of blankets at the end of the bed. Flanking him on either side were her upturned feet, rosy and freshly plucked from socks and still flecked by damp lint. Their usually slightly rank aroma was softened today by a combination of stale fruity perfume that hung in the room’s atmosphere. At this unprecedented height of twelve full inches, Scott actually stood significantly taller than his sister’s feet, which only just reached his stomach from heel to toe.

            It was hard to imagine how often her relatively petite peds had haunted his existence, usually when he was about a quarter of his current size and being squeezed into a burrito of sweat and flesh beneath her digits. Right now, they would’ve almost been cute, if she wasn’t prodding them at his legs so expectantly for attention.

            “C’mon,” Maggie wheedled. Her toes curled as they turned toward her brother, her stubby big toe pressing into his thigh. “Get going.”

            “Sure,” Scott said blankly, resolved to get this over with. He wrapped both hands around the meaty big toe first, making a valiant attempt to pull it away from his upper leg while giving it a few starting pulses. However, this only caused her toe to crease higher up the length of his leg, until its doughy pad was flattened against his hip.

            “You can do better than that,” she chuckled. “And I know, cuz I’ve seen you do it, and you were way smaller, too. I’d think you’d want to convince me that you’re better at this when you’re bigger. Right?”

            She had a point.

            “Yeah,” he said. “My bad.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” Maggie answered. She scrunched her toes again, bunching up the material of Scott’s shirt and momentarily imprisoning him in her grip. The ball of her foot was pressed flush against his crotch.

            Gritting his teeth, Scott went delicately to work, massaging his tiny fingers into the plush flesh of each individual toe on his sister’s left foot as it rested heavily against his lower body for support. He dug with his trademark application of relaxing pressure, primping the bulbous end of each digit in his palms, then cupping his hands around the short shaft of the toe. Special attention was paid to the marshmallowy crevices between Maggie’s toes, where the skin was softest, usually still moist from their last entrapment in socks and speckled with toejam.

            “Oohhh… that’s it, Scotty,” she cooed. She’d shut her eyes, rolling her head back against her pillow as her fingers slid between the long, hay-gold strands of her hair.

            “Don’t mention it,” he mumbled. Stealthily, he eased back a step, hoping to get a reprieve from the heft of the ball of her foot. The pinkish mass of flesh only followed him, though, as her foot softly shifted to a sharper angle, now pressing her toes against Scott’s stomach. The hem of his shirt had become hopelessly tangled between her worming digits, ensuring he remained close.

            “Where are you going?” she questioned without opening her eyes.

            “Just changing position,” he said.

            “I liked that position, though,” Maggie whined. “Come back closer.”

            “Okay,” he obeyed with some disappointment. He inched forward again, toward the foot that already had his shirt tangled in its toes, and felt the ball of her foot settle comfortably squarely between his legs again. At this point, the pad just above his sister’s spongy sole was actively forcing his member down against his leg through the fabric of his pants. There was no doubt she could feel precisely where his miniature manhood was beneath her broad footprint now, though her half-napping expression didn’t change.

            “Good boy,” she replied happily. At the very least, her tone didn’t convey the same kind of doglike ridicule as usual when she made this underhanded compliment, which Scott supposed was a plus.

            The massage carried on in silence for a few more minutes. The shrunken house arrestee had found that by standing utterly still, he avoided the uncomfortable possibility of his member firming to life under the weight of his sister’s sole squashed so affirmingly against his body; he was testing fate as it was. He was able to relieve some of the pressure once he finally moved on to stroking the underside of Maggie’s foot. Her buttery sole wrinkles yielded so easily to his touch as he ran his fingers up and down the length of her supple creases.

            “Okay, that’s a good enough job,” she said after twenty minutes or so. “Other one, please.”

            At least she’d learned to say please in the last year. Scott was about to make the four-step journey to his sister’s opposite foot where it rested in the sheets beside him, but Maggie made the move for him, probably to ensure the angle was to her liking.

            The left ped was tugged away, but her right leg was already in motion, preparing his next patient. This time, she took a moment to alight her toes against Scott’s chest, splaying them out and running them down his stomach.

            With a groaning lurch in his stomach, Scott could feel the distinct flick of his awakened member against the pressure of Maggie’s toes as she dragged them down his torso: a clear biological sign of all the time he’d been deprived of time alone with Ella. He cleared his throat, hoping to turn the tide.

            “So… how was the end of school?” he asked cheerily, probably with just a little too much sunshine for his younger sister to take seriously.

            “Really?” she chuckled. The ball of her foot had now heaved itself down against Scott’s hips like the last, while her toes worked on fumbling with his shirt. The pad of her big toe was pressed against his bare stomach, the flesh cold and soft as his pillow.

            “Yeah.”

            “Um, it was okay! I got good grades, I think. Or good enough that I got to make all the tournament games.”

            “What’s that mean? B’s? B-minus?”

            “Some. Mostly A-minus. I’m not a dummy, you know.”

            “I know,” he said. This, in fact, was something he did know. Not that his brain was any spring chicken, but Maggie had for the most part presented herself in years past as a poor academic example for Kyle, generally prioritizing her social life and sports over her grades. In this past year, though, she seemed to have kicked things into higher gear. What was even funnier was that she seemed intent on defending her intelligence to him: a boy she had the legal right to shrink down to an inch and put inside her mouth like a lifesaver.

            “I made honor roll, too,” she continued. “High honor roll.”

            “I heard. That’s some good work. Congrats.”

            Confused for a moment, Scott realized after a minute of intensive mental processing that he felt a twinge of pride for the girl.

            He was experiencing pride at the accomplishments of a young lady who’d spent half of her entire life laughing and tormenting him in his generally shrunken state, stuffing him into sweaty socks and burying him under her soles. Not that she wasn’t still unopposed to at least one of those, but somehow it wasn’t performed with the same tangible malice. Maybe it was the tone of her voice, or the gentler touch of her toes, or simply the way she’d actually allowed him to be slightly larger than her feet for once.

            Whatever the reason, Scott was nearly bowled over to discover he was glad for her.