Scott prepared for another necessary expulsion of his lungs. He sucked in his gut. He flattened his hands against across the smooth formation of the earth above him, and clung tight to the coiling fibers as everything around him lurched forward again with monumental effort.

            Maggie’s sock was splayed beneath his lower body, binding him to the back of her calf. It was like being covered in a popped chewing gum bubble constructed of worn sock. The briny threads ground against his back.

            And again, Maggie concentrated her body weight plus the additional steel heft of the machine’s bars into the balls of her feet. She grasped the side handles in clammy palms, gritted her teeth, and pushed outward again up the track.

            Instantly her sock constricted back around her taut limb. Scott was compressed into the malleable slope that was Maggie’s leg. The now-soggy fabric of the sock strained itself by default down against the buffer of Scott’s two-inch body, pinned at the top. Coughing was just about out of the question now if he didn’t want another breath of air like dirty bathwater. Thin, glazed drops were already traveling down toward him from her inner thigh.

            Even as Scott endured the first stint of being stored in any of Maggie’s footwear in an entire year, breaking a record he hoped would never be reached, he couldn’t help but think of Kyle.

            Kyle, strapped to his older sister’s opposite calf, most-likely being put through his paces all the same, and perhaps worse: warm putty for the constantly transforming muscle mass above, and a human sponge for whatever array of viscosities couldn’t be absorbed by the sock. Experiences like this didn’t exactly come easily, even after a day of foreplay inside slippers and marbles. At least they had light and air, however tainted.

            Certainly the geometry of this situation was unique, even if not the sensory concentration and cocktail of foul, zesty odors clogging Scott’s brain stem. It was still strangely new. He couldn’t recall a time when he’d been stowed on the back of his sister’s leg while she exercised; in times past, he was down below in the trenches, tending to her worming toes and only making educated guesses about what was happening to his body at any given time. Right now, the weight was entirely allayed, most-likely because he and his brother would legitimately die if placed under Maggie’s soles while she used a leg-press weight machine.

            It would be akin to being stood upon by a giant version of the seventeen-year-old soccer star while a clone of her hunched on that one’s shoulders, with all the combined weight and presumed humiliation piled and centered on his singular corpus. His body had endured a lot at this size, but that would probably go further than even he was capable of.
            Maggie had taken a brief break from pressing upon the platform, possibly to give her brothers a breather, or maybe just because her overworked thighs were getting worn out. Scott hoped it was the latter, because he trusted his sister to be much more cognizant of her own bodily needs before that of her helpless, shrunken sibling-toys. However, with a creak of the machinery and a shift of her muscles beneath the skin clasped to Scott’s back, he had a feeling she was starting again.

            And start she did, for one final set. The girl was really putting her all into it this time, seemingly attempting to squeeze in a post-soccer season workout at the same time as “training” her tiny brothers in discipline. If anything, this practice seemed to have greater benefits for her. It was a chance to fully explore the feeling of weight on her back and how much she could resist up through the balls of her feet, feeling the shape of her brothers’ tiny bodies glued by sticky sweat to the back of her tanned legs. It was educative in useful ways for her chosen summer profession.

            Scott and Kyle, meanwhile, were mainly just getting light heads and the occasional dastardly drip of musky discharge between their lips. Being the much more practiced of the two, Scott was able to minimize this unfortunate occurrence, but he had a feeling his brother wasn’t quite at the top of his game when it came to defending himself from intrusions. Inevitably, the younger of them was probably just focused on still breathing even as drop after drop of their enormous sister’s balmy sweat passed down his gullet like rotting broth.

            B3A2, apparently, for all the build-up, was just a whole lot of bluster. From the glint of glee in Judy’s eye before she’d left, Scott had been preparing his heart for something truly demoralizing, even when he had precious little moral left to give. The sad part was, back in his especially rebellious teenage days, Scott would’ve cut off a finger to receive this comparative walk-in-the-park procedure rather than be deposited for the hundredth time into one of his giant smirking family member’s insoles.

            Not literally, cut it off, of course, but not entirely virtually, either.

            Still, between the angle and the feeling of loping gravity in a losing tug-of-war with Maggie’s sock, the experience was beginning to turn stomachs. Just when Scott was beginning to seriously worry about how well his brother was holding up, though, the sensation of oscillating weight and regularly straining cotton fibers came to a splashy halt.

            Patiently, the two-inch Scott remained fastened in a tangle of squishy matting on the broad isle of Maggie’s calf. Her sock was unpeeled down to her ankles; when Scott was finally released into her waiting palm from the rolled patterns, he was grateful to see she’d freed Kyle first, who was seated back on the accessory table, awkwardly hacking to catch his breath. The teen wasn’t quite as the same asparagus-green as the day before, but he looked the worse for wear.

            “Not so bad, right?” Maggie shrugged as she deposited her second tiny brother back on the table with a final pat of her thumbpad on the top of his head. She smiled with no small amount of pride at them, brushing a few damp locks of hair off her forehead. “I’ve been practicing that one for a couple weeks with some of the little practice dolls, making sure they stay where I put them and don’t slip down and inside. That’s why you guys stayed put, too.”

            “Can we have a… minute before the next bit?” Kyle huffed. He pressed his fist up against his jugular, muting a belch.

            “Sure, I guess. But not suuuper long. We’ve got lots more stuff to get through, you know?” Maggie said. “Scotty doesn’t have all day.”

            “Is there an… easier one we can do?” Kyle mumbled. He hacked through something lodged in his throat, his back heaving like he was seconds away from the heaves, but he held it together. “Please?”

            Maggie blinked. Scott watched the corner of her cheek crease beside where her dimples normally formed. She chewed the inside of her cheek. Almost full facial paralysis, just for an instant.

            Had that worked?

            Her gaze held on her younger brother for another stony minute before it shifted to Scott, and then her blue eyes narrowed in a far more familiar fashion.

            “Oooh, sorry, lil’ guy, but you heard Mom. That was just part one of model B3A2. See?” Maggie scooped her cell phone out of her pocket and palmed it in view of her brothers, only long enough for them to be stunned by the brightness of the backlight. Scott was pretty sure he could make out the sight of a list not unlike one on a weight-lifting trainer app: a series of numbers and cartoon diagrams, but he couldn’t puzzle out anything specific before the phone was whisked away.

            Of course Kyle’s little beg hadn’t worked. What, did Scott truly believe his sister was soft enough to be cracked by a single pathetic please from her sibling? To underestimate her in that way would be the most dangerous thing possible today, even after all the moderate progress he’d witnessed in his sister this year.

            This was still his sister, after all. Maggie: the apple of Judy’s eye, the one who’d never been shrunken before despite every bratty or self-serving decision she’d made, the one who’d tossed him in socks and over tongues, the one who’d made him conclude mad power-hunger was a genetic trait.

            “Can we see what else is-” Kyle began.

            “I don’t think so,” Maggie interrupted. She pocketed her phone again.

            “I feel like we deserve to know what’s going to happen when you-”

            “You’re here to learn a lesson, remember? Part of that is just taking what comes and being okay with it, not making a big deal out of it,” Maggie snapped. “Otherwise, depending on who you’re dealing with, your… punishment period might be increased.”

            Scott’s spine tightened at the recollection of those words. All that training wasn’t just integrating into her thoughts; it was seeping into her speech as well. Come to think of it, just how much of what his sister had said this morning was in her own words, and how much of it was memorized from her broad-grinning Clinic idols?

            “Maggie? What are you doing here! I thought you had Saturday off?” Olivia Blackwell called out as she entered in full trainer’s regalia, tying her hair into a ponytail and landing with confident steps on the rubber floor that somehow managed to rattle the accessory station upon which Scott and Kyle stood despite being secured to the floor.

            Speak of the devil. The training counselor was here.

            “Hey, Olivia,” Maggie said, perking up from her previous stupor of standing above her brothers. She waved, and instantly put on her usual smile and baby-blue spark of self-assurance. “I do have Saturday off; I’m just here for me. What’s up?”
            “Just came in to plan out Monday’s morning training cycle. I see you came in with your little brothers.”

            The way Olivia pronounced “little” without the usual requisite, punny irony, Scott wondered if she wasn’t actually saying it to demean him, and in fact believed Maggie was the older sibling. He considered speaking up to correct this fact, but quickly reminded himself how silly such a display would come across when, standing at full two-inch height on the tabletop, he wasn’t even quite staring Maggie in the belly button.

            For all intents and purposes, with all the powers vested in her today by their mother, Maggie was the older sister. Any passerby would have no reason to suspect otherwise.

            “Yep, I’ve got both of them today and tomorrow, all to myself, and Mom wanted me to get in some training with them. So here we are,” Maggie explained. She turned, reaching down, and cupped Kyle into her palm. It was a decidedly gentler pluck. He was seated safely in the center before he’d even realized her fingers were coming.

            With an instantaneous bulldozing move, though, her digits were swooping in under Scott, until he was tumbling up against his youngest sibling in the center of their giant sister’s hand.

            “Now, from what I’ve heard, this little guy is usually on his best behavior,” Olivia commented, prodding her index finger at Kyle as he shuffled into a more secure position on the platform of flesh.

            “Usually. He kinda slipped up yesterday. We’re gonna set him straight today, though,” Maggie said knowledgably. She stroked the bulb of her pinky fingertip across Kyle’s hair.

            “I’m sure you are. Are you just giving them a… tour of the equipment right now?” Olivia chuckled. She pulled her phone from her pocket and scrolled through something on her screen, though her eyes darted back and forth to Maggie enough to indicate she was listening.

            “Actually, we’re following one of the new training protocols right now,” Maggie announced nonchalantly, though by the forced-cavalier flavor of her words, Scott suspected she wanted to impress this woman who’d been so instrumental in her work at the Clinic so far.

            “Is that so?” Olivia said, shifting her gaze more permanently from the phone to Maggie. “Which one?”

            “This one,” Maggie said, holding up her phone too high for either of her tiny siblings to see.

            “I see,” Olivia said. “Well, absolutely feel free to say no to this since you’re not on the clock now, but if you’d like some company, I’d love to see how you’re coming along with your training, outside work hours.”

            “Oh,” Maggie said. Her smile, ever-constant, didn’t even tip enough to shallow the girl’s dimples, but Scott knew when his sister was off-guard, because it happened so infrequently, and right now was one of those times. “That… sounds great.”

            “Good,” Olivia affirmed, a shadow flinting past her eyes as she leered down into Maggie’s palm again at the pair of two-inchers awaiting their fates. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, idly bending her thumb back against her opposite palm until the joint popped loudly enough to echo across the room. “Let’s see you teach your brothers a couple of life lessons.”