"I can't *hah* believe *hah*you're still *hah* holding on *hah* in there!"
My world was all gales and cacophonous gasping as I lay at the back of Jo's tongue, feeling the blustering, swampy gale of her odourous breath ravage past me as my giantess co-worker turned torturer gulped down air after her long jog. After my death-defying battle against her latest 'unaware' attempt to condemn me to her core with a surging storm of water, I was soaked through, and exhausted myself. Taking in as much of the fresh air streaming through her open jaws as I could, I tried to cling onto her slippery tongue, the taste buds thankfully providing a little purchase on the otherwise dangerously unsteady muscle. Between slowly diminishing gasps, she continued to address me in her casually cruel demeanour, despite sounding as exhausted as I was.
"Seriously, though. I'm honestly *hah* amazed by the resilience you've *hah* shown since I popped you between my *hah* lips." She finally managed to collect herself, exhaling massively one last time and sending yet another massive wave of the noxious, sweltering stink over me before her breathing returned to somewhat normal, though still amplified. "It's disappointing, though. I was sort of looking forward to feeling you squirm down in my belly. It's such a wonderful feeling."
Anxious wonder slowly seeped through me. Who, I had to wonder, had previously seen their last light from Jo's terrible jaws, faced their final moments in the bubbling, churning pit of her stomach? Who, by extension, had fallen victim to this cruel, scheming magician overall, who seemingly had the power to shrink people at will? I had already heard the nutshell version of the torment she had put her younger sister through with her feet, and a similar vague story about an ex-boyfriend of hers. My curiosity was, despite my exhaustion, enough to make me pose the question to the dominating titan herself, who responded by laughing in cruel amusement.
"You're a curious one, aren't you little guy? Is your own experience not enough for you? Hmph." She snorted in mock derision. "Guess some people are never pleased. What can I tell you? There's so many it would take a whole story to tell you of them all. I don't have time for that right now; I need to rest before I go out tonight. Perhaps I'll tell you another time, hm?" With that, she deftly picked up my body with her tongue and pressed me hard into her cheek, letting me go after a few seconds and feeling my body slide down the inside of her cheek slowly, like a glob of all the gooey saliva that also made its home in my gloomy prison. "Now, be a good snack and shut up, would you? I want to nap, and should you wake me from it... well, I'd say I'd swallow you, but you'd probably find some way to climb back up my gullet."
My world turned ninety degrees as Jo lay down, her head resting on its side. The slimy cheek became my floor, and just above me a threatening ceiling of manky yellow molars hung from their strong, gummy foundations. Through their split, I could see up into the chamber of her maw, the teeth on the other side seeming to be high in the sky, the equivalent of several stories up from me. Her choice to rest was a godsend to me; after the exercise experience, plus all the other unholy predicaments I had found myself in since I awoke from my own doze a few hours ago, had once again left me exhausted myself. Lying down on the slimy cheek- I had stopped caring about how everything was covered in Jo's repulsive spit long, long ago- I found the flesh smooth and somewhat soft, and as warm as everything else in the sauna-like environment within her body. Finally, I could try to relax a bit, try to make but a few hours of my imprisonment somewhat soothing.
I just hoped Jo was a smooth sleeper.
Not five minutes had passed before a rumbling sound echoed through the chamber, predominantly from the side where the great, hard wall of her palate now rested. My co-worker was snoring away comfortably, already in a torpid state from her exhaustion and a long day's work. How long she would be in such a state was beyond me, but I took solace in the fact that now she wouldn't be actively trying to kill or toy with me. With my mind taken off that issue, Her saliva production largely stopped in her sleep, meaning I wasn't immediately swamped in a lake of rank goo like normal. I looked around me at my oral prison, marvelling at how her mouth and the environment within were changing, deteriorating, from when she had cleaned her teeth. A biologist or a dental scientist would probably jump at the chance to be in my position, I mused, laughing to myself; they'd most likely give their eye teeth to get to explore and witness the human body as I was doing now.
Her breath, for example, was a stench that was complicated to describe. I had experienced Jo's breath now at its worst and at its best; now, as it continued to slowly deteriorate, it had gone from fresh, to stale, to distinctly unpleasant. When she had recently eaten or drank, the predominant aroma was the smell of whatever food or drink she had recently consumed, be that the meaty smell of the bacon strips in the sandwich she had devoured for lunch, the rich, sweet aroma of the coffee cake I had passed through her lips on a few hours ago, or the bitter stench of coffee that lingered on her breath like- well, a bad smell. In the times between, however, her normal halitosis was a distinctly unpleasant scent, but a fair deal more indescribable. From what I remembered from my biology classes, the bacteria that built up on her teeth and especially on her tongue excreted foul smells and odours that plagued her maw with increasingly more unpleasant scents; left unabated, this would eventually lead to the rancid stink of her morning breath, as I had experienced all those hours ago before Jo brushed. The gases they released were largely sulfuric, if I remembered correctly; this was probably why the closest I could get to a comparison to the stench of her halitosis was rotten or decomposing eggs, as they had largely the same chemicals involved. Her breath was then slightly adjusted by, like I said, everything she had consumed; sniffing at the air, I could still detect scents of bacon and coffee mingling with the rotten egg-like stink. Whatever it was, it combined with the thick, sweltering atmosphere of her maw to create, as I'm sure I have mentioned too many times already, the fetid atmosphere that I had to breathe in regularly to survive. The thickness of the air meant that my every breath was like tasting her breath as well as smelling it, putting the same unpleasant odours on my own tongue as well as hers.
Her teeth, too, were distinctly grimier then they had been after the brushing ordeal. After she had cleaned her teeth, they retained their yellow colour- no amount of brushing would purge the staining that had come from years of coffee drinking and possible, even probable, smoking- but they also had a certain mark of cleanliness about them. They seemed smooth and looked unblemished (aside from the heavy staining, of course), and when the light flooded into her mouth the slimy boulders almost seemed to gleam, the dirty yellow looking lustrous in the light. Now, however, I could look up at the ceiling they formed above me (clenched now Jo was asleep; I never understood why people clenched their teeth while napping) and see the army of germs had made good progress in recolonising the instruments of doom. Pale, disgusting looking plaque already had built up wedged between her teeth, and even the sides of her teeth seemed to be covered in a thin, rough film of the stuff. Though I couldn't see it, I could only assume that the same had happened with her tongue; I merely had to think back to the slimy white film on her tongue that had disgusted me so upon entry to this otherworld to produce a comparison. It constituted all the tiny microcolonies of bacteria everywhere in Jo's mouth; including, most probably, on me. It was a foregone conclusion that, having spent so much time as a morsel in this dirty grotto, that I had picked up at least some of the germs and other nasty creatures that called her mouth a home. I was just thankful that I couldn't see them on me, or I'd probably have thrown up in disgust.
"Mmmmmmmphhhhhh...."
My musings about the state of Jo's maw were, as was becoming usual, interrupted by Jo herself, moaning in her subconscious. The low-pitched moan rumbled through the cavern, echoing ominously as her unconscious mind pictured who knows what. Lying on my back on her soft cheek, I didn't pay it much heed, instead preferring to close my eyes and finally decide to drift off into unconsciousness myself.
If only Jo had let me.
Even in her stupor, the giantess was still able to cause me problems. Her moaning was merely a precursor to my world once again shifting 180 degrees, as floor rotated to become wall and then ceiling. I found myself slipping down her cheek, eventually falling off it and onto the much more unforgiving surface of her teeth with an unceremonious splat. Suddenly alert again, I felt the tombstones grind underneath me, and took the initiative to decide to scrabble off the unstable surface onto the softer, more forgiving plain of her gums. I had, however, had the misfortune to find myself in a particularly thick bed of the repulsive plaque I had observed not minutes ago, and quickly tried to scrape the pale yellow gunk off of me before I moved. In my disgust, I had forgotten my survival instinct was top priority; and it very nearly killed me.
"Mmmphmamaaampphmmmph..."
As Jo continued to mumble nonsense in her torpor, the sudden unstable ground made me lose my footing, and I stumbled but a few steps to the side. Unfortunately, as it happened, those few steps to the side were enough to send me into the gorge between her two crushing molars, which were opening just slightly in her gibberish as I had the bad luck to fall between them. It was just as equally fortunate that I was able to make it through the gap without being crushed into viscera; her mumbles lasted long enough for me to clear her destructive jaws and fall into the inner chamber of her maw once more, crashing into the side of her tongue. Precariously, I tried to survey my new situation; clinging to the side of her whale of a muscle, facing either a long drop to her equally unstable teeth on the other side- after cheating death once in less than a minute, I was not going to do it again- or climbing down her tongue, an act that would almost certainly trigger a reaction from her dreaming subconscious. My best bet, I concluded, was to stay exactly stationary, and hope that Jo would not react to my new position atop the sensitive muscle.
Fortunately, her mind was too preoccupied with whatever it was dreaming up to notice the mite-sized morsel straddling her tongue. It largely remained stationary, moving every now and then sluggishly to lap at the teeth in front of me. The murmuring continued, echoing round the maw in an almost unearthly chorus, but she thankfully did not move her head again.
For about five minutes, anyway.
Suddenly, I found myself slipping down her tongue as her head rotated upwards, so her imposing incisors were directly above me. It wasn't them that terrified me the most, however; what sent the chills up my spine was the gaping pit below me, leading into the terror that inevitably awaited deep within Jo's body. I tried desperately to cling to her tongue, to try and prevent my slow fall into the abyss, but my efforts were in vain; the slippery surface of the side of the muscle, having less taste buds than the main plain of it, offered no purchase as I slid further and further down towards her awaiting throat. Eventually, I found myself going underneath her uvula, sliding deeper and deeper into her gullet, falling to the back of her throat. I lost sight of her maw, and below me I could see the epiglottis, the entrance to her gullet proper, getting ever closer to my increasingly panicking form. This was not how I was to go; accidentally eaten by a sleeping girl like some unwary bug. I scrabbled for all I was worth; tried to stop my inevitable descent down towards her sphincter and my doom, all in vain. My feet were just about to touch the sphincter, at which point it would open up and suck me down into her gullet, when a miracle happened.
Jo yawned.
Immediately, a massive amount of air was sucked down her throat, immediately taking my miniscule form with it down into the tube of her trachea, away from her oesophagus. Panicking even more now, I was pulled further and further into Jo, thinking in fear that I would become trapped in her lungs, when the tube began to narrow, until it became so small that I got stuck, lodged in her windpipe. Pressure began to build up underneath me as air, supposed to re-enter the outside world in a gale of her repulsive breath, couldn't get past, and I realised that I was essentially choking her. Huge, explosive sounds boomed around me as she coughed and wheezed to get me out of her system, the very tube I was in shaking and vibrating erratically from her repeated efforts to expel me. For my part, I tried earnestly to pull myself up the tube; even though she had shrunken, imprisoned and tortured me, I didn't want to be responsible for Jo's death. For all her cruel nature, I still liked her- plus, she was my only chance to get back to normal. With all my might, I pushed upwards, trying to pull myself out of the tube and prevent her choking.
I like to think it was this that allowed her to push the air out of her lungs, sending me rocketing out of her windpipe, through her mouth and out of her lips into her hand. Back in the outside world, I exhaled in relief, glad not to be in the confining tube any longer, and looked up at the giantess above me.
Jo's face was beet red, her eyes wide and watering. Her face was still locked in an expression of panic as she looked down at me, mouth still open and breathing heavily onto me. Her other hand was on her throat, massaging it. For the first time- not only in this ordeal, but for all the time I had known her; I saw genuine fear in her eyes, a fear that I knew all too well. The fear that she was going to die. What had saved me from her stomach had almost killed her, and she had been taken from half-asleep to wide awake in a split second. I could tell that, once she recovered, I was going to be in for hell; from her point of view, I had just almost killed her, perhaps intentionally.
"Jo, I'm so, so, so sorry...."