Another enjoyable chapter. This town really has a problem. The hate level for specs is insane.
It is good for Claire to be thought a lesson.
I can't wait to Thomas gets his punishment.
I hate Alice very much. Too bad she can't suffer more.
I hope some get punished by living there lives as specks and get into to situations where their loved ones torture them.

I love the duality of this story. Gentle and nurturing, contrasted by Tae's violent urges. For now, these two stories are running parallel to each other, but it seems they may cross soon. Hopefully Eren can make it out of this with his heart intact. He's the only truly innocent one so far.

I just gotta say, this is a great story so far! I can't wait for further installments. Keep up the great work.

I hope Tom and Claire get tortured. I'm going enjoy that. 

Can't wait for the next chapter.

So Tae was born a speck, called it: http://gph.is/2lBjtGE . We finally confirm that correlation about Eren noticing how tall and athletic she is for a human and the comments about how fit Eren is since only fit specks have a chance of surviving in the dangerous world. It's interesting if Tae-yeon is Tae's biological sister instead of a friend like-a-sister. Since Grace called her Ji-soo earlier, is that a general title for a family member or Tae's real name and she just strangely goes by her friend Yeon's name? It hasn't been stated yet if regular humans occasionally concieve speck babies. It would lower the bar again on the morality of the society if parents are abandoning speck infants and dumping them upon the impoverished speck communities if not requesting their doctors to kill them outright. Since Tae has a unique biological trait, the Xirang, she could either be the biological sister of Tae-yeon or she was simply a friend kind enough to care for Tae until she one day grew.

This kind of hints that Tae may be involved in the Amrita corps ability to produce weaponized shrink serum since apparently the general public has long been immune to the original outbreak a century ago. The company may have been researching the virus in speck test subjects and Tae happened to be the one in a million who had unique genetic code allowing the virus to be extracted and edited. If specks can come from normal people she may have been hidden in disdain as a mistake of the extended Amrita branch families before being used in the latest experiments and accepted back into the family as a normal human. For such a valuable assest I wonder how closely they monitor and protect her since she seemly has a great amount of independence and gooes around kidnapping and killing people of her own accord.

I'm realy curious what Tae did to make Yeon hate her and call her a monster, considering she loved and cared for Tae when she was a speck. I've got my suspicions about preying and tormenting her fellow specks when she got big, believing it was just the natural order of things. In spite of Yeon's affections she may have just gleefully decided it was her turn to feel in control over others. Or if she was given syringes of the weaponized shrink serum after being either adopted or recognized as a member of the Chen's extended family once she became normal sized. She does have the wicked streak of enjoying torturing and killing people, perhaps it's always been regular humans she suffered at the hands of or witnessed killing her fellow specks. She may have been caught in the act by Yeon or showed her one of her victims and gleefully invited her to join her, only for Yeon to be horrified and outraged. In the darkest timeline, what if she used a syringe on Yeon in a fit of rage and killed her?

P.S. That's some hella inflation when $43.55/hr is just slightly above minimum wage and insultingly low for a college graduate, from MIT no less if it's still equivalent to present day MIT. Fingers crossed this future society actually mandates that minimum wage to actually match what the living wage is. I wonder if Madeliene thinks he's just that desperate for work or if the gears start turning when she notices other awkward moments with Eren in the coming weeks.

It is interesting how the general population thinks specks get billions in aid, when in reality they live in slums and are given scraps. Oddly enough I could see the small group of speck rights activists and the much larger specks are pests groups both coming together to cause a huge outrage if someone funded several news channels and documentary film makers to investigate and expose the living conditions of specks and how a handful of companies are pocketing the billions in funding. "Where are your tax dollars going? Tonight our investigative reporter Tom Johnson reports to us from the field from NYC's sub-borough 1, one of NYC's 5 diminshed human communities. The Werner Company holds a $40M annual contract from the city to exclusively manage and develop the cities 5 DH sub-boroughs. But what does the company do with this fnding? What we found may shock you." New channels covering multiple speck slums in cities across the country over a few weeks followed up by some famous filmmaker making a Netflix series about how the contract companies and the politicians they bribe are pocketing all the money could easily cause a public fervor from both speck supporter and hate groups for opposite reasons.

They could be setting themselves up against the world's largest conglomerate. Grace could use Eren becoming an innovative engineer at his new job as a model example to the Amrita board about specks being an untapped workforce. If she convinces the board about their use and how the conglomerate could monopolize the communities since no one else is currently using specks as a reliable workforce, the company can use the opportunity to swoop in and place the majority of the speck population under their protective wing with the promise of safer communities and living conditions. They just need to flex a bit of that wealth an influence to clear the corrupt competitors out of the way. Opportunity for a potential epilogue or a timeskip.

Interesting, so Tae is a family member of a large Chinese family owned mega-corporation. Maybe something like a branch family or adoption since she doesn't have the army of assistants lingering around her like Grace. Curious what her role was, it seems to hint she dealt with some of the shadier parts of the company, since she has access to weaponized shots of the diminishment virus, is a proficient fighter, and has contacts that can track down or even kidnap people for her. The last mystery for her is whatever tragedy happened in her past. She keeps calling herself a monster and had an instant reaction to Alice calling her one, she either killed a friend/family in a fit of rage or is guilt ridden for failing to protect them from someone else.

Curious if Thomas is going to be able to walk away from his probably inevitable encounter with Tae. He's protective enough of Alice, and I don't think Tae is going to bring her back up to torment her further, so if he brawls with Tae when he learns she's already dead I wonder who will end up shrunken and what actions Grace takes in the worst scenario. It would be interesting to see if he hesitates and talks things out if Eren confesses to him what the girls did to him the night at the bar. If he has any measure of sympathy for specks I can see Tae letting him go.

Finally Eren's job interview. I have a suspicion. I think Madeleine Lacroix is possibly either a speck friendly scientist/engineer or maybe secretly a speck herself. I think speck friendly scientist is the more likely, I sort of get a feeling from a character from the Titan Empire series who found humans adorable and loved working with them as what her personality could be like towards specks. I imagine at some point if she's speck friendly she reveals she realized he was a speck weeks ago but didn't see a problem with it. Or alternatively if I read her wrong and she's a "specks are pests" supremacist who learns Eren's a speck when someone outs him and she then fires him.

One last topic I'm curious if Grace Chen learns of how bad the specks in Norwich's situation is from Eren and if she does anything about it. A billionaire would lose pennies setting up a new and safe community for hundreds of specks. It would be an interesting twist if it was revealed her family conglomerate manages to shelter and care for specks by employing them as an innovative workforce.

This story is FANTASTIC. Turnabout and revenge are old tropes but you're managing to knock it out of the park in such a creative way while giving us small little tidbits of Tae's past throughout the story to show us why she feels how she does and how she's able to do what she's doing. All of the size interactions have been super hot and it's been delicious seeing these former bigs getting their comeuppance once they're small. The bartender getting thrown in the toilet was so disgusting and hot. It's hard to say whether or not the punishment fits the crime, but that's part of why Tae is an interesting character, because she's not perfect so we have to flinch at the thought of "does this bartender deserve to get pissed on and flushed just because she looked the other way when Eren was getting tortured?" 

I haven't written anything in a while so take my critique with a grain of salt due to how rusty I am, but this last chapter seemed a little confusing with the way you laid it out. I feel like it would have flowed better if you started with Tae going to the airport to get Grace and then once Tae got the text on Sylvia's phone, jumping forward in time to Alice being captured. 

It's a small thing but I think it would make it less confusing as to the timeframe. 

Also, the scene with Sylvia getting captured and shrunk was so incredibly well-done with Sylvia slowly starting to realize that something wasn't right until the terror at what was happening washed over her. That slow-burn really let us appreciate her fall from grace, so it was disappointing to not get a similar scene with Alice. It felt a little bit rushed to me. I was actually hoping to see a scene where Grace worked with Tae to get that job done! 

Either way I'm loving this story and can't wait to see where else you take it. Cheers and thanks for sharing!

very interesting. curious that if the tiny girl in the photo is tae herself

another awesome chapter cant wait for more