Ellie shook her head as she watched Pete run through the field that surrounded the model village. His little head swiveled about every half dozen strides to see her still sitting there but he didn't slow down at all. Of course, even at a full sprint, he had barely made it a few steps from her and she didn't see any reason to chase after him.

After all, there was nowhere for him to run to.

After the initial shock of watching him shrink beneath her had faded, she had carefully set him on his own sweater and looked up what she could about Lili-Traverston. It had been a cutesy little tourist attraction in the '90s or early aughts that a local businesswoman had turned into a safe place for Shrinkees but there was nothing official about it. There was even an old website, with no connections to any official Traverston accounts or pages, that still advertised it as a place to visit.

Whoever made this place had at least initially wanted normal people to come and see the shrunken villagers going about their daily lives. And the handful of news articles she found about it over the years told her that no one ever got prosecuted for doing anything to Lili-Traverston. One article, from over a decade ago, seemed to even imply that the girl who had wrecked the place and made a few locals lick mud from her heels was right to do so. She was, at least according to the article, the niece of the woman who owned the whole place and the shrunken people should have given her the respect she was due.

Ellie had been quietly laughing about it when she heard Pete's phone buzz with a notification.

All the amusement had seeped out of her at the noise, realizing that she'd soon enough need to talk to his dreadful parents and find out what they'd want to do with him. She thought briefly about refusing to turn him over to his stupid family, they'd huff and threaten to make a case of it but she knew from a few of their more tense dinners that they backed down easily enough. Ellie was confident that she would take better care of him than his parents would and began to imagine setting up a little place for him in her bedroom when she pulled his phone out of his pocket.

The sight of two heart emojis surrounding the name Alyssa Young shattered her fantasy.

Pete wasn't an emoji kind of guy, so at first it was easy to dismiss the cutesy symbols as something that Alyssa, as a dumb tart, must have done when she gave him her number. But her heart had skipped a beat when she saw a part of the message in the notification, 'I miss you so much. When are you...'

There had been no hesitation in her fingers as they flashed across the screen to unlock the phone and uncovered a seemingly endless string of messages. Her blood had boiled at first and she had thought about snatching up Pete's unconscious form and simply crushing him. She held his limp fragile body in her hand for a long moment, her thumb feeling out his pathetic joints while she thought about how easy it would be. But then she took a deep breath, set him on the muddy ground in front of her and decided that several years of dating wasn't worth throwing away over some flirty texts or even a little emotional cheating.

Then she found the pictures and her toes scrunched inside of her boots.

She was still scrolling through them while he ran. After the initial dick pic the two of them had become more open about what they wanted. Alyssa had their whole life planned out; Pete would break up with Ellie, they'd start dating almost immediately, he'd finish school while she looked for a place to live in their hometown, they'd move in together and everything would be great. It would have been disturbing if not for how much Pete seemed to love the idea; he talked constantly about how he missed home and missed Alyssa and how apparently exhausting it was to date her.

Ellie learned that apparently she was too political, opinionated, annoying, and a litany of other code words that essentially meant she wasn't an unwaveringly supportive blowjob machine. Alyssa, of course, seemed to agree that it was ridiculous that Ellie challenged Pete on some of his worst ideas and constantly took any moment of him venting to remind him that she wouldn't be that way. They had even talked about what would happen if he did shrink, since Alyssa was Immune like her.

She had almost gagged when she saw the photo the girl had sent in response; she was pitched ludicrously far forward while wearing a low cut top so that the camera was centered on her deep cleavage. Then she promised Pete that he would always be comfortable and well taken care of with her. It made her want to stand up, stalk over to where Pete was still struggling to reach the model village and smother him in more treacly love than the little bastard could handle.

Ellie sighed and shook her head as she finally reached the latest message. She pocketed his phone and rose to her feet before looking out to where his little form now slowly jogged toward the cluster of buildings at the village's center. She knew that she could easily catch him but if she went up to him right now, Ellie knew that he wouldn't be anything more than a stain on the sole of her boot.

Her gaze drifted from the village to the outbuildings that dotted the vast park to represent the various farms and cottages that were outside of Traverston. Feeling the smile spread across her face, Ellie took several big steps before she began to skip across the field. Giggling all the way, she jumped into the air as she neared the next cottage and came down on it with both of her feet.

The whole thing exploded into splinters and her boots sunk into the soft earth beneath.

Lifting a boot, she frowned when she saw that there was no thick red viscera clinging to it. The house was apparently one of the fakes that had never been converted to house a shrinkee. Rather than fret about it, she continued on in a broad circle across the park.

As she went, she dug her headphones from her pocket and slipped them into her ears. She stopped for a moment, her finger lingering over one of the metal albums she listened to when she was writing an essay and needed to be in the zone before she scrolled two more slots down in her recently played albums. A big sweeping orchestral score started but she skipped past the overture and the big entire cast introduction song right into the wholehearted 'I want song' of the musical.

Dancing across the field, Ellie tried to do her best to remember the movements she had been taught in the ballet class her mother took her to as a child. She jumped, slid, and kicked her way through more of the fake cottages, laughing all the while. Standing on the far side of the village, she realized she couldn't even see Faith or Callum because of the immense model church that had presumably once been the focal point of the attraction.

Ellie started to step toward it when movement caught her eye.

On the side of the village opposite where the power junction had been, there was another farm house beside a garden along with a sizable plastic box that was mostly obscured by shrubbery. Traveling along one of the roads though was a model lorry, laden down with what looked like a carrot and potato. Giggling at the sight, Ellie found herself drawn to it and angled herself along an intercept course.

As her shadow fell over the truck, it stopped and began to frantically back up.

Taking her headphones out, she heard its tiny electric engine whirring under the weight of its pathetic load and laughed. She slowed down as she spied the two little people within the modified radio control car clearly panic at her approach. Casually wrapping her earbuds around her phone, she tucked it into her pocket before she started to whistle and walk toward them like she was unaware of their presence.

Pivoting when she reached the road, Ellie walked right toward them, her own whistling covering up the sound of their truck's engine. She glanced down to see the two tiny people, a middle aged couple from what she could tell, bail from the cab and run screaming off the road in opposite directions.

Doing her best to maintain her casual unaware act, Ellie flicked her toe against the vegetables to send them sprawling across the road. The little man covered his head and cowered as a carrot the size of a felled tree bounced past him. Doing her best to hold in another laugh, Ellie brought her foot down on the lorry as hard as she could.

Plastic shattered beneath her boot and the whole thing flattened beneath her tread.

Both of the shrunken people screamed in terror and she smirked as she lifted her left foot up to smash the tiny woman beside her. But Ellie wavered in the air as she felt something clinging to the underside of her boot.

She stumbled and her foot crashed to the ground a few feet from the woman, who immediately ran back toward the cottage down the road. Meanwhile, Ellie looked down to see the bulk of the plastic lorry had clung to the bottom of her shoe.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” She growled as she scraped her foot against the road.

The noise was horrendous but the mashed up truck held firm.

Glancing around, she spotted one of the small power line poles on the opposite side of the road and bent down to wrench it from the earth. The power lines stretched then snapped as she ripped the pole from the ground and then immediately scraped it against the sole of her boot.

“Fucking ridiculous,” she grumbled to herself as the flattened wreck dropped down onto the road, completely blocking it. Staring down at the wreckage and the pole that she had used to pry it off, Ellie found herself laughing again.

Her eyes then went to the tiny man who was crawling on hands and knees back down the road.

“Hey,” she snapped, stomping her foot down in front of him. He flopped backwards while she glared down at him, “Aren't you even going to apologize for getting lorry stuck to my boot?”

She listened to the little man blubber for a moment before she simply scoffed and dropped her foot onto him. Lifting her heel up, she ground him out slowly but surely, his blood soaking into the earth below.

The sound of a small door slamming shut drew her gaze to the cottage, where the tiny woman was now shutting curtains, as if that would somehow prevent Ellie from putting two and two together.

Stomping up to the tiny building, Ellie let her hands settle on her hips before she said, “I know you're in there.” The little woman remained inside the house, “You know I can crush this place, so just make it easier on us both and come out.”

She waited another few moments and then tapped her foot.

But still the woman remained inside.

With a sigh, Ellie plowed her boot into the side of the cottage, demolishing the walls without a care. Enough of the house remained standing that rather than destroy it, she bent down onto her hands and knees and peered inside. The tiny woman wailed in terror as she pressed her face up against the hole she created then backed away so she could slide her hand in.

The punches and kicks of the shrunken woman were little more than faint taps against her palm as she closed her fingers around her. She screamed obscenities until Ellie tightened her fist and all the air rushed from the woman's tiny body in a gasp.

“God,” she muttered as her thumb roved over the tiny woman's body, “You things really are so fragile.”

She pressed down on the woman's shoulder and a soft pop echoed up followed by the woman's painful scream. Ellie silenced her with a push to the stomach that robbed her of air and stunned her for a moment before tugging at her leg. She could feel it stretch then the woman's hip popped and she tugged just a little more but only the woman's pants tore apart.

“Where were you two trying to go anyway?”

The woman was nothing more than a heaving lump of flesh in her palm, gasping more often than she could sob as pain flooded through her.

Ellie twisted her other leg at a painful angle while looking down the road. It went right toward the village proper where she could spy Faith digging through buildings along the high street. As she turned back toward the woman in her hand though, she realized that the road curved past the immense church.

“No, that's...” she shook her head, almost unable to believe it, “Then again.”

Ellie looked down at the sniveling mess in her palm and sighed, “Don't worry, I'll make this quick.”

She placed her thumb and forefinger on either side of the woman's head. She could practically feel the woman's pleading screams against her fingers and then twisted as hard as she could.

The woman's head popped off and blood spurted across Ellie's fingers.

“Damn it,” she growled, dropping the woman's corpse onto the earth below and doing her best to shake the mess off of her hands. She bent down and wiped her hand across the grass while she complained, “Every time.”