Beyond the Sea

Taking another deep, raspy breath, you avert your eyes from the hard plastic floor you are cowering on. You feel cold drops of sweat run down your forehead, and lift your hand up to your face to wipe them away. As you do so, you realise that your arms are visibly shaking – just like your legs, which are involuntarily bobbing up and down as your body desperately tries to work off some of the tremendous stress you are going through. You breathe in again, noticing that even your lips feel slightly hard. Like all the other muscles in your aching body, they too are cramping up again, accompanied by a familiar tingling sensation. Realising that you are beginning to hyperventilate again, you try to slow your breathing, though somewhere in the back of your mind, you wonder if the prospect of losing consciousness is actually preferable to the unbearable fear you are experiencing. As you deeply exhale and then slowly inhale again, your gaze nervously wanders through your cramped prison, but apart from three hard, uncaring walls of semi-transparent plastic walls, there isn’t much to see. And so, your eyes finally wander back to the fourth wall, a fully transparent plastic wall that serves as your window into the outside world. The monster is still there.

Its most striking feature is its soulless, black eye, which seems to be staring right at you. The head is enclosed in a hard, reddish-to-orange carapace, tapering into spiky looking antennules and a couple of proper antennae, all of which are several times longer than your whole body. And what is even more menacing than the monster’s dead stare and insectoid features is the sharp, saw-like rostrum at the top of its head and the mandibles around its mouth. Despite the intense feelings of fear and revulsion the sight of the alien creature elicits in you, you can’t help but stare at it. Just below the main carapace around the beast’s head, arthropodean legs protrude from its body, followed by several smaller pleopods beneath its segmented abdomen, which finally transitions into a short tail with a telson. The creature isn’t exactly easy on the eyes to begin with, but its size makes it look like something straight out of a Lovecraftian horror story. The briny, oceanic smell emanating from it only further serves to amplify the creepy feeling of otherworldliness you get by looking at the beast.

Suddenly, you notice movement from above, and based on your previous experiences of this nightmarish day, your heartbeat accelerates again as a fresh wave of mortal fear washes over you. It is a primal sense of fear you haven’t known up until now, and once again, there is only one single thought on your mind: you don’t want to be eaten. You slip into short, flat breaths again and feel your muscles tense up as you squeeze yourself into the corner of your cramped prison. More cold sweat begins to run down your body as you gasp for air and feel the blood being violently pumped through your arteries. Your feet helplessly slip over the plastic floor as you try to push yourself even further into the corner, but the walls around you don’t budge. Then the creature outside moves upwards as it is lifted up by a pair of two enormous fingers.

You let out an unconscious sigh of relief, but once again, you find yourself helplessly staring at the events unfolding in the outside world. Now, it would appear that it’s the creature’s turn to be dwarfed by an even larger being, as the fingers holding it are nearly as large as its entire body. The scale of everything out there is something you can barely wrap your head around, but what makes it feel especially bizarre is that the movements are not slow or cumbersome as one would expect at these dimensions. Once the creature has been lifted up a little further, the pair of fingers holding it is joined by another pair. Apart from their enormous size, there is nothing alien or ugly about these fingers, quite the contrary. They are ideally proportioned, slim and well-manicured, the nails painted with light pink nail polish. It is quite obvious that these elegant, almost a bit delicate fingers belong to a girl or a young woman. Their feminine grace only serves to create an even more bizarre contrast as they suddenly twist the body of the creature in opposite directions, straining its body beyond anything it was designed to ever endure. You flinch as the carapace then breaks apart with a sickening crunch, and once more as the giantess pulls the two halves apart, severing the last strings of soft meat that are still connected to each other. The raw brutality sends shivers down your spine. Then, the gigantic human being puts the upper half of the creature back on the table. As you look at the beast’s broken body again, it suddenly doesn’t appear menacing anymore. In fact, the dead, empty glare of its black eyes now has an almost sad quality to it. It may just be an animal, but you both are about to share the same fate: To be eaten by the giantess.

As you look up again, you observe how the prawn’s lower body disappears between a pair of soft, feminine lips, then you hear another soft crunch as the towering human begins to chew. You watch the giantess’ jaws move as she effortlessly chews up the lower half of the prawn, accompanied by more crunching and smacking noises. Then the movements slowly stop, and you hear a faint, but still audible gulp, followed by a slight contraction in the gigantic human being’s neck. The giantess has just casually swallowed half of a prawn that, from your perspective, is the size of a bus. She then extends her hand towards the upper half of the animal, picking it up and beginning to peel off the hard carapace around its head. Once she is finished, she places the sad remains on the plate before her with some other empty shells and pops the peeled upper half of the prawn into her mouth. You look into the black eyes of the ‘monster’ one last time, then it is sucked into the giantess’ mouth with a wet slurping noise. For a brief moment, you can still see some of the antennules stick out between her soft lips, then they too are pushed inside by her wet tongue, and the crunching begins once more. A few moments later, you hear another wet gulp, and you realise that, except for a few pieces of carapace on her plate, the giantess has completely consumed the monstrous creature. You feel reminded of the words of a wise master from a famous space opera: there’s always a bigger fish.

Except that this isn’t a fish. As your focus shifts back to the giantess that has just mercilessly devoured the aquatic monster, you once more become aware of the fact that she really is just a girl who has eaten a prawn. It wouldn’t be anything particularly noteworthy if you hadn’t been shrunken down to about one hundredth of your original size, and literally been reduced to nothing more than a side dish. Once you woke up inside the narrow cubicle, you quickly understood that you were inside a box of shrunken people as sold by Vortex, the massive international restaurant chain that makes billions each year by shrinking down criminals and other undesirables to sell them off as food. What you don’t understand is why. While your memory is a bit hazy, you have no recollection of having done anything wrong. Perhaps you haven’t always been a model citizen, but you can’t think of anything that would warrant this. So, over the course of this day, you arrived at the conclusion that this had to be some kind of misunderstanding, perhaps a mix-up or something.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter now. You’re only one of dozens inside this box, you are way to small that any of the normal-sized people out there would take note of you, and even if they would, they would probably not believe you. You have already witnessed this girl eat several other shrunken people like you, some of them crying about ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘terrible mistakes’ as she lifted them out of the box. Unfortunately, she hadn’t paid any more attention to them than to the prawn, and they all had suffered the same fate. You don’t know if she really didn’t hear them or didn’t care about them. Either way, you are in mortal danger. Whenever the girl leans forward and extends her hand, it is possible that she will reach into your particular cubicle and pluck you out, and since you already have observed this happen to plenty of other shrunken people in this box, you know that it is only a matter of time. At the moment, however, the girl seems to be a bit more preoccupied with the seafood on her plate beside the box. You didn’t actually know that Vortex served seafood as well, but from what you can tell about your immediate surroundings, this restaurant seems to be located in some kind of upscale marina by the sea, and you have heard that some restaurants offer more than the standard menu. The Japanese branch, for example, is said to sell fairly good sushi too.

Your thoughts are interrupted by another crunching sound as the giant girl breaks up another prawn and peels off some of the carapace. Then she casually throws the head into her mouth and begins to chew once more, before washing it down with a sip from her glass. From what you can tell, it seems to be plain water with some ice cubes and lemon. It’s really just a small gulp, but from your perspective, the girl has just swallowed the content of a swimming pool.

“Isst du eigentlich immer die Köpfe mit?“ You hear a male voice ask. As you were served to the girl, you briefly caught a glimpse of the other person she is sitting at the table with, a boy around her age. You assume he is her boyfriend.

“Mh.” The girl begins as she chews on the lower half of the prawn and quickly swallows so as not to reply with a full mouth. “Meinst du jetzt von den Geschrumpften oder den Garnelen?“ She says with a laugh and playfully winks at him. The boy laughs as well.

“In letzter Zeit schon.“ The girl then continues as she spears some of the smoked salmon on the plate with her fork and lifts it to her mouth, licking her lips. “Finde die schön knusprig. Früher habe ich das nicht so gemocht.“

„Reden wir jetzt von den Garnelen oder den Geschrumpften?“ The boy asks jokingly, making his girlfriend laugh again. It’s a kind, friendly laugh that is completely at odds with how big and menacing this girl is from your perspective as her food.

“Die Garnelen natürlich.” The girl explains with a smirk and lifts the salmon to her mouth. “Geschrumpfte habe ich sowieso schon immer gegessen.“

The conversation between the two giants reminds you of another factor that complicates your predicament even further. While you didn’t understand what they said, you can tell that they are German, so even if you managed to talk to the girl somehow, you can’t be entirely sure that she’ll understand what you’re saying. Sure, they both are quite young and have an upper-middle-class-look to them, so they probably speak English reasonably well. But would they be able to follow everything you say? In any case, it most likely doesn’t matter, since the girl you have been served to hasn’t made any effort to listen to the shrunken people so far. Some of the tinies she already ate actually spoke German, and it didn’t seem to have had any effect on her. Nevertheless, the fact that the giants out there aren’t even speaking your language further adds to the profound sense of alienation and isolation you are feeling right now. You don’t know how or why all of this has happened to you, and not even where exactly you are. You can only assume that you’ve been exported to Germany after you were shrunken down, but you can’t be sure about that. You only know one thing: Sooner or later, this German girl is going to eat you, and based on her eating habits so far, she will swallow you whole.

***

Lisa puts the fork with the smoked salmon into her mouth and begins to chew, savouring the fresh flavour spread over her tongue. After a few more moments, she gently pushes the lump of masticated fish to the back of her tongue and swallows, sending it down to her belly. Once it arrives in her stomach a couple of seconds later, she can feel a delicate flutter, signalling to her that some of the shrunken people she ate earlier during her meal apparently are still alive. While Lisa is aware that the slight tickle is representative of perhaps a dozen people fighting for their lives inside her belly as they are digested alive, it doesn’t elicit any more compassion in her than the prawns or the fish she just ate. Instead, all it causes is her to smile slightly, as the feeling is quite pleasant and one of the reasons why she is a frequent Vortex customer.

Enjoying the slight tingle in her belly, and perhaps subconsciously the undeniable feeling of power coming from turning an entire group of former human beings into nothing more than nutrients for her body, she leans back in her chair. As she places her left hand on her quietly gurgling stomach, she looks at the table again. There are still several grilled prawns, slices of smoked fish and even some oysters left, and about one third of the shrunken people is still in the box. Successfully holding back a small inner burp, Lisa gives her soft belly a little pat and asks herself if she perhaps should have gone for the medium seafood platter instead, as she feels quite full already. After a long day out sailing with her boyfriend Konstantin’s family on their private yacht, they both had been absolutely famished, and so they had gone straight to the closest restaurant and ordered a large plate of seafood each, along with two medium boxes of Vortex’ trademark shrunken people. While they had been invited to come along with his parents and his older sister Johanna to visit some family friends over dinner, Konstantin had been insistent they go along without them, saying that he and Lisa would get something to eat in the marina before heading back to the family’s holiday home by the beach.

“Oh, by the way, why didn’t you want us to go visit your parent’s friends back there? The, uhm… ugh, what were they called again?” She asks, leaning over towards the table again and parenthetically fishing a shrunken woman out of the box.

“The Von Schwätzingens?” Konstantin asks with a somewhat dismissive sigh as he takes a sip from his water, rolling his eyes. “The name says it all.”

Lisa laughs, popping the screaming and pleading tiny woman into her mouth and sucking on her as if she were a piece of hard candy. Then she swallows her with a soft gulp. “That bad?”

“They. Talk. All. Night.” Her boyfriend explains with a pointedly gloomy expression. “About their family tree, most of the time. Which probably is more like a circle in places.”

“Sound awful.” Lisa says and lifts a shrunken man out of the box, tentatively dunking him into a small puddle of prawn juice on her plate. Again, she pays no attention to his panicked screaming and crying as she places him between her soft lips and slurps him inside, inadvertently grinning a little as his desperate fight for survival causes a slight tickling sensation on her tongue. She can even slightly hear his mortified pleads for mercy echo through her mouth as she pushes him around a bit with her tongue, but since it’s all just the usual nonsense about him being innocent and all of this being some kind of misunderstanding, she doesn’t listen.

“But why did Johanna go along then? They’re your parents’ business partners, okay, but why would she…?” She asks, swallowing the squirming tiny man in her mouth and licking some of the prawn juice off her lips before drinking another gulp of water.

Konstantin shrugs. “I mean, you know her, she’s a bit of a Goodie Two-Shoes anyway. And since she’ll be the one to take over the business eventually, I guess she thinks she has to.”

“Ugh.” Lisa says with a frown, leaning back in her chair.

Reaching into the box with shrunken people again, she absent-mindedly lifts out another tiny and looks out through the windows of the restaurant, curiously watching a small sailing boat as it heads out of the marina and out onto the open ocean. Noting that the wind is picking up and stirring up some foamy waves, Lisa looks on a little, listening to the quite fitting, jazzy instrumental rendition of a well-known chanson about the sea coming from the restaurant’s sound system. She has always liked Konstantin’s family, since they proved to be surprisingly down-to-earth for aristocrats with a lot of money, and she knew that they liked her as well – otherwise, they would hardly have allowed her to come along to their holiday home by the North Sea over the spring holidays. But she had also noticed before that a lot of the people they dealt with could be quite obnoxious, and she knew that this was something that her boyfriend found difficult at times. It probably was one of the main reasons why he seemed so reluctant to get involved with his family’s business.

Somewhat lost in thought, Lisa lovingly glances back at her boyfriend again and then flicks the squirming shrunken person between her fingers into her mouth, swallowing them almost instantly. If she ever ended up marrying him, she would probably have to deal with these kind of rich people antics as well – but then, she is a more sociable person anyway and isn’t as easily pissed off by people’s neuroses as Konstantin. Feeling a slight tickle beneath her left breast as the tiny arrives inside her stomach, she shifts her attention back to her food and reaches into the box again, lifting out yet another wriggling tiny.

***

You let out an undignified shriek and look on in terror as the giant girl reaches into one of the cubicles right next to your own, casually fishing out another shrunken person just like yourself. It is a muscular and slightly dangerous looking young man, someone you definitely not would have wanted to get in trouble with. But now he is reduced to a sobbing wreck, yelling nothing but “No, no, no” and “Please don’t” over and over again as he is mercilessly lifted up to the looming mouth of a titanic girl who, had he not been shrunken, probably wouldn’t even have reached up to his shoulders. You hear him let out a shrill shriek as the soft, feminine lips slowly part, then he is suddenly flung inside and disappears from your view, his screams becoming almost inaudibly muffled again as the giantess closes her mouth. Cold fluid begins to run down your face, a mixture of sweat and tears of intense fear, then you finally hear a moist gulp and notice a faint contraction in the girl’s throat, followed by an almost invisibly small bulge travelling down her neck. As it finally disappears behind the giantess’ ample chest, you briefly feel as if you’re going to pass out any moment from sheer fear.

As your heartbeat calms down just a little after a couple of seconds, you look at the girl again, focussing on her as a whole, even though it is almost impossible for you to get all of her into your field of view at once – she simply is way too big for that. Weren’t it for her tremendous size and the overwhelming sense of fear she elicits in you, you would have mainly taken note of the fact that she is extraordinarily pretty, with flawlessly soft, white skin, piercing blue eyes and shimmering blonde hair, which she is wearing in a neat, medium long ponytail. As you have noted before, she has a certain preppy elegance to her. She is wearing discreet, but obviously quite expensive stud earrings, a thin, but also rather pricey looking wristwatch and a chic, tight-fitting white polo shirt, which bulges considerably around her large breasts and which she has buttoned all the way down to show just a hint of the beginning of her cleavage. Since she is sitting at the table you are on, you can’t see the lower half of her body, but when she got up earlier to fetch some more serviettes, you did see that she is wearing tight-fitting jeans that perfectly bring out her taut buttocks – so she certainly is aware how good-looking she is and isn’t shy about showing her various assets, albeit in a somewhat classier way.

Again, her feminine elegance clashes with her actions as she picks up another prawn from her table, snapping it in two and plucking off its carapace with frightening nonchalance. Once the intimidating-looking crustacean has been stripped of most of its exoskeleton, the girl lifts the prawn’s upper half into her mouth and begins to chew again. As you watch the greedy giant mouth consume the animal with more soft crunching and smacking noises, you notice a bit of juice run down from the corner of the giantess’ mouth and over her chin. She also apparently is aware of this, and quickly swallows, picking up a serviette to dab the juice off her face. As she wipes her chin, you also notice that she apparently isn’t even wearing make-up. For some reason, you are suddenly overcome by intense anger and a feeling of profound injustice. Not only is this girl blessed with money and hauntingly good looks, she is also devouring dozens of far less fortunate people like any other kind of side dish to her seafood platter, condemning them to an agonizing death in her digestive system and turning them into nothing more than a bit of fat on her already perfect boobs and ass cheeks. The cheerful, laid-back jazz music in the background only serves to make you even more furious. Not one of the giant people out there seems to be giving a flying fuck about what is happening here, not just at this table, but throughout this damned restaurant and all the others around the world. If anything, they are probably congratulating themselves on saving the planet from overpopulation and ridding society of dangerous individuals. You realise that all the talk about the shrunken people just being ‘criminals’ or ‘freeloaders’ has always been nothing but bullshit.

You hear another crunch from above as the lower half of the prawn also disappears between the giantess’ lips and hear that menacing gulp again soon after. Then your tiny body, shaking with both fear and anger, suddenly freezes as the enormous girl looks at the box again. Your brain needs a few split seconds to process the new information it is being bombarded with, then you understand why this development feels particularly horrifying this time round: She is looking right at you. You inhale instinctively, making an indecorous squeaking sound like some kind of mouse as the gigantic ‘cat’ lowers her ‘paw’ into the box. You press yourself against the hard, cold plastic walls of your prison, then you are plunged into a dark shadow as two gargantuan fingers reach right into your cubicle. Seeing nothing more than the feminine, light pink of the girl’s fingernails, which are each bigger than your entire body, you kick and squirm, your breathing becoming rapid and shallow as you start to hyperventilate again.

“No, no! Please, no! Don’t, please!” You begin to cry as the fingers wrap around your left leg.

You are lifted up just a little, but the thin layer of grease and prawn juice on the girl’s fingers makes them slightly slippery, allowing you to break free again for a moment. Panting, you try to hold onto something, but your hands too are wet with sweat and the walls around you are perfectly smooth. As you desperately gasp for air, you notice that your cubicle is filling with a bizarre smell, a mixture of pleasant, feminine perfume on the one hand and the more particular scent of seafood on the other – all coming from the enormous, warm fingers that now are reaching around your prison again to get hold of you once more. You try to make it back to your corner, but then the giantess’ fingertips close around your upper body, squeezing almost all of the air out of your lungs. As you are lifted up into the air by an overwhelming force that dwarves absolutely everything you have ever felt before in your life, you continue to gasp for air. The unrelenting grip of the girl’s fingers makes this difficult, but not impossible, and so you welcome every breath that makes it all the way through to your lungs, even though the weird smell of perfume and seafood is already giving you a headache.

Once you have managed to stabilise your breathing, you look around, though this isn’t really necessary: No matter where you look, your entire field of view is filled out by the towering body of the giant girl. Right in front of you, you can see her enormous neck, which you will soon see from the inside, and as you look down, you see your thrashing feet dangling around high above her massive breasts. If she dropped you now, you would probably fall right into her cleavage, only to be smothered by boobs the size of houses. But that isn’t your fate. Instead, the German giantess lifts you up even further, towards her enchantingly beautiful face. As your gaze meets hers and she looks right at you with her clear, blue eyes, you feel the urge to say something, to reach out to this pretty girl and beg her to stop – but all you manage to produce is an incoherent, pathetic blubbering noise, something between a cry for help and a helpless wail. And then, the giantess’ soft lips part as she opens her mouth.

A blast of hot, humid air washes over you, making it even more difficult for you to breathe. Paralysed by fear, you just watch on helplessly as the already impossibly large mouth grows even bigger, revealing more and more of the inside as more light falls through the girl’s full lips and her perfectly white teeth, glistening with a thin layer of saliva. The menacing, sharp-looking white rocks provide the frame for an even more hellish scenery: Almost all you can see now is the giantess’ slippery pink tongue, spreading out like some kind of squishy organic carpet and covered in viscous, slimy spit. To the sides, it is bordered by the chewing surfaces of her molars, where you can still spot some masticated remains of various types of seafood, and at the very back of her mouth, it gives way to the ominous darkness of her throat, its most prominent feature being the cheerfully dangling uvula. The girl’s throat is also the source of another fresh wave of hot breath exiting her gigantic body. As you inhale it, you detect a note of briny seafood smell again, but this one is a bit different from the one coming from her fingers, somehow mustier and more visceral. It’s a foreboding reminder that this is air rising up from the depths of her body, where the seafood and the other shrunken people she has eaten so far are already being digested. The smell of the place you are going.

You let out another panicked shriek as the girl suddenly extends her tongue a little and drops you right onto it. As you frantically try to wipe the sticky, slimy saliva off your face and your body, you notice how the giantess slowly begins to withdraw the tongue back into her mouth again, her towering palate menacingly beginning to fill out more and more of your sight and casting a gloomy shadow over you. Once you have managed to get rid of most of the viscous spit in your face, you realise that you are now fully inside the giant girl’s mouth, surrounded by the reddish-pink flesh of her inner cheeks, gums, palate, and tongue, as well as the white rows of her massive teeth – which are beginning to close right in front of you, like the gates of a castle being shut. You feel a wave of mortal fear and intense claustrophobia go through your body and lurch forward, but the slippery, soft tongue gives away beneath you and your face lands on hot, slightly bumpy flesh. As you press your hands against the girl’s taste buds, they squirt out even more hot spit, as if you were squeezing some kind of organic sponge. The surface around you is so soft you almost feel as if you are going to sink into it.

Just as the massive incisors close in front of you, shutting out all light, one of the strings of saliva stretching between the giantess’ tongue and her palate collapses, almost drowning you in a glob of warm spit. Coughing and wheezing, you squirm around on the slimy surface of the tongue for a few seconds, then you are abruptly sucked to the side and pressed against the hard surface of one of the molars. While this frees you from the pool of slime and saliva you were trapped in, it completely disorients you, and before you can get your bearings, you are flung around again like a ragdoll, having absolutely no control whatsoever over what is happening to you. All of a sudden, your world consists of nothing but hot, wet flesh, sharp teeth and spit, and while your olfactory senses are overwhelmed by the ever more penetrant smell of seafood, your eardrums nearly burst from the loud, moist sucking sound all around you. At the back of your head, you are aware that the giantess is savouring your taste, but you are too preoccupied with the simple task of trying not to suffocate. Finally, and to your surprise, you are blinded by light again, though you still seem to be tossed back and forth and are surrounded by particularly soft, but not just as wet flesh. After a few moments, you realise that your head is sticking out between the girl’s lips, and you catch another brief glimpse of her massive breasts and the table deep below. The oppressive smell of seafood is a lot less strong out here, and you greedily breathe in fresh, cool air, but then you hear another sickening slurp and are violently sucked into the gigantic mouth again, plunging you into darkness once more.

The movements around you, however, have stopped for now, and so you have the chance to stabilise yourself a little on the constantly moving tongue, feeling a rush of hot air wash over you from behind as the giantess exhales again, carrying more hot, moist and stuffy air into the oral cavity. Coughing, you wipe another slimy glob of spit out of your face and inhale again, already dearly missing the little taste of fresh air you got back there. But just as you think that this can impossibly get any worse, you suddenly feel the massive muscles around you tense up a little, and before you can deduce what is going on, you hear a massive, thunderous roar that echoes not just through the mouth, but seemingly the entire giant body that is about to consume you. Your eardrums can’t withstand the assault and suddenly, you go death, hearing nothing but a high pitched-ringing noise. But what is far worse is the wave of unbearably hot, foul air that now washes over you like a tsunami, making you wretch and gag uncontrollably. It almost feels as if you have been tossed into a bucket of seafood and vomit, but even though the air around you is thick and musty, you realise that it is nothing but air. Only once your spasming body calms down a bit, having been unable to relieve itself save for a bit of spit that quickly blends with that of the giant girl who is eating you, you realise that the giantess must have burped. You begin to tremble once more as you notice a burning sensation on your skin, accompanied by a distinctly acidic smell – nothing you have experienced so far is even close to the horrors that await you inside the girl’s stomach once she swallows you. Letting out a small whimper, you clumsily try to pull yourself forward again, but the giantess’ mouth is still closed. That belch mustn’t even have been particularly loud, just a small, stifled burp, but it’s been enough to drive you nearly mad with fear, disgust, and humiliation.

As you crawl towards the wall of incisors, you notice that the ringing in your ears is slowly subsiding. The smell, however, simply won’t go away, as the giantess is keeping her mouth shut and literally bathing you in the foetid cloud from the depths of her digestive system. You know that you should probably hate this selfish girl with every fibre of your body, but at this point, it is difficult to think of her as a human being like yourself – you’ve been reduced to a far more primal state, you’re nothing but a dying animal inside the mouth of an apex predator. All that is on your mind now is your survival instincts, and perhaps the unbelievable horror of knowing that you are being eaten alive. You touch one of the lower incisors – it feels like a warm, wet rock, like something out of a tropical greenhouse. But before you can think of how you actually want to get past these rows of gigantic teeth, you feel how the girl’s tongue slips beneath you and casually pulls you away again, tilting to the back slightly so that you begin to slide towards the dark abyss of her gullet. You try to hold onto something, but everything is just wet, slippery flesh, and as you slide further and further towards the back of the giantess’ mouth, you once more feel the muscles of her jaws and throat tense up around you.

“No.” You whimper, your voice shaking. “No, please… Please don’t eat me…”

It’s no use. You hear a deafening, wet gulp, then all goes dark, and you are swallowed whole.

***

Just as she is about to swallow the shrunken person inside her mouth, Lisa notices a familiar pressure rise up from the gurgling pit of her stomach, through her chest and into her throat. Luckily, she has enough presence of mind to seal her lips shut and quickly lifts her right hand to her mouth as the surge of air exits through her oesophagus. She manages to stifle the burp well, only making a very faint belching noise inside of her mouth. Nevertheless, she is a well-behaved girl and quite self-conscious about burping in public, so she quickly looks around to check if anyone apart from herself heard it. To her relief, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case – not even Konstantin seems to have noticed it, since he is busy writing a message on his phone. Feeling a pang of guilt, Lisa looks down at all the food on her table again. She knows that she has eaten a bit too much already and will not manage to get through all of this. Scrutinising the seafood platter and the box of shrunken people, she decides that she will definitely finish off the tinies and then see whatever she can still fit in, but the bloated feeling beneath her left breast doesn’t make her particularly optimistic that it will be much.

A slight tickle on the tip of her tongue reminds her that she hasn’t even swallowed the tiny in her mouth yet. Noticing that the shrunken person is apparently touching her incisors from the inside, she can’t help but feel a tad of pity for the little one inside her mouth. She even burped right onto them. That really must have sucked. The poor thing.

Oh, sweetie. That’s not going to work. Lisa thinks to herself with a benevolent smile and then pushes the tiny away from her teeth with her tongue, sliding them to the back of her mouth. It was time to put them out of their misery. Down you go.

Lisa swallows with an audible gulp and sends the tiny down her oesophagus, noting that this shrunken person apparently is – or was – one of those that don’t put up much of a fight once they go down. She picks up her glass of water and thinks about the ongoing debate this seems to cause amongst Vortex customers. It’s apparently one of these love-it-or-hate-it things, with little middle ground in between. She takes a sip of water and then turns to her boyfriend.

“Do you prefer it when they wriggle or when they don’t?” Lisa asks, contentedly placing her left hand on her belly as she feels the tiny plop into her stomach.

“Huh?” Konstantin asks, looking up from his phone with a puzzled look on his face.

“The tinies. Do you prefer it when they move around when you swallow them or don’t?” She elaborates, inquisitively looking at her boyfriend with her clear, blue eyes.

“Uhm.” Her boyfriend begins. “I never thought about it. Don’t they all kind of squirm a bit?”

“Yeah, okay, but some of them more than others. And you really notice it when you swallow them. Some really put up a fight, some you hardly notice. Jessica said some even pass out.”

“Huh.” Konstantin says again as he begins to peel one of the prawns on his plate, apparently not too interested in what his girlfriend is blabbering on about.

“Uh-huh.” Lisa nods, reaching into her box once more and lifting out another tiny. “Like this one here…” She begins and pops the shrunken woman into her mouth, forcing her down into her oesophagus almost instantly with a hard gulp and waiting for a few moments. “Wriggler.”

“Really?” Konstantin asks in a mildly patronising tone, amazed why anyone would care.

“Alessia says she finds it a bit annoying when they do that, and Tanja really loves it. Says it’s boring when they just slide down.” Lisa explains, squeezing some lemon juice on one of the few remaining oysters on her platter and lifting it to her mouth.

“Of course Tanja would say that.” Her boyfriend laughs. “And what about you?”

“Mh.” Lisa begins, slurping the oyster into her mouth and savouring its taste for a few more moments before swallowing it with a faint gulp. “I don’t mind either way.”

***

You are amongst those who are briefly knocked unconscious by the brutal process of being eaten alive, though you regain your senses quite soon afterwards. The first thing you notice is that once again, it is almost impossible for you to breathe. While you are kind of aware that you are now in the blonde German girl’s oesophagus, it feels more like a perverse mixture of going down a waterslide and being smothered to death with an enormous, undercooked steak.  It is not completely unlike being inside the giantess’ mouth when she sucked on you, but everything about it is a tad worse. The wet flesh around you is tighter and warmer, there is barely any air at all, and the little bit that you do eventually manage to suck into your aching lungs is intolerably humid and rank. And then there are the peristaltic movements, periodic contractions of the gigantic muscles around you that violently force you further into the immense body of the girl who has eaten you, as if gravity wouldn’t take care of that eventually anyway. The contractions are so intense that you can’t help but moan with pain every time the giantess’ oesophagus squeezes you down, only stopping just when you think you are going to pass out again. It’s almost as if this hellish tube of flesh and muscles was designed to make you suffer as much as possible, but it really doesn’t care what exactly you are or how you feel. You are only one thing now: Food. Nutrients to be processed by the girl’s digestive tract.

As you descend deeper into the sheer endless body all around you, you suddenly hear another sound apart from the wet smacking and slurping of the oesophagus. First, it is somewhat subdued, but then the periodic thumping grows louder and louder, to the point that you can feel the squishy walls around vibrating with every mighty thud. Since the muscular walls are also squeezing right against your face, the vibrations are carried over onto your tiny body. It is the young giantess’ heartbeat, and the way it totally dominates your world and your senses, even making your very own body shake a little with every powerful thump, is a grim reminder that you soon are to become part of her. In a way, it feels like you already are. The oppressively mighty heartbeat is soon joined by another noise, an intimidating inhaling and exhaling sound with which the enormous chest you are travelling through seems to gently lift up and down. Her breath. Steady and calm, unlike the pathetic panting with which you attempt to pump just enough oxygen into your own lungs to stay alive a little longer. You know that, to the outside world, you have already vanished forever, any tiny bulge in her throat that may have hinted at your existence has now disappeared behind her big boobs. A creepy feeling similar to that of being buried alive rises up inside of you, and you begin to cry, your salty tears blending with the spit and slime you are covered in as you begin to fully grasp the horror of your situation.

“Hu…” You begin, but are forced to violently exhale as the next peristaltic contraction nearly crushes your ribcage. As you open your mouth again to scream, a glob of hot saliva drops in, making you almost choke on the slightly fishy tasting slime. You cough and retch, managing to free your airways after a few moments. “Hu-Hul… Help! Help me!”

You don’t really know what the point of your cries for help is, as they are so muffled by the fleshy, undulating walls around you that even you can barely hear them. Letting out another helpless sob as the most recent peristaltic movement pushes you down again, you begin to realise that the mighty heartbeat and sound of the girl’s breathing is subsiding a little. Now, you start to hear an even more frightening sound, an ominous gurgling and bubbling below. It is obvious that this is the sound of the giantess’ stomach, which appears to be in full digestion mode. You wonder how long you are going to last down there. Yet another contraction pushes you down even further, and you notice how the pulsating tube begins to slope to the side. Spreading out your arms and legs, you hope to slow yourself down somehow, but since it is pitch black all around you, you can’t tell if it has any kind of effect. Then your feet bump into a tight ring of muscles, apparently prompting it to open. You hear a disgusting, moist slurping sound, then you begin to retch uncontrollably again as the opening allows some of the air below to rise up into the oesophagus. The stench is so intense that it physically hurts, and you feel like you are going to pass out again, a revolting mixture of decomposing seafood, vomit and concentrated acid. It is only now that you realise the burning pain is coming from acidic vapours entering your respiratory canals, and you start to instinctively hold your breath. All you know is that you would rather just die right now instead of dropping into the digestive inferno below. Never ever in your life would you have thought that a simple word such as ‘stomach’ would fill you with such a profound sense of existential horror.

Ultimately, your struggle proves to be in vain. While you do somehow manage to slow down your descent by a little bit, the oesophagus is just too wet and slimy to get a hold on anything. Then, your extremities are suddenly pressed against your body by another pitiless peristaltic movement, accompanied by a harsh cracking sound and a sharp pain shooting through your body. You can’t tell if your arms and legs have been broken or just cracked, but it’s enough to paralyse you, and as the tube expands again, gravity takes care of the rest. The cardia sucks you in with a greedy smack, and the next thing you know is that you are falling down into a bottomless, hot pit. Your body twitches and convulses as you are forced to gasp for air, inhaling the acidic fog around you. The smell of seafood and digestive juices is so overpowering that you feel like your head is going to burst, then you suddenly land on a wet, slimy surface that reeks of salmon. It appears that it has lost most of its structural integrity by now, not just from being chewed up, but also from prolonged exposure to the digestive goop it is floating in, and you realise that you must move carefully in order to not sink into it. You continue to gag and retch, fearing that the cramps in your upper body will make you suffocate. But after a while, your body apparently gets used to the stench and manages to breathe more normally.

As your brain realises that you aren’t going to asphyxiate right on the spot, your aching muscles also begin to relax just a little. Only now do you feel just how badly they hurt. They had completely cramped up throughout the process of being swallowed, and only now are finally provided with a bit of relief. Letting out a laboured groan, you turn onto your side, feeling how the semi-digested piece of salmon you are lying on is slowly sinking into the bubbling chyme. You crawl forward, the dissolving fish simply falling apart wherever you touch it and covering you in a foetid, viscous slime that gives off the perhaps worst stench you have ever smelled in your life. But before you can decide where exactly you want to go, you suddenly hear a strange, thunderous noise that is so loud that you can feel the whole stomach vibrate from it. Only after a few more moments you realise that it is a female voice, and although it is incredibly loud, it is so muffled that you can’t make out a single word. It doesn’t really matter however, since you still clearly recognise it as the voice of the girl who has swallowed you, and from the general sounds and intonations, you can tell that she is still speaking her native German. You realise that you don’t even know her name.

Only moments later, you hear a wet smacking noise high above you, then a torrent of ice-cold liquid pours into the stomach like a waterfall. You scream as the icy water splashes over your body and sweeps you away, once more desperately trying to hold onto something. But even though the liquid is painfully chilly, you can’t help but feel a little bit of relief, as the gulp has also brought a whiff of fresh air into the stomach, and it also serves to cool the slight, but persistent burning sensation on your skin. However, this relief too is short-lived, as the water is quickly soaked up by the pulp of masticated, digesting seafood around you. Just a few seconds later, you find yourself crawling through a thick sludge again. You don’t know what this particular swamp consists of, but it too gives off a terrible stench of digesting seafood, and it is so unstable that you could sink into it completely at any moment. All around you, you can hear the thunderous gurgling and squelching of the enormous stomach you are trapped inside, and further above, the muffled heartbeat and breathing of the giantess. She still seems to be talking to her boyfriend, but since you have no way of understanding what she is saying, the sound of her voice begins to merge with the other frighteningly loud and powerful sounds of her seemingly endless body. But what proves to be even more distressing are the agonised screams and cries of the other shrunken people in this fleshy, organic rendition of hell, some of them coming from very close to you. Some are frightened, some are angry, and others sound just plain crazy, but it’s not as if that were surprising, given the circumstances. Occasionally, you bump into one of the other people, but none seem to react to you, and some are either dead or dying. At least you hope they are, given that some appear to be in advanced stages of digestion, their flesh falling of their skeletons the moment you touch them.

Retching with fear and disgust, you finally manage to get hold of something much more solid, almost hard, and after a moment of wondering what it is, you come to the conclusion that it must be part of a prawn carapace. There obviously is no way to tell for sure, since the inside of the girl’s stomach is devoid of any light, but for you, it is good enough. Maybe it even is the same prawn you had been staring at from your cubicle a couple of moments ago, but no matter how much its sight may have repulsed you back then, now you will settle for anything that keeps you from sinking into the digesting chyme for just a bit longer. But just as you try to climb up, you suddenly notice something grab your ankle and let out a high-pitched scream. Terrified, you turn around, only to realise that one particularly hysterical shrunken person is trying to hold onto you. You don’t know what they are trying to achieve, but you know that if you don’t manage to free yourself quickly, they might drag you down into the bubbling goop along with them, as they are moving way to hectically to stay afloat.

“Let go!” You shout at the top of your lungs, only to hear the shrunken man scream at you in a foreign language you can’t identify, perhaps something Eastern European. “I don’t… Let go! No!” You continue to scream as the man begins to drag you down again. You realise that there’s no way of getting through to him and start to kick in the direction where his head must be. “Fuck you!” You yell, then your foot connects with his face, a sudden crunch indicating that you must have broken something, perhaps his nose. The other tiny’s grasp weakens and he goes limp, finally dropping into the gurgling chyme with an undignified splat.

You instantly feel shame and remorse, but you also know that the man didn’t really leave you with a choice. Just as you try to collect yourself and turn around to climb up the prawn carapace again, you hear the wet smacking noise of the cardia above once more, followed by the shrill shriek of a woman as she drops down into the giant girl’s stomach. Finally, she splashes into the thick soup somewhere to your left, and from what you can tell, she doesn’t make it back up to the surface. You feel the urge to cry, but your survival instincts seem to override your need to express your emotions, and instead, you turn around and continue to pull yourself up the prawn carapace, only occasionally letting out a whimpering sob. Once you reach the top and find yourself at least in relative distance to the bubbling and hissing swamp below, you allow yourself to rest up for a moment. You find yourself retching in between breaths, as the smell still makes you feel sick to your stomach. But it appears as if your olfactory senses are getting accustomed even to this stench. You close your eyes and roll onto your back, putting all your remaining energy into breathing in and out, and listen to the sounds around you.

While you can still hear the wailing and moaning of the other tinies inside the girl’s stomach, they are almost completely drowned out by the wet gurgling and squelching noises, some of them so loud and deep that they send tremors through the sloshing chyme. Only now that you are lying still and not fighting against sinking into the digesting morass, you realise that this massive organic cave is constantly moving, its muscular walls contracting and expanding in long, undulating movements. You can’t see it, but you know that they are continuously excreting more of the foul-smelling acid, which keeps dropping down around you like a slight rainfall. Some of the droplets inevitably fall onto your body, and while they don’t hurt immediately, you quickly feel an unpleasant heat and a burning itch spread from the spots where they made contact with your skin. You know that you are beginning to be digested alive. The burning sensation also permeates your airways, and you notice that they are slowly swelling up, making it even more difficult for you to breathe. It can’t be much longer now.

The giantess says something again, then you year a gulp from beyond the muffled heartbeat and breathing sounding above you. You realise that the girl must have swallowed something, and instinctively brace yourself. Only a few seconds later, you hear the greedy slurp of the cardia opening to release more food into the stomach, then a huge glob of slime splashes right onto you and your raft of semi-digested prawn. You find yourself covered in a weird goo that gives off more sickening seafood smell, with a strange hint of lemon you can’t really place. Noticing that you can’t breathe again, and that the ground below you is starting to sink down, you begin to struggle, frantically kicking and trying to free yourself from the rubbery, slimy glob. As you gasp for air, the strange substance is inevitably forced into your mouth and you start to choke, your stomach attempting to relieve itself once more as you realise that you are basically being force-fed an enormous oyster. Just as you are about to pass out for the second time, your eyes already rolling back into your skull, the slimy surface smothering you slips away, making you inhale hot, acidic stomach air all of a sudden. Your airways flare up again as you experience what can only be described as the worst heartburn imaginable, but somehow, the rank fog seems to contain enough oxygen for you to stay conscious.

“Fu…” You begin, gagging again as you accidentally swallow a slimy chunk of god-knows-what. To make things worse, it doesn’t stay down. You finally throw up.

After violently emptying your own stomach contents, you instinctively attempt to wipe your mouth, only to realise that what came out of you is identical to what you are lying in anyway. As you move the back of your hand over your lips, you realise to your horror that even this slight motion has caused a thin layer of skin to come off, sticking to your mouth. You spit the thin piece of yourself out and into the bubbling goop around you. Then you feel a sharp pain at the spot it came off as a wave of pulpy mush washes over it, your bare flesh coming into direct contact with stomach acid. It is as if you are literally melting into the bubbling sludge, and you are suddenly reminded that your raft is sinking down into the thick chyme. Another warm wave of vomit splashes over your legs, and you begin to pull yourself up again.

As you work yourself upwards a second time, you hear more and more shrieking and crying shrunken people drop into the stomach, only interrupted by the occasional lump of food. You realise that the girl is picking up the pace, obviously finishing up her meal and just wolfing down as much as she can until her stomach is completely full. The gluttonous massacre goes on for several more minutes, then a chunk of masticated fish comes crashing down right onto you again, pinning you against the hard prawn carapace as it pulls you down into the pond of digesting goop below. Despite the unbearable stench all around you, its particular smell and texture lead you to the conclusion that it is another piece of salmon. Like with the oyster before, the newly arrived seafood is forced into your mouth and throat as you try to breathe, and you find yourself coughing and gagging yet again, but no matter how much fish you spit out, there is always more to be pushed into your mouth and even your nose. After a few minutes, the lump of chewed salmon appears to settle a bit, allowing for you to carve out a little cave around your head with your hands. But despite the short relief this brings you, you’re aware that you are now buried. Moreover, you can still feel that you and the ever-softening prawn carapace are sinking down, and the fact that all the sounds around you have become extremely muffled leads you to the conclusion that you have sunken beneath the surface of the chyme. It is only a matter of time until the thick soup outside is going to force itself into your cave, or until you simply run out of oxygen. You feel panic rise up inside of you again, your breaths becoming shallow and quick. But you also know that you are only going to waste the little oxygen you have left, and so you focus on trying to conserve as much of it as possible.

***

“You don’t have to stuff yourself like that, you know. No one’s going to be mad at you if you don’t finish everything.” Konstantin says with a sceptical look at his girlfriend as she shoves another forkful of salmon into her mouth, swallowing it after only chewing two or three times.

“I know.” Lisa replies and immediately reaches into the box again, lifting out the last remaining shrunken person and tossing him into her mouth with half a prawn. “Bot id wud be soch a wafte.” She continues with a full mouth, making an ostentatiously sad face.

“You’ll give yourself heartburn again, sweetie.” Konstantin admonishes her and leans over to his girlfriend, giving her a kiss on the cheek as she begins to chew, only passingly taking note of the tiny man’s muffled screams coming from inside her mouth. Then they suddenly break off entirely as he is trapped between her molars and flattened with a silent crunch.

“Mh.” Lisa says and swallows, sending the masticated remains of the prawn and the shrunken person down into her stomach. “I guess you’re right. Just wanted to finish off the little ones.” She then furtively glances over at her boyfriend’s box, noticing that he has roughly a quarter of them left, and throws him a look of stern disapproval. “Konstantin!”

“It’s just food, Lisa.” Her boyfriend replies, rolling his eyes a little and then turning around as a waitress steps up to their table with an inquisitive look on her face. She is only a couple of years older than themselves, with a slightly Mediterranean or Middle Eastern look to her.

“Can I get you guys anything?” She asks, looking at their mostly empty plates.

“Nah, we’re finished, actually.” Konstantin explains, leaning back into his seat and quickly drinking the last gulp of his water. “It was very good indeed, thanks.”

“Glad to hear it.” The waitress says with a friendly smile and starts to pick up their plates. As she puts her hands around the box with the remaining shrunken people inside, Lisa gives her an inquisitive look with her clear, blue eyes.

“What do you do with leftover food? Do you just throw it out?” She asks, also drinking the remaining water in her glass and dabbing her lips with a serviette.

“The other food yes, but not the tinies.” The waitress explains in a matter-of-fact sort of way.

“So what do you do with them?” Konstantin asks her, more for the sake of conversation and small talk than being really interested in the answer.

The waitress gives him a conspiratorial look and smirks. “The staff gets them. I’m starving, by the way, so thanks.” She explains and gives them a playful wink before turning around.

“Oh, and could we pay then?” Konstantin adds, producing his wallet from his back pocket.

“Sure! I’ll be back in a sec!” The waitress replies with a smile and walks off, taking the plates and boxes with her into the kitchen behind the counter.

“See? You could even have left some for her.” Konstantin then says to Lisa.

“No.” His girlfriend shakes her head in a playfully childish way, leaning back and giving her belly a content pat. “My little ones go in my tummy.” She then adds with a pout.

“Fair enough.” Her boyfriend replies with a shrug. “Just don’t start complaining again when they give you indigestion.” He adds, teasingly poking the soft fat tissue around her navel.

“Hey!” Lisa complains, pushing his hand away again. “Keep your hands to yourself, mister.”

“Fine.” Konstantin says and pulls back his hand. “At least until we get back home.” He then adds with a grin, feeling a sudden wave of lust as he looks at his girlfriend’s perfect body.

“Maybe.” Lisa replies, closing her eyes and lifting her chin in mock arrogance. “I wa…” She begins, then suddenly lifts her hand, successfully suppressing another inner belch. “I want to go for an after-dinner walk first, though. Need to digest a bit.”

***

In the depths of the German girl’s digestive system, your situation continues to deteriorate by the minute. The downward movement of the prawn you are lying on has finally stopped, and you can feel the pressure of the food above press down onto your body, so you assume that you are somewhere at the bottom of her stomach by now. All you can hear is muffled gurgles and squelches before the faint backdrop of the giantess’ breathing and heartbeat. Otherwise, it is completely silent. No screaming and crying from the other shrunken people anymore, just the sounds of the gigantic body that is digesting you. Your own breathing has become very subdued by now, scarcely more than a croaky wheeze, and your mind is barely functioning anymore. All you feel is exhaustion and fear. You don’t want to die, but you know that these are the last minutes of your life. In a few hours, your dead and broken body will be sucked into the girl’s intestines, and whatever hasn’t been dissolved by then will be further broken down and absorbed into her bloodstream. You see moments of your life flash by you, thinking of your friends and family. All that is over now. All you have worked for, all your struggles in life, your hopes and dreams – they mean nothing now. Tomorrow, you will be nothing more than a bit of fat on the giantess’ flawless body, and perhaps some shit floating through the sewers. But most of you will have been absorbed into a random German girl.

You hear the voice of the person who has eaten you again, barely perceiving it as the voice of another human being at all. It simply is too mighty, to distorted, and it is speaking in a language you don’t understand. You feel a slight quake and a contraction of the stomach walls somewhere beyond the layers of semi-digested seafood you are trapped in, fearing that these movements could collapse the small cave around your head. Then you feel a lurch upwards, and after a short pause, you notice a rocking sensation to the left and right as well as slightly up and down, accompanied by ominous loud thuds from below that make the whole stomach tremble. After a couple of minutes, you deduce that the giant girl is walking somewhere, and that the thunderous booms are nothing but her footsteps. It would appear that she has finished her meal, but what worries you most is that the periodic quakes reverberating through her stomach are destabilising the pile of food you are entombed in. You begin to panic again, and just as you take another deep breath of the fishy air that has been keeping you alive throughout your ordeal, you suddenly hear a wet splat as one of the walls around you finally breaks. A wave of hot, particularly acidic liquid chyme shoots into your makeshift cave, filling it up completely. The acid burns in your eyes, and even though you desperately hold your breath, the vile soup begins to flow into your nostrils and ears. All you can smell is acid, seafood and vomit, and your dying body begins to twitch and spasm as your brain finally runs out of oxygen. Your resistance weakens and you open your mouth to gasp for air, but all you inhale is more of the thick slurry. You try to scream, but even that is impossible now.

Suddenly, you feel yet another quake, accompanied by a thunderous rumbling sound which is so loud that it shakes you down to your bones. The chyme around you is brutally compressed, forcing it so deep into your various orifices that your oesophagus, your airways and your auditory canals rupture. Your brain begins to shut down, overwhelmed by excruciating pain and lack of oxygen. The last thought to ever cross your dying mind is the realisation that the girl who has eaten you has burped one more time. It’s what snuffs you out for good and marks the end of your life inside the murky, hot darkness of her digestive system.

***

After paying for the food and leaving the waitress a generous tip, Lisa and Konstantin get up and leave the restaurant, stepping into the fresh evening air. While her boyfriend stops near the entrance to check a new message on his smartphone, the blonde girl walks on a couple of metres, leaning herself against the fence of the oceanside promenade near some steps leading down to the beach itself. She watches the sailboats and yachts rocking up and down in their moorings at the marina, their windows and polished hulls reflecting the warm evening sunlight, and takes a deep breath of the fresh, slightly salty ocean air. She feels utterly relaxed and full up, even a bit too full, her stomach being just a little bit bloated from all the delicious food she ate. As she continues to look out onto the open sea, she can feel her boyfriend step up beside her, gently putting his arm around her hips. Lisa turns around to him, looking into his warm, deep brown eyes, and gives him a passionate kiss. Konstantin, in turn, pulls her a bit closer to himself, also wrapping his other arm around her and moving his hand down to her firm, round butt, gently stroking it through her tight-fitting jeans. As they embrace each other, he feels her warm, soft body and her large breasts press against his chest, and gives her a loving kiss on the forehead. Then he grabs her hand and walks down the stairs to the beach with her, where she stops for a moment and bends over to unlace her shoes.

Once she slips out of her sneakers, she picks them up with her left hand and gets up again, only to feel the slight pressure in her stomach suddenly rise up through her oesophagus. Lisa raises her right hand to her mouth, but this time isn’t really able to suppress the surge of air in time, and lets out a content, wet burp. Since no one else is around, she doesn’t mind too much this time, and shrugs as her boyfriend gives her a playfully reproachful look. It isn’t the first time she has belched in front of him, and she knows that he really doesn’t care. In fact, she is quite glad, since the bloated feeling inside her stomach has more or less disappeared now, leaving her feeling simply full and satisfied. Since it has also ended the last few tickling sensations in her stomach, it does cross her mind that she has given the shrunken people inside her belly the coup de grâce, but she doesn’t really think of it as killing them by robbing them of the last thing they had in their lives, the air they were breathing. Nor does she think about the tinies as individuals she is now beginning to absorb into herself, like you specifically. She has simply concluded her meal, moving on to other, more important things.

“I told you, you’re gonna get indigestion.” Konstantin says with a shake of his head and puts his arm around Lisa’s hips again, poking her soft belly once more.

“Oh, shush.” Lisa replies and dismisses his remark with a wave of her hand. “I just had a bit of air in my stomach. It was making my tummy hurt.”

“Well, yes, because you just had to gobble up all those shrunken people, no matter what.”

“Ugh, maybe.” Lisa says and leans her head against her boyfriend’s shoulder as they continue to stroll down the beach. “But they’re quiet now, I think that finished them off.”

“If that didn’t, nothing will.” Konstantin laughs.

“Stop it.” Lisa moans, feeling challenged in her femininity. “You make me sound gross.”

“Wait, I do?” The boy asks incredulously, promptly earning himself a gentle slap against the chest, courtesy of his indignant girlfriend.

“Shut up.” Lisa says, pouting and looking onto the ocean again. “Who was that, by the way?”

“Huh?”

“The message you got.”

“Oh, that was just Florian.” Konstantin says. “I think the family vacation is boring him a bit, he says it’s raining all day and his mum still wants to go hiking all the time. And I guess he misses Alessia, but he won’t admit it, naturally.”

“Why couldn’t she come along with them on holiday again?” Lisa asks, switching to her boyfriend’s other side so that her feet would occasionally be touched by the waves breaking on the beach. “Something about your sports club again, wasn’t it?”

“There’s a swimming competition for the girls this weekend.” Konstantin explains. “I mean, I don’t think she actually has to participate, but you know how competitive she is.”

“What about the boys? Are you not going?” Lisa asks with an exaggeratedly strict expression.

“Different schedules.” Her boyfriend shrugs. “Don’t know when ours is going to be.”

“If you say so.” Lisa replies, pretending that she doesn’t believe him.

Then she leans herself against her boyfriend’s shoulder again, enjoying the soft ocean breeze on her skin, the scent of salt water in her nose and the feeling of wet sand beneath her naked feet. And of all the tasty food sloshing around in her stomach with every step she takes.

After a long walk along the beach, they finally step onto the promenade again, but since they aren’t far from Konstantin’s family’s holiday home, and because her feet are covered in wet sand, Lisa doesn’t bother putting on her shoes again. Thankfully, the pavement helps to brush off most of the sand before they even reach the house, and once they step inside, her feet are almost completely clean again anyway. Nevertheless, the girl briefly steps into the bathroom to wash off the remaining sand in the shower, then she goes upstairs to her boyfriend’s room, where Konstantin is just getting changed into some pyjamas for the evening. Lisa too takes off her clothes, noticing with a sly grin that her boyfriend is watching her with another flicker of lust in his eyes. Once she is wearing nothing but her tight-fitting lingerie, she bends over one of the drawers to look for some pyjamas, flaunting her well-shaped butt in his direction. It has the desired effect. She feels her boyfriend’s hand grab one of her soft ass cheeks, gently massaging it as he puts his other hand around her waist. As Lisa notices slight hesitation in Konstantin’s movements, she turns around to him, pressing her breasts against his chest and leading his other hand down to her butt as well, to show him that she is indeed in the mood.

Her boyfriend pants and begins to rub his body against hers, giving her left butt cheek a hefty squeeze and then moving his hands up to open her bra. As he finally manages to loosen the clasp at the back, her large breasts pop out even further, throwing off the restricting piece of clothing and happily jiggling as Lisa begins to walk a few steps backwards, dropping onto the bed with a broad grin. Konstantin climbs onto the bed and over her, lowering his face down to hers and giving her a passionate tongue kiss. As they exchange kisses and feel each other up, Konstantin relishes the feeling of her soft, almost velvety and warm skin against his and breathes in the gentle, feminine scent of her perfume. He also notices a hint of fresh seafood in her breath as they kiss again and again, but it is almost imperceptible and far from unpleasant. Moving down, he begins to kiss her neck and then her big, soft breasts, grinning as Lisa lets out a soft moan and her nipples begin to harden. Then he moves down further, kissing her soft belly, and taking almost no note whatsoever of the faint rumbling and squelching noises from the area just beneath her left breast. To him, it’s just another reminder that his girlfriend had a large dinner, not the sound of dozens of human beings being ripped apart by her digestive system to break them down into nutrients for the body he is caressing.

Lisa too doesn’t pay much attention to the slight gurgles emanating from her stomach and is far more enjoying the sensation of her boyfriend’s warm lips kissing her belly over and over. She lets out another content moan and grabs Konstantin’s head, giving him a look of pure lust and love as she begins to feel a warm tingle between her legs. Her boyfriend, himself having a visible bulge in his underpants, understands and removes them, reaching for a condom from the nightstand as Lisa slips out of her thong. Then her boyfriend climbs on top of her again, giving her more passionate kisses and rubbing his athletic body against hers as he enters her. She lets out a pleasured gasp and audibly moans as he begins to move around inside of her – since his family hasn’t returned from their dinner yet, she also doesn’t need to care too much about keeping the volume down, freely giving in to the warm feeling of ecstatic lust rising up inside of her. As their movements become more and more intense, she once again feels the content of her stomach slosh around inside of her, but not once do her thoughts wander to the people being torn to pieces inside of her as she explodes into an intense orgasm.

Finally, once Konstantin has come as well and rolls onto his back beside her, panting heavily, she turns onto her side and simply looks at her boyfriend for a few moments, feeling nothing but tender affection for him. Lisa wipes some of the sweat off his forehead as he calms down again, leaning over to kiss him. He returns the kiss, rolling over to embrace his girlfriend and simply cuddling her for a couple of moments. After a while of them both just snuggling, he moves his head down her body again, kissing her soft breasts as they gently move up and down. Then Konstantin rests his head on her belly, closing his eyes and listening to Lisa’s regular heartbeat, her calm, relaxed breathing and the subdued bubbling and squelching noises emanating from her stomach. They are oddly relaxing, and so he finds himself closing his eyes and simply listening to the sounds of her healthy body as they both slowly fall asleep.

***

One of the supposedly soothing bubbling noises Konstantin hears before drifting off to sleep is in fact the sound of your broken, digested body being sucked into Lisa’s duodenum along with a large glob of chyme that contains the remains of four other shrunken people. Over the course of the last two to three hours, the prolonged exposure to stomach acid and the peristaltic movements have turned your remains into a vaguely humanoid shape within the swamp of digesting seafood. Now, the overwhelming force of being squeezed through the pylorus and into the giant girl’s small intestine breaks it up completely, and by the time all of you has left the stomach, you are nothing more than disembodied bones, pieces of dissolving flesh and a soup of various nutrients floating through a dark, organic tunnel.

Due to the high acidity of the chyme that contains what is left of your body, it is mixed with bile from the giantess’ gall bladder, raising the pH of the thick slop again. By now, the acid has done its job, and the digestive system now begins to work on absorbing as much as it can from your former body into that of the girl who has eaten you. It is a process that goes on for several more hours. As they slowly travel deeper and deeper through the winding labyrinth of the young German’s digestive system, your remains are stripped down even further: The few remaining pieces of flesh dissolve completely, turning into a mixture of carbohydrates, fats, minerals, proteins, and vitamins that are greedily sucked up by the villi lining the walls of the small intestine. There is no light here, and any sentient life that would have been able to see this place has been killed off hours ago, but the underwater tunnel your sad remains are floating through is vaguely reminiscent of a coral reef, the alien-looking villi gently billowing in the dense soup as they extract valuable nutrients for the gigantic body they serve.

Even your tiny bones, weakened by their prolonged contact with the acid inside the stomach, begin to shrivel and break as they float through the undulating tube, accompanied by powerful, nightmarish groaning and gurgling noises that you luckily can’t hear anymore. Many of your bones are eventually ground down into nothing more than calcium-rich clouds of white powder, which too are effortlessly slurped up by the finger-like projections all around. Only very few of them make it past the jejunum and into the ileum, the final stretch of the small intestine. There, almost all that remains of you is siphoned out of the nutrient-rich sludge and sent into the giant girl’s bloodstream, which distributes you throughout her enormous, healthy body. Some of you is instantly burned off to fuel the gigantic young organism, but since the giantess is asleep, large amounts of your former body are eventually deposited in the soft fat tissue on her shapely butt, her breasts and her belly. But even though her curves now contain not just you, but the bodies of dozens of other people, it does not lead to any visible change in her appearance. Even all of you combined are too insignificant, not even amounting to a full meal’s worth of calories. And you are not even the first, either. You are just the most recent addition to fat deposits that contain the remains of hundreds, if not thousands like you.

Whatever is left of you is eventually squeezed through your eater’s ileocecal valve during the early morning hours, just as she turns back onto her side and subconsciously smacks her lips. In the large intestine, your bleached bones and other parts of your tiny body that are of no use to the giantess are gradually encased in an increasingly dense mush of digestive waste, which is now being drained of the remaining liquids. Nothing around you even vaguely resembles the meal it was a part of the evening before, the prawns, oysters, fish and human beings have disappeared and what remains now is nothing but a soft log of shit slipping through the giantess’ large intestine. As it passes the last bend of its journey, it slides down the final stretch with ease, falling onto some of the other end products of the digestive process that have already accumulated in the girl’s rectum. Only moments later, the tiny white specks that once were various bones of yours are buried in another pile of brown mush dropping down from above with a wet splat, to be forever entombed in the girl’s next bowel movement.

***

Hearing the familiar sound of her smartphone’s cheerful wake-up melody, Lisa turns on her back again and lets out a tired grunt, smacking her lips. Then she turns towards her boyfriend, reaching out to pull him towards herself, only to find that her hands are reaching into thin air. She sighs again and then reluctantly opens her eyes, seeing that Konstantin isn’t in bed with her and that he apparently has gotten up already, leaving her in the room alone. Turning onto her back again and rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Lisa then clumsily reaches for the phone on her nightstand, almost knocking over a half-full glass of water beside her lamp. Then she picks up her pink-white-encased phone and turns off the alarm. Out of habit, she proceeds to open her social networks immediately, even though she keeps telling herself to waste less of her time scrolling through vapid self-promotion, mildly amusing cat videos and self-righteous political rants. After a couple of moments, she comes across a post by her boyfriend’s sports club announcing the results of yesterday’s swimming competition. Lisa smiles to herself and gives the post a thumbs-up as she sees that Alessia is the winner of her age group, looking at the photo of the German-Italian girl confidently smiling at the camera and holding up a medal.

Sheesh, does she ever not look perfect? She asks herself with a trace of jealousy, ignoring the fact that her own looks would also be considered far above average.

Lisa puts her smartphone away and sits up, pushing her legs over the edge of the mattress and stretching her arms as she lets out a deep, relaxed yawn. Then she rises to her feet, her naked breasts and butt cheeks jiggling slightly from the sudden movement. Still a bit tired, she rubs her eyes again and shuffles over to the cupboards, putting on some underwear and pyjamas before grabbing her phone and opening the door to the upper hallway. As she walks down the stairs, her naked feet touching the cool, smooth wood, she hears voices from the kitchen, and notices the sweet smell of pancakes in the air, prompting her empty stomach to let out a growl. Lisa subconsciously places her left hand on her belly and grins to herself, then she goes down the remaining stairs and into the spacious kitchen, where she sees Konstantin sitting at the table and his sister Johanna standing behind the counter.

“Good morning.” The brunette young woman says, giving Lisa a smile and flipping one of the pancakes in the pan on the stove before her. “Did you sleep well?”

“Good morning. Yes, very well.” Lisa replies and walks over to the coffee machine, past the large panorama window with a spectacular sight of the open blue sea. “How about you?”

“Well enough.” Johanna says in a somewhat understated fashion typical for her. “Didn’t get an awful lot of sleep though, we came back quite late.”

“When did you come back exactly?” Konstantin grunts, sipping his coffee. From the grumpy expression on his face, Lisa concludes that he can’t have gotten up much earlier than her.

“Oh, that must have been around 2 AM, I think.” Johanna shrugs and flips the pancake again. “Would you also like some pancakes for breakfast, Lisa?”

“Yes, please.” The blonde girl replies. “Can we help you somehow?” She then adds with emphasis on the second word, darting her boyfriend a slightly irritated and embarrassed look.

“Oh no, it was my idea anyway and I’m almost done here.” Johanna declines.

“Okay.” Lisa says and takes a sip of coffee, placing her cup on the table and gently flicking her index finger against her boyfriend’s head.

“Hey!” He protests, looking up from his own cup. “What was that for?”

“You know exactly what that was for.” Lisa replies and gives him a patronising kiss on the forehead before drinking another gulp of coffee. “Where are your parents, by the way?” She then asks, looking from Konstantin to Johanna and back again.

“They’re out for a morning walk.” The brunette explains. “Should be back soon enough.”

“I see.” Lisa says, gently blowing into the cup. The coffee is still a little too hot for her taste. “How was your evening, then? Did you have a good time?”

“It was, uh… we had very long conversations.” Johanna answers, clearly trying to be diplomatic. “You wouldn’t have liked it; mum’s friends can be a bit… verbose at times.”

“See, what did I tell you?” Konstantin whispers to Lisa, who is visibly struggling not to laugh.

“Huh? What?” Johanna asks with a smile, as if suspecting something.

“I might have mentioned something similar to Lisa.” Her brother explains.

“I see. Well, I think you did the right thing not to come along. What did you do anyway?”

“Oh, not much. Just went to Vortex, they had a great seafood special.” Lisa explains.

“Ugh, I really should have gone along with you guys.” Johanna says, finally dropping all the pretence. “I saw that on the menu there before. You say it was good?”

“Very.” Lisa confirms, patting her belly. Talking about her previous evening’s meal also reminds her of the slight pressure in her lower abdomen she has been feeling ever since getting up, and she puts the cup of coffee down again. “Excuse me, I’ll be back in a minute.”

Then she goes upstairs to the small bathroom beside her and Konstantin’s room, locking the door behind her and pulling down her airy pyjama trousers as well as her tight-fitting underpants. She plops herself down on the toilet seat and relaxes her sphincter, a fart escaping from between her ass cheeks as she unlocks the phone and looks at her messages. One of them is from her friend Jana, consisting of a short text announcing that she got the summer internship she applied for, and different party-emoji. Lisa smiles benevolently and gives Jana her heartfelt congratulations. Just as she sends the message off to her friend, the first semi-solid bowel movement of the day slips out of Lisa’s rectum and into the porcelain bowl below, accompanied by a quiet splat as it drops into the water. It contains some of your remains, but none of them are visible, as they are deeply embedded in the brown log.

Only a few moments later, more of what was once you and dozens of other people you never knew splashes down into the toilet, accompanied by a loud, wet fart. The giant girl lets out a slight groan and then pushes out another log, finally expelling all that is left of you from her body. As if the humiliation of being reduced to nothing else than a pile of shit wasn’t enough, the giantess then also empties her bladder on top of you, soaking the lumps of brown excrement with hot, yellow urine. Then she gets up and carefully wipes herself before dropping the used toilet paper onto your smelly grave, finally pressing the flush button and sending it off to the sewers without ever thinking about you or the others again.

Lisa then pulls up her underpants and her pyjama trousers again, having to widen them just a little bit to get them past the curves of her ideally proportioned ass. While your indigestible remains float away into the sewage system somewhere beneath her naked feet, all of you that has been absorbed into her young, feminine body slightly bobs up and down with her breasts and her butt cheeks as she walks over to the sink to wash her hands. Noticing that she didn’t brush her teeth last night after having sex with her boyfriend, she quickly makes up for that. As she flosses afterwards, she also removes a small piece of the last tiny she chewed up and spits it into the sink, not knowing what it is and not caring about it either. Once she is done, her empty stomach lets out another hungry groan, loudly demanding to be filled again. Lisa smiles and almost appeasingly strokes her belly, thinking of the delicious-looking pancakes Johanna was making, and then goes downstairs to join her boyfriend and his sister again.

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