It wasn’t, in all honesty, the kind of forceful and aggressive spitting that she would sometimes do on the football field in her childhood, but a portion of saliva, prepared in advance, did undoubtedly leave her mouth. Two or three drops, foamy and slightly stringy, filled and completely consumed a rather large street crossing, sparing not the roofs and facades of nearby tenements and flooding adjacent streets like a monsoon river. As it came tumbling down onto the heads of the townspeople, it crushed some of them immediately; some were, however, left to meet their end by drowning. The ensuing panic was even more hectic than before.
“Oh my God, did you just spit on all these people?” Matylda asked, left in disbelief.
“Sure did!” laughed Natalia.
“I didn’t know you could do that. You’re so cruel!”
“Now’s your turn,” she replied, signaling Matylda with her head.
“Mine? Alright.”
Leaning over the city and holding back her long, wheat-colored hair, Matylda inspected this rather representative section of Poznań and went through the available options. The streets themselves had already been mostly deserted, but the tiny inhabitants, reluctant to seek refuge inside the buildings after seeing how prone to collapse they are, gathered outside, near walls, trees, vehicles, and bus or tram stations. What made the task of finding shelter difficult were the powerful gusts of wind that Matylda inadvertently brought about every time she breathed out through her nose.
The idea of coating the central administrative building of her own university with a layer of saliva seemed to her particularly amusing, and so, even though there was barely a speck around her chosen spot when it came to people, she decided to go with it. Soon, the entire Collegium Minus along with everything in its direct vicinity came under the assault of an absurd amount of spit, which crushed its roofs and started spilling inside the offices of the institution’s officials, giving those who decided to wait out those uncertain times within their safety quite the surprise. Matylda took care of her annoyingly stringy saliva by anchoring it onto her finger and wiping it off the nearby park - the one she had seen the stranger run into before Natalia took out the cassette. A bit embarrassed, but nevertheless satisfied, she took a good look at the sacred institution she ravaged with such brutality, wishing that there was some way to see for herself the despair in the face of the tiny rector, or at least to confirm that he was there to experience the whole thing. After all, it had hitherto been unimaginable for him to treat the university’s students as his equals, and a scenario in which he would be spat on by a Gen Z girl and treated like nothing more than a piece of chewing gum stuck to the pavement - if such a scenario even found its way into his mind - had simply seemed like a bizarre nightmare and certainly not like his unavoidable fate.
Absorbed by images of the reaction of her university’s administrators to this extraordinary event that her mind birthed, made no less vivid by the dubiosity of their presence, Matylda did not immediately notice her friend’s hand, outstretched towards the city. She went for the Okrąglak high-rise, which stood at a height of no more than a centimeter. Grabbing it between her fingers, she began to curl them around it and fondle with it as if it was a loosened screw. It wasn’t long before it crumbled into tiny pieces, unable to handle such a treatment. Natalia wiped her fingers against one another, getting rid of most of the remains stuck to them, and spoke of her sensations:
“Touching it feels really good! Too bad it’s so fragile… Hey, why don’t you try grabbing Collegium Altum,” she challenged Matylda. “Maybe you’ll manage to pick it up.”
The golden-haired student located the red skyscraper, considered by those who count the height of the spire as the tallest building in Poznań, and grabbed it the same way Natalia grabbed Okrąglak, making sure not to get pricked by it. While the iconic metal facade bent and came off, giving way without any fight whatsoever, the frame of the building itself turned out strong enough to be worthy of her fingers’ continued attention. She twisted it a bit, tried prying it off gently, bent it one way, then the other, and kept going until something snapped and came undone and she was left with a small, beaten up brick in hand, thinner than the original and suffering from the lack of several lower floors.
“Nicely done! It was quite tricky, wasn’t it? I don’t always get it right myself. All that is left now is to print out a stand and put it on your desk-- well, not really, I’m just joking. You’re not allowed to take anything that was shrunken out of the lab,” Natalia said, adding afterwards: “Yet.”
“This Collegium Altum of mine doesn’t look so good… but imagine having a section of Poznań filled with epoxy resin. Wouldn’t that look amazing,” Matylda got lost for a moment in a daydream.
“That’s a cool business idea. Mantelpiece models, jewelry, and keychains.”
“See? I’m already thinking like a member of your team.”
“You sure are! It would be great to have you there. Sadly, it’s not just up to me.”
The skyscraper held by Matylda was put to rest on its side somewhere in a nearby park, causing the waters of the shallow pond it impacted to splash and spill all over the area. She then looked towards the western end of the city cutout.
“This might sound funny, but have you ever held Bałtyk in your hand?” she asked her friend, Bałtyk being the name of both a high-rise and the Baltic Sea.
“I would be surprised if I haven’t.”
“It seems to me that it would be rather easy to pick up in one piece. Maybe you could even roll it around, like a die, if that’s okay with you.” Before Natalia had a chance to reply, she added: “Look, couldn't we just use the scalpel for this?”
“Sure, here you go.” Matylda’s mentor came to the realization that her younger colleague, without a doubt, got into the swing of it; “it” being the shake-up worthy of Le Corbusier that was currently underway in the miniature Poznań. “The blade will probably get dull, but whatever, it’s meant to be single-use.”
Now scalpel-equipped, Matylda commenced the extraction surgery of Bałtyk. While neighboring structures offered no resistance, the building’s foundations required a bit of patience and careful filing. It was all worth it in the end, though; apart from the very bottom and a few broken windows, the resulting object came out looking remarkably intact and resembling a Monopoly player token.
“Now that’s something you could put on your desk,” she concluded while having a very close look at the building she was holding between her fingertips. It seemed to her for a brief moment that there was someone inside, but she was unable to confirm her suspicions. Perhaps they fell out and landed in the city below after she rotated the structure around; or perhaps they never existed at all.
“I’ve just realized that lasers would do wonders here,” Natalia shared her observations, the tone of her voice reminiscent of a seasoned researcher. “Well, it’s not like we’ll be selling custom keychains during the midsummer fair any time soon, but the ability to cut out specific parts of the tiny city may come in handy in the near future."
Matylda nodded and commenced carrying out her original plan. In a stark contrast to the professionalism of her friend’s words, she cupped her hands with Bałtyk inside and shook it around. Having imbued it with momentum nigh surreal from the point of view of the shrunken townsfolk, she launched it onto the railway tracks located in a largely open space devoid of any high-rises. To her satisfaction and thanks to its initial speed, the building did roll over once or twice. It stopped only after striking the Uniwersytecki Bridge and obliterating it in the process.
The young women’s playfulness must have filled the microscopic people with nothing less than ineffable dread. After all, notwithstanding those who had already said their prayers and were fully prepared to meet their maker, everyone had fled the streets and went into hiding, making it impossible to spot a single living soul, even under a magnifying glass.
Since playing with such a lifeless city wasn’t as much fun, Natalia took it upon herself to swap the cassette for a new one. Prior to it getting closed up and put aside, Matylda left her final, farewell marks, swiping her finger across a couple of city blocks and enjoying the sensation of feeling them crumble at the slightest touch of her hand. Finally, she couldn’t resist knocking over the five high-rises that made up the Alfa complex and were neatly lined up in a row, but -- much to her disappointment -- she was unable to start the domino effect she was looking for and had to topple them individually.
“It’s been a while since the last time I had so much time,” she said, waiting for Natalia to get the next section of Poznań ready. “You know what this reminds me of? SimCity. In particular the part where you can initiate disasters -- a meteor shower, for example. Have you ever played that game?”
“Sure did! I know exactly what you mean. I got this feeling when I first looked inside one of these cassettes, too.” She cut through another set of seals and examined the contents. “Hey, this one has the Old Town!”
Along with the sudden appearance of Natalia's face in the place hitherto taken by the artificial sky, the tiny Poznanites imprisoned within a square kilometer of the pocket-sized historic core of the city -- to nobody's surprise -- began making their way through the narrow alleys and gathering en masse near the Town Hall in order to find out if this perplexing occurrence augurs a desperately awaited rescue.
Encouraged by the presence of her younger friend, whom Natalia -- knowingly or not -- took great pleasure in surprising, the senior laboratorian greeted them in a quite unconventionally direct way. Having licked her pinkie, she stuck it relatively gently and carefully right in the middle of the amassed crowd, inadvertently demolishing some of the nearby buildings in the process. She then raised it up to her face and took a very close look at her catch, flicking away any particularly big piece of debris while making sure not to disturb the microscopic people that managed to survive the trip without major injuries and became adhered to her fingertip. She showed her finger to an equally scandalized and impressed Matylda, and slowly swiped it across her tongue, transferring the captured persons, all confused and powerless, right into her mouth, which seemed from their point of view unimaginably large and expansive.
“Will you be fine?” Matylda asked, worried about her friend rather than the tiny people whose destiny was tied to a waste disposal box anyway.
Natalia instinctively tried to reply, but doing so with a tongue already occupied by a different task turned out to be difficult. Her own clumsiness amused her; covering her wide smile with one hand, she raised the index finger of her other one to indicate that she needed a moment. She took her microscopic visitors on a tour of her mouth, delighting in the torments her body inflicted upon them and letting up only after the nigh imperceptible sensation of being touched by the dozens if not hundreds of people trying not to drown in the continuously inflowing saliva got prosaic enough for her to decide to gather them all in a single spot and swallow them in one confident gulp, as if she was swallowing a pill.
"How was it?" Matylda asked, smirking. "Any words of recommendation?”
“To answer your previous question first: nope, I’ll be fine -- as long as I don’t eat the buildings by the handful, that is. The only thing I might want to watch out for is accidentally inhaling the tiny crumbs of debris. Some of them are as sharp as moondust and can damage your lungs,” Natalia explained in a single breath. “When it comes to my snack, well, you won’t be surprised if I tell you it’s not exactly the flavor that I’m after. They are way too small for me to taste anything. That doesn’t change the fact that it feels incredible to know that there’s literally a crowd of people inside your mouth. The way they try to fight their way out and free themselves; the way you become their whole world; finally, the way they disappear without you knowing what exactly happened to them… It’s hard not to feel like you’re the most important woman in the world.”
Matylda listened closely to her friend's personal insights -- just like the thousands of terrified people down below, who had just learned, thanks to these descriptions, drastic from their point of view, about the very real possibility of ending up eaten alive -- and unexpectedly got so aroused that she… sneezed. Despite its peculiarity, such a reaction was but by no means unexpected on Matylda’s part as that was exactly what tended to happen whenever lewd, obscene thoughts popped up in her mind. She covered her mouth in time, but couldn’t avoid spraying the tiny inhabitants with a sizable mist, which escaped through her nose, as well as startling everybody with a deafening acoustic wave.
"Bless you!"
"Thanks. Sorry,” she got a bit embarrassed. “It must have gotten to me. Your words, I mean.”
“Why don’t you give it a go yourself?” Natalia suggested.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right to give them such a death.”
“At least try it out! We’re getting rid of them today anyway,” she attempted to persuade Matylda.
When the only thing stopping you from doing what you feel like doing is a weak conviction of it being inappropriate to do so that withers away after only a few words from those you hold in high regard, or a relativist, ambiguous morality, temptation usually reigns supreme; such was also the case with the young apprentice. Seeing that the crowd, stupefied by recent events, had not yet managed to completely disperse, Matylda conscientiously repeated her friend's actions and soon managed to amass a sizable group of people at the tip of her little finger. She examined it closely, trying to identify men and women, young and old, among the microscopic debris, but the only conclusive observation she was able to make without a magnifying glass or microscope was that the sample she collected appeared very diverse. The saliva on her finger was starting to dry up; trying to prevent her captives from falling off and getting wasted in the process, and feeling a great dose of awkwardness while staring into the eyes of those she was about to eat, the fair-haired student -- unaccustomed to playing either the role of the goddess Venus or an antagonist straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale -- hurriedly put her finger in her mouth and thoroughly cleaned it off every single thing that her spit was holding in place.
Having experienced a sensation comparable to the feeling of having a multitude of tiny seeds appear on your tongue, but with each of them trying to inform you through their frantic movements that they were no mere seeds at all, Matylda recalled Natalia's words from less than half an hour ago; back when she mentioned that perhaps a shrunken copy of her was inside one of those tapes, too. Has she been to the Old Town in the past week? What if she was, by some fateful coincidence, holding herself in her own mouth? Well, not that she ever needed to worry about being on the receiving end of such a treatment -- from what she could understand, no person was actually getting shrunk for real since all the people she was interacting with in the lab were just microscopic copies of full-sized individuals possessing the same memories and personality -- but she found it hard not to empathize with them to some degree. The only thing that helped her not get caught up in an overtly compassionate anguish was the knowledge that neither her nor the tiny people could ever find themselves in any other circumstances, and personal dreams of either party or their notions of ethics or morality could never change the fact that their fate is already sealed. This kind of thinking allowed her to impose on herself an obligation of some sort to savor the moment -- so that the suffering of those unfortunate souls doesn’t go to waste! -- and transform her empathy as well as all their pain and fear she herself felt whenever she thought of the bigger picture instead of just her own point of view into something surprisingly closely related - erotic pleasure.
Controlling the crowd didn’t come as easy to her as it did to her friend. Unwilling to swallow anything just yet, she let her saliva slowly fill up her mouth and run down her tongue, picking up all the tiny people it came across along its way. Some of them ended up under the tongue itself, others got stuck between her teeth or simply crushed by them, while yet another group found itself caught in the folds and crevices of her lips and cheeks in the same places one often finds those small, residual pieces of food after eating a meal which can sometimes be hard to get rid of -- that didn’t really bode well for Matylda’s captives, whose size, comparable to the size of a coma printed in a densely printed drug leaflet, meant that they would be stuck there for a long time. With so many of them dispersed within her mouth, she was forced to swallow multiple times, and even that didn’t assure her that no tiny stranger stayed with her a little longer before finally succumbing to the lung-crushing pressure and suffocating humidity. After all, it was impossible for her to tell individual people apart or even feel them touch her body.
“They really suit you,” Natalia broke the silence, which she kept the entire time she was vigilantly watching her younger friend.
“Huh?” replied Matylda, busy wiping the corners of her mouth and not really catching the drift.
"That's exactly the thing I'm talking about. If you were as self-confident as you are cute right now, perhaps others wouldn't walk over you so often.” Matylda got embarrassed and developed a blush.
“Way to leave me speechless, haha, but you have a point. I really do feel more comfortable around tiny people than I do around the real ones,” Matylda concluded. “There’s not as much social pressure. That doesn’t mean I’ve gotten fully comfortable with toying with them, though. It’s still somewhat awkward, especially if I can tell they’re looking, all distressed, right into my eyes. Dealing with buildings is a bit easier in that regard.”
“Don’t you find it interesting? Their minds are just like ours but in spite of that, you seem hardly stressed out. That suggests appearance -- or size, in this case -- is the main factor for you.
“Are you trying to tell me that instead of imagining my audience naked, like they often say, I should act as if they were tiny?”
“I guess? Hey, if someone’s getting on your nerves, we can always try to find them here so that you can practice conflict resolution.”
“Ha!” Matylda found this idea intriguing but impractical. “I don’t even want to imagine how long that would take.”
The discussion died out, but only temporarily. It offered a moment of respite for those few persons who hadn’t found their way down Matylda’s throat yet and were violently flung around while she was speaking. The women’s attention once again focused on the shrunken city.