Oyshwan looked up in awe as Louise rose from her seat and stepped towards him, reached down, picked him up, returned to her seat, and placed him in her lap beside her plate of sandwiches. He watched her eat the rest of them, paying close attention to the gulping movements of her neck, and the way her mouth and cheeks moved while she was eating each mouthful.

“I certainly couldn’t fit you in after all that, and I doubt you’d want to keep company with a pile of consumed sandwich anyway,” said Louise, “But I think my dinner menu will be Fillet of Time Travelling Trespasser. I’ll just take you over to the house and get you settled in.”

Louise clasped him gently in her elegant fingers and carried him out of the school grounds and across a large lawn and into her house. She set him down on a small table beside the front window in her lounge room, and parted the curtains a little.

“You’ll have a nice view of the gardens there,” she said, “I have two classes to teach this afternoon, and then a bit of administrative work in the office. I’ll be back late in the afternoon to keep you company for a while, and then I’ll have you for dinner. Can I get you anything before I return to the school?”

“Do you have anything soft I could lie down on?”

“Would a cushion do? It would be like a mattress to you, even bigger.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and put one down on the table, lifting him up and lowering him onto it, “Make the most of the scenery while you can, and I’ll see you for dinner.”

She smiled with a mixture of amusement, satisfaction and contentment, and walked out of the house. Looking through the window, he saw her crossing the lawn with her long dress swaying as she moved.

He enjoyed the garden view for a little while longer, and then used his teleportation amulet to return to the colony city in his own time on the world ruled by the Queen who had inherited the throne from Ambloome.

Two weeks later, Oyshwan woke up and decided to teleport to the same place that he had originally met Louise Grande. When he had been lying on her lap, looking up at her eating, he had noticed that there was a tall tree in the same garden as the flowerbed that had been his first view of Brobdingnag. He teleported up to a high branch and waited and hoped that Louise would use the same seat for her lunch that day.

Soon he saw her coming across the school lawn, lunch in hand. She sat down and began to eat.

“Louise!” he called, “I’m up in the tree.”

She looked up in surprise.

“I don’t know what has me more bewildered: the fact that you escaped your scheduled journey to my stomach; or the fact that you’ve returned, or the fact that you’ve managed to climb such a tall giant tree.”