“If you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone with him in the garden first,” said Adrianne, and sat down in a beautiful scenic spot with the boy in the lap of her dress.

“Did you know it was me?” she asked.

“I thought it was someone who closely resembled you. I was heartbroken that your mother wouldn’t let you compete. Your other identity was the closest I thought I would come to being eaten by you. I … I made sure that you were the only one who saw me in the hunt,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, and kissed him.

“Thank you too,” he said, “This is so much better than the school bullying I left behind.”

“You’ll face none of that in my tummy,” she said.

They talked all afternoon, and then she took him to her chamber, and slowly slid him into her mouth. He waited on her tongue in anticipation and then slowly eased himself off into her throat. She sensed his enthusiasm and helped him down with a careful gulp, which took him to the front section of her stomach, where he would be safe.

2013….

After years and years of carefree life in Princess Adrianne’s tummy, he suddenly felt himself being vomited up again. Surrounded only by the moisture of her tongue, he came out of her mouth and into her hand.

“I had to let you out now,” she said, “I’ve grown many years older, as you can see, and I’m now the new queen, with the recent passing of my mother. Now my own word is law, and I wanted to give you the chance to start anew among your own people. If you stayed in my tummy, I would eventually die of old age long before you were ready to and you’d be trapped in a lifeless body which would no longer sustain you.”

She built him a sturdy boat to his own size scale and farewelled him from the beach, with all of her people looking on. She trusted him to keep their secret, unlike her mother, and would never expect to see him again.

He found that he was able to claim an inheritance from his recently departed parents, but he still had the mind and education of the mere 14 year old boy who had learned nothing new in all the three decades he had spent in Princess Adrianne’s giant stomach. Unlike Bryce Banta, alias Captain Miniature, who had retained his youth after a similar absence from the 1960s to the 1990s (in the earliest chapters of this book), Vector Small was only just coming to terms with how much he had aged physically but not mentally. It was not until Adrianne had brought him up and out of her mouth, that she had had the chance to tell him exactly how many years had passed. He had not been able to keep count of it himself, as there was constant darkness in her stomach, giving him no inkling of the passing of night and day. Nor had he obtained any vitamin D from sunlight exposure in that time. The offsetting quality was that he had also avoided any sunburn or skin damage. His facial features had largely retained the youthful appearance of a man in his 20s, and hair dye would hide a few grey hairs too. All he could do was to claim social security and do his best to make ends meet in his inherited house until suitable work came along. He managed to enrol in simpler tertiary education courses, that did not require him to finish high school, and learned as much as he could about modern computers and the internet, so that he could eventually begin a career of some sort.