Locked away in her bedroom, atop her disheveled bed sheets, Lovely Mari thrashed back and forth and rolled around. She cried out and wailed; she kicked up her long legs in striped stockings and and pumped her cute feet in the air. She pounded the mattress with her fists, slammed her head repeatedly into her cushy pillows, and let out a prolonged moan.
“Bored, bored, bored, BORED!”
It was a lovely summer afternoon in the Forest of Magic, but even lovely days can drain all the ideas out of someone’s head, especially if there have been too many of them. The powerful little witch thought about creating a thunderstorm, just to liven things up, but that seemed like too much effort. Business had been slow in her magic shop, as well: it wasn’t that she needed the money, but business meant interesting visitors with unusual and fascinating stories to share.
“Why ain’t there anything to do around here?” she whimpered. “Drummond!”
The tiny little SWAT Operative was sitting cross-legged on her tea table, attempting to translate one of her many mystical tomes. “Yes, my goddess?” he called out in a strong voice: Lovely Mari had gifted him the ability to speak loud enough to hear when he needed it.
“Give me something to do-o-o-o-o-o!” Mari rolled to her enormous chest and parked her chin on her palms, glaring at him.
He took a deep breath. This was the twelfth time the beautiful and capricious giantess had interrupted his focus, and he was disciplining himself to accept it. He walked up to the edge of the table and sat there, swinging his legs in the void not far from Mari’s face. “Well, I’m sure we can work this out together.” He stared up into her crimson eyes with wide, heart-shaped pupils and spoke in reassuring tones. “Why don’t you destroy Houston?”
Mari blew a raspberry at him. “I already took out Green Bay, Detroit, and Cleveland, Drummond. Houston’s boring.”
“Well, what about transdimensional travel?” This always took a long time, and Drummond was confident he could make a breakthrough in translation while she was gone. “I know for a fact you have a list of some extrasolar planets you’ve been meaning to check out.”
“I’ve already seen all the cool ones!” Her head slipped out of her palms and buried in her eiderdown. “Just the stupid ol’ ones are left!” Her voice was muffled in linen and down stuffing.
“The ‘hot Jupiter’ planet orbiting 51 Pegasi isn’t stupid.”
“That’s the stupidest one of all!”
Drummond felt disarmed. He’d had a daughter—before the messy divorce and custody battle—and though she was several years younger than this giantess, it looked like Mari was still stuck in that earlier stage of development. He had no tools to cope with a tantrum like this, had no idea how to calm his daughter down, seemingly no empathy with women at all. Probably why his wife left, he figured.
All he could do was come up with ideas, each of which were shot down. Treasure-hunting was dumb; building a castle at the bottom of the ocean was lame; firing Master Sparks up into the sky to see what came down was idiotic. Drummond rubbed his temples to soothe his mounting headache and realized that he was hungry.
“Do you know anything about mushrooms, Mari?” he asked the top of her skull.
The giantess raised her beautiful face. “Duh! I run a magic shop! I know more about mushrooms than you know about…” She narrowed her eyes at him. “...like, police-stuff or whatever.”
He smiled gently. “I’m not talking about magic mushrooms. I mean the lion’s mane mushroom, the one that tastes like crab.”
Mari’s eyes went huge. “Wait, what?”
“And maitake mushrooms. If you find an old one, you can dry it out, powderize it, and bake it into bread.”
“What the fuck?!” Mari’s face broke into a radiant grin. She rocketed off her bed, her frilly black skirt twirling around her thighs, and began tearing through one of her overburdened bookcases, whooping when she found the one about mushrooms. Flipping through its pages, she looked up the pictures of the mushrooms in question and made notes of several others.
Hurriedly she tugged her 18-hole kneeboots on, cast a cantrip to lace them up, and scooped up the SWAT officer in her hands. “Drummond! I love you for, like, five seconds!” she cried, tearing his shirt open and slathering him in her wide, pink tongue before tossing him back to the tea table. Her boots stampeded out of the room and thundered down the stairs as she went to look for a large basket.
“I’ll be back in an hour or three!” she called up to him. “I dunno! Whatever!” And she slammed the door behind her, charging off into the Forest of Magic, singing a bright little song of destruction and mayhem.
The little man in soaked black BDUs picked himself up and bent his head slightly, listening for the excited young goddess running around the house and plunging into the woods. After a moment he glanced back at the collection of small buildings in the corner of Mari’s bedroom. The library, sitting in front of the mass of architecture, had a tiny head poking in the window. Drummond nodded at it and hopped down from the table onto the red rug.
He’d learned that his descent was slower here, at his size, than it had been back on Earth. He was also pretty sure they were no longer on Earth, or else in a strange parallel version of it. The one solar chart he’d been permitted to glance at was unrecognizable, but that didn’t mean they were in it.
The door of the library opened and a teenage boy emerged. “Is she gone?”
Drummond frowned. “I wouldn’t have given you the all-clear if it weren’t all-fucking-clear. You need to learn to trust me here.”
The teen shrugged and apologized. He looked especially pathetic, his pale, underdeveloped body in slightly baggy borrowed clothes, holding one elbow and staring at the large bedroom. “Is she really scary? Is she gonna be pissed if she finds me here?”
“I promise you, she’s capable of anything.” Drummond didn’t know this, but it was a useful story to inspire loyalty in this soft and undisciplined kid. “I’ll explain it to her when the time’s right. In the meantime, you’re safe in this city. I talked her into supplying a modicum of power,” he waved at a small glowing orb, connected to the buildings by a thin cable, “and we hardly need any food at all, relatively speaking. You just have to lay low for the time being.”
The teen sniffed and shuffled his bare feet. “But I get bored.”
Drummond pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes and sighed.
* * *
Lovely Mari’s chunky black soul pounded the turf, and the soil rippled with the impact. Her successive footfalls were fainter and farther away, and eventually a head of shaggy brown hair poked up out of the grass by her house.
“She gone?” said a raspy voice beside him. “Andon? You see her?”
Andon nodded, a grin creeping across his face. “Took off like a shot. She’s after somethin’ and it ain’t us. Let’s go!” He bent and lifted a small portal in the soil, and two more tiny people like him crawled out. A pudgy man with a round face and slick black hair huffed a bit, then hauled out their third companion, a wiry young woman with piercing green eyes and reddish hair pulled back in twin ponyfalls.
Immediately she took a defensive position and sniffed the air. “Did you even check for squirrels or anything? Idiot.”
Andon laughed, a throaty and slightly dopey sound. “It’s all right, Pavla. We’re totally clear. All we gotta do is move fast, grab what we need, an’ we’re outta here before she even knows what happened.”
The pudgy guy kicked the portal shut and trotted over to the corner of the house. Peeking around, he waved his friends up. Pavla shot Andon a cold glare as they ran around and sprinted for the front door of Mari’s cabin. They squeezed themselves through the gap beneath the door, though of course the pudgy one got wedged halfway through.
Andon and Pavla swore, grasped his meaty paws, and heaved back with all their might, and he emerged with a comical poot. “I think if yer too big to fit under the door, Mecho, yer too big to eat anything y’kin find in here!” Andon patted his friend’s large belly.
Grumbling, Mecho said, “This way,” and they charged off to where they knew the larder was.
* * *
Deep in the woods, Lovely Mari’s day was indeed turning around! She darted from tree to tree, lean legs pumping hard as she sprang about, and that went on for around ten minutes before Mari decided she didn’t need to spring upon the mushrooms in surprise.
The wicker basket hanging on her forearm was still mostly empty, but not entirely: right off the bat she found a striking cluster of orange chanterelles, and according to her book these could be sliced and sauteed in butter and simmered in a stew! Her mouth was watering already and she couldn’t believe her luck at finding such a good score without even trying.
* * *
Drummond and the teen poked through the cathedral to see if what was still in there. While Mari’s magic had tidied up the library, she hadn’t extended the same service to most of the other buildings, it seemed. They hauled rubble aside, righted candle holders, and collected all the hymnals in one corner.
“Why do you think she collects these?” the boy asked the SWAT officer. “The buildings, I mean.”
“Everyone needs a hobby.” But he’d been wondering the same thing.
“Is it because they’re all beautiful?”
“That’s as good a guess as any.”
The teen shook the plaster and broken glass off a broad white cloth that covered an altar. “I was thinking it’s either that, or they represent a conquest or something.”
Drummond paused, then dragged a pallet of crumbled stone out the door and dumped it.
“Do you know where all these buildings came from, though?”
Drummond shrugged.
“Were there people in them when she took them? Do you know what happened to them?” He flinched when the officer dropped what he was holding and turned to stare at him.
“Kid, you do not want to know. Believe me on this.” Drummond stared at him a little longer before kicking the wooden doors open and hauling the rubble outside.
* * *
“There’s hardly enna-thin’ here!” Andon was crawling around on all fours, behind the furniture where food was stored and under the sink where food was prepared. “Not a slice, not a crumb!”
Mecho ran his hands along the base of the larder. “And the doors are charmed shut. If we don’t know what word she used to get in here, we’re out of luck.” He rubbed his palm over his jowl.
Pacing irritably, Pavla abruptly froze in her tracks, waving her friends into silence. “Did you hear that?” she hissed.
The men’s eyes went wide, sweeping slowly left and right, but even their heightened senses didn’t pick anything up. “Whaddya hear?” asked the tall, goofy-looking man.
She pursed her lips. “Maybe nothing, but is there anything upstairs?”
Mecho shrugged. “Never tried. Only way up is those stairs, and it’d take too much time for us to help each other up all the way to the top. No telling when the giantess is coming back.”
“Her bedroom has to be up there.” Pavla glanced at the ceiling. “And if anyone’s going to have snacks lying around in her bedroom, I’ll bet it’s this girl.”
Andon and Mecha gaped at her, then each other, then lit up in delight. “Of course! An’ the best food!” Andon agreed. “Cheese an’ meats’ and choccies fer afters!”
“Ooh, choccies!” Mecho clutched his belly. “Haven’t had a good choccy in years! But how’re we getting up there?”
But Pavla was way ahead of them, pointing into the next room. On the floor was an array of miniature battle armaments and structures, all skillfully carved out of wood. To anyone else they would have looked like extremely precise replicas of medieval siege engines and the props of war. But the three Tinies could clearly see these were more of Lovely Mari’s souvenirs from another world, and they were probably plucked from their original time period.
“Help me with this one,” ordered the redhead, walking around to shove a large catapult to the base of the stairs.
* * *
Lovely Mari knelt beside a large cluster of fungus at the base of a large, old oak. “Ruffles, ridges…” she muttered, going over her notes. “Brown, tan…”
She paused and studied the frilly brown fungus. “Can’t tell if it’s a ram’s head or, uh,”—consulted her notes—“hen o’ the woods.”
It sat there, squat and mound-like and totally silent.
“Well, what the heck are ya?”
It said nothing, very slowly nursing on the decaying portion of the oak roots.
Pouting, Mari jammed her notes back in her apron pocket and snatched up her basket. “Who needs ya!” she grumped, stomping off. “You’re probably some stupid poisonous false dogbutt or something!”
* * *
Andon and Mecho loaded up a round rock into the pocket of the catapult, and after some adjustments Pavla fired it off. It shot up and smacked the front of the third step from the top with a bang, then rolled and banged its way back down the stairs. The Tinies yelped and sprinted to the side as it barged through.
“Think yer alignment’s off a tetch.”
Pavla glared at him and made the final adjustments. “There, that’ll take care of it.” She swept her arm grandly over the mechanism. “Load up, Andon, you’re first!”
The tall Tiny paled. “Wha? Ya want me ta jus’... sit in that thing? And ya fire it?” He looked up at the step that stopped the rock in its flight.
Pavla smirked at him. “What, you don’t trust me? We tested it three times. Now it’s ready to go.”
Before he could rejoin with “why can’t Mecho go”, the two of them trundled their friend into the arm of the catapult, and Pavla pulled the trigger rope before Andon could recover.
Off he went, sailing through the warm air of the cabin, the huge steps racing below him. The top step loomed closer and closer, but he cleared it and sailed briefly parallel to the upper floor before rolling to a stop against a pile of books. All things considered, a successful landing.
“Hey, thet warn’t too bad!” he called back down. “Send Mecho on up!”
The chubby little guy hurtled through the air and bounced a couple times before coming to a rest, and Pavla launched herself shortly after. They dusted themselves off, gave each other a round of high-fives, then marched into the middle of the room where the capricious witch-goddess practiced her most powerful magic.
* * *
Drummond placed a hand on the teen’s shoulder, where they crouched behind a washing basin across from Mari’s tremendous bed. “You see them?” he whispered.
Peering through Drummond’s compact monocular, the kid nodded. “Three of them. Two men and a woman. They’re looking at the magic table now.”
Drummond’s eyes widened. “What magic table?”
“The one surrounded with the piles of books—”
“There’s piles of books everywhere!”
“These are glowing, and sometimes they open themselves or turn around.” The teen looked back at the man in black combat gear. “The table’s full of candles, a crystal ball, stuff for writing, and some glowing wooden block that shoots sparks once in a while. Think it’s important?”
Drummond’s heart skipped a beat. “It’s worth thinking about. But keep an eye on our visitors. I don’t know if they’re regulars or not, but let’s not bank on making close friends with them.”
Ecstatic at feeling useful for once, the teen returned to spying through the bedroom doorway at the motley trio as Drummond hopped down off the crude wooden vanity and returned to the library. Behind the front desk he opened a large drawer; behind a large, organized pile of money he had stashed two black books and one notebook. He pursed his lips and wrote a few more lines plus an untalented sketch in the notebook before replacing them behind the stack of cash.
The money had come from the bank vault. Drummond emptied the vault to store a dozen dead bodies of library patrons. And if he played his cards right, if his notes were correct, the money might come in handy someday. Maybe.
* * *
While Lovely Mari hadn’t found all the mushrooms she was looking for, she had definitely amassed a respectable haul. Some were wrinkled and puckered, others were adorably cute and round. She grinned at these, thinking of all the things she could do with them, looking forward to showing off her cleverness to Drummond. Unfortunately, she never did find the lion’s mane mushroom—it looked so beautiful in the pictures. Briefly she toyed with the idea of just magicking one up, you know, creating one somewhere near her so she could still get experience the joy of “finding” it.
But that wouldn’t have been as special as actually finding one, of course, and if she’d done that and cooked it up and let Drummond have some, he’d know something was off. He’d know she hadn’t really found the elusive lion’s mane, and she’d have to toss him into the mortar and grind him and mash him into a paste to cover her embarrassment.
She was surprised to discover she didn’t want to get rid of him just yet. He was a stupid little Bug, of course, she could pop his head off with her thumb like a dandelion… but she was curious, you know, just to see what would happen if she kept him around. That’s all. He was full of surprises, and Mari loved surprises. Nothing more than that.
Anyway, if she hadn’t found a lion’s mane yet, she probably wasn’t going to. Maybe they didn’t grow in the Forest of Magic: her mushroom-hunting skills were first-class, it’s just that this mushroom didn’t exist here. That was probably it!
Smiling, Lovely Mari spun in her boots and skipped through the woods, back to her cabin.
* * *
The trio explored the magic room for all it had, but there was no food roasting in the fireplace and no leftovers to be discovered on any pile of useless books. They looked at the bedroom door, looked at each other, and nodded resolutely.
This room was an explosion of objects, clothes strewn across the floor, bookshelves stuffed to capacity with thousands of different things, odds and ends and supplies stashed anywhere there was empty floor space. On the left were a sequence of overburdened bookcases, on their right was a large basket stuffed with maps, scrolls, special papers and vellum, and other decorative stationery. In the middle of the room was an antique tea table, and that was the likeliest spot to find something good to eat. There were piles of books everywhere, again, and a huge armoire on the left after the bookcases—no food in there.
But in the far right corner was the giantess’s bed, as enormous as it was messy, and in the far left corner was a bizarre sight. Large buildings were pushed against each other, buildings in a style the Tinies had never seen before in their lives. Many were gray stone with huge panels of mirrored glass. A few were very tall and reached up to the ceiling; most others were shorter, various sizes, and they were made out of beautiful wood or stately brick-and-mortar or styles of chiseled stone they couldn’t have imagined. It was all fascinating and, amazingly, it looked like it was perfectly scaled to their size!
Andon stared, his eyes huge, his adam’s apple wobbling up and down. Mecho could only stammer, “Juh-... juh-juh-...”
“Jackpot,” Pavla finished for him, smiling broadly. “Let’s get to it, boys.” They broke into a run and charged across the red rug beneath the tea table. When the rug ran out and their bare feet struck hardwood floor once again, however, a small explosion just before them stopped them in their tracks.
“Not so fast.” A dangerous-looking man in black appeared before them. He was also their size.
* * *
Drummed stepped out of the library. He raised his .45 by his head, a Kimber Custom TLE II. Not the most powerful hand-cannon, but judging by the looks on the intruders’ faces, it had the desired effect. “What are you doing here?”
The three scavengers looked at each other. “Well, what’re you doin’ here?” challenged Andon.
Drummond walked up to him—the shaggy, goofy-looking little man was just slightly taller than himself—and punched him in the throat. Andon staggered back, clutching his neck and gasping, and Drummond fixed his serious eyes on Mecho. “What are you doing here?”
Pavla, quick as a snake, seized his wrist in both hands and tucked and rolled beneath his body. Surprised, Drummond lost his balance and fell over her body, rolling on his shoulder to recover on one knee. The tiny woman clearly had no idea what a handgun was: she clung tenaciously to his arm, effectively holding the muzzle against her chest.
They weren’t a serious challenge. Drummond let out his pent-up breath and boxed her on one ear; she released him to hug her head and roll away. The chubby, black-haired one hadn’t made a move, only stared at them in fright. Drummond rose to his feet before him and only said, “Don’t make me ask a third time.”
“We’re looking for food,” Pavla snapped. “We’re hungry, get it? Any little scrap this giantess leaves behind is more than enough for all of us, even with you.” She rose to her feet, and everything in her stance told Drummond she was ready to square off with him again.
He holstered his .45 and folded his arms. “No food up here.”
“B-b-b-but those houses!” Mecho pointed at the collected city. “There’s gotta be−”
Drummond shook his head. “Empty. Dead. Just a collection of the crazy giantess that lives here.”
Andon, recovered, stared at him in alarm. “So she’s really crazy, ain’t she! Ah knew it! Din’t we know thet?” He swatted Mecho’s arm, and his buddy nodded enthusiastically.
Pavla raised her narrow jaw at Drummond. “Then how are you making out, huh? How are you surviving in this place?”
“Just as you said. Scraps of food, wherever I can find them. Barely enough to get by.”
She narrowed her eyes and planted her fists on her hips. “You’re lying. I can smell it on you.” She was about to say something else but swallowed it at the last second. Her auburn ponyfalls swayed gently as she shook her head, considering her opponent.
Drummond had a weakness for beautiful, competent women, and this little fighter was worming her way into his heart. Inwardly he cursed himself for this vulnerability. He was getting distracted with the notion of training her to fight, learning her knowledge of sneaking and the surrounding woods. She was strong and fast, she didn’t trust much outside of herself, and she had the ability to read someone quickly. All of these were admirable, survivable qualities. He certainly didn’t need the two goofballs that tagged along with her, but if he could forge some kind of alliance…
He snapped out of his reverie at the distant explosion of the front door slamming in its jamb. “Drummond! I’m ho-o-o-ome!” The giantess’s cheerful voice rang up the staircase.
The core temperatures dropped in all four tiny people. Drummond and Pavla said “fuck” simultaneously, glanced at each other, then stared at the top of the staircase.