Claire

After clicking her phone on stand-by, Claire gave a frustrated grunt as she threw the thing against her pillow. It landed with a muffled thud. She sighed, and her eyes closed as she leaned back against the wall with her back. Her mane of auburn hair flowed down her fingers as she rested her head against her hand and gazed out the window dreamily. Bright beams of sunlight pierced through a pack of clouds, painting the sky in a dazzling golden hue.

Hanging around on her favorite social media account, and gossiping with friends about friends, was not as exciting for Claire as it used to be. Former friends either broke contact with her entirely or started behaving like submissive weasels by cozying up to her. Claire felt most comfortable with Haisley, who remained the same.

Claire's life these last few weeks has taken a drastic turn, and she is still trying to cope with it.

Some changes were pretty neat, though. Claire previously had to make do with inferior-looking clothes and footwear, which emphasized her modest position on the societal hierarchy. Now, she can fill her huge wardrobe with fashion exclusively accessible to the elite, with no limitations. And more kept rolling in on a daily basis. Many women (and men) of means around the globe were almost desperately eager to score points with the daughter of the woman who owned nearly a third of the world.

Sophie Wilkins went on a shrink spree after her youngest daughter was shot down by a strayed bullet from an officer. On that fateful day, every member of the local police force who was already underway to the scene vanished without a trace.  – together with multiple cities throughout the region, the state's Capitol included.

It disrupted society in a significant way.

The social and economic consequences were tangible in the surrounding regions due to this event and throughout the whole state. Influential business organizations, corporates, and banking establishments that fueled the expansion of the national economy simply disappeared either partly or entirely.

However, it was the constant existing threat swirling throughout the country's streets like an upcoming thick, overcast of mist that really choked people into a state of frozen fear. No one knew who would follow next. Only Sophie knew who used her frightful powers to shrink down even more cities in the region and other states in the following weeks.

At least 120 million Brobdingnagians were already in the hands of the tyrannical Sophie, and the number was rising.

It ignited a massive population movement. Everyone wanted to get away from Sophie Wilkins as far as possible. The inhabitants of some cities and towns were just in time to evacuate their homes so that Sophie captured nothing more than an empty shell of buildings – apart from a few pigheaded stragglers who refused to flee from a single woman.

It did not take long before Sophie's wrath endangered the whole continent. Many Brobdingnagians sought refuge in harbor cities where they hoped to secure a spot on one of the many ships that set sail to better places. All these Brobdingnagian refugees craved to cross the vastness of the Grand Ocean because out there lay an overseas continent named Kentaris that was entirely different from theirs.

In comparison to the structure of their civilization – where the big ruled over the small – Kentaris was notable for its everlasting peace between the three different races. Lilliputians, Humans and Brobdingnagians all lived among one another and benefitted from each other in profitable ways. In Kentaris, there was zero tolerance for misusing one's power over the other. Some of these obnoxious megalomaniacs ended up in jail, where they were forced into a rehab program in the hope that it would alter their character in a way that would enable them to fit in with society once more.

Most of them sought their luck elsewhere and traveled by ship or plane to greener pastures where their rapacious tendencies did not feel so out of place. They settled in places such as Hopevile and Clearwater and Darkwell. All prosperous Brobdingnagian cities belonging to the same globally recognized sovereign state that was now heavily harassed by a single Brobdingnagian woman with frightful powers.

Roughly three-fourths of its cities were already shrunken down and under Sophie's control. Several assassination attempts had been made, but none of them were fruitful. Hitmen started to shrink down spontaneously when they came within a certain radius from Sophie. Bullets vanished in thin air when they were aimed and fired at Sophie's head. It was almost like some inexplicable force was protecting her.

Sending in a stealth warplane to bomb her house also proved useless for the aircraft, and its personnel was already shrunk down to nothingness right when it was about to enter the airspace of Sophie's hometown.

In an attempt to prevent this lady from taking over the continent, authorities and intelligent people from different states mulled over different strategies.

Negotiating with Sophie Wilkins seemed the only way of averting the inevitable. But the woman was known for driving hard bargains.

Sophie insisted on one thing: she wanted to become the supreme sovereign of every state on the continent. After losing a good chunk of their cities and towns, many states complied with her demands and gave Sophie rulership over their property and people. At that moment, it seemed like the most logical thing to do. It is better to be ruled by a power assertive woman while remaining normal-sized than to be ruled by the same woman but diminished to a microscopic speck.

Governments were afraid and acted thoughtfully while dealing with the whims of Sophie and her witchlike powers, and they were willing to make grand concessions to please her and her daughter, Claire. The family was already gifted with a monumental mansion – originally belonging to a Gouverneur but was urgently requested to find accommodation elsewhere – on top of a hill with a splendid panorama of the lush green, rolling landscape.

Claire stood up from her bed, kicked some of the still unopened moving boxes out of the way, and sauntered toward the door leading to the hallway. It felt absurd to Claire that the distance from her bed to the door was the same as the distance from the front door to the street in their former home.

"Need something, miss?"

Claire shrieked when a grizzled old man – the size of a leprechaun – peeked his wrinkled face inside the moment she opened the door. She was still not used to the servants milling about in their new home. The interim President – because the real President was in a shrunken state and in Sophie's possession, along with the entire Capitol – insisted on granting Miss Wilkins and her family an army of servants to meet their whims. Sophie accepted but only allowed them inside their house after halving their normal size.

"Will you mutts stop startling me, please?!" Claire's pretty eyes blazed as she looked down upon the servant.

"Y-you need refreshments, Miss? I have an ice-cold coke here," the servant deftly conjured a bottle from behind his back that was dotted with condensed water drops. "Or perhaps a scotch and a soda if madam prefers something stronger." His other hand shot out and returned with a glass full of honeyed/brown liquid.

Claire looked at her watch. "It's freakin 11am in the morning! And besides, I'm only 15 years old! What kind of servant are you, anyway?"

The servant quickly put the bottle of coke and the glass of scotch away and pulled out a bag of marshmallows from his sleeve. He presented it to the angered teen girl, whose torse loomed over him, with the most gleaming smile his ugly mug could muster. "S-some candy instead, miss?"

Claire snorted and pushed the servant out of her way with one hand. For him, the force of Claire's push was just as strong as when a small child was pushed by an adult. A case of beer, the glass bottles clanking together and frothing with amber liquid, fell over when he tumbled backward. The sound was a loud, discordant cacophony that echoed through the hallway. The beer spread out in a foamy puddle, the scent of hops and yeast filling the air.

"Just stay out of my way!" Claire sauntered off.

After taking a few frustrating detours through the house, Claire finally found the room she was looking for. Two leprechaun servants stood in front of its entrance, guarding it. They exchanged a glance of uncertainty with each other when Claire approached them. She placed her hands upon her slender hips and looked down upon the servants blocking her way.

"Well?" she said, cocking an eyebrow.

"N-no one is allowed in, Miss. N-not even you. Orders by Miss Wilkins,"

"I'm miss Wilkins!" Claire blared in his face.

"I-I m-mean your mother, mi–"

"I know exactly who you mean, fuckwad! Now, get out of the way!" Claire took a step forward, nearly bulldozing the servant over. Both servants gulped and looked up at the gigantic, slender, but beautiful teen girl soaring above them. The top of their heads was barely able to reach Claire's waist.

This took too long. Claire brought her hand up. A ring was attached to her finger and the stone set upon it started to glow. One of the servants shrunk down, dwindling smaller until he matched the size of a cockroach. His scream was brief before it was cut off by Claire's stomping sneaker. The other servant looked shocked when Claire aimed her attention at him. He, too, started to shrink down. Claire bent over and clutched his action-figure-sized body in her hand. She brought him up to her ravishing, young face.

"Don't you ever back talk me!" Claire spat. With a flick of her wrist, the tiny servant flew through the air before his flailing body smacked down on the floor, breaking a few bones.

Claire opened the door and entered the room.