The beat up laptop pitched beneath Scott's feet as Carmen laid down on her enormous bed.

Despite what she had said after learning what he used to do, the giantess didn't actually immediately pull up her resume for him to look at or set him to scrolling through job postings. The weekend had passed in the same lazy haze as the previous one, with the only major difference being the day she had spent preparing her fish tank while he toiled away on her bedroom floor slowly dragging errant socks and underwear into a dirty laundry pile. Scott figured on Monday, she would set him to work on her job hunt but instead he was dropped into the grimy tub once more, though the sponge was cut in half to make it slightly easier to handle.

“Ok,” warm breath that reeked of weed rolled over Scott's world as the laptop continued to shift beneath his feet. Carmen moved atop her bed, clearly trying to get into a comfortable position as she picked up pillows and fluffed blankets and twisted her monumental body about. Finally, with her feet crossed at the ankles hanging in the air and her chest propped up against two pillows, she reached out and tapped the trackpad beside Scott, “Where did I put my resume...”

File folders flashed across the screen as her fingers clacked against the mouse keys.

The screen was reflected in the sparkly blue nail polish that Scott had been forced to layer across her nails just the previous night before she went out to a bar. The little man had spent the rest of the night cowering in her closet, terrified that she would come home with some behemoth of a man to hook up with or a gaggle of friends who would make him dance for scraps of their greasy post-bar snacks. Instead though, she had come home a little tipsy, kicked off the high heeled ankle boots she wore and collapsed on her bed before groggily demanding he show himself.

When he called out to her, she pointed to a spot on her floor near the bed and Scott jogged to it as quick as he could. She stared at him through half-lidded eyes before weakly reaching for him, her fingers swinging overhead twice before they finally wrapped around his little body. The whiskey on her breath seemed to make the air itself burn as she rolled onto her back and slipped him into her low cut blouse.

“Nice and warm, little man...” she had groaned as she wrapped herself up in blankets like she was an enormous burrito before promptly passing out.

Scott had spent the night sweating while sprawled out atop her breast with a thin blanket pinning him in place. When she awoke the next morning, shockingly not hungover, Carmen had simply giggled when she felt him stir atop her chest.

Another lazy Saturday had passed the giantess by with Scott licking the shoes she had worn before she seemed to suddenly remember what he had done for a living when he was normal sized. Which is how he found himself standing on her laptop, the machine humming beneath his feet while she loomed over the world in a dark purple hoodie and galaxy leggings with thick rainbow socks on her feet.

A grunt of frustration echoed out, “No, that's too old... c'mon, I know I updated it last year...”

The sheer disarray on the screen above him made Scott nervously shuffle, his eyes following the muscles in her hand while it moved across the trackpad.

“There it is,” she cooed, her thumb smacking loudly against the left mouse button. A second later, her resume filled the movie theater sized screen and her weed-laced breath washed over him, “Can you see it ok?”

Scott's neck was already craning back in an attempt to take it all in when her hand wrapped around him. He yelped as she lifted him up into the air and set him down on the edge of the pillow, his feet instantly sinking into the soft mound. Warm slightly wet air rushed over his back and he could feel her nose hanging just over his shoulder.

“Better?” The whispered word tickled his backside.

“Y-yeah...” his whole body shivered with fright.

Ever since he shrank and saw Ethan end the life of another shrunken person, Scott had been painfully aware of just how powerful normal-sized people were. And he had been reminded of that fact over and over again during his time with both Ethan and Carmen. He normally only needed to worry about their feet stomping near him or their hands wrapping around his tiny body. The rest of their enormous bodies were abstractions; moving skyscrapers that dominated the sky or vast plateaus that stretched out around him.

There was something unsettling about being so close to Carmen's billboard sized face. Listening to saliva drip in her cavernous maw or the way her lips flapped as they unconsciously moved. The scraping of her chin against the pillow and how it shifted the ground beneath Scott's feet. Feeling but not quite seeing her nose hover just above his shoulder made him cringe ever so slightly, like it was about to plow into him without warning.

Taking a deep breath, Scott forced himself to focus on the screen in front of him.

Reading her name and contact information across the top of the page filled the tiny man with a strange unease. These most basic details about the gigantic woman had simply been beyond his reach for the past several weeks and suddenly they were just there in front of him.

Carmen Valencia.

Who apparently lived only a few neighborhoods away from him in an apartment complex he was vaguely aware of. He remembered taking a look at it when he decided to get his own place after years of living with roommates but had decided not to bother looking deeper after he saw one or two bad reviews. There had also been a note on their website about lower rates for people who were Immune, which had always sat uncomfortably with him.

Staring at the address, he suddenly wondered if Carmen went out to the same parts of the city he did. Had he passed her in a crowded bar at some point and never even realized that one day she would control every aspect of his life?

The thought made him suddenly wonder if she was taller or shorter than he used to be.

Before, Scott would have believed that with all the information in front of him that he would be able to mount some sort of daring escape or find some leverage he could use against the giantess. Now he was painfully aware that knowing where Carmen lived or what her email address was basically useless. She was going to make use of the only skills and knowledge he had that she seemed interested in and the tiny man knew that it wouldn't matter if he gave it to her freely or not.

Giants got what they wanted out of shrinkees.

The huge resume rolled down but his heart rate picked up.

The way that she complained about her job and her coworkers, Scott had started to think that she was overqualified for it and he could tell that Carmen clearly thought she was. Yet, there was nothing on her resume to indicate that was true. In fact, when he glanced down and saw that she didn't have a college degree, the little man realized that some places he had worked wouldn't even consider her qualified for her current title even with almost a decade of experience in the field.

Desperate to find something positive, Scott's eyes drifted to several certifications that she had listed. “T-those are up to date, right?” He stammered.

“Hm?” The pillow bounced gently beneath Scott as her chin rose up and hung just behind his head, “Oh, yeah, I think so. I might need to re-up one or take an exam or something but it's no big deal... Do people really care about them?”

He couldn't keep the incredulity from his voice as he reflexively said, “Yes!”

Her chin brushed against him as she settled back on the pillow, “Jeez, little guy, don't worry, it's not a big deal. Besides it's not like I want to be stuck at a help desk forever.”

A sparkly nail ran up his leg and Scott stumbled as Carmen's face loomed directly behind him. He glanced nervously up into her dark eyes, “Y-you want to go into sysadmin or something?”

“Ugh, only if I have to,” her lips went down in a frown, “I'd really like to get into development, I figure I'll have to start with infrastructure stuff, which I guess I can get to from admin...”

Scott's eyes raked across the movie theater sized screen but he found nothing beyond her self-reporting that indicated she knew how to code or develop anything. No competitions entered let alone won, no bad-idea-competently-made app with a smattering of downloads, not even a fucking github link. Fear coursed in the shrunken man's veins as her lips hovered just above his head.

“So,” her purring voice made him cringe, “What can I do to spruce it up?”

“I...” Scott's mouth went dry and his knees rattled against each other, “I'd say... uh...”

The mattress groaned and the pillow rolled as Carmen propped herself up onto her elbows. All the friendliness was gone from her voice, “You'd say what, little man?”

Scott whimpered, realizing that once again in an instant she had gone from Carmen the Friendly Owner to Carmen the Angry Goddess. He fell to his knees and threw up his arms, “Please, I've only just looked at it, there might be something I can do that I haven't thought of yet!”

“That you haven't thought of yet?” She thundered back as she rose onto her knees, “Cause what? I'm such a fucking incompetent idiot I don't know how to put together a resume!”

He cowered atop the pillow while her fists settled onto her hips, her expression darkening with every second, “No, no, it's... your resume is fine I just... a lot of the companies I worked for had high standards...”

Fingers pinched his torso and his body was wracked by a sob as Carmen lifted him up into the sky. “And I don't meet their oh so high standards?” Her voice rang in his ears as he dangled in front of her sneering face.

“I'm sorry,” he wailed, “I'm sorry, I know you're great but I turned down great people all the time! Lots of great people didn't even make it past the filters! I'm sorry...”

Carmen's fist wrapped around him completely and she squeezed the air from his lungs as she growled, “You're going to blame some fucking algorithm?”

All Scott could manage was to sputter while her fist clenched down on him, her popping knuckles echoing in his ears. He flailed weakly in her fist and spots swam in his vision as his lungs burned.

Then suddenly the fire in her eyes died and her fingers loosened around him. He went weightless as she fell backwards onto her bed, his little body battering between her fingers before smacking hard when she crashed against the vast mattress. Her hand went slack but still remained atop his body as an enormous sigh rattled the world.

Scott whimpered as she again plucked him up and then set him gently down onto her right breast. Carmen began to gently run her fingers down his back as she said, “Is it really that bad?”

“I...” the little man frowned as he debated whether or not to tell the truth. Looking up, he could see the sadness in Carmen's dark eyes and he realized that it would be better than being punished for failing to get her a job over the next few weeks, “You could probably get a job at another company but it wouldn't be a tech company where you'd have chances for lateral career moves. It would probably be in finance, maybe banking or really any big company that needs lots of IT people to handle day-to-day issues.”

Her eyes narrowed as she frowned and Scott immediately began to cower before another sigh rocked his world, “I've been doing that shit for eight years, it's fucking boring...”

Trembling, Scott gently tugged at her hoodie to draw her attention, “Why did you stay with the same company for so long if they didn't promote you?”

“Cause it looks better to be loyal than to hop around to a bunch of different companies...” Her eyes went wide as she looked at Scott, “Right?”

“Uh, maybe that's what the rule of thumb was twenty years ago...”

“Fuck.” The single word echoed across the cavernous room while everything shook as she smacked her head back against her pillows.

“It's ok to jump around every two years or so if you're getting a title bump or something to explain why you left,” Scott said as he watched Carmen shut her eyes tight, the faintest of tears forming. The little man began to crawl across her chest and up to her shoulder, “And it's not the end of the world if you have been at the same place for forever or even that you don't have a degree...”

Standing on the edge of her shoulder, Scott could feel her chest heave as the first cries rattled through her immense form. With a deep breath, he jumped off of her shoulder and crashed into the pillow below, gravity almost instantly pulling him toward her tear stained cheek.

He rolled across her dark silky hair, and gently tugged on it to keep from smacking against the cheek rising before him. Slowly, he crawled up to it and ran his hands against the warm salty tears running down it, brushing them away.

“I'm Immune,” the words came out of her in a croak, “They should want to invest in me...”

Frustration flared inside the little man and he caught himself from banging his fist against the wall of soft flesh before him. Scott took in deep breaths as he realized he was trying to console the woman who literally owned him and forced him to clean her floors because she was too lazy to spend five minutes sweeping them herself. And she was really only upset because she thought her own sense of entitlement would be enough to get her a high-paying job that she had barely done anything to earn.

Then he looked out across a bedroom that to him looked cavernous but which he knew was crammed to the bursting with just her bed and a dresser with a fish tank sitting atop it. A single fish swished back and forth between the underwater plants that Carmen had meticulously placed inside it last weekend, practically bursting with excitement at the prospect of having a new fish. In the corner beyond the fish tank, there was a patch of ceiling where the plaster had crumbled down at some point, never to be repaired.

After several weeks, he knew that many of her apartment's fixtures needed to be replaced and the walls could use a completely new paint job. Yet, based on the reviews he had seen, he knew that this company would never do anything to fix up their apartment complex. They gave people like Carmen seemingly good deals while doing barely any basic maintenance and screwed over anyone who couldn't prove they were Immune.

The little man knew that it was a frustratingly common problem these days.

Scott also knew that there was no escape from Carmen's apartment and after having lived under the rule of a teenaged tyrant, Scott didn't exactly like the idea of running into the unknown in the hopes that whoever he ran into next would be nicer.

Telling himself that it was in his best interest, he knelt beside Carmen's now reddened cheeks and again brushed the tears away before pressing his tiny body against it in an approximation of a hug. “There are ways to jump past all the filters and stuff,” he said, “Lots of companies give headhunting bonuses. I'd get referrals all the time. Plenty of them wouldn't have gotten an interview any other way and most of them ended up getting hired and doing really well.”

The world shifted beneath Scott's feet, knocking him onto his back and forcing him to slide down, as Carmen rolled up onto her side. He smacked into her nose and her giggle rattled his tiny frame before she plucked him up and set him down beyond the edge of the depression formed by her head.

“Well, if I knew someone who could get me an interview I wouldn't need you, would I?” Her finger tousled his hair, making the little man squirm.

“R-right, I'm just saying, maybe if you go to some meetups, exchange contact info-”

Her finger pressed against his face, silencing him instantly. The soft pad pushed in with a little more force, momentarily cutting off his air before he fell down onto his back. He gasped as Carmen's powerful index finger settled onto his chest.

“I don't need to go to any meetups or anything,” her face rose into the sky and her manic grin floated directly over Scott's head, “I just need to know where your old coworkers hang out.”

“Wh-what?” Scott shouted back, his body struggling beneath her fingertip.

“Why waste my time going out to drink shitty beer and listen to other people's shitty ideas in the hopes of getting a lead when your little head is full of them,” Carmen's lips pursed as they descended from the sky to smother the shrunken man in a sloppy kiss, “Yeah, screw my resume, why don't you tell me who you used to work with that was Immune and who might want a nice referral bonus, hm?”

Carmen's saliva seeped across his chest as he lay shaking beneath her smiling face, her chuckle echoing in his tiny ears. Even though Carmen's dark foreboding chuckles were so different from her cackles, the name of the woman who scared him the most at the office immediately jumped from his lips, “T-taylor Hart.”

The bed groaned and shadows danced across Scott's vision as Carmen grabbed her phone from her nightstand. “And where can I stalk her? Instagram? Twitter?” The giantess's dark eyes settled on him while she absentmindedly scrolled through her phone.

“I don't know but she likes karaoke, there's a bar she goes to all the time to do it...” Scott struggled to think of the name but the way Carmen's eyebrow arched he knew that not remembering it wouldn't be acceptable. Taylor had mentioned it so many times, he could practically hear her saying it in his ears. The moment the name hit him, Scott shouted, “Saturn's! It's in Uptown I think...”

Carmen's freshly painted nails tapped against her phone screen and then her lips curled into a smile, “Looks like I have a new place to check out on Thursdays, little man.” Her phone crashed onto the bed before her fingers scooped beneath his shrunken frame. Scott suddenly found himself back atop her right breast as she sighed, her voice still a little tight from tears as she said, “Now tell me everything about my new best friend, Taylor...”

Her fingers stroked Scott's back while he started saying anything he could remember about Taylor Hart.