It was a bright and sunny day along the shopping boulevard of a typical Imperial agricultural world. Automated transports whirled by on anti-grav thrusters, longer distance teleporters flickered into existence to expel or accept occupants, and random passerbys strolled the streets.

A young woman, barely a century in age, flaxen hair tied up in a ponytail with a pale complexion walked through the commotion with a pip in her step. She had just come of working age and it was her first day on the job; plus, it was just the job she had always wanted to try: working in a pet shop!

She deftly weaved through the busy foot traffic and glanced at the visual assistant that flickered in and out of her peripheral vision, guiding her to her destination, and as she rounded a corner her sapphire eyes locked onto the storefront of Trixie’s Exotic Animals, she had arrived.

Her gait slowed as she passed the display items facing the street, tiny lizards of various species and sizes, more moderate sized fuzzy creatures, and a single viciously predatory looking bird of some kind, or maybe a dragon? She wasn’t quite sure. Regardless, as she arrived at the door her heart began to race, ever since she was a little girl she’d always loved animals and here she’d get paid to work with them! She was the luckiest girl alive! With that thought, and a deep breath, she turned the handle.

The inside of the store was… plain, not in a bad way, but in a sterile kind of way. Of course it would have to be, she thought, it’s a pet store. The walls were lined with cages and enclosures, the pets she had seen on the storefront were merely a fraction of what the store had to offer. Birds and lizards, aquatic life and flora for the animals. The shop had it all.

In the back corner, tucked away almost as an afterthought, stood the matron of the establishment. Trixie herself, her brunette hair flowing down to the small of her back, her hands flickered across some machines as she worked; her focus dedicated entirely to whatever she was doing.

“Umm… excuse me, miss Trixie?”

Trixie twitched in surprise, jumping up a little and turning to her guest.

“Yes? Hello? What can I help you with, the store is closed for another hour you know, right?”

“Yes ma’am I know, I’m Elise, I applied about a week ago on-”

Elise’s statement was cut short as Trixie’s somewhat surprised facial express faded, she strode over, smiling, and placed her hands on Elise’s shoulders.

“Elise! Right!” she said as she patted her shoulders and sized her up, “you’re just in time you know! I need another pair of hands today and my previous part-timer went off to the capital world to try to ‘make it big’ like some superstar,” she huffed in visible annoyance. “Here, let me show you the front of the shop.”

Trixie’s hands unclasped Elise and she motioned her to come with her. The following hour was a haze for Elise, so many kinds of creatures, so much information to process, but her virtual assistant recorded it all for her later use. Which animals were carnivorous, which were herbivores, how best to care for certain creatures, it was all so much! And her giddiness grew with each passing fact, this is exactly what she wanted from a job! Eventually, though, the fun had to end.

“Aaand that’s it! Every animal in the front of the store! Which is basically everything we sell to customers live other than food. You ready for service? The store is going to open soon.”

Elise relaxed, knowing the tirade of new information had passed.

“Of course! What do you want me doing today?”

Trixie smiled, “That’s the spirit! Could you work the counter for the first half of the day? I was dreading going on a supply run in the afternoon, but with you along it’ll be easy as cake!”

Elise nodded and smiled, “Sure thing!” She set up shop behind the corner counter and synced her virtual assistant to it, before long customers began filing in and she helped them the best she could. Elise was a quick study, supplying every tidbit of information she had absorbed to customers while filing out there orders. A few hours in a young girl came in and marched straight up to the counter.

“Hello! Who are you? I’m May! Is auntie Trixie here?”

Elise looked at the girl with a bit more scrutiny, same blue eyes as Trixie, the same brown hair, she saw the resemblance.

“Oh, hello May!” Elise began with a smile that she always gave children, “I’m Elise, Trixie is in the back, would you like me to go get her?”

“Yeah! I wanna pick up my package!”

“Okay sweetie, I’ll be right back.” Elise headed into the backroom of the pet shop to ask Trixie about whatever May’s package was and was greeted by a strange sight. Half the backroom was what she expected, pallets filled with dry foods, cleaning supplies to keep the front area sterile, but the other half was filled with incredibly thin transparent trays stacked into towers. Trixie stood at the towers scanning them and doing, well, Elise wasn’t quite sure, but doing something with intense concentration.

“Hey miss Trixie-”

“Please, Elise, call me Trix” Trixie interjected quickly.

Elise relaxed and spoke, “There’s a girl named May up front asking for a package? Also, what are you doing back here? What are these?” she asked motioning toward the towers.

“Oh, these? These are my supply of live food for the carnivores, or at least the ones that prefer live food. They’re called humans.”

“Humans?” Elise’s eyes darted to the edge of her vision, where her virtual assistant would tell her about the unknown species only to see it display… nothing, that piqued her interest immediately.

“What are humans?”

“Here,” Trixie motioned to one of the towers, “take a look.”

Elise took a few steps forward and bent over to take a look inside. It looked like… a seething mass of pale movement. There wasn’t really much to see at this scale so she squinted, her virtual assistant automatically magnifying her vision. She saw some pale bipedal creatures, teeming swarms of the things, there must have been tens of thousands of them, all in various states of action or inaction. Most lazed around, but some of the creatures were paired off, connected to each other in various positions and wiggling.

“Umm, Trixie, what exactly are they doing?”

“Huh, what do you mean?” Trixie zoomed in with her own assistant, “Oh! Sorry this is one of the breeding towers” she blushed a tad, “the ones that are kind of attached to each other are mating, kinda gross, right?”

Gross indeed, Elise thought, shrugging and casting her glance away from the activity in the enclosure, “they’re just animals right? Animals do these sorts of things.”

Trixie let out a tiny laugh and smiled at Elise. “Now see,” Trixie began in a more jovial voice, “you might think that, but I’ve noticed that they have some rudimentary intelligence, see look back in the tower, some of them have started noticing that you’re new here.”

Elise wordlessly raised an eyebrow at Trix before doing as requested. She squinted back into the enclosure and, sure enough, more than a minority had begun to notice the new titaness, some of the ones that were mating even took notice, stopping in the middle of coitus, their reproductive parts separating, flopping apart…. gross… to gawk up at her.

Elise grimaced, unsuccessfully, trying to mask her disgust at having watched the creatures copulate. She understood why Trixie kept them in the back…

“Why are you breeding them back here?” If Trixie noticed her squeamish tone of voice she took no notice, continuing on chipper as before.

“Oh that’s simple,” Trixie began, “see I mainly use them as live food for the carnivores right? And I make sure they all see which trays I take for feed. My virtual assistant monitors each tray, the tray with the fewest successful copulations per month from each tower I use as feed for the month.” Trixie grinned from ear to ear as Elise stood perplexed.

“How does that help?” Elise was dumbfounded.

“Oh Elise! It’s because they compete! They really go at it the closer we get to the end of the month too. More mating means more young that can be used as feed or reproduce themselves in the long haul. Ever since I discovered them about half a century ago I’ve saved about twenty percent on live feed! They can double their population in as little as a year, though...” Trixie frowned a little before continuing, “they can’t actually reproduce themselves until their mid-teens, but once they hit that age I can anti-grav sort them into a new breeding tower and bam! Now that new tower is doubling every year.” Trixie was all smiles.

“Huh, do you really not have any problems with the setup? Like how can you crowd them so much?” The creatures were absolutely packed in the trays, most animals wouldn’t put up with it.

“Oh, uhh yeah,” Trixie shuffled nervously, “I kinda did at the start, but I found that a ratio one male to about seven or eight breeding capable females curbs fighting in the containers to acceptable levels. The males are really the fighters, they’ll fight over access to females, but when I balanced the ratios most fights over mates simmered down. They’ll still bicker over… whatever it is they bicker about, but most fights aren’t deadly or permanently debilitating, so it’s fine."

Trixie shifted her gaze from the tower onto Elise, “Actually there is one thing that I need to fix with them, there’s too much inbreeding, the initial stock I brought back was only around fifty thousand individuals, so I need some fresh stock to put some variety back into the gene pool. That’s what I was planning to do in the afternoon,” Trixie paused for a moment, “you’re okay taking a teleporter off world right? It’s a planet I found out beyond the frontier when I went camping with my boyfriend at the time. He wasn’t too pleased that I found some ‘stupid mites’ more interesting than him, but he was a bit of an ass anyway.” Trixie glanced up toward Elise expectedly.

Elise was… hesitant, but she probably couldn’t squirm her way out of this one. She loved animals! Big fluffy animals, smaller reptiles, giant birds! Not… some mites being raised and bred as cheap protein. But what choice did she have?

“Of course I’l go!,” Elise said graciously, “it’s my job, after all.”

As noon approached, Elise wasnt looking forward to her excursion to this human planet with Trixie. She understood that all animals needed to eat and carnivores needed meat but… couldn’t she just buy normal feed for the animals? Why bother breeding some mites she found on some uncharted world beyond even the backwater frontier? Surely the inconvenience and hassle couldn’t be worth a twenty percent reduction in feed cost… but then again, Elise wasn’t a business owner, maybe the pet industry is cut throat?

She sighed, it didn’t matter, she just had to get it over with and then she would be back to tending to actually impressive animals, animals worthy of being pets, and all would be well.

Trixie emerged from the backroom, a container in each hand, and called to Elise.

“I’m gonna feed the animals before we head out, Elise, come help me out.” Trixie stated, as Elise approached Trixie handed over a bucket of… humans. Suspended in an anti-grav field.

“Why the anti-grav field?” Elise inquired.

“Oh, they’re really soft, I think it’s part of why the animals like them so much, but they’ll get squished without a field, so anti-grav cups and containers are what I use to transport them outside of the trays.” Trixie started walking through the herbivores’ enclosures with her planet feed and shouted over her shoulder, "one cup per enclosure, okay?"

Elise shrugged, “understood.”

She glanced into the bucket, inside was, a preposterous amount of humans, at least tens of thousands, maybe over a hundred thousand.

“Say,” Elise started, “how’d you get so many of these things from fifty thousand anyway?”

Trixie shouted back without so much as glancing in Elise’s direction, “They reproduce like crazy, of the initial fifty thousand only about ten thousand were breeding age females, but I got them each outputting at least one offspring a year, by around fifteen years in or so the first generation of offspring started being viable, so I bred them, by the third generation I had nearly a million breeding age females, we’re starting to reach the fourth generation now, so I’m expecting tens of millions soon. I started it as a curiosity, but honestly? I’ve got too many of the things now.”

Elise nodded and started her rounds. She dumped cups of the humans into all the carnivore’s bowls and… well, they didn’t last too long. The walls of the bowls were far too steep, and it didn’t seem humans could climb walls. She zoomed in a few times, but stopped after a while. Watching them get ripped apart with tooth and talon was less gross than watching them mating, but it still wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do with all of them? I mean, the animals are already eating their fill…”

Trixie had finished her rounds and returned to Elise. “Actually, I have,” she answered immediately, “May actually likes the taste of them, if I can get a license to sell them I could turn a profit that way, do you want to try some?”

Elise thought back to watching the demise of the humans in her bucket, leaking and squirting as the animals set upon them when she put them into their feeding bowls, and then further back to the breeding tower, mucus oozing out of their reproductive… orifices, she felt a bit queasy.

“No, thanks.”

Trixie shrugged, “Suit yourself, we’re headed to the world I found them on in a minute, you need to go to the bathroom or anything?”

“No, no I’ll be fine let’s go ahead and go.” Elise just wanted to get this all over with.

Trixie nodded before heading to the backroom to grab some equipment and the teleporter. She was tampering with the controls as she came back into the front room and after a few seconds a tear in space materialized between the two of them.

“Well, let’s get going then.” Trixie walked right through, and Elise followed. The familiar smell of ozone and a brief sense of vertigo engulfed her and then she was through the rift, somewhere millions of light years beyond Imperial space; a routine commute for many, but not something she often had the chance to experience as someone born on an agricultural world.

Before her was a green, verdant world. A decent sized pond and… what looked like a hive next to it. She approached the mass of gray, first crunching through the outskirts of the hive until the wide and flat gray area transitioned into hive structures that came up to her ankles, the tallest approached her knees.

“I set the teleporter to take us to the highest concentration of humans on the planet, so, here we are.” Trixie extended her arms before her and smiled.

“Is this a human hive?” Elise inquired.

“Yeah… it is but…” her eyes darted to the edges of her vision, reading her virtual assistant, no doubt, “something is… off.” Trixie began scratching her head.

Elise cocked her head toward Trixie, having already noticed a distinct lack of activity in the hive, “You mean there aren’t any humans?”

“My assistant’s scan is telling me there aren’t any humans even left in this hive! When I expanded it to the planet there were only a few thousand! There were billions before! What the hell happened?” Trixie was fuming.

Elise walked around the hive and to the outskirts on the other side she saw something moving below her and reached down for it, squatting down she plucked it from the ground.

“Hey, Trix, what did you eat with that boyfriend you had when you were camping here?”

“How would I remember that?” She was still a bit agitated; she wasn’t going to like this one bit…

“Was it live Calyxans?”

Trixie fell silent and strode over from nearby, squatting down next to Elise as she lifted what was in her hand for her boss to see. An isopod a few inches long with a hard shell, frequently eaten live during social outings, especially picnics or camping trips, a Calyxan, wiggling in her grasp.

“Whoops.” Trixie said bluntly.

Elise's vision flicked to her own virtual assistant. “My VA is saying there are about thirty million Calyxan on the planet. I think I know what happened to your ‘billions of humans.’” she stated.

“Fuck!” Trixie shouted, rising quickly and sauntering over to the tallest hive structures. Elise watched with some bemusement as she flattened them with one kick, then kicked some smaller ones for good measure, shortly before stumbling over her own flailing feet in a rage and falling flat on her ass.

Elise sighed, rising herself, she walked over to Trixie.

“You said that the teleporter took us to the highest concentration of humans on the planet right?” She asked as she helped Trixie back onto her feet. “We might as well grab them, they’re dead here anyway and you need the breeding stock.” Elise was almost happy, she didn’t have to wade through billions of the things, but she couldn’t let Trixie see.

“Yeah… yeah you’re right, let’s just get what we can and go.” Trixie muttered dejectedly.

The duo walked over to a seemingly barren patch of dirt. Trixie looked down and gestured with her hands.

“Here’s our few thousand humans.”

Elise saw nothing, she started to speak but stopped herself as she saw Trixie fidgeting with one of the tools she brought. Content to simply observe, Elise took a few steps back.

Trixie held out what looked like a small pencil, she drew an outline along the ground and with a few murmured commands and a flicked switch, the ground began to rise from the surface. Piles of dirt floated up to the height of Trixie’s midriff and she began to pat the dirt off of what had been below the surface.

After a few pats, a structure emerged from the dirt. Small and cylindrical, an underground bunker of sorts, it was deep down, Elise could step into the hole it came out of and the surface would come up to her thighs, far below what a Calyxan could dig to.

“Well,” Trixie sighed before opening a rift back home. “Let’s get outta here.”

Elise didn’t need to be told twice. She stepped through the rift back home and, after a blast of ozone and vertigo, was back in the shop’s front room.

Trixie recovered quickly and got straight to work, “I’ll go crack this open and split what is left of them into the breeding trays. I told May to come back this afternoon, her package is on the front desk, once you give it to her that should be everything for today.” Trixie smiled, “so how was your first day?”

Elise was… okay with how it went, the animals up front were great, the humans were really gross, but… well the carnivores need to eat something, she figured she’d get used to them.

“It went well. I really like it here!” Elise lied, no point in being a downer on her first day.

“That’s the spirit! I’ll see you tomorrow then!” Trixie declared with a smile before stepping into the backroom with what humans she was able to recover from the uncharted world.

Meanwhile, Elise went to the front desk to wait for May, she wouldn’t have to wait long, within ten minutes May was confidently strolling through the front door.

“Hi miss Elizze!” Her words slurred as her voiced boomed out with the level volume that only children could get away with in public.

“Hiya sweetie! Are you here for you package?” Elise held it out with outstretched arms and a smile.

“Yes! I’m hungry!” May declared while she began to rip the lid off of… an anti-grav full of humans.

“Oh.” Elise muttered.

May paid her no mind. With one fell swoop she grabbed a handful of the humans, her hands turning crimson from where they smashed against her skin, and threw them, en masse, straight into her mouth. Her lips and mouth pockmarked with crimson, May grasped another handful and held it out for Elise.

“Wan’zom?” May’s voice was muffled, her mouth full.

“Oh, no, no thank you sweetie.” Elise said with a delicate smile, though she felt a little queasy.

“’Kay!”

Elise watched as May’s outstretched hand, dropped the offered humans back into the container, well most of them anyway, some just… fell to the floor, with no anti-grav to keep them up. They splattered like water balloons the size of pin pricks on the cold hard tile.

“Here, sweetie, let me walk you out.”

May smiled and nodded, she grabbed her package of humans as Elise took her by the shoulders and led her to the door. Her hand turned the handle for the young girl and May ran off. Elise took a deep breath, and with a sigh of relief for having finished her first day of work. Stepped out onto the boulevard to head home.

Anthony was born into a doomed world.

Decades before he was born two… titans opened a portal onto the Earth. It is said they stomped around the Earth, crushing hundreds of thousands, millions, only to leave after a few days. Vanishing through a portal, the same way they came.

But what doomed the world was what they left behind. From their stomping grounds emerged enormous creatures, nearly fifty meters long and more heavily armored than any of humanity's engines of war. The “tankbugs” as humanity came to call them swept over the world. Using the fauna of the Earth, humans included, to thrive and prosper. Most of humanity was devoured by armored monstrosities from another world within a few years.

Or so Anthony had been told. He had seen them, sure, he worked in the Chicago bunker’s surveillance center. From his post nearly half a mile underground he could see the tankbugs wandering the destroyed cityscape. The bunker project was humanity’s last ditch effort at survival. Only eleven were completed and all but three were gone within a decade, most eventually fell to mechanical failures, rebellions, or burrowing tankbugs if a bunker wasn’t built deep enough. The Dublin bunker fell apart from a revolt that damaged the systems beyond repair nine years prior, and a fault in the Xi’an bunker’s air supply led to their mass suffocation a few years ago. As far as he knew, this was the last vestige of humanity. His bunker of a few thousand, so he kept watch to make sure they would at least see their end coming.

And what an end it would be.

Just like in the stories he had heard all his life, a portal miles tall opened on the south side of Chicago. From it emerged two titanic creatures in the shape of women. A taller brunette and a slightly shorter one with blonde hair. He hit the alarm immediately, the bunker went into lockdown, and Anthony prayed to… something, anything, that this visit from another world wouldn’t destroy what was left of humanity.

He watched the creatures, enormous monsters, poke and prod their way around Chicago. One squatted and picked up… a tankbug, and called the other over to her, both of them squatting with their backs facing him, all he could see from his low perspective were two enormous backsides.

Booming reverberations echoed through the bunker as their footballs struck the Earth, but other more varied vibrations hummed through the Earth’s crust and Anthony realized that it was their speech. It was utterly incomprehensible to him, but it caused the taller one to go on a spree of destruction. She rose up to her full height, headed for downtown, and flattened what was left of Chicago before tripping and beginning to fall. Anthony watched it happen as if in slow motion. He braced right before the thing’s mountain sized ass connected with the ground.

The world shook in a way Anthony had never before experienced, the electricity went out and his cameras went dead. This was it. Without power their ventilation would break down, he would suffocate in this tomb, along with the rest of humanity.

But before that he would have to survive the damned titans stomping, it was booming, all encompassing, getting stronger… he realized too late that something more immediate than suffocation was going to happen to his home.

With horrific noise and shaking he realized that they must be… digging the bunker out. He had no time to imagine for what purpose, as the bunker began to rise the acceleration and g-forces caused him to black out.

After the acceleration, few in the bunker were conscious, and none had any way to see their home being carried through the rift the aliens had come through; as their transit was completed and the rift blipped out of existence, the Earth became devoid of human life.

Anthony slowly came to, what a horrific nightmare! A titan ripping the bunker apart piece by piece, dragging him through the air vaporizing everything around him with the wave of a colossal hand piece. It was over now, thankfully, he was comfortable; as his senses returned to him he felt warmth and humidty and heard… people? His eyes shot open the light blinding him. Before he could even see he heard a voice, soft and feminine.

“Hello outsider.”

“Wha-” he barely managed to mumble out while some small parts of his vision returned to him, directly in front of him, close enough to touch, was a young woman, with light brown hair, pale skin, and not a piece of clothing on her.

“Gah!” Anthony blurted out, “put some clothes on!” He covered his eyes with his hands both for her modesty and because of how bright the world seemed.

“Clothes?” her delicate voice queried. “What are clothes?”

“What do you mean ‘what are clothes?’ clothes are what people wear, its what I have on me!” Anthony's eyes were still adjusting to the bright light beyond the girl in front of him, but his hearing was fully back.

“Hmmmm…” he heard her muse before feeling her hands touch his chest and arm. “You are confused, you have nothing, you are like me.”

“Like you? I’m not-” his voice cut off as he grasped his body, skin touched skin, and he realized he was just as nude as her. His hands shot instinctively for his crotch to cover himself. All he heard from her was a giggle.

“Why do you cover yourself?” She reached to grab his hands and pulled one of his arms up to his rapidly clearing vision, Anthony saw his arm grasped by her thin hands.

“Is this a clothes?” She asked, shaking his wrist a little so his hand would flop around for emphasis.

“No… no it’s not… I just… where am I? What is this place?”

The rest of his vision slowly returned, she released his arm and placed her hands behind her back and stood up straight to answer him properly.

“This is the Being Hall.”

“The Being Hall?” Anthony blurted out, “what the hell is a Being Hall?”

She looked at him, Anthony imagined it was what he looked like when she asked him what clothes were. “The Being Hall is where men… are with women, they be with them.” She gestured toward some people nearby, as Anthony’s vision returned in full he saw what she meant.

About ten feet to his left a man was having sex with a woman, and two other women were right next to them.

Anthony visibly recoiled, backing away and looking around, only to find more groups, more fornication, everyone around him, completely naked, in various states of intimacy or merely lazing about. The lights, the heat, the smell, the humidity. It all overwhelmed his senses, it was too much, too much too fast.

He collapsed, as he felt himself losing consciousness he heard voices as others approached.

“Is the outsider healthy?”

“He is sick!”

“Take him to the elder!”

The last thing he saw was the girl’s face, the one he had spoken to, concern etched into her expression.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When he finally came to he was greeted by a vastly different, albeit still female, voice.

“Waking up then, are you?” An elderly woman’s voice croaked out.

His eyes shot open, it was dark, and the… deplorable sights and sounds from earlier had all but stopped. It seemed that everyone was sleeping.

The old woman coughed.

Well, almost everyone.

Anthony turned to her, she was naked, as was everyone, weary with a sagging, distorted figure. She was easily seventy years old. Anthony tried to speak, but before his words could form she interrupted him.

“You are not from here.”

“No… where is here?”

“The Being Hall, or at least that’s what we came to call it all those years ago. It felt more dignified than ‘the breeding hall’ or ‘hell’.” She wheezed out, and then coughed again.

“Now, young man, you are from Earth, yes? I am from Kansas City and I want to know what happened to my home. Tell me and I will tell you what you want to know.”

Anthony hesitated for a moment, he sat up, and told her everything. The titans, the tankbugs, the bunkers, and the last things he remembered.

“And then… I woke up here, the lights were blinding, I spoke to… a girl, light brown hair before passing out and being brought… here.” he quickly amended, “where is that girl?”

“Liliane is…” she raised her arm to point, “right there, sleeping soundly, she gathered a few girls up and they brought you here to me.”

Anthony’s eyes traced over the nude forms of several sleeping young women, they were very close to each other, some laying in contact with others, nestled between two women he found Liliane. Sleeping peacefully on her belly.

“Why is everyone sleeping so close to each other?...” he wondered aloud, not really expecting a response.

The elder quickly quipped in response, “Do you see any blankets around here, boy?”

He caught himself gazing at Liliane’s backside, her form slowly rising and falling with her breaths, shaking his head, he looked back toward the elder.

“You haven't told me what this place is, only its name.” he plainly said.

The elder sighed before beginning, as if the burden of memory weighed on her physically.

“When the first two titans ravaged Earth, the female one captured and brought some of us back with her. She put us into these…halls… food and water is delivered automatically to each individual, waste is disposed of as it is created. The halls are perfectly liveable, so those of us that were brought here decided to try to adapt to our imprisonment rather than raging against fate. Perhaps we should have raged…” she closed her eyes for a long moment before continuing, “as we started trying to live our lives again within the confines of these halls, some of us began to start families, the titan took notice, and… changed the system of the halls. After there were more of us, she split us into separate halls-”

“There are more halls?” Anthony interjected.

She stared at him, “do not interrupt me young man, and yes, I’ll have Liliane show you in the morning… seeing is believing…”

Her face toughed and she continued speaking, “The titan began to take a hall from each tower and… she would feed them to monsters, at the beginning she would let some return, especially young women,” she looked up grimly, “young women like me. I think to let everyone else know what was happening as we cannot see beyond The Door, I have seen… horrors there and I will not allow this hall to suffer that fate...”

Anthony sat in disbelief, “what happened after that?…”

The elder looked away again, “we eventually noticed a pattern, halls with few children were chosen to be fed to the monsters, so we did what we had to in order to survive… we competed with and continue to compete with the other halls, there is a reason there are so many of us now.”

Anthony recoiled in disgust, “that’s… demeaning! So now that’s life? You just fuck and that’s it? Making as many babies as possible to survive? That's..." he struggled to find the words... "It’s dehumanizing!” His voice rose to a louder volume that before.

“Silence!” the elder hissed, “there are others who spent all of yesterday working to keep everyone in this hall alive including you, naive boy! Allow them the rest they deserve!” Anthony recoiled at her tone, but she continued on. “And, starting as soon as possible, you are going to be joining them. Count yourself amongst the lucky, young man; most boys are raised seperate from Being Halls and are fed directly to the monsters. Rarely are we blessed with a virile young man and you are going to do your part to keep everyone in this hall alive."

Anthony certainly didn't feel lucky as glowered at her, “and if I refuse?”

She shot him a sideways glance, “you would watch everyone here die, ripped apart, screaming for their lives, for your pride?”

He didn’t know what to say, his expression softened, but he remained silent.

“It is our fate, young man,” she continued on with a solemn resignation in her voice, “I can do what I can to make it easier for you, I… empathize with your plight, but you must understand we all have to do what we can to survive here.”

“I… I think I understand.”

“Good, I can match you with Liliane to start, she only just started working as well, and…”

Anthony shot up, “’working’? You have her ‘working’? How old is she?”

“Old enough, same as you, boy. I thought you just said you understood that we do what we have to in order to survive here.” her snappiness had returned.

“I… yeah… of course…” Anthony stammered out.

“Sleep now, you’ve had a rough day, the titan ripped your bunker apart and placed its occupants in various halls. You’ll be able to see it tomorrow when the lights return, until then, rest.”

He didn’t need to respond. He laid down and, in the darkness and silence, he finally got some sleep.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He awoke to the sound of the occupants of the Hall ‘working’, as the elder had so aptly put it, it was a constant droning of light moans and impacting flesh, there was no bombastic pornographic squealing, but there was enough that everyone knew what was going on. Anthony did his best to avert his eyes.

He sat up to see the elder speaking to Liliane, the young girls eye’s were glazed with drowsiness, but her posture reflected an immense respect for the older woman. Anthony could just barely make out the tail end of their conversation.

“…and be sure to show him the metal hall the titan brought him in, it will help soothe his mind, do what you can to ease his pain, and after that be with him, you’re working age now and he is too, there can be no delay. The next choosing is coming soon.”

“Of course elder, I won’t fail you.” Liliane replied, reverently.

The elder smiled, and pinched the young girl's cheeks, “That’s my granddaughter.” she noticed that Anthony had woken up and called out to him. “Boy, Liliane will take you to the Door-side wall. To see the towers and your bunker. I hope it can bring you some peace.”

With that, she began to shuffle away but before she got far Liliane piped up, realizing she had nearly forgotten something.

“Elder! I forgot to ask, please teach me, what are clothes?”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some time later Anthony walked with Liliane toward this ‘Door-side wall’, all around them were… ‘working’ groups of a man and several women each. They reminded Anthony of what he had heard earlier.

“She ordered you to be with me, but she didn’t order me, why was that?” Anthony asked bluntly.

“Oh, I, ummm,” Liliane stammered and looked down, “I think she might have wanted it to feel less forced, so much has been forced upon you already…”

Anthony nodded sagely, “and if I won’t be with you? What if I don't want to work?”

“You do not have to do much work for me to be with you.” Liliane replied matter of factly.

“How would that even be possible?” Anthony was genuinely curious.

“You do not, uh… have to move.” Liliane clarified.

“No, no I mean, what if I refuse, what if I don’t let you be with me at all.”

“But…” Liliane sounded, puzzled, “why would you do that? We have to do this, it is what must be done, for the good of the Hall…”

“What if I just don’t want to? I’m bigger than you, you couldn’t force me,” Anthony fired back.

Liliane stopped and was silent for a time before responding. “I could not… no… please do not say no, I need to do this, you need to promise me that you will." She tried to carry the same stern voice her grandmother used so effortlessly, but her tone wavered, she was terrified of not being able to do what she thought was her duty.

“I, didn’t, uh, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, I promise I will be with you later today, okay? As instructed.”

Her eyes were intense, ferocious even. He couldn’t help but like her, even if she was a bit naive. Her body relaxed as she replied.

“Okay…" she breathed out, "thank you.”

They walked in silence for a while, or at least as silent as a hall could get during working hours. The going was slow as they maneuvered around working groups, but after around an hour of walking they finally reached their destination. The Door-side wall was massive, easily dozens of feet thick, and as he brought himself directly to it he saw an unimaginable sight.

Off in the distance were… towers, dozens upon dozens of towers with hundreds of halls stacked in each. Beyond those was the Door the size of a mountain and next to that, miniscule in comparison, sat his bunker, dug up from below the countryside west of Chicago, and now placed, broken and cut into, upon the desk of a creature nearly beyond human comprehension. All he could see of the creature was its back, as it worked on… something. It moved infrequently, its form both a marvel and a terror to behold.

“That is everything the elder asked me to show you.” Liliane stated plainly from behind him.

“Yes, I guess it is.” Anthony was still in awe of it all, dumbstruck and horrified as he gazed out upon the massive cavern that housed what was left of the human race.

Liliane tapped him on the shoulder, he turned away from the room and looked down at her.”

“Yes? What is it?”

“It is time to work.” She said.

Anthony began stuttering, “what, here? Now? Can’t it, I dunno wait a bit?

She glowered back at him, “no, we need to work, why should we get to rest when everyone else who can work is already working?” She began to try to push him to the floor, but she was simply not strong enough. After a moment she stopped trying to push him. Her eyes locked with his.

“You promised, you are not a liar, are you?”

“No,” Anthony declared, “no, I’m not a liar.”

“Good.” She began pushing him down again, but this time he let her lower him to the floor. His back against the ‘Door-wall’, she straddled his legs and used her hands reached down to help… get him ready.

Unable to move, and too nervous to start touching her, Anthony stammered out, “umm, have you, uh, ‘worked’ with men before?”

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

She shrugged, “it was just work.”

A silence hung between the two of them as her hands worked along him. Soon enough, he was as ready as he would ever be. She raised her body up from where she was resting atop his thighs and positioned herself for intercourse.

She paused at the precipice. To ask a simple question.

“What is your name?”

With a shock, he realized that he had never even properly introduced himself.

“My name is Anthony.”

“My name is Liliane.” She responded back with a whisper.

“I know, you grandmother told me.”

“Oh.” She blurted out, as if on reflex. With nothing else to say, she pushed her body down onto his hips and got to work. She was methodical, robotic even, she placed her chin upon his shoulder and moved like a machine. She continued like that, silently, Anthony could hear her breath quicken in his ear, but she didn't moan like how others often did, this really was just business to her.

After a few minutes of silence, Anthony finally broke the silence, “this… is, uh, not how I thought my first time would go.”

Liliane took her chin off his shoulder to look at and speak to him, though her lower body did not stop for a heartbeat.

“First time?” She asked cocking her head, “you’ve never been with a woman before?”

“Yep!” He gasped out, as her hips continued, he was finding it hard to think about conversation, “first time!”

“But… you are a man! A young man yes, but you could have been working for years already…” Her face showed absolute bewilderment, then her eyes flicked over to the table beside the Door. “The hall you are from, the one over on the table, it must have been a very strange hall if this is your first time.”

Her eyes tracked back to his, her assault on his lower half had not slowed down in the slightest during both the silence and the entire conversation, and he was finally pushed over the edge. He grasped at her shoulder and waist, sinking his fingers into her out of instinct. She finally slowed down and allowed him a few reflexive thrusts as he 'did his job', and then he was spent. She was still atop him for a moment, seemingly to make sure she got all of it, and then extracted herself from him, holding a hand under herself to stop anything from spilling out.

“That was… intense…” he gasped.

She smiled down at him, “you do very good work, Anthony, there is a lot here, it is even spilling out! Rest for a moment, I will go find the next girl.

Andrew’s head shot up, “next girl? What do you mean next girl? I thought your grandmother told you to ‘be with me’?”

Her curious gaze came back. “Yes…” she began, as if speaking to a naive child, “I have been with you today.” She held out her hand, semen pooling in it from where it had leaked out of her.

She continued, “I have worked for today, tomorrow I will work again, but you can give more than once in a day, so I need to go find another girl who can still receive today and bring her here.”

“How many girls are you going to bring?”

Her head cocked, “As many as you can handle.” she said plainly.

Anthony sighed in resignation and revelation, “I… see why everyone sleeps so deeply when the lights go out…”

Liliane smiled down at him and simply said:

“Yes.”

She turned to go find some more girls who needed to work.

And Anthony watched her go.

Elise yawned as she entered the back room of the shop. It was very early, the lights were still out, and she had a few things she needed to do this morning.

First things first, she stripped. Removing her plain top and pants, Trixie bought some employee uniforms last month and was adamant that both she and Elise wear them. Elise didn’t mind, she quickly got used to changing before and after work; she bent over to rummage through the uniform box for her size. Trixie, ever the optimist about expanding her staff, bought far more than two lithe women would ever need, but Elise eventually found a clean size small and donned the collared shirt, she stumbled a bit while pulling up the tight black pants, panic overtaking her until she regained her footing, she eventually got those on too.

“Close one,” she mumbled. She knew that the human’s towers had anti-grav shock absorbers so that her footfalls didn’t effect them, but that wouldn’t stop her from falling over onto one, and having a huge mess to clean up afterwards.

Her eyes drifted over to a nearby tower, there was little movement inside, even when she squinted and could make out individual humans most were sleeping. They slept together in clusters, Elise wasn’t certain why. When they were like this Elise almost wanted to admit that they were… a little cute. Her two months of working around them helped her get used to them, or at least comfortable enough to not be constantly disgusted by them. She still wasn’t gonna sit around and watch them mating all day, but she could at least not feel grossed out when she saw them doing it.

Unfortunately, the gore during feedings did still gross her out. Eventually, Trixie noticed her apprehension and told Elise that she wouldn’t have to do it anymore. Elise felt a little bad about that… but deep down she was relieved she wouldn’t have to watch them get slaughtered.

Stretching, Elise synced her virtual assistant to the backroom’s systems and got to work. She checked inventories, population counts, orders, and various other regular tasks. After a few minutes or so she finished, and started on her novel task for the day. Trixie had gone back to the human world last week to make sure there weren’t any more of them and teleported into a landscape with abnormally high background radiation, so she asked Elise to make sure they were still fertile. Unfortunately it would have to wait until later, a sample was needed to test fertility and they only started breeding once the lights came on in about an hour. Elise ran the scan to find a sample out of idle boredom and her eyebrows perked, there was a sample available according to the room’s systems. A marker popped into existence about halfway up a tower across from the door, and she squinted to zoom in.

A small female was on its hands and knees, seemingly having been pushed into the wall as it mated with the male behind it. Elise’s VA showed that the female was one raised in the store, but the male on top of it was from the new stock. The male had finished, but it hadn’t moved from atop the poor thing so it was still being pushed into the wall.

Elise noticed that the creature’s eyes were looking at her. Strange, she thought, as she stood up and began walking toward the tower. Its eyes widened as it quickly separated itself from the male and stood. Elise noticed the tell-tale dribble of the male's semen coming from the female, a sure sign of a successful coitus, and knew she had her sample.

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Liliane awoke in the dark. She had always been a light sleeper, and ever since Anthony had begun sleeping with her his rolling and movement would frequently wake her.

Today, however, Liliane had been awoken by one of the titans coming through the Door. She was… magnificent. Liliane came up to her knees from the floor and gawked at her. This was the smaller one, the one with light hair and thin form. ‘Thin’ being a relative term, even the thinnest part of its abdomen was nearly the length of a hall. Liliane’s movements must have roused Anthony for he was soon rising to join her in observing the titan.

“She is beautiful, is she not?” Liliane queried.

“Yea, terrifying too.” she heard him reply back.

The titan was taking off her ‘clothes’, Liliane had never known that the titans were covered in anything, she had always just assumed their clothes were part of their bodies, even after her grandmother, the elder, explained it to her. She still found it to be a confusing concept; at least until the titans had begun changing their clothes in front of the towers. The smaller titan had removed its lower clothes and was bending over, rummaging through a massive container.

Anthony had told her the clothing left on the titans when they changed was called ‘underwear’. It was designed specifically to cover their reproductive parts. Liliane still giggled at the idea, why would anyone, human or titan, make their reproductive parts harder to access? It simply did not make sense to her.

Liliane twitched a little as one of Anthony’s hands made its way to her lower back, she sighed, he was usually excited when he awoke, and in some way, observing the titan bending over must have excited him further. She felt him position his torso behind her, his body pressing into her back as his hands made their way to her hips. She relaxed her body, spread her legs apart, arched her back, and tried to lower her chest to the ground to give him easier access, but she was too close to the wall and instead she found herself being pushed into it. Anthony either did not care or did not notice as he began to roughly thrust into her.

She heard his breath quicken as he started to really go at it. His hips slapped into hers, but she could not help but feel a pang of annoyance as he forced her face into the wall. Liliane did not understand why he insisted on being with her first each day, but this had become something of a morning routine for the two of them. No other men worked with the same girl every day like Anthony did with her. That is not to say he did not work with other girls, he did; in fact, he had become extremely good at working. He could consistently be with almost ten girls every day, and one day he even worked with fourteen! She simply did not understand his particular attachment to her, he told her it was because she was "special" to him, but she did not quite understand what he meant. She did not mind, but normally they would at least eat and drink before starting; she was hungry and needed to relieve herself, so she hoped he would finish soon.

She distracted herself from these issues by observing the titan. It was harder to observe the massive god-like being with Anthony knocking her about, but she watched it don its clothes and then simply stand there, its eyes flicking around seemingly at random. Liliane assumed that the titan could see things that she could not see, or maybe it was the titans’ way of thinking, she was not certain.

Liliane took note Anthony’s more ragged breaths and his shallower, more rapid thrusts, so she began to push her rear into his hips in sync with him in order to hasten his finish. Her plan worked, the breath warming her neck intensified, and his grip on her hips became vice-like. within less than a minute he pushed into her one final time, smashing her face against the wall and keeping her there while his seed was rhythmically pulsed into her. She imagined that anyone watching would think she looked very, very silly. She was thankful that no one else could see, at least until her eyes focused on the titan and she realized that it was looking right at her.

No, surely the titan was looking at the towers, not at her, there was no way that-

But before Liliane’s thoughts could finish, the titan stood and started walking toward them. Liliane shot up, her unexpected movement forcing even the larger Anthony off of her. Within moments the titan strode the distance from the desk to their tower and its massive midriff was all she could see, the hall began to slide out of the tower, some unknown force preventing the feeling of acceleration or shaking from rousing its occupants, but there was nothing to stop the cold air rushing in and the panicked voices of those already awake; within moments there was outright hysteria amongst the hall’s inhabitants.

Liliane stood, her hands coming up to her chest where it felt as if her heart had frozen over. Were they being chosen? No… no that could not be right, choosings were never done so quickly after another, and her hall had worked hard to make sure they would never be chosen, even she had done her part! Her heart dropped for the briefest of moments as she felt herself rising up, she heard Anthony cry out, but all she could think of were the horror stories her grandmother had told her awaited those who were chosen, but then she realized… no one else was rising with her. She finally began to panic, but before she fully realized what was happening, she had passed the barrier of the tray; its intertial dampeners no longer masking the acceleration forces exerted on her from being moved so quickly, and she blacked out.

Elise deftly placed the tiny thing between her index finger and thumb, her virtual assistant recognized her intent and generated an anti-grav field to transport her sample. Carefully, Elise walked over to the table to set the creature up to be worked on.

One anti-grav workstation setup later, the human was ready, its body flopped around aimlessly, one quick squint confirmed her suspicions, the poor thing had passed out.

“These damn things… they’re so fragile…” she mumbled, to no one in particular.

She reached for the tools Trixie used to work on small animals and found her hands grasping at air. There was nothing on the side of the table where they usually were. Drat, she thought.

With a sigh, Elise wandered out into the front room to find the damn things.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liliane awoke, at first, she did not remember what had happened, but as her memory quickly rushed back to her she realized that she was… weightless, and lazily spinning; around her was…. nothing, no one was with her. She was alone, and it took mere seconds for terror to overtake her.

Her limbs flailed as she tried to find purchase on something, anything, only for her body to continue spinning as if she were a mote of dust in a sunbeam. Her eyes darted around like bullets, trying to make sense of the world as it looked from outside the hall. She closed her eyes, trying to concentrate, she pushed the feeling of terror down as far as she could make it go and tried to take stock of her surroundings. Her eyes opened. She could make out… towers, in the distance, the door was closer than it had ever been before, she used the door’s orientation to help her determine which way was “down” and below her she saw… the table. She was above the table! Floating, and awaiting an unknown fate. At this distance, she did not even know which tower it was, she was so far from her home.

The titan that abducted her was absent as well, it must have left her to go do… whatever it was that titans did.

For the first time in her entire life, she was completely and truly alone.

The thought, along with the temperature, made her shiver. Compared to the climate controlled towers packed with warm human bodies, the open air felt like an ice bath. She brought her knees to her chest, and curled into a fetal position, trying to warm herself, to no avail. Her chill was compounded when a horrific gust of air swept past her, louder than anything she had ever heard. The titan had opened the door and entered the room. It sauntered over to where Liliane drifted, her head fought against the rotation of her body to try to keep her eyes on it, it was absolutely enormous. A gargantuan hand rose from its side and two of its massive fingers settled on opposite sides of her; Liliane’s rotation halted abruptly with her front facing the titan, and she saw the titan’s face up close for the first time.

Liliane looked up in awe, its face was more like a mountain than a living thing. Its mouth could swallow an entire hall’s inhabitants whole, Its eyes could fit thirty people end to end between the upper and lower lid, even a single one of its eyelashes was thicker than Liliane’s entire body! She was nothing compared to this behemoth, and the thought made her curl up even tighter.

She felt a soft tingle overtake her right leg, Liliane looked fearfully at the titan, who was smiling down at her, and she relaxed a fraction.

A moment later, faster than she could ever move it herself, Liliane’s right leg jerked away from her torso, forcefully bent at a sharp angle, she heard the snap before she felt it.

And then she screamed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Ah, whoops.” Elise muttered to herself.

She had found the tools that Trixie used for the smaller animals in the front room, and she had come back to extract a sample of the male’s semen from the female, but had run into an issue.

While Elise had gone rummaging to find the tools, the creature had woken up, its frightful eyes looking up at her own. More importantly, though, is that it had locked it legs together once it regained consciousness, making it difficult to access the thing’s reproductive tract and get the sample she needed.

No problem, thought Elise, she would just use the tools designed for small animals, their clamp fields could be scaled down to even work on animals as small as humans, she just had to adjust the size and then she could work normally.

Or so she thought, as she clamped onto one of the creature’s legs, instead of gently prying it away from its body as she intended, the leg jerked and the bone inside snapped in two. The creature began to writhe and twist, obviously in pain. She checked her settings, and realized the problem. She had scaled the size of the field down, but not the strength, a stupid mistake.

“Ah well, no harm no foul.” She adjusted the settings and continued with her work. She restrained the rest of the creature, taking care not to put pressure onto the damaged limb, and moved to take a sample from the front hole between the creature's legs, just in time, too, because soon after she took the sample the poor thing began to wet itself, as it was no longer rotating, the floating puddle of its own excreta pooled and coated its lower body through surface tension. Eugh, gross, she thought.

The sample that she required in hand, she walked away from the mess and over to a specialized microscope. After all, not even her virtual assistant could zoom in enough to see individual sperm cells.

The scan ran almost instantly, Elise compared the sperm count from the new stock male to what was known to be normal and it was… just about equal, the new stock actually had a bit more, but it was close enough that she was confident that any potential radiation exposure hadn't adversely impacted their fertility.

Elise smiled, recorded the data to show to Trixie, and threw the sample away. Her task completed, she moved to put away the tools and clean the table. Her fingers moved to snuff the life out of the poor human still floating there and end its suffering, but she paused when she squinted to get one final look at it.

It was looking up at her, while Elise analyzed the sample it seemed to have vomited onto itself; tears were streaming down its face. It seemed to recognize that Elise’s fingers were closing in on its sides, and its eyes closed, as if accepting its fate. The female's face would still intermittently convulse in pain, but it was otherwise calm.

Elise frowned, she couldn’t help but feel a little bad, she loved animals of all kinds, and while humans were certainly amongst her least favorite animals, they were still just one of the creatures of the universe.

She bit her lip, and instead of pressing her fingers together, she willed an anti-grav field between them to transport the creature. She moved, slowly, much slower than she normally would, in an attempt to not knock the poor thing out again; it had suffered enough. Her virtual assistant directed her to the tray she had taken it out of, and she opened it once more. With a gentleness she had never used with humans before, she slowly lowered it into the tray. She placed it, delicately, onto the surface. The poor thing lay in a crumpled heap, unconscious despite the fact that she could have sworn she was being gentle enough to keep it awake; her VA told her that it was still alive, so that would have to be good enough.

Regardless, Elise was still on the clock, she reinserted the tray back into the tower, and moved to the front room to get ready for the day, a slight smile on her lips, satisfied with having chosen kindness rather than convenience.

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Liliane… had a hard time remembering what happened after her leg was shattered. She remembered screaming, tears running down her cheeks, as her body was constricted from moving and something tingled from within her crotch. She remembered emptying her bladder, its warm contents coating her body before turning stale and frigid like everything else outside the halls.

And she remembered the pain, it was unlike anything she had ever felt, her thighbone had been snapped clean in two, it hung at an unnatural angle and when she saw her own right thigh, bent outward at an obtuse angle, she threw up, warm sick sputtered onto her chest and belly, it soon turned tepid and then frigid like the urine before it. The titan had disappeared in the meanwhile and Liliane was left… floating, in a puddle of her own piss and puke, waiting for death.

She would not have to wait long. The titan reappeared, it wasted no time as its fingers closed in upon her from either side, she looked up at the titan, its gaze matching her own, she knew she must have not worked hard enough, she must have messed up somewhere or somehow, and this was her punishment. She accepted her end, and closed her eyes.

But instead of feeling her life end between those titanic fingers, she felt acceleration. It was weaker than before, and she opened her eyes to see that she was being carried between the titan’s fingers. Her head jerked around to see where she was being taken; after a moment, she realized she was being carried to… to a hall! Her hall! The one across from the door and halfway up! Lilane cried, either from pain, elation, or both, she was not sure.

After a few moments she felt herself being lowered into the hall, the warmth, humidity, and voices returned. Home, she was home.

Gingerly, the titan placed Liliane upon the floor, where she promptly fainted.

It was a calm and quiet early morning for the hall, the older titan had entered the back room and was changing, but it had not yet turned the lights on.

Anthony lay on his back, Liliane sprawled across his chest, she was what usually woke him up these days. She was groaning in her sleep, twitching and flinching, dried lines travelled away from her eyes and down to his chest, showing the paths her tears had traced during the night; she was dreaming again, nightmares.

Anthony sat up, slowly, and moved her to his lap. With one hand on the back of her head, and the other on her rib cage, he rocked her as gently as he could until her eyes shot open. Her pupils dilated, a brief moment of panic and fear coursed through her before she processed that she wasn’t dreaming anymore. Anthony said nothing, merely holding her in his hands. The panic passed after a few fleeting moments and her breathing slowed, having noticed Anthony’s concerned gaze, she tried to put on a smile.

“Good morning,” she croaked out.

Anthony bent down and kissed her forehead, “Good morning,” he whispered back. He said nothing about her nighttime troubles; there wasn’t anything else that could be said. Ever since her abduction and return last month she hadn’t been the same, sometimes he felt like she was an entirely different person.

Every night she would have nightmares, during the day her former chipper determination had been replaced by a barely repressed anxiety. Anthony remembered how she stood when he first met her, back straight, chest puffed out, prideful, knowing that her efforts helped to preserve her community.

Now, however, she was a wreck in both body and spirit. Physically, her right leg was useless, they had done their best, but it would still take months to heal and even when it did she would never walk like how she had before. His memory flickered back to when she was returned to them from between the titan’s fingers, a crumpled heap, covered in her own piss and vomit, they tried to set her bone while she was still unconscious, but she woke up in the middle of it.

He could still remember how she had screamed. It was the worst sound he had ever heard.

“Anthony, I need to…” Liliane’s voice tapered off, but it brought him back to the present. He smiled down at her.

“Of course, here let me get you up.”

She smiled weakly, shame etched into her expression; Anthony crouched beside her, his arms around her upper torso, holding up most of her weight.

She squatted on her one good leg, and did her best to relieve herself in silence.

The halls were amazing, designed with technology that made his former home look like a tin can. Anything that wasn’t supposed to be in the hall, be it stray hairs, dead skin, or human waste, simply absorbed into the ground and disappeared; whisked away by some unknown force for disposal. He averted his eyes from Liliane’s business, knowing that the floor would handle whatever left her body.

Somewhat disturbingly, water and food came in the same way; thankfully, it was perfectly clean and separate from the waste. It floated upward from the ground whenever the hall deemed it necessary, such as when someone relieved themselves, Elise scooped some up and maneuvered awkwardly to wash herself down there, Anthony had offered to do it for her multiple times, but each time she refused, preferring to struggle than deal with the indignity of being cleaned by someone else.

Liliane finished, rinsing her hands in the water still floating near her, and Anthony set her down. She laid on her left side, and turned away from him. His lecherous eyes traced her backside and settled on her butt, still glistening with water. Had she been healthy, he would have wanted to be with her right then, but she couldn’t handle something that physical.

That was, surprisingly, the worst part of it all, and likely the part that fed into her psychological distress. The fact that she couldn’t work was devastating to her. She even started refusing food about a week after returning, and didn’t eat anything for three days before the elder came and talked to her. Their conversation was in whispers, and Liliane was crying by the end of it, but she began to eat again after that.

Anthony simply couldn’t understand the guilt that wracked Liliane, so he sought the elder out for answers; she told him that, in the culture of the halls, there was nothing worse than being a burden. Adults worked, children were cared for and protected as the hall’s future, and the no longer fertile elders took care of any children so that their parents could spend their time working. Everyone had a role to play, a job to do, but due to the fact that the halls were safe by design, having padded walls and floors with no dangerous objects, they had never had an injury as serious as Liliane’s.

The guilt that bore down on Liliane was enough to cause her to stop eating. She had admitted to the elder that she was trying to… punish herself for being useless. The elder talked some sense into her, as grandmothers often do.

Anthony circled around to her front, squatting down in front of her. She was eating breakfast, some food, a strange sludge that tasted like salty porridge, had floated up from the ground and she was scooping at it with her hands. Anthony reached for it as well and they ate together.

“I’m gonna head along the wall, toward the table, for work today.” He told her. “I won’t be going too far, you should come with me and give the muscles in your left leg a workout.”

Liliane frowned at him, “I would only slow you down and tire you. You need to preserve your strength for working, you should not even be sleeping with me…” she trailed off. Liliane had noticed that she woke him up with her nightmares, but the elder told Anthony that her nightmares were worse when she slept with her instead of him. Much like how Liliane refused his help with her physical needs, Anthony refused to sleep anywhere other than with her. Anthony was tired during the day, sure, but he needed to be there for her.

“No, no I’m a big guy, and you’re really lightweight, you won’t tire me one bit.” He smiled back down at her. Hoping some of his somewhat forced cheer got through to her.

She looked away from him, staring at the ground in discomfort for a few seconds before replying.

“Okay…” she sighed out. Arguing with him on this wasn’t worth it, soon after she returned, she tried to convince him to stop taking care of her and to focus on work instead, he argued with her so long that he was only able to be with two women that day, and if there was one thing inside Liliane stronger than her feelings of self loathing, it was her sense of duty to the hall. She wouldn’t let him waste all day like that again, so she reached up with her arms, and Anthony helped her. He positioned his body along her right side, cupped his left hand under her armpit, and slowly brought her up with him as he stood. She slung her right arm over his shoulder with her right leg curled above the ground, and her left leg working as normal, they began to shuffle along the wall. It was a weird dance they had worked on perfecting over the past month, and they were getting pretty good at it. Anthony just had to keep her balanced and upright as she sort of hopped along beside him, keeping the muscles in her left leg moving was important to prevent atrophy.

“How’s the leg?” He queried innocently.

“It is good, barely any pain anymore.” She gave him a fake smile as she lied. He knew it agonized her, he saw her wincing in pain without fail multiple times an hour, all day long.

They continued like that for a while, the lights came on at some point and the rest of the hall began to wake up. Some ate breakfast, some relieved themselves, and still some others got to work almost immediately. Picking partners from around them and beginning.

“Anthony, I have exercised enough, the lights are here, you need to start working. Set me down.” Liliane said plainly, with a twinge of authority that he often heard her grandmother use.

“Yes ma’am,” he replied, setting her down as delicately as he could. He stood and stretched, a long day of working ahead of him.

“Anthony?” Liliane squeaked out.

“Hmm? What’s up?”

“When you finish today… could you maybe… be with me? When you are done working.” She asked in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

Anthony frowned, this wasn’t the first time she had asked him, but his answer had not changed.

“No… no your leg is hurt real bad. I could knock it around and hurt you even more.” He continued on, “you went through something extremely traumatic, you need rest, not pointless potentially dangerous activity.”

“I am fine!” She blurted out. “Look I can…” she began trying to raise her injured leg with her arms, the limb wavered and she tried her best to mask her gasp of pain.

“Liliane!” Anthony crouched down quickly in front of her and took her hands off her thigh. “Stop! Just stop! Okay?”

“I can!…” She gasped out, tears started streaming down her face as she looked at him pitifully, “I can work!…” she sputtered out, the pain she had caused herself was so intense that saliva dribbled down her chin and she didn’t even notice.

“Oh, Liliane…” he got closer and she buried her face into his chest, sobbing and sniffling quietly into him.

They stayed like that for some time before Anthony inquired.

“Better?”

“Yes…” she sputtered out, “I am sorry, I just…”

He hugged her again, and kissed her on her forehead.

“It’s okay, it’s okay…” he spoke the words like a mantra as he hugged her. They stayed like that for some time, Liliane no longer crying, but Anthony was unsure if he could leave her in such a state.

As if sensing his hesitation, Liliane moved first, she brought her head up from his chest and looked him square in the face.

“You need to get to work.” she said with as much composure as she could muster. She was stable, her moment of hysteria having passed

He looked back at her, “Yes, I suppose I do, promise me you won’t do anything stupid while I’m gone?”

Liliane gave him a gooey sounding snort, her sobbing having clogged her sinuses. “I promise.”

Anthony began to smile a tad, but was interrupted by Liliane closing the distance between them as she kissed him on the cheek, it was the first time she had ever kissed him.

His smile transitioned into a big, goofy grin that ended abruptly as she pushed him off with all her strength, it wasn’t enough to knock him over, but it was enough to force him to stand.

“Go.” she commanded him.

“Yes ma’am.” he replied with a faux salute.

Anthony turned away immediately after, but if he had been able to see Liliane he would have seen the slightest of smiles upon her lips.

Anthony strode through the hall in search of work. Clusters were beginning to form, and he looked around for some girls that took his fancy. Typically, groups of women would form and a man would ask them if they wanted to work with him that day. Should they accept, and they usually would, the man would stay there working all day, the girls were responsible for finding more partners for him should he be up to it. The women in each group varied in age, count, and appearance, as Anthony was a fairly attractive young man, he rarely had groups refuse him. Only a few groups were working already, so he had first pick.

A week into his stay here, he had learned this hall had only been chosen once, very early on, he assumed it was the choosing that the elder had survived through. The survivors had since implemented the current system, and everyone worked to make sure it never happened again. It wasn’t perfect, but trying to reorganize the system based on new ideas when everyone’s lives depended on their continued success… was a hard sell. Everyone knew they had to do their part. Almost no one griped, women only worked once a day, and many men were... more than eager to “do their part” to ensure the survival of the hall. Even those that were less than eager did their duty. Anthony had actually met a gay couple during his first month, those poor guys suffered through their fate and did their jobs admirably, the entire hall respected them immensely for it and, as far as Anthony knew, no group of women had ever refused either of them.

Anthony walked through unfamiliar faces, he had rarely been to this area. The halls were massive, it was hard to get a definitive count, but a single hall could contain tens of thousands of people. Normally he was near the corner closest to the door, but today he had ventured all the way to the center. He prefered to stay near the wall facing the door. Knowing when the titans were present was better than the ignorance provided by residing deeper in the hall. Not everyone shared his opinion, and the wall facing the door was actually less crowded than further in.

However, “less crowded” did not mean “uncrowded”, he still had to walk with trepidation, careful to not step on anyone sitting or laying on the ground.

Anthony cleared his mind, focus! He thought. There is work to do.

His eyes scanned around him, and he saw… thirteen, maybe fourteen groups, six were working already, so he scanned those that were unoccupied. He disregarded the groups of three, he could handle more, so his search narrowed down to the three groups that had five or more women each. One group was composed of six somewhat older women, not particularly his fancy, plus they tended to prefer not being with boys that could be their sons’ ages. The two other groups of five were closer in age to him. One near the wall and the other further in. He approached the wall group, preferring the view.

“Hello.” Anthony approached and offered greetings.

All eyes in the group turned to him, judging him from their seats on the floor, he always hated this part, but figured it was just part of the process.

A raven haired girl stood and approached him.

“You are… the outsider, right?” the raven haired girl asked, “we haven’t seen you here before. Normally you’re over near the door side corner, no?”

“Yea,” he replied sheepishly, “Usually anyway, I wanted to venture out a bit further today, ya know? See the hall.”

She looked him up and down, smiled at him, and looked back at her group. “Well?” she asked.

“Too scrawny!” blurted out a slightly thicker and quite well-endowed blonde.

“Triss! That’s so rude!” the girl next to her hissed, a smaller redhead with freckles, probably the youngest in the group.

“What? I calls ‘em as I see ‘em.” The larger girl spouted back.

The redhead shot the larger girl a glare, and beamed up at Anthony.

“Ignore her, outsider, we’d be happy to work with you today.” she smiled.

“Any other comments or concerns?” The raven haired girl asked, she seemed to be in charge.

“Nope! No concerns!” called out the fourth girl.

“He’s fine.” The fifth answered.

“Well,” the raven haired girl turned to him, “there you have it. You’re welcome here with us, please, sit.” she gestured to an open spot between the small redhead and an average sized brunette.

As he took a seat, the redhead leaned over and sized him up.

“Oh! He’s pretty big!” She turned Triss, the larger girl, for confirmation.

“He’s average at best and you know it, Ash!” Triss declared after getting a good look at him herself.

“Please excuse both of them,” the fourth girl, a strikingly attractive brunette beside him, spoke out, melodically. “They love to disagree with each other.”

“Only because you’re so boring, Liz!” the redhead spouted back.

“Her name’s ‘Elizabeth’ could she ever not be boring?” the well-endowed blonde agreed.

“So true, Triss, so true!”

The redheads voice was pretty shrill, at least in Anthony’s opinion.

“So…” the raven haired girl began, “my name is Zaya, you know Liz, Triss, and Ash.” she stated indicating the brunette, the blonde, and the redhead, “and this is Morgan.” she finished, gesturing toward the final girl, a blonde sitting across from him. Morgan waved genially at him, and he smiled back.

“So, girls, who’s first?” Zaya asked.

“Me! I’m going!” Ash was on her feet in an instant, she grabbed Anthony and dragged him over to the wall. She pointed out to his bunker that was still on top of the table. The larger titan would sometimes study it for some unknown purpose.

“You came from that, right! What was it like?” She was a ball of energy, it seemed, while she pointed with one hand she had already grasped Anthony’s sensitive bits with the other to prep him.

“Ah, well, it was smaller, stuffier than in here too, we only had a few thousand people, but it was built to be durable so everything was hard, physically I mean, not like how it is here.”

“Whoa, that’s crazy!” the redhead said with exasperation. Her hands unclasped his member and she positioned herself facing away from him with her hands on the wall, she bent over so that her butt stuck out, inviting him to position himself behind her. He rubbed his member against her sex for a brief moment, and she pointed at the top of what remained of the bunker as he entered her and started moving.

“What’s that do?”

Anthony drew his gaze from his hips rhythmically slapping into hers and instead squinted into the distance, “I think that’s what’s left of the ventilation system,” he said, “it’s what we used to get fresh air down into my old hall, it was pretty deep down.”

“Woo- oh! Wow!” She gasped in the middle as she received a particularly strong thrust.

He had one of his hands on her shoulder, the other on her hip, his thrusts increasing in power as he began to get into the swing of working.

She turned back to look at him, her butt jiggling as he pushed into her, she was smiling.

“That’s so cool! Tell me more!”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Ash, I dunno what’s going on in your head, but he is not big and he is certainly not great, I can barely feel a thing!”

“He felt huge from behind! You should’ve let him do you! When he finished and just pressed me into the wall… wow!”

Triss, the larger blonde, was on him now, carrying on a conversation with Ash. She was facing away from him as he lay on his back, all he could see was her ass bouncing up and down on top of his crotch, his hands grasped her cheeks, but she paid them no mind. She had been complaining, loudly, about how inadequate he was since they started, suddenly Anthony had an idea. He moved his thumb and…

“As if that would have made a difference! Honestly, even Robert was better and he’s- Mmm-ahh!” she squealed out.

Anthony had taken his thumb and started working circles around her butthole. Her moans poured out, and all the other girls doubled over, giggling and laughing at how quickly his thumb had provoked a reaction from her body despite how “inadequate” he was according to her words.

She growled, grabbing his hands as she smashed her hips down with force, grinding into him with aggression, her cheeks ground his stamina into dust, and he came within a minute.

“Quick shot.” She spat out, standing up from him, semen leaking down her leg.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He was with Elizabeth now, like Triss had done before her, she was riding him, facing away. Her brown hair streaming down her back, a darker shade than Liliane’s, but still beautiful. She had actually asked him to do what he did to Triss, so his thumb was circling her rear entrance as she moaned.

“Wow Triss!” Ash began, “she’s making almost as much noise as you!”

“Shut it, pipsqueak!” Triss rattled out, putting the much smaller girl into a headlock until her face was as red as her hair.

“Give! Give! I give!” she sputtered out, tapping onto the larger girl’s arm before Triss released her.

Morgan, the quiet blonde, approached Anthony while the other two argued.

“I’m going next, could you help me get ready?”

“Sure, if I can!” he gasped out, Elizabeth hadn’t stopped her humping. “I’ve only got my one hand, though.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Morgan smiled down at him as she placed one foot on either side of his head, he had no time to protest before her hips descended, and she straddled his face with her crotch. His face full of sex, he lasted a few more minutes, but before long his hands groped at Liz’s waist, and he thrust into her, cumming with force.

“Careful there, Morgan, you might kill him.” Zaya laughed out.

“Mmmm, not anymore,” Morgan hummed as her pussy finally left Anthony’s face. She took Liz’s position over his crotch, inserted his penis into herself, and immediately got to work.

Anthony’s eyes followed Morgan’s hips as she worked his member in and out of herself, her natural lubricant mixing with the semen left over from previous ejaculations to form silky strands that stretched as she pulled away and collapsed as she pushed him back into her, Zaya chimed in from above.

“You’ve got some stamina, outsider.”

His gaze shifted from Morgan’s rear to see Zaya standing over him, her ass and pussy preparing to smother him, like how Morgan had just before.

“You ready?” She queried.

“Do I have a choice?” He gasped out.

Zaya didn’t respond, instead she smiled down at him as she lowered her hips onto his face, and worked to get herself ready for her turn.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anthony was on top of Zaya now, tired of having been manhandled by three girls in a row, he wanted a bit of control. She was similar to Liliane in a way, she didn’t make much noise and acted… very normal, even when in the middle of sex.

“So, outsider,” she breathed out into his face, “I hear you’ve got a girlfriend.”

“A little one! Even smaller than Ash.” Morgan added.

“Hey!” he heard a shrill voice shout out.

“It’s true, it’s true! She’s a tiny one.” Zaya said to Ash. “So, outsider, what’s her name?”

“Liliane?” he said her name as a question, he was… preoccupied, not really thinking straight.

“Is that her name? She was the one chosen and then returned, right? What’s she like?” Zaya asked, genuine curiosity tinging her words.

“Liliane is…” he thought for a moment, “special. She’s kind, determined, ever since I got here she’s-” but he was interuppted.

“Liliane, Liliane! Oh Liliane! My muse! My love!” He heard Triss mock him from somewhere out of his vision. She still wasn’t happy about how he had messed with her.

“I hear he only lets her be with him, doesn’t let her work with anyone else, is that true, outsider?” one of the other girls asked, he didn’t know who.

“What? No, I mean… maybe? I just-” his voice defensive, he was interrupted again.

“Relax, outsider, it’s good you found something joyful in our hall. I’m glad she accepted being with only you.”

“Accepted being with only me? Is that abnormal?” He asked, genuinely curious.

“Fairly so, yes” Zaya replied, her breasts bouncing with each of his thrusts, “there’s precious little else to do other than, well, this.” She gestured toward where their bodies met, their parts rubbing into each other.

“It would get awfully boring being with just one man, I would never do it.”

“That’s because you're wild, Zaya!” Ash chimed in.

“Maybe so.” She smiled back. “You almost done, outsider?” Her question accented by her hands working their way long his back, pushing him into her, harder, faster.

“Almost.” He grunted, pushing her thighs apart as he worked.

“Good, Liz should be back pretty soon with some more girls…” her words paused as he thrust into her a final time. Pumping his semen into her, he stayed like that for a moment before he withdrew, a sticky white line connecting their genitals, hers overflowing with semen, his slick with her arousal.

She smiled. “An impressive amount for a fifth shot. I’ve heard you can handle being with fourteen girls in a day. I think I’d like to see that.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the end, he only had sex with twelve women. Zaya was a bit disappointed, but only teased him about it a little. Ash, and two other girls that Morgan found, told him to come back soon when he left. Now he was making his way back to Liliane. He noticed the two titans changing into their normal regular clothes outside the hall, their lips moved, but he heard no sound. He wondered what they could be speaking about until he noticed himself coming up on where Liliane sat, her back to the wall, and his curiosities about the titans cleared from his mind. She looked up at him with doe like eyes. Her face scrunched up, and she sniffed him.

“You smell like you did good work.” She observed plainly.

“Yeah,” he grabbed some water and tried to wash himself, “Some of the girls sat on my face, I absolutely reek of sex.”

“Sex?” she asked, the word unfamiliar to her.

“Oh, uh, it’s a word meaning when men and women are with each other.”

“Oh.” She chimed quietly, “Then yes, you do absolutely reek of sex.” She turned to look at him as he sat down beside her. “How many?” She asked.

“Twelve.”

She rested her head on his shoulders, “Good work today.”

“Thanks.” His voice exhausted, his mind flickered back through the day’s events, and he remembered what Zaya’s words to him.

“One of the girls today told me that being with one man every day is strange, but you have been with me every day since I came here, why?” He wasn’t sure what her answer would be.

She raised her head from his shoulder and looked at him.

“You were new, and the elder told me to be with you.” She sounded somewhat confused.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that was abnormal, why didn’t you, I dunno, tell me you wanted to go be with some other men?”

“Oh,” she said in understanding, “you wanted to be with me whenever we awoke, so I complied. I did not mind.” She paused for a moment, thinking of what to say next.

“I like you, you are good to be with.”

Anthony didn’t really know how to respond. He was happy she liked him as more than a working partner, but there was still a sadness etched into her face. He knew that her earlier anxiety still festered within her, and that he had no way of fixing it… unless…

“Liliane, lay down on your side, I’ve got an idea.”

“What? Umm… okay.” She complied, lying down onto her side. Anthony positioned himself over her hips and stroked himself. As his member became erect, it started to rub against her butt with his pumps.

“Anthony? What are you doing?” After a few moments, and with only his heavy breathing as a response, she realized what was rubbing up against her rear. “Are you sure?” a tinge of fear in her tone. “My leg is still…” her voice faded away, she had prepared herself for the pain of regular intercourse earlier, but she hadn’t prepared herself for it now.

“It won’t hurt, I promise, trust me.” He puffed out as he stroked himself with his arm.

“Okay… I trust you.” Her voice was a whisper, but it was honest, she really did trust him.

Anthony’s orgasm approached, as he got closer he double-checked their positions and at the precipice of finishing, he went for it. As delicately as he could, he spread her butt to expose her vagina, he quickly and deftly entered into her and immediately ejaculated. He stayed perfectly still as he pumped her full of semen, lest he shake her and cause her pain.

“Did you… finish?”

He extracted himself from her, semen connecting them for a moment before breaking, his seed spilling down her left butt cheek.

“Sure did!” He smiled down at her as he helped her back into a sitting position and took a seat beside her.

“You… worked yourself, and then finished in me?” She asked innocently.

“Yep! You’ve worked today, Liliane, and doing this we can work every day from here on out!” He absolutely beamed at her, but… she didn’t seem relieved.

“Anthony…” she began sheepishly, “that is not how it is done.”

“Wait, what? What do you mean?”

She gave him a bitter grin. “A hall beside us tried that. It was a new, more efficient way for men to be with women. They were chosen the very next cycle.” Her smile faltered. “The titans must not think it is valid. My grandmother told me when I was younger, as a cautionary tale against changing the system…”

“I, but,” Anthony stuttered out, “that’s bullshit! The end result is the same!” He was fuming, his solution for Liliane’s woes sputtered out as soon as it came.

Liliane said nothing, she just resumed her position leaning against him, it seemed to be the only comfort he could give her.

They sat there for a time, her body leaning on his. Eventually the two titans outside finished their conversation, the lights went out, and they laid down to sleep; Anthony was on his back, with Liliane on her left side over his right arm. Before they fell asleep together, Liliane whispered.

“Anthony?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you,” she kissed him on the cheek, “for trying.”

Trixie sighed in exasperation. The shop had closed for the night, but she was still working. Her business was struggling, and she had done everything she could to make it succeed! She had stocked all the most popular exotic animals, she had found ways to care for them without breaking the bank (or any laws), and she did everything in her power to make every step of the process as cheap and efficient as possible.

How was she supposed to know the damn dragon she sold to some young punk last month would let her niece play with the thing? Of course it slashed half her arm off! It's an exotic predator!

Trixie signed again, this time sinking her face into her palms. Remembering the events of the prior month filled her with anger and bitterness. The punks got the police involved, she received a court summons and was this close to losing her commerce license, but, through sheer dumb luck, she was able to keep her license.

Or, rather, most of her license.

Part of the settlement they had reached in court was that she wouldn’t be able to sell “predatory” or “carnivorous” animals at her store anymore, despite the fact that nearly every exotic animal could be considered “predatory.” She fumed at the unfairness of it all, the injustice!

She sighed, for the third time and final time; it was done, now, she had to deal with the fallout. And she would do everything she could to keep her business afloat, she’d spent the last week selling off unneeded supplies and enclosures, and today she received an offer for some very specific equipment.

She entered the back rooms, and was immediately met with the familiar writhing motion of her human farm. They had to go, she thought, she had already found a buyer for the towers; a gloxnar farmer from off world. He wanted them tomorrow, so she had work to do tonight.

Trixie’s eyes travelled to her peripheral vision, she synced her visual assistant to the back room’s systems and accessed the towers’ life support, she turned all the ventilation systems off. Without fresh, circulating air, the creatures would suffocate in their enclosures; she would dispose of the carcasses tomorrow morning when she had Elise’s help.

It was a little brutal, Trixie realized, but ultimately she just didn’t care; she had been feeding these creatures to her pets for years, death by asphyxiation was a mercy compared to what she had done to their forebears.

With the commands put in, Trixie retired from the shop, and headed home for a good night’s sleep.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elise entered the shop the next morning, Trixie had sent her a message telling her what she had done. Elise… wasn’t happy about it, but what could she do? Trixie invested in the humans because they had been financially sound, and they simply weren’t anymore. They had to go. Plus, Trixie was still her boss, and in matters like these, her decision was final.

However, that didn’t change Elise’s mentality, as she entered the back room, she was already dreading what she would have to do.

Trixie had no such reservation, she was already hard at work, taking each tray and emptying the creature’s little bodies into the trash.

“There you are, finally! Quick, help me with these, the buyer will be here any minute.” Trixie didn’t even look up from her work, and Elise soon joined her.

It was gruesome work, She didn’t want to see their tiny bodies, crumpled and twisted, so she took care not to squint so that her visual assistant didn’t zoom in to see much detail. She tried to pretend she was working with inanimate sand grains, but it didn’t work very well. She continued dumping the pale mites into the trash with Trixie in silence, until she heard her curse.

“Oh, damnit!”

Elise’s head shot up, and her eyes shot over to her boss.

“What is it?”

“One of the containers still has live ones!”

Elise walked over to the Trixie, and in her hands was a tray full of humans, still very much alive. Both of their eyes flicked over to their respective visual assistants, the tray had not been reinserted properly when it was last taken out, the data popped up for who last accessed the tray and… Elise’s stomach dropped.

It was her, three months ago, when she took the sample, she was the one who didn’t put the tray back in correctly. The tray’s life support kept working because it defaulted to the prior settings, but it was incapable of receiving the new ones Trixie gave it last night.

“What are we going to do?” Elise asked guiltily. “Could we just dump them?”

“The tray needs time to cool down! It’s still warm, and it’ll stay that way for hours, the buyer is set to be here any minute now!” Trixie hissed.

“I… I’m sorry I didn’t-” but Elise was cut short.

“Stop, we can figure out what to do later. Help me clean the rest of the trays first.”

“Yeah, yeah okay.”

Trixie moved to put the tray down on the table, and then she immediately returned to work. Elise joined her in silence, she was right, they could deal with it later.

They worked faster than before, they finished before the buyer arrived, but only just. Trixie went out to greet him seconds after they finished setting up all the towers in the front room. Elise could hear her apologizing to the buyer, explaining that due to an error on their end, one of the trays was non-functional. Trixie offered the tower in question for half price instead of full, and the buyer happily accepted.

When Trixie returned to the back room, she relaxed a little.

“Hey, Elise, sorry for being snappy a bit back there. I was just a rush, no hard feelings?”

“Of course! No hard feelings. It’s my fault that the tray wasn’t reconnected properly. I should be the one apologizing.” Elise was just happy that everything worked out alright in the end.

“So, what are we going to do with the last tray?” Elise queried, gesturing toward where it lay on the table.

Trixie shrugged, “I’ve got no use for it, could you get rid of it for me? No point keeping it around here.”

“Of course! I’ll handle it, don’t worry, Trix.” Elise smiled, and her friend and boss smiled back.

“Thanks, Elise, I’ll be in the front if you need me, I’ve got to update the inventory.”

And with that, Trixie turned on her heels and strode out, leaving Elise alone in a much stiller room.

Elise relaxed, she loathed making mistakes, especially in professional contexts, she was just glad that Trixie was so forgiving. She brought herself over to the table and brought the tray up to eye level.

She squinted, and her vision zoomed in. Inside the tray she saw… pandemonium, for the first time the majority of the creatures weren’t copulating. Instead, they were cowering in fear, or running around the tray in a panic.

“Now what am I gonna do with you...”

“Now what am I gonna do with you…”

She could just… dump them. The garbage bag with the other trays’ contents was still in the room. Just a few steps away. She could be rid of her mistake in the briefest of moments, and continue on with her day, but something… stopped her. When she first started working here, she would have dumped them in an instant and gotten rid of the vermin once and for all, but now? She wasn’t so sure.

These were the last humans alive, she thought. The world beyond the frontier that they came from was devoid of them, the calyxans, the little pillbugs Trixie had brought with her on her camping trip for food, made sure of that. And the rest of the shop’s humans were at the bottom of the trash bag, already dead, waiting to be recycled into more readily useable materials, as all of the Imperium’s trash was.

Could she condemn a species to extinction? They weren’t pests or anything, they even had some uses; while working over the past six months she had even gotten used to their more… gross tendencies, and even started to think they could be cute sometimes. She loved animals of all kinds! Would she let these humans die just because she didn’t want to be inconvenienced by them?

No, she thought, she couldn’t do that, but the alternative was going to be such a pain! Given their reproductive rate, they would need more space than a single tray, she could cull excess population as they were born, or retrain them to not be so fecund, but she really didn’t wanna go through all that effort. Instead, she queried her virtual assistant and assigned it to find out who held the rights to that system beyond the frontier. She hated calling people, especially big companies, but she knew if she wasn’t gonna dump them she would have to find a place for them to live, and it might as well be where they came from. The person on the other line picked up.

“Carsonin Stellar Development Group, 9th Quadrant, how can we assist you today?” The automated voice on the other end, a male’s, answered giddily.

“Hi, umm, my name is Elise, I was hoping to make a purchase.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was less than an hour into the day, and Anthony was already working when he noticed the worry. The larger Titan had entered in the morning and turned the lights on as always, by all indications it was going to be a normal day, but something was… wrong. None of the other towers had any movement. Of course, no one could make out individuals in the other towers, but where usually general motion could be observed, there was only stillness, as if they were all still sleeping.

The lack of movement was a curiosity for most of the hall’s residents, including Anthony, they still had work to do so he was going to do it. It was only as the hall fell into their usual morning routine that the real shock came. Anthony was already working with his first girl of the day when it happened.

“What… what is it doing…” He heard the girl he was behind mumble. She was on all fours, and had full view of what the larger titan. He didn’t notice it at first, he was busy working, but as the girl stood up, and he lost his connection to her, his focus was redirected. He followed her eyes to see what the titan was doing. It was taking a hall and… dumping it into some gigantic container, its inhabitants streaming down in the distance like tiny grains.

“What the…” Anthony muttered.

Those around him began to slowly take notice, their work ceasing as they tried to process what was going on.

The choosing wasn’t supposed to be for another few weeks, the titans shouldn’t be taking any halls, confusion reigned throughout the hall, but that quickly turned to panic when the larger titan took another hall from the tower and dumped it, and then a third, and on she went, before long she had cleared the entire tower, and moved on to the next. Confusion turned to fear and then panic as everyone observed that the titan’s trajectory brought her to their hall within the hour.

Before long, the smaller titan arrived and began helping the larger one dump the halls. The hall was in an uproar now, some desperate few were still working, believing that they just had to work harder to avoid the fate of the other halls.

Anthony, however, was running back to where he left Liliane that morning.

He just had to pick today of all days to go out further to work! He mentally chastised himself, the going was slow, it was hard enough to navigate through the halls when everyone was in relatively immobile clusters while working, now it was a nightmare! Bodies were everywhere, moving and weaving through them proved hazardous, he was knocked to the ground more than a few times, but he finally found Liliane as the larger titan was reaching their tower.

She was sitting by the wall as always, holding both her legs as close to her body as possible with her arms to avoid having them stepped on by those that ran by her. Her right leg was still injured, and her face was stricken with terror.

“Liliane!” He cried out. Her head whipped around to find him making his way toward her. The tiniest bit of fear washed away from her expression, but not much.

“Anthony!” She cried out as he arrived beside her. She grasped his arms with her hands and pulled him toward her, careful to not pull him onto her leg. He placed himself between her and the rest of the panicking hall, and tried to catch his breath.

“Anthony… what is going on? Did we not work hard enough? I do not understand.” Her voice was laced with fear, and Anthony had nothing he could say to help.

“I don’t know…” he sighed out, their tray was moving now. Liliane looked up at him one final time from where she sat, before turning to her left side to look out of the hall with him. They were rising, they couldn’t feel it from inside the hall, but soon they were at eye level with the larger titan. Its iris directly outside, flickering all throughout the hall for a moment before its mouth moved, dramatically and emphatically, it was speaking, loudly.

Within moments, the other titan was beside the larger one. Both stood there, their monolithic lips moving, while the hall descended into complete chaos.

But as quickly as the moment came, it went. The hall was lowered and… placed onto the table, spared for the time being, as the rest of the halls were disposed of.

Liliane and Anthony stayed like that in silence, watching the titans perform their grisly work, the rest of the hall gradually calmed from complete chaos to barely repressed terror as it became clear that, at least for the time being, they had been spared.

However, minutes later, the smaller blonde haired titan returned. It raised the hall up to its eye level and just… stared at them.

“What do you think it wants?” Anthony asked Liliane, finally breaking the silence.

“The titans… want us to be with each other, they want us to create children.” She took a breath before continuing. “The other halls, they worked hard to be fruitful, but they were still punished. I do not know what it wants us to do…” Liliane tapered off, she was obviously completely confused and terrified.

Anthony nodded, and rubbed her shoulder. She relaxed, if only slightly, and they both watched the titan as its mouth moved, speaking to… someone unseen, about something unknown.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“And you’re certain that you can clean out the planet’s calyxan problem in three hours or less, without harming any other flora or fauna, or my money back?” Elise asked the worker on the other end.

“Ma’am, with respect, we are a pest control company. We can have the planet cleaned out with our detection and teleportation systems in minutes, we only have the three hours stipulation for legal purposes.”

“Right, right okay, sorry I didn’t mean to question your capabilities.” She responded sheepishly.

“It’s not a problem,” the man on the other end replied tersely. “Our systems show you bought the planet in question about… eight minutes ago? Moving quickly, aren’t we? What’s the rush?” He asked, quizzically.

“Oh,” Elise laughed a little, “just getting a nice picnic planet for later, ya know?”

“Oh for sure, I’ve got a few planets on the periphery as well. I’ll wire the costs to the account provided. We’ll be in and out in a few hours. Thank you for choosing Ryke’s Pest Services.” He said, with a bit of forced customer service cheer, and cut the line.

Elise sighed, having finished everything she needed to do. She purchased the system from the development group, bought a basic nutrient and climate recycler for the tray, and just scheduled an extermination. Now all she had to do was wait for the exterminators to do their work, and she could drop these creatures off there and be done with them. A good deed, she thought.

She looked into the tray, she had idly held it during the three purchases, and had only just realized how agitated that probably made its inhabitants, before setting it down, though, she got a little curious. Her virtual assistant knew what she wanted to see, and it placed the tiniest marker down for Elise to zoom in on.

Sure enough, there was the one female whose leg she had broken when she took her sample. From the looks of it, the leg was still non-functional, but at least it was still alive. The male it was with before was still with it now, how cute, Elise thought to herself. Her curiosity sated, she gingerly placed the tray back on the table and called out to her boss.

“Hey! Trix! Can I borrow the teleporter in a few hours?”

Elise strode through the teleporter’s rift and arrived at her newly purchased planet. It was a small thing, having only cost a few days’ wages, but it was officially her property per the Imperium’s laws. Young people would frequently buy frontier worlds like this one, young people were also frequently scolded by their parents for making bad investments and buying useless rocks.

Maybe she had made a poor financial decision, but she wasn’t unhappy with her choice. With that thought in her mind, she hefted the tray filled with humans in one hand and searched for a good spot to put it down, she had set her teleporter’s destination to the same place she and Trixie had visited a few months back. There was a former human hive along a pond, with some greenery between it and a few smaller hives also along the pond. She chose a green spot between the larger hive and one of its peripheral colonies, and crouched low to set the tray down.

With the tray firmly placed on the ground, she tinkered with the settings, it had enough power to last for the next three hundred years or so, the humans would be self-sufficient by then, right? This was their natural environment, now cleared of potential predators, a quick glance at her virtual assistant and a double check of the invoice from the pest control company confirmed that. She adjusted the dimensions of the tray with her assistant, one of the walls dissolved and allowed access to and from the inside, Elise stayed crouched for a moment, and watched the first tentative pale dots leaving the tray and wandering onto the greenery.

They should be fine, she thought as she stood up and headed for the rift to go home.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three months later, Anthony was walking to the hall with Liliane in the early morning; her breath coming out in ragged puffs as plumes of steam streaked past her face. She walked on the mostly even ground with her now characteristic gait, with Anthony following close behind.

She had been walking for a month now, and their efforts to keep her good leg healthy and strong proved to be a good decision, but Anthony could still see her limp. She had reassured him that it didn’t hurt anymore, but it still pained him to see her like that.

As they rounded the corner of a dilapidated house, they both caught sight of the hall, filled with forms in various states. Some were nude and still lived in the hall. However, most others were fully clothed and either gathering food and clean water, warming up in the climate controlled tray, or simply coming and going for “work”. Anthony and Liliane belonged to the latter group, coated from head to toe in warm winter clothing. Almost everyone was struggling with the cold, they had all lived their entire lives in a hall packed with heat, humidity, and life. To them, the dry and cool air of what used to be Illinois must have felt like an icebox. Anthony had caught Liliane under mountains of blankets and clothing more than once to escape the “winter chill” that almost all the hall’s residents had only heard of in stories, but never experienced.

Anthony didn’t have the heart to tell her it was just mid-fall.

“Ah… that is so much better.” he heard Liliane nearly moan out as they started to feel the heat from the hall.

“Is it really that good?” Anthony asked quizzically.

“Yes.” She replied simply, smiling as her eyes fluttered, the warmth flooding into her very being. “It is the best feeling in the world.”

“Oh? I guess I need to step up my game, huh?”

“What do you… oh, I understand.” She said sheepishly before continuing. “No, you are… pleasant, Anthony.” She smiled up at him. “I only wish that you would be with me in the hall more frequently, it is uncomfortable to work in the cold away from everyone else.”

Anthony nodded in agreement, Liliane, like many in their new fledgling community, felt some degree of nervousness and anxiety when away from the hall, and especially when alone. He thought she was handling it better than most, but she also refused to leave his side when both inside and outside the hall. This had made requests for his time from other young women somewhat awkward when Liliane was still healing, as she would usually come along and just watch.

They entered the hall. Despite no longer being kept by the titans, the community’s remaining elders agreed that “working” should continue, to help grow the community and ensure their survival. The work was far less frenzied and intense compared to how life was within the halls, but Anthony would still usually be asked to be with at least some women every day.

He glanced toward Liliane, just a month ago her company on these trips was, not unwelcome, but a little weird to him as the girl he professed his love to upon arriving back on Earth watched him being intimate with other women right in front of her.

Anthony knew, though, that it only felt weird to him. Because as soon as Liliane’s leg was healed, she simply started joining when other girls asked for him to come work with them. He smiled, just yesterday he had her on the ground while another girl was…

“Are you happy about something?” Liliane interrupted him, noticing his likely goofy looking smile.

“Oh, nothing, nothing.” He replied as smoothly as he could.

“Mmmm.” Liliane merely hummed back. “Where are the girls who asked to be with you?”

“They should-” his words were cut short by a brief, bright light followed by a kind of burning smell. A portal, that the titans used, opened a few miles from them, and the smaller titan stepped through. This would have likely incited a panic, had this not been the smaller titan’s fourth visit since bringing them here.

“Oh, she has returned.” Liliane smiled.

“What do you think she wants? She keeps coming back and checking up on us.”

“She wants us to be well. She is kind.”

“Kind?” Anthony sputtered out. “Didn’t it shatter your leg?”

“That was… an accident, I think.” her voice trembled a bit as her hand unconsciously reached for her formerly broken leg, as if to reassure herself that it was still there. “She is so, so much larger. Even a tiny movement could have ripped my body apart, I think she did not mean to hurt me, or any of us. She saved us from the larger titan. Remember?”

Liliane’s statement was accented by pounding footfalls as the titan approached and then crouched before the hall and observed them. Liliane waved both her arms up at the titan, and nearly stumbled doing it. Anthony reached out to catch her, beginning to scold her before he noticed Liliane’s eyes going wider than the moon as she looked up at the titan. He followed her gaze to see the titan, flicking its own hand back and forth in a small loop. A wave, a tiny one, but at her scale it was like a sign from the gods.

“See?” Liliane whispered as she looked up at him.

“I do.” Anthony replied, astounded, as the titan ceased its movements and continued its observations.

“Good.” She said her single word with the simplicity he had come to expect from her. “It seems your friends have arrived.”

“My friends?” Anthony turned to where she was looking and saw two young women approaching, one waved.

“Well… I wouldn’t call them my friends, work buddies maybe, one of them sat on my face, actually.”

“That seems rather pointless, children cannot be made like that.”

“No, no I suppose they can’t, it's pretty fun though, we should try it.”

“Mmmm, maybe if you want to. I would prefer being with you normally, however.” She stated.

Anthony shrugged, he was happy either way.

“Anthony?”

“Yes?” he replied.

She clung to his side, even through all the clothes, he could feel her warmth. She stayed silent for a moment before speaking.

“I am glad the titans put you in my hall.”

Anthony smiled.

“Me too.”