Gina poured out some orange juice for herself only to find the carton empty. She shook it with disgust, as if that would dislodge any hidden remains, then shouted out the kitchen, “Ashley! We’re out of juice!”

“What?” Ashley’s faint voice shouted back from her room. Gina slammed the empty carton into recycling and opened the fridge again.

“Don’t just put empty cartons back in the fridge, you asshole!” It was a futile scolding, but one she was obligated to give. For the principle of the matter.

The fridge was woefully devoid of drinks. Well, except for a small glass bottle labeled “Ashley’s,” which meant it was off limits, but really you could argue that Ashley owed her a drink and therefore, by proxy, this was hers. Grabbing the bottle and tearing off the saran wrap on the top (Ashley must have thrown away the cap without even finishing it), Gina chugged the dark blue liquid and started washing the bottle before recycling it.

As she washed it, the bottle kept threatening to slip out of her hands, forcing her to shift her grip constantly. Gina frowned, carefully swirling the water inside. The bottle hadn’t felt particularly slick or anything and she wasn’t even using soap, but she could still feel the glass sliding against her skin. Staring at it, it almost looked like it was expanding. Which was weird, right? Wasn’t it metal that expanded in hot water? And she wasn’t even using hot water anyways —

Gina’s elbows suddenly hit the sink counter and she dropped the bottle and stepped back. And saw that there was something horribly wrong about everything.

Her sleeves drooped, swinging around as she recoiled; her jeans were piling at her feet; under them, she could feel her socks sag and flop when she stumbled, almost stepping straight out of them. Her surroundings weren’t any more comforting, looking as oversized as her clothes. And getting more oversized as she watched. The sink was approaching chest height, passing it even, and there wasn’t any sign of it slowing.

Gina screamed.

Ashley pounded into the kitchen, skidding to a stop at the entrance and looking much too tall herself, making Gina scream again and skitter backwards, step on her own pants, and fall straight on her butt, her shirt ballooning over her.

Ashley, looking panicked, said, “You drank my potion?!”

“Potion?!” Gina echoed as she pulled her shirt off her head. Her breath caught for a moment as Ashley hastily stepped over her to check the fridge. She tried standing up, juggling her baggy clothes in her hands, though this only served to send her spiraling into further hysteria as she stood just in time to see the sink counter rise past her eyeline. “What’s happening? Oh god, am I dying?! Help me!”

Ashley glanced down at her, chewing her lip. “Okay so don’t freak out,” she said, looking twice as big as she should have been. Gina pressed her back against a cabinet door and tried not to whimper as she caught the handle passing by her head from the corner of her eye. “So. Um. Remember when I said I was going to school for pharmacology? That wasn’t, like, a complete lie or anything, but, well…I mean, like if you really think about it, witchcraft is like a type of pharmacology. Yeah? Yeah.” She paused. “Anyways, I’m going to school for witchcraft.”

“Witches aren’t a thing!” Gina shouted desperately. Her witch roommate, whose (okay, fine, she can’t deny it) shrinking potion she had inadvertently drank, crossed her arms at her from above. Gina self-consciously clutched her shirt to herself. The back of her collar dipped down her back despite her efforts. “Please, I need help!”

“You need help,” Ashley muttered, running a hand through her hair as she strode back to her room. Gina yelped as the giant leg in front of her whooshed by and landed (relatively) eight feet away. “I don’t have the homework I need to turn in.”

“Homework?!” Gina chased after Ashley as best as she could. Her shirt was now too much of a burden, crumpled around her like a small camping tent, and she tripped over a crease and rolled right out of her collar, fully nude. Despite her current frantic situation, the sheer embarrassment overturned her priorities enough for her to hesitate and consider how to get her shirt to cover her again, before she remembered that she didn’t have the time and sprinted to Ashley’s room instead.

Ashley had already made it inside her room and was clanging about. “Yeah, I didn’t make extras because I didn’t think that someone would drink my homework! Do you know how long these — well, no, you don’t, but they take an hour to brew!”

It took a minute to cross a distance that Ashley had covered in seconds. Gina paused to lean against Ashley’s doorway. At least she had the consideration (or the absentmindedness) to leave it open. “But you can’t leave me like this! I’m shrinking! What if it doesn’t stop?!”

Ashley waved a hand dismissively without looking at her. “Don’t be dramatic, you’ve stopped already. It only shrinks you by a factor of four.”

Gina looked around. “Oh.” Still, she easily regained her bluster. “But I have to get to work! You need to make, I dunno, a growth potion?”

“No,” said Ashley, turning around and pointing a wooden spoon down at her. Even if she wasn’t currently able to kick her across a room, the look in her eyes would have been enough to make Gina retreat a few steps. Confronted by both, she retreated six. “I need to remake the shrink potion so I can turn it in to a professor that already hates me.” Seeing Gina’s shivering form, Ashley’s expression softened. “Look. It’s fine. Just call in sick for a — “

“Don’t witches have spells? Just get a wand or something and,” Gina ended her sentence with an incomprehensible gesture.

Her roommate frowned. “You aren’t listening — “

“Ashley!”

At first, when a dark look crossed Ashley’s face, Gina was afraid that she was just going to ignore her. But then Ashley sighed and stomped over to her, which was terrifying, but in a relieving sort of way.

With a hand on her doorknob, Ashley glared down, muttered a phrase that Gina couldn’t decipher, and pointed at her. Immediately, Gina grew back to normal at a dizzying rate, the sudden burst of friction burning her feet a little. After anxiously measuring herself against the doorframe, Gina turned to Ashley to thank her, only for Ashley to slam the door in her face.

“Thanks,” she said anyways, before collecting her clothes from the kitchen and running out the door.

It took four hours for Gina to stop thinking about the morning’s events, and that was mostly because of lunch break. Food had a way of refreshing the mind. Thinking about it, she hadn’t managed to eat a proper breakfast before the, uh, accident, but now that she was full, her mood improved significantly. Of course, there was a lot to unpack about everything she had just learned. And she would probably have to talk with Ashley about the whole…witch thing. And hopefully Ashley wouldn’t have to kill her to keep magic a secret or something. But all of that could wait until work was over. She hadn’t made much progress in the coding errors she was supposed to fix today what with all those distracting thoughts and needed to make up for lost time.

Gina cracked her knuckles and got typing. She made it for half an hour before getting distracted again, though this time it was with her typos. For whatever reason, she was starting to fumble. A lot. She could excuse a mistype once in a while, but at this point it seemed every key she pressed she was accidentally pressing another one. Her fingers felt clumsy and swollen against the keys, and was it getting hard to breathe?

Gina pushed herself away from her desk with a sinking feeling. Now that she was looking up from her work, she noticed that her head was inching up over her cubicle’s walls.

“Something the matter?” Simon asked her from the next cubicle. “You need to go somewhere? If it’s an emergency, I can tell Daniel for you.”

He thinks I’m standing up, Gina realized. As she unwedged herself from her chair, she said, “Yeah, thanks,” and half-jogged to the women’s room, slouching the entire way.

Nobody was in there, which was great, though Gina wasn’t happy about how easily she was able to tell, considering she could basically see right into the stalls. Sitting against the door, she managed to slide her phone out of her pocket. She could hear the seams of her shirt straining against her expanding form as she made the call.

“Having problems?” Ashley said casually as soon as she answered.

“Ashley, there’s something — you already know what’s happening, don’t you.”

“You really should’ve listened to me.”

“Okay, yes, excuse me for freaking out and making bad decisions the first time I experience getting shrunk by my roommate!” Gina hissed. Or tried to. It really was more like a wheeze. Her collar was really choking her.

“Hey, don’t pin that on me. You got shrunk by a potion. That you drank on your own.”

“You made the potion! Ow, fuck!”

“What’s wrong?”

“A button just fucking shot itself in my eye. Hang on,” Gina said. Cupping her increasingly smaller phone in one hand, she carefully aimed her pinky and tapped it. “Okay, it’s getting hard to hold this to my ear, so you’re on speakerphone. Look, can you just tell me why this is happening?”

“What? You haven’t figured it out?”

“Why would I be able to figure it out?!” Gina gasped as, almost simultaneously, all her clothes gave up around her, a symphony of rips that represented the destruction of about eighty dollars. At least she could breathe easily again. “I don’t know if you realize this, but magic rules aren’t obvious to me!”

“The potion wore off, dummy.”

“Huh?” Gina cringed as she started feeling the cool floor tiles on her butt.

Ashley sighed. “Potion effects are temporary because we digest them. That’s why I told you it was fine, because you’d grow back anyways. It’s like drinking alcohol. You get sober eventually.”

That did make a lot of sense.

“Okay. Got it. Now I know,” Gina said, slouching lower as her head approached the ceiling. Her legs were still able to fit in the space between the stalls and the sinks, but that was changing very quickly. She hugged her knees to her chest, careful to keep her postage stamp of a phone in the center of her palm. “Can you please come over and help me? I don’t want to outgrow the room!”

“Don’t be dramatic. When you drank the potion, you lost...what, four and a half feet? You’re just getting that back now. So you’re gonna be ten feet six at the most.”

“That’s not too bad,” she said, nervously hitching a leg over the toilets. “But I’m definitely bigger than that. I can’t even fit my hand through the door.”

“Oh.” The phone went silent. “That’s not a good sign.”

“Yeah, no kidding!”

“I don’t know how that could happen, that’s definitely more than double what you lost,” Ashley mumbled to herself, not listening. Gina sighed and let her talk, shifting onto her side. She morosely picked at the tiny scraps of fabric stuck to her body and flicked them off. “How can you be growing that much just from a potion wearing off? All that’s supposed to happen is the effects being reversed, essentially – unless…”

“What?” Gina said sullenly.

“...the effect of the potion was reducing a person’s size by a factor of four...normally, for you, that meant losing the four and a half feet, but then you had me use a spell to make you six feet again before the potion’s effect wore off!” There were vague sounds of clattering, as if Ashley was throwing several things into a bag and running outside. “Of course digesting it isn’t just undoing what it’s done! It’s reversing what it’s done! It’s just that usually means the same thing because nobody’s been stupid enough to undo a potion’s effect with a spell! So of course when a potion that shrinks you by a factor of four wears off, you grow by a factor of four!”

“I’m gonna be twenty-four feet tall?!” Gina shrieked, sitting up, only to hit her head on the ceiling, causing plaster to dust her face. Her foot kicked out reflexively as she suffered a coughing fit and knocked a stall door off its hinges. When she finally managed to clear her throat, her phone was missing from her hand. “Oh god,” she moaned, trying to scan her body for a place that her phone could have bounced off to, hopefully unbroken. She thought she heard some sort of buzzing noise somewhere around the folds of her belly, but then it abruptly stopped. At least it looked like she was done growing. And Ashley sounded like she was coming. Though it was ambiguous whether she was coming to actually help.

Half an hour later, there was a knock. “It’s me,” Ashley’s voice called out, and Gina dutifully tried to shift herself and unblock the door. “I mean, I don’t think anybody’s written a paper on this,” she babbled as she squeezed in, gesturing wildly as she crawled over Gina’s arm. “This could – well, I wouldn’t say revolutionize anything, but this opens up like a whole field of study at the very least! I don’t think anybody’s done anything with abusing, like, the temporary-ness of effects with permanent -- “

“Ashley.”

“Yes, yes, okay.” Ashley waved a hand at her in irritation, muttering a different phrase that was similarly indecipherable, and Gina almost cracked her head on the floor when the wall retreated from her back.

Once again, the spell worked faster than the potion, though this wasn’t as fast as growing had been. Probably because she had a lot more ground to cover than back then. She sat up, happy to not have to duck, found her phone when it tumbled between her legs, remembered that she was absolutely naked, and curled up to conceal herself, blushing.

Ashley laughed. “You didn’t seem that bothered when your tit was bigger than my eye.”

“Shut up,” Gina snapped, turning towards her. “That’s – um.”

Ashley smirked down at her, which was natural since she was still sitting down. But Gina was pretty sure that she shouldn’t be smirking that far down at her. Gina jumped to her feet, finding herself only standing as tall as Ashley’s chest and dwindling even more. She was shedding plaster dust during her descent, but most of it was still sticking to her skin and a lot of it was decidedly no longer dust, more like pebbles. There was a stray piece of toilet paper that must have gotten caught on her when she was boxed up in the bathroom that was now curling around her leg, engulfing it.

“Ashley,” she said, mouth dry, “I think you overshot it.”

“Nah, you still got a bit to go.” Looking satisfied with the trajectory of her work, Ashley started collecting the shreds of Gina’s clothes near the door and tossing them in a plastic bag that Gina only now noticed she was carrying. “Otherwise, you can’t fit in my purse.”

“You’re kidnapping me!?”

Ashley laughed and crouched down next to her. “It’s not kidnapping if I’m taking you home. I mean, your other option is to go out with no clothes -- “

“This is better,” Gina said, battling the toilet paper off. She watched the tiles under her grow to the size of cobblestones. “Uh. But, aren’t I getting too small…?”

“Hey, I don’t think I’d be able to hide you if you’re over a foot tall.” Ashley’s hands scooped up Gina from under her shoulders and she yelped, kicking instinctively. Not that her feet could reach anything. Ashley didn’t even seem to notice, seamlessly shifting her grip on Gina to one hand as she turned on a sink with the other. It was disorienting to find herself go from being the size of an arm to being the size of a phone in one second, almost as disorienting as suddenly being thrust under a torrent of water and then rolled up in a hand towel before being dumped into a bag. “Anyways, be quiet. We wouldn’t want anybody to search my bag because you made a weird noise.”

Well, thought Gina as she swung in Ashley’s purse, at least it looks like she won’t have to kill me to keep magic a secret.

The days after accidentally learning that magic was real and also her roommate was studying in some sort of magic school to learn magic were rough. Although Gina felt guilty about it, she still avoided Ashley as much as she could, making excuses or pretending to look distracted by her phone. Which wasn’t fair to Ashley. And it also sucked because they had a good thing going, as roommates. If this kept up, the awkward atmosphere was going to probably force one or the other to move out and Gina didn’t want to go through the hassle of finding another apartment or another roommate.

So it was probably for the best that, by the end of the week, Gina had gone from somewhat fearful to mostly annoyed.

“Hey Gina, can you just help me with one tiny thing — “

“No! For the last time, I’m not helping you with magic stuff!”

“I promise I’ll actually start throwing things out when they’re empty if you do.”

“That deal is so unbalanced I can’t even pretend to consider it.” Gina took Ashley by the shoulders and started to gently push her into her room, but sighed as she continued to send pleading eyes her way. “Don’t you have classmates or friends at your magic school for this sort of thing?”

“But none of them have your unique perspective! Come on, Gina! It’ll be fun, I swear, and any new discoveries you help me make, I’ll definitely credit you in my research papers!”

“I don’t care about your papers. Look, can you just leave me alone right now?”

“At the very least, my homework — “

Gina closed the door in Ashley’s face.

Phew. She went for the living room and flumped onto the couch. Who knew having a magic roommate would be so mentally exhausting. It was definitely time for some relaxation, and she had been meaning to binge that show that had started last year. Gina leaned over and picked up the remote.

“Aha! Finally!” Ashley declared, pointing at her dramatically from her doorway and startling Gina into dropping the remote.

“Were you watching me? Ashley, that’s super creepy! Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been the nicest lately, but I need time to process, we can have a proper conversation later — “

“Small, small, small!” Ashley responded, still pointing at her with excitement, which was worryingly odd. But the intent became clear when Gina felt something somewhat familiar, like everything was shifting and expanding around her in bursts, and she jumped up, dismayed to see that her sweatpants were already flopping over her feet.

“What did you do to me?!” Gina yelled, looking down the sleeves of her t-shirt. They were already edging past her elbows.

Ashley strolled up next to her and crossed her arms with pride. “I cursed you. Well actually, I guess I cursed the remote. Which then cursed you when you touched it.” She laughed when Gina fearfully backpedaled away from the remote she had dropped on the floor. “Sheesh, chill out, the curse is already on you. You can’t get double-cursed.”

“It’s not like I’d know that!” Gina snapped. At this point, she had stopped shrinking and was at a height that was still probable for a human to be. But it was still upsetting to find her line of sight slightly lower than Ashley’s chin. “This isn’t permanent, right? I’m not gonna be short forev-” The word caught in her throat as her viewpoint jolted down to Ashley’s collarbone. “It’s not done?!”

Ashley looked pleased as she checked something off in a notepad. “Yeah, no. Curses are on you until you break them. You’ve seen Sleeping Beauty and stuff, right? Though I guess that one was more like someone breaking it for her.”

Gina patted herself down with urgency as if she could physically find the curse and snap it in half. Once again the shrinking had stopped, but now that she knew there was a chance it would start again, she couldn’t relax. “So what, I’m gonna keep getting smaller unless — “ she winced as she shunted down once more. Ashley discreetly covered a snigger. Asshole. “ — I kiss someone?” She tried pulling her sweatpants up and found the waist was up to her breasts. Blushing with embarrassment, she tightened the strings as far as she could. She had never been good at judging length with her eyes alone (and even if she was, her sense of scale would be significantly impaired now, for obvious reasons) but measuring herself against Ashley and her own sagging shirt, she probably couldn’t pass as an adult woman now. She must have lost at least a foot.

Ashley scoffed. “True love’s kiss or whatever isn’t the only way curses break; it depends on how I crafted the curse. And I definitely wouldn’t do something so cheesy.” With a smug grin, she added, “You could always ask me how to break the curse. Otherwise, who knows how tiny you’ll get?”

Gina gritted her teeth as everything expanded again. The work she had done with her sweatpants was all for naught as they slipped all the way down to her hips — staying there only because she had widened her stance. She had to push her sleeves up to keep her arms free, though that was an exercise in futility as well. It would have been easier to just let her shirt slide off her shoulders and drop. But Gina was stubbornly clinging on to whatever dignity she could keep. Not that this was dignified at all, but sometimes you have to adjust your standards. Above her, Ashley looked like she was checking something else off on her notepad. And then, something clicked.

“It’s something someone says, isn’t it?” she demanded. “No, more like something I hear!”

Ashley raised an eyebrow. “Wow, how’d you guess? Yeah, you’re right. It’s supposed to be whenever you hear a synonym of — “

Gina covered her ears.

It felt childish, but it worked. With everything sounding muffled, whatever Ashley said didn’t trigger the curse. But she still loomed, and if she caught her, there was no winning. Gina turned to run and immediately tripped over her pants. With a yelp, she reflexively threw out her hands to catch herself.

“Ha!” Ashley crowed, dropping down to grab her. “Get back here you little, puny, petite, uh…tiny…? No, I already said that…hey!” As Ashley jerked the shirt upwards, Gina somersaulted out of the collar, hands on her ears again. It was hard to tell if she had gotten any smaller because, after glancing up at Ashley, she deftly rolled straight under the couch. “No!” Ashley snaked a hand down but missed Gina’s ankle and could only stare at her in frustration outside. “At least tell me if any of those words worked!”

Ashley sighed, got to her feet, and paced around the apartment. Gina could feel every step, the vibrations thrumming through her chest.

Despite her successful escape, she was in a pretty miserable position. She had shrunk a pretty significant amount, but she wasn’t so small that she could easily move around under the couch. It was a miracle she managed to fit under here — she was squeezed in so tight, she barely had the room to breathe. And worst of all, there was so much dust. If she stayed down here for long, there was a good chance that she would suffocate.

Gina waited for a while longer, listening for any more movement, before starting to crawl towards the other end of the couch. It was slow going with her hands occupied and her legs barely able to move. And it certainly wasn’t comfortable to slide her bare belly on the dusty wood floor. She was going to need a shower and a drink after this. Also find out how to break the stupid curse. She didn’t doubt that Ashley would undo everything in the end, but it wouldn’t be without its humiliations.

As she reached the edge, she paused, her nose barely peeking out. Still no sound. There definitely was a trap or something, but she really had no choice. She would just have to be fast.

She popped her head out, wriggled until she could prop her elbows on the floor, and started to leverage herself free, coughing out dust bunnies and old crumbs or whatever. There still wasn’t any sign of Ashley. It was all very suspicious. Even so, Gina cautiously removed her hands from her ears so she could push herself out easier.

“Hello~!” Ashley said from the ceiling. She was standing up there, defying gravity, but in an instant she was back on the floor again and she grabbed Gina around the middle and pulled her out and placed her on her feet.

Gina gasped and slapped her hands over her ears, but with a smirk, Ashley grabbed her wrists. Slowly, she pried them away. It didn’t even look hard for her, even as Gina strained as much as she could against her. And so, holding her arms apart, Ashley said, “Mini.”

“Ashley, please,” Gina said as she started to sink below her waist. Ashley’s grip felt loose around her wrists for a moment before she adjusted it. Her hands basically spanned her entire forearms now.

“Minute.”

“Come on, the curse worked, okay? Now you know, so…um…” Gina suddenly realized that she was having to stand on her toes now. She looked up at Ashley’s hands. “Uh, can you lower me a little — oh goddammit.”

Ashley laughed as Gina struggled to keep any part of her feet on the floor. “Sorry, what did you say? I couldn’t hear you, you’re just sooooooo…diminutive.” And there it was. She was officially dangling.

Gina was blushing now, looking down at herself. She was getting aware of just how exposed she was, her breasts hanging out for anybody to see, her body in full view for anyone who cared to look. True, Ashley had already seen everything there was to see. Twice, even. But there was something about being nude while also being child-sized that made the situation just…embarrassing.

Ashley let out a breath, arms shaking slightly. “Man, you’re surprisingly heavy. I mean,” she amended, a sly grin crossing her face, “surprisingly heavy for someone so minuscule.” Gina’s line of sight started to rise this time; now that Ashley was holding her in the air, she was (in a manner of speaking) shrinking upwards rather than down. And, from her perspective, getting higher up.

“Please put me down!” Gina shouted, wheeling her legs in the air, trying to find a purchase on anything she could stand on. But there wasn’t anything in reach. Except maybe Ashley, but she didn’t have a lot of horizontal surfaces to choose from.

“Hey, I’m not gonna drop you or anything, and you’re not that high up — well, I guess it might look kinda high for someone so teeny-weeny.” She laughed as Gina groaned, approaching baby-size. “Here, this might feel more stable for you.”

“What are you doing,” Gina said nervously as Ashley started swinging her. Like a swing set, if swing sets got joy out of your terror. Gina was whistling through the air in an arc that kept getting wider and wider, until she was swinging almost vertically. And then Ashley let go.

Gina found herself tumbling in the air, the momentum carrying her up for a few long seconds, before she dropped and landed in Ashley’s arms. Her stomach carried on down without her for a bit before leaping back up in her throat. She took a shaky breath as Ashley cradled her close to her chest.

“Thrilling, right?”

“It was like a roller coaster,” Gina managed to croak.

“So you had fun?”

“I hate roller coasters.”

When Ashley laughed again, Gina scowled and slapped at her shoulder, which only made her laugh harder. “Look, I’m just trying to show you that I’m not gonna hurt you, okay?”

“I know,” Gina whined, “but this is really a lot to handle! Stop laughing!”

Ashley responded by lifting her up a bit higher so she could nuzzle her cheek against her entire head. And oh god, she was still naked. “I’m sorry, you’re just sooooo cute — ah…“ Ashley paused, her face scrunching up until she suddenly buried her face in her sleeve and sneezed. Gina winced as she was jostled a bit. But at least she hadn’t been sneezed on. It was already gross when someone’s sneeze got on her face or something. It would have been absolutely awful if it covered her entire body. Ashley sniffed and turned down the hall. “Oh man, I didn’t realize how dusty you got.”

“So you’re gonna break the curse and let me shower?” Gina glumly asked.

“Nope!” Ashley replied with inordinate cheer as she entered the bathroom with her. “We are gonna have a bath. Did you just shrink?”

The answer was yes. Gina sank uncomfortably in Ashley’s arms before she got bounced back up into a proper cradle. Ashley stared down at her, contemplating. “Huh.”

“That’s all you have to say?! Admit it! Something went wrong!”

“I mean…not likely…” To be fair, Ashley at least had the decency to look concerned. But apparently not that concerned; she still leaned down to start the bath. “Did I say something…?” she continued as they waited for the tub to fill. “Um…’having a bath…’ no, ‘gonna have a bath…’ oh!” Ashley brightened. “‘We!’ As in ‘wee’!”

“Stop saying ‘we’!” Gina shouted up at her, cringing as she inadvertently shrunk herself more.

“Oh, this is exciting,” Ashley said, holding Gina up in front of her. “I didn’t even consider homophones!”

Gina sighed as she found herself dangling again. “Can you please tell me how to break the curse.”

“So does that mean maybe if I say…’martini’?” Ashley stared at her expectantly, but Gina, for once, didn’t dwindle. “Oh.”

“Don’t look so disappointed.”

“I guess it can’t be part of a word, then.” Ashley turned off the tap and set Gina down in the tub. The water went up to her chest despite Ashley having been considerate enough to not fill the tub all the way. Gina did take the chance to dunk her head under, and then waded away from the spreading film of dust on the water’s surface. When she looked up again, she caught Ashley in the middle of undressing and swiftly turned on her heel, blushing hard. Which meant she wasn’t prepared when Ashley did step into the tub, and she stumbled from the waves that pushed her from behind. As Ashley finished sinking into the bath with a contented sigh, Gina found herself straining to keep her head above the rising water. “Hey, can you think of any other homophones for synonyms of ‘small’?” she asked after a moment of relaxing. Gina’s head suddenly shot down under the water and she surfaced a second later, spluttering. “Whoops,” Ashley mumbled to herself, and after being buffeted by a few more waves, Gina suddenly found a knee between her legs. Though she still had to strain her head above the water. Ashley was still an asshole.

“No. I can’t. Can you break the curse now?”

“You’re no fun,” Ashley pouted, grabbing the soap. “You haven’t even gotten as small as you can get.”

Gina squeaked as she jolted down again, trying to hide her embarrassment as her shrinking inadvertently rubbed her against Ashley’s knee. “I think you found the only one. Please tell me how to break the curse.”

“You were smart enough to figure out what the curse was in the first place, I’m sure you can figure out how to break it before,” Ashley snickered, raising her leg slightly, “you get too small.”

Gina looked forlorn as the water level went back to lapping at her chin. She couldn’t even muster any sense of alarm when Ashley started lathering up her thigh and playfully bumped the bar of soap into her.

“Fine, I’ll give you a hint. Breaking the curse involves having to give me what I want.”

“Uh,” Gina stammered, her face at its reddest.

“Not like that,” Ashley said sharply. “Sheesh. Get your mind out of the gutter. Oh wait, what about homonyms? Like ‘minute’ instead of ‘minute’?” Ashley peered at Gina, who diminished only once. “Aw.”

At this point, it would be easier to sit cross-legged on Ashley’s knee. Gina glanced at the scale of the world nervously. “Uh, how sm- I mean…what’s my…lower limit here?”

“Well, you lose three inches at a time, and you look about…” Gina grimaced as a hand as long as her entire body approached to measure her. “…six inches? So the next one’s the last.”

“Fucking hell,” Gina muttered.

“Hey, come on, look on the bright side! At the worst, you only have three inches to lose.”

“Three inches is half my height!” Gina shouted back. “That means everything would look like it doubled in size! Maybe to you, that’s a slight diff-“

Everything looked like it doubled in size.

“Ooh, ‘slight,’ that’s a good one,” Ashley commented as she raised her knee slightly for the last time. Gina just groaned and thunked her head on her expansive perch. “You can still break the curse, you know.”

Gina kept her head down in thought. Something Ashley wanted. And that she could give to her.

With the tone of someone condemning herself to holding the earth on her back, Gina glared up at Ashley and said, “I promise to help you with your stupid magic homework.”

The two continued sitting in the bath.

“What, that wasn’t it?!” Gina whined, looking around a bathroom that was still a hundred times too big.

“No, you got it right,” Ashley replied as she lathered her arms.

“But, but,” Gina spluttered, gesturing all around, “then why am I still small?!”

“The curse was that you shrunk three inches any time you heard a synonym of ‘small.’ Then you broke it. So now you won’t shrink three inches any time you hear a synonym of ‘small.’ Doesn’t mean you undo the shrinking.”

Gina stared up at her in incredulous silence before throwing her hands up with disbelief. “So breaking it was pointless, then! I already wasn’t gonna get any smaller!”

“Not true. If I grew you back and you didn’t break it, then you’d still shrink.”

Gina opened her mouth to retort and realized she didn’t have one. She huffed instead and crossed her arms. “So are you gonna grow me back or what?”

Suddenly noticing a shadow above her, Gina looked up and yelped as Ashley’s hand descended and easily enclosed her in a loose fist. “Ask me again in a few hours,” Ashley responded with a grin.

“Something I don’t get,” Gina suddenly said as the two of them lounged on the couch, “if you could do magic this entire time, why didn’t you just refill the juice bottles so I wouldn’t keep nagging you?”

“That’s hard.”

Gina sat up and stared. “I’ve seen you stand on the ceiling and you’re saying that making orange juice is hard?” Ashley looked away and scowled.

“Look. Magic is based off a very archaic language — “

“Does this language not have a word for ‘juice’?”

“ — that wasn’t constructed for use of communication,” Ashley gritted out, “but for the specific purpose of channeling the energy needed to produce a desired result.”

“So this language doesn’t have a word for ‘juice,’ is what I’m hearing.”

Ashley frowned, but continued on. “There are different methods to channel energy, and different regions even developed different languages. You hear about a few people who can do magic without the support of gestures or speech or written word or whatever, but that’s supremely hard.”

Gina mulled this over. “It just sounds like you can make up a word for ‘juice.’ Or even use the actual word ‘juice.’ Since apparently everybody made up their own magical language or whatever. Dunno why you guys went through all that trouble making up weird words when the English language is right there.”

She was met with a terse silence. “It’s complicated.” Gina took this to mean ‘it’s bullshit.’ But whatever, it was better to not press any further.

“Alright. So then what are some words?”

This at least seemed to cheer Ashley up some. She snatched up a notebook and leaned against Gina to let her see what she was writing. “Right, so, ‘i’ is the word for ‘self,’ basically, and ‘nu-i’ is…I guess you can just say, ‘someone else.’ If you want to get more specific, you sort of need someone’s true name and all that. Those indicate the target of the effect, and they always come at the end because you want the spell to wait until you’re actually done specifying the effect before it shoots off. Generally, a spell starts with, like, I guess, a verb? That says the basic effect it's supposed to do, like 'float,' and then maybe an adjective, like — “

“Oh, so it’s like coding.”

Ashley paused and stared at Gina like she had just suggested nuclear war. “No it’s not!”

“I mean, you have your functions, then — “

Shooting to her feet, Ashley shouted, “Magic is a complicated force that mere mortals cannot comprehend!”

“So you’re immortal?”

Ashley paused and said, “Not yet,” as though she meant it to be a threat. “Anyways, coding can’t do nearly the amount of things that magic can!”

“Yeah, but there’s a logic to it, there’s multiple coding languages, and using it results in an effect.” Gina shrugged. “I bet I could figure out a way to refill an empty carton of orange juice with whatever magic words you got.”

Before Ashley could get any more offended, Gina took her notebook and started writing. “Like, there’s a word for ‘copy,’ right? So if there’s some sort of phrase that means something like, I guess, ‘object that is highly similar to target,’ and a word that can refer to the inside of that object…”

With a flourish, Gina handed the notebook back to Ashley, who took it and read it over numbly. After a moment, Gina rubbed the back of her head. “I mean, it probably isn’t accurate, I don’t know the words or anything. There’s a lot of conditionals I haven’t touched on with this either, but something like that might create orange juice?”

“I can’t believe it,” Ashley said, voice hollow. “Magic is basically coding.”

“Um. Are you gonna be okay?”

Ashley looked over at Gina. “Do you have any books about coding around?”

She did. She even let Ashley borrow them, despite her sudden sense of unease.

“Hey Gina,” Ashley said, greeting her at the door in a swivel chair. Gina merely grunted, stomping snow off her boots and skimming through the mail.

“Why’d you wheel your chair out here?” she asked without looking up. But the way Ashley raised her arm in response rang some alarm bells and, after uttering some sort of weird phrase, she aimed a finger at Gina, who shunted down a couple of feet. The mail flew out of her hands and scattered onto the floor as she disappeared into her clothes. Her hat and scarf, devoid of support, followed the mail soon after, and, once gravity caught up to her heavy coat and it landed on her shoulders, Gina joined them as well. It took her a moment, sitting in the melting snow, for her to register what had happened, and then she scowled. “The mail is getting wet.”

Gina didn’t even get to pick up two envelopes (now looking the size of book covers) before Ashley hooked her fingers in the belt loops of her jeans and hoisted her up next to her chair and measured her against it, leaving Gina to shake off the biggest wedgie she had ever received. “Ooh, looks like it worked!”

“Whoop-dee-doo. You did a shrinking spell again. So impressive.”

“Not a shrinking spell, a size change spell.” Ashley raised her chair a bit and chanted the same thing as before, and Gina found herself at least a few inches taller. “See? It can grow stuff too! I was thinking about what you said about spells basically being coding and I was like, what if that means you could actually use the language like code, string together words to make all these new, specific spells? Like, the way magic is taught right now, nobody has really done more than basic combinations, and so we just keep learning the same spells people've done for centuries and centuries because there's only so many basic combinations you can make! But look!” Ashley, practically vibrating, gestured at the chair. “I just basically invented a whole new spell that makes the target the height of the closest chair! Think of all the innovations this’ll cause! I mean, obviously this is gonna be dangerous, like, if you don’t form a spell good enough who knows what’ll happen, but I mean, isn’t this just amazing?”

Gina looked down at herself and then at the chair, which was, in fact, exactly the same height as her. “So magic doesn’t have a word for juice, but it has a word for chair?”

“You really know how to suck the excitement out of everything.”

“It’s just sort of hard to be impressed when this super special totally new and complicated spell you made up just makes someone the height of a chair.”

“The closest chair,” Ashley corrected. Gina rolled her eyes as she finally shouldered her coat off and tried to hang it up. She was at least able to snag the coat hanger standing on her toes, but this did mean she couldn’t quite put it back, and she stood there in silent frustration before turning around.

“Okay, so your new spell worked. Can you make me normal sized now?”

“Hmm…I dunno. I think this is the highest this chair goes,” Ashley said.

“With a normal growth thing, stupid.”

Ashley grinned slyly at her, fingering the chair lever. “What’s your rush? You’re real cute like that, you know. The baggy and bundled look really suits you.” She pressed on the lever and slowly descended.

Gina rushed her, taking care not to trip over her pants. She hadn’t quite thought of what she meant to do — probably either try to cover her mouth or grab her hand, whichever was the easier way to stop her from casting anything. But too little too late. As soon as the chair hit minimum height, Ashley shot her dead on with her chair-height spell (or whatever stupid name the stupid thing was going to have). Gina blanched as she withdrew further into her clothes mid-dash, her feet wheeling in the air instead of hitting the floor. The only thing she could see through the tunnel of her collar was Ashley’s smug face before fabric obscured her vision and she fell with a thud —

Or actually, fell into Ashley’s arms. Ashley hoisted Gina up by her shoulders, her pants left behind and her underwear barely hanging onto her hip, spun her around, and sat her on her lap. Gina flailed her arms as she tried to bunch her sleeves up to free her hands. But the laws of physics conspired against her; her sleeves slid off her instead, allowing her collar to fall around her, and her shirt pooled on her lap. She couldn’t even bring herself to feel embarrassed. “Why do you always shrink me, huh? You know how weird that looks?”

Ashley shifted Gina slightly as she adjusted her chair to a comfortable height once more. “I mean, it’s the easiest way to make sure you can’t escape or fight back, duh.”

“That’s an extremely villainous thing to say.”

“It’s too bad this chair couldn’t go any lower. You’re still bigger than a kid.”

“Not even going to acknowledge that, huh.”

“Which is whyyyyyy…” Ashley drawled as she wheeled them towards the living room. Right next to the couch was a new chair, something that Ashley must have bought today. Unlike a regular chair, it was bright pink and made of hollow plastic, making it light enough for a toddler to move. Because, of course, it was a chair for a toddler.

“Hey, hang on,” Gina protested as Ashley picked her up (there went the rest of her clothes) and plopped her down on the chair. Despite her diminished stature, her knees were forced to curl up to her chest for her to sit on it. “Stop,” was all she was able to get out before, in one second, her butt went from dwarfing the seat to being dwarfed by it. Gina found herself facing Ashley’s calves, her legs dangling off the edge of the chair and her back unable to rest on the back of the seat.

Okay. Now she was embarrassed.

Gina bit her lip and stared downwards as Ashley chuckled above. “The ironic thing is once you’re the height of a chair, you’re actually too short for it.” She wheeled closer, the sudden sound making Gina flinch back. “Never thought about that until now.”

“Shut up,” was Gina’s eloquent response.

A hand big enough to engulf her entire head patted her gently. “Being grumpy makes you even cuter, you know.”

“Shut up,” Gina repeated, but mumbling this time.

“Anyways,” Ashley said, scooping Gina up and resting her in the crook of her arm, “come with me for a bit.” As if Gina had any agency in the matter.

It turned out their journey was to Ashley’s room. And Gina had never really been inside it much, but she was definitely sure there hadn’t been a dollhouse before. “Okay.” She gestured emphatically. “This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder about your weird fixation of making me smaller.”

Ashley set her down on the table, right next to the dollhouse. Standing beside it, Gina was slightly taller. It was a bit disorienting to stand taller than a house inside a room several times bigger. A gaudy and plastic house, but a house nevertheless. There was still a sense of satisfaction of being able to lean her elbow on the roof, though. Feeling bigger actually wasn’t so bad when she wasn’t squeezed inside walls. Ashley mirrored her position, only on the table. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gina glared up at Ashley, tapping her fingers on the fake shingles. “A dollhouse is a pretty big purchase. If shrinking me is just to make it easier to use me for magical experiments, you don’t need this.” Crouching to look inside the tiny rooms, Gina pointed out, “You even made the effort to furnish it…”

She paused, trailing off as her eyes landed on a little chair. “Oh you fucking piece of shit.”

The spell hit Gina before she could let go of the roof and she yelped as her feet left the table with alarming speed. It was amazing that she didn’t just lose her grip on the roof immediately, but she wished she had. She was getting so small that the roof got too thick for her hands and she slipped off, falling for a (dollhouse-sized) story before Ashley caught her.

She fit quite easily in her palm. As Gina lay there, Ashley’s fingers loomed above. Further up was Ashley’s face, examining her. It glanced away for a moment and then refocused on her as another hand approached, carefully laying something next to her. Gina turned to look. As expected, it was a dollhouse chair. “Looks exactly the same,” Ashley said, looking satisfied. The chair ascended away and Gina took the chance to push herself to her feet.

Ashley’s fingers were still taller than her, even curled protectively as they were. Gina glared at this insult. “You don’t have any smaller chairs, right?”

Ashley sighed, forlorn. The exhale pushed Gina into her finger. “If only.”

“So, we’re done here?” Gina said, standing up again only to fall back on her butt when Ashley moved her down to the table. Ashley chuckled before depositing her in front of the dollhouse and hooking the door open with a pinky. Of course.

Approaching the dollhouse made it apparent that she was relatively small for it. Not terribly small, thankfully, but probably something like kid-sized. The doorway was just about twice her height. Inside was similarly scaled. Gina meandered around tables that reached as far as her shoulders and counters that her head could barely peek over, all colored different shades of pink. The cabinets were all stickers. Some of them were starting to peel — maybe Ashley got this from a secondhand store.

Gina staggered up the stairs, having to hoist herself up some of the steps. These hadn’t been made to be used by anybody, of course, and the architecture was a little off. Ignoring the smooth plastic bed, she strolled up to a window and peered out at a giant eye. God, she even had to strain a bit just to look out a window. Of a goddamn dollhouse. Being too small for a toddler’s chair seemed pretty okay now. This was far more humiliating. “How long are you gonna keep me like this, huh?”

“Just a little longer,” the eye replied. “I want to see you struggle some more. It’s cute.”

“That’s the second villainous thing you’ve said today. In the span of, like, ten minutes.”

“Well if I’m so villainous, maybe I’ll just keep you in there.”

“And pay the rent without my salary?”

Ashley paused. “Good point.”

“Glad you understand.”

“But I still don’t know where I’m gonna find a six foot chair.”

“Ashley…”

“So, I’m learning enchantments,” was what Ashley opened with before chucking a ball at Gina’s head.

There was a bright flash of light, and then Gina found herself curled up in a cramped space with barely any room to move. She had never considered herself claustrophobic, but this was putting up a very convincing argument for it.

“Ashley!” Gina shouted, but stopped herself from saying anything more because what if there was limited air in here? But that thought made her breathe even faster, and she twisted herself into a better position to start kicking out at the walls around her. Two solid stomps, and she caught sight of a crack and concentrated her efforts there. And with a few more whacks, half of the room snapped off and she sat up, gasping, only to topple onto the floor because her sudden movement rocked the hemisphere underneath her too far.

Before she could get her bearings, two huge pillars of arms shot down to either side of her at the same time that a pair of knees crashed in front, causing such a quake that Gina bounced into the air and landed in a graceless heap.

“Holy shit, you broke it,” Ashley whined, bringing the two halves of the ball she had thrown up to her face. Gina sat up again, looking around, at the wide expanse of their apartment and the towering form of Ashley. It looked like she was maybe six inches tall.

Gina had never been so small so suddenly — it had only ever been increments, enough time to settle into a size before getting somewhat smaller. To go from six feet to six inches in a flash was dizzying, even if she had been even smaller than this in the past. She couldn’t stop twitching and glancing around, at distant furniture, at floating dust, at the course carpet. It was all much too overwhelming. Well, at least her clothes shrank with her this time.

“Man…now I have to make another one,” Ashley said, forlorn.

“Ashley! Why am I small?!”

She glanced down. “Oh, you are. Didn’t expect that.” Ashley scooped Gina into a hemisphere from behind, sweeping her off her feet. Gina gripped the sides of her seat as she found herself ascending to Ashley’s face. “I mean, you would have been full-sized if you were released normally, but you broke the capsule instead. So that’s probably why you stayed small. Really, it’s your fault.”

“My fault?!” Gina spluttered as she tried to find a comfortable way to sit in her perch. There was no back to lean against, and it was too small for her to tuck her legs in. The height of the wall forced her to almost lie down completely so that her legs could bend over the lip, but staying in this position was going to make her back sore, she could tell. “You basically threw a pokeball at me!”

“I prefer to call it a portable transport sphere. PortaSphere, maybe.” Ashley wasn’t even looking at her anymore, instead pulling out her notebook and starting to write something down. The problem was, she wasn’t paying attention to how she was holding Gina up, and her hand was absentmindedly starting to tilt.

Gina tried to scrabble backwards (upwards?) from the edge. “Ashley!”

“Whoops.” Ashley tilted her hand back. “Man. I can’t write one-handed like this. Alright.” Without explaining, Ashley plucked Gina up, rolled her on her back, and placed her between her lips, like a pencil, before continuing to write.

Gina stayed there for a second, flummoxed, staring at the sheer cliffside of Ashley’s nose. She considered flailing and demanding to be put down, but the drop dissuaded her. At least Ashley wasn’t using her teeth, though Gina could still sort of feel them behind the folded lips, pressing on her midsection. The regular breath from Ashley’s nose kept tickling her as well. And her tongue was pushing against her side, which meant she was going to have to change her shirt when this was over. Gina’s only consolation was that she was definitely too big for Ashley to accidentally swallow her.

Gina was stuck in this position, uncomfortably close to Ashley’s mouth, for about a minute, before Ashley finally took her out. She didn’t put her down yet, though, just held her loosely in her hand, her pinky hooked around a leg and her thumb pressing on a boob. “Alright,” she said, eyes directed at Gina again. Gina grimaced at the attention. Everything wasn’t as overwhelming, but she wasn’t fully calmed down yet. “So what was your experience?”

“Can’t you grow me back first? You don’t need me to be small. You didn’t even expect me to be small in the first place.”

Ashley pursed her lips in thought. “Well. I’m still peeved that you broke my PortaSphere.”

“You’re peeved?” Gina grumbled. But she wasn’t gonna get any closer to full size by complaining. “It was really cramped. I could barely move.”

Ashley grinned. “So you’re saying…”

Gina realized her mistake as Ashley trailed a circle on her belly with a finger. “No, don’t you dare — “

“…you needed to be smaller?” Gina felt herself withdrawing into her clothes as Ashley’s hand started to engulf her body. Her socks disappeared into her sweatpants before dropping off her feet and down a height she could barely fathom, destined to be lost on the floor. Her pants bunched around her ankles before following suit. Her shirt only stayed on by the grace of Ashley’s expanding fingers, which kept it in place while her arms disappeared into the fabric. Her collar drooped past her chest, however, so her modesty certainly didn’t stay intact. Her feet now dangled without any support. The only things holding her up were Ashley’s tree-sized finger and thumb pinching her sides.

To Gina’s dismay, this was starting to become untrue, as Ashley slowly shifted her grip so that she was just pinching a sleeve. Given how small Gina had gotten, she immediately started slipping out the bottom of the shirt, only saved by clinging to the fabric. “Ashley!” she wailed, upset. Mostly because she was now dangling at a terrifying height, but partly because she was now fully naked again.

Ashley lowered her until her feet touched the cool plastic of the PortaSphere again, then let go of the shirt. It fell on top of Gina, immediately knocking her down with the sudden weight. As she struggled under her own shirt, Ashley closed the other half of the sphere on top and turned it this way and that, examining it. “Looks perfect,” she announced, opening the sphere again. Gina, tangled up in her shirt after getting tossed and rolled around, couldn’t help but disagree.

Ashley rolled Gina back into her hand, giggling as Gina thrashed her way free of the shirt. “Having trouble with your own clothes? Imagine getting lost in mine.”

“I’d rather not.”

Ashley shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

After a dizzying trip downwards, Gina found herself sliding off Ashley’s hand and onto a different surface, slightly bumpy, like a milder sort of gravel, but pale. Noticing a blue line spanning across the ground, she deduced that Ashley had set her down on her notebook.

“Okay, so what else? Clearly you were still aware. Did you feel numb? Hungry? Cold? Whatever comes to mind.”

“I mean…I wasn’t thinking much about any of that. Mostly about how cramped it was. I was afraid I’d suffocate. But I guess the plastic did feel cold and hard — “ The words had hardly left Gina’s lips before a tall, metal pillar crashed down on her right, making her yelp. It moved towards her in a sort of zigzag, making a loud grinding sound throughout. Gina pedaled away from it and then jumped out of its way. Only when she looked back was she able to recognize it as a pen. Then she got knocked flat by an arm, because of course there was an arm. Pens, by necessity, needed arms.

Ashley looked focused on her writing, but that was definitely a smirk. Bastard. Gina slid all the way to the end of the notebook before Ashley started a new line. At least she didn’t have to worry about being skewered by a pen after that. She draped her shirt around herself and waited.

“…Right. I suppose I’ll either have to make the sphere more robust. Or change the enchantment a bit to prevent this from happening.”

“So what are enchantments?” Gina asked, mostly out of politeness. Besides, if she got Ashley in a happier mood, maybe that would get this over with faster.

As expected, Ashley visibly brightened. “Oh, you see, enchantments are things you place on items to provide some sort of bonus or utility or something. You know, how like in video games there’ll be equipment that’s like, ‘plus two strength’ or it shoots a fireball spell or whatever? It’s like that. It’s really useful for benefiting from spells without having to cast them every single time.”

“Right. So it’s just a good version of a curse.”

“It’s not. Curses inflict themselves on people. Enchantments…maybe the right way to say it is it confers upon a user the benefits only when you’re using it.”

“I’m still not sure that fits this. It’s certainly not equipment,” Gina said, nodding over to the broken ball. Ashley’s eyes narrowed. Maybe it was a bad idea to bring her attention to her ruined project again.

“Oh, well, I was thinking enchantments could provide utility other than simple buffs or accessible spells,” she said, her tone airy. “I mean, if someone’s hurt and you need a safe way to carry them, wouldn’t having a PortaSphere be great? I was even thinking that I could adjust it to heal or invigorate any occupants. Maybe put them in stasis, so they wouldn’t have to worry about hunger or whatever.” Ashley sighed, lowering her hand around Gina like a cage. Her palm rested right on top of Gina’s head, not quite tall enough to give any space. Gina broke into a sweat. “But I suppose that’s on hold until I can rebuild the enchantment and find a proper object.” The cage snapped shut, squeezing Gina lightly, though her legs stuck out of Ashley’s loose fist. She felt her cell turn in the air, so that the ceiling became the floor and vice versa, and then it opened up in front of Ashley’s face once more. Gina was thankful she still had her quilt-like shirt to huddle in.

“Ashley, you’re being a bit…rough,” Gina said slowly. “Can you be more, um, careful? Please?”

“Oh, sure, no problem. What shouldn’t I be doing? This?” And then Ashley tossed her in the air.

It wasn’t a light toss either (though even that would have been pretty significant from Gina’s perspective). It could probably be called a full-on throw. In the next second, Gina found herself tumbling in the air, far above Ashley’s head, and it was only at the apex of her flight that she thought to start screaming.

She landed in Ashley’s cupped hand, bouncing once. Her heart dropped further than that before springing back in place, thumping furiously. Her breath hadn’t quite caught up yet.

“Is this also taboo?” With a start, Gina realized that she was approaching a sheer wall of flesh with alarming speed. It crashed into her, filling her vision, before something else thwacked against her back. It felt like elastic. When she shifted her head and looked up, she could see Ashley’s chin looming directly above. Judging from that, she was probably near her armpit, held in place by a bra strap.

“Ashley, stop it!” Gina wriggled against her restraints, but this was a bad idea. She dislodged herself, and with no proper support, rolled down Ashley’s breast and slid right into her cleavage. She scrabbled at bare skin to no avail — all she managed to do was sink even deeper, until only her head and arms were poking out. Her only solace was that Ashley seemed to be just as surprised, shuddering with a squeak as she struggled in between her breasts. “Come on, you’re being unfair! You can’t just take your anger out on me!”

Thankfully, before Gina could slip all the way down, Ashley dug her out and dangled her in front of her face. Gina just hung there, panting, clinging to Ashley’s thumb as hard as she could, in case this was just a prelude to dropping her or something. As Ashley examined her, her expression became downcast. “You’re right…I’m sorry. This really…god, I’m kinda being a shit.” She finally sat down and set Gina on the coffee table. “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything…well, I guess I kinda did. But I just wanted you to apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?”

Ashley scowled. “For breaking my project!”

Gina spluttered. “But that was an accident! And what did you expect would happen if you just tossed me in there without warning?”

Oh, maybe that was testing Ashley’s patience too much. It was somehow a little too easy to forget how vulnerable she was at the moment, even when she got a reminder only a few minutes ago. Gina braced herself, but Ashley didn’t move towards her, just crossed her arms.

“Well, how would you feel if I accidentally knocked a drink on your computer and broke it, and then I said, ‘Well you shouldn’t have left your drink so close to the computer’ instead of apologizing?”

Oh. Honestly, it was a bit of a false equivalence, but there was a good point in there. Gina sighed, looking down at her feet. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Is there a way I could help fix it?”

“I appreciate the offer, but probably not.” Ashley leaned on her arm, trying not to loom too much over Gina. “It’s gonna be annoying to fix it, but it’s fixable. I just wanted an apology.”

“Alright.” Gina shuffled her feet awkwardly. “Can I be normal size now?”

Ashley huffed. “I guess…”

“You don’t have to look that disappointed.”