The sun shone on the mirrored edifice that was Rural Massive, award-winning architectural firm based in Ulysses, KS. Thirty mighty floors of innovation and industry, with no competition for several dozens of miles around: these conspired to make it the mighty empire it represented for over forty years. Allan Truesdell, CEO and President; Cody Pushard, Chief Creative Officer and Chair; and Neil Riggleman, Chief Financial Officer and acting VP--three friends with a dream and a talent for business, who not only literally constructed the living environments for countless farming families but restored government offices and many historic landmarks of the region.
Not included in this roster, evidently, was Renata Benjamin, a hard-working vertebra in the spine of Regional Development. Monday morning found her tucked away at her cube, the assistant to the head of property development in Grant County, hanging up her plaid jacket to prepare for the day. The weather had started to cool, cloudless sunshine notwithstanding, and she had to dress for it: deep crimson turtleneck and black wool slacks were set off by her wavy raven hair, tidily (if unimaginatively) parted down the middle and falling around her thick-rimmed spectacles. Renata was a sweet young woman on the distal end of "youth," a little dumpy around the middle and plenty lonely. She had her assets: a wry sense of humor, a comprehensive grasp of modern cinema, and full, round breasts dwarfed only by her full, round butt. While she did not consider these last two to be desireable qualities, they were nonetheless appreciated by some of the older, hornier, lonelier men on her floor. Consequently, she focused on her work and poured nearly everything she had into it.
"Hey, Ray," she mumbled, greeting the balding man in the cube next to hers. "Here are those qualitative reports you asked for on Friday." He only grinned at her and let his eyes wander until she left.
She shuffled to the next cubicle. "Hey Joe. I found some of your printouts by the copier, here." He leered as though intending to burn a hole through the front of her dense turtleneck. "You really shouldn't be reading that kind of e-mail at work, and you really shouldn't be printing them out, for anyone to find." He chuckled at her as she turned away.
"Morning, Bess." Renata waved to the porky hausfrau across from Joe's cube. It wasn't all men here, but Bess was small comfort. Her piggy eyes flickered to acknowledge Renata's presence only for a moment, and she returned to shuffling papers around as though her sausage-like fingers struggled to handle them all at once.
Renata didn't bother greeting Gretchen, the hot young project manager who started a month ago. Mornings were her time for phone calls--not with clients, but with every single one of her friends, all of whom went out clubbing every night, and all of whom raised one or two children, sired by men who were no longer in their lives but served no end of problems for every last one of them. Gretchen had no concept of "indoor voice" and shrieked and cackled and swore with all of her over-the-phone friends, commiserating and gossiping until shortly before lunch. Wordlessly, Renata deposited a small stack of manila folders on the end of Gretchen's desk and slipped away.
She returned to her cubicle and slumped in her chair. Its decade-old hydrolics wheezed petulantly with her full weight. Her desk echoed with the twin thumps of her elbows, as she cupped her cheeks and sighed. The walls of her cube were decorated with pinned-up postcards featuring famous works of art and the foreign museums in which they resided. It had long been her dream to travel the world and see these amazing things, but one thing after another--broken car, hospital bills from mild endometriosis, round-trip plane tickets to a family funeral in Florida during the peak season--prevented her savings account from amounting to very much.
There's got to be more than this, she thought, gazing moonily at a 3" x 5" rendering of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." The office floor buzzed with phone calls, printouts, ventilation and conversation, but Renata's imagination was trained upon the swirling sky over Holland, however momentarily.
"Benjamin!" barked a familiar voice, with all the modest subtlety of a Gestapo officer. "Wake up!" A stack of folders slapped the desk beside her with vengeful zeal. Max Schanz was her supervisor, a self-styled ball-buster who didn't cut the ladies any slack. His gut strained the pearly buttons on his dingy Geoffrey Beane shirt, where the tie didn't cover it, a hemispherical gut that hovered intrusively beside Renata's head. She sat up and spun slightly to face him, her generous bosom swaying slightly.
Schanz was such a cookie-cutter rendering of a petty little boss, no further effort will be wasted on describing him. You've seen him a hundred times before.
"No time for lazing about, Benjamin!" It seemed a personal goal to make her jump with the sheer abrasion of his speaking voice, but Renata kept herself under control. "Stano and Hickok just came in this morning, and I want them processed before Moscow this afternoon! Moscow!" Schanz seethed above her, his paunch trembling threateningly before her defiant breasts, then stormed away to kiss some ass or slack off in the break room or some other stereotypical behavior in accord with his trite motif. In his wake, another office drone breezed by her cube, tallish, with short red hair and a grey sweater, sulking off on some nameless mission.
Moscow, Kansas, she mused to herself, while I'm in gulag in my own personal Siberia. She picked up the folders and spun to face her workstation, when something slipped off her desk. It was only a motion in the corner of her eye, but when she turned to find it, whatever it was, it had vanished. That patch of her desk was empty, and nothing was on the open floor.
Piqued (and bored), Renata set the folders by her keyboard and scooted her chair back to peek under her desk. Not much light fell here but she couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, just the cables to her computer and a large paperclip. She left the paperclip there to see how well the after-hours janitorial staff cleaned their cubicles: that paperclip had been lying at its particular position for a month and a half.
She started in on the Stano account, slowly scanning over the dense paperwork that represented reports in aggregate of projects underway and potential leads for more. Thank God someone else is doing that legwork, she thought, eyes glazing. I never could.
Something definitely ran over her shoe.
Yelping, she kicked with her legs and her chair shot backward a short distance on the industrial carpeting. Mice? A rat? What the fuck? Folders were thrown to the floor to make a loud enough noise to scare off whatever it might have been. Her eyes darted left and right while her mind tried to recreate the sensation: there was a light tapping across her hard leather shoe. She felt that in her toes. It ran from left to right... kind of from where she saw the object fall, off toward Ray's cube. Good, Ray can deal with it, and she slowly allowed herself to breathe again. She couldn't see anything under her desk, but she was seriously freaked out and she took her time reassembling the manila folders.
Until she saw the tiny thing peeking out from behind the mini file cabinet, under the right side of her desk. It was very small and had at least an arm and a head. The arm wrapped around the cabinet and the head was staring up at her, with round eyes and a gaping jaw. It looked, for all the world, like a tiny, nude man peering up at her.
The folders skidded under the sole of her shoe as she fairly fled from the cubicle. Her mind racing, she plunged into the hallway and made a beeline for the break room. Schanz was not in there, and nobody else was, either. Panting, she closed the door behind her and leaned on it, her pleasantly heavy body shaking like a leaf.
What the fuck was that? was the most coherent of her thoughts. All the other thoughts were ill-formed sentence fragments, lots of swear words, and swirling, zipping things that more closely resembled colors than actual words. Heart pounding, she waited a moment before opening the door just a crack, to attempt to spy on her own cubicle and see if she could discern any activity in it.
There was her cube, her plaid jacket hanging by the entrance. There were a few folders spilling out into the walkway and her desk chair. No mice, no little men, nothing else that she could see from her position.
She turned and stared at the twin coffee carafes by the brushed steel sink. What do I do? she thought. What the hell was that? That can't have been... what it looked like. That's crazy! But she had no other answers, and she knew what she saw: even in her panicked memory, she could see the tiny fingers splayed against the beige metal cabinet. She could recall the days' worth of stubble coating that tiny jaw like flocking on a plastic toy mouse. Even the amazement in his expression was very clear in her mind's eye, an astounded little man--without a stitch of clothing--staring up at her only when her head turned in just the right position, at the last second.
Did he dart off? She couldn't remember. Did he just stand and watch her go, her lavish, round ass lifting off the chair like an abruptly released hot-air balloon? Two huge, swelling buttocks churning against each other in his limited view, shrink-wrapped in black polyester, as she took off like a rocket to shelter in the relative safety of coarse-ground coffee packets and paper towels? She hadn't looked back, and she couldn't see anything in there now. Only a red-headed man in a grey sweater sauntering by, casually glancing toward her cube and then Ray's, before wandering off again.
Renata was thoroughly nonplussed. This was not any kind of Monday for her. Her Mondays were everything up to the tiny naked man. Her Mondays were the lechers seated beside her and the cut-rate military dictator who gave her more work. Those were Mondays you could set your watch to. She paced back and forth, not at all aware of the TV mounted in the corner by the ceiling, playing staticky Judge Judy.
She strode over to a large particle board table and sat down. That is, she strode up to the table, pulled out a molded plastic scoop chair with chromed legs, stepped in front of it, and as her hips bent and her curvaceous heinie widened and descended, a tiny voice called out, "Oh, yes, my goddess!" It was so tiny and unexpected, Renata did not have the faculty to process it in time and her ass plumped down into the plastic seat, filling it and fitting almost perfectly.
Beneath her butt, running more or less along the deep crack of her ass (but restrained by her office pants), there was a distinct lump. It squirmed briefly, and it was soft and warm, and it should not have been there.
Eyes huge, Renata wriggled her hips experimentally. The lump was still there, in the chair. Her left butt-cheek rolled over it, and then her right cheek, and then it seemed to nestle along the cleavage. She closed her eyes slowly, drew a deep breath, then painstakingly rose out of the chair in slow motion, as though giving reality every chance to make itself right again and not do anything stupid.
She stood up, turned around, and looked down.
In the orange hollow of the textured plastic chair, there lay another naked little man. One of his arms was bent unnaturally, but otherwise he could've been tanning at the beach, by his position. Bruising started to form along one side of his ribs, but his face--clean shaven--bore a broad, shit-eating grin. He looked up at Renata and waggled his tiny little eyebrows, as though inviting her to sit on him once more.
Renata nodded slowly, closed her eyes, and slumped to the floor in a dead faint.
(To be continued.)
When she came to, Renata was closely surrounded by various staff from the office. "She's coming 'round," a woman's voice said from the ring of silhouetted heads hovering over her. "Get the sugar-water," someone else called.
Bess was kneeling beside her, amazingly: all that obesity packed into one pink-and-white clothed asteroid of concern. How will she get back up again? Renata mused distantly, Who has the strength to lift her? But Bess, oblivious to her harsh criticism, was struggling to prop her up to a reclining position, rather than splayed flat on the floor. That done, Bess received a paper cup from a hand out of Renata's vision and pressed it to her lips.
"That'll take care of your blood sugar, sweetie." That was twice as many words as Renata could ever recall Bess ever speaking to her before. "Jus' take it real easy for a while. This kinda thing happens all the time 'round here." Bess trained her tiny, glistening black eyes upon Schanz. "'Specially when one's stressed out." Schanz' bald, sweating head had been bobbing up behind a couple other staff, but at that accusation he simply slinked out of the room.
Renata tried to protest she wasn't thirsty, but the cool water was actually quite welcome and she took a couple sips before propping herself up on one elbow and taking the cup from Bess' stuffed pork fingers.
"That's a girl. Sorry, I mean my giantess," said a tiny, naked man, perched upon her right boob as though resting upon a large crimson hill.
"Drink it all up, there you go." Another such diminutive figure sat on the crest of her left boob, his little butt resting gently upon her nipple. He leaned forward with concern.
Renata froze in mid-sip and glanced at each of them. Then she looked up at the people around her: all eyes were on her face. Not her breasts, not any tiny little beings that were roosting on them. She looked at the little men again, then up at Bess.
"What is it, sweetie?" Bess' brow furrowed. She followed Renata's gaze and swept a cursory scan over her front. Based on her blank expression, Renata surmised she didn't see anything.
Renata took a deep breath, and the two tiny men yelled "Wheeee!" as her ample chest rose and fell. "Help me up," she asked her coworker, and when she straightened the tiny men scrambled in vain for handholds. They tumbled backwards, bounced once off her round belly, then fell through space for a longer time than Renata would've guessed reasonable, before landing on the tiled floor of the break room. They bounced once each and came to a rest around her black leather shoes.
Renata looked up at the coworkers. Some of them were nodding, others sighing with relief. Part of her mind was flattered that so many people she didn't even know were concerned about her. The other part, of course, was flipping out that no one else was acknowledging the tiny little men without any clothes who had mounted themselves upon her bosom as though they belonged there.
Her eyes alit on face after face of all these people--the bald guy, the fat guy, the old mail clerk, the young man with red hair, and the two bottle-blonde bimbos who wore stiletto heels to work. They were all staring at her intently, as though concerned she might collapse again at any second, for any reason. Glancing down, the tiny men were recovering themselves around her feet.
Time for an experiment, she thought, and raised the toes of one shoe. The two tiny men froze, staring at the sole of her shoe in anticipation. Slowly, she swiveled her foot upon her heel and brought the sole over one of the little men. His astonished expression vanished beneath her shoe, but the other guy remained planted on all fours, jaw hanging slack, eyes wide. Looking up at her coworkers again, she deliberately lowered her foot to a resting position, then compressed a considerable amount of force upon the ball of her foot.
She felt the solid meat and teensy little bones of the man, not in detail but as a token resistance. She heard his scream, a high-pitched keening almost like a tea kettle but with one clean, refined note. Renata twisted her foot slightly, felt the bones shatter, and the scream ended abruptly. Yet the expressions of her coworkers had not changed in the least: they had no call to notice what her foot was doing, and not a one of them had heard any sort of noise at all.
"Thank you, everyone," she said, sitting down gently into the orange, injection-molded plastic chair (the mangled little man was no longer lying in its hollow), "I think I'm going to be all right. Thank you so much for finding me... who found me?"
A couple faces looked in a specific direction and a man started to indicate a young feller in a grey sweater, but there was an empty space where they aimed to reveal him. "Huh," was the general consensus, and people started to filter back out of the break room, returning to the Monday grind once more. Bess patted Renata's shoulder and waddled away after asking if she needed another drink.
When the last person had left and the door closed behind them, she looked down at the floor in front of her. There was a bright, almost jolly, red streak of fresh blood running a short distance from under her shoe. Beside it was the other little man. He had not fled: indeed, he was standing up and yelling up at her.
"Me next!" he cried. "Oh my goddess, please smite me under thy shoe!"
She stared at him, baffled, yet her other leg started to move as though not of her volition, and her black leather shoe began to rise off the tiles. He cheered, did the little man, he hopped about in glee until the shadow fell over him. His expression remained the same--that of high delight--but his script changed: "Oh no, my goddess! Please spare me! Do not harm me!"
"What the hell is your problem?" She commandeered her errant leg and rested her shoe next to him.
His disappointment was palpable, even at his small dimension and tremendous distance from the bottom of her chair. He flung himself to the cold tile floor and started scrabbling to crawl under her foot, pleading with her not to destroy him, until she drew up her legs and folded them upon the chair. His expression of heartbreak alone made her want to mangle him into flecks, but she had other designs.
"No! No more shoe-crushy until you talk to me!" she whispered harshly, in case anyone was strolling by outside.
The tiny man looked fretfully at the chromed chair legs, debating whether he could scale them to get at his "goddess." He declined to answer, only panted and whined in his frustration.
Confusion and fright gave way to mounting irritation in the voluptuous young woman. "You start talking to me or I'll..." He looked up at her, hope shining in his miniscule eyes. "...I'll freeze your ass in the ice cube tray." Not the answer he wanted to hear. He dashed under her chair, out of her sight.
"Hey!" Renata planted her feet on the ground and scrambled up to follow him. She rounded the chair easily and saw he was sprinting for the door. How he was supposed to open it was a ridiculous proposition, but he didn't have to. He was almost to the door when suddenly he vanished.
Renata gasped. Her eyes scanned the area around the exit but there was no naked little man anywhere. He hadn't even reached the door, yet she completely lost track of him. Though she was sure he couldn't be out in the hallway, she walked up and reached for the door handle, when he abruptly appeared before her again.
He was kneeling at the door, attempting to squeeze the upper half of his body beneath it, struggling against the carpeting on the other side. His tiny little butt bobbed in the air, his little legs kicked ineffectually at the tiled surface on this side. It was no feat at all for Renata to reach down and pinch one of his legs, dragging him back into the break room.
The little man, surprisingly, howled in agony. She had broken his shin without thinking about it, and he squirmed most repulsively from her fingertips. "Omigod, I'm so sorry!" she gasped and ran to the metal sink for some paper towels. She couched him in a couple and rested them in her two cupped hands, lifting him up.
By his expression, it was a completely different experience for him. He shut up about the pain in his leg and only stared as his conveyance brought him over the swell of her belly and up to her large breasts. Each one could have comfortably contained three of him, or either one could bear down and crush him flat. She started to wonder if she could even lift her boob up, tuck him underneath, and let it lie flat again, if she could walk around like this and not have him fall out...
The insanity, the inappropriateness of this alien train of thought shocked her. She almost dropped the tiny, horny little victim, but she recovered in time to bring him up to her face. "Please, listen, I'm sorry about your leg," she began, "but I don't even know what to do right now. You... are an impossibility." She stared at him: he was a perfectly proportioned little man, no sign of dwarfism or anything. The size of his head fit his body, his arms were long and slender, for his dimensions. And she tried not to stare, but he looked like he was of average endowment, at least as far as the brainless women's magazines in the reception lobby would suggest. "I know you can hear me," her breath gently tossed his medium-length brown hair, "and I need you to explain what's going on. This shouldn't be happening. I feel like I'm going crazy, and if you don't tell me what this is about, I'm scared I'm going to snap."
The tiny man was staring at her mouth. As her broad, full lips danced and shaped her words, his tiny penis only got harder and harder, and he gulped a couple times to keep from drooling. By all indications, he wanted to crawl inside her mouth and probably would have, if she'd held him closer to her face.
"You're really freaking me out. Seriously, can't you pull yourself together for five minutes and just talk to me?"
"Please, my goddess, allow me to enter your lips."
"No! That's not happening, I'm not putting you in my mouth!"
"Oh please, my sweet goddess! Wretched though I am, grant me the favor of entering your sweet and moist chamber of devouring!"
"Quit talking like a freak! I seriously don't understand what your problem is!"
"Don't hate me, goddess! I live only to serve you! Allow me to show you the pleasure of making love to your tongue."
Renata gave a frustrated growl and turned around, striding briskly toward the community fridge. Swiftly, she opened the freezer door and placed the little man and his nest of paper towels inside. He screamed a protest when she got an empty tray out but she silenced him with slamming the door. And she filled that tray. She filled it slowly, taking her time, with the purified water from the secondary spigot, and she took her time making sure all 12 reservoirs were more or less even. She further took more time, carefully walking the tray back to the freezer, not wanting to spill a drop. She balanced the tray in one hand and forced the door open with the other.
The tiny little man was curled up in the fetal position, both hands plunged deep in his crotch. The whistling change in air pressure through the blower fan, when she opened the door, gave her to think that she might have popped his ears by slamming the door so hard on him. But when she set the tray down and gingerly plucked him up by one arm, he had plenty to say.
"I'll talk! Oh my goddess, I'll tell you everything you want to know!"
Unconvinced, she held him over the watery pools of the tray, letting cold mist blow all around his vulnerable body. "You lead the way, because I don't even know what questions to ask."
"We only live to serve you!"
"Okay, who's 'we'? Let's start with that. I've seen, like, three of you today, maybe four. Why now, and where are you coming from?"
"We've been here all along, my goddess-..."
"And stop calling me your goddess! I'm not your stupid sex-toy goddess!"
He cringed and swung gently over the cooling water. His chest seemed only slightly larger than her thumbnail, she noted. "We exist alongside you, my... I don't know what to call you, giantess."
"I don't know that word but somehow it sounds worse than 'goddess.' My name's Renata, that's what you're going to call me unless you want to cool your broken leg and arm in an ice cube."
"Renata! Okay, Renata. Look: my world exists alongside your own, and in many ways we're similar. The only differences are that you wear clothes and you're tremendously large, and you have two genders." He glanced at the water, then stared back at her, being very careful to keep his gaze in her eyes. "I only know these words because we've all heard you talking about them. We have no words for 'clothes' or 'woman.' We've borrowed yours, but only because we live among you."
"You keep saying that-..." She frowned. "Okay, my hand's getting cold now. If I take you out of the freezer, will you promise to keep your head on straight and not lapse into that goofy-assed speech you used before?" And he frowned, but he verbally agreed, and she rested him upon the towels and brought him to the break room table. It was at this moment she realized that anyone could've walked in on them but, for whatever reason, they hadn't.
"You keep saying that you live among us, but I swear to God I've never seen any of you before." She kept her hands on her legs and slumped slightly to mostly hide her considerable boobs from his view, below the edge of the table. He was disappointed but cooperative.
"You have these 3-D movies, you call them," he said, pausing occasionally to remember these unusual words. "You wear these lenses, and the only allow certain wavelengths of light in... you know?" She did: polarized lenses. "Exactly that. Our world is the same way, to you. We can receive your wavelength, and we live among you, dodging your feet and climbing your wonderful women-bodies, but your eyes can't receive our wavelength."
Her brow knit and her lower lip pouted adorably, though he dared not tell her so. "Wait, so you mean you're in some kind of parallel dimension?"
His head wobbled as he weighed how much of that he wanted to agree with. "We occupy the same space. We work within you and around you--we can climb your legs or furniture, we can sleep on you or be crushed beneath you," (he modestly covered the first twitches of his new erection) "but you can't see or even feel us. You step on us and you can't feel it. Sometimes you sense a stray itch on your bare skin, and that's one of us crawlng along your enormous limbs. But mosly you can't sense us at all."
"Is that something you're doing?" she wondered. "Is this a defensive thing, hiding from us?"
"Not at all. It's the nature of our worlds. There are hundreds, thousands of these worlds, you know." He looked up. "You know? Did you know this?"
Renata boggled at him. Her mouth opened and closed a couple times. She wasn't sure how to answer, and then the break room door swung open. Reacting beyond thought, she tucked the little guy up in the towels and wrapped him around her thumb, clutching him to her chest, just below her left breast.
An older man with grey stubble around his jaw came in, looking to refill his coffee mug. "Oh, you're still in here?" he asked her. "You feelin' okay?"
"Yeah, I'm better," she said, making swiftly for the door. "I just think I kinda sprained my thumb or something. When I fell. Had to get some ice for it."
"Oh, no. You sure you okay? Want a doctor t' look at that or somethin'?"
She stretched her lips into what she hoped was a reassuring grin and declined his offer politely, ducking out into the hall. Her heavy, full breast bounced against the little paper package in her hands with each of her hastened strides. Once inside her cubicle, she threw herself into her chair, turned away from the entry, and hunched over her keyboard. She woke the computer out of hibernation and opened up a spreadsheet--any spreadsheet, didn't matter, just to look busy.
That done, and after peering over her shoulder to ensure no one was behind her, she relaxed slightly and unfolded the paper towels in her lap. The tiny man was wrapped around her thumb, mashing his face into her thumbprint and grinding his tiny hips into the first knuckle. Cursing, she pinched his skull with her other hand until he abated.
"You better watch yourself, you little... nuisance." She kept her voice low: though the cubicle walls had pretty good sound baffles in them, the ceiling had reasonable acoustics and once in a while the odd phone conversation drifted through the air to curious ears. "No more of that... smutty stuff while I'm trying to talk to you." He grinned up at her and she realized her cheeks were burning. She mimed thwapping her middle fingernail dead into his crotch and he chastened considerably.
They returned to their previous conversation: "No, I did not know about these parallel worlds, or whatever they are. I think the last time I heard about that was in some kind of news story about quantum physics, or something."
The clothesless, nameless, statureless little man shook his tiny head. "Different than that. That's the splintering of possible worlds at every juncture, formed by various permutations. I'm talking about discrete worlds, worlds in their own right, all the things you giants used to talk about in your folk tales. Elves, ghosts, other giants even larger than you."
Her lips curled in disbelief. "Elves? You're saying you're elves?"
"No, but we've seen them. You still see them too, sometimes, when enough of you are open to it, or if it's just one of you and you're feeling vulnerable." He thought a moment. "Like when you're deep in the woods and it's very quiet and dark, quieter and darker than you ever thought it could get. You start to get scared because you imagine all sorts of things out there. Well, sometimes your belief actually makes you receptive to things that were there all along, but you didn't have eyes to see them."
Renata let that sink in. She was amazed to still be holding herself together, after the impossible, mind-bending events of the past hour. "Interesting ideas, but I'm not sure I buy it."
"I don't know how else to explain it."
"No, I get what you're saying, but your story doesn't explain everything."
"Like what?" The tiny man sat up and hugged his knees, craning his neck to stare up at her. He looked fairly relaxed and even engaged in the conversation, for once.
"Like: I don't believe in you. I never believed in you or elves or goblins, but now you're here and I can see you. But nobody else can. Your argument totally doesn't make any sense, here."
He scratched his head. "Well... you're right." She blinked a couple times in surprise. "It doesn't make sense to me either. I don't know why you can see us today, of all days."
"What's so special about today?"
"Nothing. I mean, we've been crawling all over you all this time and you never noticed, but today-..."
"Wait, what?" Her expression darkened and the tiny man stiffened.
"Well, I told you about that."
"That little freak who ran over my shoe, that happens all the time?"
He burst out laughing. "At least!" He laughed harder, and though no one could hear him it made Renata nervous. "If that's all they're doing, running over your shoe, that's a slow and sad day to say the least!"
She narrowed her eyes at him, a cold feeling swelling in her ribs. "What is it like other days?"
"Do you want to see?" Before she could say no, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and let loose a high, sharp whistle. Seemingly from nowhere, dozens of tiny little men, all without a stitch of garment, came flooding in from all sides. Renata yelped and held her breath, staring in horror as they closed in on her.
They crawled up her chair legs, formed tiny little human ladders for others to scale up. They crawled up her shoes, dug tiny fingers into her polyester slacks and hoisted themselves up her shins, over her muscular calves. They spilled over the edges of her seat and swarmed up her thighs. And they kept coming, dozens, hundreds of these tiny little men coating the floor, covering her pants, welling up over her muffin top and belly. She could feel them now, each one weighing nothing, but as a group she could feel them tugging from all sides on her turtleneck.
They paid special attention to her tremendous breasts: she felt them climb around and over her stomach, and then tiny hands dug into the fabric under her boobs. They clung by fists to the wool, pulling themselves along as their legs hung free, and they pulled themselves up over the furthest points around her boobs' circumference. The first invaders popped up over her nipples and found easier climbing on the slanted shelf her breasts formed with the turtleneck. And they kept coming, kept climbing up to her armpits. They gripped her collar, they tugged on her hair and climbed up to her ears. With locks of hair in their grasp,they kicked away from her cheeks and swung toward her face. Hundreds of tiny hands clutched at her lips...
"ENOUGH!" she screamed, leaping out of her chair and jumping frenetically. Tiny men shook off her body and fell through the air like large, pink snowflakes. They bounced off her arm rests and tumbled to the floor, or they piled up on the seat of her office chair.
"You okay, Renata?" said Joe, poking his head around the corner of her cube entrance. For once, his lecherous gaze was replaced by something like concern or worry.
She froze in her tracks and looked at him. "Yes. I'm fine." She had to think quickly, and the answer came easily: "There was a bug, a large bug on me. It climbed up my leg. Scared me."
Joe nodded slowly, then laughed. "Women." His head disappeared around the corner and she could hear his chair scoot back into the center of his cube.
Relief was hers only for a second, as her attention swung lethally back to the throngs of tiny little naked men. They shrieked as she resumed her panicked dancing: she crushed as many of them as she could get to, before the fled (but not all of them fled). She mashed them into the industrial carpeting, she ground her hard-soled shoes into them. She crushed them completely, she mangled them partially, and she kicked them away. As for those tiny souls in her chair, her ass revolved into the playing field like a huge, angry planet. A hundred pairs of eyes turned upward as it eclipsed the fluorescent lighting fixtures. In one moment, there was a broad, round hemisphere in black polyester heaving, almost quivering above them; in the next moment, it slammed upon them and many souls winked out like the flames of birthday candles.
Renata ground her hips into her chair savagely. Something in her was beginning to give: the ridiculous interdimensional story, the fact of a miniscule humanoid in her grasp, the teeming waves of horny Liliputians all conspired against her sanity. None of this could possibly be happening, and yet the facts (as she perceived them... uh-oh!) refused to be argued away. She seethed, even as her hips shuddered and her buttocks flattened all those tiny men into a thick paste. What was she going to do, she wondered, with the dead-tiny-man paste drying on her ass all day while she tried to work...
"Lucky bastards," said her eensy-weensy little conversational partner. He had crawled to the edge of her paper towel and held on for dear life, witnessing the carnage. He didn't bother hiding his hard-on now.
"Lucky? Lucky?!" she hissed, settling down into the wee-corpse mush. "What is it with your self-destructive streak? Why do you all want to die so much?"
He waved a tiny hand before him, dispersing the faulty logic away like a fart. "That's not it at all. You've heard of the conservation of mass?" She had but her expression betrayed her lack of comprehension. "You giants, you believe that matter can't be created or destroyed. There's a set amount, and it redistributes itself, but it's never more or less than it's always been."
She nodded dumbly--her Monday was now preoccupied with Physics 101 by Professor Speckle.
"That's what it's like for us, in our world. Your... you have this tribe in where you call Alaska, the Inuit? They believe that when you kill something, it is reborn somewhere else. Kill a bear, another one is born." He tumbled back into the center of his nest and stretched back, tiny little cock pointing straight up at the tip of her nose. "We're just like that. It's our way of life. We get killed, and we just appear somewhere else. We don't have any of your babies, we don't get old: we just go on until we get slain, and then we start over."
"Dying doesn't mean anything to you?" This conversation got weirder and weirder with every passing moment. Renata wasn't sure how much more she wanted to learn.
He shrugged. "Dying doesn't really exist for us. All it is, is a brief pause. And as it happens, getting killed by you giantesses--I mentioned that we don't have women, right?--that's our favorite way to go. We discovered this a few centuries ago, during a time we were less careful about staying out of your way. One of us crawled into bed with one of your pilgrim-women and she rolled over on him in her sleep. She had huge breasts--just like you, my goddess (sorry)--and one fell on top of him." He closed his eyes, recalling the story as though his people grew up with it. "Her nipple pressed over his face, hardened, and stifled his breath. The fullness of her bosom crushed him, surrounded him, pinned him flat against the coarse bedsheets and straw mattress. He struggled in vain, his tiny arms only embedding themselves in her soft, sweet flesh, and he expired." The tiny man sighed, then opened his eyes. "And when he came back, he crawled right up into her bed again and dug himself into her ass. And then her pussy. He died about eighteen times that night before he bothered to come back and tell the rest of us how great it was."
Renata just stared at him. He lay stretched out, ankles crossed, arms folded behind his head, grinning up at her as though she were the sun shining upon him. And yet, this story... "You're sick," she muttered, "all of you are diseased in the head. I've never heard of anything so horrible in my life. That is seriously disturbing, I can't accept it."
"Oh, no? Why don't you check under your butt right now."
Dreading the sensation of gore running over her fingertips, she still did check, sliding her pale, tender hand over the full, rounded curve of her supple hip and shoving her fingers under one round butt-cheek.
There was nothing there. No blood, no limbs, not a single trace of anything besides her slacks and the fabric upholstry of her office chair.
She held up her fingertips. "Where'd they go?"
"They're all starting over again, like I told you."
"But where?"
"Your world is big to you, right? Well, it's even more enormous to us. They could be anywhere on this insanely massive globe. Impossible to say."
This was nearly too much information. And worse: she was beginning to roll with it. Her little companion was surprisingly easy to talk to, and he sounded so sure of himself, almost bored with the facts he was spilling out, that she felt herself swayed by him.
"But that doesn't answer the big question: why can I see you? And why can't anyone else?"
He pursed his tiny lips and his eyes wandered to the side, as he tried to riddle an answer together. "I'm not sure. I already told you some ways in which the world crossed over. You're either vulnerable or enough people believe in it." He looked up at her sharply. "Well, that's it, of course."
"What's it?" She raised him up to her face, not caring whether he stared at her plump, soft lips or not.
"You do know about the literature, right?"
She didn't, of course. "What literature are you talking about? We have a world of literature, centuries of it."
"No, none of that. We almost don't have any literature, but even among giantesses (which, to us, all of you beautiful women are), you are recently the most famous."
This statement, of course, begged elaboration. "It's because of the legends about you," he said. "It's... here, put me up on your shoulder."
"Why?"
"My neck's getting terribly sore from looking up. And I'd love to be there, besides."
"Maybe that's why I shouldn't do it." She was completely revulsed by what these little men got off on and didn't want to encourage him at all.
"Really?" He looked pained. "It really costs you so much to be a little nice to me, who you could destroy utterly?"
Phrased like that... She lifted the paper towel nest up to her shoulder and gently dumped him out of it. Most respectfully, he crawled up to the neck of her shirt and sat down, one fistful of shirt and the other of hair holding him in place. Thus secured, he could speak in a normal tone (for him) and her ear picked it up easily. "You giants also have your tradition," he began, and she felt this could also take more time, so she pretended to type on the keyboard. "You record your events, glorious and mundane, in books, no? You have religions centered around books. You write books about yourselves and other people.
"It's a lot like this. Someone in your world admires you so much, he has written about you very extensively."
Renata stared ahead in shock, not even seeing her computer monitor. Admired her? There was no one like this. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she said. "No one thinks of me like that. I'm just this bland, boring..." She looked down at her stomach, hanging over the waistline of her slacks.
"No, you're wrong!" he cried. "There is one here who loves you! He has written about you at such length and in such detail, we all thought you must be working with him! You really don't know who it could be?"
She assured him she couldn't begin to guess. "What does he write about?"
"Well, exactly this. You, being a full-breasted, full-bottomed goddess, and your adventures with we who worship you." She couldn't see it, but he sounded like his eyes were getting that dreamy look again. "We, who stand just above your ankle, who love your vast curves and deep crevices. We, who curl up and are enclosed in your mouth, who love your scents and your flavors. We, who can fit entirely inside the blessed, clenching corridor of your vagina-..."
"Someone's writing porn about me?!" This was, perhaps, even more unbelievable than a parallel, unseen world of tiny, naked, horny men who never grew up and never died. "Who's doing this? Where is it?"
"Ah, that I know how to answer, finally. It's on your Internet."
Of course it is, she thought angrily, and she grilled him for the address. He didn't know this--his people simply received the giantess porn in a different medium, though sourced from the same place--but after some searches for a few specific phrases he could remember from the texts, they found the site it was hosted in. She had to create an account to access the site, which she did, creating a dummy e-mail account strictly for this purpose, and she was in.
Renata had never heard of giantesses before, never thought of them as erotic, and certainly would never have put money on betting that anyone in the world would jack off to them. But here was a masturabator's dream: pictures, stories, sound files, movies--as many media as possible were employed to construct a fantasy realm that was impossible in this world. Or, at least, she thought wryly, previously unheard-of.
She found the stories in question: the writer had slightly altered her name and made her the main character in no fewer than 35 stories. The titles were ridiculous, sounding like radio dramas from the Depression Era or pulp fiction novellas. Renata did not dare open any of the files, however, not at work: she wrote down the URL and would look it up at home for real research that evening.
In the meantime... her head was spinning with unlikely new information, and there was a little nude man perched on her shoulder. "I've got to get back to work," she whispered, "though I don't know how I can think of anything else."
"I don't blame you." His tone was genuinely sympathetic.
"So, uh, what am I supposed to do with you in the meantime?"
There was a haze of light chuckling on her shoulder. "Do you really want suggestions?"
And for some reason, she thought she did. His bald astonishment was amply manifest, but he gathered his thoughts and made one very serious request. What the hell, thought Renata, frayed from the morning's revelations. He could be useful later on, and like he said, it costs me nothing to make him happy.
And so she left to go to the bathroom--"Are you really going to do this? Really-really?"--found an unoccupied stall--"Oh, my goddess! Oh, my sweet and beautiful goddess, how I am devoted to you alone!"--and slid the tiny little man down the back of her panties, into the deep, dark crack of her ass. He wriggled joyously, burrowing in as deeply as his feeble musculature could manage, and then sang himself to sleep in her butt.
Renata pulled her panties back up, fastened her pants, washed her hands for good measure, and returned to her desk. Somehow she managed to stifle the shrieking heebie-jeebies in her head and concentrate on the stack of folders Schanz dropped off earlier, but once in a while she wondered who the hell it was in her office that was so obsessed with her, that he could write a series of literature so detailed about her that it opened up a rift to a parallel world.
And other times, that foul little man snaked his hand in too deep and started tickling her anus with his miniscule little fingers. It usually took a couple warning clenches to settle him down again. It was going to be a long day, all in all.
That afternoon presented the most harrowing ride home Renata had to date experienced. It wasn't the constant squirming of the tiny little man in her butt that distracted her: her body weight was usually enough to compress him into place, but if he found an inch of wiggle room, she could adjust herself in the driver's seat enough to clamp down on him once more. She was long past the weirdness of storing a living person between her cheeks and now more pragmatic in coping with that situation.
The other situation was the newly opened portal to the realm of tiny, horny men. As creepy as this had been in her cubicle, it was outright life-threatening on the streets. It was readily apparent she had to stay off the highway, what with the writhing mass of bodies swarming over her windshield, flooding her dashboard. But even in sticking to the residential streets, she had to pull over occasionally to allow her panic attack to subside, or just to draw a deep lungful of air (covering her mouth from invaders) and issue a huge, infuriated screech of banishment. The discharge of her force of will worked to cast the antagonizing little people away, but only for a while: after she calmed down or her attention was diverted elsewhere, they began to creep back in from their dimension, like so many gnats temporarily shied off with a swipe of an arm.
Plus there was that unnerving squelching noise, as tiny men materialized beneath her car, only to be immediately ironed out by the tires. Disgusting at first, it gradually became a source of comfort to her, imagining scores of the incessant pests being wiped out and relocated by the dozens.
She reached her modest rambler, with its pristine monocropped yard, in its homogeneous neighborhood. Normally a sight of respite from a hard day in the office, the approaching home filled Renata with a little sickness: she didn't want to ruin the safety of her home with an infestation of measly fuckbois from another dimension. But there was nothing else for it. She had to go home and find a way to relax, then research what all this mess was about.
The tiny man in her butt—whom she'd named "Oliver," for no reason known to herself—squirmed excitedly as she walked around her own home. Little beings formed around her like snowflakes, dropping heavier to the ground than snowflakes, then disappearing behind her like especially ephemeral snowflakes as she went down the hall to her bathroom. There she fished Oliver out of her underwear and informed him of his name as she scrubbed him brusquely with a cake of French soap.
"Oliver!" she chirped. "Oliver! I love that! What does it mean in your world, my sweet goddess?"
Her brow furrowed as she pummeled the minuscule man with the soap. "No idea. It sounds like 'olive,' I guess. Probably comes from that."
"And what are olive, my illustrious goddess?"
"What is an olive. It's like this small fruit with a large pit in it. It comes in green or black and it tastes salty. You eat it or people put it in drinks."
Oliver invited his succulent goddess to devour him any time she cared to. Renata merely blasted him with cold water and jostled him in a scratchy hand towel. "Knock off all the worshipping, already. It sounds disgusting when you say it."
The little man's face contorted with pain. "My sincerest apologies, my most ravishing goh−... uh, sweet mistress! I only live to serve you and cause you every conceivable delight!"
She pursed her lips and plucked him up by one scrawny leg. "Now that's a fucking lie. All you little horndogs want to do is get yourselves off using me as a tool. Not a single goddamned one of you has shown the remotest curiosity about anything going on inside my head."
"Oh, but my delectable mistress! My entire, wretched being is fully absorbed with craving to know exactly what goes on... inside you..." Upside down, his lecherous leer was even more disturbing than usual.
Sighing, she pinned him to the cold mirror with one heavy thumb. "I'm serious, Oliver. Knock off all your disgusting smut-talk right this second, or I'll smack you against the vanity with all my force, and you'll be reincarnated very, very far away from me. Got it?"
The miserable little man looked as though he were going to cave in on himself with sadness.
Renata witnessed her own exasperated expression in the reflection behind the tiny naked man. "Or you can behave as my extra-special little guy," it sickened her to say, "because I need you as my guide for this. I needed you to explain how your dimension worked with mine, and now I need you to solve this bizarre-ass porn riddle with me. Okay? Can you hold your shit together long enough to be of some use to me?"
Tiny arms and legs flailed excitedly from around her thumb. "Oh yes, my goddess! I mean, my mistress! I mean, Madam Benjamin! I can gather all of my shit and contain it for as long as you require!"
She peeled him off the mirror and set him on her shoulder, setting aside a lock of hair for him to hold onto. "How do you know my name, again?"
"We know everything about you, Madam Benjamin. We're around you all the time, we see all the things you see." Oliver's voice rang clearly, just outside her ear, as she made her way to her home office. "We learned English by being around you. Few of us survive the wonder and spectacle of being around your deliciously destructive body, but we learn in shifts and trade notes."
"But you don't know about olives."
"If olives were your favorite food, we would know all about them. You don't care about them, and so they don't exist for us."
Renata thought about this as she pulled out the chair from her desk and fired up her old tower computer. "Do you know all the people I work with, in the office?" There was a crew of tiny, naked men on her computer chair, waving and cheering at her. She tried not to think about them as she swiveled her hips over the cushion and let herself drop with undue force.
"We know the ones you joke around with and the ones that cause you emotional distress. We know those very well, and we take action against those in your realm who cause our goddess the least discomfort."
Her eyes widened. "What do you do?"
She felt Oliver stirring on her shoulder. Wanting to see him, she plucked him off carefully and set him on a beer coaster beside her keyboard. He seemed very proud. "We do everything within the range of our capacity, I promise you, Madam Benjamin. It takes supreme concentration on our part, but in large groups we may manifest long enough to tie shoelaces together, disable a part of a circuit board, or defecate in someone's lunch."
The sound of that alarmed Renata, until she pictured Joe biting into a sandwich with a secret parcel of dookie embedded within. She smiled unconsciously, and Oliver looked as if he might burst with pleasure. "So you have your uses after all," she muttered, opening her browser. Referring to her scrawled note of websites, she began looking up what appeared to be message boards for writers, most of which looked very old-school and badly in need of renovation. She executed a search for her own name and found several titles by someone called...
"AlucardSpiegel? What kind of dumb name is that?" She grimaced at her little helper.
"Well, have you ever watched Watercolor Princess?"
She blinked repeatedly at him. "Why have words suddenly stopped meaning anything?" To her tremendous surprise, the tiny man pulled a deep breath, opened his mouth, paused, then waved the air in front of him.
"As my magnanimous goddess says, it is a stupid name." He flinched. "Sorry, Madam Benjamin."
"You can't just call me Renata?"
"I would sooner die than so presume!"
Shrugging, she opened several stories in tabs and leafed through them. In the corner of her vision she noted Oliver shifting his negligible weight from foot to foot until, to alleviate the distraction, she plucked him up and rubbed his chest thoughtfully with her thumb. The deep, rumbling purring that resulted from this somehow pleased her. "So this AlucardSpiegel, he's really detailing my entire work life, here." Her eyes flicked down the screen, reading line after line. "He's obsessed with my boobs, it looks like. I would never... I would never do that!"
"Do what," Oliver murmured dreamily.
"I would never pick up one of my boobs and slam it down on a tiny person! That's ridiculous! Who thinks of this crap?"
"You could do it to me if you liked." Two tiny men popped from around her monitor and volunteered as well; Renata plucked them up and tossed them over her shoulder.
"I don't like!"
"Just to see. For science."
She sighed exasperatedly. "No boob-slammage, Oliver. It sounds painful to me." Reading on, throughout several texts, she pieced together the complete image of how she appeared to this anonymous writer. "He sounds like he's attracted to me, but he's wrong about everything. My breasts aren't that big, and no one's attracted to my fat ass."
Oliver shook with laughter in her palm. "You could not be more mistaken on that point, Madam Benjamin."
"What would you know?"
One thin arm pointed at the monitor. "For one thing, it's almost all AlucardSpiegel thinks about. For another, my people are with you every second of every day! We see how people look at you when your back is turned. You have to know by now that Ray and Joe each glare lasciviously at you as you pass by."
She winced. "Joe makes sense, but Ray, too? Dammit." Three tiny men crept up on her right, sneaking up on her hand on the mouse as though it were prey; when she spotted them, she swept them away violently. They struck the far wall and vanished.
"It's a good thing, my enticing mistress!"
"It's really not, Oliver. It's not flattering to know that those two creeps stare at me and think about what they'd like to do with me."
Oliver tilted his tiny head. "But you sounded disappointed that no one would find your luscious hindquarters appealing."
"Hell of a word choice there, little guy. Anyway, there's a huge difference between feeling unattractive and feeling attractive to scummy, creepy men." She paused and looked off to the side. "Actually, not much of a difference."
"You're saddened that no one finds you attractive, but you're disgusted when they do?"
Renata leaned back in her chair and pressed the pad of her thumb upon the little man's entire face. "You know what, I don't feel like breaking it down for you. I just want to know who this freakin' AlucardSpiegel is." She leaned in to study the stories again. Yet another tiny man brushed her skin, this time attempting to climb up her ankle and into her pant leg. Almost thoughtlessly, she crushed him with her other leg and continued reading.
Something caught her imagination. "In three... no, four of these little stories, he actually walks by my cubicle. He describes the interior: in 'The Whispering Canal' he talks about the photos of my family, and in 'Magnificent Cradle' he mentions my postcards. Where the fuck does he come up with these titles..." She continued. "In 'Planet of Butts' he's described nearly my entire wardrobe, everything I wear to the office." She looked pointedly at Oliver. "'Planet of Butts'?"
"Yours is pretty magnificent, goddess, if only you could wrap your mind around it." The tiny man shrugged tiny shoulders. "I would happily live to an old, ripe age on yours, given the chance."
He was wrong, of course. Renata knew how she looked in the mirror, in the shower. She could only think about her trips to TJ Maxx, once or twice a year, when she had to shop for replacement pants that fit her. Oliver wasn't there for her anguish when she'd get dressed for work, and the only slacks that matched her top suddenly split a seam or the zipper wouldn't go up without a fight. Or maybe he was, considering everything he'd told her. Maybe her heartbreak meant nothing to a little pervert who was into large asses. Of course, to him, even some young, hipless skinny-Minnie had a big butt. She laughed ruefully and Oliver gave her a strange look.
"But I can't just catalog every single person who goes by my desk. I'm in the middle of the office, probably everyone in Rural Massive has been by me at some point." She stared at her tiny companion thoughtfully. "What do I do, Oliver? Is there anything you can share with me to help me out?"
His entire diminutive being fairly glowed with pride, and he hugged Renata's thumb joyfully. "I can tell you everything about him, my pulchritudinous majesty! His name's Gerald Keller, he lives with his mother and baby sister in Hickok. He does data entry for finance."
Renata nearly crushed Oliver in her fist. "You little prick! Why didn't you tell me this in the beginning?" Three tiny men emerged from the shadows of her computer desk, saw what was going on, and quickly receded into obscurity again.
The tiny man strained to push her huge thumb off his fragile chest, his eyes bugging. Startled, Renata relented. "I thought you were enjoying the thrill of the chase, Madam Benjamin. You're so beautiful when you're digging around for clues, being analytical."
"I just wanted to find this asshole! And you knew who he was the entire time?"
"I've known for as long as I've been in existence! Longer, even!" He coughed and stroked the tip of her thumb consolingly. "We've been enjoying your splendid bodyscape for years. We became aware of him when his writing, and all the passion and sincerity he pours into it, began to breath the barrier between our worlds. So, yeah, I know exactly who he is and I could tell you a ton about him."
Renata leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. "Next time you know something, Oliver, don't play coy. Don't hide it from me." She regarded the naked man in her hand, then rested him upon her left breast. He sprawled upon the red turtleneck, recovered, and clung to the massive sphere desperately. His upturned face was a huge question mark: she stared down the length of her nose at him for a long moment, then slowly nodded.
Oliver's jaw dropped. "Really?" he whispered.
"Before I change my mind."
Nearly weeping, Oliver buried his face into the fabric of her turtleneck and began grinding his hips into her swelling mound. She couldn't feel a thing, not a nudge, not a rustle. She watched him dry-hump her for a while, then brought up her hand and ever-so-gently began to stroke his bare back. Now he did openly weep, praising her name, thanking her profusely, choking on his own words as he gasped for the air to fuel his endeavors. Renata only marveled at his enthusiasm, how he threw himself entirely into such a futile gesture.
But what now? She knew who was writing these stories. The why of it was incidental. What was important now was getting Gerald, or AlucardSpiegel, to knock this shit off. She wondered what he looked like: the name wasn't familiar at all, so he was just some faceless nobody in the office, a data entry drone who clocked in, did his work, and went back home to... Hickok. Barely a town at all, a dot in the middle of struggling farmland. Dilapidated homes, rusted-out pickups, the very stereotype of coastal elitists when they thought of America's Heartland. And he lived with his mother and a sister, in some hovel, in the wasteland. He plugged away at mind-numbing data entry, brought home a paycheck, and in his free time he cranked out tale after tawdry tale about Renata.
She scrolled through the stories and contemplatively patted Oliver's tiny little butt. "He's fixated on my boobs and my butt," she said to herself. "But he's taken the time to study the details of my cubicle. He's walked past me a hundred times a day and I've never noticed him."
"He's the one who got help for you when you passed out," gasped Oliver. Tiny little eyes peered in the darkness behind her monitor, glinting with envy and hunger.
That surprised her. Either Gerald was luckily in the area, or he was always watching her somehow. Maybe he sat nearby? No, finance was on the other side of the office. She went from touched to skeeved-out in a matter of seconds. Was he spying on her? Could he hack the webcam on her computer? She swore under her breath.
Oliver grunted, expended himself, and collapsed in a limp heap upon her breast. "Is something wrong, my munificent goddess?"
She glanced at him, then back at the screen. "I'm just trying to figure this guy out, I guess. Is he going to give me trouble? Can I intimidate him? Is it enough to get the stories taken down? I mean, I could email the site admin and make a complaint, but I guess it's up to their sense of honor whether they'll act on it." She hummed and tapped her teeth. "But even if I get the stories taken down, what's to stop him from writing more?"
If Oliver had any answers, they were locked within his slumbering little head.