Benjamin Modine’s heart rattled from the walls of his ribcage. He checked his watch for the umpteenth time as he spun on his office chair. Required duties for the day were all checked off except this one.

            The big meeting.

            In less than ten minutes, he’d be face to face with a supervisor, and quite possibly, putting himself on the map at this company.

            The thirty-three year old ran his fingers through his sandy, mildly unkempt hair again and again like a threshing machine. He told himself there was no reason to be nervous. He was the top Blend specialist still under this roof, after all. Granted, the company was currently tipping downward toward the financial red like the Titanic as other food and beverage conglomerates literally consumed the industry. Which in some ways made him merely the employee-of-the-month on a doomed vessel.

            Still, Ben had reason for confidence. After he’d spent the better part of the past two years tinkering in his off time and occasionally during work hours when nobody was looking, the man had put the final polish on his magnum opus. A sheer symphony of applied science and fizzy beverage know-how. The formula for a beverage which could not only be cheaply produced but contained absolutely zero of anything the populace’s health nuts might swoon over. Fat, calories, sugar, sodium, everything. For all intents and purposes, it was like drinking a bottle of carbonated water, and yet the chemical genius of it allowed any number of flavors and combinations to be wedded with his liquid design without altering its health benefits. He’d collected all his findings, submitted his proposal, and waited four weeks; after it seemed his idea was just lost in the upper management slush pile, though, he’d received a call informing him he was to have a meeting with his supervisor and possibly even a higher-up from corporate.

            This was that major. And it was all he could do to keep from fidgeting from the build-up of it.

            “Hey,” droned a voice from the door. “Captain Einstein. Earth to Einstein. Look at me.”

            Ben obeyed and looked to the door. There stood Mariah Tennyson, an admittedly attractive blonde with piercing green eyes and a mouth that would offend any number of biker gangs. Another Blend technician, and his unofficial rival, Ben had been easily keeping ahead of Mariah for the past five years, hence the disdain dripping in her words. She obviously didn’t feel the need to congratulate him on his big meeting.

            “Yes, Mariah?” he said pleasantly. “May I help you with something?” There was no better payback than cool passive-aggression.

            “Don’t start with me,” she sneered, looking him up and down. “Just get your ass up to the fifth floor. Ms. Hoshoku’s office. Five minutes. And you better get moving, because I may or may not have dawdled on the way here to tell you.”

            “Ms. Hoshoku!” Ben gawped. His blood froze in his veins, as his fingers atrophied around the arm of the chair.

            There was no way he was actually supposed to meet Ms. Hoshoku: no lowly supervisor, but the actual production manager for his department. Though he’d never met the apparently strikingly beautiful Japanese import woman in person, he’d heard rumor of her ruthless business acumen and terrifying physical presence which commanded the attention of grunts and CEOs alike. She was said to be scaling the corporate ladder two rungs at a time if not faster. In fact, Ben believed she’d actually started lower in the company than he did five years ago, yet here she was, calling the shots and giving the man butterflies in his stomach about meeting her.

            No, this had to be a joke. This was Mariah relating the information. She just wanted to screw him over.

            “Mariah, I don’t have any time for you to be pulling pranks on me just because you’re jealous I created something useful to the company,” Ben remarked coldly.

            The woman blinked. Her lips pursed as if she might spew venom. Instead, she gave her hair a flighty toss over her shoulder and crossed the arms of her lab coat. “Believe me, Benjamin, if I wanted to pull pranks on you, you wouldn’t have noticed it. You’d just be watching your career spin down a drain.”

            “Oh, I’m shaking in my boots,” Ben said. He rose from his chair and elbowed past the woman, rougher than necessary. “Now be serious. Where am I going?”
            “Like I said. Hoshoku. Fifth floor. Don’t be late,” Mariah groaned, and from the way she rolled her eyes, Ben was finally willing to trust her disgust at his success. With a song in his heart and a lump in his throat, the man bundled his notes and tablet under his arm and power-walked for the elevator.

            As he went, though, Ben couldn’t help but steal a glance over his shoulder at Mariah as she stalked off in the other direction. Sure, she was a bitch, but the woman really knew how to pick a skirt that accentuated her firm assets. Her lab coat made it tricky to make out the hump of her ass below, but Ben was patient. It was there, subtle or not. He didn’t like to put unnecessary labels on his tastes, but one thing was for sure, if he was forced to choose a quadrant, he wasn’t a boob man. That was clear, at least.

            In the elevator, Ben watched the lit numbers rising higher above his head until the doors slid open, releasing him onto the fifth floor, where he seldom had reason to go. His pulse flared. This story, and higher up dependent on promotion level, generally was reserved for those in management and higher positions. Those who didn’t have to get their hands dirty, unless an underling like himself happened to have a brilliant revelation to pull the Blend company right out of the murky waters of failure.

            He marched with confidence befitting someone of his talents. It was getting easier to remember that he had earned this meeting after so much work and effort put in over the tiring months. He was going to meet Ms. Hoshoku, a woman with the power to make or break careers in this new-age Willy-Wonka factory of delicious libations. Ben clenched his fists as he approached the correct office, nodding to himself. This was going to go smoothly.

            A single knock. Ben had only just lowered his hand and begun counting the seconds until it was appropriate for a second rap on the door when the handle turned and the entrance swung open. And there, wrapped in a smart curve-embracing top and skirt and an absolute aurora of hungry authority, stood Ms. Hoshoku.

            Ben couldn’t help it. His jaw hung open to lay eyes on her for the first time in person.

            Sure, he’d seen some blurry motivational video tapes emailed out to all employees, which occasionally included Ms. Hoshoku. From those crappy-quality tapes, he’d determined she was pretty. Probably beautiful, even, in higher definition. But she’d also been sitting down in those videos. Thus, the man was entirely unprepared to be looking almost three inches up into the enchanting dark eyes of his superior. She had to be at least 5’11”, scraping up against six foot. Ben himself stood at a lowly 5’9”, which he knew was average, but before this slender goddess, he felt like less than nothing.

            Not to mention her age. Again, the fuzzier quality of the motivational videos had belied the truth. He’d assumed someone in Hoshoku’s position, someone who’d rocketed so quickly up the work food chain, had to be older in order to have the necessary experience to bypass contemporaries.

            But not at all. There wasn’t a wrinkle out of place in her pale, creamy complexion. If anything, the woman looked like she could’ve been the same age as Ben, give or take a year.

            “Why, hello, there,” Ms. Hoshoku said curtly, her voice twinged by a note of quiet sweetness. Only the tiniest trace of an accent lingered in her voice. Her long olive fingers beckoned him forward, her opposite hand stroking a black bun tied in her hair by carved needles. “You must be Benjamin Modine, correct?”

            “T-That’s… that’s me!” he piped. His voice came out far higher-pitched than he was used to. So, of course, it was the first falsetto noise to be choked out of his throat in the presence of Blend royalty. He tugged at his shirt collar and self-consciously adjusted his tie.

            Ms. Hoshoku’s lips pursed into what the man realized was a smile of some pitying bemusement. She nodded. “Well, come into my office, then. We’ve got plenty to discuss.”

More anxious than ever, Ben watched as the towering businesswoman turned and led him back into her office. That was when he spied her caboose. Narrow a figure though she had, the suit skirt was tight enough around the rear to hug the modest globe of her ass. From the way she gyrated ever so subtly with each step, its suppleness, despite her humble hips, was made apparent. It took all Ben’s concentration to pull his view of it, not to mention her long, athletic legs, away.

            It wasn’t the most luxurious space ever, but clearly the woman had an eye for design and fashion, even without the spotless catalogue-sense of a company president. Her space was spare, almost Spartan in its utility, with a bonsai tree in the corner and little other furniture beside her desk. Multiple framed business degrees hung on the wall behind her desk. Manicured fingers to the tabletop, she sunken regally into the plush swiveling armchair that looked more like it belonged in a smoking lounge than the Blend corporate floors.

            “Take a seat, Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku said, some underlying instruction evident in her steely voice. She smiled that same silently calculating smile which, while it enraptured Ben, only increased his nerves.

            He turned, spying a standard office chair meant for him on the opposite side of the desk. He lowered himself into it and found he was once again staring up to his superior Ms. Hoshoku across the silver span of the desk.

            The woman rummaged in a briefcase well out of Ben’s view. When her hands returned to the tabletop, her fingers were cradling a pair of clear glassy bottles. Ben recognized them as prototype beverage units, with no merchandising marking on them; these were exclusively for testing the cutting-edge new products.

            His heart thumped again. This had to be good news. It had to be.

            “Congratulations, Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku said with apparent warmth. Her almond eyes peered deeply into his for perhaps the first time during this introduction. It caught Ben off guard. He almost felt he was sinking deeper into the chair cushion, melting away.

            “W-What for?” he managed. He bit his tongue; that stutter had to go. Even if he was in with the big dogs now, that didn’t mean he could look like a weakling. The big dogs were the big dogs for a reason.

            “Oh, there’s no need to play coy. A Blend tech with as much raw, natural talent as you? Benjamin, that research you prepared was brought to me three and a half weeks ago. Everyone who saw it first was very impressed, and then so was I. And believe me, I’m not easily impressed. We’ve been hard at work ever since, ensuring that your effort is translated into a fruitful and financially successful outcome.”

            “Y-Yeah?”
            “Very much indeed. You see, your research not only caught my eye for the sheer originality of your approaches to the age-old diet-soda issue, but for its unique capability to bond with any combination of partnering elements, such that just about any new beverage can be crafted.” At this point, Hoshoku rose from her chair and circled around the desk toward a nearby bookshelf, which Ben realized doubled for a bar. She removed a chromed thermos from a high platform on the wall and laid it gingerly across both of her wide palms.

            “Well, thanks!” Ben said. “That’s… the idea!”

            “And don’t I know it now,” she said as she returned to the desk. “As you may have heard, I’m considered something of a busy beaver around Blend, especially on these upper floors. I’ve had my own… shall we say, elite team of Blend technicians, my personal squad, hard at work on a project I’ve had on ice for at least three years. Following?”

            Nodding, Ben couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy and burgeoning resentment. Elite team? What, so he was just cut out of the final product? Nevertheless, he managed to cool himself mid-flare. After all, he was here, right? There had to be something in it for him still.

            “Uh-huh.”

            “Well, to avoid boring you with the needless details of the transition period…” the woman continued. She uncorked the thermos and poured out a velvety waterfall of rich, red liquid almost the hue of strawberry jam into each of the glass bottles. “…suffice it to say we’ve got a real winner on our hands here. Your blend formula, and my personal technicians’ cherry on top. I’d sincerely appreciate you taking the inaugural tasting with me.”

            The necks of each crimson-filled glass bottle perched between Ms. Hoshoku’s draped fingers. But Ben hardly noticed.

            He blinked. He wasn’t even close to processing what was being said to him. Not only because it sounded so wildly too-good-to-be-true that he was half-convinced this was a dream, but also the very visage of Ms. Hoshoku herself. More than a dream, she was nearly a mirage. So angelic and immaculately sculpted. That raven hair, which seemed to catch the light on at least once perfectly silky strand wherever she stood. God, she was gorgeous. How did anyone on earth ever look at her and hear what she was saying? Ben felt like his skull was being sucked into a tractor beam.

            “Ben?”           

            “Yes! Yes? Sorry, I, uh…” he mumbled. “I drifted, I apologize. I suppose I’m just…”

            “…nervous? I suppose I could’ve guessed that from your stammer and the flop sweat you’re sitting in now,” she remarked casually, her chin resting upon a softly clamped fist upon her desk. “Or maybe just from the way your mouth hangs open when you’re not trying speak.”

            Again, Ben froze. Damn, she was perceptive. He didn’t doubt she could cut right to his core if she watched him for long enough, like taking a flensing knife to his soul.

            The woman smirked. “Don’t fret, Benjamin, I’m only having some fun with you. I’m well aware many of the lower company assets such as yourself find me and my offices intimidating. I couldn’t blame you for that. Perhaps there’s something logical in such a feeling. Regardless, there’s no need for such trepidation today. Because this is a day of celebration.”

            “A day of celebration, ma’am?”

            “Oh, don’t be so formal, Benjamin. None of this ma’am business. Just call me Ms. Hoshoku.”

            Really? That was less formal? Ben didn’t have time to ponder the oddity of this distinction, nor to care about it, as he witnessed the leggy businesswoman’s next move.

            She ascended from her desk again, and as before, Ben’s attention was instantly diverted toward her legs encased in nude nylon beneath the hem of her taut skirt. He watched her high heels stalk one in front of the other across the floor. The swish of nylon between her thighs whispered in the man’s ears. Her butt peeked just around the corner of her lower hip, taunting.

            “Benjamin?” she pressed.

            “Yes! Sorry, ma’a… I mean, Ms. Hoshoku.”

            “Now that’s a good boy.” Her palm flattened around his shoulder, her long fingers encasing much more of his shoulder blade than Ben would’ve guessed possible. Goose bumps rippled like plague through his entire body. Instantly he felt stirring down between his legs, as sure sign of an incriminating pants tent. He cleared his throat and leaned forward to conceal his half-mast.

            “Drink up,” she instructed, handing him a bottle, and she didn’t have to tell him twice. He wrapped his lips around the neck and guzzled down half the bottle in one gulp, if only to alleviate the redness in his cheeks. Indeed, as she’d hinted, it tasted like cherry. Grinning, Ms. Hoshuku followed suit, drinking down her own beverage as she stood over her employee.

            “As of this moment, we’re pointing Blend back toward the sky. I’ve already passed on this partnership beverage between your original research and my tireless team to the requisite suits. They’re about to push it hard, putting a bottle into the hand of every viable consumer. You’d do well to hang on tight, Benjamin, because there will be no gentle flight for anyone too shaky to handle the ascent,” Ms. Hoshuku informed him with crystalline philosophical clarity. Her hand remained on his shoulder, fingers drumming on his back. “This… that liquid you feel running down your throat right now, is the future of Blend. And who knows? Maybe it will be the future of a few other things as well.”

            A pit formed in Ben’s stomach.

If Ben learned nothing else in that first week following his meeting with Ms. Hoshoku, it was that he couldn’t overestimate her claims enough.

            That anonymous cherry-blend creation (officially called ForLit now) credited to himself and Hoshoku’s “elite squad” struck the food and beverage industry like the blitzkrieg. It was on every periodical cover, both in ads and health articles. It plastered on the news and into television ads. People carried bottles of ForLit on the streets like mugs of coffee. If Ben had to guess, Blend was sinking every last dollar it had on reserve into this campaign. And it appeared to be paying off in spades.

            As Ben came to work on the subway, he couldn’t help but notice almost half of the individuals on the car either clutching bottles of the cherry-red substance, or personal thermoses which sloshed with the stuff as well. Others carried flasks, which Ben supposed very well could’ve transported secret reserves of ForLit. He swelled with personal triumph.

            “That’s mine,” he wanted to say proudly to every stranger he met. “I made that. Well, me and some people I’ve never met using some ingredients I didn’t approve first, but damn it, I’m in there!”

            Of course, Ben hadn’t gone unrewarded. He’d received a decent gift of thanks from the company in his bank account, just a bit larger than his Christmas bonus. Plus he’d won the admiration of every coworker in his building who would get to keep their jobs now that Blend wasn’t tanking. While still not quite skyrocketing, as Hoshoku had promised, the company was making an unprecedented turnaround in the stocks. Even Mariah had shut her trap finally.

            “Ben?” a voice uttered kindly from the side as the man stepped off the subway platform.

            He smiled at Kendra Roberts, a lower Blend technician-in-training who seemed to be the antithesis of Mariah’s bitter jealousy and office politics. The bright-eyed, caramel-skinned beauty was simply a good person, and Ben appreciated having a genuine friend as he was probably on the verge of rising up in the business world.

            “Kendra, hi, how’re things!” he said cheerily as they headed for the Blend subway entrance. For an instant, he couldn’t help but notice that he seemed to be staring at the young woman directly eye-to-eye, whereas he once stood closer to a head taller than her. Nevertheless, he shrugged it off. She was probably just wearing heels.

            “I just wanted to say congratulations on your success. I’ve been rooting for you, after all that work you put in and, well… I’m glad it’s coming through for you,” Kendra said. She gave him a genial half-hug, waved, and sauntered off toward her department’s entrance. As she went, Ben gave in to his usual exit peek. Kendra wasn’t exactly well-endowed in the derriere, but she was young, cute, and pert, and thus still worth sneaking a glance. As she disappeared through the door, though, Ben noticed she wasn’t actually wearing heels. Nevertheless, he shrugged it off.

            When he arrived in his office, he found an email waiting. From Hoshoku. A name he never expected to see in his personal inbox.

            Benjamin.

            Come up to my office when you arrive in the building. We’ve a few matters to discuss.

                        Ms. Hoshoku

            Heart aflutter all over again, Ben checked his reflection in the computer screen, desperately combing his hair and picking at his teeth to make sure he was clear. Not that he expected a single thing to ever come close to happening with this gorgeous woman, but instinct made it impossible to help himself.

            “Matters” to discuss. That didn’t necessarily sound positive. Ben jokingly smacked himself in the cheek for trying to self-defeat yet again. He’d helped create ForLit! The new MVP of this entire corporate enterprise! He had no reason to be nervous, perhaps ever again!

            Gathering his supplies as he did last time, Ben did up the buttons on his suit. He noticed the hang of the jacket was looser than he remembered. At least a size too large. Again he shrugged it off; he’d been putting in some extra jogging time, that was all, and shed a few pounds. Maybe he could get himself a new suit if he received a raise and a promotion from all this ForLit buzz.

            In the hallway, Ben realized he was walking straight for Mariah, going in the opposite direction. Ordinarily he would’ve busied himself with the folders in his hands so he could avoid looking at her until she was turned around, but this time, he had to take notice.

            Mariah certainly couldn’t be considered a tall woman. Average height, at best, if not below. Ben was probably a full six inches over her the week before, which he remembered more distinctly than he did Kendra, because he found it so sweet to lord his big meeting with Hoshoku over her as he slid past the messenger.

            And indeed, Mariah wore heels, unlike Kendra, but that still didn’t quite account for the possible optical illusion Ben was experiencing beneath the office fluorescents. The woman was definitely taller than him. Those spike heels gave her an edge, but there was no way she was wearing nine-inch heels. Did they even make them that high? Ben swallowed, unable to keep himself from tracing his gaze down the length of her body as she power-marched toward him. Her bust, never exactly a winning point for her before, had increased, and noticeably. Ben wondered how she’d afforded the plastic surgery to enlarge her chest, though he didn’t question it so hard that he became less grateful for the opportunity to gawk at those rotund orbs pressing through her lab coat.

            “Eyes to yourself, creep,” Mariah snarled as they passed. Ben shrugged, diverting his vision again. Okay, she probably had him there; he’d definitely stared longer than he should’ve. Even then, he couldn’t avoid sneaking a glance at her retreating form.

            It seemed she’d developed in the lower regions, too. Though her lab coat had once all but made her rump invisible, today, Mariah’s ass had filled in her garments nicely. The white fabric bulged along the curved corners with the increased girth.

            Ben idled to himself in the elevator. Maybe his blonde rival hadn’t even gotten plastic surgery, maybe she’d just packed on a couple pounds in exactly the right places? He wasn’t going to complain, either way.

            The walk to Hoshoku’s office was less intimidating this time, even if it seemed a hair spacier than his previous visit. He knocked once on the door, just as last time, but had to wait longer before it once again swung away to reveal his superior and the reason he was suddenly a minor league Blend superstar.

            And was it ever a revelation. Ben had to clench the muscles in his back and legs just to prevent himself from popping an erection from merely standing before her. The woman’s previously semi-prominent breasts had evolved into, Ben had to admit crudely, melons. They were almost aching against the buttons of her suit top. Not to mention her hips, which swung down in an elegant hourglass slope from her ribs to her thighs. And if he’d thought Kendra and Mariah were making the most of their stature, he’d been putting his standards far too low.

            Ms. Hoshoku had definitely grown. There were no two ways about it. Before, where she’d hovered about two inches above Ben’s eye line, now, she was up somewhere closer to a comparison of a mother and pre-teen child with Ben. She was certainly over six feet now, perhaps even a full inch, and making the most of it with some truly dizzyingly tall high-heels.

            “Benjamin,” the woman intimated simply. Again, the sickly, scheming smile which lit up her gentle oriental features but simultaneously swirled the man’s stomach as he looked up, truly looked up, at her. Finger beckoned. “Come in.”

            “R-Right away, Ms. Hoshoku,” he said, croaking past the stutter. He had no idea why he was compelled to sound so much like a busboy when all she did was invite him in. Still, the words came out.

            As before, he obediently followed his dark-haired, olive-skinned siren into her office. This time, it was a scientific impossibility to tear his eyes from her ass, and not just because it was significantly closer to his eye line; nearly stomach level, in fact. Her butt had been transformed into a veritable globe. Not merely teasing against the fringes of the fabric, her entire skirt line was inflated by her beautifully yoga-sculpted rear. Like twin dunes, it artfully tested the tensile strength of its confining fabric, probably longing to stretch free.

            Ben’s mouth watered just a little. What it would be like, just to get near it. Just to touch it, with one finger, and press in hard enough to experience the softly jiggling, muscular mass for himself. He was sure he could be happy with that much.

            Ms. Hoshoku turned around, ending the show, and sat in her chair.

            Numbly, the man continued standing before the desk, unsure whether he was staying long enough to even need to sit. What if he sat down and embarrassed himself for it?

            Amused, his boss batted her dark eyes and provided another lilting smirk. She nodded.

            “You can go ahead and sit down, Benjamin,” she said permissively.

            Now feeling like an idiot for waiting to hear office etiquette, Ben shuffled into his chair and folded his hands in his lap. Again, he was tasked with leaning far enough forward that his pants tent remained invisible.

            “My time is valuable, Benjamin, so I’ll just skip right to the point,” Hoshoku said, her calculating tone dropping an octave. Correspondingly, Ben felt his body go rigid.

            Maybe he did have reason to worry?
            “It’s happening,” she said. “Blend is on the rise, just as I said it would be.”

            Ben quietly exhaled with relief.

            “But more to the point, we can help it on its ascent, such that it reaches the stars all the speedier. You and I. Did you know that?”

            “N-No, no, I, uh… I hadn’t considered that.”
            “I imagine not. It would seem silly, wouldn’t it? The idea of you, a Blend technician, forming a partnership with your product manager and quite possibly soon-to-be director of production?”

            Ben’s pulse quickened yet again, just as soon as he’d relaxed. Conversations with Ms. Hoshoku were proving fast to be emotional roller coasters. What was this about a partnership?

            “You see, it’s like this,” Hoshoku said, steepling her fingers together a crossing a nyloned leg over its equally slender mate. “Marketing has arrived at the conclusion that what this new beverage… this meteoric phenomenon could use… is a human side. A presentation of Blend’s absolute focus on teamwork. Something to tether it to Earth, even as we take the industry by storm. Thus, they would like you and I, ForLit’s creators, to become the faces of the campaign.”

            Ben nodded. He couldn’t possibly be hearing her right. Teamwork? Faces of the Campaign?

            “Of course I told them it sounded marvelous to me,” Ms. Hoshoku said, her unimpressed tone suggesting she hadn’t found much of anything in her entire life to be marvelous. “And that you felt the same.”

            “Oh. Well, uh…” Ben mumbled, shifting his gaze to his knuckles. Much as he knew he couldn’t say no to increased time in the magnetic presence of his boss, he also wasn’t sure he was ready to make the leap to “Marketing Campaign Face.” Him, Benjamin Modine, putting his identity out with this drink? Him, who’d won Shyest Student back in first grade by popular vote, was going to be advertised in conjunction with a diet beverage which was currently being enjoyed by the crateload on a nationwide scale?

            “What’s that?” Ms. Hoshoku questioned sharply.

            “Nothing, nothing,” he said. “I suppose it’s just a lot to take in.”

            “I suppose it is,” she responded. She reached to the corner of her desk, where another chrome thermos and two empty glass bottles awaited. Her dark eyes almost seemed to shimmer as they bored into his pupils. “But I’m sure you’ll find a way to get used to it.”

            And just like that, Ben knew, he was on board. He couldn’t back out. There was no physical way. Not with this leviathan of a woman.

            Hoshoku set to uncorking the thermos and pouring out two bottles full of crimson ForLit, as she had last time.

            “Come now,” she said, scooting his portion across her desk. “Drink up, Benjamin. Last time was a celebration of new potential. This is a toast to fresh partnerships.”

            “Uh… a… toast-”

            “I can tell you’re speaking slower so you don’t stutter in front of me, Benjamin,” the sharp-eared woman said. “And I want you to know I find it quite entertaining. Endearing, really. As I’ve said, it’s something I’m used to seeing in male technicians. However, for the sake of wrapping up the meeting in a timely manner, go ahead and speak at your normal speed.”

            “Ah… ah, um… yes, of c-course. And, uh… thank you, Ms. H-Hoshoku. For everything,” Ben managed. He grasped the bottle and took a swig along with his boss. Sure, he was terrified out of his mind at the idea of having to display his likeness for all the world to see. But then again, if he started bringing the numbers down, they could simply boot him out and focus on Ms. Hoshoku.

            He couldn’t imagine a single human eye would be focused on him for even a solitary second, either way. No rational person who glanced at, say, a poster containing both Ms. Hoshoku and Benjamin could do anything but become entranced by the towering Japanese giantess and her curve-complimenting business suits.

            Ben finished the bottle of cherry liquid and placed it back on the desk. Maybe, he supposed, there was no need to worry. Yes, he was visibly and balefully nervous in front of this woman who could see right through him with ease. But things were looking up. He just had to sit tight for the ride ahead.

            “Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku said imperiously, having drawn out the last languishing sip of her ForLit bottle. “I have a question I need to ask you.”

            “Anything, Ms. Hoshoku,” he said.

            Again with the over-dramatic agreement. Why couldn’t he talk like a normal person in front of her, even just a little?

            “Have you ever been a footstool before?” she asked casually.

If Ben had any ForLit left in his bottle, he would’ve probably spit it out in surprise. So, he was glad he had already finished, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t shocked.

            “P-Pardon?”

            “A footrest, Benjamin. Have you ever used your body to, in the spirit of… teamwork… provide relaxation and comfort for an individual’s legs and feet?”

            “I… I mean, I know what footrest means, but I, uh…” he meandered verbally. What could possibly have been the correct answer to such a bizarre posing? Yet already Ben was questioning his reality, simply from the seriousness with which the woman asked. Was this a common trend she was talking about, and it just went right over his head, culturally?

            “Yes or no, please, Benjamin. My time is valuable.” The woman’s smile spread ever-wider as her voice drew lower.

            “No,” he gulped.

            “I see. Well, I suppose not everything about this “human side” collaboration campaign can be perfect from the outset. But I’m sure you’ll pick up the skills.”

            “I’m… sorry?”

            “The marketing campaign, Benjamin. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?”

            “Well… I mean, yes, I have, ma’am… Ms. Hoshoku, sorry, sorry… but-”

            “This is all about teamwork,” Ms. Hoshoku interrupted softly. “Aren’t you a team player, Benjamin?”

            “Yes.”

            “Wouldn’t you like to see yourself rise higher through the ranks of Blend as it regrows in the image of myself and ForLit?”

            Herself and ForLit? What about him?

            “Y-Yes.”

            “Then come around to my side of the desk, and I’ll be the judge of that.”

            Ben had no idea what earthly force was in control of his puppeteered muscles now as he rose creakily from his chair, wandered around the desk, and stood before Ms. Hoshoku. Even while she stayed sitting down, their seven-inch height difference made it such that she was just about eye-level with the meager man.

            “Go ahead and climb under my desk. Right under here,” the woman commanded in a gentle whisper. Her intimidatingly lengthy index finger extended under the desk, where, Ben realized, there was quite a bit more room than he’d have guessed from the other side.

            “Okay… um…” he mumbled, lowering himself to his hands and knees. He couldn’t help but let his sight linger on the now up-close visage of the woman’s nude-nyloned legs, bulging with calf muscle and just as smooth as the rest of her. She was obviously a runner, perhaps even a marathoner. Maybe that was what helped compel him to obey without much of a second thought. The promise of being near those legs.

            Her wide, white hands were on his shoulders again, her fingers lithely digging into his back through the fabric of his jacket. Those nails were talons. Almost a mind meld; she must’ve had a grip on a pressure point nerve. He crouched beneath the desk and settled into a seated position.

            “Now hold still, Benjamin.”

            The woman’s shoes were pried off at the heels, freeing her feet from their prisons. In no time, Ben realized that Ms. Hoshoku’s legs were coming for him, just as her earlier question suggested. Somehow, part of him still assumed this was a joke up to now. Some kind of corporate hazing as they groomed the lowers for ascension.

            But nope. The six-foot-one woman in her smart suit and thigh-clenched nylons was simply using her employee as a literal footstool.

            The heels of her heavy feet, close to the length of Ben’s entire forearm, came to rest comfortably in his lap. The damp fabric of her stockings between her toes tweaked at his stomach, the ball of her foot testing the flimsy strength of his abdomen. Her other foot found its way directly between his legs, stretched from one thigh to the other, the nyloned sole resting a gnat’s breadth above his still-obvious pants tent. If she lowered her foot another few millimeters, her instep would be squashing down on his erection.

            The aroma of green tea wafted from the fabric of her clothes, not to mention latent night sweat and the sweet precursor to warm body odor.

            Ben squeezed the air inside his lungs. He almost popped a blood vessel with the focus of diverting attention from the scenario to prevent uncomfortable information from coming out any further. She already knew he found her attractive and intimidating; there was no reason to add sexual harassment to the list of offenses as well.

            Ms. Hoshoku didn’t seem to have any further requests. She only wanted him to be an inanimate object for her legs to rest upon.

            He wasn’t sure where to put his hands. Her calves and thighs crossed together directly in his line of sight, as the woman’s lower half now filled his limited vision from beneath the metallic cave of the desk. However, it seemed beyond questioning to consider actually wrapping his narrow palms around the woman’s meaty thighs and softly undulating calves, no matter how tempting. It was hard, too, to forget that within arm’s reach, bearing the weight of her increasingly tall body, was that irresistible ass of hers, juicy and aerodynamically plumped by regular exercise.

            What if she’d asked him to be a chair, and not a footrest? Would he have even hesitated? Ben, unfortunately, had an answer to that, but didn’t dare admit it to himself.

            “Thank you for your contribution to the advancement of this company,” Ms. Hoshoku said after at least half an hour had gone by. Ben was too terrified to inch a muscle in any direction until she spoke, having endured the woman’s feet idly shifting about with his shirt and coming dangerously close to brushing his erection. “I’m glad to see you are, indeed, a team player, just as you said. Blend thanks you, and so do I. You may feel free to come out now.”

            Ben did so, feeling like a zombie as he was guided back to the door and it closed behind him without another word. Palms sweating, erection only just now wilting, he made his way for the elevator in isolation.

            What the hell was happening to him?

Though it was a difficult reality to grapple, there was no remaining in denial now.

            Benjamin Modine was getting smaller.

            The first week zipped by without any real disturbances in his routine aside from his clothes feeling a little baggier and eye lines meeting higher than normal, at least with women; with the men, he’d almost forgotten the change, as just about every male coworker he encountered at Blend and on the street stood the same diminished height as him. Maybe it was the success of ForLit which allowed Ben to carry himself higher than usual, his chin tilted to the sky, which helped allay the illusion.

            Today, though, two weeks into the unthinkable juggernaut that was ForLit, it was obvious. He, somehow or other, was losing height. Maybe his spine was telescoping, or maybe some fungi inside his organs was eating away at him and killing muscle and skin cells in tandem. Whatever the reason, he was now down to just about five foot even. He knew, because he’d tested it with a tape measure, and dropped the thing in shock when he saw where the line stopped.

            Ben stepped from the subway as always that morning and made his way to his office with a newfound attentiveness to the world around him, which he’d somehow let go in the optimism of his small ForLit cash bonus and thankful coworkers. He actually set his eyes to the streets and halls and looked. Part of him wished he hadn’t.

            Only now did he realize he wasn’t the only one shrinking. Most of the men he passed were about his same height, and some even shorter. There were also decidedly fewer males out in the streets, and those that were didn’t wear their suit jackets, quite possibly, Ben guessed, because their old clothes didn’t fit so well anymore. Certainly his didn’t. He’d had to dig out some old t-shirts from his middle school days just to get by.

            Conversely, he realized, that probably freak reaction of a height comparison between himself and his female coworkers, namely Kendra and Mariah, didn’t seem so probable now. Each of them had noticeably grown.

            Just then, the pair of them entered the building together ahead of him, and though Ben had to pause and admire their proportionately bulkier rear ends, especially Mariah’s, his nerves fastened on their stature.

            Mariah had to be six feet now. A full foot taller than him, her high heels aside; Kendra, meanwhile, who’d begun at above-average height, now stretched up closer to the six-foot-three range. It was surreal watching them bustle between the thin crowds of four-foot-tall men: the little fellas in their oversized shirts, trying not to bump into the supermodel-sized Blend techs, who hardly bothered to look down upon where they were planting their hard-soled shoes.

            He also couldn’t help but notice their clothes seemed to fit perfectly. Yet their new bodies were curvier and more bulbous than ever, accentuating hilts and spheres that couldn’t possibly have fit into their old tops and skirts; had they just gone shopping? By the clang of bracelets and glimmer of studded rings, not to mention designer labels upon the attire of his other female coworkers, Ben had to guess they’d completely redone their wardrobes in the wake of their collective growth spurt. He seemed to remember Kendra mentioning something or other about stock options in Blend, all of which he’d dumped at least a year ago when the company was mired in debt.

            Was it possible that the six-foot-tall amazonian women stalking their way around him had all bought into Blend at exactly the right moment, thus ensuring a healthy spike in their incomes? Ben wasn’t much for finance, so he hadn’t even thought to try jumping aboard two weeks earlier. Yes, ForLit was now a sensation and in the hand of every consumer, just as Hoshoku promised, but surely the company wasn’t soaring up that fast to visibly double the take of every female coworker who happened to purchase stock?

            Though the truth of all this was a hard swallow for Ben, he had to face it. The evidence was all around him, towering over the earth in spike heels and, respectively, scuttling around in big boy clothes. Men and women, separating further inch by inch, day by day, some faster than others. There wasn’t a single body who bypassed Ben outside the subway who didn’t confirm this fact.

            Women, meaning every woman, was taller, at least six feet if not a little higher, with the kinds of athletic-erotic curves to make even a man of the cloth blush. And every man, like him, was a willowy shrimp. Almost a dwarf. He looked from them, then up to a skyscraper-length advertisement canopy which draped over the windows and practically reflected off the sky like a mirror: DRINK FORLIT. A crystal-clear image of the red liquid, pouring from a bottle in animated sorcery. It was so delicious and refreshing looking on the poster, the image actually made Ben’s throat gurgle, and that’s when he stopped in his tracks.

            The women growing, the men shrinking. ForLit, his perfect base of absolute alchemy, combined with ingredients Ms. Hoshoku had still never deigned to enlighten him with.

            ForLit. It had to be. ForLit was doing this. To him, the other men, and every woman who put it to their lips.

            Ben was still entrapped in his haunting reverie of the shocking truth when he found himself colliding with an immovable object. A woman’s derriere in skin-tight denim jeans: her ass was so plump yet firm, it was like trying to take down a punching bag by running into it headlong. Ben collapsed on the ground from the accidental impact with the woman’s butt.

            “Oh, so sorry,” the woman said. She turned after a moment, clearly not even noticing at first the insignificant man who’d walked straight into her behind. Her fingers cupped over her lips, then combed through fiery red hair which draped down to her chest. “Was I in the way?”

            “N-No, no ma’am,” he said to the stranger. He didn’t know her, but it was hard not to call someone so tall a ma’am.

            Dizzy, his mind clung to the sensory experience of slamming into the woman’s ass, and the sheer rolling geometry of it. In that one moment, he’d felt the chain reaction ripple of her globes jiggling yet holding still in space, unwilling to move. From his sprawled position on the ground, she was a titan of a person. Her jean-clad legs seemed to stretch just as high as that skyscraper-length ForLit banner.

            “Here, let me help you up, little guy,” she said sweetly. Looming above, she reached down, hand spread to receive his. Her palm collected his puny fist like a small child being guided by the teacher. Though he shuffled his legs, preparing to sit up, to his surprise, the woman launched him back to his feet in a single tug. It just took one of her arms, as if she was starting a lawn mower.

            “Thanks,” he said, dusting himself off and recollecting his lost briefcase. He could feel his cheeks burning hot with the embarrassment of his stumble and those “skinny” jeans hugging the righteous curves of this redheaded stranger.

            “No problem, cutie-pie,” she said, and disappeared inside the sliding subway doors.

            Ordinarily Ben probably would’ve been swelling with pride and lust after such an exit, but the way she’d said cutie-pie was troubling. Not in a sultry, come-hither tone; rather, a pitying, childish way, as she might say to a young nephew.

            Nevertheless, he re-centered himself. There were far greater problems at stake here. Evidently, not a single other person had attempted to address this drastic change in the population. Certainly nobody at Blend’s corporate office was running through the streets, yanking down the banners, and telling people to quit guzzling so much ForLit.

            Which left it to Ben.

            And though it made him just a little queasy, as well as pre-emptively aroused, he knew who he had to go see about this. The one person who, if anyone did, knew exactly what was going on with ForLit and its size-altering properties. The same person who knew exactly what had gone into his innocent concoction of diet-approved chemicals.

Once inside the building, Ben considered stopping at his blend tech work station to put together a mental battle-plan, but decided against it. This couldn’t wait. In the elevator, he rose to the fifth floor and marched confidently toward Ms. Hoshoku’s office.

            Or at least, he thought he was. That boldness took a hit when he reached the door, the same one from seven short days before, and saw a new name on it. “Mr. Blaine Johnson.”

            Wasn’t Blaine Johnson the director of productions? What was he doing down here, on the fifth floor?
            Then Ben remembered. Ms. Hoshoku’s off-hand comment about rising in the ranks, and possibly in the immediate future. Could she have literally meant within the week? Biting his tongue and taking the off-chance, Ben returned to the elevator and shot up to the eighth floor this time.

            When he emerged in the well-lit space, he found he was faced with a secretary, just as statuesque in height and luminous in her ample curves as every other woman out on the street. At least, he assumed she was a secretary; he didn’t know much about the finances of Blend, but he was pretty sure a secretary wouldn’t be able to afford the kind of Tiffany jewelry and designer handbag she displayed so prominently on her person.

            Still, this was the right place: Ms. Hoshoku’s new name plate was emblazoned on the door behind the secretary.

            The auburn-haired woman barely acknowledged him on approach; it was only when he stood in front of the desk and knocked on the wood that she even looked up to him with a raised eyebrow.

            “Yes?” she cooed, as though speaking to a lost child. Her desk nameplate read Shauna Brown. “May I help you with something?”

            “I need to speak to Ms. Hoshoku.”

            “I’m afraid she’s busy at the moment. But I’ll certainly take a message for you and see she gets it at her earliest convenience.”

            “This can’t wait, I-” Ben insisted. His gaze diverted behind Shauna to the office door, which cracked open at that moment.

            “Benjamin,” said Ms. Hoshoku, poking her head around the corner. “I thought I heard your voice. I’m glad you found my new office. You must be here for our meeting.”

            Meeting? Ben ticked back through the previous fifteen minutes in his mind and determined he’d arranged no meeting post-panic, nor had he seen anything in his email inbox. But it didn’t matter how he got in that office; he just had to confront her.

            “Yep. Yes, that’s why I’m here,” he said.

            “Then I suppose you’d better come in, hadn’t you?”

            For the third time in two weeks, Ben filed like a schoolboy through the open door of his superior’s office. And for the third consecutive time, he was nearly bowled over by the sight that met him. A hanging jaw didn’t quite cut it anymore; this was the kind of view that could put people into cardiac arrest.

            Ms. Hoshoku was enormous. There was no other word for it. Not that he needed the further evidence that something was amiss in the general population, but the women downstairs, while massive in scale compared to their dwindling male counterparts, were within the bounds of his perceived reality. Women could grow to be six feet, after all. It wasn’t common, but plenty existed.

            The enchanting Japanese business shark of a woman who now stood before him was in a category aside. She stretched up in shocking contrast to Ben’s stature. She, the mastermind of ForLit’s secrets and the new director of productions at Blend, was at least six-foot-six. If not several inches higher.

            Frankly, Ben couldn’t quite make it out exactly from so far down, because he was staring straight at her abdomen. This was hardly a woman; this was a monument. And a bedevilingly alluring one at that. It took all the willpower the shrunken man had left to peel his eyes away from Ms. Hoshoku and all her newly formed hills in the tit and ass ratio. It was almost too much.

            No. He had to focus. Not on her, not on this beguiling citadel of a woman, but the problem at hand. His lost height. The very-real health crisis in this nuclear beverage they’d crafted.

            “Well, Benjamin,” the beauty said as she languidly took a seat in her new chair. She spread her arms wide in indication of the obviously larger and more luxurious office, complete with brand-new mahogany furniture, decoration, and high-society niceties that Ben knew couldn’t have cost any less than a cool fifty thousand. The bonsai still stood in the corner.

            “Ms. Hoshoku-”

            “Don’t just stand in the middle of the office like a lost puppy. Come over here to my desk and speak to me like a normal person.”

            Nodding, Ben did as he was told and crossed the lengthy carpeted span of the office. He doubted anyone on earth was capable of actually talking to Hoshoku like a “normal person.”

            “Good,” she said when he’d come to stop in front of her desk.

            “Ms. Hoshoku,” Ben began at last. He cleared his throat, going over the words he’d rehearsed to himself in the elevator, and pulled the second chair out in front of the desk. “I don’t mean to sound like I’ve come here to throw accusations and unproven claims around. However, as part creator of ForLit, I have a real responsibility to point out to you that-”

            “Excuse me, Benjamin,” Hoshoku cut in sharply, her voice at needle-pointed as ever on each syllable. “But I don’t recall offering you that chair.”

            “Oh,” he said, practically leaping away from the furniture as though it had caught fire. “As I was saying…”

            “Why don’t you go ahead and just take a seat here, beside me.”     

            “On…” he mumbled. “On the floor?”

            Ms. Hoshoku rolled her entrancing almond eyes as though it was the most foolish question to have met her ears in a lifetime. “Yes, on the floor, Benjamin, unless you see an invisible chair in my office I’ve not been made privy to? I admit, there have been many additions to my personal quarters in the weeks since ForLit went live, but even I don’t have the capital yet to invest in perfectly transparent furniture.”

            Ben felt his throat contort with confusion again, reminded of the mysterious financial windfalls it seemed every woman, especially Hoshoku, was enjoying so readily. However, he stayed on target. Patting down the folds of his slacks, he took a seat on the floor, in front of Ms. Hoshoku’s swivel chair. He didn’t even question the position again, so intent was he now on getting through his point.

            “Now…” she drawled. “Come closer.”

            Ben obeyed. Ms. Hoshoku lifted her strong, winding left leg up, then her right, and crested both over Ben’s thin shoulders. She set her calves down against his back, her supple thighs now relating most of their considerable weight to the frailer man’s shoulders.

            Trembling from the surprise and added girth suddenly borne by his back, Ben opened his mouth to continue the rant. To start the rant. No sound came out.

            “Oh, and there’s the hanging lips again. Didn’t your mother ever come up with some old wives’ tale to frighten you into manners, Benjamin?” Ms. Hoshoku asked sternly as she squeezed her quadriceps a few inches closer around her employee’s narrow neck.

            Another two or three inches, and she’d have him in a full headlock, the air constricted in his windpipe. Ben was never more aware of this fact than right now. Especially because he doubted he’d be able to stop her if she did so just then.

            The warmth of the woman’s nyloned legs was transforming Ben’s very body temperature. He could feel her steady, relaxed heartbeat through the veins beneath her firm flesh. Netted fabric bristled against Ben’s skin and the hairs of his neck. Muscle, carved by some Olympian, flexed casually through the threads of the nude stocking.

            “I… I, uh…” he stammered. His back twitched with the weight of her hanging legs. She’d melted him right back into a puddle.

            “Don’t tell me you can’t be a team player AND speak your mind at the same time, Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku interrupted again, when it was clear the man was only going to sputter. “Out with it. Yes, obviously we didn’t have a meeting scheduled. So why don’t you quit wasting both of our time, mine especially, and tell me why you’ve come to see me today with that little chest of yours puffed up like a peacock?”

            The woman’s thighs were bending lower, bowing Ben closer to the ground and nearer in toward the apex of her endless, toned limbs. Partially out of exertion from the weight of her legs, and partially due to lethal curiosity, Ben inhaled sharply rather than answer the question.

            He was greeted by the same tantalizing green tea aroma, spiced by the heat of her spotless skin and downy nylon fabric. When he took another whiff, he caught something new. Feminine odors, oily and sweet in his olfactory senses. It emanated from just ahead, within the guarded confines of her panties and, beyond, those positively titanic ass cheeks. His erection was at full stand inside his pants, and there was no way the woman couldn’t see it if she chose to glance down.

            SMACK. The crack of skin on skin. Ben, flustered, shook his head from side to side, at least as far as Ms. Hoshoku’s python-like thighs would allow him to.

            She’d slapped him right across the face and nearly given him whiplash. He could still feel the stinging hand-shape tattooed on his skin.

            “M-Miss-” he warbled.

            “Excuse you, Benjamin. But just as I don’t recall instructing you to take a seat in a chair when you entered, I don’t recall offering you permission to sniff your superior’s pussy like a stunted little pervert,” she scowled in a flinty whisper. “Are you truly this incapable of waiting to follow simple directions?”

            Ben realized, at this moment, in perhaps his purest understanding of the situation, that he was in well over his head. Last time was a silent, surreal encounter of the kind he assumed would never occur again.

            Today was different. There was no dawdling, no toying around with whether or not she was pulling a prank. Because she wasn’t. She was putting him down. And she wasn’t afraid to look him in the eye and tell him she was doing so, while she did it, with legs fastened around his neck in a chokehold.

            “Do you say you’re sorry, Benjamin?” she asked. Her thighs clamped harder around the man’s neck, her powerful calves easily pulling him nearer into the orbit of her body on the throne.

            “Yes!” he bleated. He could feel his face turning red from humiliation and air loss.

            “Yes, what?”

            “Yes, I’m sorry!”

            “Sorry for what?”

            “For s-sniffing… sniffing y-you… there!”

            “Good enough, I suppose,” she sighed, and at last relented the flushing grip of her gently vibrating thighs from around her employee’s bruised neck. “But we’ll have to work on your articulation next time.”

            “N-Next time?”

            Ms. Hoshoku smirked. Her hand, close to double as wide as Benjamin’s own, descended. It briefly blotted out the light above and came to rest on his forehead. Fingernails teased at his scalp, threatening to scratch, but only gripping him by the tufts of his sandy hair.

            “Now, Benjamin… after how far we’ve come in this business partnership… you’re honestly going to say you wouldn’t like to continue our arrangement?” she inquired. Though her voice was low, it echoed ominously in Ben’s cranium. “Surely you wouldn’t want to halt the progress of your career?”

            Ben swallowed. Was she threatening his job? Or was that only the very least of what she was threatening?

            “No, ma’am… I mean, Ms. Hoshoku. No, I would not.”

            “Then I suppose you’d best run along now, hmm? Find something to busy yourself with down in the blending offices. Perhaps you’ll discover a new flavor. Green Tea ForLit, maybe?”

            Dumbfounded, Ben crumpled back on his haunches upon the carpet where he’d just been so casually abused by his boss without so much as a raised voice or a question of intent. It was clear this woman simply took what was required. Nothing less and nothing more. Well, maybe a little more.

            “But first tilt your head up for me,” Ms. Hoshoku instructed. She rose up from her chair, making herself into a veritable valkyrie standing above, with Benjamin sprawled around her shins.

            “Huh?”

            “What did we just say about following directions?”

            “Sorry,” he said, and pointed his face toward the ceiling and the alpine visage of his curvaceous business teammate’s ruthless rumps, fighting against the lower seams of her skirt.

            “Now breathe all the way out, and then you’ll have that sampling you were wanting.”

            “That samp-”

            “If you could divert enough blood flow from your cock back up to your brain for just a moment, Benjamin, you’ll recall I never suggested you would not have the opportunity to sample the atmosphere of my ass. Simply that you would have to wait for permission,” she explained. Her long thumbs slid up the back of her skirt, fumbling with the band of her panties. “Now, do as I said. Exhale, and take a nice, healthy whiff of your boss’s cheeks, if that’s what you came up here to do.”

            It wasn’t what he came up here to do, though. Ben was still seething with the very-real terror of the fabric of humanity being altered by the mad proliferation of this beverage he’d inadvertently helped frankenstein together. He’d gotten nowhere except onto the floor at his boss’s feet.

            Yet he exhaled. Heavily. He blinked, unable to believe his insane fortunes as Ms. Hoshoku planted two snow-shoe soles beside either of his ribs and tucked into a squat. Her fingers tugged the stretched fabric of her underthings down her jiggling, pale thighs, revealing her bare, moon-like fanny below. The curved surface of it was gifted by flawless olive skin, just like the rest of her massive form. It drew nearer and nearer toward Ben’s face, like a sinking planet, and he simply laid still in preparation.

            “Now breathe,” Ms. Hoshoku said callously. Her fingers drummed against the shimmying, liquid-esque surface of her rounded skin. “Breathe all the way in. Hard.”

            Ben obeyed. He inhaled for all he was worth, filling his dried lungs up to bursting. Every magical note of the woman’s aura was absorbed into his nostrils and throat. The green tea was only a faint ghost of soapy flavor now; the earthier zest with a hint of sour acridity now tantalized Ben in full as the woman’s ricocheting butt cheeks hovered a mere two inches away from his face.

            Sweating and quaking now with the novelty of it all, his erection quivering for release in his pants, Ben languished on the darkly stale scent of Ms. Hoshoku’s lovingly maintained and cleansed but nonetheless complicated, richly satisfying ass. Only then did she descend that extra few inches, brushing Ben’s nose directly through the valley of her heavenly ass cheeks, cupping the sides of his face by her moldable flesh.

            Ben thought he might faint.

            Her long, ramrod fingers were digging into his hair again. Nails on his scalp. She was dragging him up to his haunches as easily as a ragdoll.

            “Stand up, Benjamin” she instructed pleasantly. He did so, though her hand remained clasped possessively to the top of his head as he stumbled up. At his pathetic full height, he was reminded again of the fact that he had to look up to get a full glimpse of Ms. Hoshoku’s breasts bulging through her top. He could even see the button stitching pull. “Do we have an understanding now?”

            “Y-Yes, Ms. Hoshoku,” he said out of instinct. “T-Thank you.”

            “You’re welcome, Benjamin. Now get the hell out of my office, if you please.”

Ben awoke each day that week wondering how he was able to live with himself.

            He was still shrinking, after all. They were all shrinking. The men, or what was left of them. So many had disappeared from the Blend offices, ostensibly because their shorter statures made them unfit for the rigors and potential dangers of the scientific workspace. Perhaps a dozen men, at most, remained in Blend’s employ.

            And yet Ben had done nothing.

            He’d come to work every day that week to find a message from Ms. Hoshoku instructing him what time, exact to the minute, such as 12:17, to arrive at her office door. In he’d go, be amazed yet again by the multiple inches the woman had grown overnight, and then set to work. Sometimes she used him as a silent footrest, and sometimes as she had in their most honest encounter, by resting the entire bipedal mass of her luscious legs over his shoulders and back.

            And, of course, each session ended when Ben was given the option to ask nicely to be brought closer to that magnetic ass attached to the back of his towering boss. She always obliged, tugging down her panties and sweeping the crescent mass of her derriere along his unworthy face. It almost had its own gravitational pull. Ben could barely breathe from how blessed he felt he was, at least in that fleeting experience.

            On the last day of the work week, Ben had come in with the full intention to finally confront his dominating superior about the secret ingredients of ForLit. But on that day, he had been allowed to plant a single, gentle kiss on Ms. Hoshoku’s butt cheek. The warmth of her hourglass tush and sweet aromatic of her olive skin met Ben’s lips, sending a crackling signal of desperate desire through his heart, and after that, he knew he couldn’t bring up ForLit’s mysteries again to her. Not if he wanted another smooch.

            Three-foot-eleven. Four weeks after that first sip of the cherry beverage. Ben hadn’t been that short since preschool.

            And he was one of the lucky ones. Many of the men he’d seen, before they inexplicably vanished from the office and streets, were wandering around at all of two feet in height wearing oversized doll clothes like little clowns. Precious few of the men still lingered in the halls of Blend, and those that did were constantly bumped by the misplaced knees and rotating asses of female coworkers. The boys were knocked aside, tripped by broad-soled pumps, and shouldered out of the food court line. And the worst part was, Ben couldn’t say how much of it was on purpose by the giggling giantesses he called coworkers and how much of it was the clumsiness he realized now infected him as a byproduct of the size divergence from the female sex.

            He was afraid. Of them. Especially Ms. Hoshoku, more than any other.

            His fear ran as deep as the arousal he now felt simply by conjuring the image of her cruel smile in his mind and the impending global totality of her pale, meaty ass cheeks descending on his face.

            Ben took a different route into the building these days, which allowed him to avoid the amazonian female crowds. It was too embarrassing, especially as he was one of the few remaining men making their way in the public surrounded by women who were literally bumping their heads up against the seven-foot mark. Nearly double his entire height.

            Through the parking garage back entrance, Ben sidled into the elevator, but was always first given a good glimpse of the menagerie of luxury vehicles which lined the garage in chrome silver and hotrod red. There were increasingly more of these luxury vehicles now, humming mechanical beasts which surely cost their owners close to or in excess of a million dollars.

            Ben sighed in the elevator, trying to smooth out the obvious wrinkles in his secondhand suit jacket he’d purchased from the used clothing store after his primary attire no longer fit. It was probably once owned by a five-year-old attending a wedding who outgrew it after one use.

            If only he’d jumped aboard the stocks when they were within his price range. He wondered if he could even afford to buy one share today. The odds weren’t with him.

            The metal doors opened on the second floor, and there in the hall, standing at a mind-mangling seven feet tall, stood Mariah Tennyson, no longer wearing her lab coat, but instead dressed in the kind of custom-fit crimson-red business vestment similar to what Ms. Hoshoku was so fond of flaunting.

            Ben didn’t even need confirmation; it was obvious she’d been promoted. After he’d heard the quality manager, male of course, took indefinite sick leave earlier that week, someone else had moved up the ladder. Clearly, the slot had gone to Mariah, and now, she was Ben’s boss.

            “Well, well, well,” Mariah said, her elegant fingers twiddling with her jeweled rings in anticipation as she grinned victoriously down at her former rival. “Look who’s still coming to work even though he’s too short to reach the elevator buttons.”

            “Hello,” Ben said. “Yep, still here.” Begrudgingly, he stepped aside to make room. Mariah ducked below the archway, taking up most of the space in the metal box as the door slid shut, trapping them inside together.

            “I suppose I owe you a major thank you, Captain Einstein,” she said after a moment of awkward pause. She bunched her palms beneath the silky heft of her highlighted blonde locks, raising it in a series of sexy sworls and cascading golden trails down her neck.

            “Oh?”

            “Oh, yes. You see, before your little science experiment put Blend back on top, I was just trying to keep on top of the rent. Now… well, as you can probably see, I’m moved up a social class or three.”

            “Yes,” Ben coughed, nodding in her general direction. He focused on the floor. The sooner this interaction could end, the sooner he wouldn’t have to look at Mariah and be reminded of not only how much taller and stronger she’d become than him, but how much wealth she’d accrued by benefiting from his invention. Not to mention she’d since developed those irresistible boobs and succulent ass, like immense ripe fruit, begging to be held and squeezed. They were calling to him.

            “So maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you’re actually just some sort of knight in shining armor. A gentleman who puts himself second, and the ladies first,” Mariah continued. Cramped as she was inside the elevator at seven-feet tall, she had managed a compromise, propping herself back against the wall handles. She bowed her blonde crown down under the lights so she could glare squarely at Benjamin, where he was shoved to the corner by the bulk of her legs and hips.

            “Who knows,” Ben said.

            It would not do to say something snippy. Not here, where she had all the advantage. It was hard enough just trying to keep his mind off the sizable bulwark of Mariah’s warm, curvaceous abdomen in a sleek red top pressed up against him. He could feel her pulse quickening, maybe even faster than his.

            “I know, Ben,” Mariah corrected. She jabbed a pencil-length finger under the man’s chin, forcing him to look up. “I know.”

            “So maybe you do,” he grunted.

            “Now as kind as it was of you to do all that work, just so I could earn more in a week than you made in the last two years, I do have one more favor to ask of you, little Ben, if that’s not so great a thing?” Mariah wheedled. Her fingers tickled at his neck, her palm flattened to his cheek, if only to remind him just how much of her hand could cover his narrow countenance. How she could cup her palm over his mouth and nose and suffocate him, if the mood struck her.

            The elevator cables creaked somewhere above; the car had stopped moving.

            “Just a teeny, tiny little favor,” Mariah repeated under her breath.

            “What’s that?” Ben muttered, feeling lower than ever.

            “Would you be a gentleman and give up your seat for a lady?”

            “My seat? W-”

            Ben’s foolish wonderment was quickly answered and then silenced as Mariah shifted her entire backside upon the man’s helplessly crumbled body. Her tanned ass cheeks, barely contained by a perilously short skirt, stretched out beyond their fabric bounds and cruised heavily down upon Ben’s back. It felt like having a dozen sand bags thrust over his spine all in one fling. Instantly, he was pancaked into the cold-steel floor, with Mariah’s considerable heft concentrated down on him.

The experience beneath Mariah’s butt, for Ben, was something akin to having an entire defensive line of football players dogpiling him in a heap. Except it was one woman, with the lunar shape of her ass cheeks compressed down into his spine, practically molding him like clay to her insistent shape. He felt the prodigious mound of the woman’s rump spread itself liberally across his back, activating his vertebrae to cling together for dear life. It was hard to imagine this same butt was once made invisible beneath her lab coat; now, it was on the verge of smothering Ben beneath its sheer mass.

            “Oh, this is so kind of you, Ben,” Mariah mocked. “A girl could really get comfortable on a seat like you.” She threw her hands in the air, snapped her fingers, and began to rock back and forth as though in time with a catchy, quick-tempo pop beat. The rotund diameter of her rear grinded from the small of Ben’s back and up to his neck, stretching out the unbelievable pressure on a second-by-second basis as far as she could shake her hips. Ben was the dough, and Mariah’s butt was the rolling pin.

            “Mariah!” he wheezed, red in the face. “P-Please! Stop!”

            “It’s funny, I thought I heard something, but I must not have, because Ben’s a gentleman who doesn’t mind letting me use his puny body as a chair after he earns me enough money in three weeks to retire if I wanted to, while he’s still stuck taking the subway like a funny little peasant,” she simpered, a song in her heart.

            Ben huffed and puffed, struggling even to take regular breaths now. The jabs at his own comparatively shaky financial situation were only adding insult to injury. How was it right, that the woman he’d made rich, could do something like this out of the blue whenever she wanted? Shouldn’t she be thanking him? At the very least, leaving him the hell alone, so he could shrink down to nothingness in peace!

            “C’mon, Ben. Whatcha gonna do? Or should I say Benny, to someone of your… height-challenged type?” Mariah taunted. She flexed her bulbous cheeks and heard Ben’s back pop as though a chiropractor stuck him in the marrow. “Maybe you’d prefer a name like Benny, just so people keep their expectations for you where they belong. At floor-level.”

            “Erghhh!”

            “Ooh, that’s the spirit, Benny. Roar for me like a little lion cub,” Mariah egged him on. “Go on. Try and get up. If you can even budge me, I’ll stand right up, and you can go back in your little mouse hole somewhere.”

            Ben made his best attempt. He paused, gathering his breath, loosened his muscles. And then he thrust. Every which way, he attempted clawing out from under Mariah, even bucking his hips up against her oppressive globes. Kicking, swinging his fists, thrashing his head into her sides. None of it made the slightest vibration in Mariah that she wasn’t executing herself with her gyrating, musical movement. The man was utterly, completely, sickeningly, maddeningly helpless under this woman he’d hated the very sight of every day for five straight years.

            “God, I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to do something like this to you,” Mariah seethed. “How many times I’ve thought about this in my sleep, and how many times I’ve… touched my-”

            At last the elevator screeched back to life and opened up to Ben’s floor. The doors slid apart, revealing Kendra on the other side. The woman was clutching a stack of heavy file storage boxes to her chest, but when she saw what was happening inside the elevator, she quickly set them down and stooped down into the car.

            “C’mon now, Mariah,” Kendra groaned, rolling her eyes. Her hands cupped near Ben’s face, unsure whether she should try and tug him out from under the weight of his tormentor; wisely, she apparently decided against it, in case his head popped off like a grape.

            “Hey, Kendra!” Mariah said brightly. She patted Ben’s unoccupied legs several times, batting his swinging limbs back to earth with ease. “Grab a seat. There’s plenty of room.”
            “I… have a lot of work to get through today, with the promotion and all,” Kendra said. “Maybe it’s best to just let him out, yeah?”

            Promotion? Not that Ben wasn’t happy for Kendra, but how was everyone but him moving up the food chain so fast, while he remained static?

            Nevertheless, he was eternally grateful that his only ally in the building had appeared in his moment of greatest need and lowest oxygen. By now, his lungs were all but collapsed under the juicy, beanbag-like glutes of the woman he once looked down upon with such easy disdain.

            Mariah’s rear end muscles clenched taut, just for good measure, at Kendra’s suggestion. Perhaps a reminder of what could’ve happen to Ben and his brittle bones if Kendra hadn’t discovered them in the elevator.

            “Oh, all right. Spoil the fun, why don’t you?” Mariah chuckled. She took her time getting up, planting both palms flat on the elevator floor and taking special care to deposit her entire body weight squarely down into her ass cheeks one last time for her squashed rival’s benefit.

            Ben, all three-foot-eleven of him, looked like a discarded crash test dummy. Crumpled on the floor in a heap, his clothing wrinkled and even torn at the joints where the fabric was most vulnerable. His cheek and jaw were raw and bruised from where he’d face-planted into the elevator car floor on Mariah’s initial flying derriere assault, akin to trying to head-bump a weather balloon. He had no chance.

            Wordlessly, Kendra gathered her materials back up and took Ben by the hand. At seven-foot-four, the woman had to bend down a little to grasp his fingers in hers. When she did, it was like putting his own hand inside a baseball glove: warm, a little clammy, but comforting all the same. It occurred to Ben how easily this woman he’d come to respect and appreciate so fondly could simply crunch the bones of his hand like a fortune cookie if she cinched her fist. But of course nothing could’ve been further from her mind, at least he hoped, as he was guided like a sniveling child into her new office.

            For the next half hour, Ben was treated to some soothing care he sorely required. He sat up on Kendra’s thighs upon her bar stool seat while she dabbed at his swollen cheek with an ice pack and washcloth. Occasionally, she’d even comb her long fingers through his hair in a motherly, calming fashion. Ben had to admit it felt good receiving some office TLC after he’d been thrown around, sat upon, and used as a human stool for a month now.

            “Maybe you ought to take the stairs from now on,” Kendra suggested as she caressed the man’s pink cheeks with her enormous palms.

            “That’s probably a good idea,” he admitted. He was about to transition into his secret theory regarding the contents of ForLit, but realized it felt unnatural to bring up the elephant in the room of their constantly shifting size differences. Kendra was smart; she had to have pieced together the insanity already herself and, just as Ben was so passively allowing, had not done a single thing about it. Perhaps because she was directly benefiting from it in much the same way as Mariah, as even Kendra had gone in for the new, flashier wardrobe thanks to her stock earnings.

            “What ever happened between the two of you to make things get so bad?” Kendra asked at length.

            “I couldn’t tell you,” Ben admitted. “I guess sometimes people just… react… poorly, and… sorry, there’s a chemistry joke in there somewhere, but my head hurts too much to figure it out.”

            Kendra giggled. “That’s all right, I’m sure it was funny.” She dabbed at his cheeks again, then gently took his jaw between both of her opened palms. The woman easily cradled his entire head between the lengths of her lithe appendages. “Feeling better?”

            “Much. Thanks,” he said, going to slide off of her legs, but realized the drop was steeper than he remembered. Instead, Kendra clutched the man up to her chest, squeezed him into her supple tits, and then lowered him to the floor like a vet might with a recently neutered dog.

            “I suppose I should get to the lab,” Ben shrugged.

            “All right. Take care of yourself, Ben. Use the stairs. If I see Mariah coming your way again, I’ll do my best to give her a run for her money.”

            Which was probably quite a lot, if said money was in American dollars.

            “Thanks again, Kendra,” Ben said as he exited the office.

            “Don’t mention it.”

            When the disgraced Blend tech arrived at his deserted workspace, since his desk had since been repurposed for the offices of one of the recently promoted female techs, he found an email already there from Ms. Hoshoku.

            Benjamin.

            Marketing campaign work today. Car will pick us up out front at 10 am sharp. Don’t be late.

                        Ms. Hoshoku

            Finally it was happening. This “teamwork” concept that was going to display the creators of ForLit breaking barriers of class, wealth, and office rank. As if ForLit needed the help; from what Ben had seen thus far in the past month, the drink was doing well enough on its own shrinking all the men to rats and inflating all the women into goddesses. Couldn’t Ms. Hoshoku have at least given him the heads up so he could bring a change of clothing, in case he was accosted by a business rival’s hot, medicine-ball ass cheeks in the elevator? The odds were getting higher by the day, after all.

            Yet he already knew this was happening today, whether he liked it or not. There was never any backing out of a deal with Hoshoku. It was just a question of accepting it now.

            And of all the days he had to get beaten up by Mariah, today was not the ideal day. Ben looked drearily down at his partially tattered shirt and child’s jacket, realizing the left arm of it was actually ready to be shorn right off with about a finger’s worth of pressure. He sighed. This wasn’t going to go over well, he imagined.

Ben was down by the curb in front of the building at 9:42, just to be on the safe side, and waited patiently for eighteen minutes before Ms. Hoshoku emerged from the double doors like a queen hitting a red carpet even several social classes beneath her worth. The repeating shock of seeing the woman ever-taller had finally worn off, or perhaps simply numbed, though Ben still couldn’t allow himself not to gawk whenever she was in eyesight.

            Hoshoku was within a day of hitting eight feet tall. It was clear she was replacing her outfits daily with newly fitted custom suits and skirts designed to accentuate her in all her strengths, though at this point, there weren’t many points on the woman’s skyscraping frame that weren’t strong. And Ben had a special understanding of this truth, because he’d been squeezed against so much of the director of production’s lower body, he could confirm: just about every square inch of her now was pure, unabashed, flexible muscle, layered beneath skin with just the pitch-perfect level of jiggle when it was dipping a man’s tiny face into the crack.

            At this point, Hoshoku was double Ben’s height, meaning he was face-to-crotch with the woman if he was ever unlucky, or subconsciously lucky, enough to be standing in front of her. This wasn’t a common occurrence within the confines of her office, where generally her first mandate was for the man to cower directly on the carpet so she could use him to cradle her feet and legs.

            However, today, there was no getting around this gaudy direct size comparison. As they awaited the car service to transport them to the hired photography studio for the marketing campaign shoot, the Blend tech was achingly aware more so than ever before, even when he was laying on the floor at her nyloned heels, of how truly massive Hoshoku had become. While the entire female population, it seemed, had ballooned up to more than seven feet, this woman, the boss of his business and his body, was still yet in a league of her own at seven-foot-eleven. Not merely a giantess, but a deity.

            Ben could hear female passerby giggling and snapping pictures of the odd couple standing by each other on the sidewalk. Not that the man had any illusions about what people might think, of course. No one was going to mistake them as boyfriend and girlfriend. He would’ve visibly presented as an underling to complete strangers before he lost his height; now, the point was driven home so hard it went right past comical and into the tragic. If anything, it would’ve helped his cause if he could’ve pretended he was simply Hoshoku’s little adopted son, rather than a man of roughly the same age as his dizzingly huge companion.

            Ms. Hoshoku was silent other than to utter Ben’s full name in her usual droll tone as a greeting. When the car arrived, which turned out to be a stretch limousine, the woman had nothing to say to Ben. It seemed her chattiness only truly came out in her office with the door shut, where she was free to toy with him to her heart’s content.

            Ordinarily, Ben would’ve had the thrill of his life sitting in this backseat with his boss. It was the kind of event he could’ve gloated to his friends about and put pictures up on social media. All of that had fallen by the wayside in the past month, though, with contacts and relationships breaking apart as fast as the men were melting inches. Now, he was just a loner the size of a toddler, folded into himself on a leather seat that looked far too big for someone so shrimpy. Meanwhile, Hoshoku had to bow her head and bend deeply at the knees just to fit inside the extra-large vehicle. The pair were silent for the entire trip as Ben continually glanced in the direction of his superior and had to remind himself that, no, they weren’t taking a ride inside an electronic remote control car, they were in a bus-sized limousine, and the other passenger was simply too tall for words.

            Ben was led into the maze-like studio behind the photographer and Ms. Hoshoku, who he closely followed for fear of getting lost in this vast space by himself. Of course, because serendipity was being so kind today, almost the first thing he did upon entering the studio hall was face-plant directly into a photography assistant’s rear end.

            The young stranger’s decidedly plump behind, unlike most of the other female associates whose asses Ben had inadvertently interfaced with, was not composed of the same rock-hard gluteus-maximus might. In words Ben’s college friends might’ve balked with, she possessed a pretty fat ass. It was more like being squeezed flush into a body pillow as Ben sunk several inches deep into the folds of the woman’s skirt, feeling her ass cheeks through her panties separating at the accidental application of pressure from his neck. Practically inviting him into the hot, wet cavern where the sun most certainly didn’t shine.

            Flabbergasted, Ben tumbled backward, mildly traumatized by the experience. The full-bodied woman turned, chuckled mildly at his misfortune, and wandered off in the other direction with an armful of stacked camera lenses.

            “Perhaps you should learn to watch where you’re headed, Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku said somewhat predictably, appearing almost out of nowhere despite her imminently visible personhood. She snatched him by the scruff of his collar and hoisted him up with one hand like the lost puppy she’d once compared him to.

            “Y-Yeah, probably,” he sighed. Outmatched, as always.

            “If you’re going to represent this company as I think you want to, there’s a certain decorum to be maintained,” Ms. Hoshoku explained, with broad hands defiantly planted on her hips. She glowered down at this clumsy little man who only came up to her waist. “So let’s keep our eyes on the prize. And not the kind of prize you want. That sort of prize is granted to you if and when I feel you’ve earned it.”

            “Yes, Ms. Hoshoku,” he agreed with the humble nod of a servant.

            “Come now, Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku said, brushing her slender digits through her raven locks to ensure her ensemble was just as camera-ready as always. She patted down her shirt, as well, highlighting the thrusting hillocks of her breasts through the top and the waning geometry of her prominent hips within her tight skirt. “After all, we’ve got some ForLit to sell to the last remaining eggheads on this continent who have yet to join the following. Don’t we, now?”

            “Yes, ma’a… I mean, yes, Ms. Hoshoku.”

            Then came the part he’d been dreading for almost a month straight, even before the unnatural phenomenon of his body reducing down to an elf. The very reason he was ensnared in Ms. Hoshoku’s tentacles at all: because Blend, supposedly, wanted a human face on the campaign of ForLit, combining the forces, talents, and differences of two employees from opposite tips of the spectrum. Frankly, the man had yet to hear from a single corporate voice aside from Hoshoku’s whispered promises while she pressed her bare foot into his stomach and lowered her anus down to within inches of his face.

            For all Ben knew, Blend had no intention of displaying him in the afterglow of his own manufactured success, and he was here entirely as Ms. Hoshoku’s lapdog. God knew he was small enough now to pass for a whining little mongrel, curled up on her powerful thighs where he belonged.

The photo shoot proceeded roughly how Ben assumed it would, at least at first. Ms. Hoshoku, in her most expensive-looking suit and skirt yet, looked at her absolute pinnacle of beauty, strength, and bodily curvature. The camera loved her, her bulging breasts, and athletic hips. Every shot was a winner, framing her just right under the glow of the flared fixtures to create an angelic aura about her Olympian corpus.

            Less loved by the camera lens was Ben, who wasn’t given a costume change from his torn up, wrinkled attire. It was bad enough he barely stood as tall as his business superior’s waist; he also had to look like a scruffy street urchin who wandered in out of the alley.

            He’d quietly asked Ms. Hoshoku before they began if he required a cleanup, but she only shook her head, smiled, and informed him he was already wearing an accurate representation of his status. That, he had to admit with a heavy heart, wasn’t incorrect.

            There was no excuse here. So much of his current misfortune could’ve been avoided if he’d just looked into it when Kendra explained. If he’d even bought one share of stock, he probably could’ve replaced this shredded child’s coat with a real one. Just a single token of whatever amount of humanity he still owned.

            An hour dragged on at the pace of drying paint, at least in Ben’s mind. He and Ms. Hoshoku were posed like living dolls by the photographer into every possible photogenic position on the face of planet Earth. They stood next to one another; holding hands; seated on a bench; laying on the floor; each one holding a bottle of ForLit; holding onto the same bottle of ForLit.

            Bright lights burned Ben’s retinas every time they flashed, and they flashed often. In one twenty minute span, there had to be at least three hundred extra pictures saved on file for potential use in the ad campaign. Was that truly not enough?

            The woman in charge of the session was obviously a patron of ForLit. She was a mature forty-something strawberry-blonde, yet slender, well-endowed, and physically fit: the complete package, as was every woman who imbibed the mysterious substance. Ben didn’t even need to see what she looked like before to know it, because she was one of the taller ones he’d seen. She must have begun her addiction to the cherry libation quite early. She even rivaled Ms. Hoshoku’s height at a frightfully respectable seven-foot-eight, though she lacked the same degree of girth in the booty as Ben’s boss. In fact, he had yet to see anyone who didn’t.

            “This is all good stuff,” the lofty photographer said. “However, I think we’re still missing a certain spirit from this partnership of yours. We want to show unity here, as I understand?”

            “That’s correct,” Ms. Hoshoku informed. “The mission is to display the unique partnership of ForLit’s patrons from diametric departments coming together for the good of the consumer, strengthening the chain of command and increasing the value of the work.”

            Ben couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at this last statement. Early on, when she’d described the goals of the campaign, it sounded like the idea was to put himself and Ms. Hoshoku on equal footing. Obviously that was impossible physically now that her feet were literally double as long as his, but it still had potential at an emotional level. But now she was using phrases like “chain of command.”

            Was any of this song and dance now even still about Ben’s part in the accomplishment?

            Deep down, he knew this answer, too. And it made him ill.

            “Very good, very good,” said the photographer with a nod. “So let’s try for a different tone now. We’ve gone over everything you might see in any given catalogue. But Blend isn’t any given company, I gather.”

            “Not at all,” said Ms. Hoshoku proudly.

            “I see. Then if you’ll indulge me, let’s attempt a couple new angles,” the photographer said. She sauntered into the snow-white backdrop stage of the photo shoot. “Let’s see, little fella? Yes, you?”

            “Benjamin?” barked Ms. Hoshoku.

            “Yes?” he peeped.

            “Why don’t you come over here to your boss, and she’ll give you a lift. Then we’ll see what kinds of shots we get.”

            Unwilling but also unprepared to face Ms. Hoshoku’s passive-aggressive wrath later, the man considered that he'd already done far worse things for his dignity than be picked up. So, with little left to lose, he approached his leviathan superior. Her tray-like palms clamped easily around his shallow ribs and scooped him up into the air like a baby.

            Ben wanted to keep his eyes closed, but was told to reopen them, just as soon as he tried to take refuge from the harsh flash. So he endured a few dozen shots hoisted easily up in the air by Ms. Hoshoku’s omnipotent arms and firm, controlling hands. All the while, Ben didn’t think he detected even a quiver in her limbs indicating she was becoming tired. He was cradled, draped over her shoulder, and tucked under her arm as if she was about to run for a touchdown. Then, just for good measure, a regal and rather humbling position where Ben was hoisted high above the ground, his arms and legs hanging limply, and the rest of him at the mercy of gravity and Ms. Hoshoku’s hopefully secure grip.

            “Good start. Now we’re cooking with gas,” said the photographer.

            Next came a role reversal. Whereas Ben was supported by Ms. Hoshoku, it was the employee’s turn to support his employer. Obviously his spine would’ve bent back and snapped like a cinnamon stick if he attempted to lift the woman’s entire body up in his arms; instead, he was laid out flat on a bear skin rug, with the image of a crackling fire superimposed on the background. And of course, to complete the imagery, Ms. Hoshoku was to take a seat upon him.

            “Remain still, teamplayer,” she instructed coolly. “I’m sure we’re almost through.”

            This was Ben’s hope as well as he braced himself, tensing every muscle in his body, and waited out the oncoming calamity of body weight and statuesque mass of butt heft. After this morning beneath Mariah, he hoped his abdomen was inoculated to the risk of air deprivation by a single, well-placed, pair of globular ass cheeks. And as per usual in this terrifying new age, Ben was completely wrong. He wasn’t ready.

            The woman swept her skirt up in the flash before she descended, ensuring the only barrier between Ben’s back and her humongous, naked tush was a paper-thin layer of underwear.

            “Ffuuughhh!” he spat instinctively, his lungs emptied on impact. Ms. Hoshoku sunk back lavishly, sandwiching Ben hard between the bear skin and her pale, exposed rump. He’d had many a chance to admire her rear from up close already, even bury his face into the crescent valley and plant kisses on her skin. She still had yet to put her weight, her full weight, upon him. To use him as a seat cushion. And Mariah was by no means a comparable substitute for the experience.

            Within seconds, Ben was flailing wildly for her attention. This wasn’t simply a case where his breathing was restricted, as it was under Mariah’s harshly gyrating caboose this morning; he actually couldn’t breathe now. Ms. Hoshoku, as he’d long suspected, simply was far too much to handle. He could feel his cheeks turning bluer within a minute. Kicking, flapping his arms like a chicken, and whining low in his throat were his only defenses. None made a lick of difference, not to the photographer, the assistant whom Ben ran into earlier, and definitely not to his superior as she utilized his spine as a comfortable place to rest her unparalleled keister.

            Flash after flash, cameras rolling and spinning, lenses being changed. The photographer, and Ms. Hoshoku, seemed to take to this specific pose with great affinity, because far more photos were taken here than in any other arrangement. From lack of oxygen, Ben’s brain was beginning to lose its mathematical capacity, but he was fairly sure the photographer snapped at least five hundred images of Ms. Hoshoku in various stages of relaxation upon her employee’s body: her legs crossed demurely; chin resting on her firm fist; spread-eagled; full recline, as though she was floating on beachy waves off Costa Rica.

            And then, through the sensory deprivation and simultaneous nervous overload of it all, Ben became aware of something. Something which made him feel furious: a kind of quiet rage he hadn’t experienced in weeks as he passively allowed himself to be molded into Ms. Hoshoku’s personal servant.

            His dick was erect. Harder than he’d ever been in his life, in fact. His skin was alive and electric with the need for progression and climax. How absolutely fucking typical, he fumed to himself within his reverie. What had become of him? Was there any part of the old, self-sufficient, well-adjusted Ben left in this puny husk of a freak who was sexually aroused to new heights through the sensation of a giantess crowning him with her planetary derriere?

            Ms. Hoshoku discovered this new development in Ben’s pathetically prone body, though she didn’t even, as far as he could tell, glance down to the lower half of her cushion. Her fingers simply found their way to his hips, which she squeezed, her thumb leading the charge along his own rear end, and under, where she was able to easily cradle his miniature hard-on through his grit-stained slacks. Then, with two fingers, barely exerting any effort into the act, she began to pinch and tease his cock through the fabric. Little input from Ms. Hoshoku was required after all the build-up this morning and during the photoshoot.

            She made sure to lean back especially far, transferring every cubic gram of her lovely bum density into Ben’s hapless, abused form, and then gave his penis a final clawed massage through his pants. Writhing briefly, the broken Blend tech came explosively in his pants, and found himself almost drifting into unconsciousness now from the all-consuming weight of his boss, who had no intention of releasing him from this ass-weight prison until she’d extracted each and every teamwork-displaying photo that this godforsaken stage had to offer.

            Crawling groggily out from the makeshift tent of lab coats he’d fashioned into his new home, Ben leaned back against the stone wall of the Blend tech laboratory which was once his office, but now was exclusively used to make tweaks and advancements in flavor and quality to ForLit. The belongings he could still use, at a height of just under two feet tall, had been shipped to the office per a donation from Ms. Hoshoku, allowing him to work an even fuller day than before without having to brave the dangers of the street.

            There were no more men left in the office. Perhaps even in the city itself; Ben hadn’t been outside again after the photo shoot to confirm or deny. The stragglers of Blend had either been fired or simply disappeared. Were they confined to their homes? Prisoners of their spouses? Maybe they just drowned in a gutter, abandoning hope of doing anything but shrinking down so far into nothingness they could disappear through the electron rings of an atom. Or maybe something even worse that he couldn’t imagine.

            Ben was the last testament in the building to an evidently dying species of male who was tall enough to be seen with the naked eye. He, alone, remained to work.

            Of course, his “work” was no longer what he’d signed up for on his first day at the company, eyes bright and mind alight with glorious purpose in science. For one matter, he was far too short now to reach the tabletop he’d need to aid in mixing; plus, by this time, plenty of other female technicians could not only easily reach the table themselves, but had all miraculously increased their capability in the lab, turning them each into virtuosos of beverage blending. It was becoming obvious that ForLit granted intellectual talents to its female consumers. Thus, Ben was out of a “job,” at least the kind that paid him a regular salary for sitting in an office and testing out soft drink combinations.

            He still had one job, though. One that wasn’t going anyway anytime soon, as far as he could see. Which, he supposed, in this dark new age for which he was partially responsible, wasn’t a bad thing.

            Ten hours a day, five days a week, Ben lived in Hoshoku’s new vice-president office. She’d inherited this new space from a previously resistant shrinking man within the last seven days on the top floor. Alternately, the former Blend tech acted as a footrest, a toe-rubber, a leg massager, or simply a literal statue to stand by her desk and hold a bouquet of incense to freshen the space. And, of course, Ben was a cushion. Her favorite cushion, to be precise, as this was what she made of point of calling him with that endearingly haunting grin of hers.

            The photoshoot had lit a fire in Ms. Hoshoku’s heart, apparently filling her with creative inspiration for Ben’s practical uses as an office “assistant.” She’d been kind enough with her ever-increasing wealth to purchase a foam-padded medical pillow to act as a buffer between Ben and the hard-based chair, such that his bones didn’t snap like twigs on the first, second, twentieth time she laid her mammoth rump upon his breakable body.

            Ben had quit bothering with the mental calculation necessary to determine how much height and girth separated him from his boss now, a woman who, a mere five weeks ago, was only two inches taller than him and probably actually weighed less than he. Trying to make all the comparison just gave him headaches. All he knew now was that he was less than two feet tall, and Ms. Hoshoku, God bless her and keep her, had broken nine feet: the same height of most office room ceilings.

            Nine. Feet. Tall.

            In short, it was a necessary gift that the pillow be laid underneath his stomach to help bear the load. Otherwise, Ben knew, especially after he’d spent multiple hours under Hoshoku’s pert, muscular glutes which now stretched wider than his entire body length, he would be dead. There was no questioning it. He should have died of asphyxiation or internal bleeding from wretched bone splits each and every time Ms. Hoshoku used him as her chair.

            But he didn’t. At least not yet. Perhaps there was some plan for him yet to serve this new world order. And so he remained in the incense-flavored, green tea-spiced, feminine body odor haze which now defined his very existence and gave him a reason to get up in the morning. The weekend was his to wait in the lab in crushing solitude, resting up his sore little body for another week of radical human repurposing: a sacrifice to Ms. Hoshoku and her expectant, deserving, celestial body of an ass, in all its painful perfection.

            Ben wasn’t granted long in his grateful isolation. The offices were rarely empty for long. He heard the omnipresent clatter of pump heels: a crowd of them, growing louder like a stampeding herd of fashionistas. For an instant he considered burrowing back into his lab coat tent to avoid being seen, but they were already entering, filling the door frame and gloating down upon him with big, bright eyes eight and a half feet up. Although too short to make out the identities of the three women who’d just arrived, Ben could at least recognize the one who stood in front, though he sincerely wished not to.

            “Well, well, well,” Mariah said, her blonde head a matter of inches away from the tall laboratory ceiling. She was practically a giraffe now, except for that crimson top and skirt which wedded her to the visage of power and glamor she so craved. Palms cupped under her immense breasts, she gave them a shake, grinning at Ben’s helpless reaction to stare. “Looks like someone’s been hit hard by the economy. Am I right, Benny?”

            “Maybe,” he sighed. It wasn’t worth trying to argue with her.

            “But hey, at least you’re not homeless, right, little one? You’ve still got a roof over your head, and plenty to eat. Sometimes what you’re eating is even food!”

            Ben flinched but nodded.

            “Ooh, don’t look so shy! I figured if a person makes a decision in their life to spend all day every day eating ass and being a human seat cushion, they must not have the shame left to even be embarrassed!” Mariah reasoned. “Wouldn’t you say that’s true, Benny?”

            What did he have to lose?
            “Maybe,” he repeated.

            “But that’s not why I’m here, to remind you about that,” she explained. “I mean, it’s part of why I’m here… down on this filthy floor where I don’t belong anymore. No, I’m really here to make you a proposal.”

            “Are you going to sit on me again?”

            “Don’t be crude, Benny. We’re just having some fun here. And no, I’m not going to sit on you. Probably not. T-B-D. But the proposal is more about you and your obviously diminished financial status. I’d like to present you with a gift, you see. An opportunity to make up a deficit.”

            What, she was going to throw nickels at his head? Ben didn’t suppose he was ready. He lacked the hand-eye coordination at this clumsy size to avoid such an assault. Plus, with a cranium this tender now, like a baby’s, he would probably come away with a concussion or even go unconscious for the forthcoming female takeover of planet Earth he’d begun to suspect was underway.

            Although, all things considered, was it really so bad to want to be asleep for that outcome?

            “What is it?” he groaned at last, when he realized Mariah wasn’t going to stop glowering down at him with toned, crossed arms until he answered.

            “It’s pretty simple,” Mariah said. Her thumbs dug deep under the billowing, curtain folds of her sexy red skirt and drew her panties down the length of her thighs.

            Ben watched, unable to keep his mouth from watering as he watched the woman’s tanned, generous thigh flesh altering shape ever so slightly to accommodate the taut black silk of her underwear stringing along her limbs. It got easier around her knees and shins, and she easily pulled the looped undergarment over the crests of her heels. Bending the waistband back against her outstretched thumb like a slingshot, Mariah fired her panties at Ben.

            His coordination was as weak as he anticipated. Ben sputtered, literally knocked off his feet by Mariah’s flying panties. They covered most of his body like a blanket in all their black, silky glory. He ripped them away and threw them aside as forcefully as he could, which was really just akin to casting aside a parachute. It probably looked pretty pathetic.

            Mariah giggled. “Sorry about that. My aim’s not so great. I was trying to give you a black eye.”

            “I’ll bet.”

            “So here’s the proposal. Or I suppose I should say: Part One of the proposal,” Mariah said. “All you have to do is pick up those panties, lick all the way up the middle on the inside, and I give you one hundred bucks, right now.”

            One hundred bucks? It sounded like so much compared to what he had now, Ben almost had to remind himself how little use he had for the green stuff inside his cave now. Most of his needs were taken care of: food, water, shelter, warmth, sexual release. Ms. Hoshoku had summarily seized his assets earlier in the week on a legal condition that he was too small and weak to handle his own finances now; effectively, he was penniless.

            Still, he had to think about the future, even if it was bleak. If he was ever discarded from Ms. Hoshoku’s good graces and flung out into the street like Mariah’s dirty laundry, he’d need a nest egg just to survive. Even if he couldn’t reach the tabletops to beg for food scraps.

            “I see you’re thinking about it,” Mariah said. “And I want you to know that if you don’t decide in the next five seconds, that offer drops down to fifty bucks. Then twenty. I can keep going.”

            “Okay, okay!” Ben squealed. He was shaking from a combination of adrenaline and excitement at making back some of the massive shortage in cash he was experiencing: a shortage which almost rivaled the one he was suffering through in physical height. He took the blanket-like panties of his athletic, towering rival in his fists and lifted it up to his face.

“Wait,” Ben said suddenly as he gripped the length of Mariah’s discarded panties. “Show me you have the mo-”

            “Easy. The money’s right here,” Mariah taunted. She plucked a crisp one hundred dollar bill from her purse and waved it high above Ben’s head. “What, you thought I wouldn’t have it on me already? Have you seen the way I’m dressed now? The kind of car I drive? I guess you couldn’t have seen my house since you’re Ms. Hoshoku’s little lap bitch now, but believe me, my house is fucking huge now.”

            “I… I b-believe you…” Ben blubbered.

            “Seriously, Benny. This is nothing. One hundred? It’s like a penny to me now. Less than that. Watch,” she scowled, smiling ever-wider. She pinched the bill between two fingers and ripped it up into tiny shreds, small as it already was in her massive hands, then let it scatter in the breeze to the ground below.

            Ben winced again as though she’d torn him up instead. He could’ve used that little boost, what she called less than a penny. Maybe he could tape the pieces back together, if she forgot they were on the floor?

            “Don’t look so scared. I have another fresh one for you, assuming you don’t stall any longer and I’m forced to only pay you five bucks instead. Which, fair enough, I’ll have to go to the ATM to get that for you then, because obviously I have no reason to carry around so little money in a bill now,” Mariah explained. She slipped a second just-as-crisp hundred from her purse. “It’s just not convenient for me.”

            “I get it,” he sighed.

            “Now quit being a bitch and stick your little tongue on my worn-out panties. And take your time,” she commanded, her booming voice filling the office. Surely some other coworkers down the line had heard, though no one came to Ben’s recue. A couple poked their heads out into the hall with curiosity.

            Ben studied the tainted fabric. Though it was black, he could make out the distinct signs of crusted, dried ejaculate where Mariah’s pussy had no-doubt emitted its juices in the night. There was also a noticeable, rank odor reeking from the opposite end of the cloth partition, where her enormous ass had probably been clenching the panties up into her puckered anus for the better part of a day.

            Looking up again for support, Ben was still unable to see the faces of the two women who stood silently as sentinels behind Mariah. Clearly, they had no intention of intervening into this continued transaction. The choice really was up to him. Though, as far as he saw it, the choice wasn’t really about whether he chose to lick Mariah’s panties for some money; the choice was whether he licked them for money, or he licked them sixty seconds later because she’d planted her spike heel into his back and threatened to impale him on the floor if he didn’t do it for free.

            Where the hell was Kendra when he really needed her again?

            “Do it now,” Mariah slurred. “Three. Two. One…”

            Ben pressed his jaws into the panties and raked his tongue from one end to the other. As he was instructed, he took his time, really allowing the shivers of disgust to ripple up through his frame for his audience to enjoy. As he’d predicted, he could taste the two very distinct ends of the panties. Hoping to end on the front for dessert, Ben forced himself to begin with the darker, sweat-stained half. The flavors of Mariah’s ass entered his cheeks and throat like a horrid disease. He could taste her cheeks, the zesty salt of her sweat, the hollowing filth of her rectum. It instantly filled him with nausea, and while he wanted to throw up almost immediately, part of him hoped that if he did indeed vomit, it would please Mariah enough to see that she’d throw in an extra twenty dollars or more to the trade.

            “Good,” Mariah chuckled. “That’s a good boy. Lick it more. Other side now.”

            Only too glad to oblige, Ben gagged and slid his tongue across the divide in the panty cloth. As he’d hoped, the flavors of Mariah’s leftover cum were a little more inviting, if not a bit like sour milk to his lips, after the stuff had had time to settle into the fabric. He choked back a minor gurgle in his stomach cloying for him to stop. That hundred bucks was about to be his.

            “All right, that’s enough,” Mariah said. “We don’t want you to enjoy this too much or I’ll have to deduct money again.”

            Again? Had she deducted some to begin with? Ben looked up as the green bill was crumpled in Mariah’s powerful fist and tossed at his head. It plunked into the scoop of the panty thong.

            $10. Only $10. Was this a joke?

            “You said one hundred,” Ben defended. Even so, he picked up the bill and unfolded it. It was something, after all, and he was in no position to snub his nose at any offering no matter the size.

            “What would you actually even do with one hundred, Benny? No clothes beside doll outfits will fit you. You could eat a peanut, maybe, and not need anything else for the day. Think of it like I’m saving you from the sinful excesses of greater wealth.”

            Smacking his lips, Ben spat into a dirty coffee cup beside his pile of loose belongings. The taste of Mariah’s ass, and her triumph, was still fresh in his throat. It would take some serious scrubbing to get it all out. Maybe some bleach.

            “But wait, there’s more!” Mariah announced like an infomercial presenter. “Okay, for one hundred bucks this time… for real, no more fooling around. Honest-to-God hundred bucks. You have to lick the source of items such as those lovely garments you’re holding now. You can do that, right?”

            Belly wrenching, Ben shook his head. There was no way he was licking Mariah’s ass. Not for one hundred. Not for one thousand. Well, probably for one thousand. That was a hell of a lot of money, after all. But one hundred was simply out of the question.

            “One hundred, for real this time. And these two ladies will make sure I stay honest,” Mariah said. She waved the bill about. “Real simple. You don’t have to take your time like on my panties. Just stick your tongue inside and do one swipe. One itty, bitty, little lick, like you’re tasting a lollipop. It might even taste better than that. So what do you say?”

            “No,” Ben growled.

            “Ninety dollars,” Mariah threatened.

            “NO.”

            “Eighty dollars?”

            What kind of bidding was this? You weren’t supposed to go down when the customer had already said no! Did she still expect him to jump onboard when she got down to twenty dollars?

            “I don’t think he’s got the balls to do it,” said Shauna Brown from behind Mariah; Ben now realized Ms. Hoshoku’s middle-aged yet beautifully amazonian secretary was one of the anonymous spectators.

            “You should do it, Ben,” the second voice said softly from behind, a demonstratively taller source. A caramel-hued hand waved as Kendra stepped fully into the room, out of the shadows from where she’d previously been silently standing. Her hair hung in gleaming black braided ropes that the man would’ve once longed, maybe even loved, to caress in a meaningful indication of his true feelings.

            Ben’s heart sunk to see her now.

            Kendra? His one ally? Here, now, encouraging him to lick an asshole for increasingly few dollars? It seemed to Ben now he’d truly lost everything. Sure, he’d lost his modest house, his few belongings, and his small retirement savings already. But at least he had a friend still, somewhere. Or he’d thought.

            That, apparently, had been a major miscalculation as well.

            “K-Kendra?” he warbled with despair and disgust. He retreated backward a few steps as his eight-foot-eight coworker, once-intern and now-superior, crossed further into the room on her soft flats.

            “Don’t look so upset, Ben. It’s not a big deal, really, if you think about it,” she explained.

            “Why?”

            “Well, we… most of the women at this company, I mean… now have got all these assets to use, and nobody to share it with. Seriously, I’ve… well, I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve made so much money in the last month, I could spend it all in designer stores every day for the rest of my life and I’d still have leftover. Think of it as a way to give back.”

            “You… you’re gonna… you’re gonna let Mariah make me lick her butt, for… eighty dollars?”

            “Twenty, now, since you took so long to decide,” Mariah giggled. “And you’re wrong about one thing, Benny. It wasn’t my asshole you were going to lick. God knows I don’t need to feel your perverted little tongue on me.”

            Ben raised an eyebrow, trembling at the knees now as he stood at Kendra’s feet. If not Mariah, who was she talking about?

            Kendra gave a half-hearted smirk, anxiously twiddling her thumbs, then descended the long journey downward to be nearer to Ben. She crouched on the ground, her rotund, brown ass hovering over the cold ground. And then he understood whose ass he was meant to taste.

            “I’ll give you some extra cash, honest,” Kendra whispered to him. Her fingers were already teasing her own panties down far enough over the globes of her rump that she was exposed from behind. “All you have to do is lick inside my crack for three seconds and I’ll give you some extra… two hundred, maybe… plus whatever Mariah gives you.”

            Ben shuddered to his haunches, crumbling fast in his resolve. At this point, he’d have preferred to lick Mariah’s asshole, if it meant she was the only one here to witness his fall. God knew he couldn’t be broken too much more in the department of bodily humiliation. He longed for that alternative future, if it meant he still had a friend somewhere in the building. He understood now, for real, why Mariah didn’t want his tongue between her butt cheeks: because it would take so much more from him to do the same to his former friend and last remaining ally, Kendra.

            Tears descended Ben’s cheeks. It was the first time he’d cried since all of this madness begun in Ms. Hoshoku’s office with that first damning bottle of cherry elixir.

            He already knew he was going to do it. There was no way he couldn’t. Two hundred, plus twenty, plus the ten from licking Mariah’s panties? That was more than he could ever hope to own again simply by acting as Ms. Hoshoku’s cushion. The hard part was simply accepting the end. The severance of his last remaining true personable connection: the final woman who, at least the week before, saw him as a man worthy of value aside from where he could stick his tongue.

            “Don’t cry, Ben,” Kendra begged gingerly, an encouraging smile on her lips. “It’ll be quick. Like it never happened. Then you can have the money, and seriously, a guy as little as you could eat like a king on two hundred and thirty dollars. Don’t let Mariah try to tell you you can’t have nice things.”

            The woman’s slender index finger stroked up and down Ben’s cheek, collecting his tears on her skin. That finger went between her lips, where she sucked his miniature tears into her mouth. She tucked the rim of her palm under his chin, gently demanding his attention upward.

            “Now c’mon, don’t be shy. Just get it over with,” she instructed softly. “I cleaned back there extra-well this morning. It shouldn’t even taste bad. It might be like just putting your tongue on my hand. Nothing to it.”

            Sniffling, Ben realized the sooner he tore the metaphorical band-aid off, the sooner he could begin wallowing in this pit of human breakage. What, truly, did he have to lose now? His body? His pathetic, frail, papery, two-foot-tall body? If his empty bank accounts were to be believed, that was hardly a major loss, financially speaking.

            “Just stay there. I’ll do the rest. All you have to do is… well, open your cute little mouth,” Kendra said with genuine kindness as she adjusted her footing, careful not to kick her shrimpy coworker, and turned around. The caramel-colored, unblemished pair of cheek masses which constituted the woman’s youthful, wonderful, jiggling derriere loomed before Ben’s face. If anything, he’d have to stand up on his tiptoes to actually reach into Kendra’s squatting ass.

            He just hoped nature didn’t call for her while he was doing so.

Ben cupped his puny hands up under Kendra’s tender, broad thighs, knowing she wouldn’t mind if he did so for support. He granted himself an extra inch in height by rolling up onto the balls of his feet, and craned his neck. Kendra aided in the cause by bunching her palms up around each globe of ass flesh and separating her cheeks as far as she could, revealing the glorious, star-shaped darkness that was her awaiting anus.

            Dreaming for just a glimmering, optimistic second, Ben wondered how life might’ve been different if he’d never invented the chemical base that became ForLit. He might never have even had to meet Hoshoku to eventually become her unspoken slave. He might have stayed at five-foot-nine, very happily able to live and work on his own. He might have asked Kendra on a date; there obviously was, or had once been, a mutual attraction between them. She was once sweet and caring, putting others before herself, yet willing to crack a joke and throw down at a party. They could’ve been very happy together.

            Yet here he was, less than two feet tall, about to press his face between the brown crescent valley of her ass cheeks and lick her sphincter.

            The glimpsed dream ended, and Ben stuck out his tongue. He raked harder than was necessary, so charged had he become with passion for what might have been. One second. Little Ben’s tongue dragged up the soft, curvy slope, crossed the wrinkled portal of her anus, and finished at the top. Two seconds. Clean flavor, as she’d said, and even delicious with hints of mango soap and body lotion; that wasn’t the point, though. It might as well have tasted to Ben like rotting animal carcass. Three seconds.

            Difficult though it was, he tried to imagine this same act in a loving, consensual scenario with this woman. Two months ago, if he’d known by premonition that he’d someday have the opportunity to lick Kendra’s rear, he’d have jumped for joy and immediately gone off to masturbate. At their original sizes, he would’ve eaten her ass for all it was worth, maybe made her orgasm from the mere sensation of his skillful tongue; he’d certainly had enough practice in his college days.

            But the act was different now. This wasn’t a chance to lick a beautiful woman’s ass; this was humiliating blood money like he never conceived could exist. This was a ransom for his right to be a human.

            “Thank you, Ben,” Kendra murmured as she pulled her panties back up and ascended higher to her full height again, her gorgeous legs like a pair of smooth tree trunks on either side of her tiny, emotionally destroyed coworker. “I know you didn’t want to, but you did a lovely job, and now you can have what was promised to you.”

            And, true to her word, at least, Kendra did lay two crisp one hundred dollar bills at his ankles. She patted his head with gentle, willowy fingers like she might to an obedient puppy that just learned not to pee in the house. Then she was walking away, laying her ballet flats down softly on the ground such that Ben was only mildly vibrated with seismic activity. She rejoined her two newer, more gigantic friends near the door. Shauna filed out first, then Kendra, until only Mariah remained.

            “I suppose you earned this, you funny little freak,” Mariah sighed. She took a crumpled twenty dollar bill from her purse, balled it again in her fist, and flicked it at Ben. It hit him in the chest and fell beside his other earnings.

            “Thanks,” he heard himself say. If he didn’t show gratitude, he feared she might cross the room and tear up his meager earnings from Kendra.

            “By the way, just in case you were curious… that money you have now? All of it, what both of us gave you? My stocks earned me double that much in the time it took you to lick Kendra.”

            Crestfallen, revolted beyond belief, and blubbering in a full-on sob now, Ben buried his face in his hands as he was abandoned again in the desolate workspace with the money and Mariah’s dirty panties.

            Once he’d gotten over the tears, Ben was none too proud of himself when he dragged Mariah’s discarded undergarments into his little tent and masturbated vigorously into the lacy fabric, deeply inhaling her pussy’s secondhand aroma all the while. He came hard into the cloth, then fell back into crying all over again. Though he couldn’t be sure, he was pretty sure he shrunk another inch or two as soon as he was finished.

            It was not a smooth morning. The man was only glad the trio hadn’t returned to witness his folly and depression. This was the absolute edge.

            His laptop rested on the floor by his tent. It didn’t have much use for Ben now, as it had been rigged to only allow through emails from Ms. Hoshoku telling him when to come up to her richly decorated office for a day of service. At this moment, it glowed with a brand new message from his nine-foot mistress:

            Benjamin.

            You will meet me in the building lobby at 8 pm sharp tonight. Do not be late. It doesn’t matter what you wear, as new clothing will be provided to you at the time. Shower yourself.

                        Ms. Hoshoku

            Too tired and drained of tears to feel upset at the prospect of leaving his tent again today, Ben shrugged and wandered off to find the laboratory sink nearest the floor, where he could rinse himself of the humiliation and previous day’s labors. The water was warm and relaxing, and almost allowed him to forget Kendra and her newfound cohorts. He scrubbed so hard his skin turned red.

            Surprisingly, Ben wasn’t asked up to Hoshoku’s office today for work. It was the first time all week. At first he wondered if there’d been a mistake and he was digging his own grave by not appearing at her door, but then realized he’d probably be in even more trouble if he wasn’t supposed to arrive, only to do so unexpectedly like the little ass-man he was.

            It wasn’t hard to guess he’d be punished severely and at length for such an indiscretion. He knew, because Ms. Hoshoku explained the risk of such an outcome to him daily, usually while he was compressed beneath her weighty ass and skirt folds, his puny erection squashed under her cheeks.

            So, Ben bided his time. Freshly washed and dried, he huddled silently in his tent throughout the day, praying the Blend techs who’d replaced him would simply assume he wasn’t home today, as per usual. Thankfully, none of the giant, laughing women peeked down into the tent to molest him.

            The hours ticked slowly by. Ben actually realized now time seemed to pass more quickly on the days when he was with his mistress, servicing her lower body and making himself useful. Right now, he decided, he had no use, and thus was more aware of his pointless existence in an uncaring world which was daily better suited to the fairer sex.

            7:39. Ben decided it was best to get moving now, since it would take him a while to reach the lobby at his size. He took the steps carefully, lowering himself fully down each one and crouching for safety. When he reached the lobby twenty minutes later, Ms. Hoshoku was already there in the most incredible outfit he’d ever witnessed in his life.

At last, she’d shed those business suits and skirts which defined her office life. Ms. Hoshoku had transformed herself into a shimmering, geometric anomaly of unrelenting hourglass beauty in a velvet-satin and sequin dress which ran the length from her shoulders to her knees and sculpted every curve, line, and sensuous angle on the way down. Violently angular high heels adorned her boat-sized feet. Her breasts rebelled against the low-neck cut, threatening to spill like watermelons from the tensile fabric; her ass cheeks blossomed from behind, shaping the transition of her back to her bum into a contoured shelf.

            It was a party dress, unlike any Ben had witnessed before. It was truly something tailored to a goddess. Tall as the other women around him had become, Ben knew no other amazon could wear such an ensemble quite like Hoshoku. No one had the courage, nor the right.

            “Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku said as usual. Her tone didn’t suggest anything was different tonight, though obviously, by her lack of calling him to her office, and now her presentation to him in the most stunningly sexy outfit he’d yet laid eyes upon, she had to know this was special. She smiled in that dark, scheming persuasion which made Ben’s skin crawl, yet he’d learned to crave it, require it every day, even, just to feel cozy enough to sleep.

            “M-Ms. Hoshoku…” he uttered in awe.

            “You look terribly foolish in those rags. But I suppose that’s why I’ve acquired you a replacement,” she said. She drew a tiny dry-cleaner bag from her purse, something that could’ve easily fit onto an infant, and draped its contents into Ben’s hands far below. “You’ll change in the limo. Come, now. We have some business affairs to attend to.”

            “B-Business?”

            “Not all business is conducted in the office, Ben. As small as you’ve become, I trust you’ve grown to understand that now.”

            “Yes, Ms. Hoshoku.”

            “Good. Now follow me. We’re going clubbing.”

            And clubbing they did go. The limo arrived, complete with champagne and glass flutes, and roared off to the upper crust of the city’s party arena with pop music booming from the walls of the vehicle.

            Ben’s outfit turned out to be a rather smart navy-blue suit, obviously ordered and crafted specifically for his use, as it wasn’t a mere burlap doll costume. An authentic custom set of clubbing attire, probably from a shop which the man would’ve never been able to afford even before his boss absorbed all his savings. It made him feel more important than he had in weeks just to wear something remotely handsome that actually fit his body. He tried not to think of the fact that within a few days, he’d probably be too small to wear it any longer. Tonight, he had to live in the present, and just enjoy the moment.

            After all, if it wasn’t for the seven-foot height difference between himself and his “date,” Ben realized he and Ms. Hoshoku could’ve made a very attractive couple tonight to any gawking outsiders. They emerged from the limo and Ben was clutched like a toddler to his keeper’s breasts as she bypassed the female bouncers with a nod and entered the hall.

            The club floor was hot and hopping. The smell of perfume, sweat, and fruity vodka shrouded the air. Dry ice coolly drifted in a hazy fog over the floor. Neon lights blared all around in time with the ear-splitting percussion of the rhythmically pulsing electronic song. At the center of it all was a regular riot of dozens of dancing women: singing, laughing, downing entire bottles of $600 crystal liquor mixed with ForLit. Some even joining the sexual promise of the music a step further, pressing their full, warm lips together and snaking hands down into one another’s panties for a mutual benefit.

            It was near-impossible to see where they were going as Ms. Hoshoku carried Ben between the throngs of eight-foot-tall behemoth women, all of them and their deified curves hugged by the light and shadow in ways that made the tiny man’s loins stir more vigorously than normal. This must be what heaven was like, Ben decided. Being carried through a vast army of joyous, dancing, jiggling, swaying women in the prime of their life and size, hugged to the bulbous tits of a woman who outshone them all with her style, intelligence, and power.

            He didn’t need his pathetic dreams anymore. This was the dream.

            Before Ben could realize what was happening, he was being gently removed from Ms. Hoshoku’s capable hands like a doll and cradled into the grips of others. Notably, many of the women surrounding him had shed their bras, panties, or even entire ensembles of expensive party clothes; there were no other men around to gawk and harass them, at least none large enough to be threat, after all, so what was the harm? He was squeezed between the naked breasts of strangers, with erect nipples pressed forcibly between his lips; he was only too happy to oblige, licking, sucking, and chewing on every bit of female skin which was shoved over his teeth. A single areola was just about enough to fill his cheeks. He was massaged up and down six-pack abdomens and slender, sloping hips. Hands explored his body, cupping his puny jewels through the fabric. His body was clamped between rigid thigh muscles and loping ass weight. One woman even dipped his head down into her loose panties, raking his head over the smooth, ejaculate-painted lumps of her vulva.

            And then, just as suddenly, Ben was back in Ms. Hoshoku’s hands. He had no idea how she’d located him again in the pink-lit space filled with so much noise and sticky, flailing limbs. She regarded him with only a glance and that famous, jealous smile, and then she was tucking him behind her back.

            Ben felt his mistress’s fingers clawing with his newly selected clubbing outfit. She was tearing at it, hungrily, in almost animal lust. His jacket was ripped to confetti, and then next his pants, leaving him only in his makeshift underwear, which was robbed of him, too. In no time he was naked in Ms. Hoshoku’s hands, palmed against her broad, clammy palms, his member pinched teasingly between her fingertips. The shimmering, protruding wall of her unbelievable derriere suddenly drew near in the dark. Ben was squashed squarely into this holy place at the center, his helplessly erect penis pinched into the folds of silky fabric and Ms. Hoshoku’s enormous, muscular cheeks. With a pinch of her fingers, the skirt was tugged higher, and then there was nothing separating Ben’s naked crotch from his boss’s epic mass of butt. Then the music picked up.

            She was grinding on him. Ms. Hoshoku was a talented dancer, Ben realized. It was just another skill to a skillset that already included tricking the entire human race into altering its size for the betterment of her ideal world.

            With no clothes to encumber his body, Ben was left to focus on the gentle brush and firm squeezing of Ms. Hoshoku’s fingers around his hips and legs. Like fleshy tree trunks, teasing him into complete arousal. Horniness dripped from him. His full-length cock was flicked and twerked at every angle, up through the curved valley of her crack, then back and forth on the uneven hillocks of her cheeks. All the while, the woman was constantly flexing and releasing the hold of muscle and skin upon Ben’s hapless form: her ass transferred on a dime from hardened, Olympic gluteus maximus to flabby, marshmallowy ass flesh.

            In those flashing seconds, punctuated by the quaking and trembling of her grinding ass, Ben experienced everything he adored and feared about Ms. Hoshoku’s powerful rump. It was the purest distillation possible of the dedication he felt every waking and sleeping moment: a reminder of the exact reason why, so many weeks ago, he’d done absolutely nothing when he realized what was happening to the world. He’d allowed it to happen, allowed himself to shrink down into the dusk of male existence, so that he could be here.

            So he could be pressed into Ms. Hoshoku’s pale, bare bottom in a fog of sweat, fruit, and lust, and reach the climax he’d been aching for his entire life.

            Ben’s orgasm was almost nuclear. Cum spurted over the luscious mountains of her ass cheeks, leaving him quivering and meek in her grasp. He writhed as his body was electrified by pleasure and soreness, his every extremity up to his fingertips alive with internal flame and sexual necessity. If he could do this over and over again, for the rest of eternity, repeating this moment, Ben knew he could be the most blissful man on the face of this lonely earth.

            But she wasn’t done. Not yet.

            The world went black for Ben as his head was smacked forward into the gaping valley of Ms. Hoshoku’s ass so hard he felt he’d been cracked over the head with an entire hot air balloon.

            When next he awoke, groggy and head spinning, Ben realized he was back in the limo with Ms. Hoshoku, those almond eyes and leering Japanese smile drinking him in. At least, he thought it was Ms. Hoshoku staring him down in the privacy of the limo’s shadows.

            It was hard to be sure at first, as she was now so large, he easily laid in the palm of her hand without spilling over either side of the fleshy platform. The word “goddess” to describe her was no longer a hyperbole. In the stinging afterglow of the most wonderful orgasm of his life, Ben realized he’d lost most of his height. More than a foot, in fact. He couldn’t have been taller than six or seven inches.

            And now, this was all that remained: that which could fit into Ms. Hoshoku’s godly palms and fingers. It seemed reckoning was near.

There was nothing left of Benjamin Modine.

            Technically, there was still a little of him. One inch, to be precise. Half the length of a human thumb, if he was lucky. But to the man, who’d fallen so far he couldn’t even remember now how high he’d begun, four inches might as well have been zero. It might have been negative.

            And in practical terms, soon, if he continued to shrink like he had been, it would be negative. Subatomic, perhaps.

            Despite the cloudiness of those vague numeric terms, Ben did understand a few things now which were entirely irrelevant to his current existence yet impossible to shake:

            Drinking ForLit had activated his bodily shrinkage, to be sure, but it wasn’t the only factor. He sped up the process, he realized only too late, by experiencing sexual urges. The harder he got, the lower his biology was encouraged to reduce him on a molecular level. Orgasms were the biggest killer. They robbed him of inches in seconds: the costliest pleasure he could imagine. The one at the club, especially, had melted him to a trinket.

            Today, barely five weeks since he helped ignite this nightmare, Ben spent his nights in Ms. Hoshoku’s office, living in an hold hamster cage, complete with wood shavings and tiny container for him to drop his waste. Twice a day, he was offered water and fibrous food clumps. He was granted merciful sleep for roughly five hours a day. The rest of the time, meaning every waking moment aside, was dedicated to Ms. Hoshoku and uncompromising devotion to her ass.

            Ben was no longer a beggar on the floor, holding his breath until his face was brushed by those lunar cheeks and their accompanying sweet odors. There was nothing between him and Ms. Hoshoku now. No air, no skirts, no panties. Hardly his own skin, in fact.

            Every day now, as he went from six to five to four to two inches, Ms. Hoshoku wadded Ben into a crumpled cylinder in her godlike fist, parted her ass cheeks with far more delicacy and love than she handled his naked body, and slid him into the crevasse of her gorgeous, warm, earthy crack.

            Then she’d snap her panties back on, pat down the skirt, and return to her day with nary an acknowledgement of his existence. Other than the rocking and jiggling about of her rump upon the chair, enjoying the comfort of her personal attendant, there was no communication.

            Benjamin had his simple instructions, and they were to be followed without fail: licking her skin. Tasting her filthy essence. Jamming his tiny tongue into the wet, wrinkled orifice of her lovely anus and sliding his lips as far around as he could manage. That was all he was now to her.

            When the day of work was concluded, and probably a couple more billion bottles of ForLit sold to the female-dominated population, the boarding process was reversed. Ms. Hoshoku stood in the solitude of her new presidential CEO office which took up the entire top floor of Blend and lowered her pants. Generally it took a little prying to pluck Benjamin’s moist, smelly little body out from between her juicy ass cheeks. He was truly dwarfed on a scale he could’ve never imagined. The woman’s butt was easily double as large as it had ever been before in her earlier life, and she was filling the ample space with a nude man the size of a cigarette. It took no adhesives or additional pressure to keep him snugly inside her ass; the mere strength of her two cheeks, clapped together and constantly flexing her glutes, was plenty to entrap Ben within his prison.

            “You know, Benjamin, I’m so glad you decided to come around to my view of things,” Ms. Hoshoku said unexpectedly to Ben that morning as she tapped a few pellets of cat food into the hamster cage for him to consume hungrily. Sitting at her customized six-foot-tall desk, the woman could almost convince Ben she was something average. Just for a second, that she was a human.

            But of course, she wasn’t. She was a dark-haired, fair-faced, twelve-foot-six archangel the likes of which Ben could never have crafted in his wildest dreams two months before. The silky black rivers of her raven hair, those graceful olive hands, her pillowy jugs always aching to tear through the seams, and of course that rotund ecosystem of an ass Ben was gifted inside every day.

            “Me too, Ms. Hoshoku,” Ben said obediently as he nibbled on his breakfast. “I’m glad.”

            “I didn’t believe at our first meeting you would bow completely. Not at first, anyway,” she explained. “I knew you were weak, of course, but at the time I saw something inside you that may have resisted my new world. Something mannish and stupid and disgusting that I would’ve had to crush. Maybe even crush you completely, as I’d have had no use for you. But you proved me wrong, Benjamin.”

            “Thank you, Ms. Hoshoku.”

            “You’re truly a credit to your nearly extinct species of man, Benjamin. Beings like you are what I envisioned when my elite Blend techs and I crafted the concoction to reduce the size of men and increase the scale, virility, and intelligence of women. There’s so much we could accomplish as humans, with women in bodies befitting their souls, and men making use of themselves for their new leaders. Unfortunately, many of the men previously in power in the industry, the media, and the branches of government weren’t as useful as you. They resisted, and as a result, have been dealt with properly now,” Ms. Hoshoku explained. She drew a long slurp from an opened bottle of ForLit, draining the container in one mouthful.

            Ben couldn’t be sure, but he was almost positive he watched her stretch almost three inches taller from that one simple, massive gulp of blood-red miracle soda.

            He wasn’t surprised by a single word of this explanation. Though he’d known none of it for sure, Ben had long suspected the oncoming consequences from that first day when he noticed he was shrinking. Somehow, there was a certain peace to be found in receiving the wisdom gently from his owner before she removed him from the cage for his daily routine and duties inside her ass.

            Like he mattered enough, just that infinitesimal amount, to receive the truth.

            “I see,” he said approvingly.

            “Do you?” she wondered aloud.

            “I believe I do, Ms. Hoshoku,” he said. “I’m ready to be useful. However long that lasts.”

            “Benjamin, I can say, without even the shadow of a deception, that I hope you last as long as possible,” she said with what Ben detected to be the closest approximation of love in Ms. Hoshoku’s heart.

            This wasn’t the end, he realized. This was just a new beginning.

            “Thank you.”

            “You’re welcome, Benjamin. Now, wrap your hands around your pathetic little cock, and start pumping it for me. I want to watch you shrink again before my eyes, before I put you back in your new home again for the day.”

            Only too pleased to oblige, with his spirit renewed by Ms. Hoshoku’s trust and “partnership,” Ben wiped his hands and clenched his member. Tugging it to life didn’t take a whole lot of effort, not with his beautiful boss and her immaculate lips, taunting breasts, and commanding hands hovering outside his caged world. He had all the inspiration he could ever want, right out there, all for him, and only for him.

            At this point in life, it was inconceivable to imagine any man on the planet foolish enough to resist the new way of things when they had this existence as a potential prize. Who could be selfish enough to want for more? Ben was embarrassed just to belong to a gender so unwilling to accept what was good for them.

            This wasn’t a corporate office anymore. This was the afterlife, and Ms. Hoshoku’s exposed, juicy, plump ass was the face of God.

            The woman stepped away from her desk, ducking just to keep from banging her shoulders on the upper rafters, and began to strip. It was all lost in sequence, revealing the perfection beneath like a sky-sized butterfly. Her jutting pumps, her slinky nylons, her bed-sized suit jacket, her billowing tablecloth skirt, the bucket-cups of her seductive bra, and the holy shroud of her panties: all of it removed on porcelain fingers and deposited on the floor beyond Ben’s vision.

            He tugged and pumped, squeezing himself toward another whopper of a climax. Breathless now, feeling the build-up of pressure and the requirement of orgasm. Still, he took his time, knowing the shrinking effect would be all the more potent if he dragged it out. If he really tortured himself with the waiting, simply gazing at Ms. Hoshoku’s alpine hips and looming ass cheeks swinging low and sweet for him. As he’d once witnessed and so now again, the woman’s parted derriere valley was brought to bear above his head. She watched him from over her shoulder, her dark eyes lousy with lust and need just as great as his, if not greater. Anticipating his downfall.

            Ben came after several sustained minutes of torment, buckling over on his knees in an appropriate bow to the woman who possessed his being in every way. He quaked with gratitude and unfettered happiness as he watched the cage walls wind higher, his body succumbing to the science of his invention. He was shrinking again, diminishing into the void. Hardly a millimeter now, if that.

            A smile.

            The cage door was unlatched, his body fished from the flakes between the vortex of Ms. Hoshoku’s thumb and forefinger. She could’ve smashed him to paste with a simple flinch, yet she didn’t, her massive form in control as always. As poignant and absolute as her oncoming ownership of the world, and possibly the universe beyond.

            Ben whispered a prayer to his goddess as he witnessed the blessed form of her anus draw near to consume him.