It was unusual for Caleb not to feel as if he was in control of a situation. Whether he was out with his mates, messing around in class or even arguing with the people who called themselves his superiors, he never felt as if he was subject to their will, or that things were going in a way that he could not influence. Even after being banished to after-school detention with his friends by their ever-irritating philosophy teacher (which, granted, was partially due to Caleb’s said surety in himself manifesting in argument), his pride and accompanying arrogance remained, that feeling that a victory had been won, and the now routine detention they were to suffer was Miss Blaine’s go-to response rather than come up with any form of coherent line of argument. Indeed, Caleb had felt a particular sense of pride after this particular clash; his argument for her subject being boring and pointless had been executed perfectly, in his lofty opinion, and her apparent lack of counter-argument had made the fruit all the sweeter. His haughty swagger into the detention room had said it all; despite the situation and the supposed power dynamic they were in, she was in his control, and her dagger-flinging scowl as she had looked up from the teacher’s desk upon his entry had proved it.

Yet now, for the first time in what had to be a long while, he felt strangely, helplessly powerless. And he was as terrified of that as he was his warped and yet totally familiar surroundings.

He had already tried to wrap his mind around what had happened, and come up blank. It had all seemed so regular, so routine. They had all sat down, ready to complete the hour and a half as normal; him and the lads, in a ninety-minute staring contest with the wall and the hazel eyes of their stony-faced supervisor. He had intentionally sat as far back as he could, to emphasise his place as leader of the pack, behind his loyal cronies, who all sat slouched in their chairs in their general display of sullen defiance at their sentence. Miss Blaine had taken the register, and after the typical snide remark she’d make of them had buried her nose in some old-looking book; presumably some tedium about Aquinas or some other old bastard who talked too much. Caleb, as was his practice, had immediately started scrolling through Instagram, without trying to hide his phone in any way. Indeed, all five of them were constantly chatting through messenger throughout the period, berating their situation and the youngish woman who had placed them in it. They had to have been at least half an hour in when suddenly and seemingly without any cause a blinding flash had permeated the room, blinding him and causing him to lose consciousness.

He wasn’t sure when he had woken up, but he did so slowly, and with a blinding headache. Whatever had made him lose consciousness had also knocked him to the floor, as he found himself sprawled out upon the hard surface; which had been strange, considering the room he was in was carpeted. That had been the first indicator that something certainly wasn’t right. The second came when he finally managed to open his eyes.

It was as if he had been transported to another planet, or even another dimension, and even with the clarity he had now he was still awestruck by his seemingly new surroundings. The platform he found himself on stretched for at least half a mile in either direction, a strange, smooth blue plain seemingly made from some form of high plastic. On one end, it curved off into an edge, below which was unknown to him, the ground being replaced by a horizon of huge black pillars extending down into a blue ocean. On the other side, it curled up to form a high wall. He had followed it up, craning his neck to see it rise, until it finally ended at least a mile up. Above that, the sky was made up of colossal grey squares, with no form of light source or sun in sight. None of it made sense to Caleb; his mind was unable to process what the alien surroundings were… until he turned around and saw the higher platform above him. As he turned around fully, he saw that the platform he was standing on was somewhat covered by said higher platform, which was far larger than his own dull blue belvedere. To the left and right it stretched, ostensibly supported by the black pillars that reached down towards the vast ocean below. As alien as it seemed and as crazy as his mind processed it to be thinking such a thing, the gears in his brain finally started to grind, and familiarise this phantasmagorical new sight. As the one thought manifested itself, others finally came with it, and to his wonder and horror a picture pieced itself together.

The platform above him was a table. And the platform he was standing on was a chair; a table and a chair of gargantuan proportions. And if he remembered correctly, these were the exact chair and table he had sat down in.

Revelations as they were, he had no way of proving them. Whether out of a basic need for logic or a final, desperate attempt to prevent the fears in his mind from being true, he needed proof of his predicament. Standing up finally on shaky legs and walking over to the edge of the chair, he looked up at the underside of the colossal table. He didn’t want this to be true, he had thought, he had honestly hoped against his own logic that he would find nothing under that table, the table he had always sat at, stuck gum under, written obscenities about Miss Blaine under. And yet, there they all were; dried, shrivelled wads of gum from his own mouth, now arguably as large as he was, stuck to the table; random scribbling done by a pen he knew he owned dashed across the bottom of the wood; and, the cherry on the cake, a large, poorly scrawled message explaining exactly what his annoying teacher could suck if she so wanted. If there had been any doubt before, any hope that this wasn’t real, that it was all just a strange dream from his stupor, it was as dashed as the myriad blobs of gum along the table underside. It was the unthinkable. The impossible. Yet somehow, against all laws of physics and reason, it had happened. He had been shrunk, to almost miniscule size, in the detention classroom.

Such was the situation Caleb found himself in, and all he could think to do was question how this had happened, and what was the source. Mentally, he was shaken to his core, and all sorts of questions about what life at a measly half an inch would be like plagued him like flies. However, though his bravado and confidence were certainly knocked, it wasn’t dead. Slowly, his mind returned to a sense of order; he couldn’t lose his cool now. There were questions to be answered, and things to be done. Small though he was, he was still the king, and the king had to get his realm in order. A plan had already formed in his head; first, he would need to find and gather his cronies, second, they would answer the remaining questions they had about their predicament; third, they would try and get themselves back to a normal size, hopefully find their clothes (self-confident in his body as he was, he didn’t particularly feel like walking around school in the buff) and leave this entire predicament behind. Everything was accounted for; or so he thought.

In all his planning and theorising, his callous disregard for one person had meant they were entirely left out of Caleb’s equation. As it so happened, they had been theorising themselves, and were about to put their own plan into action. Unbeknownst to Caleb, his second goal was about to be achieved, though through no power of his own.

Up until that point, the room had been deathly quiet. The only sounds had been the monotone whirr of the computer and the quiet eddying of the wind outside, blowing the autumn leaves around. Caleb had taken little notice of it while deep in his thoughts, and was about to move off when a dull, yet loud thump echoed through the room.

Thud.

Initially, Caleb was startled, but he passed it off as just an ambient noise, perhaps from another room.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The sound was becoming more methodical, a dull boom every few seconds. And it seemed to be getting closer.

As before, Caleb stopped, his mind unable to process what the sound was. It appeared to be moving around the room, and had a clear pattern.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The sound got closer still, and the tiny gang leader began to worry slightly again. Whatever was making that sound was coming towards him, and whatever it was, Caleb didn’t think it sounded good.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

As it happened, Caleb did not need to imagine the number of horrible and dangerous beasts and creatures that were flying through his subconscious at that moment to figure out what the source of the sound was. As he stood there in fear and wonder as to what it was, his eyes suddenly caught onto a massive pair of black pillars moving into his vision from the other side of the table.

Except those aren’t pillars, Caleb immediately realised, all his other knowledge coming back to him to reach a terrifying clarity. They’re a pair of giant legs. And there’s only other one person in this room who would be wearing black tights.

This wasn’t some beast or horrible creature that was coming for him. No, this was far worse.

Miss Blaine, the teacher he so enjoyed irritating and making life hell for, had just become his biggest problem- quite literally, he realised dryly, through his fear.

Now stock-still, he watched the giant pair of calves sail past the front of the table and along the row, trying to reason with himself once more to quell the panic building inside him. There was no proof that it was Miss Blaine. Any woman or girl in the school could be wearing black tights- it was the autumn, after all, and a bloody cold autumn at that. It was entirely possible that this was another person come in to check what had happened, perhaps (or so he fervently hoped) someone more benevolent in regard to his plight. He tried to reassure himself of this as he watched the monolithic pillars stop periodically at each giant chair before moving on, trying to look at her now visible open-top shoes and trying to remember what shoes his philosophy teacher had been wearing earlier, failing miserably thanks to his previous ignorance. As the pair of legs finally stopped at the final chair, next to the wall on the horizon, they stopped, before turning a full 180 degrees a few seconds later. She was picking up his friends, he realised; to do what with them, he didn’t know, but when the giantess sailed past him again he realised he would probably be finding out soon, as he was next. He hoped against hope that she would turn around and leave, if it truly was the person he most feared it was; terrible as it sounded, he hoped she just took his friends and left him be. He prayed to the god that he’d never believed in that she would just go away; but, much to Caleb’s panicked dismay, God clearly wasn’t listening. The gargantuan legs turned as they rounded the table, and he could only watch as the rest of the chair was cast into shadow.

Caleb, being who he was and judging how he reacted to her lessons. had never paid too much attention to Miss Blaine as a person, preferring to mess about until the inevitable scolding and ensuing argument came. He knew she was young, perhaps in her early to mid-twenties, and quite short; he had always loved the way he towered over her at his once lofty five foot eleven inches that he told people was six foot. Of course, now, it was him looking up at her; and where Caleb had once had a few inches on Miss Blaine’s height, she now was to him was a skyscraper or even a mountain was to a normal person.

Even from far away, he could see every detail on the short, slightly chubby woman’s billboard-sized face. Her chestnut coloured hair fell like a waterfall down to her chin, with her signature block fringe covering most of her forehead. Her chubby cheeks were pushed out by her full, dull red lips as they spread into a grin, displaying a long, terrifying wall of perfect, yellowed teeth each bigger than Caleb himself, a pink sliver of gumline visible between the two. Above her button nose, easily large enough to be a small hill that someone of Caleb’s stature could surmount, her hazel eyes gleamed like gems in what the tiny student far below could only describe as excitement and malice mixed together. He knew, then and there, that he was going to be in for a very rough ride- perhaps one that he wouldn’t survive. Her voice suddenly filled the air, booming all around him like the voice of a British accented feminine deity.

“And last but not least, the little gang leader. I think I’m gonna have the most fun with you.” She giggled, the cacophonous laughter hurting his ears. But even at his size, and scared as he was of the titanic teacher laughing at his fate above him, Caleb wasn’t about to just go meekly into what he presumed would be his own death. He was going to stand up, and make his last stand as king, even if the power dynamic was now well and truly shifted out of his favour.

“What do you intend to do to us, you giant bitch?”

In response, Miss Blaine only laughed harder, her mouth opening and leaving Caleb wondering in fear just how large that cavern was; and whether he would be entering it. Eventually she was able to control herself, her malevolent beam returning this time with the tip of her colossal tongue in between her stained teeth.

“Oh, I wouldn’t speak to me like that, little Caleb. After I’m done with youand your little cronies, you’re never going to want to have another detention again.”

Caleb could only stand there, frozen in terror, as her laughter boomed around him again and her titanic hand began to reach for his tiny, helpless form.

There was no sense running; even Caleb, in his fear and abject disbelief, was aware of that. He knew that a sprint away from the titanic hand that was extending towards him was a futile gesture, as the colossal woman whose imprisonment he was soon to be under could cover in a mere step or reach what to him was easily half a mile or more. Instead, he simply chose to look on, partially through said terror and partial refusal to believe this was indeed happening as the grasping palm of his worst enemy sailed ever closer to his miniscule form.

It was as if her hand was moving in slow motion; whether that was an illusion due to his terror, the physics of being so much smaller than his colossal kidnapper or simply an intentional move on the part of the giantess to create such an atmosphere was completely unknown and irrelevant to him. It sailed through the air, a gargantuan fleshy behemoth with five huge outstretched digits coming to do God knows what to him. The closer it got, the more Caleb could see of the billboard-sized palm, until it was so close that he could see the lines crossing Miss Blaine’s palm, the massive swirls of her fingerprints, even the beads of sweat that glistened on the warm, pinkish skin. Slowly, her hand changed position as it advanced, seemingly graceful and majestic in its size and movement but equally terrifying given the connotations; Miss Blaine was making to grab him, her thumb and forefinger poised to pinch him between them. It was only then that Caleb could really gain an appreciation for just how small he really was, as the grasping fingers began to fill his vision and he noted that to him, each fingerprint was easily the size of a car to him, the fingers themselves as tall as decent-sized town houses. Caleb couldn’t even begin to fathom the relative size of Miss Blaine compared to himself; and quite frankly, for the preservation of what remained of his sanity, he didn’t want to.

Then, the fingers were either side of him, and all too soon he found himself clamped between the two rough, slightly rubbery pads of his teacher’s fingers. He could feel every ridge of the swirls of her fingerprints, and the warmth and subsequent dampness of her skin from what he realised, with some disgust, was her sweat. The pressure was intense from both sides, just barring being painful but still extremely uncomfortable, and his arms were squeezed into his torso. He felt himself slowly lift off of the ground and into open air, now fully in her grip and being pulled away to what he presumed to be his doom. Slow as it had seemed to be as her hand advanced, the ride back was far faster than he had imagined; at his size, he was travelling at many miles per hour, completely exposed to the elements. The room flew past like the view from an aeroplane window, and a combination of the rushing winds, high g-forces from the acceleration and the continued panic he found himself barely suppressing causing multiple waves of nausea to wash over him. Higher they climbed, seemingly into the heavens, though Caleb knew that the goddess he was being taken towards was by no means benevolent.  The only constant sight was the plumpish, smiling face of his teacher, the woman now so ostensibly titanic that to the young student she could easily be considered deific, getting ever larger as he was pulled towards it, until mercifully the flying stopped. Quickly looking around to assess his new position, he realised he was high enough off the ground for any fall to end very nastily for him, and close enough to her face that it filled his puny vision.

Even from far away, Caleb could see that Miss Blaine’s face was, understandably, large compared to his own; up close it was colossal, enough so to be terrifying all on its own. Looking down upon him, her two hazel eyes now were more akin to massive spotlights, scrutinising every facet of his tiny, naked form and making him feel a sudden self-consciousness that no girl’s judging gaze had ever created. He could see every dimple on her cheeks, every hair on her eyebrows, and every old blemish on her skin. Her nose, though he was still at least a far enough distance from her face that she could see him without stressing her eyes, seemed to loom over him, the two nostrils great cave entrances that he imagined he could easily crawl- or worse, be sucked- into and possibly never come out of again. As she exhaled, a hot gale of air came rushing past him out of the twin tunnels, making his normally perfectly-kept hair fly about wildly and bringing tears to his eyes, dispelling also for a few seconds the sweet if faint aroma of her perfume. Then his gaze moved down to level, and he saw the sight that, upon frantic thought and only amplified now so close to them, actively terrified him most of all the features on her landscape of a face.

Her lips.

Miss Blaine’s lips were as long as at least twenty of himself, and that was at a conservative estimate. Stretched ever further by the threatening and excited smile she still wore, the full, plushy lips, coloured a dull, flesh-like red, were a disarmingly safe-looking yet tremendously scary entrance to what Caleb could only imagine in his fear would be the worst fate for any person his size. As if on cue, the cushiony lips parted to reveal her teeth again, a yellow wall of slimy, smooth, and most importantly deadly-looking boulders that Caleb could now surmise were not only bigger than him, but the largest ones were easily twice the size of him. Slowly, the grin split, and the tiny gang leader had to wonder whether she was going to end it then and there; this was it, his final fate, tossed into the jaws of his worst enemy to be chewed into viscera. But as they opened a fraction, nowhere nearly enough to reveal the horrific sights of what Caleb knew lay inside but didn’t want to see, her colossal tongue poked through from the depths and slithered between her teeth to sluggishly rest on her lower lip. From there, it began to make a slow circle around her plush lips, revealing first the plain of endless taste buds and then the smoother, slimy underside, dull blueish rivers marking the path of the great veins within. As it slithered along, it deposited a smooth sheen of Miss Blaine’s saliva, leaving them somewhat gleaming in the light from the fresh coat of presumably less than fresh oral fluids. The slow, intentionally threatening and disabling nature of her merely wetting her lips was not lost on Caleb, and when he looked up he knew the look in her twinkling hazel eyes very well. Indeed, he reflected, he had been the subject of it many a time, from many a girl; but not quite like this, with nowhere near as deadly circumstances.

Hunger.

The pieces began to fit together in his head, and a terrifying picture began to take shape; one, he realised, that incorporated the horrors he had just now thought he would hope to avoid.

This giant bitch wants to eat us.

Terror, panic and all manner of other emotions flooded his head all at once, but with much effort he was able to suppress them. He knew, he could tell, that to go to his death in fear and broken pleading was exactly what the sociopath in front of him wanted, to break him both physically and psychologically. He knew she could, and by that point knew she would, break him physically. That, surprisingly, he could come to terms with- unless by some miracle he could escape, and he fully intended to search for one, he could see that his death was inevitable in the hands of this woman. He wasn’t stupid; his very condition was clearly no form of shock to his now slightly salivating teacher, and it didn’t take an Einstein to realise she was the cause of it. But much as he was fond of life, especially his own considering how amazing it was, he never had too much of a problem with accepting death, or so he told himself. It was inevitable, after all. But she could never take his mental capacities from him, much as she tried. He knew then, in front of her colossal face, scrutinising gaze and display of hunger, that if he was going to die, he would do it like the king he was. She could send him into the gates of Hell (for, he assumed with some dryness, her gargantuan maw would probably be a fitting metaphor for them, if not even worse) and sentence him to die in her stomach, but he would never let her take his sanity.

He had his mission. He knew what was coming. Closing his eyes, he smiled; he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of watching him react; and waited for the inevitable plunge into his death sentence.

He was very much surprised, therefore, when he suddenly felt the pressure of her fingers release from him, and opening his eyes again he found himself in free fall.

In his shock, he couldn’t even scream for the first instant, instead in stunned silence at this sudden development when he was so sure his lot was to be lost to Miss Blaine’s digestive tract. When the scream finally came, it was lost to the rushing wind and blurred surroundings as he dropped like a stone towards what he presumed would be his inevitable death on the ground. Yet, as the whim of the titaness desired, again he found himself misinterpreting the timing of his demise. Instead of continuing to fall, he found himself impacting soft ground with a muffled thud. He had landed on his front, and the pain at first rippled through his torso, but otherwise, he reasoned, he felt alright; the soft, warm ground had broken his fall. He slowly staggered to his feet again, realising that he was standing on a fleshy platform which almost encircled him; Miss Blaine’s hand. She must’ve moved her hand when she released me from that vice grip she had me in, he reasoned, correctly. In my panic and the blur, I didn’t even see it. Exhaling deeply as his heart rate returned to slightly more normal rates (as much as they could do given the nature of his situation), Caleb craned his neck to look up at the face of Miss Blaine, now partially obscured by her somewhat buxom bosom, and tried to come to terms with the fact that he had just thought himself on the brink of death twice, at the whim of his colossal philosophy teacher, and then had been saved by the whim of the same woman. You’ve proved yourself wrong, you silly tit, he joked to himself dryly, despite everything. All this time you’ve been telling us there is no definitive proof for the existence of God, and now you’ve made yourself one.

“Hehe, not yet. There’s too much fun to be had yet with you, my new little pest. But your time will come…”

Her omnipresent voice once again boomed around him, only amplified by the reverberating walls and partial ceiling of her fingers and hand. Her very skin seemed to vibrate slightly as she spoke, the power of her monolithic vocal chords seeming to resonate through her whole body. Caleb couldn’t help but marvel slightly at the sheer power she had from his perspective; just as everything else in his new massive world, her sheer size compared to him made even the most normal things seem strange, even somewhat alien in their actions. His wonder was rudely interrupted, however, when Miss Blaine’s fingers moved swiftly above her palm, the tips coming to rest on and pressing down the lower part of her palm so they arched over him completely like a living ceiling. Simultaneously, her thumb made a wall where before there had been a hole between her fingers and her palm, and her little finger (still the size of a tall building to the mite trapped within) sealed off the other escape route between it and the plushy palm he was stood on. Darkness now reigned as Caleb found himself confined to the enclosed space within Miss Blaine’s poorly-made fist, now a prisoner of the quickly rising temperature as her body heat found no way to escape and the musky smell of his kidnapper’s hand sweat. Without any warning, his world flipped and began to swing back and forth violently, and he was ricocheted around the long, vaguely tube-like confines of her hand. Clearly, he surmised with some irritation, the bitch was on the move, and she intended to make it as uncomfortable as possible as him; in reality, the natural swing of her arms was more than enough on its own to cause him the troubles he was in.  Far above, he could hear her humming jovially, the sound muffled by the prison of her own flesh, and every step she took jostled him slightly more. Slowly his nausea returned, accompanied this time by dizziness and disorientation as he tumbled over and over in seemingly every direction. It wasn’t unbearable, but it was certainly an experience he never wanted to go through again, and worst of all he knew that this was far from the worst she could- and most likely given the glimmer in her eyes before, intended to- throw at him.  At last, mercifully, it stopped, and he found himself being unceremoniously dropped out of her hand, the building-like digits recoiling suddenly to reveal the textured wooden surface below which he landed on arse-first with a considerably painful thump. His dizziness subsiding, he watched as the towering figure that deposited him glided around the desk that he knew was at the front of the classroom, and came to sit down on the similarly colossal green office chair before him. It could have been his imagination, but Caleb could swear he heard the air rushing from underneath her as her unimaginably huge form settled into the comfy chair. He felt himself under the hazel spotlight again before he saw it, and slowly had to gaze up the body of his foe once again as she gazed at him like a child would a sweet.

Miss Blaine, even sitting, towered over Caleb like a mountain; possibly even larger, but mountain was the largest thing Caleb could come to reference in comparison. He’d seen plenty of mountains, the Alps were like a second home to his ski-crazy family, but the stone monoliths he’d come to know were a far cry from the living, breathing, practical landscape of a body his teacher had become to him. He was eye level with her belly, her black blouse giving no hint of pudge or flab, or even any hint of the colossal stomach within. It made Caleb marvel and fear all the more that within this colossus was a series of chambers and tubes which at his new size would theoretically be navigable; a whole network of inner plumbing that one could imagine getting lost in in some fantasy or science fiction epic. He knew, knew too well, however, that this was not some epic story, that to end up inside that colossal body was a one-way ticket to his own death. He didn’t even want to picture the giant, churning pit that Miss Blaine’s stomach now would be to him; on terms as he was with his own death now, even by disappearing down the gullet of the vengeance-lusting psycho sat before him, he didn’t want to picture the grisly details; such things made him shudder to think about and twisted his own miniscule stomach to no end. Instead, he brought his gaze down to her other fist, laid out on the table in front of him- notably, the opposite hand to the one he had been not-so-comfortably transported in. Held in much the same way as the fist he had been imprisoned within, he could already guess from her walk around the classroom that her other hand contained his poor friends, who had obviously shared in the same fate as him.

It was then that he finally picked up on the muffled shouts, unmistakeably from inside the makeshift prison that her fist was serving as. His fixed gaze on her fist had not gone unnoticed by Miss Blaine, and the grin that split her face looked bigger and more malicious than ever before.

“Right, boys… let’s get started, shall we?”

Miss Blaine’s building-sized fist opened up, and out scrabbled four boys of about his age, of varying heights and builds. Caleb, of course, knew them well; as his best friends and loyal cronies, he ought to, considering he viewed them as the brothers- and indeed, siblings as a whole- he had never had growing up as a spoilt only child. He could recognise anywhere the lanky frame of Harry, or the equally short stature of Ralph, whom he jokingly referred to as 5’4” of pure muscle. Between them, he was both surprised and relieved to see that Quentin, the most bookish and reserved of the group, had found his large, square glasses shrunk with him. He could only imagine the horrors the next few hours would be for him if he was mostly blind throughout the ordeal; that said, he realised with darker thought, perhaps it was somewhat better that way. For all their differences in physicality and character (for there were many; Caleb liked to keep a diverse friendship group both out of interest to know different kinds of people as well as make sure his cronies were constantly somewhat at odds with one another, so as to keep himself on top as leader; he was able to immediately spot one thing on the faces of all three figures stumbling towards him from the open palm of their teacher’s colossal hand. The pale faces and wide eyes all betrayed their fear, and Caleb knew that to make the trio in front of him scared took one hell of a lot.

Behind them, however, the fourth figure and final member of Caleb’s cohort was not so, though. As he came into view, the leader could see his attempts to not stumble like those in front of him, keep his head high and his face stoic. It was a sight that gave him more much-needed confidence, and for the first time since his shrinking he found a smirk creep onto his face. He could always rely on Jack to keep him sane.

They had been friends for years, longer than Caleb even could remember; indeed, his parents would often say of Jack that the two were separated at birth. Though one look at the two would immediately give away their different parentage, personality wise Jack and Caleb had found themselves to be almost perfect companions. Prideful, self-confident, easily as arrogant and obnoxious as Caleb could be, the pair were the terror of their primary school back in their time. Indeed, it was said that only Caleb’s superiority in age denoted the two as leader and second in command, and neither Jack nor Caleb questioned the natural positions they had fallen into. Between them they had recruited and moulded the three between them to create the formidable brotherhood they were today, and cemented their reputation as the unquestionable top dogs in their school. Of all of his gang, Jack was the one that Caleb knew he could always count on, always get help from, his loyalty practically unquestionable. They had faced everything together, and they had come out of the other side.

Their eyes met, and Caleb knew his thoughts immediately. He had always been able to read Jack like a book, and he knew that Jack knew they may not make it out of the other side of this one. He wasn’t stupid, after all; as one of the only people Caleb viewed as his equal, he wouldn’t be. Good, he concluded, the smirk returning. If we are to go down, let us go down together. Like the heroes of old, or some shit like that.

His friends drew closer, and upon seeing him broke into a run, Jack still following at walking pace close behind. Fear was replaced temporarily with relief as they saw their friend, their leader. Soon, they crowded him, and he was thronged with questions and exclamations.

“Caleb! Thank God you’re alright! We feared you’d already been snuffed out, or worse…”

“Hey, speak for yourself! I personally was hoping you’d managed some miraculous escape, or not been shrunken like us altogether. Of course, I can see now…”

“Both of you, quiet! Caleb, do you know any of what’s going on here? I mean, I can ascertain the main parts myself, and I can figure out that the planet-sized version of our bitchy philosophy teacher is probably the cause of it, but I figured you may know more than I do…”

“Give the man some air, would you? Jeez.”

Jack’s deep voice carried over the cacophony from the other three and bade them silent. They cleared the way as he strode towards Caleb and extended his hand to him, which Caleb took warmly and shook.

“Glad to see our current situation hasn’t dampened your sense of class, Jack,” Caleb said in greeting, his smirk becoming a full smile as he stepped away and into the circle of friends they had formed. “So, it would seem we’ve all had the same experience, huh?”

“Essentially,” piped up Quentin. Shy and reserved as he was at times, he had grown comfortable with the gang, and he was always willing to recount a story. Caleb trusted him the most out of the three to retell it accurately. “From what we understand, the same thing happened to all of us. After that big flash of light, we all found ourselves at this height on our chairs. Then the huge woman presently eyeing us down like we’re Ferrero Rochers showed up, and before we could do anything her great, grubby hand had swept us up into its hot and sweaty embrace.” Quentin paused, the disgust visible on his face. A bit of a germaphobe, Caleb knew how averse his academic friend was to human contact, as stereotypical as he thought it was for his type of personality. A ride in the giant, sweaty fist of Miss Blaine certainly wasn’t going to be top of his wish list. “Then, our prison unfolds, and we’re dumped here with you.”

“Hm.” Looking up from his friends, the gang leader could see that Miss Blaine was indeed still gazing at them hungrily, the disarming and threatening grin now reduced to merely a smile, hiding those killer teeth. She seemed, however, content to let them converse for the time being; why she did was beyond his reasoning, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Besides, he really didn’t want to delve into the mind of the woman almost lustfully staring at them, as he didn’t want to even begin to consider all the horrible ways she was thinking of inevitably dealing with them. Instead, he looked back to his friends, all clearly waiting for their leader’s plan of action, which he knew they weren’t going to like. Sighing away any last doubts, he began.

“Now, guys. We’ve been in some scrapes before, and come out of them fine. But I’m going to level with you. This…” he paused and pointed up at the colossus behind them, “…is most likely not going to be a happy ending for us.” His smirk was long gone, replaced by a look of sorrow.

“What are you trying to say, Caleb?” Harry queried, the worry plain on his face.

“What I’m trying to say is… what I really don’t want to say is…” he sighed. “We can’t, without a miracle at least, beat something that is thousands upon thousands of times bigger than we are.

“So that means…” Quentin mumbled, unable to hope against hope any more that their fate was anything but sealed.

“Gentlemen, these are probably our last few hours on this planet.”

He looked at them, sadly. Quentin and Harry looked distraught. Even Jack looked solemn. Ralph, however, spoke up, angrily. “Bollocks, Caleb! We could easily make a run for it and hide, in places she could never get her fat fingers into. We could hold out for a while until she gives up, and then get help. We’re all in relatively good shape- Harry’s a school athlete, for God’s sake! Why should we just give In to her because of a size difference?”

“Ralph, are you in denial of the truth, or just that thick?” Quentin rebuked, himself now also angry. “If you hadn’t noticed, the woman who did this to us can with a swish of her arm move miles faster than we ever could! As for hiding, we’re on an open desk, steep drops on either side! How do you presume to scale those with a psycho behemoth on your tail?”

“I hate to say it, Ralph, but Quentin’s right,” added Harry. Unless we can reason with her in some way, beg for our lives perhaps to gain some sort of salvation, we’re as fucked as a fir tree in December.”

“Begging won’t help,” Jack replied, his deep voice seeming as cold as ice. “Look at the way she’s looking at us. That’s the look of someone who’s about to get everything she’s ever wanted, and in this case that’s revenge on all of us in the worst and I fear most permanent way.” He shrugged. “Caleb’s right. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Now, I know it seems dire, because let’s face it, it is.” Caleb resumed, garnering the attention of the four cronies again. We’re all most likely going to our deaths. But honestly? I could not ask to die in the company of any more distinguished and excellent people than yourselves.” He smiled at them again. “If we’re going to die, so be it. This bitch can and will have her revenge, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But we, as a last act of resistance, can take at least some of the enjoyment out of it. We won’t play her little games. We won’t scream, or run, or hide. No, we will go into death with our heads held high and our pride on our chests, as we always do. That way, we don’t let her enjoy her revenge. We don’t let her have the feeling of knowing our last moments were spent screaming in terror as we were crushed under her shoe, or sucked down her gullet. One last middle finger to Miss Blaine that is so giant it will become legend. The tiny last stand against the behemoth before us.” His voice had been rising, and it hit a crescendo as he reached the final line. “What say you, comrades?!”

Before they had a chance to react, however, a much larger voice drowned them all out, startling both him and his cronies and making them turn towards it. It was showtime at last.

“Oho, I most certainly agree,” Miss Blaine chuckled, grinning at them again like a giant Cheshire cat. “Your little speech was rousing, I’ll give you that, and your contemptible little plan bold. But I know, just as well as you do, that it won’t work.”

Caleb looked at his friends, all staring up at the colossal woman dominating the room. Their expressions were not those of fear any more, and they looked up at her with adrenaline pumping through their veins. Yet Caleb knew, in the deepest recesses of his mind, that she was right; that when push came to shove their hearts were not in it, try as they might to enact it. He could come to terms with that. As long as they tried, he knew their loyalty at least was true. Striding forward in what he hoped looked like a confident manner, he moved in front of the line his friends had formed and shouted up to his teacher.

“You call MY plan contemptible? Whatever fucked up multiple homicide you’re planning is the very ESSENCE of contemptible! Just because you can’t control your shitty little philosophy class, you decide to find creative ways to murder and dispose of the ringleaders? How little spine do you have, you giant sociopath?”

He was almost shaking with adrenaline by the end of his speech, and seeing the expression of the billboard-sized face change from its previous smirking, smug features to a harder expression of somewhere between anger and irritation, he was spurred on to continue. “You can torture us, maim us, even kill us, but we will NOT give you the satisfaction of our screams! We go into death with PRIDE!” His closing line finished like an explosion. Still pumping with adrenaline and heart racing at breakneck pace, he found himself panting after his exhortation. Filled with pride in himself for his stalwart defence, he watched the anger burn in the giant female eyes above him, the giant hands clench into fists that could reduce him to pulp and viscera.

If he hadn’t been so caught up in the adrenaline rush, he would have probably been pissing himself with fear.

“It’s… commendable… that even at your size, you can still be such a mouthy little shit,” Miss Blaine growled through gritted teeth. Even though she was able to maintain somewhat composed, and hold back her anger, Caleb could see the fires of rage burning in those hazel spotlights, the desire to crush him, the ‘mouthy little shit’, there and then under her massive fist.  It made him proud to know that he was able to rile up even a giant with so much more power than he. When she had composed herself enough, she continued, teeth now unclenched. “But your words and your shitty little plan won’t do you any good at all.” The anger flared up in her eyes again, if only for a moment. “You see, I’m aware that detention isn’t a lesson to you at all. You need a harsher punishment to teach you a lesson. And that can’t happen in this room. So I’m moving you to a, how do I put this, ‘new’ detention room. One that’s far more secure… where I can monitor you 24/7… where you’ll finally learn your lesson.”   

From directly in front of him, Caleb was suddenly distracted from Miss Blaine’s threatening, booming monologue by a far more alien sound. It sounded like a mass of rumblings and gurglings, as if the roar of an earthquake had mixed with the bubbling sounds of a jacuzzi- and it seemed to come from in front of him, where the cloth wall of her blouse still dominated the horizon. Caleb didn’t need to think this new mystery through; it was already painfully obvious given the nature of the monologue the titaness was giving.

“Oh, as if on cue,” Miss Blaine continued, her huge lips once again forming into a smirk. “I should apologise, really. Normally around this time of day, I have a late afternoon snack at home to ease me through until dinner. Her eyes, once filled with anger that gave him pride, now glinted again with excitement that made his fear rise once again. “Of course, instead, I had to be here… in detention… with you five tiny and, may I say, deliciously bite-sized looking students.” The deliberate, slow emphasis on those two penultimate words was followed by yet another assault on her lips by her tongue, dragged out as slowly and intentionally as was the last one. She was making it painfully obvious what she was going to do, he knew that she knew that as well as they did. This was all part of her game, and the emphasis was clearly hyping her up all the more.

“I’m sure you get the picture, don’t you? You’re a smart boy, after all, Caleb. A smart boy who wasted all his potential.” She gave a small sigh, and for a moment he almost felt like she felt the smallest twinge of sorrow for him. But thankfully for his already addled brain, it didn’t last. As she started to speak again, her monumental figure began to lean across the desk, the massive face sailing closer to him and casting his minute form and that of his friends in shadow. Somehow, her voice was like silk slowly getting quieter as she advanced, despite beginning to detail, finally, the horrors that awaited them.

“Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to torture your friends, and then I’m going to eat them. I’m going to make you watch each and every one of them go into my mouth and slide down my waiting gullet. Then, I’m going to break you. Oh, not physically; that I can do easily. No, I’m going to destroy your mind and leave you a hollow, broken shell.” Her face stopped, mere feet from his perspective from his form, so close that he couldn’t even see the full length of her lips. When she spoke, it was at a whisper, and the animation of her lips in forming and articulating words was a fearsome and unearthly thing to watch. Her perfume once again filled the air; until she spoke, and for the first time Caleb was subjected to the stale, reeking wind of Miss Blaine’s breath. The hot, damp wind that poured from her mouth enveloped Caleb in its embrace, filling his nose with the unholy stench of a mingling of tea and the general decomposing egg-esque stench of gallons upon gallons of stale saliva and excrement from the myriad colonies of bacteria festooning her maw. Flecks of spit flew out as she continued, leaving him with a fair modicum of the disgusting spray upon him. As foul as it was, however, he remained fixated on her words, as she finally detailed his own demise.

“Then… then I’ll take you into my mouth. I’ll suck on you like a sweet and let you be completely humiliated by me as I taste and savour every last bit of you. Finally, I’ll swallow you down like all of your friends before you… and you can spend your last hours in the pit of my stomach, with whatever remains of your friends, to die in the depths of my body. Think of it not as detention… think of it as permanent isolation.” The grin split wide again, like a mountain range of yellow, slimy peaks on both sides of him, before she finally leaned back, smirking again, leaving him showered in saliva and nauseous from the reek of her breath. “And you think your plan will last through that?”

Caleb wouldn’t admit it, but he was scared. Of course he was; this was a woman who was throwing everything in her giant arsenal at him to break him psychologically, and bend him to her will. But he knew he had to stand strong; for the benefit of his own last stand, and that of his friends. They needed to see their leader still stood defiant if he was to have any hope of achieving his last hurrah. Despite it all, he recalled his adrenaline reserves, and made his stand.

“We will last,” he shouted, with as much might as he could muster. “We will last through anything you throw at us, and more! Like I said, we go into death with pride, and nothing you can say will stop that!”

This time, however, his exhortations did not change her expression. If anything, her smirk only got wider, splitting into a grin once more. “Are you sure about that?”

He noticed her eyes were no longer trained on him, but rather above him… or behind him. Wheeling around, he saw three of his friends standing in a line, looking scared but still attempting to look defiant… and Ralph, running for his life away from them and the giantess. He stared on in equal parts disbelief and despair as he watched him sprint further and further away.

You bloody fool, Ralph, he thought to himself. In trying to escape, you’ve put yourself in her sights first.

“Looks like we have our first volunteer!” Miss Blaine exclaimed, the excitement now evident in her decibel-shredding voice as she once again began to reach out for the tiny speck below her.

The internal battle that had been going on in Ralph’s mind ever since his friend had laid out his idea for a ‘glorious last stand’ was an intense one. On the one hand, he didn’t understand how Caleb could just be so willing to go into his death- and a humiliating, painful, disgusting death at that- without at least first trying to find some way out of this. He also didn’t see how his friends could legitimately back such depressing insanity. Did they really want to die in the churning soup of Miss Blaine’s stomach? Could they seriously see no other option? He thought it madness to just accept the fact that she would eat them and allow her to without a struggle.

On the other hand, he knew Caleb, he trusted Caleb, and he was loyal to Caleb. He was their leader, and part of Ralph truly believed that if death was truly the inevitability he saw it as, then he must be right. After all, he surmised, Caleb was rarely wrong when it came to tough decisions. He didn’t understand how letting their giant teacher do as she pleased to them would be one last kick in the teeth to her, but seeing Caleb’s confidence and his mockery of Miss Blaine even at the minute proportions they were, he thought he had an idea of it. Though the survival instinct still gnawed at him, and gnawed at him hard, he had made his mind up, or so he thought. He would follow Caleb to the ends of the earth if he had to.

Then, Miss Blaine had outlined her plan for his demise.

He had, like all the others, listened intently as the ominious rumble of her belly resounded across the desk, and grown uneasy again. Then, he had seen her tongue slide across her lips again, her voice stating how ‘deliciously bite-sized’ they all looked, and had felt the fear rising again in his body. But the straw that broke the camels’ back was watching her lean towards them, this mountainous titan of flesh and bosom and cavern-like jaws, and seeing said mouth right in front of them, articulating in soft tones the way she was going to torture them, torture him, and then swallow them like so much food before them. And Ralph snapped. He couldn’t let her dump them in her giant, disgusting maw and eat him like a sweet. His fear won out, and all rational thinking stopped. Fight or flight kicked in, and looking at the woman whose very spittle was at present being sprayed onto him, whose awful breath was buffeting him like a gale, the short, stocky boy decided then and there to make a run for it. While he still could.

He ran, faster than he ever felt like he had before, away from the voracious monster that had been his philosophy teacher and to God knows where. He didn’t know where he was going, or how to escape the desk for that matter; he only knew that he had to get away from her, and if he didn’t he would be on a whistle-stop tour straight to her stomach. Soon, he was puffing and panting, cursing his short body; Harry was the athlete, he’d always been the fighter. The desk seemed endless, and he could feel himself slowing down; no matter how hard he pushed, he was beginning to get exhausted. He hadn’t been paying attention to anything else, just his own escape, but it was hard to blot out the deific voice of Miss Blaine around him as she saw his desperate attempt.

“Looks like we have her first volunteer!”

That did it. Fear surged through him in the form of adrenaline and he pushed his body through the pain into a sprint once more. Eyes wide, face red, and heart going at breakneck speed, Ralph kept running for his life, knowing that now the chase was on.

He wouldn’t look behind him- he refused to, preferring instead to keep his eyes on the goal, the edge of the desk that now finally seemed to be closer. Had he looked, he would have seen roughly the view that Caleb had seen from his chair upon first encountering Miss Blaine at her new massive stature. Her eyes twinkled with glee, her grin almost a radiant beam if it weren’t for the malicious nature of it, and her giant, grasping hand leisurely sailing through the air at almost imaginable speeds towards the terrified speck she was watching try a futile attempt to escape her. It extended past Caleb and the others, who could only watch in despair and horror at their friends’ plight, before finally coming to hover over Ralph, who through his hazy, tear-filled vision saw his world cast into shadow.

“No!” He refused to believe his time was up, urged himself to keep running out of the shadow of the deadly embrace of the hand he knew was about to descend upon him. In those few seconds, he saw hope as he managed to clear the shadow, get back into the light and towards the edge of the desk, the gap between him and it closing fast. He allowed himself to believe, hoping against hope, that he had outrun her, that he was about to escape the plain of the desk and find a more secluded space to hide. Unfortunately, if he had been thinking logically, or even merely looked above him, he would have realised that Miss Blaine was just playing games with him. Just as he was about to make it to his salvation, he felt a slight windfall directly behind him, and then..

BANG!!

Miss Blaine’s hand, which had stopped to hover over him out of its owners’ desire to terrify her little snack, had balled into a fist and slammed with unimaginable speed down onto the desk. The result of this was immediate and chaotic; the force of such a large object moving so quickly and hitting the hard surface caused a shockwave like an earthquake to resonate across the table. Such power did the impact have that the resultant shock even made the four spectators, who had watched in silent awe and horror when her giant fist had moved at speeds they couldn’t even comprehend for something that large, tumble onto their arses from halfway across the desk. Ralph, being essentially at the epicentre of the quake, was subject to far worse. He was immediately launched into the air, not awfully high but high enough for him to sustain injury, and fell with a scream back onto the hard surface of the desk. He landed badly, on his front, and a searing pain shot through his ribs and pelvis. Tears filled his eyes, and he could tell that from the pain, he had probably at least cracked a few of his ribs, at worst broken them. Tears now filling his eyes fully, he looked around at the cause of his injury, and saw the balled up, chubby fingers and thumb towering above his prone form, having done its job perfectly.

“Perfect,” came the pleased-sounding voice once again, knowing her prey was now subdued. “Now, come here, you little treat…”

Despite the burning pain in his chest and the aches now all over his exhausted body, Ralph tried to keep moving. Unable to stand, he tried to scrabble forward on his forearms, dragging his tired out body along in a last ditch attempt to clear the desk. Try as he might, however, his time was up, and he felt the warm tips of Miss Blaine’s fingers clamp around his left leg. Refusing even then to give up, he frantically kept trying to crawl forward, twisting and writhing to free his grasped leg, but found himself being dragged backwards like a mouse in the jaws of a snake. Squeal like a mouse he did as he gained speed and was finally lifted off of the ground, left dangling by his leg in open air while the world went by in a blur around him. Eventually he found himself stopping, and the upside-down classroom came into focus. He knew where he was, and much as he didn’t want to see it he felt the sharp twist on his leg bring his body around to face it. He was dangling upside-down in front of Miss Blaine’s enormous, grinning face, and he knew that there was now no escape from being tossed into those yellow, horrifying jaws. Her girlish giggling echoed all around him as he felt the blood rushing to his head.

“So, who’s do we have here, then…?” The huge eyes narrowed as his captor tried to focus on his tiny, dangling body. “Ah, I see you now, Ralph. Caleb’s little bodyguard. Of course it’d be you; you’re the only one stupid enough to think running away from me would actually work.” She laughed cruelly, the laughter all around him only making him feel more self-conscious. He knew he wasn’t that smart; he rarely understood much of what Miss Blaine had been teaching; but his friends had always made him feel as if that didn’t matter. Now, this giant bitch was making him feel smaller than he already was, and amidst the fear his self-confidence sprang up anew.

“Says the one who can only deal with us by shrinking us to size!” he heard Caleb roar up at her. Even at this size, and even after Ralph had betrayed him by running, he was still looking out for him. In the corner of his mind, he realised what Caleb was saying before had been right; if he was to die today, he felt glad to be going out with such great friends as them. He didn’t deserve it.

Miss Blaine ignored his friend’s insults, too fixated on her prey to care. “Oh well, at least you’ll be some useful calories… and I always did like fast food.” Laughing at her own bad joke, she lowered him down slightly, past her nose and in front of her ominous lips. A hint of a tongue poked out from within, like the tip of an iceberg floating on the sea. “Speaking of…I hardly think it’s fair that I’m going to eat you without you at least seeing where you’re going. Don’t you think?”

Ralph stayed silent, rendered speechless by the thought of what he knew was coming. She continued, unphased.

“Oh, come on now, Ralph, don’t go shy on me now. You were always so loud in class, joking around and backing up your leader like the imbecile sycophant you are. Well, I suppose I don’t need to show my food where it’s going… but it is fun torturing you like this.” More giggling ensued. Miss Blaine formed her lips into an ‘o’ shape and started blowing on him gently, the cold air making him twirl around like a leaf in the wind and shiver somewhat, naked as he was. “Guess that’s decided, then. I was always taught not to play with my food, but I think this is a special exception…”

Ralph found himself being dangled ever closer to her lips as they came apart from each other, the narrow ravine slowly growing wider until it was a yawning chasm before him. Her yellow incisors and canines for the first time he had seen parted like gates, revealing the horrors within. As her mouth gaped wider and wider, he was hit by a hot, damp, stinking blanket of air, escaping the chamber it had been confined in and enveloping him in the thick, cloying atmosphere of Miss Blaine’s mouth. Within her mouth, he could see all of her molars marching back into the steamy, dark depths of the back of her maw, yellow boulders that framed the fleshy cavern and the darkness of her throat beyond it. In the middle of it all, her pink, sluggish tongue, glistening with saliva in the light now flooding into the pungent cave, dominated her mouth, slowly moving like a beast all unto itself. The saliva was everywhere; it glistened on her teeth, her cheeks, her tongue; it formed silvery strands that criss-crossed her mouth from her tongue to the smooth, red roof of her upper palate; and a huge lake of it had pooled in the bottom of her mouth, making her tongue look all the more like some disgusting alien swamp creature. To top the horrifying scene off, her saliva production had produced so much that it actually overflowed, a steady stream of spit escaping over her lips and slowly descending to pool on the table below. She’s actually so eager to eat us that she’s drooling, Ralph noted in horror and disgust. Like we’re the sweetest chocolate out there. He shuddered, despite the oppressive, swamp-like heat he was bathed in.

“Lah wa eu hee?” the great abyss before him garbled, saliva flying like rain and the stinking air gusting past him in a gale of rank breath. He certainly didn’t like what he saw. He was absolutely petrified of the horror he saw and smelled and felt before him, all the more so because he knew he was to end up in that hellish pit. As before, though, he didn’t answer, instead opting to continue to gawp at what he was seeing numbly. The great voice rumbled from within once more.

“I ring I wan a lihl athe…”

He didn’t understand the garbled gibberish he had just heard, from the great vocal chords he was so close to that the sound made his ears hurt. What he did immediately understand though was her intentions. Her tongue, previously docile, came to life, slithering up over her teeth and lips like a serpent before reaching out towards him. Ralph closed his eyes as it advanced towards him, shuddering profusely as the slimy tip of the muscle touched his feet and took his lower legs into its warm, slimy embrace. From there, as it had with her lips, the inquisitive muscle dragged its way up his body, dragging across his face and leaving a sheen of foul-smelling goo across his entire body. It immediately got into his nose and mouth, and he spit and gagged at the taste. Too soon the tongue was back for another assault, the rough taste buds dragging against his skin under the coat of saliva that gave the muscle its sliminess that made him cringe so. Mercifully, after two licks the beast retreated into her mouth, which closed up again, a smile on his colossal teacher’s face.

“For a useless pest of a student, you taste pretty good,” she said to him, matter-of-factly. “A little salty, but that’s to be expected from all the sweat. The other tastes, though… they’re just…” she dropped her voice almost to a whisper, “indescribable.” The grin returned. “Ooh, I bet you’d be really chewy, that fat little body of yours. All the flavour… it’s making me salivate even more just thinking about it. I could just eat you up right now… but no. If you’re going into my digestive tract, you’re getting the grand entrance. I’ve just got to think…”

Ralph could only begin to imagine all the horrifying ways Miss Blaine could have sent him to his imprisonment in her awful jaws. He could see, far to vividly, her slurping him up like pasta; he could see her tearing his limbs off one by one with her teeth; he could see her lowering him slowly into the horrifying pit, watching her excitement to finally send him down her gullet. But, in the event, none of those horrifying visions became a reality, as Miss Blaine was suddenly interrupted from her torturous teasing- by her own belly, grumbling and gurgling like a boiling stew.

In that moment, he could see from the lighting up of her eyes, still high above him considering his proximity to her face, that she didn’t need to think about it. Her belly had made her decision for her.

“Of course…” she mumbled, “…I don’t have to make it all slow and fancy. I am pretty hungry…. So why don’t we just… send you down the hatch! “

It all happened in an instant. Suddenly, he felt her fingers pull violently on his leg, dislocating his leg in the process. Like a ragdoll he was pulled upwards, and at the apex of his ascent he felt her fingers let go, sending him flying into the air. The room once again blurred around him as he shot like a rocket into the sky, doing aerial somersaults and climbing ever higher. Eventually, he reached the apex of his climb, and for a split second he was neither climbing nor falling in the air. In the same split second, he looked down, and saw the twinkling eyes, the brown hair thrown back over her head, exposing her bare forehead, the almost petite button nose- and most of all, the yawning, gaping abyss of Miss Blaine’s open maw far, far below him.

In that moment, he screamed for all he was worth.

Then, he was falling, back down to earth like so many raindrops, seeing the red, slimy abyss get closer and closer….

Snap.

Another instant went by, and all went gloomy and dark as her mouth closed again, the sound of her teeth closing resounding through the cave and leaving him careering down her slippery tongue like a slip n’ slide. He thought he would be funnelled straight into her gullet on a straight journey to her belly, but his momentum was quickly stopped by her tongue, which pressed him hard against her slimy hard palate. As it lowered again, Ralph finally looked around him, and the horrors he had just experienced were made only all the worse.

The yellowed, grimy walls of her teeth were only all the more petrifying when viewed from the inside. In the gloom, the saliva that covered everything no longer glistened, but he could still tell it was everywhere- including a copious amount on himself. The air, awful enough simply being subjected to it outside of her mouth, was unbearable within; the swamp-like, steamy atmosphere was made all the more unbreathable by the fact that much of the oxygen had already been leached by her powerful lungs, leaving it thick and cloying. The horrible stench of her breath, too, was only amplified within the hellish environment, and Ralph could now smell the decaying reek of whatever she had eaten for lunch added to the putrid mix of tea and general halitosis. There was no escape now; he knew that, and he was terrified of what was inevitably going to happen next.

It’s over. She’s gonna swallow me whole, and I’m gonna die in her stomach. Eaten by my philosophy teacher, what a way to go. He closed his tear-filled eyes, trembling and tearful, and waited for the sound of her gulp, any mocking final messages before he was consigned to the depths of her body.

Miss Blaine, however, wasn’t done.

Ralph found himself being suddenly pulled around her mouth by her monstrous tongue, its inquisitive nature knowing no bounds of privacy. He was sucked upon and pressed into her palate and cheeks, screaming all the while. Saliva flew around in a torrent of disgusting slime, getting him ever more thoroughly coated in her rank oral secretion. Over it all, the moans of satisfaction reverberated through the cavern, making his ears burn in pain and his whole body vibrate from the rumbling, blasting moan of pleasure. He was battered, he was bruised, he could barely breathe, and the pain in his chest and leg was blindingly awful- only made worse when she sucked on him like a boiled sweet. He didn’t even have the energy to scream after a while; he just wanted the horror and the humiliation of being a snack for his sociopathic, revenge-mad teacher, literally being used as a human gumball, to end, and let him be at piece.

He didn’t realise she had deposited him on her teeth until he felt the diamond-hard, bumpy surface of her grimy molar on top of him. The pressure built almost instantly; on his torso, his legs, his arms, his head; and the pain increased exponentially until, in one instantaneous searing, excruciating stab of pain he felt his tiny, battered body explode into crushed bones and viscera, and his only, last thoughts were of pain, terrible, blinding pain. The next instant, everything had gone black.

In a horrible, sickening crunch, one of the five members of the gang was no more.

CRUNCH.

CRUNCH.

CRUNCH.

Far below, on the desk, the four remaining companions could only watch in horror and despair as Miss Blaine’s jaw moved up and down, slowly and methodically, the horrific sounds of their friend’s body being masticated into utter pulp assaulting their ears from within the murderous teacher’s equally murderous maw.

Quentin threw up, spewing the contents of his guts onto the smooth wooden surface of the desk. Harry had collapsed, and was sat in a hunched position, shivering. Even Jack had gone a deathly pale. None of them could quite believe what they were witnessing. The reality of it was so dark, so gruesome, yet so absurd, that it wouldn’t seem out of place in a particularly bad nightmare, or a gory horror flick. Yet they weren’t dreaming. What they were witness to, what they knew they were to be subject to themselves one by one, was gruesome, vengeful, and utterly sadistic murder.

Caleb, for his part, was stunned. Despite the very nature of the logically improbable situation they were in, not to mention the nature of the giantess presently savouring the remnants of Ralph, a small part of his mind had still genuinely believed that she was only bluffing, that they would perhaps be subjected to some form of humiliating yet mostly harmless torture before being let off the hook. Through the lingering vestiges of his bravado and confidence, Caleb had underestimated Miss Blaine, and made the assumption that she didn’t have the guts to actually send them down into her guts. Her threatening intentions had not phased him; her toying with of poor Ralph like a lioness with a gazelle had failed to break his belief; even when she finally introduced his doomed friend to the unholy confines of her cavernous gullet he had been unwavering in his belief that once she had given all of them a thoroughly unpleasant time through using them like boiled sweets she would eventually spit them out, presuming she had adequately punished them. However, no amount of hope or belief in his mind could survive the sickening, jarring crunch that had sliced through the air like her teeth had Ralph’s miniscule, obliterated body. There was no question about it once her jaw had closed, and the screaming immediately stopped as it was replaced by the shattering sound of bones being crushed and flesh being chewed. Miss Blaine was entirely serious, and there was little hope of any chance of survival. Where that burning hope in his conviction had been, Caleb could now only find a sad relief that at least Ralph’s death had been quick and relatively painless, if terrifying and humiliating. Despite never believing in any sort of God, he silently remarked to himself that Ralph had to have now gone to a better place.

The same, unfortunately, could not be said for what remained of his body. As Miss Blaine’s jaw continued to move up and down, as it would normally when chewing anything, the crunching slowly gave way to a horrible squelching noise as what was left of Ralph’s body was further masticated into mush. To any other observer at normal size, the sound and sight of this teacher chewing would seem almost innocent, as if she was just working through a cereal bar or a handful of crisps. However, the sound of flesh being slowly assimilated into mush by her awful saliva and methodical attacking was far louder to the miniscule people on the desk, to whom the sound of this gigantic woman obliterating their friend was amplified several thousand times thanks to the same size that made them such bite-sized appetisers in the first place. They could hear the bones being crushed to dust, organs popping, and the disgusting slopping sounds of Miss Blaine’s saliva mixed with what they could only assume was a repulsive, gooey cocktail of saliva, blood and viscera flowing around her awful mouth. It was no wonder, then, that the looks they shared as they watched the inhumane scene unfold were of horror, and of mental scarring not unlike that which is commonly affiliated with PTSD.

Worst, perhaps, was watching the giantess herself react to her act of oral homicide. While swilling the then very much alive and screaming Ralph around her maw, she had assumed the look of inquisitive pleasure that generally comes with trying new, interesting foods, combining it with the almost erotic moaning that she knew full well was partially to scare both the helpless victim at her mouth’s mercy and the terrified onlookers knowing they were next on her menu. As she crunched down on his body, she closed her eyes and tensed slightly at the pleasure, knowing sadistically that she had just ended the poor boy’s life with a single bite of her tremendous jaws, feeling the gore and viscera spread through her mouth like she had just bitten down upon a particularly juicy cherry. Her pleasure, however, was short-lived. As the new metallic taste of blood combined with the taste of raw human flesh and, for that matter, the various contents of his own insides, Miss Blaine found the taste quite unsavoury, and her face contorted in disgust before morphing into discontent while she continued to chew the obliterated remains. Tiny though he was, her taste buds were sensitive, and she could taste far more than she thought she would be able to- and thus, far more than she wanted.

“He’s not as tasty as I thought he would be, y’know,” she mumbled to the revulsed students, mouth still ‘full’ with his remnants, knowing that her commentary while still chewing their deceased friend was all the more torturing them. “He was nice at first. A bit salty, but I think that added to the flavour of him. But crack that nut open, and man, it’s certainly juicy, but it’s vile. All blood and raw meat and I don’t even want to know what else.” Finally tilting her monolithic head back, she gulped the contents of her mouth down, the sound almost resembling a drain burbling upon draining the last of the water from a sink, albeit a far slimier-sounding drain. The last they would see of their friend, or at least the unrecognisable remains of him, was a barely visible bulge in her throat, almost completely hidden as her imperceptible Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, signalling the consignment of his remains to their final resting place in her stomach. Shuddering the last of her revulsion out of her, she turned her attention back to the rest of her prey, and Caleb could see the excitement and hunger flash back into her hazel eyes upon surveying their shaken state from the horror they had just been privy to. “Oh well, at least I’ve now sampled the cuisine. Curiosity killed the student, huh?” Her sadistic grin was speckled with the blood of their dead friend, making her look even more psychopathic than previously. Despite his waning resolve, Caleb could not help but feel fear knowing that another of his friends was about to be on the menu, and that once again he would be forced to watch them helplessly succumb to the whims, and the jaws, of the vengeful titan above him. He couldn’t even imagine how his friends must have felt looking at the same visage, knowing there was a one in three chance of being the next top choice on Miss Blaine’s menu.

After a few seconds, her cheeks momentarily expanded, and she opened her colossal maw to let out a small belch, fortunately far enough away from the four surviving gang members to spare them from any accompanying stench. Caleb knew that the indication was that her quarry had finally reached her stomach, which had met it with seeming eagerness. She smiled down at them in malicious glee.

“Well, one nasty little student is now happily stewing away in my new detention room. That leaves four delectable little pests to go. Who wants to be next on the rollcall…?”

No-one volunteered. Out of either shock or defiance, they all just stood, challenging the titaness to enact the next move herself.

“No volunteers? That’s a pity- though I suppose you lot were never the kind to be putting your hands up to volunteer. Maybe if you were, we wouldn’t be in this situation, hm?” She looked down at them in mock sternness. She certainly believed what she was saying, but was clearly having far too much fun to take it seriously. “Alright then, guess I’ll just pick you myself.”

Her colossal hand, the same that had ended poor Ralph’s doomed hopes of escape and carried his friends to their execution grounds reappeared, pointer finger extended above them like the hand of God itself, giving judgement to the huddled masses. The simile was ironic, thought Caleb dryly, considering the almost deific power Miss Blaine was enjoying exerting over their tiny forms. Her finger almost seemed to bounce through the air, pointing at either Jack, Quentin or Harry in time to the little ditty she began to recite.

“Let’s see, now… eeny, meeny, miney, mo…eat a student, down he goes…in his struggles, he will know…I will never let…him…go!”

Her finger had landed on Harry. The boy sentenced to die immediately tensed in fear, eyes widening and skin turning white, the hungry spotlights fixated on his tiny, shivering form. Having chosen her next victim, the peckish titan leaned in to size up the petrified student, taking in exactly what she was about to sample next.

“Ah, the athlete!” she noted, already considering her possibilities for toying with him. “That’s quite a change of cuisine from your other little friend. He was fat and juicy, and you’re all skin and bones!” She paused to laugh, her giggling playful as a schoolgirl’s. Meanwhile, Harry just shook all the more, watching in terror his would-be killer size him up like a hunk of meat. “It’s probably a good thing you’re so skinny,” she continued, patting her stomach. “In the long run, that’s just less calories for me to burn off. I’m sure you’d approve of that, no?” She stuck her tongue slightly out at him, as if she thought he would find the joke based on his death as funny as she did. Still unmoving, he barely seemed to notice as two massive fingers grasped his sides, holding his torso in a vice-grip as he was lifted into the air and towards her face. He seemed literally frozen in terror, unable to move or elicit any form of sound. Faced with his own immediate death, especially after the gory horror he had witnessed of one of his best friends’ demise, the normally active mind of the school athlete was in disarray. He merely continued to stare into the brilliant iris of Miss Blaine’s left eye, almost as if he could see his own reflection in the rapidly shrinking black dot.

“Harry the athlete,” she declared, finally able to see the terror on his face up close as she held her prey before her. “Fast at running, but not fast at much else. Admittedly, you’re more able than your dim-witted friend Ralph was, but not by much.” Her sneering remarks continued to show no effect on his stock-still face, and part of her began to wonder if she had literally scared him to death. “Quiet now, huh?” She poked him, not too gently, with her other finger, hitting him squarely in the chest. “What happened to the boy who was so willing to make jokes about my size in lessons? Not going to make any now, when I am, literally, so much bigger than you?” Her eyes had narrowed at this stage, and any vestige of a grin had vanished from her face. Watching from below, Caleb could see that she wasn’t kidding around. Miss Blaine, he knew, had taken a lot of shit from his friend over the years about her size, as he would so often insert it into their steady stream of insults and arguments during lessons, proud of his own body as Caleb knew Harry was. Hilarious as he had found it then, it had never occurred to him in his triumphant arrogance that what they were doing had at any stage hurt her on a personal level. Reflecting on it now the tables had been turned so drastically in her favour, and Caleb could see why some of what they had thrown at her would naturally be hard to swallow and move on from. Indeed, the tiniest part of him could almost understand why Miss Blaine, whatever way she had found her newfound unfathomable shrinking powers, had used them on him and his cronies to get such an ultimate and permanent revenge. But he quickly pushed such thoughts aside. Teasing was teasing, but murder was murder. 

His attention was diverted back to the execution unfolding above him, as the colossal, hungry teacher began to speak again. “Still giving me the silent treatment, huh? So be it. Perhaps some time within my body will make you finally think twice about all the horrible things you said about it.” She lifted him up above her head, and like a passing frost the seriousness in her face melted back into the voracious grin that was now seared into all their minds. Tilting her head upwards, obscuring much of her face to the tiny observers on the desk, she addressed the petrified student one last time.

“Goodbye, Harold. Thank you for teaching me to watch what I eat.” She laughed the laugh of someone tipsy on the liquor of vengeance, before her jaw moved downwards, indicating above that the great chasm of Miss Blaine’s steaming, heart-stopping gullet had open once more like the gates of Hell. Harry was merely a speck to his tiny friends watching him die as he was lowered down towards her ravenously awaiting jaws.

It was then, being lowered into that oppressive, stinking pit, that Harry finally began to break out of his almost comatose state of terror and come to his senses. Seeing the grisly visage of her wide-open mouth below him, saliva glistening and dripping from the walls and red, monstrous tongue rolled out onto her chin to greet him, he realised with immediate shock that he was, finally, about to meet his maker. The omnipotent ‘ahhhhhh’ suddenly resonated around him, coming from deep within the dark abyss he was looking into, and not a moment later he realised his nose was being assaulted by the stinking, sweltering blanket of air rising up like a cloud from the steaming hole below him. As he came closer and closer to her plush lips, he finally was able to take back control from his petrification, and almost immediately he panicked like he never had before, determined to stop or at the very least forestall his imminent demise down in Miss Blaine’s cavernous gut.

“WAIT! WAAIT, PLEASE! I’M SORRY, I’M SO SORRY MISS! I know it was terrible and horrible of me to make fun of your body, and I will never do it again! I’ll do anything, ANYTHING to have you forgive me, just please, PLEASE DON’T EAT ME!!!”

For an instant, the lowering continued, and Harry, panting from the effort of his exhortation and from his heart racing at speeds unknown, thought that his pleas had fallen on deaf ears.

However, the slow descent stopped, leaving him dangling just above her lips. The damp heat and cloying stink flowing from her mouth was almost unbearable at such close proximity, making Harry all the gladder when the plush lips closed once again beneath him.

“Did I hear an apology in that incoherent babble?” Her voice, again at close proximity, was like standing next to a speaker at a concert, and he clamped his hands over his ears immediately to prevent any serious damage to his hearing.

“YES! Yes!” he shouted back, desperately. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything for you to forgive me, just please take me away from your mouth and let me talk to you.”

The plump lips below him formed into a triumphant, malevolent smile. “Anything, eh…?” She brought him back away from her lips, tilting her head forward again to eye up her suddenly co-operative plaything. “Excellent. I knew you’d soon come around to my way of thinking. Now… let’s get you on the road to forgiveness, shall we?”

Her giggling once again echoed through the humungous room, drowning out the near fanatical string of worship-laden thank yous from the bite-sized student in her hand. Caleb could see the way the wind was blowing, and the worst part was he knew full well that Harry was being tricked. Whether Miss Blaine’s feelings about their past teasing was genuine or not was irrelevant. What mattered was that she had, again intentionally or no, managed to break one of his friends to her will.

He could only watch, and wait for the awful theatre playing out in his gigantic philosophy teacher’s hands- and, by extension, another of his friend’s lives- to reach its inevitably gory conclusion.

“Now then, seeing as how you’re so suddenly so, ahem, willing to atone for your behaviour, I think we can both make some progress, you and I. Don’t you think?”

Harry, now on his knees upon the soft plain of Miss Blaine’s hands, could only continue to look up at the scheming behemoth before him, trying to find the tiniest shred of hope that this was truly the road to retribution. Hopeless as he knew the situation inevitably was, he found it surprisingly easy to cling onto the idea that his bargaining had delivered him from the jaws of fate, and that if he could just survive whatever Miss Blaine was scheming to do to him, he may be able to get out of his desperate situation relatively unharmed, if certainly scarred. Even in what was to them all the darkest of times, he chose to resolve to cling to desperate hope rather than succumb to fear, depression and despair, as he thought his other friends (excluding Caleb, who was acting in his opinion at that moment markedly insane) were inevitably resorting to.

Not that clinging to hope did Ralph much good, he bleakly reminded himself. That said, his hope was to escape his fate, rather than co-operate with the instigator of it to perhaps avoid it. This is the right thing to do. This is the right thing to do.

“Y-yes, miss. Anything, anything for you.”

She smirked at his sudden terror-fuelled co-operation, ostensibly gleeful at her ability to break him to her will so utterly. “Yes, progress. Progress with which we can help each other, though in two separate areas.” In a swift motion, she plucked Harry’s tiny body off of her hand, startling him profusely as she pinched him by his sides and lowered him to chest level, in front of her mountainous bosom. “Look at my body. Would you describe it as ‘healthy’?”

Harry knew the game she was playing, and he knew she had trapped him in a horrible catch-22. However, he considered it far better to play it safe.

“Yes… yes, miss. Beautiful.”

Her tone in response was quizzical. “Oh? That’s odd. People always seemed to tell me rather the opposite. Often quite rudely.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Am I to assume your bias is because you’re distracted by the sight directly in front of you, or just because I literally have you in my hands right now?”

Much as he tried to elicit a response back, Harry only managed a few stutters and apologetic-sounding noises. In truth, it was a mix of both, though almost certainly more the latter. The goddess’s voice grew stern, and the vice-grip on him tightened, causing him to yelp in pain. “Don’t lie to me, Harry. Tell me what you really think. You had no problem with it before.”

Wincing in pain, he struggled to note his uncomfortableness, but Miss Blaine’s grip did not relent. He decided to continue to play along, but pick his words carefully, so as to navigate the minefield he knew he had to enter as best he could. “I suppose…you are a tad…..”

“Yes? Yes?” She shook him slightly, causing him ever more consternation as the impatient jiggling rattled his tiny body.

“….A tad… ow, ow… plump. Not fat, by any means…but plump. But that’s not a bad thing! Not at all! Ahhh…”

“I see. Still too much of a coward to tell me the whole truth of your opinion, but at least you’re not entirely spineless.” Her grip eased, and she set him back down on her palm, letting him collapse onto its soft, warm surface. “Yes, as you put it so tamely, I might be considered on the plump side. Personally, I’ve never thought that a bad thing, but I suppose some people just aren’t so forgiving. Not all of us can be, or for that matter want to be, star athletes.” Glaring at his collapsed form, she jogged her hand slightly, and he flew slightly into the air before landing with a light thud on the thankfully forgiving skin. Understanding the message, he immediately collected himself and stared back up at her titanic face.

“So… wh-where do I fit into all of this?”

She smiled at him, in a way that could almost have been construed as benignly. “Well, I figured that since we both have two problems regarding my figure, we could help each other figure them out.”

Through his nervousness, confusion as to what her plan was grew further. “And how exactly… do we do that?”

Miss Blaine laughed softly, revelling in the information she was about to reveal. “A good question. Well… I need to lose some weight… and you need to stop being so narrow-minded about fitness, or more acutely lack of it. As such, I figured the best way to do both… was to take you on at what you do best. “She paused, to let her subtle reveal sink in and watch his tiny eyes widen as confusion gave way to disbelief and then terror. She grinned again, blood still flecking the grisly visage. “Y-you want…t-t-to have… a race?”

“That’s the deal, my tiny fitness trainer. I want you to prove to me that all your training you do means something in the long run. And I may get more fit in the process, as well. It’s win-win!”

Both Harry and everyone else on the table knew that Miss Blaine had just dropped a death sentence on him. At his size, there was no way he could possibly outpace his gargantuan philosophy teacher-she knew that as well as he did, and they did. There was no point arguing with her, pleading with her- such would just delay the inevitable, or at worst accelerate its arrival. Yet, plead he did.

“But… but… that’s IMPOSSIBLE! I-I can’t ever possibly win that sort of race! I’m… I’m… I…”

Miss Blaine cut him off, briskly, her trap within a trap now fully sealed around him. “Why the defeatist attitude? Surely, with all your athletic prowess, you could beat little, tubby old me. After all, aren’t you far more healthy and athletic than I can ever, will ever be?” She plucked him up again, bringing him up to eye level- he could practically feel her beady eyes drinking in the snivelling, grovelling mess she had made of him. “Have some faith in yourself. Where’s the Harry we all knew before? This miserable wreck is a shell of the arrogant athlete we all know you to be.” She shook his poor body again, clearly enjoying the level of mental and physical torture she was putting him under. “Get a grip. This is happening whether you’re ready or not.”

Slowly, her whole titanic body began to rotate sideways, as she maneuvered the giant swivel chair she was on to shift her continental form from facing the desk to facing the expanse of carpet. Even after a little while at their new size, it was still mind-boggling for the three miniature students on the desk to watch the behemoth moving, in a slow, deliberate, and one might even say graceful way from their tiny perspectives. It was a sight to behold, and none of them thought they would ever truly get used to seeing it.

Of course, mused Caleb, continuing to watch the movement of the monolithic teacher, we won’t need to, considering the way we’re going.

For Harry, the experience was much different. Moving at such high speeds through the air brought back the familiar feeling of nausea he knew from his first encounter with the colossal tormentress. He could only clench his eyes shut as they moved further, both to try and keep the rushing air out of his eyes and to provide some respite from staring at Miss Blaine’s billboard of a face, which seemed to dominate his vision whenever he opened them. Eventually, he felt himself losing altitude, until finally he felt the warm, grooved fingertips holding him release their grip and he fell a short distance to the ground below. The carpet, while old and musty-smelling, was still somewhat pliable, and he was able to pick himself up and find he hadn’t sustained any bruises from the unceremonious drop.

The world he was now in was, as so many locales seemed to be at his miniscule size, an alien one. Even in his miserable state, he had to wonder somewhat at the landscape he had been dropped into. Before him the carpet stretched out seemingly endlessly, a massive blue ocean of short fibres that in almost all directions spread to the walls and the door on the horizon. He was in a canyon between the monolithic desk and the wall, in the shadow of the colossal furniture looking out onto the plain of blue. Inevitably, his gaze was drawn back to the huge, green door, which was the exit out of the room and potentially this horrible, horrible situation entirely. Looking closely, he could see the space between the door and the carpet was, while narrow, plausibly wide enough for him to crawl, even potentially run under. However hopeless and impossible his escape may have seemed, a small, desperate part of him still noted that to himself before a colossal sound behind him indicated his competitor was clearing her cavernous throat, and thus wanting to garner his attention.

What was behind him was arguably the most spectacular, and yet terrifying, sight of them all. From his position on the floor, Miss Blaine now looked more like a goddess than ever, sat on a throne that could rival a mountain for its size. Directly in front of him, even her open-top shoes dwarfed him; indeed, Harry figured that even her littlest toe would give him a run for his money at this size. As they somewhat impatiently tapped on the ground, possibly for effect as much as it was impatience, he could see the sheer area her massive soles could potentially cover, the sheer size and power of her monolithic, deity-esque form evident in them. Her legs extended upwards high into the sky, thicker than any tree and higher than any skyscraper, before capping off at her dome-like knees and disappearing. Her smiling face could have been lost in cloud, so far off from him did it seem, even when she was bending over slightly to look at him and at the same time cast him in her great shadow. This was his competition, he thought to himself, this continent of a woman whose very toes could obliterate him utterly without so much as a second thought. If ever his hopes seemed most impossible, it was then, as he took in the sheer awesome size of the philosophy teacher in her swivel throne from his minute perspective, a tiny mite in an ocean of carpet. Even her voice, so all-encompassing and omnipresent before her face and even on the desk, seemed somewhat distant as she laid out the rules for this, what would probably be his final race and indeed his final few minutes.

“Your goal is simple. If you can get to the door, you win. Your point is made. I will, of course, be trying to stop you. I’m sure you can figure out what happens if I do. The same goes for if I reach the door first, though I will take my time, and I will give you a sizeable head start, because I’m such a good sportswoman, even though you’re clearly much more athletic than me.” She smirked, revelling in the wave of irony she had been riding since she had begun to toy with him. “Simple enough, right?” She paused melodramatically, knowing she wouldn’t hear any response he made, and then continued nonetheless. “Good. Then I’ll give you a countdown. “5……4…..”

Despite it all, Harry leaned down, and got into his starting position, trembling. He knew he was fucked, whether he won this sham of a race or he didn’t. One way or another, this scheming, revenge-lusting woman was going to murder him, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop it. He knew his chances of escape were nigh on impossible- poor, dead Ralph had proved that running from a giantess was a pointless and foolish exercise. All he could do was feel miserable and despairing as the deific voice continued to count down the seconds to his doom, and think about his last desperate and pointless run for his life, as his friends watched in despair and horror.

The death knell came far too quickly.

“1…..GO!”

--

High up on their vantage point on the desk, Caleb, Quentin and Jack leaned over the formidable precipice to watch the main act of the sadistic drama unfold. Harry was little more than a speck to them, deep in the vast canyon, sprinting through the prarie of carpet like a panicked ant. His progress, though they were certain he was running as fast as his legs and the terrain would allow him, looked almost leisurely compared to the huge size of the world around him, including his intently watching behemoth of a competitor. As he ran, a larger scene began to occur behind him, drawing their attention; almost silently, Miss Blaine was slipping off her shoes, revealing her nylon-clad feet to the three stunned onlookers. Poor Harry had barely just gotten out of the space between the desk and the wall before the giantess, eyes practically glistening with lustful excitement, announced her entry into the race.

“Fe, fi, fo, fum!

I smell the sweat of a tiny one!

Be he fat, or be he thin….

…my belly he’ll digest within!”

The creaking of the chair in protest pierced the air as the monolithic body rose out of its throne, soaring higher and higher until eventually Miss Blaine, stood at her full height, towered over even the minute students craning their necks to look up at her in awe. Her mouth was split asunder in an ecstatic and thoroughly disturbing beam.

“Here I come…”

--

The pace Harry was keeping, even in his terror-fuelled adrenaline, was fast becoming too exhausting to be tenable for much longer. The carpet, while looking similar to an endless grassland, was anything but like running through grass. The thickness of the carpet fibres was just light enough for his feet to sink between them, but dense enough to make it effort to pull out again. The effect made his sprint like running through snow or sand, and already he could feel his legs complaining as he heard Miss Blaine, with all pomp and circumstance, announce she was about to join the doomed ‘race’. He refused to look behind him when the chair’s protests announced her standing up, knowing the sheer, daunting sight of her at full height from the floor would render him paralysed in terror and incomprehension. Instead, he kept running, keeping his streaming eyes locked on the massive, forest-green door that would be his potential salvation. He was pushing himself to his limits as an athlete, throwing everything his healthy engine of a body could at preserving the last shred of hope for survival.

THUD!

The first step the titaness took was, surprisingly, not nearly as terrifying as he’d feared it would have been. He’d pictured the result as something not unlike the cliché stomping they’d used for the T-Rex in Jurassic Park- a stomp so loud it echoed like an explosion, and shook seemingky the entire world. The reality was better; the pliable carpet fibres, lack of hard surface like a shoe sole on the monstrous foot, and the surprisingly delicate stepping by Miss Blaine created a dull sounding, yet still loud and somewhat echoing thud as perspective thousands upon thousands of tons of skin, flesh and nylon made contact with and pressed its massive weight onto the ground. Dull as it was, the step was close, enough to create an earthquake that made Harry stumble in his now exhausting sprint. He was panting hard, but he pushed himself forward again against the screaming protests of his heart and lungs- he didn’t need to look to know that the voracious behemoth was already hot on his tail.

--

It was obvious she was toying with him, that much was blatant to the miserable watchers on the desk. If she’d wanted to, Miss Blaine could have snuffed out Harry’s existence with her foot in one mere stride. The step she took was, by her perspective, small; not even half a step. Yet, she had already made at least three-quarters of the progress Harry had, and as she raised her foot again they could see that she was in prime position to begin torturing her exhausted, tiny prey. Much as the fact that Miss Blaine was so many thousands if not millions of times bigger than them made the fact that Harry’s chances of survival were zero was not lost on them, they only grew more disheartened and miserable nonetheless at the scene of their friend’s fatal plight.

--

THUD!

As if out of nowhere, Harry’s view of the door was suddenly cut off by a wall of skin, covered in a mesh of fabric that even at his size was made up of fibres too small to see. He’d thought the game was finally up when he’d seen the gargantuan shadow of her foot pass over him, getting larger by the moment as it descended, but clearly Miss Blaine was intent on prolonging his suffering. Suddenly having to slow to avoid crashing into the warm, slightly sweaty wall of flesh, he immediately sprinted off in the direction of her mighty toes so as not to lose too much speed. He knew there was no hope of climbing it, and stopping was essentially suicide- that much his panicked, exhausted mind could process. Eventually, the nylon barrier began to lessen in its imposing height, ending at the huge prominitory of her biggest toe, before he was past it, running past her threatening digits towards the sight of the door again. However, he knew as soon as the shadow sailed past him effortlessly again that there was no way the massive feet were going to allow him to reach the door.

THUD!!

This time, Miss Blaine’s foot came down more aggressively, creating a tremor so powerful and so close to Harry that he was thrown upwards and forwards into the air, crashing headfirst into the nylon. He slid down the warm, damp material, able now to smell the musky, stale scent of Miss Blaine’s sweat all around him, the dampness transferring onto his own naked body and making him instinctively shiver as he crumpled onto the ground before the titanic arch.

Exhausted, streaming with tears and by this stage in quite some pain both from his running and short flight, Harry knew it was over. Still, however, he made one last desperate push, picking himself up and moving into a quickly faltering sprint towards her toes, hoping to perform the same manoeuvre as before. Miss Blaine was able to counter him quickly, swivelling her right foot around on the ball of its heel to meet her other foot in a right angle to wall Harry in. Through blurred eyes, the doomed athlete watched the translucent fabric-coated foot flew through the sky to meet the toes of its partner, cutting off his escape. To truly finish him off, the cruel giantess brought the sole of her foot down hard on the ground, sending his pathetically flailing form down to the ground for the last time.

“Awww, is someone giving up already?” Miss Blaine pouted, though Harry was unable to see her face, merely the two mammoth pillars of her legs, stretching up into the darkness inside her blouse high up in the sky. Her laughing tormented his addled, exhausted mind. “Well, guess if you want to forfeit, it means I win. Who figured I could beat the legendary school athlete?”

As she gloated, he noticed her right foot, the one that had just ended any hope of his survival, was becoming restless, the sole raising up off the ground to hang ominously over the carpet. Something told him he knew what was coming next, and suddenly he wasn’t sure which end for him would truly be worse.

“Now, I heard that when you get beaten by a girl, it’s customary to give them a foot massage,” Miss Blaine trilled, eager both in her victory and her chance to finally come to the climax of her game and end the little bug once and for all. “Think you could do that for me, little guy? My feet do ache after all that exercise…I’m not that athletic, after all.”

Her giggling was accompanied by the arrival of her right foot, the sole now ominously hanging over his prone body. Looking up at it, Harry considered one final act of desperation, to roll away and to safety, but then thought better of it. It was over the moment he was shrunk, and all his desperation to survive had merely been a game for his malevolent teacher’s enjoyment. There was no point.

Then, the foot was on him, the warm, damp, rubbery yet somewhat soft flesh of her sole pressing down on him and trapping him underneath a mountain of warm flesh and slick nylon. Immediately, the air around him began to heat up from the close space and the heat emanating from the colossus herself, making the stale, fetid smell all the more oppressive. Though he knew she was only exerting the lightest pressure on him, he felt the tons of flesh move him violently, rolling him up and the little arch in between her sole and her largest and second largest toe. Even down on the floor, far away from her mouth and surrounded by tons upon tons of skin and flesh, he heard her expressions of pleasure.

“Oh yeah, right there… right between my toes… perfect, just perfect…”

The nylon rubbed against him, damp as it was from the rank excrement that had accumulated on it, until her felt utterly covered in a slimy sheen of Miss Blaine’s foot sweat. Eventually, he was rolled right under her actual sole, and he found himself with his face buried in a smothering cushion of warm, saturated flesh and fabric.

“Man, you’re as bad a masseuse as you are an athlete. Although, perhaps the blame’s on me. Maybe I’m not applying enough pressure…”

The pressure began to mount, and the tiny athlete felt his body begin to be compressed under countless tons of titaness body. His lungs had begun to burn from lack of oxygen, and he knew his body wouldn’t last under sustained addition of pressure- it was just a question of whether he suffocated, or was crushed first. He almost felt acceptance as it mounted, strangely; after all his begging, pleading and misery, he almost felt content with how he was about to die, even after his humiliation.

At least it’ll be quick. One blinding moment of pain, and then I’ll be with Ralph. That’s got to be better than slowly digesting alive in her stomach, hasn’t it?

He didn’t answer himself. In the next moment, his mind was filled with only screams- and had he not been compressed under a smothering mountain of Miss Blaine’s foot, the same screams would have pierced the room.

CRACK! SNAP! CRACK!

In an instant, several of his ribs broke, his arms shattered, his legs snapped like twigs and his spine was damaged beyond any repair.

All of that was nothing, however, when the broken student felt the pressure lift off of his body, and the harsh light of the room filled his eyes again. When the blinding pain that seared across his entire body failed to cease, he began to scream and bawl like a dying animal.

“Ohh, that didn’t sound healthy,” came the voice from above, barely registered by the crippled heap on the floor. “Guess I was just a bit too much weight for him.”

He didn’t see her titanic form bending over to pick him up, but he did register the gargantuan pads of her fingers pinching up his leg and slowly taking him back up into the air again. When he did finally open his eyes again, he found himself before her gargantuan face again, his vision hazy and coming in and out of focus as she dangled him upside down before her, inspecting him like a broken toy. In a last act of cruelty to him, she had even denied him a quick death, in the hopes of festering upon him one final humiliation. Her expression feigned seriousness, but her eyes twinkled with a satisfied, psychopathic sparkle that would haunt Harry to his rapidly approaching grave.

“Yep, as I thought. Broken beyond repair,” Miss Blaine declared, dismissively. “Useless. Can’t be an athlete, can’t be a masseuse, and isn’t even tough enough to withstand a little pressure.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’d think for someone who was so confident about their body, that it wouldn’t be so…useless.”  Shaking her head, she began to raise him up above it, as she had what seemed like an aeon ago, when her terrible game of cat-and-mouse with him had begun. Looking down, he saw her smiling again; she had been waiting for this since she had plucked him up, he knew, and now as he dangled there crippled, sobbing, and dying, he knew the wait and torture had made the prospect of sending him down her gullet to oblivion all the sweeter for her.

“The only thing you’re good for now… is to be a little meal for me. Though I doubt I’ll get more than a calorie out of you, if that. You can’t even be food without being incompetent at it.” She sighed, mocking discontent, her nasty breath washing past him as his vision finally began to go spotty. Still… can’t say I’m not eating healthily. I’d think you’d approve.” Grinning, she began to lower him slowly towards her face, finally about to consume her prey and end the grisly theater once and for all.

“Goodbye, Harry. I’m sure your pitiful nutrition will finally make you marginally useful.”

As his vision finally faded to black, the last sight he saw was her wide-open maw, engulfing him in its slimy, salivating confines like a final resting place.

Somehow, for the three students fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough, depending on how you looked at it) to still be standing on the desk watching the demise and consumption of their comrade, an eternity seemed to pass as they watched Miss Blaine feed Harry to herself like he was a particularly enticing oyster. It felt like seasons or even years could have gone by as his limp, miniscule form was lowered into the abyss of Miss Blaine’s enormous maw far above them, her gargantuan jaw closing and her chubby fingers sliding out with almost a comical pop from between her lips, slick with saliva. This time round, she mercifully did not bother to chew her prey- instead, she seemed content to let physics do the work and for its cold, unknowing and uncaring forces to send him involuntarily sliding down her tongue into the slick, eager confines of her oesophagus. Even from as far away as they were, they could see her eyes close, her body shudder in pleasure and hear her small moan of pleasure as her throat did its job funnelling Harry down into her body.

GULP.

The titaness brought her head back from its tilted position, the relaxing of skin concealing the modest bulge travelling down her neck and revealing her murderous, wicked grin once more, eyes practically shimmering with pleasure and excitement.

“Ahh, that was much better than the fat one!” she said decidedly and seemingly mostly to herself, idly feeling where the bulge had been moments ago. “Still a little blood, but nowhere near as odious tasting. And he went down like butter, without all those bones causing issues!” Her gaze shifted down again to the remainder of her quarry, where Quentin was once again dry-heaving, attempting to bring up stomach contents he had lost a good while ago, and even Caleb’s cold defiance seemed shaky. As he looked up into her eyes again, he could feel the doubts dancing ever more jovially in the back of his mind; could he really keep this façade up much longer?

“Perhaps I should have all of you like that, hm? Break you and slurp you up like oysters.” The tongue darted between her teeth again, as if eyeing them up at that suggestion. “But no, there’s so many other games we can play…”

Miss Blaine’s titanic body lowered back into the office chair, coming back down from her comparatively mountainous full stature to a sitting position again and, in a fairly fluid motion, crossing her arms and bringing them down on the table. The resultant shockwave was enough to topple Quentin, already weak at the knees from sustained retching, leaving him looking pitiful and mildly dishevelled lying on the floor. Rushing to help his friend up, Caleb viewed the titaness with as much ire and defiance as he could muster, watching her monolith of a head come to rest on her folded arms, looming over them somehow more intimidatingly now than she had standing. His will was trembling, his doubts growing ever stronger on the generous feed of imagery and scare tactics it was being constantly fed, but he could still feel strength in him, and where there was strength, there was defiance.

“For someone who calls us immature, you’re pretty damn close to it yourself, aren’t you?,” the diminished king shouted at his titanic tormentress, inviting her gaze to him and Quentin. “Most people sensitive about their weight actually, y’know, do something about it. But you’re so petty and insecure in yourself, you do the extreme version of lashing back out and try to murder us! Sure, us lads aren’t the most mature sometimes, especially not in your monotonous class, but this is just ridiculous!”

That got to her, he could see it. Much as she tried to hide it, at her size the clenching of the jaw and the fire reigniting in those hazel lakes were hard to miss. It made him feel more confident; yes, she was still going to kill him, and yes, he was still somewhat stunned that she was actually capable of the murder and horrors she had committed, but he could still dent her enjoyment of the sadistic fantasy she was trying to live out as much as he could.

“You do realise that you’re literally eating your problems, right?” Jack had spoken up! His own confidence must have empowered his closest friend and partner in crime too. He shot a look over at him, and gave him an encouraging nod. “Most people only use that as a by-word for comfort eating so you can ignore your problems, but you’ve actually taken it one step further!” Though he still looked just a shade scared, Caleb’s continued support convinced him to take his mockery one step further, and he started clapping, slowly and sarcastically. “My congratulations, Miss! You’ve managed to take a figure of speech about your own insecurities and made it literal. Actually literal!”

Caleb didn’t even bother to suppress a snort and laughter. Even Quentin, now back on his feet, had a weak smile on his face. The same could definitely not be said of their teacher, however, who looked by this stage positively steaming, like she was ready and all too happy to forgo the rest of her game, to just take her fist and just hammer them into viscera.  She opened her mouth to speak… and then closed it again, and her expression changed almost like wiping a slate, as if she had been distracted by something. For a twinkling moment, Caleb was almost zealously happy in his defiance. We’ve even done it at this size! She has no response to us! Even tiny and depleted, we’ve still got it!

The window closed almost as quickly as it opened, when he saw Miss Blaine’s cheeks puff out.

BLUURCH!

The next instant, the trio were all staring into the colossal, slimy maw before and above them, raining horror and saliva onto them. The sound of the belch, ostensibly so much larger than the first one, seemed to deafen them, and the wind turned from non-existant to gale force and yet somehow still swampy in its heat and humidity, sending their hair into chaos and knocking poor Quentin back on his sore arse. All eyes were affixed on the roaring beast before them, stained teeth opened like the gates holding the horrific attack back- right in the back of her odious mouth, her uvula danced as if mocking their pitiful resistance. Though it only seemed to last for a few seconds, it seemed minutes upon minutes to be stuck in the hideous combination of sound, wind, saliva and rank, oppressive stench- and then it was over, leaving the three little resistance fighters spattered in a rain of spit, suffering in the cloying, lingering stench of her breath, and utterly humiliated. The belch had blown away any sense of confidence or bravado that had been so vigorously been built up- made all the worse when Caleb opened his eyes again and saw before him, drenched in bodily fluids, a running shoe that could only have been Harry’s. Before them, Miss Blaine sat with smug and triumphant written all over her billboard of a face, any anger dissipated in what must have been a cathartic and blissful display of power for her.

“Funny, I think your little friend Harry down in my stomach disagrees with you. He seems to be all for eating my problems. Especially when you mites are all so low in calories!” Her smug giggle stung Caleb’s ears. “Now, if we’re all quite done with our little display of throwing tiny stones….”

Her gaze immediately fell upon Quentin, still on his rear having not found the energy to get up again. He certainly wouldn’t find it now- any sliver of strength he had remaining withered and died as he realised her gaze, and with it her hunger and sadistic pleasure was now fixed on him, and his number was up.

“Quentin.” Somehow, she sounded just a note less gleeful in saying his name than she had his two late compatriots. “Intelligent, bookish… pliable, pushable Quentin.” She sighed, treating them all to a thankfully more relaxed, but still disgusting and humid gale. “You could have been so much more. So much better. You had, even still have, the potential to be a good student with a passion for philosophy!” Surprisingly, her complaints seemed genuine- her face betrayed the sadness and even wistfulness behind her words. In an instant, however, her face was stone again, and any sense of a human inside the goliath before him was washed away. “But you just had to hang out with…. Them.” Her eyes shot daggers at his friend and leader, who if hadn’t still been recovering from her belch may have reacted. “They brought you into their gang, and being as weak and pathetic as you are, you submitted to all their ways, happily being pushed into sinking to their level. You could have been wonderful… but instead you became just another failure.”

It was at this point that, finally, Caleb found his words again. “What do you take us for, the Untermensch?”

She did not even bother to respond. Instead, Quentin watched in fear as her eyes, practically spitting fire, darted to Caleb, and her huge lips began squeezing and stretching intermittently, until finally she released a scarily accurate white ball of spit at him, arcing through the air and dropping barely perceptible droplets until it hit the gang leader square in the torso, toppling him like a bowling pin and leaving him partially immersed in a small pool of gooey, bubbly, and hideously rank saliva.

“You really don’t know when to shut up, do you?” she spat at him, before returning to her intended prey. “Now, I’d love for you to be that student, become that student… but I fear it’s too little, too late. Little weak Quentin is too devoted to his precious gang.” She snorted in derision. “So, instead, I’ll make you a deal. Because I know you could have, should have been better and that, in a better world, we could have perhaps been on good terms, I won’t torture you. I’ll give you some mercy and swallow you whole, give you some kind of dignified death… if you can be obedient and respect my authority as teacher just this once.” At this point the smile returned, from Quentin’s point of view more chillingly than ever, as he waited for his sentence to be passed down.

“I want you to show you can be obedient… and feed yourself to be. Walk into my open mouth, walk across my tongue, lie down upon it, and I’ll swallow you down. Nice and simple.”

By this stage, Quentin’s ravaged mind was already set. He had seen two of his friends die horrifically and had been humiliated and tortured by proxy enough by Miss Blaine, and that belch combined with the sombre knowledge that he was next on her menu were the final straws necessary to break him. If he could avoid the torture, he’d take it; let him die in as dignified a manner as being digested alive by his philosophy teacher’s cavernous stomach would allow. If that involved submitting himself tot her… so be it.

“I’ll… I’ll do it.”

Miss Blaine smiled the simper of victory, beaming down at the broken boy she was about to devour. She ignored the loud exhortations of Jack and Caleb, the latter of whom had finally struggled out of the awful pond of saliva, and focused solely on her sweet, sweet victory. “Good boy..” she almost cooed in giddiness. “It would have been so much more horrible to have to use my teeth to rip your limbs off one by one. Such a pity to hear your screams.” Whether he believed that or not was of little consequence, but something in him told him that perhaps, just perhaps, she wasn’t lying. Perhaps they could have been on better terms….

However, it was far too late for that now, he knew. With a sense of finality, Miss Blaine addressed him;

“Right… whenever you’re ready. Though, I’d make that sooner rather than later.”

Her arms disappeared back behind the desk, her head lowering to rest upon it, about ten metres by his stature from where he sat. Quentin didn’t know why, of all the things, it registered in his mind, but he realised she had probably slipped off the chair behind her to achieve the position she was in. Before him, the gigantic cave opened- somehow it seemed almost serene despite the terror and foulness it had become accustomed to being draped in- until it was wide open before him, yellowed teeth almost glistening in the soft light of the room, a great atrium yawning before him and inviting him further inside her colossal body. Her tongue almost lethargically spilled over the stained pegs of her lower incisors to rest on the desk before him, a thin river of saliva beginning to cascade down its whitish centre to form a small puddle before the fleshy platform he was expected to step onto. Closing his eyes, Quentin made a mental goodbye to all he loved- his family, Caleb, and Jack, he didn’t have many others- and stood up shakily, stumbling once before righting his balance. With a furtive look back over his shoulders, he stared straight ahead at Miss Blaine’s maw, and his fate.

“Goodbye, guys. I’m… sorry.”

His legs began to move him forward.