Theo felt his first encounter with his real life giant roommate could have gone much better.. He leaned his back against a wall watching her casually hold his broken luggage cart, which certainly outweight him by a hundred pounds.. It wasn't exactly despair, but it was a reassessment.

Three times on this trip, he’d had his whole concept of the limits of the human body completely readjusted. First, the tall, friendly but intimidating guys. Then first Atlasian girl he sees is still in high school, and her belly button was above his head.

Above his head!

Now a college girl who could knee him in the chest without lifting her toe off the ground.

He saw them all coming in, and he got it. It was clear. When Luc said the tallest guy he knew was nine feet, he hadn't been lying. Looking around at the ten or fifteen males milling around the hall and in the lobby, he'd have put them all under nine feet.

But with the girls, Camille and five or six others he saw, every one of them far exceeded ten feet. Gen was just about the smallest he’d seen, in fact.

So Atlasian females were actually taller. Much, much taller in fact. Their males at about waist height seemed the norm for them. It felt like irony, or poetry or... something.

Maybe that changed things. He wouldn't so much be seen as feeble and unmanly. Women from the core would still see him as no worse than average. But here, if he altered his thinking, being smaller than these females was actually normal to them.

It was better than nothing, anyway.

“You okay?” Camille asked him, pulling him out of his thoughts as she approached.

“Sure,” he said.

She walked up ahead. She was wearing form fitting green shorts, reaching into her pocket. The muscle she carried on her thighs was amazing. Her quads seemed to jump out of her skin with every step.

And the globes of her butt, which were two feet above Theo’s head, was straining the fabric even without her rifling for her keys.

He was practically at a full jog just to keep up with her strides at first, but he noticed she slowed down.

She casually switched the overloaded cart to her other hand as she neared their door. She stopped.

Theo saw her huge form twist, and he looked up to see her her eyes peeking down at him over her shoulder. She asked him, “You got your key? I think I left mine in the apartment.”

Theo reached into his pocket and pulled it right out, held it straight up toward her.

“Can you open it? That only opens the smaller door, I would think. But then, you can open the big door from the inside.”

He was eager to help. Theo told himself it was because he wanted to make a good impression on a new roommate. It wasn't because she was, conservatively, a nine out of ten. And it wasn't because deep in the back of his mind he was terrified of what this giant stranger might be like if she was particularly unhappy with him.

He got the door open and went through into the oversized living room. He closed his small door, stepped back, and asked himself how he was going to turn that lock, and that doorknob.

Like she was reading his mind, she asked, “Hey, my bad Theo, can you even reach it?”

“Yeah, I can reach it,” he yelled. By that, he meant the if he stood on his tiptoes, his fingers could graze the bottom edge of the lock. Turning it was something else.. but hey, she hadn't asked him that.

The knob was not so bad. It was a few inches above his head. He reached to turn the lock in the center. It wasn't easy. He wasn't expecting to have to muscle it, but it was geared for Atlasian females.

Once he got that, he was kinda stuck. He pulled off his belt, and threw it across the thinner end where the knob met the door. He grabbed the loose end, put it through the buckle, and used it to pull himself up.

Camille yelled from the other side, “Just get Gen to come open it.”

Theo paused with he feet halfway up, straining against the belt. “I got it, hold on.”

He managed to get one arm around the knob, then both arms. He swung his feet up to get on top of the knob. Twice he missed it, and nearly went tumbling to the floor below.

“Listen, Theo, if you hurt yourself trying to open a door, I'm gonna be really upset with you. And I'm gonna feel really bad.”

“Keep your pants on!” He yelled. He got one arm barred precariously around the knob. It was a lot bigger than a doorknob on earth, but that only made it about eight inches across.

“What did you say about my pants?”

This time, he whipped his feet up, got them wedged against the slender bar of the deadbolt knob. He got it to slowly start to move, holding on for dear life so he didn't go flying off the knob to injure himself on the floor. And piss off a bombshell well over double his height.

He got it vertical, then past it and it got easier. Here we go, he thought. It finally got easier, and he heard the deadbolt slide open.

He felt the knob twist. Oh shit.

The door swung open quickly. His instinct was to hold on to the knob, which might have been a mistake. Gravity pulled him off balance, and the attachment to the door yanked him briefly perpendicular before he lost his grip. His momentum carried him airborne, spinning wildly into the hallway, and he was going to fall the seven feet to the floor.

His ribs hit something solid, knocking the wind out of him. Then he was suspended in space and in time, for a long moment trying to take a breath.

Camille had him in her free arm. She pulled him up against the right side of her torso, and he wasn't going anywhere at that point. When she had caught him in mid air against her forearm, it hadn't moved a millimeter. It was like hitting a padded steel girder.

Camille said, “Okay. I'm stumped. How did you do that?”

Theo said “A magician never tells.” It came out like a croak. He was trying to inhale and not halfway succeeding.

Theo heard the door to the bedroom open. From his vantage point he couldn't see Gen, but heard her ask, “Oh! Is he okay?”

Camille asked him as she carried him in one arm and the huge luggage cart in the other, “You okay? Did you hurt yourself? Am I hurting you?” He shook his head no, but she was squeezing just tightly enough to keep the air out of his lungs.

He heard Gen come around saying “I got him.” Camille loosened her grip and Gen got him under the arms and lifted, taking him off her. She held him up off the ground as he finally got a breath. He looked up at the pretty young girl’s face and saw genuine concern. “Ohmigahd,” she said with an exaggerated affectation. “He's sooooooo light!”

Then she lifted him higher, up above her eyeline and off her body, looking at him with a pouty, worried expression.

Just like he was a puppy.

Her face shifted from a pout to a smile, and she batted her eyes at no one in particular. It was incredibly girly for someone over ten feet tall. Theo had never thought of himself as having fragile masculinity, but the moment cut his male ego deeper than he'd ever though possible.

“Going to have to get over that,” Camille had told him.

Theo got his bearings a bit. Camille was behind him now, in the interior hallway walking toward his room.

He kept from kicking his feet in the air, like a child. He instead tried to stretch his feet to the ground by use of sheer will. He was staring into the face of a high school girl, recognizing that his attempt was entirely unsuccessful.

“Put him down Gen, you just wanted an excuse to pick him up,” he heard the even bigger one say.

“I'm just making sure he's okay,” Gen said, starting to lower him.

“I know you, Genevieve,” Camille said.

Mercifully for Theo’s self image, he started to descend. Gen’s face rose above his again, then her shoulders, her chest her ribs, her belly button, the tie on the waist of her sweats... The tips of his feet touched the floor, but not his heels. Gen held him there, suspended, until he looked straight up at her and told her, “I’m okay. Let me down.”

Then, she released him. It was total control. There was nothing he could have done to get back to the ground but to ask her to allow it.

She stood back to her full height, satisfied, smiling at him from five feet up.

And she was the little one.

As a reminder, Camille returned, leaning over Camille’s shoulder. She had about four feet on her younger sister. That was nine feet on Theo. They were both so far above him, Theo felt like a baby in a crib.

“Watch him. This shorty is crafty.” Camille pronounced the word like “shawty.”

“I’ve been told,” Theo said. “Never been called ‘shawty’ before, though.”

“Don't take that the wrong way,” Camille said, walking into the kitchen. “It's just slang, you know, for a cute boy.”

“Cute, I have been called quite often.”

Camille laughed. “I bet you have.”

“Lived with my grandmother every summer, she’d tell me over and over. That’s how I got my rep.”

Camille laughed again, a hearty laugh this time. Theo saw she had put his heavy, broken motorized cart down in front of his door.

Between the luggage and the cart itself, it had to be over three hundred pounds. And she carried that thing in one hand, for like five minutes.

He was still looking at it when a huge shadow fell over him. Camille had been kind enough to stand about ten feet back, but he still had to crane his neck a bit.

“Let me ask you something,” she started. She was holding a bottled water, and offered it to him. He took it.

It was basically a two liter bottle, with a widened mouth, it struck him as a perfect compromise, something they both could use. Theo tipped it back.

“When you first arrived here at the Village... “ Camille trailed off. He look was bemused, knowing.

“I had no idea.”

She laughed hard, the joyous sound rolling through the space and shaking his bones. He shrugged, and offered the bottle back to her with both hands. She took it with three fingers.

“When you fell on your ass, I kind of figured.”

“That's not fair, I was just trying to look up far enough to see you.”

“What was it you said?” And Camille dropped down again, reducing herself to about eight feet tall. “Gotta be kidding me?”

“Wait, that was out loud? I thought that was internal monologue. I meant, you gotta be kidding me, my roommate couldn't possibly be this lovely. How could I get this lucky?”

“That part is true. At first it was girls only, then we opened it up to guys, but no one on campus since there is a real perv factor around here.”

Theo chuckled. Then he thought about it. “Hold on, so what if they were pervs? They couldn't exactly push themselves on you.”

“See, that's short sighted. They could still get compromising pictures, make us feel uncomfortable, or just piss us off to the point we lose control... Roxanne is already on thin ice.”

“Wait... Thin ice? What thin ice?” Theo did not like the sound of that.

“So you were not curious about the girls you were moving in with?”

“There are a hundred and sixty-two human settlements out in the galaxy. I figure people are all the same.”

“Do you still think that?”

“I haven't seen anything to make me think otherwise at this point.”

Camille smiled. She turned and walked away. He could feel Camille’s steps through the solid floor.

Theo lowered his head, and started rubbing the back of his neck. It was gonna be sore tomorrow from all the looking up. Damn.

Definitely his own fault.

Not that he would have thrown out his chance at decent housing, but at least he would have made less of an ass of himself.