Elise deftly placed the tiny thing between her index finger and thumb, her virtual assistant recognized her intent and generated an anti-grav field to transport her sample. Carefully, Elise walked over to the table to set the creature up to be worked on.

One anti-grav workstation setup later, the human was ready, its body flopped around aimlessly, one quick squint confirmed her suspicions, the poor thing had passed out.

“These damn things… they’re so fragile…” she mumbled, to no one in particular.

She reached for the tools Trixie used to work on small animals and found her hands grasping at air. There was nothing on the side of the table where they usually were. Drat, she thought.

With a sigh, Elise wandered out into the front room to find the damn things.

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Liliane awoke, at first, she did not remember what had happened, but as her memory quickly rushed back to her she realized that she was… weightless, and lazily spinning; around her was…. nothing, no one was with her. She was alone, and it took mere seconds for terror to overtake her.

Her limbs flailed as she tried to find purchase on something, anything, only for her body to continue spinning as if she were a mote of dust in a sunbeam. Her eyes darted around like bullets, trying to make sense of the world as it looked from outside the hall. She closed her eyes, trying to concentrate, she pushed the feeling of terror down as far as she could make it go and tried to take stock of her surroundings. Her eyes opened. She could make out… towers, in the distance, the door was closer than it had ever been before, she used the door’s orientation to help her determine which way was “down” and below her she saw… the table. She was above the table! Floating, and awaiting an unknown fate. At this distance, she did not even know which tower it was, she was so far from her home.

The titan that abducted her was absent as well, it must have left her to go do… whatever it was that titans did.

For the first time in her entire life, she was completely and truly alone.

The thought, along with the temperature, made her shiver. Compared to the climate controlled towers packed with warm human bodies, the open air felt like an ice bath. She brought her knees to her chest, and curled into a fetal position, trying to warm herself, to no avail. Her chill was compounded when a horrific gust of air swept past her, louder than anything she had ever heard. The titan had opened the door and entered the room. It sauntered over to where Liliane drifted, her head fought against the rotation of her body to try to keep her eyes on it, it was absolutely enormous. A gargantuan hand rose from its side and two of its massive fingers settled on opposite sides of her; Liliane’s rotation halted abruptly with her front facing the titan, and she saw the titan’s face up close for the first time.

Liliane looked up in awe, its face was more like a mountain than a living thing. Its mouth could swallow an entire hall’s inhabitants whole, Its eyes could fit thirty people end to end between the upper and lower lid, even a single one of its eyelashes was thicker than Liliane’s entire body! She was nothing compared to this behemoth, and the thought made her curl up even tighter.

She felt a soft tingle overtake her right leg, Liliane looked fearfully at the titan, who was smiling down at her, and she relaxed a fraction.

A moment later, faster than she could ever move it herself, Liliane’s right leg jerked away from her torso, forcefully bent at a sharp angle, she heard the snap before she felt it.

And then she screamed.

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“Ah, whoops.” Elise muttered to herself.

She had found the tools that Trixie used for the smaller animals in the front room, and she had come back to extract a sample of the male’s semen from the female, but had run into an issue.

While Elise had gone rummaging to find the tools, the creature had woken up, its frightful eyes looking up at her own. More importantly, though, is that it had locked it legs together once it regained consciousness, making it difficult to access the thing’s reproductive tract and get the sample she needed.

No problem, thought Elise, she would just use the tools designed for small animals, their clamp fields could be scaled down to even work on animals as small as humans, she just had to adjust the size and then she could work normally.

Or so she thought, as she clamped onto one of the creature’s legs, instead of gently prying it away from its body as she intended, the leg jerked and the bone inside snapped in two. The creature began to writhe and twist, obviously in pain. She checked her settings, and realized the problem. She had scaled the size of the field down, but not the strength, a stupid mistake.

“Ah well, no harm no foul.” She adjusted the settings and continued with her work. She restrained the rest of the creature, taking care not to put pressure onto the damaged limb, and moved to take a sample from the front hole between the creature's legs, just in time, too, because soon after she took the sample the poor thing began to wet itself, as it was no longer rotating, the floating puddle of its own excreta pooled and coated its lower body through surface tension. Eugh, gross, she thought.

The sample that she required in hand, she walked away from the mess and over to a specialized microscope. After all, not even her virtual assistant could zoom in enough to see individual sperm cells.

The scan ran almost instantly, Elise compared the sperm count from the new stock male to what was known to be normal and it was… just about equal, the new stock actually had a bit more, but it was close enough that she was confident that any potential radiation exposure hadn't adversely impacted their fertility.

Elise smiled, recorded the data to show to Trixie, and threw the sample away. Her task completed, she moved to put away the tools and clean the table. Her fingers moved to snuff the life out of the poor human still floating there and end its suffering, but she paused when she squinted to get one final look at it.

It was looking up at her, while Elise analyzed the sample it seemed to have vomited onto itself; tears were streaming down its face. It seemed to recognize that Elise’s fingers were closing in on its sides, and its eyes closed, as if accepting its fate. The female's face would still intermittently convulse in pain, but it was otherwise calm.

Elise frowned, she couldn’t help but feel a little bad, she loved animals of all kinds, and while humans were certainly amongst her least favorite animals, they were still just one of the creatures of the universe.

She bit her lip, and instead of pressing her fingers together, she willed an anti-grav field between them to transport the creature. She moved, slowly, much slower than she normally would, in an attempt to not knock the poor thing out again; it had suffered enough. Her virtual assistant directed her to the tray she had taken it out of, and she opened it once more. With a gentleness she had never used with humans before, she slowly lowered it into the tray. She placed it, delicately, onto the surface. The poor thing lay in a crumpled heap, unconscious despite the fact that she could have sworn she was being gentle enough to keep it awake; her VA told her that it was still alive, so that would have to be good enough.

Regardless, Elise was still on the clock, she reinserted the tray back into the tower, and moved to the front room to get ready for the day, a slight smile on her lips, satisfied with having chosen kindness rather than convenience.

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Liliane… had a hard time remembering what happened after her leg was shattered. She remembered screaming, tears running down her cheeks, as her body was constricted from moving and something tingled from within her crotch. She remembered emptying her bladder, its warm contents coating her body before turning stale and frigid like everything else outside the halls.

And she remembered the pain, it was unlike anything she had ever felt, her thighbone had been snapped clean in two, it hung at an unnatural angle and when she saw her own right thigh, bent outward at an obtuse angle, she threw up, warm sick sputtered onto her chest and belly, it soon turned tepid and then frigid like the urine before it. The titan had disappeared in the meanwhile and Liliane was left… floating, in a puddle of her own piss and puke, waiting for death.

She would not have to wait long. The titan reappeared, it wasted no time as its fingers closed in upon her from either side, she looked up at the titan, its gaze matching her own, she knew she must have not worked hard enough, she must have messed up somewhere or somehow, and this was her punishment. She accepted her end, and closed her eyes.

But instead of feeling her life end between those titanic fingers, she felt acceleration. It was weaker than before, and she opened her eyes to see that she was being carried between the titan’s fingers. Her head jerked around to see where she was being taken; after a moment, she realized she was being carried to… to a hall! Her hall! The one across from the door and halfway up! Lilane cried, either from pain, elation, or both, she was not sure.

After a few moments she felt herself being lowered into the hall, the warmth, humidity, and voices returned. Home, she was home.

Gingerly, the titan placed Liliane upon the floor, where she promptly fainted.