Ava didn’t consider herself a violent person. Sure, like every other smart, self-confident woman with a tendency to sarcasm, she’d occasionally been called a bitch, usually by men lacking in their own self-esteem. But that wasn’t the same thing.

She was a supportive and loyal friend, a good girlfriend, a loving daughter and sister. She was the one who could be counted on to go overboard in celebrating a sorority sister’s birthday, who was the shoulder friends cried on, who cheered the loudest for her volleyball teammates.

Even when someone did her wrong, she didn’t seek revenge. Or, at least, she didn’t take pleasure in it. Not like her friend Jen. God, she shuddered to think what Jen would do with a city of tiny people at her mercy.

But yet, she had just routed an army, done untold damage to the fragile city she now approached on her return from that one-sided battle. She knew, intellectually, that she had killed Gulliverians and Lilliputians with her actions, even as relatively minor or accidental as they were. But seeing these featureless, miniscule specks of color that were this city’s supposed inhabitants, those ant-sized soldiers and their toy vehicles at her feet, it was hard to register them as ‘people’ at all, let alone people worth protecting.

And they had kidnapped her, assaulted her! The conclusion of their intentions was unavoidable: only Lilliput had the technology to bring her here and her capture would undoubtedly make for an effective and lucrative bargaining chip with her mother’s company (who, like her, likely had no idea that she couldn’t actually be harmed by their puny weapons). And when she had tried to push back and leave, they had shot her. Who was she to argue with means, motive, and opportunity?

And so what if she kind of enjoyed tormenting that tank that had blasted her in the tit?

Deep in thought, Ava paused her stroll to idly toe the desert floor with a sandaled foot as she pondered her options, unknowingly sending up a shower of dirt, boulders and plant life hundreds of feet high. What was she going to do now?

Thoughts of Jen brought back other thoughts of home. First of her family – her parents, her brother and sister, presumably not even knowing where she was. Then of her roommates, her closest friends, likely out to lunch or something else fun to pass the school holiday while she languished here in this cursed desert.

When she had left for college, her mom had offered to buy her her own apartment nearby – one of the many perks of being the daughter of one of the richest people in Brobdingnag. But Ava  had said no. Said she wanted a real college experience, not the cloistered lonely one of the solitary rich girl. She had instead lived in the character-building squalor of the campus dorms for two years before she, Jen, Emily, and Sophia had decided to move in together off-campus in a spacious, but modest shared walk-up apartment. Sure, they sometimes fought, as friends and roommates were wont to do, but she couldn’t imagine another group of people she’d rather spend her college days with.

She longed to be back there. Yes, all told, it really hadn’t even been that long in this place, but the thought of being stuck in this godforsaken universe with only hostile microbes for company terrified her.  

She couldn’t accept that, she wouldn’t.

She knew then more than ever that she’d do whatever it took to get home. Microbes be damned. With renewed purpose she strode once again towards the city.

John struggled to clear his vision, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands repeatedly. Re-opening them, angry red after-images still slid across his field of view, remnants of the strange, pulsating energy field that had enveloped him in the station. He attempted to take a step forward but staggered, distinctly feeling the disorientation and brief nausea of a portal jump, even though he had stepped through no portal.

What happened?  he wondered groggily as the vertigo started to ebb.

Things coming more into focus didn’t seem to help. He appeared to be in a vast indoor space -- a light-colored, well-worn wooden floor beneath his feet, artificial light mixed with bright sunlight illuminating his surroundings. Yet he couldn’t see any windows, or, now that he thought of it, a ceiling, or walls. The floor beneath him seemed to simply go on for miles, hazy dark shapes looming in the distance looking like towering mountains on the horizon.

He took another tentative step forward, feeling mostly clear-headed for the first time, and a realization borne of years of portal travel hit him like a ton of bricks. Somehow, he had indeed traveled through a portal, and somehow, he was back in Brobdingnag. But not in the terminal station of his daily commute, with its orderly turnstiles, helpful holographic attendants, and high-speed trams and elevators ferrying workers to desk jobs in the sealed, safe Lilli sections of the vast Brobby office towers. 

No, he was in real Brobdingnag. Where miles-tall titans like the girl currently menacing Concordia City lived their daily lives. Beings for whom he would appear as a speck of dust, if they could see him at all. Beings who could wipe out entire Lilliputian towns with a single step, should they choose to do so.

While he was still processing this realization, another hit him: he wasn’t alone. There, several feet away were a group of his fellow Lilliputians, huddled together and apparently equally bewildered by the strange environs. They looked to be people he’d seen in the station with him, people who had, just moments earlier, been whispering together in fear, when not complaining loudly about being trapped inside. And then he saw another group, and another, scattered over this vast wooden floor. There must have been hundreds, even just counting those in his narrow field of view. Spinning fully around, he saw even more – a large group clustered far off in the distance behind him, scattered groups roaming the floor to his left and right.

Had more than one station been hit? How could there be so many? Were there even more he couldn’t see?

John made to walk toward his fellow unwilling travelers to discuss these very questions when a loud, metallic clicking stopped him in his tracks. Far in the distance behind him, the distinct sound of a key turning in a lock echoed sharply across the room, muffled voices seeming to emanate from somewhere unseen.  

Spinning around sharply to find the source of these unsettling sounds, John now noticed a vast, dark portal at the end of what seemed to be an immense, arching hall at the far end of the room. With a whoosh of air he could feel even miles away, this portal -- what he presumed now to be a monstrous, Brob-sized door – swung open to reveal more bright light and the dark outlines of three enormous figures filling the doorway completely as they towered into the sky.

Unobstructed by the previous barrier of wood and metal, overlapping feminine voices of incredible volume suddenly filled the space, words unintelligible in the cacophony of reverberating sound, but punctuated by thunderous high-pitched giggles and resounding exclamations that threatened to burst the ear drums of the tiny Lillis below.

The colossal figures, still chattering away, invaded the narrow entryway, each moving faster than anything that size had a right to. As they stepped into the hall, their heavy footsteps pounded the hardwood floor in irregular and intersecting patterns, the unpredictable and often continuous quakes repeatedly throwing the assembled Lilliputians to the ground as they struggled to stand under the onslaught.

As the figures moved ever closer, John could begin to make out the features of their tormentors. Leading the way, a lithe, athletic-looking girl with long chestnut-colored hair stood head and shoulders taller than the other two, although her already towering height appeared to be further boosted by a pair of cork-looking platform sandals, the soles of which alone must have stood over a thousand feet high. A much shorter blonde sporting a stylish spiky pixie and a glinting nose ring stood just behind and to the brunette’s left, bare right arm encircling the taller girl’s waist and exposing a line-drawn tattoo on the well-defined bicep, while above a pair of sharp blue-grey eyes flashed dangerously. The blonde said something that earned a thunderous laugh from the whole group and with a wicked grin stretched up to plant a brief kiss on the tall brunette, the soles of her black canvas and white rubber shoes lifting off the ground as she strained on tiptoe to reach her paramour’s face high above, the earth shaking even harder as the smirking girl landed heavily on her heels. Bringing up the rear, a warmly smiling, olive-skinned brunette beauty in tight yoga pants, sturdy leather sandals, and skimpy grey tank top split the difference in height but, John noticed, put the others to shame with the way her sports bra and spandex leggings strained ineffectively to contain a set of outrageous curves. All three of the immense Brobby girls looked to John to be maybe in their early 20s – all fit, beautiful, and enjoying another glorious day in the prime of their lives.

And all completely oblivious to the now panicking Lillis scattered across the floor.