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With a soft groan, Melanie opened her eyes. The light flooding into the room just about blinded her, and she shut them tight again, wincing. She covered her face with her hands and sighed. Warm, alcohol-flavored breath washed over her palms. It took a few minutes for her eyes to adjust to the light, and finally, she was able to look at her surroundings.

Melanie found herself laying in a bathtub in a bathroom completely unfamiliar to her.

“Not the worst place I’ve ever woken up in,” she muttered, gently massaging her temples as she did so. She tried to push herself out of the bathtub, failed, and fell back in. “Guess I’ll stay here for a little while.”

As she looked around, she tried to remember what had happened last night, and found that she couldn’t remember anything. This was about par for the course, considering the past few months. Melanie was an unashamed alcoholic, and her nights were filled with hard partying. The intense hangovers that occurred the day after inevitably led her to make a solemn vow to never do it again: a promise that was always very quickly broken, sometimes as early as that very night.

She was finally able to pull herself out of the tub, sitting on its edge as she did so. Sure enough, the bathroom was completely unfamiliar. She bit her lip. Well, that was awkward. She didn’t envy talking to the people living in this house.

There was a single leather boot lying on the ground in front of her. She blinked, looking down at her feet, which were both bare. She cursed, wondering where the other boot was. Melanie liked that pair. They hadn’t exactly been cheap, either. She walked over to the mirror on the wall, and froze.

Oh, dear.

Her face, hair, and body were covered in what looked like ash. Her hair was a tangled mess, and was filled with what looked like small rocks, though Melanie already figured she had a good idea of what they were. She winced as she very slowly put her hand through her hair and pulled out some of the rocks to look down at them. She cursed again, knowing she had been right.

Rubble.

She dropped it all in the sink, washing it down the drain. She then leaned in closer to her reflection.

“Um…is anyone in my hair?” she said. “It, y’know…it’s okay if you are, just…just give me a shout or a wave so that I know if you’re there.” She paused. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she then added. She waited for a few seconds, but could see or hear nothing. Which was either very good or very bad. She leaned in even closer to the mirror, almost to the point where her forehead was touching the glass, and went to work weeding through her hair with her fingers. It unfortunately didn’t take very long at all to find someone. The poor thing was completely tangled up in her hair and had probably broken his neck at some point. Melanie let out a disappointed whimper and carefully removed him from her hair, gently depositing his body in the sink. She renewed her search through the hair, and though she eventually found two more bodies, she gave up hope on finding anyone alive. She washed the bodies down the drain of the sink, and afterward, pushed her own head underneath the faucet, scrubbing furiously to get the dust and debris out.

She looked at her reflection again when she was done. Her dirty blond hair could be seen again. She ran another hand through it. She felt terrible about the people, of course, but the feeling of stuff being in one’s hair was still creepy. Her piercing green eyes scanned the rest of her reflection, but there was little else to note. Her clothes looked like they were beyond redemption, though. She was wearing a simple T-shirt and skirt, both of which were filthy and pockmarked with holes.

“Looks like the army was out last night,” she growled, examining the holes in greater detail. She finally gave a shrug at her reflection, figuring there wasn’t much else she could do about how she looked until she got home. Taking a shower was a very tempting thought, but she certainly didn’t want to do it in this unfamiliar house. She grabbed up her boot and tiptoed out of the bathroom, poking her head out first to make sure nobody was around.

There. A flight of stairs. She slowly moved toward it. The hallway was filled with pictures of the family, which seemed about as ordinary as you could get, complete with dog and 2.5 children (all growed up, too). Melanie half expected to have to walk through a white picket fence and a man calling his son “sport” on her way out. Her purse waited for her about halfway down the stairs, apparently discarded by her the previous night. Well, that gave her at least a little bit of luck, she figured. If her purse hadn’t moved at all throughout the night, maybe there hadn’t been anybody home when she had gotten here. Which meant she was home free. She snatched the purse off the ground and allowed herself to walk a bit more quickly. Stepping down into the living room, she even allowed herself the opportunity to hum a simple tune, which was stopped when she noticed the sobbing woman on the couch before her. The woman looked up, and her eyes widened in horror.

“Stay back!” the woman shouted, pulling her entire body on the couch. She curled up into a ball. “Get away from me!” Melanie crossed her arms, feeling that familiar pang of guilt well up in her stomach.

“Um, I didn’t mean…” she started, but was immediately interrupted by another scream from the woman.

“Just STAY AWAY!”

“Listen—“

“GIVE THEM BACK!”

Melanie groaned, rubbing her temple again. She was having a killer hangover, and the woman’s screams certainly weren’t helping. And it looked like this lady’s confidence was starting to grow. She was standing on her feet now, glaring and shouting at Melanie, which forced her to give some thought to the possibility that a neighbor could hear the screams and call the police. Which would stir up a whole new hornet’s nest of problems.

“Okay, lady, I really need you to quiet down for a second. Just calm down. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Melanie accompanied this statement with a particularly intense glare, but the woman did not back down. She actually grabbed up an entire lamp off a nearby table and started brandishing it threateningly at Melanie.

“YOU BITCH! GIVE THEM BACK!” The woman started to advance closer to Melanie, who decided that she finally had enough. She raised a hand and concentrated, and in a quick flash of light, the woman and the lamp disappeared. Melanie grumbled, again rubbing her temple. She would have to find some aspirin or something before she left. She dropped her purse and her one boot on a nearby coffee table and got on her knees, looking for the woman. It didn’t take long at all to find her, as the woman was still brandishing that damned lamp as if it could do anything against the relatively gargantuan Melanie.

“You should really put that down, little one,” she growled, and reached forward to grab the little lady, who promptly swung the lamp against Melanie’s enormous hand, shattering it. She quickly retracted her hand with a curse, inspecting the tiny cut it had given her. This lady was proving to be quite the annoyance. The lady was now running towards the sofa, probably to hide underneath it, and Melanie quickly grabbed the tiny woman up in her left fist, squeezing her with a gentle firmness. Still, the woman thrashed about, beating her fists on Melanie’s skin.

“Jesus,” she muttered, standing up and walking over to the nearby kitchen. She spotted a glass on the counter and picked it up, quickly placing the woman down on the kitchen table and the glass upside-down over her. The woman was now trapped, and she beat her fists mercilessly on the glass, screaming her lungs out all the while. Melanie gave the glass a very forceful tap and glared at her. The warning was clear. It appeared that the woman had finally calmed down a little bit, giving up her screaming and now going back to curling into a ball and crying. “Finally,” Melanie said, sighing. She walked around the kitchen, opening up various cabinets. “Do you have any aspirin?” she asked the trapped lady, who was surprisingly unhelpful, electing to continue her screaming. Melanie raised an eyebrow and decided to ignore her, going back to her search. She did eventually find a bottle of aspirin (extra-strength, too, oh joy), and with a glass of water she got from the fridge, chugged down about four. That was better.

Melanie retrieved her purse from the living room and walked back into the kitchen, sitting down in front of her captive. She dropped her purse on the table beside the glass, the noise of which caused the trapped woman to jump up into the air in fright. She glared up at Melanie indignantly, who responded simply by sticking out her tongue. She then searched through her purse, and pulled out her cell phone. Maybe this would hold some clues as to what happened.

A message popped up, informing her that she had 18 new messages. She gave an emotionless smirk as she read through them. She kept her cell phone number a closely-guarded secret, giving it out only to her closest friends, so she didn’t have to worry about reading a message from an army general telling her that they were looking for her. Still, there were a handful of messages saying something like, “girl u rokk!!1” or “just turned on the news, WOW”, and a single message from her friend Lisa which simply said “bitch u just crushed my car!” Melanie put her phone down on the table, and continued rooting around in her purse. She always did this on a “day after”, as she called them. Twice now, she had woken up to find stowaways in her purse, and she had once gone three whole days before she discovered that a teenage boy had been hiding in her purse the entire time. Little pervert. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be anyone hiding underneath her lipstick this time, and so she put her purse back on the table and examined the woman in front of her.

“So…you ready to play nice?” Melanie asked. She was met with a rather forceful raised middle finger on the part of the tiny woman. “Alright, fine. Then you stay under the glass.” Melanie leaned in closer to the woman, resting her head on her arms right before her. “Okay, you. Tell me everything. What happened last night?” The woman stared at her, an occasional sob still shaking her body, her face completely red with tears. She didn’t talk for a few seconds. Then she shouted.

“Are you kidding me!?” Her voice was slightly muffled by the walls of glass around her, which Melanie was grateful for. The woman’s voice was pretty shrill, and the aspirin seemed to be losing the fight against the headache at the moment.

“Okay, I get that you’re mad at me, Ms…uh…” She waited a bit for the woman to give her name, but none was given. Melanie raised an eyebrow before continuing. “Alright. I get that you’re mad. Whatever I did, I’m sorry. Did I…what, step on your car or something?”

“You shrunk my family!” the woman screamed, again getting to her feet and banging her fists on the glass. Melanie felt her face turn a deep shade of crimson. That wasn’t expected.

“Your…your whole family? Kids, too?”

“You BITCH!” The woman’s pounding of the glass was so intense that it actually moved the cup the slightest of centimeters. Still, Melanie paid no notice. She hurriedly pushed the chair back from the table and examined the soles of her feet. They were pockmarked with little red specks, which did not make her feel fantastic, but also did not answer any questions about the current status of the woman’s family. She held up a finger.

“Wait right there, dear, I’ll be right back.” She quickly stood up and moved away from the lady, retracing her steps back through the house, and carefully watching her steps as she moved. She advanced up the stairs and back through the hallway, poking her head back into the bathroom she had woken up in, but still there was nobody. She then looked through the various bedrooms the hall led to, and in the very last one, she found a crib. “Oh, please please please please” she whispered quickly to herself as she looked inside the crib. She was met with a wave of satisfaction. There was a baby, and he was sleeping soundly. And he was sickeningly adorable. She paused a second to let out the appropriate “aww” and then went back to her search.

After combing every room in the house, she found no trace of the family, and so she stomped back to the little woman in the glass.

“Alright, miss, we might have ourselves a teensy little problem here,” she said, sitting herself down again. “See, I, um…may have had one too many drinks last night, so I can’t really remember much about what happened, and now, well…” she laughed a pitiable chuckle. “I don’t think I know where your husband and kids are.” She gave a pathetic ‘what are ya gonna do’ shrug as she stared. The woman just renewed her screaming sobs. Melanie felt extremely uncomfortable. “You…have a really beautiful baby, though,” she offered, as if that compliment could make up for whatever she had put this woman through throughout the night.

“Listen,” Melanie finally said after a few awkward minutes. “I’m sure your family’s okay. And I’m going to find them, I promise. I just need to know a little bit about—hey!” She tapped the glass to get the woman’s attention. “I just need to know a little bit about what happened last night. Please.” She thought at first the woman would just scream and yell again, but it seemed as if she had finally given up. Or maybe the glass was cutting off her oxygen. To be on the safe side, Melanie lifted the glass off of her, which she figured would at least make the woman think she was being nice.

“You…really don’t remember?” the woman asked. “Any of it?”

“Yeah…it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. And if it…hadn’t happened before.”

The woman stared at her for a little while, as if considering what to say.

“Well, I don’t really know too much about what you were doing yesterday. All the stuff you did happened in the city, which is a good ways away from here. We’d hear the occasional boom, but we all figured you wouldn’t come near us. We were watching your rampage on TV before the power cut out.”

“There was rampaging?” Melanie asked with a groan.

“After a while, our neighbors called up, told us it looked like you’d been killed. Was another couple of hours before you showed up. You stormed into my house late last night. You looked extremely drunk. And also taller. I could’ve sworn you were a good seven feet tall last night. Scared the bejeezus out of me and the kids.” She looked around wistfully, as if the mere mention of her kids could bring them back. The woman continued talking, and very familiar flashes were going through Melanie’s mind. Ah yes…that was what happened…

---

The front door is unlocked. Melanie opens it and walks through, ducking slightly to accommodate her size.

The family stares at her in horror. The father gets up, roars at her to get out. Melanie just sneers at him. In a flash, he’s gone. A speck at her feet. He’s already forgotten. She walks forward, narrowly avoiding stepping on the man in the process, and addresses the housewife.

“I’m sleepin’ here fer the night,” she slurs. “Dun call anyone, dun leaf the house.” She glares at the two kids, who stare at her with expressions of complete terror on their faces. The girl looks like she’s barely out of high school. She’s holding her little father in her hands. The boy doesn’t look much older than his sister. The girl shields her father with a free hand, as if to protect him. This makes Melanie laugh. She walks over to the kids.

“If you dun do what I say,” Melanie says, turning her head to look at the wife, “you never see yer kids again.” She waves her arm, there’s a flash, and the kids are also now gone: specks at Melanie’s feet. She nearly topples over as she kneels down to pick them up in a single large fist. She can feel them beating around in there. She squeezes just enough to make them secure, and then stands in front of the woman. “Not. A. Word.” She then winks, bends down, and plants a solid kiss on the woman’s lips.

She walks upstairs, dropping her purse as she moves, and goes into the first room she sees. A bathroom. She walks over and sits on the toilet. She opens her palm, and pokes at the little ones with the index finger of her other hand. She giggles.

“I need a place to put you cuties,” she says, her alcohol-filled breath washing over them. They both cough and gag, making her giggle more. She smacks her lips as she looks for some place to put them, and then she looks down. Smiles. She pulls off the one boot she’s wearing and lifts it up, holding the kids above it. “Nighty night, little ones…” she says, sounding very tired. She then tilts her hand and lets the children fall into her boot, screaming all the way. She looks inside, smacking her lips some more, and gives them a little wave, though she can’t see them through the darkness of her boot. She then gently puts it on the ground and stands up.

There was a bedroom nearby, she was sure of it. But she needs a second first. She sits on the edge of the bathtub, and falls down into it, her legs sticking up out of it. She laughs. Too small. With a flash, she’s the right size again, and nestled cozy in the tub.

“Guess I’ll stay here for a lil’ while…” she says. And with that, she’s out.

---

“I know where they are!” Melanie suddenly shouted, interrupting the woman in the middle of her talking. She ran over to the living room, grabbed her boot, and run back. She again found herself muttering “please please please” under her breath as she tipped the boot up and spilled its contents onto the table. And there they were. The kids rolled out onto the table’s surface, looking exhausted but relatively unharmed. And the girl was still holding on to her dust mite-sized dad. Excellent. The kids were a little less than half the size of their mother, but Melanie was just grateful that they were okay and did not concern herself with how her aim was while drunk. The mother got down on her knees and hugged her little ones, sobbing all the while. Melanie just watched with her head on her hand, grinning. It was all very sweet. She gave them a few moments before she spoke again.

“I’d just like to tell you all again how…really sorry I am. Really. Can’t tell you how bad I feel about all this. I just turn into a completely different person when I’m drunk.” She lauged, though nobody else did. The son in particular looked pretty grouchy, though she supposed she would too if she spent the entire night in someone’s boot. “Wasn’t too hot in there for you, I hope? Anyway, um…I should probably, y’know, get going,” she said, motioning her head to the door.

“What about us!?” the boy shouted up. Melanie giggled.

“Well, duh, yeah, I’m not gonna forget to grow you back,” she said, extremely thankful that the boy had reminded her. All her thoughts were focused squarely on going home, curling up in her sheets, and never ever leaving them. She put her palm on the table and let the family climb aboard. She then placed them on the kitchen floor and stepped back. “Also,” she said, “I hate to sound like the big nasty giantess when I say this, but I really need to know that you guys won’t say anything. Okay? I kind of like my privacy, you know, and if some guys show up at my door and I find out you sent them, I’m not gonna be a happy camper. It won’t do you any good anyway. And you’ll end up spending more than just a night in my boot.” She paused for a few seconds, letting her words sink in before she smiled and let the cheerful demeanor that she hoped she was conveying return. “Alrighty, let’s get you guys back to your normal size!”

Melanie rose up her hands, and a flash filled the kitchen. It was much easier to concentrate with her mind clear. They were all back to normal. Even the dad, who was lying on the ground. He quickly got to his feet, blushing and dusting himself off. All of them looked pretty filthy, actually. And none of them looked happy. Melanie gave a hopeful little grin, but it soon vanished. “Yeah, I’ll just…go,” she said, picking up her boot and her purse. “Sorry…again.” She placed a gentle hand on the girl’s shoulder, feeling disappointed as the girl flinched away from her. Melanie just nodded sadly, turned, and walked out the front door of the house.

Standing on the sidewalk, she looked around, assessing her situation. No fire trucks, no ambulances, no police cars…and no footprints in the asphalt. Good so far. She looked around, trying to find some indication of where her home might be, and froze. “Oh…balls,” she grumbled. On the horizon, she could see her missing boot: hundreds of stories tall, and square in the center of the city that it dwarfed.
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