Tara stirred from her slumber to find herself in a darkened room with bare walls. The floor was surprisingly soft, as if it’d been lined by a quilt. She heard the groans of the other girls around her, but it was pitch black. 
     “Amy!” she called into the darkness. “Amy, you there?”
     “I’m here!” Amy coughed. “What happened?”
     “No idea…”
     Faint sobs echoed around the room.
     “Is everyone in here?” came the sweet southern voice of Jessie. “I can’t see nothin’ at all!”
     “I’m sure we’re in a fucking closet or something,” said Melissa in her usual condescending tone.
     “I don’t know, it feels kinda—”
     Then, the roof opened up fifty feet over their heads, bright white light pouring into the room. The pledges looked around to see that the walls were gray with a sort of cardboard texture, and the expansive floor was indeed some kind of white fabric. In the middle of the space, there was a sort of raised lip about a foot high, round like a fountain, with an etching going across the—
     Tara shuddered when she realized what it was.
     “Oh…my…god…” Bailey put her hand to her mouth as she realized it too. Sara started crying and speaking in quick, panicked German. They sounded like prayers.
Tara, in a state of half shock, walked up to the massive object and touched its metal surface.
     A dime.
     A dime about ten-fifteen feet across, with the ridge over a foot high.
     “What the fuck?!” Melissa blurted.
     Everything else seemed to come together, even if Tara couldn’t believe it. A giant dime. The floor was toilet paper. The walls looked like cardboard because they were cardboard. They were in a gift box of some kind, the kind used for cheap jewelry.
     “Are we shrunk!?” Nikki asked, rubbing her hands nervously.
     “No way,” Lindsay said with her Australian accent, looking around the room. “This has got to be some kind of prank. I mean, they sell these right big coins at party stores.”
     “Not this big…” Tara said.
     It was only a matter of time before Erin started bumbling, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…”
     “Erin, shut up,” Melissa demanded.
     “We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die, oh my god, oh my—”
     “Shut up!” Mel slapped her on the back of the head.
     “Hey!” Tara shouted. “That’s enough. If we’re going to figure a way out of this, we better start taking stock. Let’s see,” she looked over the dime. “Dimes are 18 millimeters across, and at least three of us and fit across from head to toe, so…”
     Amy was sniffling next to her friend, afraid to even speak, her eyes darting nervously to and fro.
     “We’re each about five millimeters tall,” Tara gulped.
     “How big’s that?” Nikki asked. Her inner city upbringing obviously hadn’t included the best education.
     “Half a centimeter.”
     Nikki thought for a moment, “Um, and how big is that?”
     “You people are ridiculous!” Lindsay said, shaking her head. “You actually think we shrunk? Or we could shrink? Unbelievable.” Strutting across the room in her white bikini, she started pounding on a wall, “Hello? Alright, the joke’s gone far enough! These people are scared! Open the door!”
     As if to answer, the room rocked, then started to tip. The tiny pledges slid, screaming in terror, as they were dumped out onto the solid white surface…of a round table in the middle of an apartment kitchen.
     And hundreds of feet above, surrounded on all sides, the smiling faces of the Omega titanesses looked down at them.
     Half nearly peed their bikinis. Almost all of them screamed.
     “Shhh!” Spencer held a gigantic finger to her lips to shush the micro girls.
     It didn’t work.
     They continued to yell and hold each other, all except Tara, who stared slack jawed in disbelief as Amy clung to her arm in terror.
     Spencer shot one of her sisters an annoyed look, who answered with a nod. Ashley, who Tara recognized as one of the school’s basketball players at well over six feet tall, with chocolate brown hair and olive skin with a thick physique, turned around and grabbed a fly swatter. Which she then proceeded to hold ominously over the group. She could’ve flattened all ten with one smack.
     Reluctantly, the micro girls shut up, standing huddled together in the shadow of the swatter.
     “So, this is how it works,” Spencer explained, her voice booming, nearly shaking the ground beneath the tiny micro girls. “We’re going to play Hide and Seek, extreme edition. In four hours and five minutes, whichever one of you hasn’t been found yet becomes a proud member of the Omega sorority.”
     “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Nikki whispered, giving herself false reassurance that everything was going to be okay.
     Assurance Spencer was more than happy to shoot down the next moment. “But if you’re found,” she smiled, “well, it’s probably best to demonstrate.” She gave one of the other sisters a nod and she disappeared into a nearby bedroom. The sister was Caitie, a Jersey girl through and through. Caitie had what one might call a rubenesque physique, but not quite fat; a light muffin top poked out between her white shorts and purple cutoff top. At one point, she had played soccer in high school, but then quit to focus on drinking beer…and it showed. She was still beautiful in a way, but her bitchy attitude and nasally voice perfectly accented her fake tan and jet black hair. When she returned, she dropped something to the table a few dozen yards in front of the group of pledges and stood back with a sadistic smile and her hands on her hips.
     “Oh god…” Tara whispered to herself when she realized what it was.
     Another micro girl. This one was wrapped up in thread, as a spider did to its potential meal, with only her head poking out. She was a blonde, with olive skin, sobbing uncontrollably.
     And everyone immediately recognized her.
     Katie Jordan wriggled and writhed in her trap, no more than a quarter of an inch tall, struggling futilely to escape. Katie was the president of the Delta Zeta sorority, and in an effort to sway pledges from Omega, had run a smear campaign earlier in the year focusing on Omega’s secrecy and the fact that nearly every girl in it was a reclusive brat. It was the first time anyone had publicly spoken out against Omega.
     And Tara got the sickening feeling that it was going to be the last.
     “All of your names are on the wall here,” Spencer nodded to what looked like a scoreboard hanging on the wall. The ten names of each pledge were listed alphabetically, each with a green light glowing next to them. And at the bottom was an eleventh name: Katie Jordan. “Allow us to demonstrate how we keep track of who gets found.”
In one swooping motion, Caitie stepped forward and placed the bottom of her right wrist on the table, then extended her index finger—which looked for all the world like the fuselage of a jumbo jet made of flesh. The tip hovered over Katie, waiting for the word.
     “No! Please!” Katie begged through tears, looking up at the menacing ridges along the bottom of Caitie’s finger. “I have a little sister! She looks up to me, please! Pleeeeaaaasssseee oh god pleeeaaassseeee!”
     “And don’t think,” Spencer spoke to the micro girls as Katie continued to squirm and screech, “that you can just find a place and hang out for a few hours. If you don’t move at least a foot every minute, an alarm goes off with your location. That keeps things more interesting, kind of a cat a mouse thing. Or,” she thought, “more like pissed off girls and ants kind of thing.” She looked at Caitie, then nodded.
     “No!” Katie screamed once more. “Please! Please! I don’t want to die! I have so much to live for! I don’t want to—”
     It all happened so fast.
     There was no fading scream of terror nor a sickening crunch of bones. One second, Katie Jordan, who obviously had a bright future, was pleading for her life and the next moment, Caitie the bitchy Jersey girl slapped her index finger to the surface of the table in an impossibly quick motion, bringing Katie’s pleas to an abrupt end. After twisting her fingertip for a second, Caitie peeled it back, revealing the smushed corpse of Katie Jordan stuck to her finger, a bright red splotch on the table where she once lay. And as casually as one would after a good meal, Caitie sucked the miniscule remains of the DZ president off her fingertip, licking her lips afterward.
     A buzzer went off near the wall as the light next to Katie Jordan’s name turned red.
     The micro pledges were in shock, afraid to move, unable to contemplate what had just happened, unable to believe that a proud, beautiful woman a few months from graduating, getting married and pursuing her goals was converted to no more than a little stain of worthless grease on the underside of a massive bitch’s finger, the only remains of a promising life now traveling through the digestive system of a woman who probably couldn’t pass basic math.
     “So,” Spencer clapped her hands together. “You all know the stakes now. We’re going to separate everyone into different parts of the apartment, and then the fun begins. Good luck!”