Jessica materialised in a clearing covered by a green plant that resembled grass with it’s short green thin leaves, the entire trip seemed to take place in no more than in a blink of an eye. The clearing was surrounded by pine trees or what looked like pine trees as she wasn’t on Earth anymore but they definitely had the appearance of a pine tree with its cluster of green needle like leaves and the tall thin scaly bark.

 Jessica felt disoriented from the trip, it was very different from the way she travelled whenever she was on a mission. Gabriel’s method seemed to tug at the very atoms that made up her body and while painless, it was very disconcerting.

    A few seconds later, the familiar vortex appeared in front of her and out rose Gabriel before it vanished, leaving only the grass like plant beneath his feet.

 Gabriel threw his cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with his black toe covered formal shoe before turning towards Jessica and giving a gentle smile.

 “How is it you can do all this? I’ve seen people with powers like that but they all work for Park Incorporated and I’ve never seen you there.”  Jessica wondered as she sat down and looked at Gabriel with a look of curiosity, he had answers and she needed them badly.

 “ I’ve never heard of that person or place but there’s no need to know how but rather what I can do. Before we start, could I offer you some food? A drink perhaps? An aperitif before we start? Even a mint, a tiny little mint to freshen your breath.” He waved his hand and instantly, a plate of bangers and mash complete with a glass of red wine and a small aperitif materialized in front of Jessica.

Jessica shook her head and moved a few strands of her hair behind her ear as she responded to Gabriel’s question, “ I’m not hungry so no thanks.  Plus my breath smells fine thank you very much.”

 She crossed her arms across her chest as Gabriel looked on with a smirk across his wrinkled face.

 “ Suit yourself, most people here don’t eat to fill their stomach, you don’t need that while you’re here.If you do get hungry, just ask and you shall receive.  Also, I never said your breath was bad, it helps to keep you awake.” Gabriel snapped his fingers and the mouthwatering food vanished into thin air.

  Jessica leaned in closer to Gabriel, “ I just want to know. Where am I?” A warm column of air came out through her mouth, slightly messing up his smartly combed white hair that began to stick out at various angles. Gabriel noticed but did nothing to correct it.

  “ Think of it as a world between worlds. A universe that surrounds every other universe. It has no name, names are something civilizations invented but some of the others here call it Limbo. They seem to think of it as some waiting room to the afterlife but I don’t have the heart to tell them this isn’t the waiting so much as it as a final destination.

 ‘ As for me,” Gabriel pointed at himself using an erect thumb.

 “ I have been here since I can remember with all the powers you’ve seen and a few you won’t want to see.” Gabriel bowed down,  his body bent at a sixty degree angle before he stood straight again.

 Jessica had more questions than answers now but she decided to focus on the more important ones, namely why was she here?

 “ Why am I here? I am not dead,” Jessica sounded exasperated as she said it, it made no sense to her that she would end up here if this was the underworld.

 Gabriel grinned and drew a circle in the air to the right of Jessica using his pointer finger. Yellow tendrils of smoke shout from his finger and formed a larger circle about thirty feet from Jessica, it had a diameter that was about half of Jessica’s height. The smoke began to fill up the empty interior of the circle before it turned pitch black.

   Once it was done, Gabriel brought his finger close to his face and blew on it, blowing away the residual smoke being emitted from his fingers.

  “ Another of my little tricks, I can see into different universes and before I met you, I actually took the liberty to look into what happened on yours and it’s...interesting. You’re here because of the need to maintain balance in the universe.

‘The universe must always be in a state of equilibrium and if that is disturbed, it will take steps to correct it. In this case, someone travelled back in time and there was a need to balance the scales. You were the weight that needed to be shifted.”

 Jessica’s eyebrow bunched up as she felt even more confused by Gabriel’s explanation of her circumstances, something Gabriel noticed and he thought about it before snapping his finger and pointed at the black circle.

 Jessica turned and saw an image forming and when it was fully formed, she gasped, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide with shock as she saw another giantess there and she was holding Tucker as she walked. She was much taller than Jessica was but slimmer and  lacked Jessica’s curves with a much smaller bust. The most striking detail was her white hair which came down to her elbows. Even more surprising was how the picture was moving, Jessica was seeing events on Earth as they unfolded!

  “ Who is that?”

 Jessica squinted hard at the giantess who  now appeared to be talking to Tucker in some sort of cave. She saw a little of herself in the girl and she began to come to a realisation even if she couldn’t believe despite the fact that it was staring her in the face.

  “ She’s my daughter? How can it be? Who’s the father?” Jessica exclaimed.

 Gabriel rolled his eyes, “ Pfft! Who else?”

  Jessica frowned and looked more closely at the girl before she turned towards Tucker and gasped loudly, placing her hand over her mouth as she did so.

 “ It can’t be, how could it be Tucker ?” Jessica looked at Gabriel, turning her head away from the live feed she had on Home.

  Gabriel shrugged his shoulders, “ I don’t know the exact details, you should! You made her or well, you will make her.”

 Jessica’s lip curled up in annoyance as she looked at Gabriel as if he expected her to know that.

 “ No I mean I am the biggest person on Home. All of my husbands were your size and I…” Her cheeks were flushed with colour as she realised how embarrassing it was to tell a stranger like Gabriel what she did behind closed doors.

  “ tried to have kids with them but doctors said my…” Jessica paused and scratched her head as she thought of a more polite way to tell this to Gabriel who was thoroughly amused by this, pressing his lips against each other as he tried his very best not to laugh at Jessica.

 “...said my body was too big for their sperm to survive and fertilise any egg of mine. Thats it but how did Tucker succeed when all my ex-husbands failed? I don’t get it-wait-I married Tucker?”

 At this Gabriel’s amused look faded and he looked to more serious , “ No, she’s there because you didn’t marry Tucker, she never knew him at all.”

Jessica chuckled to herself as she found that ridiculous, “ Why not? I love Tucker and if we had a child together, I would let him see his little girl. I would never keep them apart.”

Gabriel did not share her sentiments, he found it terrible that she was laughing.

“ Everyone else is dead and normal while you’re alive and large so I’ll make an exception to your inappropriate laugh. Let me show you, it’s best...this way. This is about three years after you met Tucker, it seems you two didn’t see each other for a while,” he said with a hint of sorrow.

 Jessica detected that but she was at a loss as to why Gabriel would feel that way about Tucker and her when he barely knew them.  

 Gabriel  snapped his finger again and the live feed that showed Jessica and Tucker flickered before showing a very different scene. Jessica only saw Tucker and he appeared to be in a hospital by himself and Gabriel was right, Tucker was on Earth as the hospital looked very different from the one on Home.

- - - - - - - - - -

Tucker coughed violently into a handkerchief he had on him, droplets of blood were splashed across the bluish white cloth.

After being returned to Earth and having his memory wiped, Tucker had found himself unable to explain to his drinking buddies at the local pub where he had been after missing quite a few matches the group would usually watch together. Most of their theories were wild, ranging from giant humanoid aliens beaming him up and conducting all sorts of alien experiments  on him to Tucker being a secret agent for the government.

 All of them laughed it off and resumed their normal idyllic lives but Tucker always suspected something was missing, he could not have forgotten an entire month’s worth of experiences, something was going on but he never figured out why he had a chunk of memories absent from his mind.

. His life seemed to be on the up after getting a job working at a construction site but a year ago his health had began to deteriorate as he was down with the cold every month and when he wasn’t, he felt weak and anaemic at times. His employers were left with no choice but to fire him and replace him with someone who could at least turn up for work.  To make it worse the last two weeks had Tucker was coughing up blood as the newest addition to everything that was wrong with his body. Out of concern, Tucker decided to get himself tested at the local hospital  in order to get to the bottom of it. He had wanted to go earlier but he needed to save up on those government welfare checks in order to afford the tests he wanted to do.

Tucker was deep in thought, ignoring the cacophony of sounds made by nurses wheeling patients on gurneys, doctors giving orders to various hospital staff and the sound of patients coughing and wheezing as they waited for their turn to see the doctor.

Tucker was thinking of what could have been. He once had a beautiful, a job that paid well enough for him to enjoy the finer things in life which brought him great satisfaction. Now he had none of that, his wife divorced him the moment  his company went under and left him without a job. Tucker heard that she had found a new man to mooch off and she had even started a family with him. No, he only had his health and even that seemed to slipping from him like most things he once had.

 “ Tucker Martel, the doctor will see you now,” said a calm metallic female voice over the speakers that were placed across the many pale white colourless hallways of the hospital, pulling Tucker’s mind away from the realm of fantasy and back into the harsh reality he found himself in.

Tucker got up and stepped in to the room where he saw a tall young man with a messy head of hair seated in the doctor’s chair. He seemed to be no older than Tucker was and he wore the ubiquitous doctor’s white coat with a stethoscope around his neck like it was a scarf. He had a thin face and a sharp nose.

 “ Good afternoon Mr. Martel, have a seat,” said the doctor.

Tucker took a seat in the chair opposite him, it was a simple wooden chair that had a velvet cushion to make it a little more comfortable. It would have helped if the cushion were not missing most of its stuffing as there was a huge gash in it.

 “ Thank you Dr…. Donald Tennant. What seems to be the problem with me?” Tucker had read his name off his badge which he had pinned to the white coat.

 Donald reached to his side and grabbed a brown file that had Tucker’s name written on the cover. He flipped it open and Tucker watched as Donald’s face sunk as he read the results and he swallowed hard as looked up at Tucker.

 “ Mr. Martel,  I have good news and I have bad news,” Emile said grimly to Tucker.

 Tucker did not like the way he said it, he had a feeling it would be bad. The only question would be how terrible would the result be?

 “ Just give it to me, I can handle the news.” Tucker coughed, covering his mouth with his handkerchief and as he put it away, he saw a red stain on the grey cloth instead of a fine spray of blood.

“ Sorry, please continue,” said Tucker as he leaned against the chair so he could sit up straight.

 Donald sighed as he closed the file and he looked straight into Tucker’s eyes and calmly said to him, “ You have leukaemia. The bad news is that it appears to be terminal and the cancer has left the marrow and progressed into tissue around it so chemo is out along with most forms of treatment we would recommend. The good news is that we got this before the worst part of the disease.

‘You’ll have some time to be with your friends and family before you’ll be bedridden. I urge to do what you have to before it’s too late. It isn’t much of a good news but I thought you needed something to cushion the blow. By my estimation you have about four months before your body is too weak to walk and after that...it’ll boil down to your own body’s constitution.”

 It’s already too late for me, thought Tucker.

Tucker was crushed, he knew it was something worse than the common cold but for it to be cancer and terminal cancer no less was the worst news he could receive.

I am going to die, alone any real friends or family, Tucker thought as he felt everything around him falling apart. He had nothing left but to go back to his apartment, sit back and wait for the reaper to claim his pathetic life.

 Tucker stood up and shook Donald’s hand as the doctor also got to his feet, “ Thank you Donald for...explaining everything that was wrong with my body. I’ll be on my way, to do what I need to do before it’s too late.”

 Tucker let out a very hollow laugh, there was nothing funny as his attempt to lighten the mood had no effect on his own demeanour.

 He then turned around and walked out before closing the door. As he did, he coughed again, this one sounded as if he were retching before the brown wooden door finally closed.

 Tucker stood outside the door, the doctor’s final words ringing in his head. Tucker knew he was right but he had been too late to react.

 “ I guess the end of Tucker Martel’s insignificant and forgettable life” he whispered to himself as a tear ran down his cheek. He looked because he didn’t want anyone to see a grown man like him crying while he looked for a chair to wait for his turn to pay for appointment.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Jessica was shell shocked and close to tears, she could not believe what she was seeing.

“ Oh my, how terrible! He should have stayed with me. Didn’t I do anything? At least tell me I went back to check on him. Tucker, your life is nothing like that! I remember you!” Jessica had practically shouted at the images before her but Tucker could not hear her, that was not how Gabriel’s powers worked.

Jessica was trembling as she dreaded what she was about to ask.

“ Gabriel did I….did I...did I at least try to find him?”

Gabriel nodded and without saying a word, he snapped his fingers . He didn’t want to say anything, this next one would devastate her and he’d have no words that would be console her.

Jessica turned to the screen and this time, she saw herself on Earth.

- - - - - - -

  Jessica was standing in the town where Tucker had seen her and perhaps going against his better judgement at the time, climbed into her handbag and gone back with her without her even knowing.

 It had taken a long time but she had convinced the people at Parks to allow Tucker to come and stay with her on Home. He would become a full fledged citizen and he would even work in the same company as her. While the members of the boards were against letting a stowaway come over, Jessica had successfully argued for it saying that Dawn needs a father figure to look up to and it would be unhealthy for her daughter if Tucker was not around to raise her with him. The board relented soon after and she had come over as soon as the vortex to Earth was available for use.

 As a surprise, Jessica had decided to pick him up herself and she even wore the exact same outfit she had on when she met Tucker for the first time.

 She wore the exact same blue denim jeans, the same black top, the same blue denim jacket and the exact same pair of blue open toed heels except that these were bigger although they still fit her well thanks to her growth spurt which caused her to gain thirty feet in height and another cup size, making her breasts even more unrealistically huge despite it being completely laughable for a girl as big as Jessica to even need implants in the first place.

 “ Oh Tucker, you just have to meet your baby girl! We’re finally going to be a family! I am so sorry I didn’t tell you how I felt, you deserved better,” she said to herself very softly but barely able to contain her excitement as she walked to the same apartment block where she dropped him, letting him climb into his house as he got off her palm and onto the open balcony before going home again.

  Jessica soon reached the balcony where she had dropped off Tucker, it was lower than she had expected but she had recently undergone a growth spurt that added thirty feet to her height some years back which had caught her by surprise as she had not grown since that night at the funfair. It hadn’t been easy adjusting to her new size but she had to spend a small fortune having the ceilings in her apartment raised so she could walk about without having to constantly being hunched over.

  As she looked inside the apartment which came up to her navel, Jessica saw someone but it was definitely not Tucker. This man was grossly overweight, his paunche was hanging out of a wife beater that was too small for him and he was sitting on a worn out old couch watching television, laughing at some poorly drawn cartoon series.

  “ Strange, where did he go?” Jessica blew air out through her cheeks and accidentally causing a strong gust of wind to go through the apartment which startled the man inside. He looked panicky as he looked for the cause of the sudden breeze but luckily for Jessica, he did not notice her despite looking straight through her.

**************

 “ I couldn’t find him, he’s gone and I searched the entire town looking for him. There must be some way I can find him without searching the entire planet,” Jessica sounded extremely concerned as she paced back and forth in her apartment.

 Agent Rogers was with her, the two were extremely close and she had come to him for advice after her search for Tucker came up empty due to the fact that they were very close friends.

 Rogers sat in her hand as she walked around, rubbing his lime green eyes as he was taking a nap when Jessica had picked him up to ask him for help without waking him. His wake up call had been when she gave him a poke with her finger which jolted him awake.

 “ I’d go with you but I’m booked for the next month. How advanced is Earth anyway?” he asked Jessica.

 Roger’s fleshy seat shifted as Jessica sat in a chair scaled up for her and she placed him on her desk which was situated in Jessica’s own cubicle. She would use it when there was paperwork to be done on the rare occasion that she didn’t have a field mission to complete.

 “ They have something called a television which they use to watch films and stuff like that. Tucker mentioned something called the Internet which you can use to lookup information for-I got it!” Jessica slammed her hand down on the table in excitement as she finally had an idea.

 Rogers teleported out of shock as her huge hand came down next to him , appearing on top of Jessica’s head.

 “ Don’t do that, you could have taken an eye out,” Rogers was still panting from the shock of Jessica nearly crushing him.

 “ Sorry. You can come back down now,” Jessica replied apologetically as she turned a deep shade of red.

 Rogers teleported, turning up in front of Jessica.

“ Now, before you so rudely gave me the scare of my life, what was your idea?” Rogers asked, looking up at Jessica who looked down, a proud look on her face as she came up with a solution to their missing Tucker problem.

  “ We could use the Internet to do it. I could look up Tucker Martell and we could find out where he is from there. You could modify my VSC to do it, I know you’re good with technology so could you please help me? You’d make Dawn a very happy girl when she finally sees her father for the first time!”

 Rogers was fond of Dawn and he liked that thought, the girl needed a father and this would definitely help her with it. Jessica was also using her cutest  girliest voice which she only brought whenever she wanted a friend to do something very important for her.

 “ Well...I’ll do it. Just make sure that you don’t lose him this time. I went to Earth a couple of years ago so I should be able to calibrate the device to pick up the signals you need to access it,” he replied as Jessica picked him and gave him a kiss on the head for that.

***************

 Jessica appeared in the same town again, this time with the modified VSC that could pick up Earth’s Internet.

 She hoped that this would help her find him. If Tucker could not be found using the Internet, she would never see him again and she didn’t want to let Dawn down, the girl deserved to know who her father was.

 With the VSC now on her wrist again, she brought it closer to her face and pressed a button which led to a new interface for the watch, one that had an option to access any wireless network within a ten kilometre radius.

 Jessica did exactly as Rogers had told her when he presented her with the finished product and soon enough, she found herself on a webpage called Google.

 “ So...it can find anything for you if it’s on this Internet? Must be like Home’s Zoom.”

Jessica keyed in Tucker’s name using the VSC’s touchscreen capabilities and waited as it scoured the Web for anything related to him. Fortunately for her, Google was able to find a page in literally one second that was relevant to her search terms. Unfortunately, it bore the worst news she could find.

 “ Tucker….is dead?” Jessica said to herself as she looked at the image on the device, it was from a local newspaper and it had been published about two months.

 Jessica was speechless and she felt faint but she was able to steady herself or she might have fallen on something.

 How could he be dead?

That single thought was running through her mind, Tucker was alive and kicking when she last saw him. What happened to him?