Carly latched herself into the metallic void above as she perched at the edge of the lab table, studying the opaline fingertips belonging to Michelle as they pressed and sealed the transparent rim of the containment tube. It held the small, sloshing sampling of urine she’d once again offered up after Claire’s most recent demonstration of physical aptitude for making the three-inch prisoner’s life a living purgatory. The pale flesh compressed at the lid, briefly losing even more color, if such a thing was possible, as Michelle’s fingerprints were smeared along the plastic curvature.

            Eyes falling back to the jet-black plain of the tabletop, the miniature titaness of mind and spirit watched a last bead of sweat trickling down her bust, having just made the ticklish journey along the soft incline of her neck. The salty bead disappeared beneath the fabric of her makeshift jumpsuit, dissolving into the fabric and melding with the circular stain collected around Carly’s breasts after another half-hour of intensive treadmill pounding to work up enough sweat for a fresh sample. Swiping her thumb over her upper lip, Carly’s finger wound its way across her cheek, offering the cooling remedy of her digits momentarily to her balmy skin before finding a loose tuft of her dishwater-golden locks and twirling dreamily into their silken folds.

            “Thank you, Carly,” Michelle said uneasily, not having easily gotten over the unrepentant rebellion of her finger-sized charge after the way the previous sampling session had ended.

            Carly didn’t quite care enough to offer eye contact at this show of timid gratitude, but she could perceive a modest quiver in the young woman’s lip as they ejected the words. The slightest of tremors that inflicted undulation on each sound. For what reason, Carly didn’t know, but she couldn’t help but savor the sensation of another human being expressing a lack of confidence in her presence. It was affirming in a way she hadn’t been able to experience after all these months of belittling abuse.

            “Now, um…” Michelle rotated back around in her chair to the opposite counter, fumbling quietly with an assortment of beakers and implements neatly laid out in a line on a white towel, then returned with a fresh container pinched between her willowy fingers, setting it on the surface again a few inches from Carly. Wisely, the woman had elected to stow the completed samples well out of the miniature hellion’s reach once they’d been filled with her blood, sweat, tears, and piss. “Now we just have one more.”

            The sexual discharge. Again saved for last. Eventually Carly gifted the woman with a glance, even going so far as to withhold blinking despite her post-exercise dehydration. Her lips steeled and arms folded behind her ramrod-straight spine, she betrayed nothing in the glaze of her crystal irises, and she could see Michelle was just as anxious of the test going poorly again, which intrigued the youngest Arton.

            Michelle could easily snatch Carly up in those expansive, pale palms and commit any number of atrocities with the tools spread out on the opposite table, anything from inducing an orgasm herself with a swab to jamming a needle into Carly’s nether region and sucking out the necessary fluids. And judging by the newfound presence of large and potentially frightening hardware displayed in obvious view behind Michelle, more-than-probably at Claire’s request, Carly knew her kidnapper must’ve authorized more effective means of completing the test if she didn’t comply this time.

            Yet in spite of this insurance, in spite of her massive strength advantage and complete immunity to consequence now, there was something there behind those raven strands of hair that dangled over Michelle’s olive eyes. Nervousness, curiosity, and maybe even fear.

            All of which were traits Carly knew how to mold like putty, no matter how small her hands were now.

            “Yes,” Carly said, the velvety musical note of her potent voice apparently startling Michelle, who all but flinched at this heretofore unseen gesture of engagement. The tiny twenty-year-old had to fight back a satisfied grin from creeping over her lips.

            “I think you already know what it is,” Michelle said, recomposing quickly and straightening her back against the chair as she leaned back in over the table, resting the heel of her hand against the corner. “We need a sample of fluid from your vaginal canal.”

            Carly suppressed a hearty giggle at this last bit of phrasing, taking a few steps toward Michelle’s rigidly positioned fingers still curled around the miniature container. Steadily she worked a falsified stumble into her step that felt oddly foreign to her, a girl who couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t placed her feet upon the earth without self-assuredness oozing from every pore.

            “Yep,” she said, lowering her head again, taking a deep breath as she settled into the full act. “I… I know.”

            “There’s no need to be upset. It… won’t have to hurt,” Michelle said, flashing a glance to the steely toys glistening behind her in the dim iridescence. Her free hand brushed through her dark bangs, trembling slightly as those ivory fingers threaded between each follicle. The wheels of her swivel chair squeaked as she pushed gently off the floor on her bunker-wear boots, creating grateful space between herself and the miniscule actress perched on the table. “I can’t leave you alone in here, but I can give you some room if it helps you.”

            Nodding, Carly sunk down to her haunches and slid her hand inside her tunic, clasping her palm to her distinctly unmoistened nethers. Huffing another gasp of theatrically anxious oxygen, she set about squirming her arm every which way while her hand remained relatively still inside. She knew she really had to sell this.

            The rhythm was easy enough to find. Like a familiar dance that, tragically, no one on the planet had yet demonstrated they deserved to witness.

            Except for one, of course.

            “We just need enough to fill up to the bottom line on the vial,” Michelle explained, wincing at the obvious effort the three-inch girl was displaying after so much silent stillness.

            Grunting, Carly spilled onto her side, curling into the fetal position as she worked even harder to perjure masturbation. Her toes curled into the balls of her feet, whitening and furrowing her tiny bare soles as she established a pumping pattern.

            Burying her chin into her chest, out of Michelle’s sight, she allowed herself a smirk. Carly knew if she was allowed to continue much further in this fashion, it would be enough for just about any ordinarily hormonal human being on the planet to pop a boner or wet themselves, respectively - for Michelle, though, she could tell it was becoming agonizing. She really had to congratulate herself.

            “Anything yet?” Michelle asked.

            “N-No. No. I’m sorry.”

            “It’s all right. Just concentrate.”

            After several minutes of continued dryness, though, it had apparently become too much for Carly’s overseer, who had taken to pinching at the bridge of her nose so she could hide behind a hand, her vision darting from one dank corner of the cell to another.

            “I could turn around if that helps you,” Michelle said, shifting to thumbing at the button of her jacket.

            “I’m sorry,” Carly lied, swallowing loudly enough to send a message. “I really am.”

            “Don’t be,” Michelle insisted.

            “I don’t want you to use the things on that table.”

            “I know. I don’t want to have to. I… won’t. But Claire will if you can’t cooperate.”

            Carly chewed the corner of her lip, maintaining the same vacant expression of sorrow and helplessness, even though the gears were turning rapidly enough to generate sparks just inside her cranium. There was her opening.

            “Can you help me?”

            A hollowing quiet as devoid as the bunker itself followed as Carly locked with those massive olive eyes again, refusing to stutter view of her baby blues for even a heartbeat.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Please.”

            Michelle seemed to withdraw into herself, shrinking before Carly’s eyes as her arms folded over her stomach, her lips pursing and paling to the same tone as her icy skin.

            Despite the crane in her neck required to stay engaged with the massive face above, Carly felt more as if she was watching Michelle reduced down to a sniveling miniature at her feet, ready to be curled into her toes and rolled beneath her sole. And effectively, she was.

            “I can’t,” Michelle said, her voice dropping to a wispy shell of Carly’s. “I know it doesn’t seem fair to you… whoever you might have been before being gone, I don’t know… and… but… but the work… it’s too important. We can’t… not until we’ve found out… how.”

            “What do you mean?” Carly intoned, a pure note of innocence fused into the syllables as she tilted her head like a confused puppy - not for an instant betraying her glee over the setting of the terms. Meager as the information was, it was plenty to satisfy the girl for now. “I meant… can you help me… finish?”

            “Oh. You… you mean…”

            “Yes,” Carly sighed demurely. Wrapping her fingers into the folds of the clothing, she slid it off her shoulders and over her head, letting it pile up around her ankles until she was left bare before Michelle, who immediately shuddered but kept her cool, and this time, Carly thought she could comprehend why.

            So simple. So weak. It was like playing with a doll again. One far less interesting and fulfilling than she used to, but still, Carly was prepared to work with what she was given in these vile conditions.

            “I… I could get an, um…” Michelle muttered, her free hand rummaging on the adjacent table for a cotton swab in a glass box next to the industrial tweezers, though her attention remained paid in full to Carly. Her pupils dilated, drinking in the miniature blonde madwoman.

            “No,” Carly said, hovering somewhere between opinion and commandment, the latter of which was instantly followed by Michelle, whose gargantuan hands, now having developed a mild twitch, returned to alight at the edge of the table by her plush fingertips.

            “Then how-”

            “Can you do it?” the girl whimpered, lowering down to her back and spreading her legs wide, careful to maintain the same comically fearful shaking as before to keep up appearances for the entirety of this grimly humorous show. “J-Just you? I… I don’t think I could with… with one of those, it might… hurt too much, I…”

            “I understand,” Michelle said, almost on autopilot as her index finger extended softly from a loose fist, descending reverently above Carly’s prostrate form, the shadow of her digit cast between the tiny breasts, until the center of her fingerprint’s spiral was proffered just above the delicate lips of the patient’s holy region.

            “Go on,” Carly said. “Please. I don’t want Claire t-to… I, I mean… p-please… don’t let them hurt me. Michelle.”

            The utterance of the young woman’s name seemed to spur her into action, as though the sounds themselves were drops of honey poured from Carly’s lips and into the center of Michelle’s brainstem. Her fingertip lowered onto the shrunken girl’s flower and set to work massaging the cusp of her lips with the care of one trying to pet a sleeping butterfly’s wings.

            Almost immediately Carly released a genuine moan, a trail of sticky reactionary juices dribbling from between her legs and into the grooves of Michelle’s fingers, which only increased the vigor of the aid, but of course the youngest Arton’s mind had drifted to a more ideal location the exact moment Michelle’s hand made contact.

            She wasn’t locked in Claire’s maze-like fortress any longer in underground God-Knew-Where.

            She was back in the paradisiacal solitude of her bedroom, her every muscle melted into the hot-pink comforter draped over her mattress. Her panties and socks were kicked daintily to the carpet as she cupped Jack into her palm just above her chin after a thorough exploration of his precious body under the writhing might of her tongue, a light glistening of perspiration glazed over her chest from the sheer anticipation of it. It was time.

            For the moment. The one she’d been having wet dreams about for six years now.

            Her legs curled in closer, wrapping around Michelle’s finger, which only encouraged the girl further to sink into the minute passions of this wild act. Carly’s tiny soles clasped to the flesh, a marriage of sweat and pre-cum, squeezing together until every other sense was focused in the epicenter of her pleasure, where her hand was now moving, the ghostly memory of her brother still peacefully perched in her hand, lovingly awaiting his reward for so many years of servitude to his rightful owner.

            Orgasm arrived much more rapidly than Michelle was probably expecting, though for Carly it was an inevitability. Pearls of ejaculate squirted across the tender underside of Michelle’s finger, providing the towering woman with a surplus of sample and an even greater supply of emotional embattlement, but these facts were miles distant in the diminutive girl’s subconscious as she passed Jack’s imaginary frame through her fleshy barrier and deposited him inside her body, feeling his legs thrashing to bring her just as much joy as he was receiving by being invited into her being, and she knew then beyond a shadow of doubt that she couldn’t give up hope until it was made real.

            Suddenly the kindling Carly had felt in her heart while bathed in the artificial glow of the Matter Reduction Device was requited with reality. Claire was offering partial salvation with the return of Jack, something Carly was willing to move heaven and earth to see come to fruition, but now through Michelle, she could see the possibility of a complete renewal.

            Everything she wanted. No compromises. No bowing to the monsters that had wrenched her away from her birthright, and Jack’s birthright as well.

            The flame inside was growing, its light revealing a departure from this seemingly infinite hell where the world could pretend she wasn’t the goddess she knew she was. An exit, previously locked away to her.

            And this pathetic little woman was going to be her key.