For quite some time Fulda held me in her hand, smiling down at me while we chatted about everything we had been up to for the past several years.  Naturally, since she had not spent the entirety of it trapped inside a glass cage at the mercy of a megalomaniacal teenager, Fulda had the lion’s share of stories.  It sounded like she had a lot of fun at college while I became slowly more resigned to the living hell she had condemned me to, even if she had not done it on purpose.  Apparently throwing wild sorority parties every couple of months did not interfere too much with her academics, and she was even able to exploit some of the people she had shrunk to build her senior project, which resulted in her graduating with honors.

Gina was later than usual, so to help fill the time I made it clear to Fulda why she needed to be stopped.  I told her about some of the people who were mercilessly crushed or eaten by her sister, the ones I could remember at least, and introduced her to a few of my fellow cohabitants who had yet to scorn me.  They could still be saved, I insisted, even if she could not take them with her.  There was no need for them to suffer any more, and finally introduced her to Akane, who had an eye-opening conversation with Fulda.

“You’re the one my little dude was clinging to when I got here, right?” Fulda asked, holding Akane in her other hand.  I did not know by what right she claimed I was hers considering she gave me to Gina with her full endorsement, but I did not particularly feel like calling her on it.  She had agreed to take me away from here, after all, and I did not want to make her reconsider the deal.

“Yep, that’s me!” Akane answered.  She was surprisingly at ease between Fulda’s large, calloused fingers, somehow maintaining her bubbly disposition.

“Hm.”  Fulda looked her over, turning her this way and that while inspecting her.  “Didn’t know the little guy had a thing for Asians,” she said when she had finished.  “And you’re a little small for his type, too.  I guess it’s all relative though, and you’re like three times his height.”

“By Goddess Gina’s grace!” Akane instantly replied with an irrepressible amount of exuberance.

Fulda burst out laughing, carefully aiming so that she would not blast either of us with her spit.  “I’m sorry, did you-“ she remembered that Roni was still in the room and giving her a nasty look for playing with Gina’s “toys,” and quickly brought her voice back down to a whisper.  “Did you just call my little sister a goddess?”

“Yes, of course I did!” Akane answered.  “She cast out Jessica the Shiftless and raised Veronica to rule alongside her as a result of her unwavering faith.”

Fulda seemed unsure how to respond when faced with someone who earnestly believed the tripe Gina had been feeding us for years.  “So, first of all,” she began, “Jessica wasn’t ‘cast out,’ she went to college.  Gina had absolutely nothing to do with her leaving.  Secondly, what makes you believe Gina’s any sort of goddess, aside from her telling you so?”

Akane thought about it for a moment, shifting uncomfortably between Fulda’s powerful fingers.  “Well… she’s our goddess.”  Recognizing that she had just given the textbook version of a tautology, Akane rushed to reinforce her assertion.  “She brings us food, controls who lives and dies, bathes us in light, and controls the sizes of all people in her domain.  She alone sits in judgment over us, and rewards or punishes us as she sees fit.”

Fulda smirked.  “You realize how ridiculous that sounds, right?” she whispered.  “She gives you a slice of bread every couple days and can work a light switch and she’s a goddess?  Her temper tantrums where she crushes your friends make her divine?  And using a skill that I taught her is, what, how she manifests her blessings?”

“But… when she made me one of her high priestesses, she gave me the power to use it, too.”  I could see the fissures in Akane’s faith in Gina deepening.  She was no true believer, I knew, since she had shown me unprecedented levels of kindness and genuinely felt bad for nearly killing me: someone who received succor from Gina’s words and attitude would have utterly crushed me instead of feeling pity.  It was entirely possible she thought Fulda was testing her, and became more sure by the moment that she was not going to report her apostasy to Gina.

Fulda’s eyes widened at that admission.  “Wait, she taught you how to shrink people, too?” she asked, not believing what she heard.

“And grow them!” Akane helpfully offered.  “It’s all in a book she gave me a while ago if you want me to show you!”

Fulda leaned in close to Akane until her glossy pink lips were nearly touching her.  “I’m the one who taught her how to do it,” she said, then pulled back and looked over her shoulder at Roni, who was glancing at us every few seconds while she flipped through the grimoire, doing her best to appear unbothered.  “She teach her, too?”

“Yeah,” Akane answered.  Her enthusiasm was dissipating, which could only be a good thing.  “She’s teaching a bunch of her friends, too.  They’re all big like her now.”

“One thing at a time,” Fulda insisted.  “I can’t let Gina keep torturing these people, but I can’t take them with me either.  And I can’t fight my own sister, and even if I did that huge blond back there would just continue her reign of terror.”  A soft hum emitted from her throat while she thought it over.  “When she gets home, I’ll make you big.  Bigger than her, even.  That should be enough to protect you.  I need you to subdue her and make her small, about the size of one of the people in that cage, while I deal with the supposed exchange student.  After that, if everything goes right it’s up to you what happens.  Got it?”

“Got it!” Akane squeaked, throwing a salute up to Fulda.  It was a simple plan, about the best we could come up with on such short notice, without a lot of moving parts.  There were still a lot of things that could go wrong: Roni might have heard the whole thing, Gina might bring some friends home with her, one of them might get overpowered, or a dozen other things.  If it worked I would finally be out from under Gina’s thumb, but if it failed I expected to join the conspirators under Gina’s sole when she meted out swift retribution.

A door closing downstairs reverberated through the house, followed by thudding footfalls on the steps.  Only one set of footsteps I could discern, meaning Gina had come home alone.  Whatever had kept her two hours later than usual, she must have parted ways with her friends after. 

Fulda set us down by the white tips of her enormous Converse in anticipation of Gina’s arrival then stood and turned toward the door.  The rotation of her titanic body swung one of her shoes over us, blocking the sky with brown rubber diamonds for a moment.  When she was done she stood astride us, her massive legs towering above like a colossus.  With her looming over me like this I was almost able to forgive the whole “consigned to a living hell” thing while she prepared to meet her sister head-on.

The door swung open and Gina stepped through.  She stopped mid-stride, nearly stepping on the toe of Fulda’s shoe, and quickly adjusted herself.  “Well,” she began, looking down, “if it’s isn’t my so-called big sister.”  They had a brief stare-down, trying to out-stern each other from a few inches away.  Suddenly she cracked, smiling for a reason other than cruel satisfaction for once and let out an ear-piercing squeal.  “I’m so happy to see you!”

She leaned forward and wrapped Fulda in an enormous bear hug, shoving the shorter sister’s face into her stomach.  With seemingly little effort she lifted the dense body of corded muscle off the ground, then savagely shook her in the air.  Fulda’s fearsome shoes passed over Akane and me several times while they dangled in the air, each time threatening instant death if she were to be released at that moment.  At the very least that would obviate the need to go through with this plan, and one of us would be sure to live out the day.

Fortunately she put her down near the wall, completely missing the opportunity to crush us by accident.  Now that I had a clear view of the two of them, the difference was massive.  Gina thoroughly dwarfed Fulda, the latter not even reaching her chest, and had to crane her neck back to look at her.  I had not realized just how massive Gina had become over the past several years, and after a certain point it stopped mattering to me, but she must have towered over every single person without augmented height in the world.

“I’m so excited, it’s been years!” Gina boomed loudly enough in her excitement to make my ears ring.  “You look great!  Been hitting the gym to make up for how short you are, huh?”

“Something like that,” Fulda answered, brushing the question aside.  “You’ve certainly gotten tall.  What are you, ten feet now?”

“Ten and a half, actually,” Gina corrected her.  “And there’s no sign of it stopping any time soon!  The next time we see each other I’ll probably be able to fit you inside my shoe.”

“That’s… I’m happy for you, Gina.”

“Can you imagine it?  You, the big sister who used to tower over me when we were kids, the size of a bug to me!  And everyone else!  I’m so excited for it!”

“I’m… hm.”  Fulda was not quite sure what to make of this.  “You know I’m happy to see you and all, but I’m concerned.  You’re obsessed with your height, and I’m starting to worry that you’re abusing your powers.”

“And you don’t?” Gina countered.  “I remember the pictures and videos from your parties.  There were an awful lot of tiny men there, and you certainly didn’t look upset when you had one in your mouth.  Face it, everything I’ve done I’ve learned from watching you.”

“You’re taking it too far, though,” Fulda shot back.  “I never once thought of establishing a religion around myself, or turning them into a society of tiny people.”

Gina looked at the floor and spotted us, then grinned.  “Speaking of tiny people,” she began, ignoring Fulda’s accusations, “it looks like you’ve helped yourself to a couple of mine.  Interesting that the first thing you go for in my room is shrunken people, huh?”  She squinted down at us.  “Isn’t one of them your ex?  And the other is a girl I think he has the hots for!”

She took a lunging step forward so that she was only a few inches away from us, then squatted.  Her knees pushed out so that her stocking-clad knees loomed over us, and her enormous face was framed by her shapely thighs.  Gina gave Akana a playful poke with a humongous finger and giggled.  “Come on, let’s play with them together, it’ll be like old times!”

Fulda sighed.  At least Gina had made this easy for her.  “Yeah, we’ll play a game,” Fulda said.  “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”  Gina turned around to ask something, but Akane was already undergoing explosive growth.  In an instant she expanded to fill the space Gina was occupying, toppling her over with a great crash.  She continued to get larger, almost unbelievably so, while Gina’s legs splayed out in front of her, just barely missing me when one of her titanic legs slammed to the floor.

When Akane finally stopped growing she was colossal, easily the tallest person I had ever seen.  Her feet stopped expanding just when they were about to subsume me, leaving me standing at the heel of a brown loafer that resembled the Great Wall to me.  The black socks running up her calves were obsidian towers, topped with the shining marble towers of her thighs.  A brief flutter of her skirt showed that it would be enough to cover a whole town, but beyond that she was just incomprehensibly huge.  It reminded me of when Gina would shrink me even more for fun.

“What the fuck?” Roni shouted, followed by a loud rustle.  I turned to look if I could see anything, but Gina’s gargantuan thigh blocked my view.  Red and blue streaked by over my head while Fulda exploded into action, and I heard the hollow groan of the air being knocked out of someone’s lungs.  Hopefully Fulda’s blitz had worked and she was not about to be a stain beneath Roni’s shoes.

Once she overcame the shock of Akane’s sudden growth Gina sprung into action.  She swung one long, shapely leg around Akane’s ankles, nearly dropping its enormous weight onto me when it settled, then wrapped the other around her knees.  With a single movement she buckled her legs, toppling the giantess onto her.  Gina caught her was she fell and threw her upwards, slamming her head into the door as her legs slid by me.  While she was stunned Gina scrambled to get atop her, resting with all her weight on Akane’s lower back.

With Gina’s legs out of the way I could see what was happening in the rest of the room.  Roni was doubled over holding her stomach and wheezing for breath.  Fulda took a quick step back and lined herself up against the much larger woman.  She raised a foot off the ground and coiled it back, then snapped it forward, catching Roni on the chin.  While the blond staggered back Fulda pressed her advantage, charging forward to lay a shoulder into her hips.

Akane was having a much worse time with the plan.  Gina ground her butt into Akane’s back, making some vertebrae pop under the weight, then reached up to seize a handful of jet black hair in her long fingers.  She jerked her head back then slammed it into the floor, making all of Akane’s enormous body shudder.  A cruel laugh rang out from Gina’s lips.  “I should have smashed you in front of your locker instead of picking you up,” she boomed.  “Now I’ll have to beat you senseless and then toss you at Liz’s mercy.”  Akane gasped, apparently horrified by the prospect.

Fulda showed that her sculpted muscles were not just for show and heaved Roni into the air, bashing her head into the ceiling.  While she reeled Fulda fell backwards, suplexing Roni into the ground with an enormous crash.  The whole room shook and I fell against Gina’s knee from the shock, grabbing onto a thick nylon strand to remain standing.  Roni was not moving aside from some shallow breaths, still held tight around the waist by Fulda’s arms.  She had been knocked unconscious.

Gina was still toying with Akane, clearly in the dominant position.  She yanked at Akane’s hair again, making her moan as she tore at her scalp.  I had to do something.  Though both women were colossal in size and thoroughly immune to anything I could do, I could not stand by while Gina beat her face into a bloody pulp.  If she lost I was going to die anyway.  The least I could do was not die a coward.

After a deep breath I sprung up, using the elastic fibers I was holding onto as a springboard to help propel myself upward.  I grabbed onto Gina’s stocking and dug my feet against the fabric, then began to scale the towering thigh.  Years of training on this exact cliff had prepared me for just this moment, and I made swift progress on the ascent.  In only a few seconds I was halfway to her shorts, trying to ignore the whimpers coming from Akane while her body shook beneath Gina.

A pair of blue eyes peeked over the mountain face I was climbing.  “Oh, hello there,” Gina’s voice rumbled while she smiled maliciously.  In an instant her hand engulfed me, and two fingers pinched my sides.  She easily tore me away from her leg, her stocking slipping out of my fingers when my grip gave out, and lifted me to her face.  Gina could barely suppress her laughter while she looked at my puny body in her fingers as though she found my attempt to die a hero hilarious.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she asked.  Past her ear I saw Fulda still clutching a doll-sized Roni that was still shrinking in her arms.  Gina let go of Akane’s hair solely so she could poke me, then grinned.  “Are you seriously trying to fight me?”  Her gigantic face contorted in a sneer that was trying to fight the unbreakable smile.  “I really ought to crush you between my fingers right now and be done with it, but I have a much funnier idea.”  Akane wheezed, Gina’s weight making it difficult for her to breathe.

“Hey, Akane, you dumb bitch!” Gina shouted, the force of her voice blowing back my hair.  She leaned forward, drawing me past Akane’s ear, and gripped her by the throat with the other hand.  With a jerk she raised her face up and held me in front of one of her soft, dark eyes.  “I found your little boyfriend!  Yeah, I know you’ve been trying to steal him from me.  I’ve decided to let you have him, and a little snack before I hand you over to Liz.”

Gina slowly lowered me along Akane’s face, keeping pace with one of the tears falling from her eyes.  Though nothing looked broken, at least not from this close, even someone who had not seen the fight would surmise it did not go well for her.  A steady stream of blood poured out of her nostrils, and her bottom lip was split while the top one was already swollen. 

As Gina brought me toward her mouth Akane pressed her lips together.  “Oh come on, open wide!” Gina chided, leaning forward for leverage while she laid a palm on Akane’s chin.  She shoved me against Akane’s lips, pressing me into the soft, pink tissue.  Slowly her jaw parted, and I felt myself slipping further into her mouth.  Gina leaned forward a little more and pressed harder on her jaw and I slid up to my waist into her lips while a warm blast of copper-scented air hit me from her nose.

Suddenly Akane’s head shot back, ripping me out of her mouth and striking Gina square on her nose.  The surprised giantess’s fingers briefly went limp, letting me slip from between them.  I landed on the carpet, cushioned by its soft fibers, and looked at Akane looming over me.  She flashed me a confident grin then flipped over, whipping the ground around me with her long strands of hair.  Before Gina could recover she pulled a leg out from under her, pulled the knee to her chest, and planted her foot on Gina’s stomach.  With a firm push she kicked Gina off her and jumped to her feet.

Gina bumped against her dresser, and before she could stand up straight Akane was on her.  She hit her with a flurry of punches in the abdomen, then grabbed her by the bangs and pulled her to the side.  Akane stuck a foot into her path, causing her to trip over it and spill onto the floor with a cataclysmic quake.  In a second Akane was on top of her dropping onto Gina with a powerful aftershock that nearly smashed me with her knees so she could throttle the blond.

While Akane had her hands wrapped around Gina’s neck her anger began to manifest in different ways.  Amazingly, the pinned woman began to rapidly get smaller.  Gina tried to break the hold on her throat, but found that her increasingly tiny hands were useless.  Before long Akane had to let her go since there was not enough room for her hands, but Gina continued shrinking.  “What are you doing to me?  No!” Gina protested, her voice losing its roaring quality.  “No, please don’t shrink me!  I don’t want to be small!”  Her pleas were overtaken by sobs, but at the end I finally heard what Gina’s real voice is like for the first time since before I took Fulda to prom.

Akane stood and wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her hand, glaring down at Gina’s tiny body beside her shoe.  Fulda walked over, clutching the unconscious Roni in her hand, and bent over.  She opened her fist and deposited Roni beside Gina, then stood and looked up at her partner in battle.  “What happens now is up to you,” she said.  “Not only to them, but to the people in that tank.  Her chest heaving for breath, Akane offered Fulda a weak smile and flashed her the peace symbol before returning to glower at the former titanesses.

Fulda walked toward me, her feet slapping the ground with a series of rhythmic quakes.  When she reached me, she knelt and leaned forward so that she loomed over me.  “I saw what you did,” she said, fixing me with her cold blue eyes.  Grinning, she continued, “That was incredibly brave.  She could have swatted you like nothing, but you managed to turn the tide.  I’m impressed.”  Fulda’s hand descend toward me and she gently set a finger on either side of me, lifting me out of the carpet.  While she stood she concluded, “Let’s get out of here, I think they have some business to take care of.”  With that she left, carrying me out of Gina’s room the first time in years, and closed the door behind her.

Akane raised her foot and moved it over the two tiny women at her feet.  Even Gina did not move out from under it, too pathetic to save her own life.  It would have been easy to simply lower the sole of her shoe onto them, smash them beyond recognition and grind them into the carpet.  Gina had certainly done so to hundreds of people over the years, and Roni was a suitable protégé for her.  If she crushed them now it would no doubt save a lot of trouble later and rid the world of two would-be tyrants.

She couldn’t, though.  If she took revenge like this she would not be any better than them.  Akane bit her split lip and pulled her foot away, looking at the two helpless, tiny women at her feet.  Maybe some time as one of the tiny people they loved to torment would give them some perspective, possibly even rehabilitate them.  She bent over and picked one up in each hand, then moved over to the terrarium she had lived in earlier that day.  Carefully she set them down in front of the steps of her old house, then closed the hatch.