In only two gliding strides Gina crossed the room to stand beside her desk – or, as she referred to it, the playground. The desk’s surface didn’t even come up to her knees. From her explanation, she liked to interact with normal-sized objects since it made her feel exceptionally gigantic. My take on it was that she simply did not want to go through the hassle of building another desk when this one served her purposes just fine.
I descended with such speed it was as though the floor had fallen out from under me, and I even let out a brief scream in the apparent freefall. Gina kept her hand beneath me the whole time though, and slowly brought it to rest on the wood finish. Then she tipped her hand sideways and dumped me onto the empty expanse. She stood back up and leaned forward so that she could loom over me, then extended a single gigantic finger toward me and shook it emphatically. “You stay put now, okay?” she commanded. “Otherwise you’ll incur your Goddess’s wrath.” Luckily she didn’t see me roll my eyes. Where could I even go?
Gina’s stockinged feet thudded against the floor until she pressed herself up against the terrarium’s glass wall. She flicked open the roof’s panel and stared down at the assembled captives milling about. “Your Goddess demands tribute!” she bellowed, loud enough that even I felt my knees go weak. “You have five seconds to provide Me with five blood sacrifices. If you don’t I will crush every single one of you pathetic worms. Now!” Gina could be quite persuasive when she wanted to be.
I doubted it took half as long for that many people to be separated out, and Gina plunged her hand into the tank. She withdrew it triumphantly a moment later, holding the group clenched in her fist. Gina was beaming while she walked back to me, probably elated at the slaughter that was about to ensue. Her thundering steps stopped when she was looming over the desk again, then she knelt and sat back on her heels. For a moment she let her clenched fist hover above, then flung her fingers open to deposit the sacrifices beside me.
Feeling sorry for them, I went around and helped them get back to their feet: some of them had never been carried before, let alone dropped like that. As I had expected it was a bunch of nobodies, new arrivals whose faces I barely recognized, until I got to the last one. “What the hell are you doing out here, Will?” I asked, helping the relative old-timer up. “You know better than to be caught by her!”
“It was Roni!” he explained, eyes wide with panic. “She kicked out my leg and threw me toward her! Said it was either me or her, and it sure wouldn’t be her. You gotta help me, she listens to you! I don’t want to die like this!” He was on the verge of tears, and clearly misremembering the last year of his life.
“You know I can’t do anything, man,” I explained. “She’s never listened to me, and if she wants five bodies she’s going to get them.” It sounded cold, but there was no sense lying to him. If he was going to meet his fate at Gina’s hands, he needed to hear the harsh truth, not platitudes about how I’d do my best. The kid deserved that much.
“Six,” Gina boomed. We turned to face her, and she was gazing down at us with an enormous grin from her mountainous height. “I see six tiny people in front of Me. Maybe it’s time for Me to get a new High Priest, hmm?” She reached forward and prodded me, shoving me back several feet. “That senior girl looks pretty feisty, I think she might serve Me better.” Roni was a senior when Gina shrank her over two years ago, could she be making a power play now?
“Gina, this isn’t funny,” I protested, backpedaling from her constantly ramming her finger into me.
“Who says I’m joking?” she asked, knocking me over with a forceful shove. “All these years you’ve thought you were safe, just because you’re My ‘favorite.’ You’ve gotten complacent.” She formed a wall with all the fingers on her right hand and began raising it. “You’ve forgotten that you’re just a bug to Me like any other, and I can snuff you out just like that!” Gina swung her hand down with impossible quickness, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
A crack split my ears, and a shockwave with enough force to make my eyes water washed over me. I forced myself to look, and saw Gina’s gigantic hand pressed against the desk hard enough that her fingernails were bright white from the pressure. She peeled her hand back, revealing spattered blood stuck to the bottom of her fingers. Where her hand had been were the crushed remains of one of the girls Gina had brought back last month, completely flattened by the force of Gina’s swat. If she had screamed, no one could have heard it over the impact of Gina’s hand.
I tried to remember what group she was a part of when Gina shrank her. My gut said freshman and marching band, but for all I knew she was a cheerleading junior. It hardly mattered now, though. This sort of thing is why I never got too involved with newbies.
Gina began cackling, a horrifying rumble that rose from the pit of her stomach and chilled the joints of her audience. “You tiny people crush so easily!” she exclaimed through uproarious laughter. It took her several minutes to calm down from her homicidal glee, but she got right back to business. “And who’s next? Is it you? Or you?” She pointed at two of her captives on the edge of the desk who were so scared they were shaking. “Actually, I think it’s you.” Her finger pointed right at me, and I began scooting away. It was pointless to try and escape, and her gigantic hand closed on me within seconds.
She paused the pursuit with her hand right above Will. “Actually no, you’re closer,” Gina declared, and scooped him up with her fingers. Will disappeared into her hand, and she rotated her wrist while pulling it away from the desk. When it was about chest level for her she stopped and spread her fingers, revealing the tiny figure in her palm. “Beg, pipsqueak,” she ordered.
Will didn’t even wait for her voice to stop rumbling before he was on his knees. “Please, my Goddess, I’ve basked in your light for so long, I only want to do it longer! Let me live, I’ll do anything you ask, anything!”
Gina feigned a yawn. “Who are you again? All you tinies look alike.” Gina’s fingers began folding inward, and Will’s begging turned into incoherent babbling. The fingers converged on him, and Gina’s expression turned manic. Her victim screamed, and was quickly muffled by enormous fingers pressing down on him. His bones cracked audibly, then Gina turned her hand back over and released him, dropping his mangled body onto the desk.
The others screamed while I looked on in shocked silence. I had seen it coming the moment I saw him in the crowd, but I figured he would last longer. Now the only person whose name I even knew was Roni, and from the sound of it she was trying to get Gina to kill me. The terrarium was about to get a lot lonelier for me.
“You!” Gina snapped, breaking me out of my contemplation. She was pointing at one of the guys near the edge, and he had become frozen with terror. “You look particularly small, I bet I’ll only need two fingers to crush you.” Without giving him time to run she plucked him up with her thumb and forefinger, his scream trailing off while she raised him to her face. Gina’s fingers tensed, and cries of agony reached us. Suddenly the tiny body collapsed and Gina’s digits came together, handily extinguishing him. With a grin Gina wiped her fingers on her thigh, then picked out her next victim.
“And you look even smaller than he did,” Gina purred, extending a thumb from her blood-streaked hand. “I shouldn’t need anything more than this.” The thumb was easily four times the size of her target and twice as wide. When her shadow fell over the girl she had selected, the panicking, condemned victim shrieked and began kicking at the desk’s surface. She didn’t get far before Gina’s thumb pinned her down, though. With a sickening crunch her body gave way, and Gina began twisting her thumb back and forth, grinding her into paste.
The only remaining shrunken person lost his nerve and took off running for the edge. He leapt from the plateau, waving his arms wildly while he plummeted toward the ground. Unfortunately, he had misjudged the length of Gina’s legs and landed on her thigh, just above her knee. She looked down with a smirk and said, “You’re making this too easy.” Immediately her fingers seized the desperate escapee, swiping him up and bringing him up to her face.
“Hm. You’re bigger than the others,” Gina declared. I hadn’t noticed a significant size difference between any of us: she targeted shorter people in general these days, and there were fractions of an inch difference between all of us. “Too big, actually. You could stand to be a lot smaller.” He didn’t scream, probably not even realizing what was happening while he diminished in size. In just seconds he had disappeared from view completely, not even a speck left to blemish Gina’s palm.
Gina’s hungry blue eyes fell on me. With no one else left to distract her, she was free to do whatever she wanted with me. “Looks like it’s just you left, My favorite pet,” she cooed, placing a titanic hand next to me. I wished she would settle on a single term for me. Probably she thought this kept me on my toes, while really it was just confusing. “No other little bugs for you to hide behind. You were always the smallest, did you ever notice that?” Though I had never thought about it before, I realized that I had been looking up at everyone non-stop the last several years. Even the one Gina had crushed under her thumb had me at eye to chin. With a smirk she asked, “Why are you so smalllllll?”
She hadn’t asked me this question in years, but even with her voice a low rumble and amplified far beyond normal human capacity she still found a way to make it obnoxious. I hadn’t even thought about it since Fulda handed me off to her like a book she had become bored with. With how intently Gina was watching me though, I figured I should come up with something. “Well, as my Goddess you made me small,” I began, looking to stroke her ego, “so there must be a reason. You made me small so that I could best serve you.”
“To serve Me, huh?” she repeated, sliding her fingers around me. “That’s an interesting choice of words. You’re close, but not quite on the money.” Her thumb and forefinger pinched around my chest, covering me from head to toe with some to spare. She lifted me from the table, raising me until I was around chest height. “The reason you’re so small, so significantly insignificant, is to be served to Me. Observe!”
Gina opened her mouth, revealing rows of perfect white teeth behind her pink lips. She cocked her hand back, and in a split second she catapulted it forward, launching me from between her fingers. I tumbled head over foot, her face looming larger with each rotation. It became clear that I was on a direct course for her cavernous mouth with nothing to stop my flight.
I sailed between Gina’s lips and slammed hard onto the familiar pink beast of her tongue. She slammed her jaw closed, sealing me into the wet, lightless cave and throwing me against her palate. Her tongue rushed up and collided with me, then the soft tentacle flattened out to engulf me. In a matter of seconds I was drenched in saliva and pinned between her tongue and the ridged roof of her mouth.
This was far from the first time Gina had tossed me in her mouth, and I didn’t intend for it to be the last. After the first few dozen trips behind her lips I had built up a resistance to the burning from her saliva, and a few score battles later I had learned how to effectively fight her tongue. I seized one of the ridges of her palate, and with a solid pull slid out from between her tongue and the firm tissue above.
I landed ankle-deep in her frenulum, still on the inside of her wall of teeth, and tried to get my bearings. Gina’s tongue shot forward, hitting me in the chest and throwing me over her molars. It drove me into the soft, slimy tissue inside her cheek, where she held me far enough in I could hardly breathe. Expecting this, I reached back and grabbed the tip, then spun myself around and latched onto the massive pink beast. Before she could pull it back I grabbed my forearms with the opposite hand, constricting her tongue and firmly attaching myself to it.
The enormous beast withdrew behind Gina’s teeth, scraping me off during its retreat. Her jaw dropped, opening a gap between her teeth, and with a sharp tilt of her head I tumbled into it. I managed to grab onto a tooth as I fell past, just barely holding on to the slick enamel of a canine. Gina’s tongue descended on me almost immediately, slapping across my whole body hard enough that I lost my grip and got driven into the delicate tissue of her frenulum.
Gina reared her tongue back and slammed it onto me again, pressing me further into the padding around the base of her mouth. She gave me a moment of reprieve then went on the offensive again, jabbing at me repeatedly with the tip. I tried to shield my face only to find it bulged around my hands, threatening to overtake my whole body. When it was poised to pin me I clamped my arms around it again, constricting the monster that was trying to assert its dominance over me.
The tongue reared up, slamming me into the roof of Gina’s mouth. I kept my hold strong however, and weathered the beatings from the mighty tentacle. Gina thrashed it around, trying to throw me off, but I squeezed tighter to keep from sliding. Finally, she ran me along her palate as though it were a washboard, but found herself unable to dislodge me from my ostensibly precarious position.
Gina parted her lips, flooding the damp cavern with light once more, then stuck her tongue out. When I was past the soft, pink pillows that acted as a gateway for her mouth she raised a hand up toward me. She firmly seized me with her thumb and forefinger yet again, then slid me off the beast I had ridden to freedom. Her eyes fell on me, no longer with the hungry gleam they had before. Now they were expressing something different, something I had never seen from her until now.
“My, you’re tenacious,” Gina declared, lifting the collar of her shirt to dry me off. “I burned more calories trying to eat you than I would have gained from it… not that that’s too difficult, mind.” She gave a quick, snorting laugh, and continued to dab the saliva off me. “But I’ve decided to keep you around as My High Priest a bit longer. Congratulations!” She still had that look in her eye, and Gina expressing an unfamiliar emotion toward me caused some serious consternation.
She stood, keeping me roughly level with her chin during the meteoric rise. By now I was used to sharp changes in elevation like this, and easily dealt with the discomfort inside me. With her elegant gait, Gina crossed the room in only a few steps, carrying me back to the glass cage that had become my home. The giantess plunged her hand through the open roof, depositing me in a circle of my fellow inmates.
The soft pounding of Gina’s mammoth feet held our attention momentarily while she walked back to her desk. She pulled out a black leather-bound book with sheets of paper jutting out from between the pages, then returned to her bed, the only place to sit that fit her anymore. Silently she cracked open the grimoire to one of the marked spots and began reading, moving her lips along with the words. I had gotten a decent amount of practice lipreading from when Gina would shrink me to what she called me “true” size, but nothing she was mouthing resembled English, or even any language like it.
Whatever tricks Gina was up to, I was sure to find out later. For now, my main concern was finding Roni.