Shelby walked along the rim of a vast crater, hopping over potholes in the blasted, lifeless landscape she inhabited now. Her red hair was tangled and wild, the result of running for her life for a whole day after spending the one before trapped in someone’s fist. By now her green eyes has gone dull, though she could not afford to let them stop darting around. She had not gotten any sleep in over two days and did not expect she would for several more. Death could come from her at any moment, striking from miles away. If she felt the ground shake, she knew, it would be too late.
The table’s glass top had always seemed so smooth and serene when looking at it from above. Even when she had first been shrunk it looked placid, and though it would take her hours she could cross it on foot without issue. At this scale, however, it was more like the Moon’s surface. She could not even see through the glass: to her, it was cloudy and chipped, like poor quartz. The only difference from that celestial body was the lack of a horizon. Shelby could see for dozens of miles if unobstructed, though there was not much to see aside from the occasional foot stomping through her line of sight.
She turned her eyes upward from the bleak expanse to what had cast a long, inescapable shadow over her. Akane was sitting at the desk, looming over her despite being completely unaware of her presence. A normal-sized person would need an electron microscope to see her, she figured, and even that might not be enough. The only way she knew it was Akane above her was the single dark eye she could see, along with the absolutely incomprehensible scale of her. Her face was so immense that she could only focus on one part of it at a time despite its great distance from her. In Shelby’s eyes, she was the embodiment of absolute power, her mind so removed from concerns on her level that they might as well be in different dimensions.
Though Akane had been sitting there for twenty minutes, the only effect she had on Shelby was her cold, dark shadow. Not even Akane’s breath affected her, safely flowing around her instead of blowing her away like a mote of dust. A constant low growl traveled through the pockmarked glass while Akane wrote on a sheet of paper that might as well be a long skyscraper to Shelby, but by now that was just part of the environment for her. She simply told herself that there was an unusually large hive of bees nearby to take her mind off the fact that such an inconsequential act could discomfort her so and grind at the fabric of her mind.
The ground trembled as though it were about to split open, and a tremendous black object appeared in Shelby’s path. At first glance it was like a large black wall, impossible to scale, had suddenly sprouted up in front of her, complete with weathering and scratches. When she looked up, however, the wall changed from a firm, solid material to one that looked fuzzy, or that it might have some sort of black vegetation growing on it. Continuing upward the wall boughed out, the reverse incline rendering it effectively unclimbable if its sheer size had not. Further up the wall abruptly stopped, revealing a dark, yet somehow blurry, night sky beyond it. After it came into focus, Shelby realized that it was merely Gina’s stocking, rather threadbare after being worn almost constantly for months at a time.
There was supposed to be an order so that things like this didn’t happen. Gina was supposed to watch Ashley, Ashley would watch Julie, and Julie would watch Shelby. If they had kept to that, no one would get lost despite the immense size differences between the ostensible friends. Unfortunately, as so often happens with such arrangements, it was forgotten about within an hour, and Shelby along with it. Ashley had suddenly picked Julie up from the ground, and Shelby slipped out of Julie’s loosened grip. By the time the larger woman was aware of what happened they were some distance away, and outside of an amazing coincidence there was no way they could find Shelby again.
The air around her crackled with energy, and Shelby felt as though she were going to vibrate apart. There was no way to hide from it, since it seemed to be coming from all directions, even the ground. She looked around, terrified of what could be causing this much of a disruption out of nowhere, but it stopped before she could find it. There was no time to feel relief, however, as it came back hundreds of times stronger before she could even feel the tiniest bit of relief. Shelby felt her mind rolling inside her cranium, and she desperately glanced around to find the source. Her eyes came to a stop on Akane’s titanic pink lips as they bent and contorted above her, and she felt sick. All of this was being caused by a mere conversation.
Though she was sure that she would be destroyed by the force of their voices, Shelby was never killed by the power of their unintentional sonic assault. In her current state, that was the greatest disappointment she could get.
“So are you going to grow me back now or what?” Gina demanded of the woman looming over her, oblivious of the torment she was causing below. Being shorter than anyone else had been unthinkable to her all her life, let alone tiny. As young as twelve she knew she would outgrow her oldest sister, and she never hesitated to heap mockery on those shorter than her. There was especially no quarter for that flea she had brought back while they were dating, whom Gina secured for herself. She was going to be the tallest, and she was going to have the admiration of the smallest.
Akane did not see things her way. “No,” she simply replied, then paused. She ought to elaborate. “There are still dozens of people in that tank, and you’re responsible for them being there.” Her hand gestured toward the terrarium against the opposite wall. “Many of them are even left from your reign of terror. Until every single one of them is back to their original size and with their family, it would be irresponsible for me to even think about giving you a single inch.”
“But I’m a giantess!” Gina protested, stomping her foot. “My destiny is to tower over everyone else, and it is beneath my dignity to…”
Akane slapped the table, cutting her off. Her strike made Shelby’s joints pop and loosen as the force of an earthquake never before felt by humans ploughed into her, but nobody heard her cries of surprise and pain. “You don’t look like a giantess to me,” Akane replied. She regarded the puny blond on the table with contempt. She had no interest in Gina’s destiny, as she called it, or reinforcing the tiny madwoman’s delusions. Her first task, above everything else, was helping the people she had hurt.
“It’s not about size, it’s about attitude!” Gina shot back. “I’m more than a giantess, I’m a goddess. The people in that terrarium worship me, and they need me more than I need them!”
“Is that so?” Akane reached out with her free hand and very carefully plucked Gina up by the collar of her shirt, letting her dangle freely in her grip. Shelby, barely recovered from the last calamity, screamed and took cover as the sky was falling, but it stopped several miles or so from landing on her. The largest woman deftly plucked Gina from the table and held her in front of her face, dropping her pen with an earth-rending clatter to Shelby so she could pay attention to the temporarily-embarrassed giantess.
“If you’re a goddess, smite me.” Akane glared at the tiny tyrant in her grasp, daring her to do something, anything. “It must be in your power, right? I doubt you, so you can strike me down whenever you want.” She could see Gina pouting, despite her diminished size. Akane let the challenge sit a moment before smirking. “I remain here, unsmoten. What’s the hold up?”
“Smiting people isn’t in my powers!” Gina proclaimed. “I’m the goddess of size, you see, not smiting disbelievers. It would be inappropriate for me to impinge on another deity’s portfolio.”
“I see,” came Akane’s reply, accompanied by a short giggle. “Well then, who’s in charge of smiting people? Maybe you can tell them about my disloyalty and they can smite me for you, really teach me a lesson.”
“Roni,” Gina answered. “If you take me to her I can get this whole thing cleared up, and she’ll smite you good!” She bellowed it with such confidence, like she thought that would actually work.
“Now Gina,” Akane began calmly, “you know I can’t let you and Roni see each other. You’d just grow each other back to your old sizes and start terrorizing people again. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.” She looked at Gina swinging helplessly beneath her pinched grip. Akane took no pleasure from her impotent fury, though it was funny. In truth, it broke her heart to be mean to anyone, even Gina, but she had her priorities.
“Well then,” Gina started, “grow me back yourself.” She waited for Akane to burst out laughing, but that never came. “I can double the rate you get these people out of my room and back to their families for nothing, and I can get my old life back!”
“What did I just tell you about being born yesterday?” Akane asked. Though she admired Gina’s persistence, she was starting to feel a little insulted. “Your old life involved tormenting people smaller than you, and you clearly haven’t learned not to do that. If I grew you by any significant amount, you’d just get Roni and start that cycle again, and I’d be out sending someone home. Besides, I’ve already grown someone back today, remember? You shouted an awful lot about how it should have been you, at least.”
Gina fumed inwardly. Yes, she remembered how that ungrateful bitch Zoe had grown until she dwarfed her in size, hugged Akane around the thighs, and then ran out of the room crying. It was only a few hours ago, and she made a mental note of everyone who escaped. “Why not just let me off this table, then?” Gina suggested. “It’s much too restrictive for me, and I’d like to be able to walk around my room at least.”
Akane fixed Gina with a stare from her big, black eyes. She really wished Gina would give her more credit. “So that as soon as I turn my back, you can go running to Roni and become a terror again? Come on, I can read you like a book. The first time I left to go to the bathroom I’d come back to you filling the room and eager to prove to the world that you’re a goddess again, whatever that means to you.”
“Okay, how about this,” Gina came back almost immediately, as though it were her idea to begin with. “Let me off the table for an hour a day. It can be whenever you want, and you can watch me the whole time. I just want to stretch my legs more than I can here! Plus, how is keeping me trapped on this table any more cruel than me keeping people trapped in that terrarium over there, hm?”
Akane considered the tiny woman’s words. There was no doubt that she was far from as cruel as Gina, since she had never eaten or crushed any of the people who would otherwise be at her feet. However, an hour of freedom, completely under her supervision, couldn’t hurt, right? Maybe it would even teach Gina the lesson that power isn’t what you take from people, but what you give them. “Fine,” she hissed through gritted teeth, “an hour a day. But only because I’m so magnanimous. If you try anything – and I mean, the slightest bit of misdirection – you’ll be looking up at Shelby again. Got it?”
Gina nodded feverishly, making her limp body sway in Akane’s grasp. “Yeah, of course!” she shouted. “I don’t even think I could traverse the whole room in an hour, so you have nothing to worry about. At least, my tiny boyfriend could never manage it.” Akane rolled her eyes at that last bit. Despite all her teachings, she still had not gotten it through her head that the shrunken person she kept prisoner for six years and regularly threatened to kill was not, in fact, her boyfriend.
“We might as well start your first hour now then, huh?” Akane offered, already carrying Gina away from the table. “I mean, you’re so eager to get to it and all.” Akane lowered the former titaness below the table and along her tall black socks, expecting a shout of protest any second. When it did not come, she told herself that maybe she did not have any plans to immediately betray her, and that was enough. At the very least, it gave her time to plan for the eventuality that she did betray her.
Gina obediently allowed herself to be slowly lowered along Akane’s shin, not even protesting once she was down to her ankle. When her feet finally set down on the hard plastic mat around the chair she let out a small yelp of surprise, inaudible to someone whose ears were hundreds of feet above her. In good time, an hour a day would be all she needed. “There, was that so hard?” she yelled up at the gigantic Japanese girl. Though she stood even with the toes of her gigantic brown loafers, she would not allow herself to feel small. “It’s not like I asked you to make me gigantic again!”
“No, you just did everything short of that,” Akane retorted. She was far from trusting Gina, but she was confident in her abilities to make sure nothing got out of hand. Hopefully, she would learn that the true power she wanted, whether it be giantess, goddess, whatever, came from the kindness with which she treated people, and not the punishments she was able to mete out from her sheer size. “You might want to start moving now, your hour’s already started.”
Gina did not waste her time nodding enthusiastically. Instead, she began walking a path around Akane’s chair, pretending that her primary interest really was in simply getting off the great plateau above. The whole time she felt Akane’s dark eyes on her, not wanting to give her even a second unobserved. That was fine. After all this time being tiny, she could wait a bit longer to make her move.
Shelby had followed the proceedings with a vested interest. Once she had returned to her original size, there’s no way Gina would hold a grudge, right? Regardless, it was better than taking her chances with her current circumstances, where she’d starve to death in weeks. She grabbed onto the sole of Gina’s shoe before she was lifted away from her grasp, a titaness taken by what might as well be a planet. If that blond bully would get out of this, she told herself, so would she.
While she dangled, Shelby had more than enough time to take shelter in one of the pits of Gina’s shoes. She crawled into the opening as though it were a cave, and there was more than enough space for her to stretch out. It did not take long for her to make herself comfortable. Despite her bluster, Shelby also believed this was a momentary embarrassment for the giantess who had given her everything, including friendship. Once Gina was on the ground, she kicked her feet up and relaxed. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, Gina would be back on top, and she intended to ride that wave as high as she could. It was a damn sight better than waiting to die on the table.