Gina looked down at the terrarium by her feet, one of the few objects she hadn’t grown along with herself and Veronica. It was dinky, small enough to fit in her hand if she wanted to pick it up in its entirety. Even though it was no longer practical for her to play with the shrunken people inside, she had added two new buildings to it after the gymnasium. Under cover of night, she and Veronica had gone out and acquired the neighboring houses, taking them and their inhabitants as trophies. They were just dressing on top of the real prize, however. With the houses gone, they were free to expand the house – and themselves – to over twice their previous size.
A small, mouse-like voice reached Gina from below. “Didn’t you learn anything?” it shouted. “More size won’t solve your problems! Whether you’re two inches or two miles tall, you’ll be plagued by the same issues. You need to look inside yourself and find peace, only then can you be happy with yourself and get satisfaction as you get bigger. The only way to rightfully become the goddess you claim to be is to act with the kindness, compassion, and foresight that title deserves!”
After a moment of searching Gina found the source of the pathetic mewling. Akane, a little taller than her ankle, was standing on the outside of her left leg, shouting a bunch of new age platitudes about forgiveness and compassion that she’d heard at least a hundred times before. If she didn’t listen when she was inside the terrarium herself, there was no way she’d give the ideas any mind when Akane was smaller than her foot. She was a goddess again, and she could define that however she saw fit.
Gina bent forward and swiped a hand at Akane, slapping her whole body with an open palm. Her fingers snapped shut, seizing the smaller woman in her grip, and brought her to the withering gaze of her clear blue eyes. Much to her disappointment, she was not struggling to get free or begging to be let go. She simply met Gina’s amused look with a harsh, intense stare, demonstrating her resolve in the face of impossible odds.
“And who are you to tell me what a goddess is and isn’t?” Gina boomed. Her voice had taken on a deep, rumbling quality due to her enlarged vocal cords. It was a new development for it to be a universal quality for her, and she liked it. She could imagine the masses trembling at her feet as she issued terrible proclamations in it. “No one’s ever worshipped you. Your puny body could never command that level of devotion, and you lack the will for it. Even when you were in control, you were a victim.”
Akane kept her eyes closed during Gina’s tirade to keep the repeated blasts of hot air out of them. She waited for the monologue to stop rattling her bones before starting on a reply. Gina always did love the sound of her own voice. “How willfully ignorant can you be?” she shouted, her calm façade cracking. “It’s not about how big you are, it never has been and never will be! Even if you had such power, you’re such a wretched person that you’d lose it immediately because you’re nothing but a giant bully!”
“That so?” Gina asked, a mercurial smile tugging the corner of her lips. She squeezed Akane, making the smaller woman grimace under her constricting fingers. Akane slapped uselessly at Gina’s hand, unable to make a chip the stony grip. “You’re a prisoner, trapped in a cage of your own self-righteous beliefs. I know that you’re not too stupid to realize that there is no such thing as good or evil, only power and those who use it, and those who get used by it. You just won’t admit it, because then all the time you’ve spent being a goodie two-shoes would have been a waste.”
Akane squirmed in the giantess’s grip, futilely trying to loosen the hold running from her shoulders down to her knees. Her efforts only made Gina’s grasp stronger, tightening the fingers around her chest. She took quick, shallow breaths, but every time she exhaled Gina’s hand filled the gap left by her receding diaphragm, squeezing a little tighter. Even though she struggled to breathe, she maintained her defiant spirit. “You’re a… coward,” she sputtered, despite her light-headedness. “Abusing people smaller than you… to make up for… how empty you are inside.” Spitting the final fragment took the last of what Akane had, and she passed out.
Gina considered the limp woman in her hand, her head lolling to the side. If she continued holding her just like this, in a matter of minutes she would suffocate, sparing herself from untold how many boring rants about ethics and morality in the future. Even easier, she could simply drop her and let internal bleeding from the impact take care of the rest. All she had to do was release her fingers and the ever-present pest would be out of her hair forever.
That would be too easy, though, and Gina wanted Akane to see her demise coming. She wanted to break her, make her admit defeat and beg her through tears to stop. Ever since Akane used weak, under-handed tactics to get the better of her she had dreamt of seeing her reduced to a wailing wretch at her feet, shattering her worldview, and making her admit that she had been wrong all along. Only then would she deliver the killing blow, and it would be slow and painful.
Still, there was no reason to make her life easy before then, either. Gina and Veronica had enlarged most of the furniture aside from the terrarium to be appropriate to their size, including the table at the far end of the room. With two long strides she crossed the distance and looked down at the flat surface below her. At around thirty feet tall it did not quite reach her waist, but it was the perfect place to strand a nuisance. She roughly tossed Akane onto the table and took pleasure at how long it took her to roll to a stop.
The stairs creaked under thundering footsteps, and Gina turned to see Veronica stoop through the doorway. She stuffed the second half of a large pizza into her mouth, easily fitting it between her lips. Her teeth ground it into mush in only a few seconds of chewing, then she easily swallowed it. Years ago, that much food would have kept her fed for an entire weekend. Now, it was only enough to stave off hunger for a few hours.
“Aw, were you having fun without me?” Veronica asked once she spotted Akane sprawled out on the table. Her voice was normally like a wave of velvet, but at her size other people would feel as though they were being draped in it. Gina had made sure that she was the larger of the two by a foot, but it was a difference only they noticed. Every other human on the planet would be nipping at their ankles, the thought of which alone could keep them warm at night. Neither of them so much as entertained the idea that they were done growing, but they figured they had reached a satisfying plateau on their way toward towering over cities.
“Yeah, I was,” Gina replied, forcing herself to act embarrassed. “Sorry, Roni. She’s just so small, there’s not enough of her to go around! Tell you what, later on we’ll go get a normal so you can have your fun, too.” She gestured toward the glass box on the floor, smaller than one of their phones now. “Why don’t you take it out on some of the tinies in the meantime?”
“They’re not very fun anymore,” Veronica answered. “They’re so small I can barely see them, much less hear their litanies of devotion while I decide whether or not to crush one. Hell, the last time I got one out I either lost it or couldn’t even feel it get squished. They just don’t do it for me anymore, you know?” She had been waiting for a chance to show off how powerful she was now, and going after the same pool of tiny, so-called people was not giving her that opportunity.
“Suit yourself,” Gina said flippantly. “Akane’s going to need some time to recover once she wakes up though, I think I cracked a rib this time. Unless you can snatch a jogger or something, it’s the tiny worshippers or nothing for a while.”
Veronica grunted and crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at the terrarium. She could barely see that, much less its dozens of inhabitants. To her, their inch-tall bodies were mere grains of sand. “Why do we even still have that?” she asked. “We’re already giantesses and we’re still growing, shouldn’t we get bigger toys? It won’t be long until normals are as small to us as the tinies used to be.”
Gina thought about it for a moment and blew a strand of blond hair out of her face while she cast a forlorn look at the terrarium. “Sentimental value, I guess,” she finally said, sighing. “That was where my tiny boyfriend lived, you know? It’s where people first started worshipping me. I guess I kind of consider it a holy site for people dedicated to us.”
“Listen to yourself,” Veronica began. “We’re going to have entire continents as our domains one day, and you’re worried about one little fish tank infested by people the size of bugs? We’ll have other holy sites and millions of times as many worshippers, there’s no need to hold on to this. It won’t be long until we’re able to designate sacred ground as we see fit, and no one will be able to say differently.”
Gina rubbed her chin in thought. While the terrarium had played a crucial role in her personal apotheosis and rebirth, she had to admit they outgrew its usefulness about thirty feet ago. The last thing she wanted was to be tied down by tradition, even if it was something of great importance to her. “I guess you’re right,” she reluctantly admitted. “It had a good run, but it’s time for us to give Tiny Town one last send-off before we view every town as Tiny Town.”
“That’s the spirit!” Veronica exclaimed, glad she finally got Gina to come around to her point of view on something. “I can do the honors if you think you might be too invested.” While she wanted to crush something substantial enough to feel it crunch under her foot, she did not want to seem too eager to do it, either. Neither of them saw it as ending scores of lives, because they had stopped seeing the people forced to live in the terrarium as people long ago.
“No, I’ll do it,” Gina offered. “I could use the catharsis of smashing that old thing. Besides, it’ll be symbolic. A definitive break between my time as a burgeoning giantess, and my ascension to being revered by every miserable soul on this planet.” She stepped toward the tank, and Veronica wanted to hurriedly smash it to bits. It would only take a moment, and nothing could be more satisfying to her than destroying where she’d been forced to draw her consolation prizes from over the past month. Her sense of honor stayed her foot, however. The offer to let Gina do it had been genuine, even if she would much rather do it herself.
Gina placed one of her black flats parallel to the tank while she got into position. Looking at it now, it was difficult to believe it and its inhabitants had ever kept her entertained. The whole thing would fit inside her shoe with room to spare, and the tinies within were nothing more than fleas without the durability. None of the inhabitants ever meant anything to her aside from her tiny boyfriend and Roni.
Gina stomped her other foot down onto the terrarium, buckling its metal frame and smashing panes of glass. The tinies inside must have been panicking, but she coiled her leg again and prepared to bring down the thunder. Her foot slammed onto the tank, buckling its legs while bowing the rest of the frame out. Glass shards rained down to the floor while she pressed her foot down harder, bending the weakened supports with a small, metallic creak. The entire structure finally gave way beneath her force, collapsing into a flattened disk of ruined metal. If any tinies had survived her onslaught, they were bound to be eviscerated by the thousands of shards of broken glass or perish from exposure.
In the twisted wreckage, Gina spotted a small mound of paper that had been skillfully hidden behind the terrarium. She bent over and scooped it up on two fingers, brushing the tiny shards of glass harmlessly aside. Gina carefully lifted the pile to where she could see it while glass splinters fell to the floor far below. By the time she could make out any of the print it was just the envelopes and a few stray fragments from the tank.
Gina had to squint to make out the tiny writing on the envelopes. It was packet after packet of junk mail, unceremoniously tossed to the ground below by a light flick from her index finger. She was perfectly capable of dealing with termites on her own, and the unlimited credit card in her mother’s name made any pre-approved offers unnecessary. It all looked fairly new, which Gina thought odd since she hadn’t collected the mail since before she got shrunk.
At the bottom of the pile, she found her answer. A sparkly silver envelope was all that remained on Gina’s index finger, and after a long look at it she saw that it was addressed to Akane. Strangely, it had been opened, leaving a ragged edge of ripped paper along the top. She carefully squeezed the envelope, dumping its contents onto the tip of her finger. In relatively large, bold letters on the front which she read aloud it said, “Save the date.”
Precisely maneuvering her fingernail, Gina pried the card open and loudly read its contents. “Dear loved one,” it began. “You are cordially invited to the wedding of Fulda Stein and…” the second name was written in a script too small for her to read no matter how much she focused, but she could guess who it was. “We would be honored if you joined us to witness the joy of our union…” The address was only a couple blocks away, and it would be happening in a week. “We hope you are able to join us for the most beautiful day of our lives!” it concluded, and Gina flicked it away with a scoff.
“Akane!” Gina bellowed, and a weak moan answered her. “Why is mail addressed to you getting delivered to my house?” Even had her toy been lucid, she did not expect an answer to that. “And what’s this about my sister getting married to my boyfriend?” Her outrage was genuine, despite how unfounded it was. “I think I should be more in the loop on this. Akane, why don’t you text Fulda or my boyfriend and tell them they can stay here before their wedding?”
“Ugh, but…” Akane sputtered, but Gina was hearing none of it.
“But nothing!” she interrupted. “They’re going to be here and that’s the end of it, got it?” Reluctantly, Akane texted Fulda and told her that she would be more than willing to host her, considering that it was her house and all. Gina closed her eyes and imagined the surprise on her sister’s face when she found out she had been set up.