“Well, you came to me. What do you want?”

A nervous, unremarkable-looking man was sitting in front my desk, wearing – I kid you not – a trench coat, fedora, and oversized sunglasses. I get that my line of work is only technically legal, but there are definitely better ways of going unnoticed than looking like a spy novel cliché. I mean, it was fucking July, for god’s sake.

The man hesitated, apparently uncomfortable with my straightforward attitude toward this appointment. Maybe he was wondering why a woman whose business specialized in catering to the world’s more outlandish fetishes wasn’t more demur, or maybe this was his first time soliciting. It would explain the painful attempt at going incognito.

“I, uh… want to see you grow into, um… a giant.”

“I’m here to serve,” I replied. I kept the smirk off my face. As a specialist in domination, I try not to be obvious with my sarcasm until after I know that’s what the client is into. (It’s the professional way to be.) “But I’ll need a few more details than that. The first thing is how tall you want me to become.”

This time, he only paused for a quick second before answering. “I’m not sure. I mean, what I really want to is to see you while you’re growing, so I’m not sure if there’s an actual stopping point for how tall you’d be.”

Ah. I could work with that, although he probably didn’t want me to grow to, for example, the size of a mountain. There were very few people on the planet who could afford that (and, at least from what I’ve heard in industry circles, they wouldn’t be into that sort of thing, anyway).

“I see. Are there any details to my growing you want to see?”

I was expecting to hear that he wanted me to wear a bikini so that he could watch it strain and snap under the force of my expansion, or that he wanted to see me grow until I couldn’t fit inside a room, causing the unfortunate building to explode as I shot upward. Some guys – and it seems like it’s almost always a man – even want to be in the building when that happens. In my experience, most people with giantess fantasies don’t want to die under a piece of falling plywood, but you can never tell. And if there’s a man who gets hard from the thought of death by flying drywall, then I’ll be absolutely happy to take his money and make it happen.

He paused. Again.

“Well, there is something….”

***************************************************************

There are a lot of things I can do, and to be frank turning into a giantess is probably one of the less interesting things. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lot of fun to go rampaging through a city like you’re Godzilla, but there’s just not a lot of subtlety. In theory, I can do exactly the same thing to normal-sized people as a giantess as I can do to shrunken people at my usual height, but in practice it’s louder, out in the open, and just in general a little too obvious for my tastes. There’s nothing wrong with a little exhibitionism (so to speak) in my field, but… it always feels harder to be experimental as a giantess. It’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m putting on a show.

On the plus side, all of that also makes it one of the easier client requests to handle. There are always variations, of course, and I (usually) appreciate that, if for no other reason than the novelty of it. Sometimes a client wants something more bizarre than average; there was this one guy who wanted me to grow to the size of the Eiffel Tower and then add his body to a vajazzling design (which he’d come up with himself), after which I would strut down the Champs-Élysées like a nude supermodel. Whatever floats your boat, dude.  

As for my most recent client’s special request, it was… odd. I thought it was actually sort of funny, but it was basically pointless. I’m still not sure what the payoff is supposed to be. It seems like whatever punchline he’s looking for, if there ever is a punchline, he’s not going to be there to see it land. But like I said: whatever floats his boat. I mean, I’d already been paid – a lot, and in cash. At that point, he could’ve asked me to do any number of unspeakable things to his boat, and let’s just say that I’m able to do pretty much anything to your dinghy when I’m a hundred feet tall.

So when he described what he wanted, I said sure.

When I arrived at the address he’d given me – basically in the middle of nowhere – I got out of my car and glanced around until I found him lurking under a tree. It was, in fact, one of the only trees in the area. A polite description of the place would be “prairie and streams,” but that would be giving it too much credit. It was mud. To be fair, I’d known that there would be something like that, and I’d known I would have to get a little dirty. It’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before, and honestly this was going to be easier than most of my jobs anyway.

He was still nervous-looking and still wearing the hat and sunglasses, but at least he’d ditched the coat. Maybe he’d realized the creepier connotations of wearing a trench coat to a session with a fetish worker? I don’t think he really wanted to talk to me, which… isn’t uncommon, I guess. Sometimes the client just wants to watch, and it’s harder to objectify me when I’m a person first and their fantasy second. As long as they keep their end of things respectful, it’s basically fine with me. All I ask is for professional courtesy (and also their money).

But I needed to check one final thing with him. “Ready for me to start?”

He gave me a thumbs up.

I took off my shoes and started walking.

Growing is weird, not because the sensation is overwhelming or strange, but because it’s neither. Growing feels like nothing except that my point of view keeps going higher and higher. In terms of smoothness, it’s almost like riding up an elevator. Maybe it’s different for other people in my line of work; our techniques are trade secrets, and we don’t share much with each other. But for me, growth is only slightly more effort than walking. And when I’m growing while walking, the effort is barely noticeable at all.

What is noticeable is the constant change of perspective. The human brain is able to explain away all sorts of sensory inputs in order to make sense of the world, but it just can’t trick you into thinking you’re still five-foot four when you’re ten feet tall. I mean, fifteen feet tall. I mean, twenty feet… you know what I’m getting at.

By the time I was about thirty feet tall, I’d been walking for five minutes at most, but I’d already walked over half a mile from where I’d started. I turned around, looking back at the lengthening strides between my increasingly large, increasingly deep footprints. I could just barely make out the tiny, distant figure of my client. He must have noticed that I’d stopped – to be fair, what else would he be doing except watching me? – because he waved at me. He might have been waving at me to keep going, but it was hard to tell with him looking so small at that distance. Or at that height. Probably both, I guess.

I kept going. After another five minutes, I was almost two miles away and just overtaking Nancy Archer in height. I didn’t stop walking for an hour, although I did end up going in a gigantic circle. At the rate I’d been growing, I could have easily walked a hundred miles, and I was trying to stay within the bounds of the alleged prairie. I don’t know exactly how tall I was by the time I’d made a full loop. The tree my client had parked himself under looked like it was a few inches tall, so probably… five hundred feet? My client looked like he couldn’t have been more than a fraction of an inch.

I’ll give him credit, though. If a five-hundred-foot tall giantess had been walking toward me, I don’t know how I would have reacted. He seemed to be pretty calm about it, although to be fair I absolutely could not make out his facial expression from my height. He wasn’t fleeing in abject terror, at least.

I looked back. My feet had left deep, clear impressions in the ground behind me. I don’t know how he expected this to work, but hey, I’d done my part. I let myself slide down to my original height, acknowledged the client with a nod, and left. 

***************************************************************

Scientific papers are academic papers, no matter when they were written. The essential parts – the findings, the pleas for more funding, the fights over whose name will go first – are timeless. They are also characteristically dry; if you don’t speak the language of scientists, the words do little to convey the sense of wonder that made them happen. And if you do know how scientists write, then you might understand the confusion screaming from this excerpt from a future archaeology report:

Radiometric techniques suggest that the footprints found in central North America predate the late Anthropocene uranium boundary by approximately 500 years (95% confidence). Structural analysis suggests no formal differences in shape between the subject footprints and contemporaneous examples. Along the length of the track, individual footprints increase in length 120% relative to previous steps. Gait analysis suggests that the tracks belong to a single individual, with individual strides increasing approximately 120% relative to previous stride. The depth of each print is approximately 172% deeper relative to previous. Prints range in length from .15m to 14m. Additional research is required.