The pure circle of the moon was as tranquil as the quiet night, interrupted only by a silhouette breezing underneath it. A woman glided across roads of houses, her descent leading her to skim across the variety of roofs until her landing point was in sight. She flew on a broom that was clutched between her legs, held steady with her left hand while the other tapped up a text message on her phone: “Almost home. Unlock the door please.” Hanging off the front of her broom was a plastic bag stuffed with snacks and drinks, perfect for an overnight study session.

Luciene had hosted the get-together for her friends in preparation for their upcoming college exams, despite herself having little need to study so diligently. Her craft was especially refined for her age, having been brought up well in a long line of successful witches. She was not as regal as her mother and certainly unlike the mothers before her, but she was not without elegant habits. Her flight posture was poise and unwavering compared to others her grade, presenting a clean image of a witch with long, flowing black hair. This was no age for robes and such, not outside of ceremonies, and so Luciene had traveled to the convenience store wearing a casual combination of a gray sweater and tight jeans. Even after her trip concluded with her landing on the walkway up to her door, she appeared completely unfrazzled by the wind, cooly approaching her home as if she had walked peacefully the entire time.

But her graceful strides ended abruptly at the door. Instead of smoothly entering her home like expected, she was locked out. She frowned, but thought little of it. It had been the point of texting her housemate Vivin before arriving, but it was a trivial annoyance. As both hands were occupied with the broom and bag, Luciene whistled a spell to levitate her house keys from her pocket and into the lock.

Immediately upon entering the entry hall, however, another unexpected development greeted her. Luciene blinked and raised her nose in confusion; an entire set of clothes, boots and all, lay spread out in the middle of the path. The door rocked into Luciene as it tried to close into her stunned state. She closed her eyes, exhaled, and quietly closed the door behind her. “What have they been up to…?”

It wasn’t as though alcohol could explain why someone had just abandoned their clothes in the hallway. No one was drinking, not on a study night. Luciene inspected the pile while she propped her broom into a corner, recognizing the clothes as Vivin’s; the boots with the fuzzy insoles gave as much away, but there was also the black graphic tee and pink skirt she had been wearing earlier. Her housemate was known for some slobbish tendencies, but never something as blatant as this. Luciene sighed, “Is this a joke?” It was a bit funny, she admitted, but still untidy. She bundled the pile with one hand, then tossed it towards the den so that it was out of the way. “Vivin can clean that up herself.”

Having slipped out of her loafers and stepped further into her home, Luciene realized just how quiet and still everything was. When she left, there was plenty of activity as the five settled in for a night of studying. The only missing factor was a lack of food and drinks, hence her trip to the store. Either they were all immersed into their notes and books, or something was afoot; she knew better than to suspect the former. Not even a thump could be heard from upstairs where she last left them. She called up to the second level, “I’m back… Is everyone still awake?”

Luciene stopped short of the staircase upon glancing up its steps. She grimaced at what she saw, yet another set of clothes strewn down the middle of the flight. “Whose is it this time?” she wondered, slowly traversing up. The purple jacket and black pants suggested it was Cretia, but it made even less sense that these clothes would end up so collectively on the stairs. Her footfalls became heavier as she progressed upward, becoming less patient with whatever game her friends were playing -- nothing normal could come of her friends stripping suddenly while she was away.

There was a motion from the top of the stairs, the first sign of life Luciene had come across. She first recognized the flash of red hair, an unmistakable trait of Lorelle’s, but there was a staggering change to her friend since having last seen her. The railing of the second floor was now taller than her, and the autumn brown scarf she wore was wrapped around her like an oversized robe, much of its length dragged behind her. It was no illusion, Luciene knew, but a curse that had actually shrunk Lorelle to a fraction of her height.

“Oh, thank goodness, you’re home!” Lorelle hurriedly praised, bouncing against the railing with excess energy. She was always the liveliest and quirkiest of her friends, but more so than usual was she flustered by what had happened. “Something weird happened, Luciene! I don’t know where the others are!”

“A-Alright, but, slow down--” Luciene warned, but it went unheard. In her rush of worry, Lorelle tripped over her scarf while coming down the first step. Her little body tipped forward suddenly, and Luciene lunged up to catch her, her movement handicapped by the collection of snacks she still held. However uncomfortable the predicament was, Luciene had saved Lorelle from a nasty fall, embracing her in both arms. Although Lorelle was in the range of thirty centimeters tall, she still had enough weight to make Luciene wobble with imbalance.

Lorelle gasped, “Shit, th-that could have been bad! Th-Thank you, Luciene! It’s great that you’re back! This is nuts!” She squirmed in Luciene’s hug, nearly slipping out from her scarf entirely. Luciene had to grasp her with both hands wrapped around the small body, as if holding up a large, writhing doll. Lorelle’s flustered expression emphasised her fragility in this predicament. “I-I was just in the study with Freya when-- when this!”

Luciene fell back one step in her fight against confusion. “... Did someone cast a spell?” she reasonably asked. “And where’s Freya?”

“Not one of us, n-no,” Lorelle stammered, “and Freya, she-- I don’t know, but she was in the study with me. I went looking for anyone just a minute ago, b-but…”

“It’s clearly magic, though,” Luciene muttered. “Maybe a potion? Or…”

Her foot then twitched in response to what felt like a bite. The fidget kicked something, she realized, and her and Lorelle’s attention was brought down to the scatter of clothes on the staircase. Luciene was surprised to have uncovered an especially tiny Cretia partially under her foot, wrestling with the gray wool socks she wore. Her toes shivered and curled from Cretia’s squirming, but situated on the staircase the way she was, she couldn’t immediately lift off of her, nor did she have the reaction to -- Lorelle may have been small, but Cretia was only six or five centimeters tall, dwarfed by Luciene’s foot.

“No, no! St-Stop, d-don’t move!” Cretia whined. She pushed up against the toes and her legs kicked as best they could in their pinned position. “Ahgh-- erk! Luciene!” Her eyes shot open, her worry blended with relief now that her friend had noticed her before anything devastating occurred. She tugged at the fabric of the sock, “I-I’m sorry, Luciene, j-just don’t step any harder…!”

Luciene burned with an embarrassed blush, never the one to intentionally hurt others. Cretia was an especially sad victim to see, being the meekest of Luciene’s friends. She was also the least capable when it came to magic, but had the drive to improve, especially when she was around talent like Luciene and Vivin. But now, transformed into such a state, Cretia was more feeble than ever, stripped of her size and put out of reach of her magic.

Luciene’s foot leapt off her belittled friend and settled on the next step down. “How did you end up there?” she asked accusingly, flustered by the situation. She looked again to Lorelle in her arms, wondering just as well why the two appeared so different. Lorelle was at least five times Cretia’s size when normally their height difference was only a couple inches.

“I was just going down the stairs!” Cretia began, retracing her steps from the past few minutes. She had started in the study with the others, when next, “I heard Vivin go down to get the door for you, s-so I came down too, because I was still hungry…” She turned to her alien surroundings as to fill in the rest of the gaps of what occurred. Each stair was as tall as a street light, and her clothes fell upon them like an avalanche stopped in mid-motion. It was from that detail, however, that shame completely enveloped her, only then comprehending that she was completely naked.

A tiny, shrill shriek was just sharp enough to make Luciene and Lorelle wince. Cretia cried and scrambled to a sleeve of her jacket, blanketing it over her nudity. “D-Don’t look at me, Luciene!” she snapped, feeling the weight of the giant’s gaze upon her. She shuddered with her head burrowed into the fabric, “You should have just stepped on me and ended it! I’d rather be dead!”

Luciene provided a nervous grin, offering just a slither of comfort. Cretia often acted this way around her, though for what reason, she didn’t understand. Somewhat awkwardly, Luciene cradled Lorelle with one arm while the other reached down. Cretia jumped when several trucks’ worth of snacks and sodas in a blimp-sized bag landed on the step above her, slid down from Luciene’s extended arm. “N-No, d-don’t--!” she whimpered, not yet ready to be touched in her current state, but Luciene scooped her into her palm without hesitation. Cretia coiled into herself for cover, ever aware that her exposed body was being handled effortlessly by her friend.

“Do you know what happened? Why everyone shrunk?” Luciene inquired, bringing Cretia level with her neck. Cretia was washed with wonder anew, however, gawking at Lorelle’s size. Relatively, Lorelle was a small giant, but still impressively tall underneath her cloak of a scarf. Yet this larger person was huddled into the more massive Luciene, creating a trippy effect that reemphasized the staggering height differences.

In the end, Luciene’s tenderness won through to calm Cretia enough to answer. Cretia stuttered, “I-It… was, maybe, the confections… probably…”

“Confections?” Luciene repeated. She glanced at the bag weighing down her wrist -- wasn’t the whole point of her leaving to retrieve food that they didn’t have?

“It was the candy?!” Lorelle sparked. Cretia trembled into Luciene’s fingers. “You didn’t tell us it was magical, Cretia!”

“I-I didn’t think it’d do this!” Cretia replied. “I mean, th-they were just supposed to make you lighter -- lose weight! A-A treat you can eat without… feeling guilty!” She weakly shrugged, biting hard on her lip. “You all said you were starving--”

“Cretia! Vivin was chowing down on them! Something could have happened to her!” Lorelle recalled as much when Cretia first revealed the tin canister full of green-swirled candies the size of marbles. Both Vivin and Freya had taken handfuls right away to stave their appetite at the time, but Vivin was especially impatient for Luciene’s return from the store. “That’s probably why you’re so small! You had more than me, right?”

“Yeah, th-that makes sense,” Cretia sniffled. “Gosh, that must mean that--”

“Vivin!” Luciene panicked and spun back to descend the stairs. Her passengers were brought along with her in the sudden motion, each grappling to the giant body however they could. Lorelle in particular was hugged tightly into Luciene’s chest, which then proceeded to bounce hard and fast as she raced back down to the entryway. Each step saw that her sweater-bound bust pounded into Lorelle, an exhausting experience that the shrunken woman protested against.

“Stop, Luci! Mmf, s-stop!” Lorelle complained, her voice muffled into her friend’s breasts. She pushed hard against the pillowy mass so that Luciene would have to slow down. “I-I can barely breathe like this…! Let me go…!”

Luciene stuttered, torn between actions. She carefully but hastily let Lorelle slip down to the staircase, still inching off in the direction of where Vivin’s clothes had been thrown aside. She waved Lorelle away, “Go find Freya! I’m getting Vivin, I-I may have thrown her across the room…!”

“You what?” Lorelle gasped, but Luciene wouldn’t clarify. Caught up in the urgency, Lorelle did as told and began the long climb up the large stairs, bundling the excess of her scarf up to her waist.

Luciene darted to the den, hesitating for only an instant to glance down the entryway. There was no sign of Vivin in the hall, and so before her momentum was gone, she continued to where the mess of clothes had been tossed. Her heartbeat froze with horror, her feet at the very edge of a forest of carpet fibers. How small did she become? Luciene had to ask, vainly sifting through the living area’s floor for signs of human life. Any careless steps from there on was at risk of stomping her housemate into nothing. In this pause, she made the wise decision to leave the bag of refreshments behind.

The utmost caution was exercised as Luciene tip-toed past the couch and towards Vivin’s clothes. Cretia observed from her hand, equally curious and concerned for their friend, but also amazed at how huge the house had become. It was as though she was riding a building that trucked through a flat plain disturbed by mountain-sized furniture. As Luciene squatted over the pile, Cretia imagined what the den had to look like for Vivin if she truly had shrunk the smallest of them all.

It was then that a distressing idea came to Cretia’s mind. “Err… Luciene? Wh-What if she’s too small?”

“Hm? Too small for what?” Luciene spoke tersely, concentrated on the graphic tee that she had pinched in her fingers.

“I mean, if she’s really that small, you might look right over her. Y-You might have stepped over her already…”

Luciene stiffened. Cretia was absolutely correct. If Vivin had become speck-sized, then this search was the equivalent of looking for a specific grain of dust. It was possible for Vivin to be hidden anywhere around her at this point, and the thought made her gut swirl, thinking too much of how someone could be looking up at her that very moment. But she wasn’t without ideas, and Cretia’s nervous movements had inspired a solution.

Lorelle shuffled across the second floor, winded from her ascent up the stairs but still pressing forward. Though her oversized scarf was clearly weighing her down, she refused to abandon it and become as naked as Cretia had. Even when she tripped over it and face-planted, she bounced back up and continued ahead, enduring her clumsiness in stride. Luciene’s study wasn’t a dangerous place, but she worried still for Freya, abandoned somewhere in that now-giant landscape of a room.

“How many did she eat?” Lorelle asked herself, finding the time to wonder such things. The hall to the study wasn’t long at all, normally, but she was only halfway across despite her hurry. She thought of when they were all hanging out and the moment that Cretia brought out the candies. Vivin had comically taken a handful all at once, but Freya was a habitual snacker, and she plucked one swirled candy every couple of minutes. Lorelle was left to worry if Freya, like Vivin, had shrunk to an abysmal state.

With all her weight, Lorelle pushed open the door with a grunt. The room’s features impressed her all over again with its tall bookcases and looming tables, but it was the work desk that she turned to immediately. A swivel chair sat idly at the desk, occupied only by a set of clothes draped over its seat. Lorelle bounced in that direction, confident she would find Freya still within her clothes.

Freya had been overwhelmed by the change in scenery. The quietest among her friend circle, she had her nose aimed into her tomes when the magic surprised them all. All of a sudden, she was ripped from her peaceful study session and thrown into a confusing nest of warm fabric. The darkness befuddled her, and she kicked and punched at the tarp-like clothes that she was spontaneously drowning in. Finding her way out of the many folds of fabric had taken a distressing amount of time, and her anxiety peaked at an all-new high upon the revelation. Luciene’s study had grown around her, and she was now a naked sprite trapped on an office chair the height of an office building.

Being naked did not bode well for her, and so Freya frantically bundled what she found around her for modesty. She then threw the pink fabric away from her; “M-M-My underwear?!” she realized. “E-Ew!” But it was the best she had, and she huddled into her panties. The creep of loneliness itched her back and she spun around in a circle, knotting herself up in the process. She was alone in the empty room, a dash of black hair to be found in a mess of clothes. “Who did this?! Wh-Where’d everyone go?”

“Freya!” A voice boomed from the corner where Lorelle had entered the study. Her arrival shocked Freya into bunkering into her clothes, but she turned around when she recognized the voice. She was greatly relieved to have a friend here, but she was startled by what she discovered. Lorelle hadn’t been immune to shrinking, but was not nearly as small as she was. The comparison was chilling; Freya was merely three centimeters tall, but Lorelle stood tall enough to be a giant in contrast.

And that giant was stomping towards her with surprising speed. Despite Lorelle’s shrunken form, her footsteps were heavy enough to rattle the floor up to where Freya was perched in the chair. She slowed to a stop just in front of the chair, sliding it forward slightly when she went to lean against it. Freya kept herself low, prepared as if the chair could crumble under Lorelle’s weight.

“Lorelle! D-Don’t move so much!” Freya frantically called up from her ducked position.

“It’s fine~ I’m glad I could find you!” Lorelle laughed some of her nervousness aside. “But, look at you! You ended up really tiny, you know.”

Freya scoffed under her breath, “As if I didn’t know…” She rose, but her wobbling feet wouldn’t see her rise past her knees. From her limited perspective, she tried to absorb the details of the room, but Lorelle swallowed most of her vision by standing so close to her. She grumbled, “What is this? Why are you so much bigger?”

Lorelle took a strange pride in that, raising her head in a gloat. “Heh, it was the candy that Cretia brought,” she explained. “She thought they would just make people lighter, but, you know Cretia… Try not to be too mad with her.”

“Mad? Well, maybe a little, but I’m impressed.” Freya examined herself, studying the magical effect her body was under. “This is a curse. Did she even mean to make a curse? This effect is fairly powerful.” It was Freya’s field of expertise, and the only magical craft she was exceptional at. Making and applying curses was an ancient art that had Freya intrigued by its complexities, but by accident had Cretia developed her own curse set into the candies she made. “Where did she get mixed up?”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Lorelle said, her chipper tune cracking at Freya’s concentration. “She’s pretty tiny like you too~ Come on, let’s not leave Luci worrying.”

“Oh, oh no,” Freya rejected, backing away with a fold of panties against her chest. Lorelle’s hand was raised but then hesitated back, waiting to pick her up. Freya shook her head, “I am not leaving like this… Maybe you don’t mind running around like a half-naked bimbo in someone else’s house, but I do. Just… Just come up here when everything is done.”

Lorelle whined, “That’s not what Luci asked. Come on,” she smiled and reached onto the seat, “this time you can’t sit in a corner and ignore us like you always do!”

“L-Lorelle, p-please…!” But Freya’s resistance was ignored. Five fingers as big as she was wrapped around her body, always beating her regardless of how she squirmed to avoid them. She felt weightless when carried into the air, revealed from the warmth of her clothes and exposed to the chill of conditioned air. Movement was entirely out of her control, her safety and balance both managed by Lorelle and her whims.

“Aww, you’re way lighter than I thought,” Lorelle noted, captivated with how it felt to have a whole person in her grasp. Freya barely moved at all, but Lorelle could still feel every twitch and shake tickle at her palm. She giggled with reddening cheeks, “You’re really cute like this! You look so~ grumpy, even when you’re so small…”

Freya slumped in Lorelle’s fist, beaten down by the weight of two eyes keenly running over her. Rather than fight her friend, she gritted her teeth and braved the teasing, but her patience was ruptured when the unstoppable fingers spread apart her arms in order to reveal her torso. “H-Hey, wh-what are you doing?!” she stammered. “P-Put my arms down! I’m naked!”

“Yeah…” Lorelle dully replied, turning Freya around in her grip. “I’ve never seen you naked before. I never noticed how big your boobs are… You’re always hunched over so badly.”

Freya burned pink with embarrassment, unable to pry herself free. Her breasts were out on display, a feature of herself that she normally kept hidden under shyness. Being caught nude was arguably the least of her worries in that moment, but it was all she could think about while the giant Lorelle studied her body so intently, so enthralled that she seemingly forgot about the others. “Lorelle? What about Luciene?”

Lorelle snapped out of her trance. “Right, right. Luci and the others would love to see this, too. They probably have no idea, either.” Though that wasn’t what Freya intended to urge, it at least spurred Lorelle back on track to go meet up with the others. “Hopefully they found Viv, but… if you became this small, then Viv, well…”

Distant and muffled rumbles from an outside world shook Vivin awake. She was sprawled out in no comfortable position, but the ground she was thrown upon was plush and welcoming, its softness wanting to lure Vivin back to sleep. But she couldn’t rest, not when she glanced at the unrecognizable environment, a landscape that intrigued her as much as it worried her. “Where-- What happened?” she groaned, feeling the leftover pains of something violent, something she could barely recall.

Was the door ever opened? Vivin instinctively checked her pocket for her phone, but she was naked -- a surprising fact she only just then learned. Was it a plane crash? An abnormal leap in logic, but what she remembered fit the experience. Rocketing through the air at unbelievable speeds in a twisting vehicle, and then the impact, like the entire planet falling apart. She looked again at her surroundings, and the notable lack of any plane. Magic, she could at least assume, definitely magic…

Vivin grimaced as she stood up. “Why is it so rank…?” she complained aloud despite the eerie loneliness. The ground was nothing very familiar, made of soft bushes that stretched all around this cavern that contained her. They weren’t plants, but some kind of cotton, tufts that were difficult to trudge through. She shook her head and covered her nose, too distracted by the odor to think much of anything else. It was familiar, for whatever horridness it actually was.

The conclusion dawned on Vivin, so striking that she stopped her aimless sifting through the cotton tufts. She wanted to collapse, but not when she knew where she was. “This… is my boot,” she scoffed, looking for evidence to say otherwise, but it was the only answer she could come to. The shape of this tunnel she was in and its one, wide-mouthed exit, and how the tufts were flattened down with traces of moisture in a distinctly shaped impression. The landscape had been formed by her, she realized, for this was the inside of her boot.

Her favorite pair of boots, no less, which she regretted entirely. She regretted wearing them that day, she regretted ever buying them. Had she known she would shrink suddenly and be trapped within them, she never would have enjoyed their stylish design, the cozy interior that was plush and welcoming -- it made her physically sick to continue going on in what she now comprehended was her own boot, tipped onto its side.

A constant thundering was heard beyond the leather walls. Booming footsteps and distorted voices, the movements of a normal sized person. Vivin could only assume that someone was rushing about in distress, figuring out what had happened. “Luciene,” she said, both with relief and despair in her tone. Of course, she thought, that it would be her housemate to be stepping around, effectively a giant as far as Vivin cared to imagine. Her and Luciene were rivals, so Vivin asserted. Childhood friends that both sought careers in magic, it was Luciene that inched ahead in everything; grades, commendations, and even in height, which was now grossly exaggerated. Vivin flinched at the thought of being rescued by Luciene, but being saved by a friend was better than wallowing in her own boot.

“This is freakin’ embarrassing,” Vivin griped, making slow progress towards the boot’s mouth. “How the hell did I get so small? Seriously, this is scary small. Who did this? Heh, seriously…” She shook her head, still under assault by the smell of her own lingering odor. “I’m gonna strangle whoever--”

The quaking grew steadily more powerful with each consecutive blast, culminating to an intensity that tripped Vivin off her feet. The light that seeped into the footwear shifted as the unseen giant outside neared it. Vivin’s breathing spiked as she feared being tossed around again, only adding to her ongoing bitterness with Luciene. There was a discussion, Vivin inferred, and a long pause. Finally, a shadow stretched into the fuzzy cove, and from around the lip of the boot entered Cretia, edging her way inside and riddled with hesitations.

“I-I don’t know, Luciene, th-this seems stupid…” Cretia whined, ducking her head under the roof of the boot. Her expression twisted sourly, surely affected by the scent. “Ughh… I don’t see her. Isn’t this far enough…?”

“No!” clapped a stern voice; its hugeness rattled Vivin, due to how it was Luciene’s. “You’ve made enough trouble. Go in.”

Cretia groaned, “But Luciene~”

“Vivin could be very small! You have to do a thorough search, Cretia!”

Cretia’s shoulders sunk as she stepped further into the trailer-sized boot, yet unaware that the tight space was a whole ecosystem for Vivin somewhere in the fibers. Despite her small size, she towered above the fluffy plains, awed at from afar by Vivin where she had bunkered into some of the fabric. It was a new sight to behold, and an especially intimidating one. Vivin had deduced that she wasn’t the only one to shrink in the house, but that she had shrunk more than the others -- or at least, more so than Cretia. The younger classmate was a giant compared to her, regardless of her actual diminutive state. This of course lead Vivin to a whole world of worry, wondering just how big a normal sized person would look like. She grumbled again, “Luciene…”

Deciding to figure that on her own in due time, Vivin rose from her spot and trudged forward with her arms flailing above her head. “Cretia! Down here, Cretia!” she yelled between panting and gagging, the humid air difficult to shout in. She jumped for Cretia’s attention, but when her gaze finally fell upon her, she shuddered and nearly stumbled.

“... Oh! Oh my gosh, Luciene was right! I-It’s Vivin!” Cretia gasped, startled by the discovery of her friend. Her vision had nearly glossed over Vivin, confusing her naked body and blonde hair with just one of the thousand little tufts that she casually stepped over. She dropped to a crawl and continued ahead as such, approaching Vivin with an arm outreached and her fingers twiddling. “H-Here, Vivin, c-come here…”

Vivin’s confusion folded into a glare up at the bent-over Cretia, shooting an insulted glance at the fingers in particular. “Do I look like a stray cat to you?” she bluntly asked. “C’mon, Cretia…”

“Err, no, sorry…” Cretia laid her nervous hands out flat in front of Vivin, allowing her to climb on. The touch of a nude body slithering up her palm was distressing enough to make her squeak. She was slow to move from her kneeling position, like the body in her hands was too heavy to lift. “I’m sorry, i-it just… feels so bad in here…”

“Yeah? Then get us out of here maybe?” Vivin sighed. “There’s sock lint in here bigger than me. I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”

Cretia agreed and was thus driven to leave the boot, ignoring that she was holding a naked body in her hands. She stepped into the cold outer world with closed eyes, but Vivin’s were wide open to observe the intimidating splendor of her own living room. The walls and ceilings of the home were vague concepts as distant as the sky, and the carpet below was a lush sea that ended in wood panel beaches. If she hadn’t had Cretia transporting her, then surely Vivin would not have gotten far from her boot, lost in a never-ending world of the floor she so often forgot to vacuum. The furniture were impressive mountains that dwarfed the cavern of a boot, belittling the prison that had seemed nigh-inescapable. No words could describe the utterly ordinary world she was looking up at, but she was most choked by the presence of her behemoth housemate, a person so tall that her toes alone were a range of hills to survey.

“Wow, you actually found her,” Luciene said. She sat squat next to the pile of clothes, her knees draped over with Vivin’s tee from where she was searching for her. “Thank you, Cretia. But… wow. Wow, she is… really tiny…”

The barrage of noise overwhelmed Vivin into submission. Luciene’s voice was tremendous, rocking the very air that it traveled through on a scale only Vivin could recognize. Cretia’s voice had been surprisingly loud, but her usual mumbling and stuttering restrained her volume. Luciene needed only to speak casually for her voice to drop onto the tiny woman like a jet engine roaring to life. Worse yet was that this was but one layer of Luciene’s massiveness that Vivin had to endure. The view was significantly harder to swallow, gazing up at the impossible titan from her elevated position in Cretia’s hand. It was impossible to keep all of Luciene in her vision, and this was when she was seated with a lower profile than usual. Vivin couldn’t imagine what a standing Luciene would look like, but the idea of it was enough to annoy her, that she was gawking up at her superior.

The gravity of Luciene’s presence intensified when she leaned over Cretia, exerting her weight indirectly over the minuscule Vivin. She peered closely, wanting to see her housemate for herself, but even in Cretia’s hand was she troublesome to identify. Vivin wished for the studying to end, unsettled by the magnificently huge eye that was absorbing her every detail.

“I think you’re scaring her,” Cretia said, raising Vivin up slightly.

“You think I’m-- scared?!” Vivin growled at this accusation. “I-I am not! I’m not--”

She was cut off by a vibrating boom of a voice. “Ooh, Vivin… You don’t need to worry anymore,” Luciene said, attempting to speak tenderly. “It’s just me. We’re all figuring this out right now.”

Vivin unflinched from the overbearing volume to pitch in her thoughts, “N-No, I’m not scared! Luciene, I’m--” Her arguing was sentenced to an end when her enormous rival shifted, offering her own hand down flat for Cretia to embark. Too tiny to be heard, Vivin was taken into Luciene’s realm along with Cretia, rocketing upwards as the biggest of the giants rose to her feet.

Luciene gathered her bearings and wandered out of the living room, but not without the others occupying her mind. Fortunately, she wasn’t left in suspense as she saw Lorelle making her way down the stairs, one step at a time. In her hands and not enjoying the ride was Freya, grappled by Lorelle so that only her legs could kick at the open air. Luciene may have been unsure of that method of moving a shrunken person, but she was grateful enough to see both were well and unharmed.

“I found Freya!” Lorelle announced, the least bothered by the house’s predicament. Her little footfalls were just barely audible as she reached the end of the stairs and crossed over to where Luciene was. “You were able to find Viv… right? Or did she get swept under a rug?”

Luciene nodded and explained by holding out Cretia, who in turn held out Vivin. The three-way chain of varying frowns earned a chuckle from Lorelle, who followed Luciene into the dining room. They were corralled to the breakfast nook where Luciene could keep everyone together in one place. Her friends pieced together a rather strange scene with their different sizes; Lorelle stood behind the table atop the bench seat, while Cretia and Freya walked along the surface itself, the latter of which still cradled Vivin in her hands. Luciene backed away from the four while they adjusted to each others staggering heights, taking in the absurdity of the situation with a well-deserved sigh.

“So, err, what now?” Cretia was the first to ask after many glances across the new surroundings. “Th-This might be stupid to ask, but, isn’t there a cure?”

“Why don’t you tell us, Chef Cretia?” Freya spat, arms crossed over her chest. Though half the size of Cretia, Freya was unphased to be looking up at a friend she was meant to be taller than. “It was your candies that did this. Did you cook up a cure or not?”

Cretia swallowed, stammering ahead with a thought before being interrupted. It was a shrill, little voice from Vivin to cut in, “The candy?! This is because of your candy?! Y-You…! There was magic in those things?!” Vivin stomped, but being the smallest of the four, her ranting was the easiest to ignore. “That’s dangerous as hell, Cretia! You could have made us explode or somethi-- iieee!”

It was Vivin’s turn to be interrupted as a loud, jangling crash hit the table. The source was the plastic bag of drinks and snacks, carried and dropped onto the table by Luciene without her thinking of its weight. She unloaded the contents one item at a time while the others watched without explanation. Once everything was on display, Luciene moved into the kitchen where she acquired a list of things from a specific cabinet: colored powders, grinded herbs, swirling tonics, as well as spoons, knives, and jars, all loaded into a wide, black bowl.

“Every curse can be cured,” Luciene explained while the others looked over the supplies. “Even Cretia’s. I have some ideas about how to correct this, so that’s what I’ll be doing tonight. If you want to be returned to normal size sooner than later, then try not to disturb me.”

“What do we do then?” Lorelle asked, her upper body spilled out on the dining table in reach of a distant soda. Between her and the can suddenly dropped a large tome, its cover unfortunately too familiar to the students. Luciene had magicked it into existence, not hiding a teasing smile as she did.

“Exams are this week,” Luciene explained. “Study.”