With
Friends Like These
Shivering
as he looked out of one of the classroom windows, Stefan pulled his sweater up
a bit further and gazed out into the bleak winter afternoon. It wasn’t actually
all that cold inside the building, but even the mere sight of the weather
conditions outside was enough for him to want to crawl under a warm blanket and
read a book all day. Then again, Stefan would have given pretty much anything
preference over having to sit through one of Mr. Schneider’s social science
classes. It wasn’t that the subject as such wasn’t interesting, he himself
actually was quite interested in the humanities, and wanted to go on studying
them at university once he graduated. But there was something creepy about Mr.
Schneider, a lean, wiry man with an austere buzz cut and thin glasses, who
always was impeccably dressed. He never ever raised his voice to his pupils,
but that also wasn’t necessary, since his soft-spoken demeanour somehow only
served to enhance his vaguely threatening aura, something nobody could pin down
to anything specific. Nevertheless, the whole school was afraid of him. It was
one of the sinister flashes of Mr. Schneider’s glasses, briefly reflecting the
bright fluorescent light above and hiding his eyes behind two white disks for
just a split second, that tore Stefan out of his musings and brought him back
to the present. Was he looking at him?
“Now,
what many do not realise is that deviancy is not a state, it is a trajectory. A
leads to B leads to C. All of you would be well-advised to keep this in mind, some
more than others.”
Stefan
found himself shivering again and looked around. What was that supposed to
mean? His glance wandered over to his classmate Marie, who was sitting next to
the window he had been looking out of, flanked on both sides by her minions
Carolin and Isabel. She was just opening her mouth for a bored yawn, and though
she quickly lifted her right hand up to cover her lips, he briefly found
himself staring at the back of her dark, gaping throat. Marie clearly wasn’t
listening or, just as likely, had not understood Mr. Schneider’s remark. But
then again, she didn’t need to. Their teacher had certainly not been talking to
her; Marie was far too well-off and stupid to be at risk of any kind of
‘deviancy’. If anything, she was one of those people who regularly disposed of
any misfits, as demonstrated by one of her most popular videos on social media.
It showed her snorting a shrunken person up her nose with some cocaine before
swallowing them whole, and while the possession of narcotics could theoretically
get her into trouble, upper-class bimbos like her never did. Mr. Schneider was
right in that regard; some people were predestined to being eaten. And others,
like Marie, were predestined to eat.
The
sudden ring of the bell made Stefan jerk a little, throwing him off his trail
of thoughts. It also caused some commotion among the pupils, with some of them
prematurely beginning to put their books and notes away. The surge of noise
quickly died down again, however, since Mr. Schneider kept standing where he
was, his paper-thin lips warped into a dismissive smirk.
“Class
ends when I say so.” He said in his characteristic eerie monotone, although he
did dart Marie a disapproving glare when she opened her mouth in silent
protest. “Now, if you would kindly open your textbooks on page 137. Jessica,
read the title out loud, please.”
The
black-haired girl sitting at the desk next to Stefan hastily put on her reading
glasses and cleared her throat. “Comparison of social streamlining policies in
North America and Europe over the course of the last two decades.” She read out
dutifully.
“Read
this until Friday and answer questions 1 through 4. You do not need to write an
essay; some simple notes will suffice. You are dismissed.” Mr. Schneider then
finally concluded the class, sitting down at his desk again and adjusting his
glasses.
Stefan
also began to put his textbook and notes away, looking out of the window once
more. Especially in dreary weather like this, the concrete façade of the school
building looked even more depressing, as cold and uninviting as the monotonous
grey expanse of the overcast sky, the slightly darker shade of grey of the
asphalt schoolyard, or the brownish-black colour of the leafless trees. To make
things just a little bit worse, it was starting to rain again, not very much
so, but a persistent sleet drizzle that would be quite unpleasant to walk home
through.
“What
are you looking at, dweeb?” Marie suddenly hissed just as Stefan rose to his
feet.
“Huh?”
He asked, sounding a little perplexed. “I was just looking out of the…”
“You’ve
been staring at me for minutes now. Isn’t that right, Caro?” Marie continued.
“Uh…”
Carolin began, looking back and forth between Marie and Stefan for just a
moment before she realised that duty was calling for her. “Yeah, right, what
was that all about!? Ugh, so creepy!” She then said, crossing her arms in front
of her generous cleavage and frowning. Isabel too gave Stefan a judgemental
glare and shook her head in disapproval.
“I.
Was. Looking. Out. Of. The. Window.” Stefan explained impatiently, putting on
his jacket and lifting his school bag over his shoulders.
“Beat
it, you three.” Jessica joined into the exchange, stepping up to Stefan’s side
and putting her hand on his shoulder in his defence. “You know he
was just looking out of the window.”
“And
how would you…” Marie shot back.
“Oh
my God, you guys gotta see this!” Another female voice chirped from behind.
Before
any of the participants in the discussion could even turn their heads around to
figure out what this was about, Jessica’s seatmate Tanja had circled around
them and put her arms around Marie and Carolin, holding her phone up to their
faces as she began to play a video.
“Tanja,
we’re in the middle of somethi…” Marie began irritably, but then her eyes
suddenly widened when she inadvertently looked at the video Tanja’s phone was
playing. “Is that…” She began, gasping. Then she snorted derisively. “Oh my
God, what a fucking dork.”
“I
know, right?” Tanja grinned and tilted her phone a little for Isabel to see the
video too.
As
she did so, accompanied by the shrill laughter of Marie and her friends while
they eagerly watched what was happening in the video, Tanja purposefully
navigated the three towards the door. Before they stepped out, the blonde
briefly turned her head towards Stefan and Jessica again, giving them a wink
with one of her piercing blue eyes. Stefan breathed a sigh of relief. Marie and
her underlings were the resident bullies of their grade, and being somewhat of
an introverted nerd, he usually would have been a prime target for them. But
through sheer luck, he also happened to be friends with some of the most
popular boys and girls in school, who were even above Marie in the social
pecking order. Marie knew this and it irked her, so she would try to provoke an
argument every now and again, like the test bites of a shark.
“What
is her problem?” Jessica asked, almost imperceptibly shaking her head as she
zipped up her winter jacket and began to head out of the classroom along with
Stefan.
“She’s
just looking for trouble.” He answered, sighing again and giving Mr. Schneider
a short nod as they walked past his desk. Their teacher responded with a brief
nod of his own, and an almost unnoticeable, again somehow derisive smile.
Then
they stepped out of the classroom, joining a group of their classmates as they
proceeded along the corridor and down the stairs leading to the main foyer. It
was almost empty this late in the afternoon, with only a few clusters of older
students scattered throughout the large hall. Just as Stefan was about to look
around for a group they could join, Tanja skidded back into his field of view,
startling him just a little with her sudden reappearance.
“I’m
back!” Tanja exclaimed with a mischievous grin and then put her arms around him
and Jessica as she began to walk along into the foyer with them, just like she
had done with Marie and Carolin before. “Don’t worry, they’re gone.” She then
clarified.
“Thanks
for that.” Stefan said. “Marie’s in a really bad mood it seems.”
“Don’t
mention it.” Tanja said with another knowing wink.
Stefan
looked Tanja in the eyes for a moment, breaking into a nervous, shy smile. She
was an unbelievably beautiful girl, a natural extrovert who seemingly got along
with everyone, and her good mood often proved to be contagious. But
nevertheless, he had secretly always felt conflicted about her. Tanja had never
given him a personal reason to dislike her; in fact, she had always treated him
decently and even kindly, this being not the first time that she had helped him
out of a situation like this. But when he looked into her almost hypnotic, icy
blue eyes, he always felt that there was a more sinister side to her, something
predatory. In a way, she wasn’t that different from Marie, an apex predator who
always got what she wanted. And he had seen how she treated shrunken people
that had the misfortune of falling into her hands. She didn’t just eat them
like most people, but toyed with them like a cat, clearly relishing the power
she had over them. Sometimes, when he felt depressed and pessimistic about his
future, Stefan had found himself imagining what would happen if he were to be
shrunken down and end up in her possession. And despite the kindness she was
showing to him at the moment, he still felt almost certain that Tanja would eat
him nevertheless.
“Mr.
Schneider also seemed a bit grumpy today.” Jessica said, interrupting his
thoughts.
“Yeah,
because he’s all charm and smiles usually.” Tanja scoffed. “Dude needs to get
laid.”
Jessica
frowned, but also had to suppress a giggle. “Thanks, Tanja. Now I need brain
bleach.”
“Do
you think he has a wife?” The blonde mused.
“Well,
he’s definitely married. Got a ring on his finger.” Stefan said with a shrug.
“Does
he?” Tanja asked, her blue eyes widening with curiosity.
“Maybe
he’s gay.” Jessica speculated.
“Huh.”
The other girl made, raising her eyebrows. “I never thought about tha… Oh, hey
girl!”
During
their conversation, they had moved across the foyer to one of the main entrance
doors, where another group of students had accumulated, apparently waiting for
the rain to ease up a little before they headed home. Stefan hadn’t been paying
any attention to them, focusing on his little chat with Jessica and Tanja
instead. It was only now that the blonde suddenly tapped one of them on the
shoulder and the girl turned around to them that he recognised her. It was
Alessia, another one of their classmates and one of the school’s top athletes.
“Oh,
hey Tanja.” Alessia said with a broad smile as the two girls embraced each
other. “How are you? Haven’t seen you all day.” She continued, hugging Jessica
and Stefan as well.
As
she put his arms around him and pressed her body against his for a moment, Stefan
could not help but feel a slight stinging sensation in his chest. For just a
brief moment, he closed his eyes and simply relished Alessia’s affectionate
embrace, feeling the warmth of her body, and inhaling her discreet, sporty
perfume. When she let go of him again, he momentarily looked into her deep
brown eyes, feeling as if he was going to melt as she flashed him a short
smile. Stefan was perfectly aware that he was smitten with her, but he had
needed a while to admit it even to himself. They had been friends with each
other ever since kindergarten, and for most of the time, Stefan had seen
Alessia as a cool older sister of sorts, even though their birthdays were just
a few weeks apart. It was only over the last two or three years that he had
developed somewhat more complex feelings towards her, and it didn’t seem as if
they were going away anytime soon. He had even considered talking about it to
her, but was too afraid that it might ruin their friendship if he did. Plus,
Alessia was in a relationship with their classmate Florian, someone more
befitting of her status as perhaps the most beautiful girl in the entire
school.
“Eh,
I’m fine.” Tanja answered Alessia’s earlier question with a dismissive wave of
her hand. “We’re just coming from Mr. Schneider’s social sciences class.
Bo-ring!”
Alessia
wrinkled her nose. “Don’t envy you for that.”
“We
were just wondering if he’s gay!” Tanja said excitedly, making the other girl
gently raise her right eyebrow in confusion over her sudden mental leap.
“Huh?”
Alessia said. “I don’t think so. He’s got a wife.”
“How
do you know that?” Tanja asked, her mouth slightly agape.
“I
think he brought her along to the last sports festival or something.” Alessia
shrugged. “But yeah, definitely has a wife. She’s pretty good-looking, too. If
you would believe that.”
Tanja
gasped a little. “Details, girl! I need details!”
Looking
back and forth between the two girls as they continued to gossip, Stefan noted
that they were oddly complementary. With her light blonde hair and her intense
blue eyes, Tanja would have been the perfect choice to play a Valkyrie in a
school play, whereas the German-Italian girl would have made for a formidable
Venus or Aphrodite. In any case, their beauty truly was verging on
supernatural, and Stefan once again found himself wondering how he had ended up
being friends with these popular girls. In all likelihood, it was ultimately
due to him going way back with Alessia. And even though he had turned out as
one of the nerdy and shy types, she had never treated him any differently or
with less respect as a result.
“You
guys want some?” The voice of another girl interrupted his thoughts.
Stefan
looked around for a moment, soon identifying the source of the voice as Jana,
another one of his classmates. Jana was a close friend of Tanja, although one
wouldn’t have assumed her to be. Unlike her blonde friend, she was a
mild-mannered and unassuming girl, with long brown hair and brown eyes, and
generally considered to be one of the nicest people in their grade. A fact that
echoed through Stefan’s mind somewhat ironically when she lifted a small Vortex
box up to her friends, offering them to help themselves to some little snacks.
Peering into the plastic box as Jana offered it to him, Stefan shivered a
little, seeing that half of the shrunken people inside the small cubicles
apparently had been eaten already.
“Uh,
no. Not my cup of tea, thanks.” He said nervously.
“You’ve
never eaten tinies, have you?” Tanja asked with a quizzical look on her face,
smiling and nodding at Jana for a brief moment as she reached inside the box
and casually grabbed a wailing shrunken woman. “Aren’t you even a little bit
curious?”
“Nah.
Not really.” Stefan replied, trying to sound bored. He knew that showing any
signs of fear or discomfort only served to get Tanja more engaged and excited.
Another one of those little details about her personality that made him
slightly afraid of her.
“Suit
yourself.” Tanja said with a shrug and leisurely popped the tiny woman into her
mouth, swallowing her and, in doing so, promptly cutting off her pitiful cries
for mercy.
Awkwardly
shifting his stance, Stefan observed the slight contraction in Tanja’s throat.
What he was not aware of was that he had just become the last person to see
Jasmin Albers alive as Tanja’s lips closed behind her. Jasmin had been a young
woman from the other end of town, a hardware store employee whose meagre salary
had grown increasingly insufficient to cover her debts. This had led to her
stealing money from the cash register, something that had gone unnoticed by her
employer for several months. When they had found out, however, she had promptly
been turned over to the authorities, and consequently to Vortex. Deemed more of
a burden than an asset to society, she had been shrunken down, and now would
conclude her short, joyless life inside Tanja’s stomach, soon to be buried
underneath her actual lunch.
“Jessica?”
Jana asked, handing the box to the black-haired girl next to Stefan.
“No,
I’m good.” Jessica shook her head and patted her belly. “Still digesting my
lunch.”
“How
about you?” Their friend inquired further, looking at Alessia.
“I
really shouldn’t.” The German-Italian girl said with a pained expression on her
face. “Got that fucking APH exam tomorrow.”
“And?”
Tanja asked, slurping another screaming shrunken person into her mouth. Stefan
saw that he was a young man, barely older than himself. “So do I.” She said,
gently swallowing.
“APH?”
Stefan asked, trying to block out the cries of the miniaturised people in the
box.
“Some
inspectors from the Agency of Public Health coming over to the club tomorrow.
They do that every so often, especially before tournaments.” Alessia explained,
forcing herself to a guilty smile as she reached into the box as well and put
her fingers around a shrunken person. “First time they’re coming to one of my
exams though. Not gonna lie; I’m a bit nervous.” She explained, ignoring the
shrunken man’s cries for help as she flicked him into her mouth.
Unlike
Tanja, Alessia didn’t swallow this one immediately, therefore prolonging the
agony of Faruk Şahin even further as he was sloshed around on the girl’s
tongue. Covered in Alessia’s hot, viscous spit, the former bouncer whose
criminal past now had finally caught up with him began to cry out for his
mother, begging for help that would never come. Mere moments later, his
frightened screams were forever drowned out by a wet gulp that quickly ferried
him down to Alessia’s near empty stomach. There, he would endure almost another
hour of unspeakable torment before her stomach juices finally got the better of
him, proceeding to digest his body with callous efficiency and turning him into
mere nutrition for her organism.
“I
don’t think you’ve got much to worry about.” Jana said, sounding just a bit
envious as she scrutinised Alessia’s athletic figure from the corner of her
eye. “Both of you.” She then added as she glanced over at Tanja, who just had
helped herself to yet another shrunken woman.
“I’m
not letting any fucking inspectors tell me whether my weight is okay or not.”
Tanja said snippily before she tossed the tiny into her mouth, devouring her
with another quick gulp.
“Easy
for you to say.” Jana complained while she reached into the box herself again,
lifting a shrunken man to her face and giving him a reproachful look. “These
guys are making me fat.”
“Then
don’t eat me!” The tiny between her fingers cried incredulously, prompting a
round of amused laughter from the other girls. Stefan too couldn’t help but
snort a little.
“He’s
got a point.” Alessia grinned while she grabbed a shrunken woman and flipped
her into her mouth, not even bothering to look at her. Then she swallowed,
putting an end to the slight shrieking noises emanating from behind her closed
lips.
Jana
gave her a playfully indignant glare. “Not what you’re supposed to say,
Alessia.”
“Give
him to me, then.” Tanja interjected. “I’ve always got room for one more.”
“You’re
not fat, Jana.” Jessica said, staring at Alessia and Tanja disapprovingly.
Stefan
looked at Jana again. Jessica was right, of course. The brunette may have not
been just as athletic as Alessia and Tanja, but she wasn’t fat by any means. In
fact, she too was a very pretty young woman, just not as intimidatingly
beautiful as the other two girls. She did have a slight amount of extra pudge
around her belly and waist, but that really only added to the aura of the
cute-girl-next-door vibe she gave off. Stefan always struggled to wrap his head
around the thought that someone like Jana could seriously think of herself as
fat or unattractive.
“You
really aren’t.” He then said, with Alessia nodding in agreement. All the while,
he tried to ignore the panicked, pleading look the shrunken man in between
Jana’s fingers was giving him. “And Tanja just wants more of your food.” Stefan
added with a glance at the blonde.
“Guilty.”
Tanja grinned sheepishly.
“You
guys are too considerate.” Jana mumbled. “Anyway, I bought them, so I might as
well finish them off now.” She decided, tilting her head back and opening her
mouth.
“No!
Please don’t!” The shrunken man began to sob as he was lifted above the girl’s
face.
Jana
didn’t pay any attention to his tearful whimpering and dropped him into her
mouth. She also didn’t bother to play around with him much further, instead
allowing him to slip right to the back of her tongue and swallowing him with
her mouth still half open. It was the sad end of Björn Heinze, a prison guard
who had grown a bit too close with the inmates he had been supposed to guard.
The result had been a mass breakout attempt on his watch, and while all the
prisoners had eventually been rounded up and shrunken down as punishment, he
still had to face to consequences of his actions by joining all of them on
their final journey through the depths of Jana’s digestive system. Not that she
ever learned that she had digested every single participant in these events,
the news of which had also been kept from the public.
“Yo,
what’s going on.” A male voice sounded from behind them.
Stefan
noticed how Alessia’s expression darkened considerably and turned around to see
who had joined them. Standing behind him was his classmate Nico, a lanky kind
of guy with long blond hair, blue-green eyes, and a perpetual stubble across
his slender face. His rakish good looks made him quite popular with the girls
and some of the boys, but in terms of personality, he was a somewhat more
divisive person. Stefan had befriended him only quite recently, after
discovering that Nico was an avid reader like himself, and held some
interesting, albeit fairly subversive political views. He wasn’t sure what to
think of his radical opinions, which, along with his proclivity for
mind-altering substances, got him into a lot of conflicts with authority. But
Nico was a free spirit. Being someone who was a lot more afraid about the
world, Stefan respected, maybe even envied that a little about him. Next to
Nico was his girlfriend Vanessa, an emo girl who always looked like she was
half asleep even if she happened not to be stoned.
“Hey
Nico!” Jana said with a welcoming smile. “Hey Vanessa! You want some tinies?”
She asked, holding the Vortex box over at them. This was accompanied by another
uproar of tiny voices from inside the cubicles as the shrunken people were
tossed around again.
“Oh,
thanks.” Vanessa thanked her absent-mindedly and reached for the box, only for
Nico to gently grab her arm and move it towards himself instead.
“I
told you, you shouldn’t be eating those, babe.” Her boyfriend said and put her
arms around his shoulders, leaning in to kiss her. “You don’t wanna be a pawn
for The Man, do you?”
“I’m
sorry sweetie, I forgot.” Vanessa replied, sounding as if she was completely
baked again. Then she started giggling as Nico kissed her and began to tickle
her with his stubble.
“Ugh.”
Alessia huffed, rolling her eyes. “What do you want, Nico?”
Ignoring
her question, the long-haired boy turned to Stefan. “Yo man, you should come
join me and Vanessa in the park when you’re done here. Got something I wanna
show you.”
“Sure.”
Stefan agreed, looking outside. The rain seemed to have stopped for the moment,
and even though it still looked cold and wet outside, he was willing to hang
around a bit longer to see what Nico was up to before he went home. “Meet you
at the benches?”
“That’s
where I’ll be!” Nico replied and began to move towards the exit along with
Vanessa. Then he turned around and looked at the girls again, making a peace
sign. “Later, chicas.”
“Fucking
douchebag.” Alessia growled once Nico and his girlfriend had left.
Tanja
giggled, zipping up her thick winter jacket as she got ready to head home too.
“Come on, he’s fun. He’s gonna get into some serious trouble sooner or later,
but might as well enjoy him while he’s still around.” She said with a wink and
snatched another tiny from Jana’s box. Tossing them into her mouth, she now
began to push them around like a piece of candy.
“Why
do you keep hanging out with that loser?” Alessia asked, turning to Stefan with
a look of genuine concern on her face. “He is just gonna get you into trouble.”
“I’ll
be fine.” Stefan said. “He’s just a bit of a contrarian.”
“Who
deals drugs.” Added Jessica, who had been silent the entire time Nico had been
there.
“Just
stay out of that kind of crap, okay?” Alessia said, still looking worried. “I
don’t want a jerk like him to drag you down along with him.”
“Well…”
Tanja began, swallowing the shrunken person she had been playing around with in
her mouth. “If you become a drug dealer and get shrunk, make sure you get
delivered to me. I promise I’ll be really gentle when I eat
you.” She then added with a seductive wink towards Stefan and slowly, almost
ostensibly licked her full pink lips.
“Tanja!”
Alessia hissed, slapping her friend on her upper arm. “That’s not funny.”
“Calm
down.” Tanja said, rolling her eyes. “I’m joking, obviously.”
Then
she looked over at Stefan again, and while she did give him a kind, reassuring
smile, there was just something about the expression in her eyes that made him
shiver. He couldn’t say why exactly, but somehow, he just knew that Tanja was
lying. She would actually do it.
“Anyway.”
The blonde continued, producing a dark grey beanie from one of her pockets and
pulling it over her head. “Gonna go home now. You coming, Jana?”
“Mhm.”
Jana made, slurping another tiny in between her lips and swallowing quickly.
“Sure. Are you sure you don’t want any more?” She then asked Alessia, holding
the box to her again.
“Uhh…”
Alessia began, looking a little bit hesitant. “Okay, one more for the road.”
She then conceded and reached into one of the cubicles again, pulling out a
screaming shrunken man.
“You
heading home too?” Stefan asked, trying his best to not look at the tiny person
between Alessia’s fingers as he began screaming up at him, his voice cracking.
“Please,
man! Tell your friend to let me go! Please, I don’t wanna die!” The tiny
sobbed.
“Yeah,
I might as well.” Alessia said, waving the pitiful shrunken man around as she
gestured across the near-empty foyer. Then she nodded to Tanja and Jana as they
headed towards the doors and out of the building. “Everyone else is leaving, so
no point to hang around.”
“Have
you…” Stefan began, furtively looking around and then down at the shrunken
person flailing around in Alessia’s grip. “Have you ever let one of them go?”
The
girl snorted, seeming mildly amused by the question. “Nope. Why, have you ever
given a chicken nugget a second chance? Become friends with it?” She asked with
a sarcastic chuckle as they began to head out the main entrance as well. “Fuck,
it’s cold.” She then frowned as they stepped out into the open, zipping up her
jacket a little further.
Stefan
grimaced a little as well as the wall of cold air hit his face. It was probably
around zero degrees, but at least it had stopped raining for the time being.
“Well, it’s not exactly the same thing.” He then said, turning to his friend
and returning to their conversation.
“It
is, if you ask me.” Alessia shrugged, her warm breath forming near-invisible
clouds as it exited her lips and diffused into the surrounding winter air.
“I’m
not a chicken nugget!” The shrunken man cried, tears running down his face.
“Would
you be saying that if I were in his place?” Stefan asked, looking over at the
main gate of the schoolyard, where Tanja and Jana had just disappeared around
the corner.
“Is
this about what Tanja said?” Alessia inquired, furrowing her brows. “You know
how she is, don’t let her screw with you.” She then added with a reassuring
smile at her friend.
“I
was just thinking that maybe you…” Stefan began. But before he could finish his
sentence, Alessia flicked the little man into her mouth. The tiny let out a
last agonised scream for help one final time before the German-Italian girl’s
soft lips closed behind him.
“Huh?”
Alessia swallowed. “That maybe I…?”
“…
Nevermind.” He said as they both stepped through the gate and out onto a
pedestrian way leading towards a residential area in one direction, and a park
in the other.
“So,
you’re really going to hang out with Nico and Vanessa for a bit longer?”
Alessia asked. “You know they’re probably smoking weed or something. Please
tell me you won’t be?”
Stefan
couldn’t help but laugh a little. His friend could be almost comically straight
at times. It made sense, of course – her being a top athlete, her stunningly
good looks, her good grades, all that didn’t come from slacking off. But still,
he thought, it would do her good to just relax a little sometimes. Not that he
was anyone to talk, being somewhat high-strung himself. But it was always
easier to recognise those traits in others than in oneself. And over the last
couple of weeks, Alessia had come across as particularly stressed to him. He
knew that it was most likely just due to the upcoming final exams, which had
everyone on edge anyway. And on top of all that, she had to deal with her rigid
training schedule and those upcoming swimming tournaments as well. It had led
to her being somewhat grumpy and impatient recently, and on some level, Stefan
was worried that all of this was just getting too much for Alessia.
“I’m
just gonna talk with him and Vanessa for a couple of minutes and then head
home.” He then said with a calm smile. “I don’t do drugs, and Nico isn’t
pushing me, either.”
“Well,
okay.” Alessia said, looking at him for a moment with her deep brown eyes. Then
she leaned forward and gave him another long hug. “Sorry for being such a bitch
lately.”
Hearing
the mixture of sadness and regret in her voice, Stefan suddenly felt a little
alarmed. It didn’t happen very often that she behaved like this. Returning her
embrace, he pulled her a bit closer to himself and hugged her tightly. “You
haven’t been, okay? You’re just stressed out.”
“I
guess.” Alessia sighed, her warm breath blowing across Stefan’s cold cheeks as
she let go of him again and smiled at him somewhat apologetically.
“Promise
me to rest up a bit when you get home, okay?” Her friend said. “Take a nap or
so.”
“I
can’t.” Alessia said, massaging the bridge of her nose with her fingertips.
“Still got to eat some proper lunch. Then I’ve also got some homework to do,
and then training at six.”
“Can’t
you skip that for once? You look exhausted.” Stefan inquired.
“No.”
She said categorically, shaking her head. “Got to get in all the practice I can
get before the tournament. And there’s the APH exam tomorrow, would look bad if
I skipped today.”
“Will
I see you tomorrow at all?” He asked.
“No.
Only would have had German classes tomorrow, but they’re letting me skip that
so I can train all day.” Alessia explained. “Coach talked to the principal
about it.”
“Okay.
Hey, maybe call me on Saturday or so? We can talk a little if you want.”
“Hm…
yeah. Yeah, why not. I’d like that.” She said with a tired smile. “Just like
old times.”
“Exactly.”
Stefan nodded. “Now get home and eat something, you haven’t had… uh, much.”
Alessia
giggled, beaming at him. “Right. Talk to you on Saturday. See you!”
“See
you!” Her friend replied and waved to her as she turned around, heading down
the path towards the residential area. When she reached the main road, she
turned around once more and waved to Stefan one last time before disappearing
around the corner of a nearby hedge.
Exhaling
into the cold air, Stefan looked at the fleeting clouds formed by his own
breath for a moment. When they had dissipated after a few seconds, he turned
around and began walking down the path in the opposite direction, further into
the park. He had just reached the start of the dirt path leading to the benches
where Nico and some of the other school stoners would usually hang out, hidden
away behind some dense bushes and trees, when he felt a couple of cold
raindrops on his face. Looking up at the depressing grey monotone in the sky,
he asked himself for a moment if he should just go home instead, since he
really didn’t fancy standing around in the rain for long. But it seemed like it
was just a slight drizzle again, and so Stefan just quietly sighed to himself
and continued down the gravel path.
Small
stones crunching beneath his shoes, he turned around a corner, trying to avoid
stepping into one of the large puddles stretching across the dirt path. When he
finally reached the last stretch leading up to the benches, he froze all of a
sudden. The path was largely blocked by a black truck parked right in the
middle of it, obstructing his view. Stefan felt himself tense up as his
heartbeat accelerated. Something about this didn’t feel right.
“Fucking
hippies, honest to God.” A female voice said disdainfully. “They’re all the
fucking same. Muh rights, hurr durr. Hey, maybe I should just eat the little
losers myself?”
“Calm
down, Kim. He just scratched up your pretty face a bit.” A man replied. “Also,
none of that would have happened if you had stunned them first. You know, like
you’re supposed to?”
“Yeah,
maybe.” The woman admitted. “But seriously, maybe I should just eat them?!”
“No,
we’ve got a quota to meet, remember? And these two punks got a shit score. Easy
meat. No discussions later, no questions asked.” The man explained.
“Ugh,
fine. But hey, maybe we should…”
Stefan
had slowly started to back up again when a young woman, apparently only a few
years older than himself, walked around the truck, freezing when she noticed
him. She was wearing black work clothes with the white swirl of the Vortex logo
on her upper arms and seemed to be holding something in her left hand, though
it was clenched into a fist, and Stefan could not see what exactly it was. She
had a couple of thin scratches on her left cheek, with some blood running down
her face from the middle cut. From her surprised and angry expression alone,
Stefan could tell that he had walked into something he hadn’t been supposed to
see.
“Thorsten?
Looks like we’ve got a visitor.” The woman then called out to her colleague.
Feeling
a sudden surge of panic, Stefan turned around to run away, only to bump into a
large middle-aged man who had somehow appeared behind him all of a sudden.
Hectically looking around, he tried to make out an alternate escape route, but
both were blocking the path.
“Could
I see some ID, young man?” The male Vortex employee asked calmly.
“Wha…”
Stefan began, confused by the man’s relaxed, even business-like tone. “I-I
d-don’t think y-you can…” He stammered, trying to question the man’s authority
to ask for his ID.
“Relax,
there’s nothing to worry about.” The man said, putting his hand on Stefan’s
shoulder. “Me and my colleague here? We just apprehended some dangerous
criminals. As you surely know, we are authorised by the Ministry of Justice to
do so. We just need to know you have nothing to do with these people.” He
explained, giving him a reassuring smile.
Seeing
that there really was nowhere to run, and that these two could probably catch
up with him anyway, Stefan reluctantly decided to cooperate. He didn’t really
believe the man’s story about the dangerous criminals. In fact, he was pretty
sure that he was talking about Nico and Vanessa, but that only made him all the
more afraid for his own life. Reaching into his pocket, he produced his wallet
and took out his ID, handing it to the Vortex employee.
“Thank
you for your cooperation.” The man said, pulling a card reader of sorts from
his belt and inserting Stefan’s ID into it. After a few moments, there was a
slight beeping noise.
“So,
what’s the score?” The woman asked.
“Not
great, not terrible.” Her colleague replied, shrugging. “But it’s enough. Do
it.”
“Wait,
what ar…” Stefan began, turning around to see the female employee right behind
him.
Before
he could figure out what was going on, he suddenly felt an intense pain shoot
through his entire body. His muscles violently cramped up and he wanted to
scream, but somehow, he was unable to produce a sound. Then he suddenly felt
like he was falling, the world, and then the very ground underneath him giving
way to a painfully bright void. And then, as swiftly as it had started, the
pain disappeared again. The glaring light too vanished all of a sudden, and
Stefan felt his eyes close, giving way to nothing but dull, unfeeling darkness.
***
Alessia
took a deep breath and looked around the room, impatiently drumming her fingers
on the soft padding of the examination table she had taken a seat on. Slowly,
her eyes wandered across the posters on the walls, displaying diagrams of
various parts of human anatomy, and then over to the clock above the door.
Apparently, she had only been waiting in here for five minutes, though it felt
more like at least half an hour to her. Trying to ease the sense of wary
tension creeping up inside of her, Alessia exhaled and nervously eyed the
life-sized model of a human skeleton next to the physician’s desk at the other
end of the room. But she was still not sure what to do with her hands, now
anxiously fumbling around with the one-way paper spread across the exam table,
and tearing little pieces out of it. Then, almost as if to make her even more
uncomfortable, her empty stomach contracted and produced a noisy growl. Except
for the measly sandwich she had hastily eaten earlier this afternoon, she
hadn’t actually eaten anything since breakfast, a fact her stomach was all too
eager to remind her of.
I’m
starving. Alessia
thought to herself, placing her left hand on her belly. I probably
should get myself something to eat on the way home.
Gently
rubbing her belly as if this would somehow alleviate the nagging sense of
hunger, she inhaled again. Alessia felt almost a little sick for a moment,
though it was probably due to the combination of her being tense, hungry, and
the smell of disinfectant in the air. She was more nervous than she cared to
admit to herself. Medical examinations were very much standard procedure before
tournaments, but there never had been any APH inspectors there for any of her
check-ups, and Alessia wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. In fact, nobody,
including her coach, really seemed to know what they did. Every once in a
while, they would just show up, conduct medical examinations, take lots of
notes, and leave again. Some of the more political members of her sports club
had even complained about them at one point, given that the APH wasn’t actually
a government agency at all, but a private organisation. This had raised some
questions about how they used the data they gathered, but ultimately, it had
been made clear that the APH was acting on behalf of the Ministry of Health,
which was simply outsourcing some of its competencies to external contractors.
Not
that Alessia particularly cared about these kinds of issues anyway. She was
quite aware that, if something involved the government and big corporations,
there was nothing she could do about it anyway, and thinking about these things
was a waste of time. What mattered was that she was being examined today, and
that it was important for her sports career to pass this examination. Alessia
threw a nervous glance at the scales. With all the stress over the last few
weeks, she had been eating more than usual, snacking on fast food like Vortex
more often than she should have. For a moment, she found herself worried that
she could have put on weight, but then she calmed herself, knowing that she had
also been working out a lot more.
Just
as Alessia quietly told herself that everything would be fine, the door swung
open, and a somewhat stern looking woman in a lab coat entered the room,
followed by Ms. Scholz, the sports club’s nurse and physiotherapist.
Instinctively, Alessia rose to her feet, only now really noticing the little
pieces of torn paper in her hand and quickly letting them disappear into one of
the pockets of her tracksuit pants. The inspector nodded to her and extended
her hand.
“Ms.
Santoro?” She asked as they shook hands for a moment. Alessia nodded politely,
noting that the woman had a firm handshake, befitting of the commanding, even a
little authoritarian aura she exuded. “I’m Helena Wagner from the Agency of
Public Health. As you know, I am conducting your examination along with Ms.
Scholz today. We will also update your medical records for the Ministry of
Health and gather some additional information in accordance with section 4 of
the Law on Public Health and section 8 of the Law on Reproductive Hygiene.”
“Uh,
sure.” Alessia said in a somewhat confused tone, not having the faintest idea
what the woman was talking about. “Do I need to sign anything?”
Ms.
Wagner gently raised an eyebrow. “No, that won’t be necessary. Now, if you
would take your clothes off and step onto the scales over there?” She asked
while she sat down at the desk, although her tone made it quite clear that it
wasn’t a question.
Alessia
nodded, zipping down her tracksuit jacket and taking it off before kneeling
down and beginning to untie her slightly worn-out sneakers. Meanwhile, the
inspector’s fingers scurried across the keyboard as she entered some
information into the computer on her desk and then turned to Ms. Scholz, who
was still standing near the entrance door.
“Questionnaire?”
Ms. Wagner asked, peering at the nurse over the rim of her glasses.
“Handed
in.” The younger woman nodded.
“Blood
and urine samples?”
“Taken
this morning.”
“DNA
sample?”
“Not
yet.” Ms. Scholz explained.
“I
see. If you would kindly get me a kit?” The inspector said, again masking her
demand as a question. While Ms. Scholz headed over to a cabinet behind the desk
to fetch one of the DNA test kits, the older woman turned her attention back to
Alessia, who had stripped down to her underwear by now, and looked slightly
lost at what to do next. “All the way.”
“Uh,
right.” Alessia replied, taken a little aback by Ms. Wagner’s frosty demeanour.
Then
she moved her hands behind her back and grimaced a little as she fumbled around
for a couple of seconds to open her sports bra. Having removed that as well a
few moments later, Alessia then took off her underpants and put them onto the
pile of clothes on the examination table. She shivered a little, feeling the
cold, clinical tiles beneath her feet, and looked over at the inspector again.
Ms. Wagner wasn’t paying attention to her, instead looking at the screen on her
desk and nodding contentedly as she read through some information.
“That
is quite a collection of accolades for someone your age, Ms. Santoro.” She
said, clearly impressed. “Don’t like finishing second, do you?” The inspector
added, finally turning her head just a little to look at her examinee with a satisfied
smirk.
Despite
the cold feeling on her naked skin, Alessia felt a warm rush go through her
body. She already could tell that Ms. Wagner was nobody to make idle
compliments, which made these unexpected words of praise sound all the sweeter.
Nevertheless, she still felt compelled to at least pretend to be modest about
her own achievements as a competitive swimmer.
“I
got lucky often.” Alessia said evasively.
“Nonsense.”
The inspector interrupted her with a dismissive wave of her right hand. Then
she eyed Alessia up and down for a couple of moments. “I know a winner when I
see one.”
“Well,
I do train a lot…” Alessia cautiously admitted, trying to meet Ms. Wagner’s
stare. She was starting to feel uneasy again, even though the older woman
seemed to be quite impressed by her. It was difficult to pin down, but
something about her demeanour was still off-putting.
“Indeed
you do.” The inspector said, briefly nodding to Ms. Scholz as she handed her
one of the DNA test kits from the cabinet. “Now, Ms. Santoro, if you would step
onto the scales?”
“Oh,
right.” The girl remembered the earlier instructions and went over to a
stadiometer with built-in scales, almost feeling Ms. Wagner’s inquisitive stare
on her naked body.
Stepping
onto the small measuring platform, Alessia briefly prayed to herself that she
wasn’t in for a nasty surprise, feeling a little better about herself when Ms.
Scholz stepped up beside her, giving her a reassuring smile and a wink. Then
the nurse pulled down the headpiece and adjusted it to rest on the top of
Alessia’s head before turning around to the inspector again.
“Height
176 cm, weight 62 kilograms.” Ms. Scholz said. Alessia couldn’t help
herself but let out a faint sigh of relief. That was perfectly acceptable.
“Excellent.”
The inspector said, followed by a sharp snap as she put on a pair of
examination gloves. “Now, step into the middle of the room, please.”
Again,
Alessia did as she was told, feeling a little more confident about herself once
more. As she went over to the middle of the examination room, Ms. Wagner also
got up from the desk and picked up a little voice recorder, activating it and
lifting it to her lips as she stepped up to the examinee. Alessia flinched a
little bit as the inspector’s cold, gloved hands pinched the muscles on her
left upper arm and the woman began to speak almost mechanically.
“Alessia
Santoro, eighteen-year-old female. Height 176 cm, weight
62 kilograms. BMI 20.0. Athletic build, Mediterranean complexion.” Ms.
Wagner spoke into her voice recorder. Then she gave the girl another slightly
painful pinch in the belly. “No excess fat deposits.”
Listening
to the inspector speak, Alessia suppressed a frown. She was aware that
everything the woman was saying was flattering to her, but there was something
about her tone and her unfeeling, cold touch that made her profoundly
uncomfortable, nevertheless. In some ways, it felt like Ms. Wagner wasn’t
actually describing her, but some kind of prize cow. Right in that moment, the
nurse stepped up behind her and put a measuring tape around her, measuring the
circumference of her body in several spots while the inspector continued to
observe.
“Bust
98 cm, Waist 66 cm, Hip 98 cm. Proportions optimal.” The inspector continued in
her chilly monotone. Suddenly, she grabbed Alessia’s chin and moved her head
from side to side, not even waiting for the examinee to comply. “Well-shaped
jawline. Facial proportions also optimal. No visible impurities or acne scars.”
“Mh.”
Alessia made to articulate at least some protest against this kind of
treatment, darting Ms. Wagner a resentful look as she pulled her head back.
While
the nurse made an apologetic face and rolled her eyes in sympathetic disapproval,
the inspector simply turned off the voice recorder for a moment. “Open your
mouth.”
For
a split second, Alessia considered complaining about being treated like this,
but the look in Ms. Wagner’s eyes made it clear that she didn’t take kindly to
people who made a fuss. So Alessia ultimately decided to swallow her pride and
opened her mouth, deriving at least some satisfaction from the fact that she
got to stick out her tongue at the woman. Ignoring this act of juvenile
obstinacy, the inspector turned on the voice recorder again and then produced a
little flashlight from one of the pockets of her lab coat, using it to
illuminate the dark inside of Alessia’s mouth. Again without any sort of prior
warning, she put her gloved fingers in the girl’s mouth and proceeded to feel
her teeth, evidently trying to ascertain if any of them were crooked or loose.
Then she bent over a little further and looked straight into Alessia’s throat.
Frank Schuhmacher.
Takeshi Maeda. Jan Holst. Melanie Frankenfeld. Ann-Christin Schmidt. Benjamin
Müller. Marvin Jung. Nele Wieczorek. Faruk Şahin. The inspector had never
heard any of these names, and neither had these people ever heard anything of
each other. But they all had one thing in common: The sight of Alessia’s gaping
maw had been the last thing they had ever seen before being swallowed alive.
Travelling down into the athletic girl’s stomach, they had then forever
vanished in the dark depths of her digestive system, becoming nothing more than
nutrition for and part of the healthy young body the inspector was now
examining. And they only were a few of countless people for whom Alessia’s
stomach had been the final destination. Not that Helena Wagner of the APH
could have cared any less.
“All
teeth present, in superb condition. No decay or calculus, no malalignment.
Wisdom teeth not yet protruded. Both tonsils present and healthy. No
halitosis.” The inspector concluded, removing her fingers from Alessia’s mouth
and turning off the recorder. “Fetch me the kit.”
The
nurse complied silently, walking over to the desk and bringing back the DNA
test kit for the inspector. Ms. Wagner took it off Ms. Scholz without even
looking at her, and then pulled out a small cotton swab. Inserting it into
Alessia’s still open mouth, she swiped around inside for a few moments before
carefully putting it into a plastic bag. Then she gave it back to the nurse,
who sealed it and wrote down a number on it before returning it to the desk.
Giving her another stern look, Ms. Wagner circled around Alessia, intently
scrutinising her naked body.
“Do
you ovulate regularly?” She then asked.
Alessia
inhaled. She didn’t think that this was any of the inspector’s business, but
even more so, she feared what consequences it might have if she gave anything
but her full cooperation.
“Yes.”
The girl replied.
“Any
observable abnormalities?” The inspector continued.
“No.
It hurts pretty bad sometimes. But I don’t think that’s an abnormality.” Alessia
said.
For
the first time today, Ms. Wagner attempted something that resembled a smile.
She looked pained, though Alessia couldn’t tell if she was empathising or if
she was just using a group of muscles whose existence she had almost forgotten.
“It isn’t. Now, sit on the table again.”
Turning
around, Alessia went back to the examination table and sat down again.
Meanwhile, Ms. Wagner exchanged her gloves for a new pair and proceeded to put
on her stethoscope. Then she picked up the chest piece and placed it on
Alessia’s sternum. The girl flinched a bit as she felt the cold medical
instrument on her chest, but tried to not show her discomfort.
“Breathe
normally.” The inspector demanded.
Again
doing as she was told, Alessia sat up straight and tried to breathe as normal
as possible, even though she found herself breathing in and out a little more
deeply than usually. After a few moments, the woman asked her to take even
deeper and slower breaths, moving the cold chest piece around her breasts. Then
Ms. Wagner nodded to the nurse again, who strapped a blood pressure meter to
Alessia’s left arm and activated it with the press of a button. The cuff
inflated until the girl felt a somewhat unpleasant pressure around her arm,
then deflated again and gave off a quiet notification sound as the monitor
displayed the result.
“Lung
function optimal, heartbeat optimal. Blood pressure 108 to 66. Pulse 58.” Ms.
Wagner said, speaking into her voice recorder again. She then proceeded to feel
around Alessia’s face and neck, and nodded to herself. “Thyroid exam showing no
abnormalities.”
The
inspector then curtly indicated Alessia to lie down on the examination table,
to which the girl complied. She flinched a little again as Ms. Wagner inspected
her abdomen, pressing her fingers down on it in several spots. Unbeknownst to
either of them, one of these movements released the corroded remains of Faruk
Şahin’s skull, which had gotten caught up in between some of the villi deep
inside Alessia’s intestine. Now it would travel further through the dark
labyrinth of his consumer’s guts, to be finally flushed out of the girl’s
digestive tract with one of her next bowel movements. Most of his digested
remains had already been excreted earlier this morning, along with what was
left of the other two shrunken people Alessia had eaten the day before. The
gurgling and groaning noises surrounding the lone skull were also heard by Ms.
Wagner as she placed her stethoscope on the girl’s belly. But she didn’t care
about what was inside Alessia’s intestines right now, only if they were
functioning properly.
“Abdominal
exam likewise showing no abnormalities.” The inspector concluded, taking off
her stethoscope and telling Alessia to sit up with another perfunctory hand
gesture.
Switching
off the voice recorder once more, Ms. Wagner then took a little hammer handed
to her by Ms. Scholz and gently struck it against Alessia’s patellar tendon,
contentedly nodding to herself at the normal reflex it produced. Then she got
up and went over to her desk, where she turned around and indicated Alessia to
get up.
“Now,
spread out your arms and touch the tip of your nose with your index finger.
Like this.” She explained, demonstrating the movement. Again, the girl did as
she was told.
“Very
good. Close your eyes and slowly walk towards me in a straight line. One foot
in front of the other.” The inspector demanded, and Alessia complied. “Yes…
Okay… A little further. Yes. That’s close enough. Excellent, Ms. Santoro. You
may get dressed again; we’re done.”
Letting
out a subdued sigh of relief, Alessia turned around and went back to the
examination table. She picked up her clothes and started slipping into them
again when Ms. Scholz walked past her and towards the door with a supportive
smile on her face.
“You
did well.” The nurse whispered and winked. “Very well indeed.”
“Thanks.”
Alessia nodded and returned her smile.
“Algorithmic
valuation accurate.” The inspector mechanically spoke into her voice recorder
again as Ms. Scholz headed outside to call in the next examinee. “Overall
impression highly indicative of exemplary specimen. Academic and athletic
achievements support assumption. Compare results of exam and thorough DNA
analysis, update database. Should findings be confirmed, schedule additional IQ
evaluation and fertility assessment.”
“More
tests?” Alessia groaned, noticing her own exasperated tone a little too late.
“Yes.”
The inspector stated calmly. “But not today. And I assure you, it’s a good
thing.” She then added, engaging in her own attempt at an encouraging smile
again. “Have a nice day.”
“You
too.” The girl replied, zipping up her tracksuit jacket as she finished getting
dressed.
Alessia
then picked up her sports bag from beneath the examination table and headed out
the door. As she closed it behind her, she nodded to Ms. Wagner again, but the
inspector wasn’t paying attention to her anymore, instead fully focussed on
entering information into a form on her computer screen. Finally outside in the
hall again, Alessia exhaled and rolled her eyes. That had been even more
unpleasant than she had thought. Trying to focus on something else, she started
walking down the hallway, looking through the glass panels on the other side
and down to one of the main swimming pools of the building. The boys were
currently practicing their backstroke, and she could make out her boyfriend
Florian amongst them as well. For a moment, she considered waving to him, but
then decided against it. He probably wouldn’t see her anyway, and even if he
did, she would only distract him. But she did stop to observe him for a couple
of seconds, noting that his technique was getting better and better.
Proud
of you. She
thought lovingly, smiling to herself as she continued along the hallway and
down the stairs, where she reached an entrance hall with several glass doors
leading outside.
Looking
out through the glass, she noted that it was raining a little, just like
yesterday. Eager to get home after another long day, she was just about to put
her hood over her head when she saw Ms. Scholz and one of her teammates heading
towards the staircase from a waiting area. They nodded as they passed each
other by, and Alessia was just about to continue outside as she heard a
familiar voice call out to her from the waiting area.
“Hey
Alessia!” Tanja chirped. “You going home already?”
Turning
around, she noticed that her friend was standing next to some of the other
girls still sitting in the waiting area. Very much aware of the tugging
sensation in her empty stomach, Alessia wasn’t in the mood to talk for long,
but decided that she couldn’t just run off now. So she turned around, went over
to the seats, and joined the group of girls, who were all wearing the same dark
tracksuits with the emblem of their club. Joining Tanja at her side, she saw
that the blonde was happily munching away at a ham sandwich, sipping water from
an insulated bottle every now and again. The mere sight of her friend’s
sandwich made Alessia’s stomach contract and produce an audible groan. Upon
hearing that, Tanja broke into a sly grin.
“Yo
hongwy? The blonde inquired with her mouth full and swallowed. “Want a bite?”
She then asked, holding up her half-eaten sandwich to Alessia’s face.
The
German-Italian girl seemed to think for just a moment and then shrugged.
Stealing a bite would at least tide her over until she could get herself
something proper to eat. It would have to be something more substantial than
just another sandwich, though. She was tiring of those.
“Well,
don’t mind if I do.” Alessia then said and leaned over, biting off a big
mouthful from the piece of bread. She chewed only two or three times and
swallowed noisily. “Thanks.”
“Don’t
mention it.” Tanja said, still grinning. “Wouldn’t want you to starve,
sweetie.”
***
“Oh
my God.” Klaus Helbig wheezed, frantically trying to breathe as his giant
captor pressed the two sandwich slices together around him. “I can’t… I’m
suffocating.”
To
make things even worse than they already were, the increase in pressure around
him now forced up some more of the mayonnaise. The thick goop immediately
soaked into his overalls, soon reaching up to his neck. For a moment, Klaus
feared that he might drown, but then, the presumed threat actually turned out
to be a blessing in disguise. Now lubricated by the sludge, Klaus managed to
pull himself along further between the enormous slices of ham and lettuce, up
towards the light. Maybe there still was a way out. Maybe he would not get
eaten by Tanja today. Maybe he would live to see tomorrow after all.
In
what almost seemed like a previous life, Klaus had run a small record player
shop. At first, it had done quite well, but then he had refused to recognise
the emergence of new media and technologies, insisting that these were just
fleeting trends. By the time it became evident that they weren’t, it had
already been too late, and although Klaus had managed to keep the shop alive
for another few years with the help of some other vinyl enthusiasts, it had
turned into no more than a niche curiosity and finally gone bankrupt. Unable to
pay his debts, he had slipped into depression, been divorced by his wife, and
lost custody of his two children. When Klaus had finally been shrunken down, he
had been nothing but a shadow of his former self.
The
Vortex box containing him had been bought by a beautiful blonde girl, probably
around the same age as his own daughter. Klaus had been prepared to die that
day, witnessing dozens of people getting eaten alive by her while she rolled
around on her bed and absent-mindedly watched some girly comedy series on her
laptop. But for some reason, she had kept around a third of the tinies from his
box, placing them in a different box she had labelled her ‘special reserve’.
There, Klaus had met other shrunken people from other boxes, and learned that
the girl’s name was Tanja. Apparently, she sometimes kept tinies around for her
own personal entertainment, even though he hadn’t understood what that was
supposed to mean back then.
Over
the following days, he had learned. Tanja took some kind of twisted, sadistic
pleasure from playing with shrunken people, sometimes downright torturing them
before she ate them. Getting to know the other tinies in the box, Klaus
nevertheless had developed a new will to live, particularly a determination not
to be eaten by Tanja. She had quickly picked up on this and played deranged
mind games with him, making him believe several times that she would swallow
him before letting him live yet again. When Tanja had stuffed him into her
sandwich this morning, he once more had taken this for yet another one of her
games.
For
most of the time, this indeed appeared to have been the case. Over the course
of the day, she had eaten all sandwich slices but the one containing him, and
when she had finally lifted his piece out of her bag, he had assumed she was
doing so to let him out.
But
then Tanja had started eating. Nightmarish crunches had echoed through the
sandwich as the girl’s giant white teeth had cut into it, almost slicing Klaus
in half several times. Sobbing and screeching in terror, he had retreated
further and further into the sandwich, praying that Tanja was just screwing
with him once more. He had noticed that the pressure applied by her fingers was
concentrated right around him, so she definitely hadn’t simply forgotten that
he was in here. The question now was whether she truly intended to eat him or
not.
“Hey
Alessia!” He heard his tormentor call out high above. “You going home already?”
Klaus
didn’t know who Alessia was, and he didn’t care. All that mattered was that he
got out of this sandwich before the blonde got the chance to eat him. Groaning
and spitting out a glob of mayonnaise that had dropped onto his face from the
slice of ham above, he pulled himself further up towards the light. Once he was
free of the two humongous bread slices surrounding him, he would maybe get a
chance to jump out of the sandwich before Tanja noticed him. In the distance,
he heard a faint rumble, like that of an approaching thunderstorm.
“Yo
hongwy?” Tanja asked, followed by an ominous swallowing sound. “Want a bite?”
Suddenly,
the entire sandwich moved upward. Klaus’ heart began to race. He had a
suspicion of what was going on, but he hoped to God that it wasn’t true. His
breathing becoming more frantic and shallow again, he squeezed himself up
further, wiping more thick mayonnaise out of his face. The smell of ham, fresh
lettuce, bread, and mayonnaise was making him dizzy.
“Well,
don’t mind if I do.” Another voice said.
Thrusting
himself forward with all his strength, Klaus managed to stick his head out
between the slices of ham and bread. He desperately inhaled the fresh air and
hectically looked around. But all he could see was the enormous face of a
beautiful, Mediterranean-looking girl filling out the entire horizon. But Klaus
had no time to appreciate her beauty, instead feeling a surge of mortal panic
shoot through his body as she opened her mouth and leaned forward. Before he
fully understood what was happening, Klaus saw two rows of colossal teeth slip
past and bite into the bread above and underneath him. And right in front of
him, he found himself staring into a dark, wet abyss of pink-red flesh, easily
recognisable as the inside of a human mouth by the outline of a glistening
uvula that seemed to point down into perfect darkness.
All
of a sudden, the bite containing Klaus became detached from the rest of the sandwich
and pulled deeper into the mouth of the giant girl. What had Tanja called her
just then? Alessia? Klaus would never know for sure. Without any further
warning, he was thrust around inside the hot, humid cavern, nearly getting
flattened between two gigantic molars as they bit down. One or two more chewing
motions followed, then there was a loud, wet gulping noise.
“No…
no…” Klaus whimpered, tears running down his face as he was sucked into the
girl’s oesophagus and swallowed whole. “Please… HELP ME! HELP! PLEA…”
***
Feeling
the bite travel down her throat and drop into her stomach a few seconds later,
Alessia gave her belly a subconscious pat. Just a mouthful of sandwich like
that obviously wouldn’t last for long, but it would keep her stomach from making
any more embarrassing noises.
“Mh.”
She said appreciatively, smacking her lips as she licked some crumbs and
mayonnaise off her lips. “This is quite good. What’s in it?” Alessia then
asked, borrowing Tanja’s bottle of water as well for a moment to wash it all
down.
“Lots
of love.” Tanja said in an almost maternal tone and put her hand on Alessia’s
shoulder. “Did you like it?” She then asked innocently. “I made it myself.”
“Really?”
Alessia asked, taking a gulp of her water and subtly burping into her closed
mouth as she gave the bottle back to Tanja. “I didn’t know you did anything
yourself.”
“Big
talk from someone who just bit off half my sandwich.” Tanja protested and gave
Alessia a playful slap on the arm. “She keeps stealing my food, you know!” She
then said to the other girls, accusingly pointing at the German-Italian girl
next to her.
“Yeah,
right. Keep talking, Tanja.” Another girl said, not looking up from her phone.
“Nobody
ever believes me!” The blonde moaned, taking a small bite from her sandwich and
shaking her head in mock disappointment at the lack of reaction from her
clubmates.
“Wonder
why that is.” Alessia said, giving her an amicable, albeit slightly patronising
smile.
“Hey,
how’d your exam go, by the way?” Tanja changed the topic before she finished
off her sandwich, chasing it with a gulp from her bottle of water before
putting it back in her bag.
“Ugh.”
The other girl replied, rolling her eyes again at the memory. “Ms. Scholz said
it went well and I guess all the results were very good, but that inspector
creeped me out.”
“Right?”
Tanja said, her eyes widening. “I swear that bitch was feeling me up when I was
in there. And what was up with all that robot talk about specimens and
proportions? Could have just fucking said that she liked my tits.” She
complained, suggestively giving her left breast a squeeze. “Though maybe she
couldn’t help herself, with that view she got.”
“Do
we really need to go in there?” Another one of the waiting girls whined.
“I
don’t think she’s perving.” Alessia mused. “She was too cold and unemotional
for that. It’s more that she just treats you like a cow or something.”
“Reaaally
looking forward to this.” Yet another girl said sarcastically.
Despite
the bite of sandwich she had eaten, Alessia’s stomach let out another audible
rumble. Frowning and giving the other girls a slightly awkward, apologetic
smile, she put her hand on her belly, noticing a slight tickle in the pit of
her stomach. After a few moments, the sensation grew stronger, resembling the
more familiar feeling of a tiny moving around inside her belly.
“Tanja…”
Alessia began and let out an exasperated sigh as she slowly moved her hand
across her flat stomach, as if trying to pinpoint the exact source of the
tickling sensation.
“…Yes?”
The blonde said, another impish smile beginning to appear on her face.
“Did
you just… was there a tiny in that sandwich?” Her friend asked.
“My
secret ingredient.” Tanja winked, causing the other girls to burst into
surprised laughter.
“Well,
great.” Alessia complained, making a facepalm while trying not to laugh
herself. “Girl, I haven’t eaten anything else. I can feel every fucking little
kick he’s making in there. Or she?”
“He.”
The other girl clarified, visibly struggling not to laugh. “But I really didn’t
think you’d swallow him whole.” She then added in her defence. “You didn’t chew
properly.”
“Seems
so.” The German-Italian girl said, shaking her head in mock disapproval. “Well,
now I really need to get something else to eat. Otherwise, this will go on for
hours.” She explained, rolling her eyes again at the renewed laughter from the
other girls. “Not funny!”
“You
gotta admit, it kinda is.” Tanja replied, not able to hold back her giggling
any longer.
“Fuck
you!” Alessia shot back humorously while also starting to laugh herself. “I
gotta take care of this.” She added and put her hood over her head, both in
expectation of the slight rain outside, and as if this would somehow shield her
from her friends’ laughter. “See you, girls!”
“Bye!”
Tanja and the other girls replied in unison, still chuckling to themselves and
waving at her as she turned around and headed towards the exit.
When
she left the building and stepped out into the chilly evening air, Alessia
pulled the hood of her tracksuit jacket down even further to keep the sleet
drizzle from falling straight into her face. Cursing herself for not bringing a
pair of gloves along, she rubbed her hands and walked over to the bicycle
stand. She blew a cloud of her own hot breath onto her hands, then Alessia
unlocked her bike and moved it onto the walkway, kicking it off and swinging
herself on the saddle in one fluent motion. Turning into a path leading away
from the sports club and along the track field, she let go of the handlebar and
continued to rub her cold hands again, feeling the cold, wet air blow into her
face. While she zoomed past the empty track field hands-free, Alessia looked at
the lanterns along the path, lighting up in the beginning dusk. It was getting
dark so early these days, and it really was miserably cold. Better to just get
herself some fast food and head home quickly. She couldn’t be bothered going
shopping and cooking now.
“Stop
it.” The girl groaned beneath her breath, giving her belly a gentle slap.
Unfortunately, it didn’t result in the tiny she had accidentally eaten to move
around any less inside her stomach. If anything, he was getting even more
lively due to him panicking as Alessia moved around.
The
faint tickle at the bottom of her stomach had at least some subconscious
influence on her next decision. Cycling down a few more residential streets,
Alessia finally stopped at another bicycle stand in front of a restaurant.
There, she got off and locked her bike. And when she was done, she glanced up
at the swirling white logo above the entrance as she headed inside.
***
Stefan
froze. Over the course of this nightmare of a day, he had heard the discreet
bell above the entrance all too often. And yet, every time he heard it, he felt
another rush of raw panic go through his entire body, a cold wave of primal
fear that made him want to crawl into a corner and hide. The problem was that
there were no corners to hide in. He was inside a Vortex box, having woken up
shrunken down to one hundredth of his original size this morning. When he had
encountered the shady Vortex employees and their black truck in the park, some
part of him had already feared that he would wake up to this. But another,
perhaps bigger part of him refused to believe that this was going to happen to
him, especially since he couldn’t think of any particularly good reason why he
would have been shrunken down. Yes, he was somewhat of an outsider, but he
wasn’t a criminal, and he was wise enough to stay out of politics.
But
here he was, yet again finding himself staring at the entrance of the Vortex
restaurant he had been shipped to, inadvertently asking himself if the next
guest was the person who would buy the box he was inside of. It also stood to
reason that the same person would be the one to eat him. This would have been
bad enough already, but after the initial disorientation, he had also
discovered that this was the local Vortex, the one right in
his own neighbourhood. Where basically everyone he knew went. So there also was
somewhat of a chance that he would be bought and eaten alive by someone he
knew, perhaps a neighbour. Over the last few hours, Stefan had repeatedly tried
to tell himself that it could maybe be a good thing if his box was purchased by
an acquaintance, since they might recognise and help him. But that too was an
all too optimistic assessment of his situation. First, it would have required
for him to actually be bought by someone he knew. Second, that person would
have needed to recognise him in time. Third, and perhaps most depressingly, it
would have required for that person not to just eat him anyway. It was a sad
thing to assume of his fellow human beings, but Stefan couldn’t help but think
about what Tanja had said to him just yesterday.
When
he fearfully looked over at the entrance, it took him a few seconds to
recognise the girl in the black tracksuit who had just entered. Then all the
tension suddenly gave way to a wave of relief. It was Alessia. Just seeing a
friendly face after spending all day trapped in this box was enough to give him
a renewed sense of hope. Stefan was aware that he still was in danger, perhaps
even more so now that another customer had entered the restaurant. But he
actually found himself praying that Alessia would be the one to buy his box.
Sooner or later, his box was going to be sold anyway, but if she were to purchase
him, there was at least some chance of being saved after all. There still was
the danger that Alessia would accidentally eat him, which was a particularly
sad prospect Stefan didn’t even want to think about. But he was sure that if
she realised who he was, she would help him. They were friends, after all.
There was no way Alessia would intentionally do that to him. Unlike the other
three acquaintances of his who had come to the restaurant earlier today. They
had been Marie, Carolin, and Isabel.
Marie
and her minions had come to the restaurant around lunchtime, a little after
classes had ended. Stefan had only recognised them when they were standing
right in front of the display counter holding the boxes with shrunken people.
They had towered over him like human-shaped skyscrapers while they kept talking
to each other about some cosmetics streamer and their newest video. Looking up
at his three classmates, he had not only found himself afraid of being
purchased and eaten like with all the other customers, but more specifically
fearing that he could meet his demise being eaten by Marie, Carolin, or Isabel.
All three of them were very good-looking girls, a fact that had only been
accentuated even further by the perspective from inside the glass display. At
one point, Marie had even turned her back to the boxes for a moment as she
pointed to the table she wanted to sit down at, and Stefan’s field of view had
almost entirely been filled out by her curvy, jean-clad ass. But Marie and her
two underlings were terrible people; spoiled, materialistic brats with a mean
streak, and he had no doubt that any of them would still have eaten him even if
they had realised who he was. They probably even would have found it funny and
made a video of it, like of that poor shrunken guy Marie had just snorted up
her nose when doing a line of cocaine. The thought of going out like that,
eaten alive by a self-centred bitch like Marie, terrified Stefan even more.
And
for just a couple of moments, it had seemed as if that was indeed going to
happen to him. The Vortex employee behind the counter had taken out the two
medium boxes of tinies right above him and put them on Carolin’s and Isabel’s
trays, and had already reached for Stefan’s box next when Marie suddenly had
changed her mind, going for a small box instead. Had she not reconsidered just
then, Stefan thought gloomily, he would already be nothing more than a few
bones floating through Marie’s intestines. When the three giant girls had then
sat down at a table just a couple of metres away from the display counter, he
had watched on in horror as they devoured their meals. None of them had paid
any attention to the tinies they ate, and so Stefan surmised that Marie would
have swallowed him without ever realising who she had eaten. It was a harrowing
reminder how insignificant and small he was now. And yet, when Marie had pushed
away her empty tray, chasing the last tiny with a sip of her milkshake and
letting out a dainty belch, he had leaned back in his cubicle for a moment and felt
nothing but relief that he had been at least spared that particular fate.
Once
they had left, the salesclerk had inserted some new boxes into the metal
brackets above Stefan’s box, and it was likely thanks to this decision of the
young employee that he was still alive and uneaten hours later, when Alessia
entered the store. As she approached the counter, he once again felt the
characteristic vibrations of a customer’s approaching footsteps, and sat down
on the plastic ground in expectation of the tremors only getting more intense.
When she reached the counter, her booming steps indeed had grown to the
strength of small earthquakes, and Stefan found himself involuntarily crawling
to the back of his cramped prison as Alessia positioned herself right in front
of him. Through the translucent dividing walls separating him from the other
cubicles, he could see the faint outlines of the other shrunken people acting
in very much the same way. Cowering down and fearfully gazing up at the giant
who might eat them soon. Feeling his heartbeat speed up with apprehension,
Stefan looked up as well.
Alessia
looked quite exhausted, obviously having spent all day training at the club,
just as she had indicated during the conversation yesterday. But Stefan had
always thought that this was when she looked best. Wearing no make-up at all,
her long black hair flowing down naturally, and her just wearing a tracksuit
she obviously felt comfortable in. It only served to underline how genuinely
beautiful she was, with absolutely no need to spiff herself up. The only thing
that was different about her was her sheer incredible size. Seeing Marie,
Carolin and Isabel at this tremendous scale had been strange enough. But since
Stefan always had perceived them as intimidating bullies, them being blown up
to the scale of actual skyscraper-sized giants had felt oddly appropriate in a
way. Seeing Alessia at this size, however, felt much more surreal, and only now
Stefan truly began to get a sense of just how small he was. He was only about
as big as one of his friend’s fingernails. It also made him wonder if Alessia
really would be able to recognise him before he got eaten by her. Noticing a
slight tingle in his extremities as his breathing grew shallower and more
hectic, Stefan looked up at her again. From his tiny perspective, her face was
partially obscured by the bulge of her breasts, which shifted a little beneath
the black fabric of her jacket as she took a closer look at the menu.
“Yes,
young lady?” The Vortex employee asked. He was a middle-aged man with a Turkish
accent, having replaced his younger colleague for the evening shift.
“Uh…
I think…” Alessia began, her voice suddenly sounding much more powerful and
loud to her shrunken friend. “Yeah. I would like a salami pizza and a medium box.”
Stefan
could feel his heart beat up to his neck all of a sudden. “Please…” He
whispered.
“Of
course.” The salesclerk said, entering the order into the computer at the
register. “What drink would you like to go with that?” He then inquired,
reaching into the counter.
“Lemonade,
please.” Alessia replied, producing her wallet from her sports bag.
A
second later, a sudden jolt went through the box as the employee removed it
from the metal brackets and lifted it out of the counter. Even through the
walls of the other cubicles, Stefan could hear a ghostly chorus of frightened
voices starting to wail and scream. But although his heart was beating
excruciatingly fast, and he was on the verge of hyperventilation, he still felt
an odd sense of relief as the box was carried towards the register. This had to
be a good thing. He had survived through this whole day, had some disturbingly
close encounters with death, only for his box to now be bought by Alessia. What
were the odds? No, she would definitely recognise him in time. He would just
have to do his best to somehow draw her attention.
The
salesclerk stopped for a moment. “Dine-in or take-out?” He asked Alessia.
“Take-out.”
The girl replied, taking some banknotes out of her wallet.
“Would
you like a bag?” The employee inquired further.
“Uh…
No. I’ll just carry them in here.” Alessia said with a smile, patting her
sports bag.
“Sure.”
The salesclerk responded, walking over to the counter and handing the box to
her.
All
the while, Stefan kept staring out of the window, gasping as the box was
reached over the counter and taken by his now gigantic friend. Once more, he
looked up at Alessia as she gave the Vortex employee a friendly smile, then the
entire box tilted forward all of a sudden. Seeing the giant girl open the zip
of her sports bag down below, he suddenly slipped forward and towards the
window of his cubicle. He crashed onto the hard plastic surface with a dull
thud, accompanied by more variations of the same sound throughout the box as
all the shrunken people around him smashed onto the new floors of their
shifting prisons. There was more muffled wailing, crying and cursing from the
neighbouring cubicles, but Stefan tried to block it out, instead focusing on
regaining his bearings as the box slipped into Alessia’s bag. It landed between
a folded towel, which gave off a faint smell of chlorine, and what appeared to
be gargantuan swimming goggles, but before he could get a closer look at them,
the zip of the bag was closed again, sealing the tinies in complete darkness.
This resulted in another few seconds of panicked screaming from the other
cubicles, but then the sounds slowly died down as everyone began to anxiously
wait for whatever was going to happen next.
***
Alessia
put the box with the tinies in her bag and closed it again, bringing her left
hand to her mouth as she tried to suppress a yawn. It didn’t work, and the yawn
turned out much louder and heartier than she had thought it would be. The
salesclerk broke into a smile.
“Long
day, huh?” He asked casually. “No worries. Pizza will be ready in a few
minutes.”
“Yeah,
sorry.” Alessia apologised. “Had training all day.”
“You
run track?” The employee asked.
“Swimming.”
The girl said.
“Swimming.”
The man repeated and nodded appreciatively. “Very good for you, very healthy.
But you work up quite an appetite. Will have your food ready soon.”
She
smiled again. “No rush.”
Alessia
waited for another few minutes, then the salesclerk disappeared into the
kitchen for a moment before returning with a pizza carton and her drink. Paying
for her order, she thanked him once more and headed outside. She frowned as she
stepped into the cold, rainy evening again. The sleet drizzle was starting to
turn into real rainfall now, but at least she lived just around the corner.
Hurrying to her bike and putting the pizza and the drink into the basket behind
the saddle, she looked down at the carton with the Vortex logo and let out a
quiet sigh. For her as a real Italian, it seemed almost criminal to be buying
pizza from a fast-food joint. She even had lectured Florian more than once
about what could be considered a real pizza, and felt a tad hypocritical now.
But she was hungry, and nobody had to know about this.
Unlocking
her bike and swinging herself on the saddle, she cycled off down the road
again, turning right after a few dozen metres. Once more rubbing her cold hands
as she drove along the quiet residential streets, she smiled as she felt
another delicate flutter in her stomach.
Still
kicking, huh? She thought to herself. Don’t worry,
you’ll have some company soon.
At
first, she had been a bit annoyed about swallowing that shrunken man in Tanja’s
sandwich whole, since there hadn’t been much she could do about the tickling
sensation he had caused in her belly. It wasn’t that she particularly minded
the feeling in general, but on an otherwise empty stomach, it could be a little
bothersome. When Alessia had started cycling home again, however, she had
focused on the feeling a bit more, finding herself imagining how that little
guy was fighting for his life inside of her stomach while it inevitably got
started on digesting him. Unlike Tanja, who obviously relished the power one
had over shrunken people, Alessia usually just saw them as food and didn’t
think too much about them. But after a day like this, being subjected to such a
humiliating treatment, there was an undeniable appeal in imagining how much
more powerful she was than all of these shrunken criminals and miscreants. That
she could just eat them and swallow them alive. And that they could do nothing
to stop her. It was a feeling she felt a little ambivalent about. But again,
nobody had to know about this.
When
she finally reached her family home, Alessia got off her bike and rolled it up
the paved path leading to the front entrance, locking it to a big wooden bench
none of them really used during the winter months. Then she took the paper cup
and the pizza carton from the basket, awkwardly balancing the former on the
latter for a moment as she reached into her sports bag again and fumbled for
her keys. She found them after a few seconds of feeling around inside the bag,
then carefully pulled them out and unlocked the door.
“I’m
back!” She called out cheerfully, stepping inside.
***
“Sono
tornata!” Alessia’s voice sounded from above as she apparently opened a door.
Stefan
squinted a little at the bright light falling in through the slit of the open
zip. When the young giantess had reached into her bag and fumbled around inside
of it for a few moments, the other shrunken people inside the box had almost
lost their minds. Fearing that the girl was about to eat them, they had started
screaming and crying again, hammering their fists against the unyielding confines
of their plastic prison. They had calmed down again for now, but this was
something that wouldn’t go on for long. His eyes still adjusting to the
brightness inside the building Alessia had entered, he tried to make out where
she was, though this was made even more difficult by her sports bag
rhythmically rocking around in unison with her mighty, booming footsteps. But
judging from the fact that Alessia was speaking Italian, it seemed safe to
assume that she was back home now, talking to her family.
“Oh,
eccoti qui. Mi chiedevo dove... Ma davvero, Alessia?” The voice of his
friend’s mother said from beyond Stefan’s field of view. Unfortunately, he
didn’t understand what she was saying, but he did notice a shift in tone, from
friendly to almost indignant.
“Non
guardarmi così, mamma. Non ero sicura che tu o papà foste già tornati.” The
girl said defensively. “Inoltre, ho avuto una giornata molto lunga e stavo
morendo di fame!”
“Oh
Mio Dio.” Her mother replied, sounding exasperated, though not really upset.
“Che
succede, Claudia? Cosa ha combinato nostra figlia?” Alessia’s
father chimed in just as she stopped walking, apparently reaching one of the
rooms inside the house.
High
above, Alessia groaned impatiently. Despite the dire situation, Stefan couldn’t
help but smile to himself. He could vividly imagine his friend rolling her
eyes, as she always did when people, usually Tanja, were starting to get on her
nerves. Strangely enough, this light-hearted conversation between Alessia and
her family somehow calmed him down a bit, even though nothing about his
circumstances had changed. Somehow, Stefan just wasn’t able to associate the
sound of Alessia bickering with her mother to the imminent danger of being
eaten.
“Ha
preso una pizza da asporto.” Ms. Santoro said disapprovingly, instantly
followed by her husband starting to laugh out loud. “Perché ridi?” She shot
back at him.
“Non
è giusto!” Another, younger female voice complained. Stefan recognised this
voice as that of Alessia’s younger sister Valeria. “Anch’io voglio una pizza!”
“Assolutamente
no. Sto già cucinando per te.” Her mother told her, followed by the
teenager letting out an exaggerated groan of discontent. “Ora riguardo te, Alessia
…”
“Lascia
che la ragazza mangi la sua pizza.” Mr. Santoro chuckled.
“Grazie,
papà.” Alessia sighed.
“Stavo
per chiederle se ha bisogno del forno per scaldarla.” Her mother said.
“Probabilmente si è raffreddata mentre tornava a casa.”
“Ehm...
sì, perché no. Grazie. Ma non ti serve il forno per cucinare?” The
girl asked, starting to move again. Her renewed movements were once more
accompanied by the powerful boom of her footsteps below, and the familiar
rocking sensation. “Non voglio intralciarti...”
“Non
mi sei d‘intralcio, tesoro.” Ms. Santoro said a lot more amicably and gave her
daughter a loving hug, her towering shape now briefly visible through the
opening in the bag. “Ecco, posso farlo io per te?” She then asked when she let
go of her again.
“No,
tutto bene. Volevo comunque mettere un po’ di extra sulla pizza.” Alessia
explained as they went into another room. Judging from the sounds and smells,
it was the Santoro family’s kitchen. The notion caused Stefan’s
heartbeat to accelerate again. “Ma cosa stai cucinando lì?”
“Solo
un risotto. Puoi mangiarne un po’ domani, se vuoi.” Ms.
Santoro explained, her voice moving away a little. “Ovviamente, se Valeria non
lo mangia tutto.”
Alessia
laughed kindly. “No, no. In ogni caso, dovrebbe mangiare quanto vuole.”
Through
the open zip above him, Stefan observed how the giant girl placed the pizza
carton and her drink on some sort of counter, then she suddenly reached down
into the bag, grabbing the box with the shrunken people inside. There was
another uproar of frightened voices as the box was promptly lifted upward,
causing Stefan to fall over and lie flat on his back again, the G-forces so
overwhelmingly strong that he could barely move. Then, the box tilted by ninety
degrees, causing the tinies inside to brutally crash on the old and new floors
of their cubicles, which just a split second ago had been one of the walls.
Groaning with pain, Stefan rolled on the ground for a couple of moments before
looking up again. Rising up in front of him like a mountain was Alessia,
slipping her pizza out of the carton and onto a baking tray. Maybe she was
going to warm it up in the oven for a moment – it was quite cold outside after
all, and it seemed possible that the pizza would have cooled off a bit in the
meantime. Nearly forgetting about his miniscule size for a moment, Stefan
looked on as his gigantic friend turned on the oven next to her. And then, to
his absolute horror, she grabbed the box again, lifting it above the tray with
her pizza. This time, he joined the chorus of anguished screams.
“Alessia!”
He shrieked as an icy wave of panic went through his body. “Stop! Please
don’t!”
Like
all the voices of the other wailing and crying tinies in the box, Stefan’s too
went unheard by the giant girl. Pulling back the plastic foil covering the
cubicles, she started to tilt the box again, carefully sprinkling the occupants
onto the enormous pizza on the tray below. Feeling tears run freely down his
cheeks, he cried out for Alessia to stop over and over again as more shrunken
people began to fall out, landing on the molten cheese and pieces of salami on
the pizza with soft splatting sounds. Gravity forced him against the plastic
foil, still covering his cubicle for the time being, but Stefan was aware that
he would simply fall out of his cubicle as soon as it was removed. Desperately
trying to crawl back into his prison, he sobbed and cried, refusing to believe
that he was going to end like this. It just couldn’t be.
“Please!”
He whimpered. “I don’t wanna… Oh God, no.”
Tears
clouded his vision as more and more tinies dropped out of the adjacent
cubicles, crying out in mortal fear as they fell down onto the pizza. Then the
foil above the cubicles right next to his own prison came off, and Stefan’s
eyes widened in shock as he briefly saw Nico fly past. He couldn’t be sure if
the other shrunken boy had seen him, but his face, distorted by fear and panic,
sent a cold shiver down his spine. Seeing his tiny form fall onto the pizza
near the crust, all the anger he had felt towards him over this day, blaming
him and Vanessa for dragging him into this situation, evaporated and gave way
to sympathy. Nobody deserved to die like this, regardless of whether they were
actual criminals or just misfits.
“Nico!”
A female voice cried out next to him. “Oh my God! Nico!”
Looking
to his right side, Stefan saw Vanessa desperately clawing to the edge of the
cubicle she apparently had been trapped in, right next to his own. “Vanessa?”
He called out.
“Who…
Wha…” The girl began, looking around. Wearing a set of black Vortex overalls
like all the other shrunken people instead of her trademark emo clothes, she
looked very different from how Stefan remembered her. Her face didn’t look like
it usually did, much more awake, and obviously terrified. He noticed that
Vanessa too had been crying a lot. “Stefan?”
Wiping
away some of the tears around her bloodshot eyes, the girl extended her hand
out to him, apparently hoping that he would help her. But with the plastic foil
still in between them, there was nothing he could do, except clumsily trying to
push his own arm through one of the narrow airholes. Suddenly, the box tilted
back into an upright position, and Vanessa lost her grip. Letting out a shrill
shriek, she plummeted downwards and out of Stefan’s sight, falling onto the
giant pizza somewhere near her boyfriend. Smashing back down onto the floor of
his prison yet again, Stefan simply lay there for the next couple of moments,
quietly crying into the collar of his overalls as Alessia placed the box back
on the counter. Then she grabbed the tray with the pizza and pushed it into the
oven, humming to herself as she casually set a timer.
***
Screaming
in utter horror as her hand slipped off the edge of the box and she found
herself in freefall, Vanessa helplessly flailed around with her arms and legs,
reaching out into thin air as if something to hold onto would somehow magically
appear out of nowhere. Obviously, this didn’t happen, and so her rapid drop
only came to a sudden halt as she smashed into a bizarre landscape of molten
cheese and oversized salami slices with an indecorous splat. Falling onto what
almost felt like a mattress of soft, warm cheese, her impact sent globs of
thick red liquid splattering across her immediate vicinity. To an observer, it
would have almost seemed as if she had simply exploded on impact. Even Vanessa
herself believed that she had been gravely injured, letting out a high-pitched
shriek as she found herself covered in red goo.
It
was only when she accidentally swallowed some of the fluid that she realised it
wasn’t her blood, but simply tomato sauce from the giant pizza she had fallen
onto. At least physically, Vanessa remained unharmed for the moment.
Psychologically speaking, however, she was on the verge of a mental breakdown,
sobbing uncontrollably and starting to hyperventilate as she rolled over onto
her belly. As she pressed her hands into the gooey molten cheese and tried to
get up, even more tomato sauce squirted out from below, spraying all over her
face. Vanessa began to cough and retch, spitting out globs of the thick red
fluid, but somehow, she actually managed to rise to her feet and look up at the
colossal shape of her normal-sized classmate.
“Alessia!”
She yelled as loud as she could. “We’re down here! Please! You gotta help us!”
Just
like back when Vanessa had been in her cubicle, repeatedly calling out
Alessia’s name, the giant German-Italian girl didn’t hear her. Instead, the
giantess simply put the half-emptied box back on the kitchen counter and then
grabbed the enormous baking tray the pizza was on, sending a jolt through
Vanessa’s surroundings that made her fall over on her behind. Almost as if to
add to her humiliation, this resulted in a moist farting noise and was followed
by even more tomato sauce squirting out of the molten cheese beneath Vanessa.
But the shrunken girl didn’t care. Seeing how Alessia lifted up the baking
tray, the pizza, and her, carrying them to a gargantuan oven next to the
kitchen counter, she just shuddered, overcome with paralysing dread as she
suddenly realised what was going to happen to her next.
“N-no…
no…” Vanessa began to stammer. “No, no… Alessia… What are you…”
All
of a sudden, the air around her became almost unbearably hot, making it
difficult for her to continue breathing normally. Vanessa then heard an
unpleasant metallic screeching sound as her classmate perfunctorily pushed the
tray into the oven, finding her weird surroundings illuminated by an eerie,
yellow-orange light shining down from above. Then there was a loud thud, and the
baking tray shook a little in its brackets as Alessia closed the oven door.
Staring out through the glass, Vanessa simply looked at the giant girl in
disbelief as she glanced into the oven one more time and then set a timer for
herself. Vanessa was aware that, by the time that timer ran out, she would very
likely be dead, burnt to death as just another topping on Alessia’s pizza. And
what remained of her charred corpse would then simply be eaten by her
classmate, chewed into pulp, and finally swallowed and digested. Vanessa was
not a human being anymore, just a piece of meat on a pizza, like the giant
slices of salami around her.
Feeling
her chest constrict as she struggled to breathe, her vision began to blur,
although she wasn’t able to tell if this was due to the tears pooling in her
eyes, or due to the air starting to shimmer because of the intense heat.
Vanessa laboriously inhaled, her tiny lungs cramping up in protest against the
unbearably hot air, and began stumbling towards the crust of the pizza. She was
aware that making it off the pizza wouldn’t change anything about her
situation. After all, she still was inside a gigantic oven, which would soon
heat up to temperatures that no human being could hope to survive.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t just sit there and wait to be baked to death over
the next few minutes. She had to at least try and do something.
Staggering
across the expanse of molten cheese, Vanessa ignored the screaming of the other
shrunken people feebly crawling around on the pizza. All that mattered now was
to perhaps find some way of getting out of this oven, no matter how remote the
possibility was. Feeling sweat stream down her body and soak into her black
overalls as her body desperately tried to cool itself in the ever-increasing heat,
she coughed and gasped for air again, even though this resulted in a painful
burning sensation in her lungs. But even though she wasn’t too far away from
the crust, her progress towards the edge of the pizza was seriously slowed down
by the slippery and squishy underground she had to navigate. To make it even
more difficult for her to move forward, the cheese also began to soften with
the increasing temperatures. Just as she thought that she had found a way to
balance herself, the ground underneath simply sank in as she made another step
forward, causing her to fall flat on her face. Inhaling the overpowering smell
of cheese, oregano, and tomato sauce along with the burning hot air, Vanessa
tried to push herself up, only to realise that she was beginning to sink into
the molten cheese.
“No…”
She began to sob again, realising that her limbs were stuck in the warm goop
and that she was unable to free herself as she sank in further and further.
“Not like this.”
All
of a sudden, she felt someone put their arms around her hips and pull her back
out of the cheesy swamp. “I got you, babe.” She then heard Nico’s voice in her
ear as he leaned over.
Feeling
a wave of relief rush through her, Vanessa put in all of her renewed strength
to push herself out of the cheese. For a couple of moments, they both continued
to struggle, but then, she finally came loose and fell backwards into her
boyfriend’s embrace. All she wanted to do in that moment was to lie down and
rest for just a minute, but the burning air all around was a harsh reminder
that they had no time to lose. Nico too seemed aware of this, pulling her up on
her feet and putting his arm underneath hers to support her as he started
walking again.
“Nico…”
Vanessa coughed, frowning when she felt a searing pain on her skin. “I didn’t…
I didn’t know where you…” She began, now feeling a sense of guilt that she
hadn’t even tried to look for him. But when she had realised that Alessia had
put them into an oven, the sheer panic had washed away any thoughts that hadn’t
been concerned with her own raw survival.
“It’s
okay.” Nico simply replied, wheezing as he tried to draw breath. “Come on, we
got to…”
Somewhere
from behind them, near the middle of the pizza, they heard a gruesome howl that
was clearly distinguishable even against the backdrop of screaming and crying
from the other miniaturised people all around them. Vanessa turned her head for
just a moment, only to feel Nico’s hand cover her eyes and turn it away again.
Nevertheless, in the corner of her eye, she still caught a glimpse of a
shrunken person’s overalls catching fire, and them starting to flail around in
agony for a few seconds as they burned to death with a grisly sizzling sound.
“Don’t
look.” Her boyfriend said, coughing once more as they continued to stumble
towards the crust. “See those? We gotta try and get into one of them.” He
added, pointing to several cracks in the pizza’s bread crust that almost looked
like crevices in a cliff.
“Do
you think…” Vanessa began sceptically. She couldn’t imagine that crawling into
one of those would really protect them from the heat. But where else could they
possibly go?
“Come
on.” Nico replied, helping her move forward another step. “It’s our only
chance.”
***
Stefan
slowly wiped away his tears, continuing to stare at Alessia in disbelief as she
pushed her pizza into the oven and set a timer for five minutes, all while
silently humming away to herself. At the back of his mind, he was aware that
his disbelief was somewhat unwarranted, since there wasn’t anything unusual
about Alessia’s behaviour. She had eaten countless tinies in front of him, some
of them she had swallowed alive, some she had chewed up, and others she had
used to top up some other food of hers. This was what people did with tinies,
after all. But seeing all of this happen from the perspective of one of the
shrunken people made it feel a lot different. Stefan still couldn’t really
grasp what was happening. Alessia just had turned Nico and Vanessa into pizza
toppings and put them in an oven. And soon, she would possibly eat him alive
like all the other tinies who still remained in the box with him.
“Vado
a mettermi qualcosa di più comodo. Puoi averne un po’ se vuoi.” The
giant girl said to her mother, pointing at the box as she turned around and
walked out of the kitchen.
“Grazie. Forse ne prenderò uno o due.” Her mother replied as
Alessia went into the hallway, although she seemed to be more focused on the
pot on the stove she had been stirring.
For
a couple of minutes, she kept cooking, but then she glanced over at the box.
Stefan once again had not understood what precisely Ms. Santoro and her
daughter had been saying, but Alessia pointing at the box before she headed out
had felt ominous enough. Now, her mother put the cooking spoon down for a
moment and picked up the half-empty glass of red wine she had been drinking
from every now and again, taking another sip as she began walking toward the
kitchen counter. Once more noting the tremors caused by a giant human being’s
footsteps, Stefan felt his heartbeat speed up again and instinctively backed up
against one of the cubicle walls. Then he looked up just as Ms. Santoro’s
approaching form cast a dark shadow over the box, whimpering as her elegantly
manicured fingers reached down towards it and pulled back the plastic foil a
little further. This time, his cubicle became uncovered, and Stefan gasped as
the enormous Italian woman reached into one of the cubicles right next to his
own. He could hear a shrill shriek and saw a pair of hands slip across the
semi-transparent dividing wall for a moment, then Ms. Santoro lifted a
squirming shrunken woman out of the box.
“Let
me go!” The woman cried out in panic. “Please, I’m begging you! Don’t eat me!”
Stefan
felt the urge to look away, but there was also something almost hypnotising
about the sheer horror of the situation unfolding before him that simply made
him unable to do so. And so he watched on as the struggling tiny woman
continued to be lifted up into dizzying heights against the backdrop of a vast
feminine belly, hidden behind a cosy grey sweater. Further up, the sweater
gently bulged out to accommodate a pair of voluptuous breasts, where just a
hint of cleavage peeked out at the bottom of the V-shaped neckline.
“No!”
The woman yelped, her voice sounding increasingly frantic. “Help! Someone help
me!”
Her
screams turned into nothing more than incoherent blubbering when she reached
the giant woman’s face and Ms. Santoro began to open her mouth. Looking at the
gentle smile around her lips as she lifted the tiny towards them, Stefan
couldn’t help but take note of the striking family resemblance. Just like her
daughter, Claudia Santoro was an incredibly good-looking person, even though
she was a few years into middle age now. She had the same sun-kissed
Mediterranean complexion and warm brown eyes, though her hair was markedly
curlier than Alessia’s. What also set her apart from her daughter were the
minor wrinkles that had started to appear on her face over the last years,
especially in the corner of her eyes and her mouth. But she still was extremely
attractive, and whenever he visited the Santoros, Stefan had found himself
quietly admiring them, noting with some envy that this family was the very
definition of a genetic goldmine. It could be very discouraging to think how
unequally looks, health and ability were distributed throughout humanity.
Alessia’s family sure lacked in none of it.
“Oh
God, no! Let me g…” The tiny begged one last time, not getting to finish her
plea before she was dropped into Ms. Santoro’s mouth, disappearing between her
shiny white teeth.
Then
the giant Italian woman closed her lips again and rolled the shrunken woman
around in her mouth for just a few moments, smiling to herself as she relished
her taste. When she was done, she lifted her glass of wine to her mouth and
took a gentle sip again, sending her living snack down to her stomach along
with it. Stefan watched the slight contraction in the giantess’ neck as she swallowed
the little woman, accompanied by an almost imperceptible bulge that rapidly
travelled downward and then disappeared into Ms. Santoro’s busty chest. But
before he even had the opportunity to really empathise with the tiny Alessia’s
mother had just eaten, the giantess reached down into the box again. This time,
her enormous fingers reached right into his cubicle, inquisitively feeling
around as they searched for Ms. Santoro’s next snack.
“Fuck.”
Stefan cursed beneath his breath and pushed himself flat against one of the
dividing walls inside his prison. He knew that he would eventually have to try
to get one of the giant human beings’ attention, but after seeing how Ms.
Santoro had just swallowed that shrunken woman without even looking at her, he
felt a lot less confident that he would be recognised.
Inhaling
the scent of garlic and parmesan coming from the giantess’ fingers, Stefan
closed his eyes and tried to fill his lungs with as much air as possible. Once
she grabbed him, he would have to call out her name as loud as he could, and
while he already shuddered at the thought of her simply not hearing and eating
him, he knew that he had only this chance. If he blew it now, Ms. Santoro would
swallow him whole, and then he would go down to where that poor woman was. Into
her stomach, to be digested by his friend’s mother, and never be seen again.
One
of her fingertips touched his face, and Stefan could feel the small, bumpy
friction ridges against his cheek. Her other fingers closed around him,
grabbing his shrunken body with ease and lifting him up. His own pulse beating
in his head like a drumbeat, Stefan breathed in deep and was just about to
scream out her name when there suddenly was a loud beeping sound. It apparently
caught Ms. Santoro off guard as well, as her whole body slightly flinched and
she let go of him again, dropping him back into his small cubicle. Stefan let
out a surprised groan as he fell onto the hard plastic floor again, feeling a
sharp pain go through his entire body.
“Alessia,
la pizza è pronta!” She called out, sounding just a little bit
annoyed.
“Sì,
sì, sì!” Her daughter replied from somewhere upstairs. “Arrivo!”
Picking
up the little timer next to the oven, Ms. Santoro turned it off and then peered
into the oven for a couple of seconds, apparently deciding that the pizza had
been warmed up enough. She turned off the oven and grabbed a thick kitchen
towel, then opened the door and took out the baking tray. Pushing the towel
underneath the hot tray so that it wouldn’t come into direct contact with the
countertop, she put it down next to the box. Stefan didn’t even want to see if
any of the tinies Alessia had sprinkled onto her pizza were still alive, let
alone what state they were in, and so he looked up at Ms. Santoro again instead.
His eyes widened as she reached down into the box once more, but luckily, she
didn’t really seem to care which particular tiny she ate, and now picked up
another one several cubicles away. This one was a fat young man with a
neckbeard who kept squealing like a pig as the giant woman lifted him to her
mouth.
“Hai
già tolto la pizza dal forno?” Alessia asked as she stepped back into the
kitchen, having changed into a crop top that showed off her tan belly, and some
tight-fitting yoga pants.
“Sì,
è laggiù.” Her mother confirmed, lowering the screaming tiny again for a moment
as she turned around and pointed at the pizza, leaving her snack dangling above
her wide cleavage. “Dovrebbe essere abbastanza calda ora.” She added, picking
up her glass of wine again.
“Grazie.”
Alessia smiled and gave Ms. Santoro a kiss on the cheek. “Ti voglio bene, mamma.”
“Non
c’è di che. Anch’io ti voglio bene, tesoro.” The woman replied with a
smile of her own, also giving her daughter a kiss on her forehead. Then she
dropped the tiny into her glass.
Stefan
flinched when the pudgy shrunken man fell into Ms. Santoro’s red wine with a
visible splash, only to resurface a couple of moments later with a panicked
gasp. This turned into a series of high-pitched shrieks again as the Italian
woman brought the glass to her lips, tilting it to let the little bit of wine
that remained flow into her mouth. Seconds later, the tiny slipped into the
darkness between her teeth, but Stefan would never see the gulp with which
Alessia’s mother sent the man down into her belly. Instead, he only heard it,
as she now turned around and walked towards the stove again, her large and firm
butt cheeks jiggling slightly in her tight-fitting jeans. Ms. Santoro then
placed the empty glass next to the sink, silently providing an answer to the
question of the poor man’s fate. As she resumed stirring the contents of the
pot on the stove, her daughter slipped the warmed-up pizza from the tray and
onto a wooden board she had produced from a nearby drawer. To his dismay,
Stefan could now see several small human shapes on the giant pizza, some of
which turned out to be still moving.
Trying
to not look too closely at the shrunken people on the pizza, Stefan looked up
towards Alessia again. The giant girl briefly turned around as well, folding
the empty pizza carton and throwing it into the nearby rubbish bin. Then she
came back to the kitchen counter to take her food, but carrying the wooden
board, her drink, and the box at the same time turned out to be a bit tricky.
Picking up the box with her left hand, she pinned the board between her left
arm and her belly, inadvertently giving the surviving tinies quite a view of
where they were going to end up in soon, and picked up her drink with her right
hand. As she carefully balanced her way towards the kitchen door, she stopped a
moment when her mother raised an eyebrow and gave her a look that was somewhere
between questioning and disapproving.
“Non
far cadere nulla.” Ms. Santoro then said strictly, lifting a warning finger.
“So
cosa sto facendo.” Alessia answered and rolled her eyes, nevertheless checking
that she had a firm grip on everything before proceeding out of the kitchen and
into the hallway.
“Buon
appetito.” Her mother called out from behind her.
“Grazie.”
Alessia said back, though she still seemed preoccupied with not dropping the
items she was carrying. “Vado nella mia stanza!” She then called out towards the
living room.
“Va
bene, tesoro.” Her father’s voice came back, sounding somewhat distracted.
“Buon
appetito!” Valeria called out happily.
“Grazie,
grazie.” Alessia muttered more to herself, now slowly moving up the stairs.
Stefan,
meanwhile, was still trying to get his bearings again after being thrown around
in his cubicle once more when Alessia had picked up the Vortex box. Even now,
the incline of the floor below him kept shifting with every one of her
footsteps, forcing him to extend his arms to keep himself from smashing against
the walls. In the few moments of relative calm before Alessia had lifted up the
box, he had considered to scale these walls and try to escape, since her mother
had removed the plastic foil keeping him trapped in the cubicle. But that was
not even remotely possible now, with him not even being able to stand up
straight. And so he did the only thing that was left to do for him right now.
To yell up at his towering friend, calling out her name in the hope that she
might somehow hear him after all.
***
Nico
let out a groan, rubbing his forehead to alleviate some of the throbbing pain
behind his skull, only to find his skin to be surprisingly sensitive to the
touch. For a couple of moments, he continued to just lay on the hard ground beneath
him, wondering where he was. But when he painstakingly pushed himself up to
sit, he found himself feeling awfully dizzy once more, overwhelmed by the
surreal sight that presented itself to him. He was looking across a vast, flat
expanse, which gave way to the sight of an absolutely enormous kitchen in some
distance. At the other end of the giant room, he saw an unbelievably massive
woman standing next to a stove, apparently cooking something. After a few more
seconds of profound disorientation, it finally all came back to him. Him and
Vanessa being shrunk. The box. The pizza. The oven.
He
and Vanessa had been ambushed by two of those Vortex goons in the park just
when he had been about to show his girlfriend the fine weed he had gotten a
hold of earlier this week. Nico had desperately tried to fight them off, even
succeeding in scratching up the face of his female assailant. Visibly enraged,
the woman then had suddenly pulled out something like an electric cattle prod
and shocked him, causing him to lose consciousness. When he had woken up again,
he had already been shrunk and placed in a Vortex box, and ultimately, it had
been bought by no one else than that jockette Alessia. Nico didn’t like her,
and he knew very well that the feeling was mutual. She obviously thought of him
as a lazy stoner and made no secret of her contempt for him. And although she
was extremely popular with his classmates, Nico saw her for what she truly was:
a self-absorbed conformist who was obsessed with fitting in and excelling in
academic and athletic achievement. Unlike Marie and her friends, she didn’t
really bully people, at least not aggressively. But her wilful ignorance to
what was going on in this society made her a poster girl for the system. A
willing cog in the machine.
A
machine he and his girlfriend had fallen victim to as well now. He hadn’t known
for sure if he was in the same box as Vanessa until the now gigantic Alessia
had dropped them onto the pizza and put them into the oven. They had fallen
onto the pizza in different places, but Nico had managed to find her again
quickly, saving her from sinking into the melting cheese. They then had
attempted to find shelter from the rapidly increasing heat in the oven by
hiding in a crack in the pizza crust. This had turned out to be not
particularly effective, and while it had saved them from catching fire and
burning to death like some other tinies, they both had soon realised that they
were going to die anyway. Unable to breathe the hot air, their skins turning
red and blistering, they had tightly embraced each other one final time,
expecting imminent death. But just then, the oven had been turned off again,
and the pizza had been taken out of the oven by Alessia’s mother. Realising
that this was the best chance at escape they had been given so far, Nico and
Vanessa had hastily crawled out of the crack again and begun to climb the
crust. They had even made it to the very edge of the pizza and just tried to
figure out a way to climb down onto the counter when Alessia had come back and
lifted the wooden board up all of a sudden. The jolt had separated them, and
while Vanessa had fallen back on the pizza, Nico had fallen on the counter and
lost consciousness for a few moments.
Now,
Nico was all alone. Realising where he was again and remembering what had
happened, he felt the urge to cry. Vanessa wasn’t dead yet, but she was still
on Alessia’s pizza, and in all likelihood, she would be eaten by their giant
classmate soon. To survive all of that ordeal just to get eaten anyway. It just
wasn’t fair. But thinking like that was going to get him nowhere. First, he
would have to get off this gigantic counter somehow, and then he could start
looking for Alessia’s room somewhere in this gargantuan house. Nico was not
kidding himself. Even if he managed to get there in one piece, the chances of
Vanessa somehow surviving were slim. But he had to try. And so, he forced
himself on his feet again, flinching a little as he touched the cold, hard
surface of the countertop with his bare hands. Like large parts of his skin,
they were slightly red and showed fresh blisters, probably second-degree burns.
Then again, Nico tried telling himself, this was probably a surprisingly mild
outcome after having spent several minutes in an actual oven. So he tried to
ignore the burning sense of pain all over his skin and began to walk forward,
reaching the edge of the kitchen counter after a few minutes.
When
he saw how far the drop down to the tiled floor of the kitchen was, Nico began
to feel a profound sense of vertigo and stumbled a couple of steps back again.
Getting off this counter was going to be more difficult than he had thought.
But when he looked around to maybe find something that would help him get down
there, the shrunken boy was presented with another, much more immediate
problem. It announced itself in the familiar form of the ominous thuds and
tremors that accompanied the footsteps of normal-sized people at this scale.
Looking up and instinctively gasping, Nico saw Ms. Santoro suddenly approach
the counter. Intuitively, he began walking backwards a couple of steps,
frantically looking around in search of some place to hide behind, but unfortunately,
he could not see anything in his vicinity. But it didn’t seem as if Alessia’s
mother had seen him. And indeed, the giantess reached up towards some shelf
high above Nico, apparently looking for some spice to add to whatever she was
cooking in the pot. He exhaled again, still quietly backing away from the
sweatshirt-clad belly in front of him when Ms. Santoro took a small pepper box
out of the shelf. She was just about to turn around and walk back to the stove
when she suddenly froze. Nico shivered.
“Well,
what do we have here?” She said in an almost amused tone. If it hadn’t been for
this terrifying situation, Nico would have found her friendly, warm voice and
her pleasant Italian accent quite charming. But instead, it filled him with
cold, existential dread. “Come here.”
His
muscles tensed up, ready for him to run as fast as he could, but before his
body was able to translate the impulse into action, he suddenly found himself
pinned between a giant thumb and index finger. A mere instant later, Nico was
lifted up high into the air with uncanny ease, as if the giant woman didn’t
need to put in effort at all to pick him up. And then he realised that she
indeed didn’t have to, given that his whole body maybe was only around as large
as one of her fingernails. Swiftly passing by her belly and her large chest, he
soon found himself face to face with her, looking directly into her deep brown
eyes. Ms. Santoro smiled, showing two rows of impeccably white, straight teeth
that sent another shiver down Nico’s spine. But it was a kind, almost
compassionate smile, and the slight wrinkles showing around her mouth and eyes
only served to enhance the bizarre sense of maternal care he got from her.
“Were
you trying to run away?” Ms. Santoro asked gently.
“P-please.”
Nico began to stammer, feeling his heart beat violently in his chest. And
although the giantess’ grip on him wasn’t very forceful, he still felt almost
unable to breathe. “I-I know your daughter. P-please, you g-got to help me, my
g-girlfriend is somewhere on that piz…”
Ms.
Santoro raised her eyebrows and huffed in disbelief. “You know my daughter?”
She said, cautiously looking at him for a moment. Then she broke into a soft
laugh. “Not bad. I haven’t heard that one before.” She said and gave him a wink
before she opened her mouth.
Nico
shrieked as he felt Ms. Santoro’s hot breath on his skin. It was almost like
being thrown into the oven again, though it was more humid, and gave off a
scent of wine. “No, no, please! Please wait, I…” He began, but suddenly felt
himself being thrust forward.
Flying
through the air for just a moment, Nico looked down, an atavistic response of
his brain expecting for him to fall. But all he could see were Ms. Santoro’s
big boobs tightly squeezed against each other in her cleavage. Then he passed
through her lips and crashed onto a soft, squishy and moist surface, covered in
organic bumps that squirted out hot, sticky fluid as he came into contact with
them. Knowing that this was the enormous woman’s tongue, he tried to push himself
up, only to slip even further down the sloped surface. When he looked up, he
found himself staring right into a visceral, organic abyss of wet flesh.
“Please
don’t!” He screamed again, his voice cracking as tears began to run down his
cheeks.
Nico
frantically tried to push himself away from Ms. Santoro’s gaping throat, the
sight of her cheerfully bouncing uvula being the last thing he ever saw before
the giantess closed her lips behind him and sealed him in darkness. For a few
moments, the fleshy cave he was trapped in was filled with nothing but the
muffled sound of his own sobbing and the wet splatting noises caused by him
trying to move around on the giant tongue. Nico tried to control his panicked
breathing, but found himself retching at the overpowering smell of saliva and
wine. And then, the tongue suddenly squeezed him against Ms. Santoro’s palate,
tilting towards her throat.
“No,
no, please, I don’t wanna die!” He whimpered. “Please…”
Then
there was a loud gulping sound and Nico was catapulted forward, feeling the
woman’s uvula slide across his back for just a split second before he was
sucked downward in a deluge of saliva. He let out a last sob, and then fell
silent forever as his tiny body was forced down into Ms. Santoro’s digestive system,
her oesophagus closing behind him with a wet smack.
***
Claudia
swallowed gently, feeling the silly little shrunken boy slip into her throat
and travel down her oesophagus. Having enjoyed her impromptu snack, she licked
her lips and gave her belly a pat as she felt him drop into her stomach. There,
he would join the other two tinies she had swallowed earlier to go with her
wine, and of course the caprese salad she had made for herself and her husband
earlier today. It really was a shame that Valeria had such an aversion to
salad, or anything vegetable-based, for that matter. But then again, unlike her
older sister, Valeria still was just a bratty teenager. She would grow out of
it eventually.
Sighing
to herself, Claudia turned around and returned to the stove, where the risotto
she was preparing was still quietly bubbling away in the pot. She then
carefully seasoned it with some of the pepper she had taken from the shelf
above the counter and stirred it for a few moments. Lifting a teaspoon out of
the drawer next to her, Claudia proceeded to taste a mouthful of the risotto,
rolling it around on her tongue for a moment to check the taste. When she
concluded that it tasted just right, she swallowed and turned off the stove.
She put the used teaspoon in the dishwasher, and then took a plate from the
cupboard, using the ladle to serve her famous homemade risotto for her younger
daughter. At least Valeria liked that.
Just
when she was finished serving the risotto onto the plate and about to carry it
over into the living room, Claudia’s belly gave off a gurgle, followed by a
surge of air travelling up inside her chest. Since she was alone in the
kitchen, she allowed it to escape through her mouth as a soft burp. More out of
habit, she still raised her hand to her lips, but didn’t think much about it
otherwise as she went back to the living room to bring Valeria her evening
meal.
***
Awkwardly
shutting the door to her room behind her with her foot, Alessia suddenly found
herself feeling utterly exhausted, as if she had locked out all of the stress
of the outside world as well. She stifled a yawn and looked at the digital
clock on her nightstand as she carried her food to her bed, placing the pizza
and the Vortex box on the mattress while putting her drink down on the
nightstand as well. It still was too early for her to go to bed, and she would
have to stay awake for at least another few hours to not mess up her circadian
rhythm. Looking down at her food, she felt another contraction in her near
empty stomach, which was accompanied by a loud growl once again. This also
caused a renewed tickle beneath her left breast. Apparently, the tiny she had
been unknowingly fed by Tanja earlier was still alive. Alessia couldn’t help
but be a bit impressed by that, even though the sensation had slightly annoyed
her over the course of the evening, and his survival was probably not due to
some particular tenacity on his part. One shrunken person likely just wasn’t
enough for her digestive system to take note of, and with her stomach being
empty, he wasn’t going to run out of oxygen.
“Well,
playtime’s over.” She muttered to herself with a cursory glance down at her
bare belly, taking a slice of pizza and raising it to her mouth as she went to
her desk to fetch her laptop.
Stuffing
almost half the slice into her mouth, Alessia noisily smacked her lips and
started to chew, easily pulverising the charred bodies of three shrunken people
that had not survived the heat in the oven between her teeth. But to her, the
roasted tinies were just an additional meat topping on her pizza, not all that
different from the salami. If anything, they reminded her of bacon bits. It
wasn’t something she had come up with herself, but instead learned from Tanja,
who apparently had come up with the idea of putting tinies into an oven as part
of some kind of game she played with them every now and again. As usual,
Alessia had disapproved of her friend messing around with food like that, but
when Tanja had later offered her some of the losers of the game, she had found
the result to be surprisingly tasty. Not to mention crispy.
Alessia
swallowed greedily, sending the mouthful of pizza down to her stomach after
barely chewing at all again. She was aware that she was pigging out right now,
but she was too tired and hungry to care. And here in her room, nobody could
see what she was doing anyway. At least nobody who wasn’t going to get eaten by
her over the next half hour or so. Ignoring the frantic pleading from a
shrunken woman near the crust, who was among the few survivors of the pizza’s
stay in the oven, Alessia stuffed the other half of the pizza slice into her
mouth as well, her cheeks visibly bulging outward. She could faintly hear
another shrill scream from the tiny woman as she closed her mouth and began to chew,
this time taking a little longer to chew her food in order to not accidentally
choke on it. Picking up her laptop, she went back to her bed and let herself
drop down onto it, the sudden impact of her body on the mattress nearly sending
the box flying off the bed, and several shrunken people out of their uncovered
cubicles. Seeing the half dozen tinies on her sheets quickly trying to scramble
to safety, she let out an annoyed groan and swallowed hectically, barely taking
note of the near inaudible, high-pitched shriek that accompanied the bolus of
chewed pizza being forced into her throat.
“Oh,
for fuck’s sake.” Alessia cursed, quickly picking them up before they could
escape.
For
a moment, she considered eating them right away, but then decided against it.
However, since putting them all back into their cubicles individually was
unnecessarily complicated as well, Alessia simply sprinkled them on her pizza,
immediately picking up one of them again with the next slice she grabbed. This
particular one was a shrunken young man who, judging from his muscular
physique, would have been quite strong at normal size. Now, however, he wasn’t
even able to free himself from the sticky molten cheese he had fallen into,
screaming in unrestrained panic as he was lifted up towards Alessia’s opening
mouth.
“Wait!”
He yelled frantically. “I didn’t do anything, you gotta belie…”
The
tiny never even got to finish his sentence. Instead, his torso was cleanly
sliced in half as Alessia’s incisors came down on the slice of pizza right
where he had been stuck, killing him instantly. Easily chewing up the upper
half of his body along with the bite of pizza, Alessia leaned over to her
laptop and selected the next episode of an immensely popular and violent
fantasy series. With her extensive training schedule, she wasn’t always able to
watch the new episodes right when they were released, but at least this meant
she also could watch several in a row when she finally got around to catching
up. When the episode started playing, Alessia leaned back in her pillow and
swallowed, letting out a sigh as she finally allowed her body to relax, and bit
off another mouthful of pizza. This time, the lower half of the tiny
disappeared into her mouth as well, also being thoroughly masticated before being
sent down to Alessia’s stomach a couple of moments later. She then ate the rest
of her second slice, washing it down with a generous gulp of her lemonade.
Feeling the warm food and the cool drink settle in her belly, Alessia noticed
that the mildly annoying tickle caused by the lone tiny had also stopped. In
all likelihood, he had been buried beneath the two pizza slices she had just
devoured.
It
was just a fleeting thought for her, and one that didn’t especially concern
her, now that the cause of the issue had been dealt with. Instead of wasting
any more thoughts on the shrunken man now miserably suffocating underneath
several layers of chewed-up pizza deep inside her stomach, Alessia just grabbed
the next slice of pizza and opened her mouth again. The three living tinies
still trapped on it began to wail and cry as her lips parted, revealing to them
her cavernous mouth and the chewed remains of pizza still stuck to her tongue
and her teeth. But just as she was about to bite off a first mouthful, her throat
suddenly quivered, and before she could do something to hold it back, a wet
burp slipped out of her mouth, blowing right across the unfortunate tinies
stuck on her pizza slice. Alessia blushed just a little.
“Whoopsie.”
She said, giving the three tinies on her pizza a sheepish grin. “Sorry about
that.” The girl then apologised, thinking to herself that she really needed to
slow down a bit now.
“Fuck
you!” A shrunken woman screamed angrily, still retching at the rank smells
carried up from Alessia’s digestive system by her unrestrained belch. “You just
ate my fiancé, bitch!”
The
normal-sized girl’s smile froze and got a much more dismissive quality as she
furrowed her brows. “Well, and now I’m gonna eat you.” She stated
in a matter-of-fact sort of tone and shrugged, her lips parting again as she
pushed the slice of pizza into her mouth.
“Stop!
I’ve got noth…” A shrunken man began, silenced by Alessia’s lips closing behind
him.
Taking
her time to chew thoroughly this time round, she smirked a little as she felt
three tiny bodies consecutively getting caught between her molars and ground
into pulp as she bit down on them. Finally, Alessia took another sip of her
lemonade and washed the masticated paste in her mouth down, the feeling of the
bolus travelling down her oesophagus vanishing behind her breasts. Then she
finished the third slice of her pizza, her healthy teeth easily tearing apart
the grilled remains of some more shrunken people before her oesophagus claimed
them with yet another greedy gulp. Wiping some of the grease off her lips,
Alessia then licked it off her fingertips and lowered her hand to the wooden
board again, reaching for the next slice.
***
Stefan
whimpered as Alessia’s gigantic hand reached down and cast a dark shadow over
the board again, her hand grabbing the crust of the slice next to him. With a
wet smacking noise, the slices began to tear apart, creating short-lived
strings of molten cheese that tore apart after another couple of seconds, when
the fourth slice was lifted up high into the air above them. Trying his utmost
to block out the desperate cries of the two tinies trapped on that particular
slice as they approached Alessia’s all-consuming mouth, Stefan pulled himself
forward again, only just about managing to disentangle his legs from the sticky
cheese that clung to his black overalls like some kind of glue. Every time he
suddenly felt himself sink into the sticky goop, he feared that this was it,
that he would end up stuck in place now like most of the other tinies on the
pizza. This would mean that he would have to watch on helplessly as Alessia ate
one slice after the other, slowly approaching until it was his turn to be
eaten.
When
the girl had sat down on the bed a couple of minutes earlier, Stefan had been
amongst the tinies who had been catapulted out of their cubicles and landed on
Alessia’s mattress. He had been caught completely off guard by this, and unlike
some of the others, he hadn’t even really tried to run away, not sure what
exactly had happened when his friend’s giant fingers had closed around him.
After a few anxious moments in which he already had feared to be tossed into
her mouth and swallowed, Alessia had dropped him and the others onto her pizza
instead, where he had landed in the middle of an oversized piece of salami.
Knowing that he wouldn’t be safe there, Stefan had jumped down into the swamp
of molten cheese all around, trying to work his way towards the crust and off
the pizza again. And although he now was in constant fear of getting stuck for
good, he still was glad that he had made that decision, since the piece of
salami he had landed on now disappeared in between Alessia’s lips. Along with
it also disappeared the other two tinies who had happened to get stuck on that
particular slice, and Stefan knew that it was down to sheer dumb luck that his
friend hadn’t eaten him already.
Still
crawling across the warm, squishy surface that gave off a sickeningly intense
smell of cheese, oregano and tomato sauce, Stefan tried to focus only on the
bread crust on the horizon, stretching along the edge of the cheese desert like
a distant mountain range. What he tried to ignore in particular was the
ceaseless screaming and crying of the other shrunken people on the pizza,
Alessia’s noisy chewing and swallowing, and the sight of the red-to-black,
charred corpses littering the landscape around him. But after pulling himself
further across the sticky expanse for a few moments, wiping warm tomato sauce
out of his face whenever it squirted out from below, he suddenly came across a
shrunken girl stuck in the yellow goop.
“Vanessa?”
He asked cautiously, once more not recognising her right away.
“Wha…?”
The girl began, turning around to him.
Stefan
winced a little when he saw her face. Just like before, she looked very
different from her usual self, wearing black Vortex overalls, with her hair
dishevelled and covered in cheese and tomato sauce. Her eyes were puffy and red
from crying, and her skin had a strange pink discoloration in most places,
along with dozens of painful looking blisters. Stefan had no idea how she had
survived being put in an oven for five full minutes, but quite evidently, she
was still alive. Not that either of them would be much longer if they didn’t
get off this pizza soon.
“It’s
me, Stefan.” He said gently, pulling himself towards her. He knew that this was
going to cost him precious time, but he couldn’t just leave her here. “I’ll
help you get out of this.”
“No.”
Vanessa shook her head, her burnt cheeks moist with tears. “You got to save
yourself.”
The
shrunken boy hesitated for a moment. He knew she was right and that he had no
time to lose, but the answer still caught him off guard. “Vanessa, there’s got
to be a way, we jus…”
“You
got to get out of here. You and Nico.” The girl replied weakly.
“Nico?”
Stefan asked, looking around. To his dismay, he saw Alessia throw the last
piece of pizza crust into her mouth and start to chew. “Where is he?” He turned
back to Vanessa with a sudden sense of urgency. “Tell me now, Vanessa. Where is
Nico?”
She
suddenly looked up at him, a hopeful glimmer in her tearful eyes. “He escaped.”
“He…
escaped?” Stefan repeated, finding this difficult to believe after all he had
seen today.
“Yes.”
Vanessa nodded with a sad smile. “He fell off the pizza. He’s going to make
it.”
The
other tiny didn’t say anything, his eyes widening with fear instead as Alessia
swallowed the last mouthful of pizza and began extending her right hand toward
the board again. Feeling his heartbeat intensify yet again, he anxiously gazed
at Vanessa. On the one hand, he wanted to turn around and crawl away as fast as
he could, on the other hand, he simply couldn’t just abandon her like that. How
would he be able to look at himself in the mirror again, even if he somehow
ended up surviving this ordeal? Stefan simply stared at Vanessa’s battered face
again as Alessia’s hand cast another dark shadow across the pizza. Then a
powerful jolt went through the slice they were lying on and it was slowly
lifted up from the board. Again, Stefan heard the soft smack of the molten
cheese tearing apart along the edges of the slice. Without even knowing it,
Alessia had solved his dilemma for him. He was going to stay with Vanessa. And
get eaten up along with her in the progress. It was all over now.
No. Stefan
suddenly thought to himself. This isn’t over yet. We’re not going to
die like this.
Collecting
all his remaining strength for one last act of defiance against his impending
doom, Stefan inhaled and looked around. The slice of pizza had left the board
completely behind by now, flying towards Alessia’s impossibly large body. She
was sitting cross-legged and leaned against her pillow, her attention
completely focused on the series she had been watching all this time. Stefan’s
attention, on the other hand, was immediately drawn towards her tan, bare
midriff, her taut belly gently moving a little as she calmy breathed in and
out. He had always admired Alessia’s flat tummy, but up until today, he would
never have thought that he might meet his demise in there, digested by a close
friend he had known for his entire life. But there was one last chance to keep
this from happening. He readied himself as the giant pizza slice was lifted up
further, now passing by her tight-fitting black top. Despite the severity of
their situation, it was a slightly awkward moment, and Stefan still found
himself bashfully averting his eyes as his friend’s cleavage filled out his
entire field of view for a second or two, turning back only when her neck and
her face came into view. Seeing Alessia’s familiar face blown up to such
incomprehensible proportions made this entire situation even more bizarre than
it already was anyway. Despite all that had happened over the course of this
day, Stefan’s brain still wasn’t able to comprehend that this towering,
all-devouring monster and his childhood friend were the same person. And yet,
he still understood that he was just seconds away from being eaten by Alessia.
Mustering all his courage, he began to yell as loud as he could.
“ALESSIA!”
Stefan screamed at the top of his lungs. “IT’S US, STEFAN AND VANESSA! WE’RE ON
YOUR PIZZA! DON’T EAT US! PLEASE, WE’RE DOWN HERE!”
Just
in that moment, there was a hard cut to a loud battle scene on the screen,
fully drowning out his miniscule voice, and even making Alessia flinch.
Slightly grimacing, she leaned over towards the laptop to turn down the volume,
lowering the pizza down to her cleavage for just a short moment. Stefan blushed
a little again as he stared right down at the giantess’ breasts, but then was
distracted by a splat from behind him, not unlike the sound of the cheese
tearing apart whenever Alessia had picked up another slice of pizza. Turning
around to see what had happened, his eyes widened as he saw that one of the
pieces of salami had come lose and was sliding across the sloped surface of the
pizza, coming right at him. Stefan felt a surge of panic swell up inside him
and glanced over at Vanessa again, but before either she or he could say
anything, the oversized piece of salami suddenly slammed into him from the
side.
The
next few moments were a complete blur. The piece of salami had basically run
him over like a freight train, and Stefan had become trapped underneath it,
being rolled around his own axis so rapidly that he almost lost consciousness.
Then he suddenly found himself in freefall before landing on a warm, soft
surface just a mere split second later. Thankfully, it cushioned his fall
perfectly, not only absorbing the force of the impact, but even making him
bounce off a little again before he slipped down into some kind of crevice. It
was only there that Stefan began to feel a sudden sense of claustrophobia,
slipping deeper and deeper until he was fully surrounded by the oddly squishy
material. Maybe he had fallen between two pillows. But no matter where he was,
he was still in danger. Not only did it feel like he was being smothered the
further he sank into the crevice, as Stefan looked up towards the only
remaining source of light, he suddenly saw the giant piece of salami sliding
down towards him again. Only when it apparently didn’t fit into the crevice any
further, it finally came to a complete halt around a head’s length above him,
but although it no longer posed a threat, it now blocked his way out.
“Shit.”
Alessia’s voice then sounded from above, reverberating through his
surroundings.
All
of a sudden, the piece of salami was lifted up, and Stefan found himself
staring at Alessia again. The perspective was quite distorted from his point of
view, but he clearly was looking up at her, having a clear view of her from the
shoulders upwards. His view was only limited by the two mountainous protrusions
pressing down on him from his left and right, which, judging from his point of
view, had to be… Stefan gasped, realising that he had fallen into Alessia’s
cleavage, and that he was fighting against being squished between her breasts.
“Ugh,
now I got sauce on my boobs.” The girl whined, wiping some red tomato sauce off
the gently wobbling mounds to his left and right, and then licking it off her
fingers.
She
didn’t see me. Stefan thought to himself. She doesn’t
know I’m in here!
High
above, Alessia casually popped the piece of salami into her mouth and chewed
for just a couple of seconds before swallowing. Stefan heard a loud gulping
sound and then observed a gentle contraction in the giantess’ throat, and
although he couldn’t be sure, he imagined that he could almost feel something
travel down Alessia’s oesophagus right below him just a few moments later. Then
there was an ominous, wet gurgle from somewhere below, which again seemed to
reverberate throughout the entire massive organism. Scared out of his mind by
the literally tangible power of Alessia’s vast body, Stefan remained entirely
still, not even daring to wipe some of the sweat running down his forehead. And
so he could only watch helplessly as the girl turned her attention back to her
pizza and opened her mouth, biting off a piece just a little short from where
he and Vanessa had been located on the slice. Once more, his giant friend
chewed noisily for a couple of seconds and swallowed. Again, Stefan could
almost feel the bolus of food travel down into her belly. And then, the
giantess ate the rest of the slice.
Alessia
smacked her lips again and audibly continued to chew for what felt like an eternity
to Stefan. Then she reached for her cup of lemonade again and took another sip,
washing down the contents of her mouth with a big gulp. Stefan’s eyes began to
blur, tears freely beginning to flow down his cheeks. Trembling, he carefully
put his hand against Alessia’s warm skin as the chewed lump of food containing
whatever was left of Vanessa passed down below him, forever disappearing into
the murky depths of the giant girl’s digestive system.
“I’m
sorry.” He whispered, trying to cry silently so that Alessia wouldn’t hear him.
***
Anxiously
closing her eyes and quietly praying to herself that Alessia would notice them
as Stefan began to call out the giantess’ name, Vanessa breathed in and made
another attempt to free herself from the gooey molten cheese. She considered
calling out as well, but feared that this would make their tiny voices less
intelligible, and therefore left it to Stefan to draw their enormous
classmate’s attention. It likely would be better anyway if Alessia recognised
him first, since Vanessa had no doubt that she would help him if she realised
who he was – as for herself, she wasn’t just as sure. She had no personal
problem with the German-Italian girl, but she was aware that Alessia and Nico
didn’t like each other, and in this situation, that wouldn’t be helpful. Nico.
She wondered what had happened after he had fallen off the pizza. The drop down
to the kitchen counter hadn’t been particularly far, so he had to be still
alive.
However,
it seemed that she would indeed never be reunited with her boyfriend, or even learn
how his story continued from this point on. All that was left for her now was
to pray that he had survived and would live on to remember her. Because now,
her last faint hope of getting out of this nightmare in one piece was shattered
as some loud noise from Alessia’s laptop drowned out Stefan’s voice. Suddenly,
the giantess leaned over forward to adjust the volume, the slice of pizza with
the two tinies on it dangerously tilting towards her breasts. Behind her
shrunken classmate, Vanessa already could see some of the viscous oil starting
to slowly run down the slanted surface of the slice. But before she could even
open her mouth to warn him of the imminent danger, a piece of salami suddenly
came loose and slipped towards them like a rock sliding down a mountain face on
an avalanche. Stefan too heard something and turned around, his eyes widening
as he saw the giant piece of meat heading towards them. He looked at her again
for just a split second, but before he could say anything, the salami slammed into
him from the side and carried him away along with it, falling off the pizza
moments later.
“Stefan!”
Vanessa blurted out incredulously, not being able to see where they had fallen.
High
above, Alessia leaned back in her pillow and looked down at herself, looking
confused. “Shit.” She muttered to herself and picked up the piece of salami,
the giant piece of meat that had just easily taken Stefan with it now looking
strangely small between her fingers.
“Alessia!”
Vanessa called out hoarsely, desperately trying to pull her arms out of the
molten cheese. “Don’t…” She coughed, spitting out tomato sauce again. “Don’t
eat that! Stefan is…”
“Ugh,
now I got sauce on my boobs.” The giant girl said to herself and frowned as she
looked down at her cleavage again. Wiping away the red sauce she had
inadvertently spilled onto her breasts, she quickly licked it off her
fingertips and then threw the salami into her mouth.
“No!
Wait…” Vanessa cried out again, more tears beginning to run down her face as
Alessia started to chew. A few seconds later, the colossal girl swallowed
easily. “Oh my God…”
There
was another wet rumble from Alessia’s belly as it eagerly welcomed the newest
arrival of food in her digestive tract, then the giantess’ beautiful brown eyes
focused on the slice of pizza again. To Vanessa, it almost felt like she was
looking at her, but she was aware that she hadn’t actually seen her.
Nevertheless, it made her think of all the times she had talked to her, been
recognised as a fellow human being by her. The last real conversation between
them had been during a group project for their English class, and she recalled
some of the people in her clique expressing their ‘condolences’ for Vanessa
being grouped with the school’s queen bee. A lot of the less popular pupils
tended to think of Alessia as arrogant, and while she could be aloof and a bit
snarky at times, she had never been disrespectful towards her and always did
her part in any assignments she was given. Vanessa had always felt a little
intimidated by her even back when they both had been normal-sized, but unlike
Nico, she didn’t dislike Alessia. To think that she was now going to be eaten
by her seemed too surreal to be true.
Nevertheless,
it was exactly what was going to happen now. Vanessa whimpered as the giant
girl opened her mouth once more, feeling her warm breath blow into her face. It
was terribly humid and gave off the same intense smell of cheese and oregano as
the pizza she was on.
“Alessia,
please…” Vanessa cried, struggling to wipe the tears out her eyes as they began
to cloud up her vision. Not even in the oven had she been so afraid. “Please
don’t eat me.”
The
gargantuan mouth opened further, now filling out the shrunken girl’s entire
field of view. It looked like a vast cave of slimy, pink-red flesh, glistening
with spit. The organic grotto was framed by perfectly symmetric, pearly white
teeth, each one of them large enough to maim or crush Vanessa’s shrunken body
with ease. The bottom of the apparent cave consisted of a massive red tongue, covered
over and over in slime and chewed-up pieces of pizza, some of which also still
stuck to the chewing surfaces of Alessia’s molars. The tongue kept moving in
between the giantess’ sharp teeth like some kind of alien snail, now gently
extending towards the slice of pizza as if to welcome it and Vanessa to their
journey into the depths of Alessia’s body. Gooey strings of saliva stretched
between the tongue and the girl’s palate, soon tearing apart as the giantess’
mouth opened even further. The light falling into the fleshy cavern now also
illuminated the very back of her throat, where Alessia’s uvula ominously
dangled above the entrance to a visceral abyss of undulating flesh. If
Vanessa’s assumption had been correct, Stefan already had disappeared into that
organic chasm, literally swallowed up by it, never to be seen ever again. To
think that he and Alessia had been close friends their whole lives…
All
of a sudden, Alessia’s massive front teeth snapped down just an arm’s length
away from Vanessa, brutally cutting into the molten cheese and pizza dough. Oil
and tomato sauce came squirting out of the area where the slice had been
severed in two, the force of the bite tangible throughout the ground beneath
Vanessa. This violent jolt, and Vanessa jerking back in shock, suddenly allowed
her to break free of the molten cheese, rolling over on her back as Alessia’s
mouth retreated backwards for the time being. While she had almost come to
accept her fate a few minutes ago, the sight of her giant classmate’s maw and
the feeling of her hot breath on her face had now filled Vanessa with a renewed
sense of pure dread. Her survival instincts were beginning to take over, and
she rolled over on her belly, gasping as she began to crawl across the pizza
surface again. She didn’t even know where exactly she was going. She only
wanted to get away from Alessia’s mouth. She wanted to live, and see Nico one
more time.
Behind
her, the female colossus continued to chew, the sound of her teeth smashing
down on her food and the greedy smacks of her lips ringing in Vanessa’s ears as
she desperately pulled herself forward. Then, there was another gulp, and the
shrunken girl instinctively knew that time was up. Freezing in place and
closing her eyes as her tears began to drip onto the gooey cheese below her,
the shrunken girl let out an anguished whimper as she heard Alessia’s lips part
behind her with a wet smack again. Then she felt another blast of humid heat
wash over her body from behind, and a dark shadow being cast over her. All around
her, she could feel Alessia’s lips and teeth pass by her as the pizza was
pushed into the girl’s mouth. And just a few moments later, she found herself
looking out into her classmate’s room from inside the organic cavern, her field
of view constricted by two menacing rows of teeth. From above, spit dripped
down onto Vanessa’s head from Alessia’s palate, and from the sides and below,
even more saliva began to soak into the pizza dough. The last thing Vanessa
would ever see of the outside world was her classmate’s bed, with a half-eaten
pizza and her laptop in front of her, and the posters and shelves on her wall.
Then Alessia’s teeth closed in front of her, biting off the slice she was lying
on and sealing her in perfect darkness.
When
the giant girl’s incisors mercilessly severed the bite of pizza Vanessa was now
a part of, she was thrown backwards all of a sudden and landed on her tongue,
viscous saliva squirting out of the bumpy tastebuds. Vanessa gasped,
inadvertently inhaling the warm and unbearably moist air along with some spit.
She instantly started coughing, spitting out the sticky fluid, and tried to
wipe it off her face, only covering herself in even more slime. Being stuck in
the molten cheese had been messy enough already, but here inside Alessia’s
mouth, absolutely everything was covered in spit and organic goo. And as if
this wasn’t bad enough already, all of Vanessa’s surroundings kept moving
constantly, and she couldn’t see a thing.
“No.”
She spluttered, coughing up more of her classmate’s pizza-induced spit. “No,
no, no!”
Slipping
across Alessia’s tongue, Vanessa bumped against what felt like wet rocks,
though it was perfectly clear to her that these were the girl’s teeth. Merely a
second later, the tiny could hear and feel an unbelievably powerful smash as
Alessia’s upper molars slammed down onto the lower ones. A wet splat echoed
through the fleshy cave as dough, cheese and salami were effortlessly flattened
between the girl’s teeth. But before Vanessa was able to even begin to
understand how close she had come to being pulverised, she was violently tossed
across the tongue again like some miniature ragdoll, this time coming
dangerously close to Alessia’s left canine as it cut into another lump of dough
and cheese. Finding herself caught in a constantly shifting mush of masticated
pizza and spit, all Vanessa could do was draw breath whenever she happened to
be not submerged in the thick mass for a moment. But the forces around her were
several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything she had ever
experienced, and she had absolutely no way of putting up any meaningful
resistance to what was happening.
Again
and Again, Alessia’s molars came hammering down on the pulpified mass of pizza
in her mouth, very nearly missing Vanessa’s tiny body several times over. At
one point, her face was only a hand’s width away from the giantess’ teeth as
they crushed the charred corpse of one of the tinies who had been burnt to
death in the oven, shattering it into thousands of splinters. Vanessa inadvertently
ended up swallowing some of these herself as she gasped for air, accidentally
inhaling more spit and pizza mush as well in the process. Too busy to not drown
in her classmate’s saliva, Vanessa didn’t even take note of this, instead
flailing around helplessly as she was thrown across the tongue yet again,
landing on one of Alessia’s molars. Some part of her hoped for the upper molars
to smash down onto her, obliterating her in an instant, but it was not to be.
Instead, Vanessa was now sucked towards the tongue again by a strong current of
saliva. Then there was another smashing sound as Alessia’s teeth bit down yet
again, only this time, it was accompanied by a sharp pain as Vanessa’s left
lower leg was caught in between the enormous molars. The shrunken girl screamed
out in agony, realising that her lower leg hadn’t just been severed, but
instantly ground into a pulp of meat and bone.
Nearly
passing out due to the excruciating pain, Vanessa finally was deposited on the
back of Alessia’s tongue, hearing the giantess bite down two or three more
times before the chewing stopped all of a sudden. The utter chaos gave way to a
strange few moments of relative calm, in which Vanessa laboriously wiped some
of the masticated slop off her face again and let out a series of tortured
sobs. The intense throbbing pain where once her left knee had been was
unbearable, though for some reason, her body simply refused to let her lose
consciousness.
“Just...
let me die.” She panted, clumsily continuing to wipe spit and pizza bits off
her face.
While
she couldn’t see anything in the darkness that surrounded her, she still knew
that she was very close to the edge of Alessia’s throat, feeling a sickeningly
humid blast of hot air hit her face again as the girl exhaled. As before, it
smelled intensely of cheese, tomato sauce and oregano, but there was another,
even more menacing note in it, a faint whiff of acid. And then, light suddenly
poured into the fleshy cavern again, though Vanessa almost wished that it had
simply stayed dark, as she now found herself staring right at the back of
Alessia’s throat. She was even closer to her gullet than she had thought, mere
centimetres from slipping into the gaping maw below. The giant girl’s uvula was
gloomily dangling almost right above her, as if pointing down into the black
abyss to taunt her regarding her impending fate.
Vanessa
let out a fearful moan and turned around, glancing down her body for a moment.
Her black overalls were partially torn and completely soaked with spit, as well
as covered in slime and chewed-up pizza bits. But what was worse than anything
else was the sight of her left leg, which had been cleanly severed right at the
height of her knee, oozing red blood onto the wet tongue. Whimpering to
herself, she looked away and painstakingly turned towards Alessia’s half-open
mouth, squinting at the glaring light falling in from the outside. Just as her
eyes had managed to adjust to the brightness, however, a torrent of clear
liquid came pouring in from beyond the girl’s lips, carrying the chewed-up
pizza pulp towards her like a tsunami.
“Oh
God.” She whispered to herself, the torrent reaching her just a split second
later.
The
shrunken girl felt a fierce wave of cold lemonade smash against her body, then
she was simply carried away by the violent current, which soon turned into a
roaring waterfall when it splashed over the back of Alessia’s tongue. Passing
by the young giantess’ uvula and tonsils, Vanessa looked down, letting out a
panicked gasp as she gazed down into the colossal throat that would now swallow
her. There was an exceptionally powerful, wet gulping noise, and Vanessa’s ears
popped as the air pressure suddenly changed around her. Rushing downwards with
the tsunami of lemonade and masticated pizza, she could see Alessia’s
epiglottis rush to close her windpipe and protect it from any foreign objects
entering her respiratory system. It left Vanessa with only one way to go from
here: Down into the girl’s gaping oesophagus, a dark tunnel of undulating flesh
that now greedily slurped her in as she was swallowed alive.
***
Alessia swallowed the mouthful of pizza
with a gulp of lemonade, leaning back in her pillow as she felt the lump slide
down her throat, being deposited in her stomach a few seconds later. She looked
down at the board and the remaining three slices, and decided to eat a few
tinies from the box now. There still was around half of them left, and now that
her stomach was a bit fuller, they wouldn’t tickle too much even if she
swallowed them whole. So she took the box and placed it on her gurgling belly,
tearing off the remaining plastic foil and crumpling it into a ball. Since she
felt too lazy to get up again just to throw it away, she eyed the trash can
next to her desk for a moment and then just threw the crumpled ball towards it.
Interestingly enough, it landed right in the middle of the bin, something
Alessia hadn’t actually expected to happen. Raising her eyebrows in mild
surprise, she nodded appreciatively and then turned her attention back to her
series. The noisy battle scene was over by now and the story had moved on to
some more subdued dialogue between two of the main characters, so that she felt
safe enough to turn up the volume a little again as she leaned forward and
fished one of the tinies out of the box. This shrunken man didn’t even bother
to beg for his life. Instead, he just kept hurling insults at Alessia while she
opened her mouth and popped him inside. She was about to swallow him when her
phone, which she had placed on her nightstand when she had gotten changed
earlier, started ringing. Checking out the caller ID, Alessia saw that it was
Tanja.
She
swallowed the squirming tiny in her mouth and picked up the phone, tapping the
pause button on her laptop as she accepted the video call. “Yeah? What do you
want?” Alessia then asked a little impatiently as her blonde friend appeared on
her phone’s screen.
“Mh.”
Tanja began, sucking a pair of kicking little legs in between her lips. “Thewe
yow aw.” She said, swallowing the tiny in her mouth with a soft gulp. “I’ve
been meaning to call you.”
“Which
you are doing now.” Alessia said, expecting her to explain why she was calling.
“Yes.”
Her friend smiled happily, walking around in the kitchen of her family’s home.
“What
do you want, Tanja?” The black-haired girl groaned. “I’m watching something.”
Tanja
frowned. “You’re not being very nice to me.” She pouted with faux indignance.
“Of
course I am being nice to you.” Alessia protested, furrowing her brows.
“And
now you’re gaslighting me.” Tanja admonished her with a subtle smirk. “I don’t
know, I’ve been getting lots of passive-aggressive vibes from you lately. Is
this about that American dude I made out with the other day?”
“Uh,
no?” Alessia said, looking confused for a moment before remembering what Tanja
was referring to. “But now that you mention it: Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“Josie
and I are more like… friends with benefits.” The blonde replied evasively.
“Does
she know that?” The German-Italian girl asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Of
course she does.” Tanja replied, sounding shocked. Then she flipped another
screaming tiny into her mouth and swallowed. “You’re making me sound like a
terrible person!”
Alessia
shrugged, reaching into her box of tinies and lifting a shrunken woman to her
mouth. “I mean, it’s none of my business. Just don’t hurt her, okay? She’s a
nice girl.”
“I’m
not.” Tanja shook her head, now looking somewhat more serious. “Josie knows
we’re not exclusive.” She said before changing the topic: “Hey, I see you got
yourself some Vortex!”
“Yeah.
So did you, apparently.” Alessia said, placing the miniaturised woman in
between her lips before easily sucking her into her mouth and swallowing her
down.
“Oh,
these? No. I’m just cleaning up the house. I had a little… incident a few weeks
ago and some of them got away.” She explained, looking a little gloomy. Then
she seemed to pick up another shrunken person from somewhere outside of her
phone camera’s field of view, lifting the crying little woman to her face and
smiling at her. “But you stuck around, didn’t you?”
“Uh,
Tanja…” Alessia began, realising that her friend was drifting off into
Tanjaland again.
“Oh,
don’t cry now, Michelle.” The blonde cooed as she raised the sobbing tiny over
her face. “You knew this was going to happen sooner or later. It’ll be over
soon, I promise.” She said, her voice cracking a bit as she opened her mouth.
Dropping the shrunken woman inside, she swallowed gently and then wiped away a
tear from the corner of her eye.
“Are
you crying?” Her friend asked incredulously. “What was that all about?”
“Sorry.
That was a very emotio…” Tanja replied, interrupting herself as she raised her
hand to her mouth and let out a short belch. “… emotional reunion for us. We
went way back.”
“Right.”
Alessia stated dryly. “So, why is it you’re calling me?”
“Yes,
I should let you get back to it.” Her friend said. “I wanted to ask if I could
borrow your history notes. I figured I maybe actually should study for that
test on Wednesday. I was going to ask Stefan, but he was ill or something, and
Jessica didn’t have hers with her today.”
“Uh,
sure. Just come around anytime you want tomorrow, I’m not going anywhere. Only
my morning run at six.” Alessia explained, eating another shrunken man from her
box.
“Yeah,
I won’t be awake that early, girl. Not on a Saturday.” Tanja laughed.
Alessia
grinned. “Didn’t think so.”
“Anyway,
thanks. See you tomorrow. Enjoy your evening, sweetie!” Her friend said, waving
her goodbye as she started walking up the stairs to her room again.
“You
too. Bye.” The black-haired girl said with an amicable smile, and then hung up.
Just
when she was about to put her phone back on her nightstand, Alessia thought
about what Tanja had mentioned. She hadn’t been in school all day because of
her swim training and the exam later in the afternoon, but she was sorry to
hear that Stefan apparently was unwell. For a brief moment, she considered
calling him to check in on him, but then she decided against it. They had
agreed for her to call him tomorrow anyway, and if he was ill, he most likely
just wanted to be left alone. So she opened her messenger app and went to her
ongoing chat with Stefan, typing up a short message to ask how he was doing.
hey!
tanja said you were ill today. hope it’s not too bad? lmk if you wanna
talk! <3
Alessia
waited for a couple of moments in case he replied immediately, but when it
appeared that this was not going to be the case, she shrugged and put her phone
away. She would just phone him tomorrow and see how he was doing then. Letting
out a soft sigh, she grabbed her paper cup and took another big gulp, feeling the
cold liquid run down her throat. Since all of the live tinies on the pizza had
been eaten, she fished a few more out of the box and sprinkled them onto the
remaining pieces, then picked up another slice and brought it to her mouth.
***
Following
the violent chaos and mayhem that came with being eaten alive, the journey down
Alessia’s oesophagus felt almost anticlimactic to Vanessa. It wasn’t a pleasant
experience by any means, but after being tossed around in her classmate’s mouth
and almost being crushed to death between her teeth, it was much more
straightforward. In fact, the slow descent down into Alessia’s body had an
almost serene, otherworldly quality to it. For just a short moment, Vanessa had
even wondered if she had indeed died in the giantess’ mouth and was now being
ferried towards the afterlife through some kind of eldritch tunnel. But the
slimy texture of the oesophageal walls and the peristaltic contractions, the
regular thump of Alessia’s heartbeat, and the throbbing pain in her left leg were
all harsh reminders that Vanessa was still very much alive, and currently
sliding down into the giant girl’s belly. Soon, she would arrive in Alessia’s
stomach, to be digested by her classmate while awake and conscious. There were
few ways to die Vanessa imagined to be worse. Not only would it be extremely
painful, but it would also not be instant, a slow, undignified death as her
body was molten down and turned into nutrition for the girl that had eaten her.
And sometime tomorrow, Alessia would shit out whatever remained of Vanessa
after spending the night inside her digestive tract.
This
can’t be happening. The shrunken girl thought to herself as
another powerful contraction of the surrounding muscles pushed her down
deeper. This must be some kind of nightmare.
Almost
gliding downward along the slick, warm walls of the giantess’ oesophagus,
Vanessa was unable to see anything in the absolute darkness. But instead, she
could virtually feel what was happening around her. Just above her, the bolus
of chewed-up pizza was travelling down in the same direction as her, having
dropped into the oesophagus just a moment after her. The torrent of lemonade
that had washed her down had flowed passed her by now, vanishing into the dark
abyss below. And through the fleshy walls constricting around her aching body,
she could hear, even sense the calm beat of Alessia’s heart. Since the girl who
had eaten Vanessa was an extremely fit athlete, now relaxing as she ate her
dinner, her heartbeat was quite slow, giving it a strangely calming, almost
hypnotic quality. Further adding to this almost soothing soundscape was
Alessia’s tranquil breathing, a sound of powerful lungs to Vanessa’s left and
right drawing in vast amounts of oxygen before gently forcing out equally large
quantities of carbon dioxide. Vanessa couldn’t tell for sure, but to her, it
indeed sounded like the breathing of a top swimmer, far more controlled and
efficient than that of a regular person like herself.
But
the thought of being inside the body of an athlete like Alessia caused her own
breathing to become hectic and shallow once more. Being trapped inside these
cramped, hot and humid confines made breathing difficult enough, but thinking
about Alessia’s fitness and health also served as another reminder that the
girl’s organism would make short work of her. Not short enough to be quick and
painless, but to leave very little, if anything of her that wouldn’t just be
absorbed into Alessia. Perhaps there would be nothing left of Vanessa at all
when this was all over. Perhaps she would just vanish, burned off as nothing
more than a miniscule amount of energy to be used by her classmate. Perhaps
that was going to be her ultimate fate.
“Let
me out.” Vanessa cried, feebly pressing her hands against the pulsating wet flesh.
Unable
to fight her unstoppable descent, the girl closed her eyes as Alessia’s
heartbeat grew almost unbearably loud, hammering into her head with such an
intensity that it overpowered even her own thoughts. She tried to scream,
feeling as if her very soul was being torn apart and absorbed into the slimy
organic tissue around her. But all she managed to produce was a pathetic
gargling sound that simply bounced off the powerful muscles clamping down on
her. Again, the peristaltic movements forced her deeper, and suddenly, Vanessa
began to feel as if she was being buried alive. Buried underneath layers of
flesh, muscles and tendons, within a living mountain. Her head began to spin,
only adding to her profound sense of disorientation. The only thing Vanessa
still could make sense of was where up and down was, and that, judging from the
thumping heartbeat next to her, she had to be somewhere inside Alessia’s chest.
Somewhere behind those voluptuous breasts so many envied and admired.
Finally,
the oppressively strong heartbeat became a little weaker again, but the price
for this apparently was that the air inside the oesophagus became even more hot
and rank. Whenever Vanessa tried to inhale, it felt like she was just sucking
in some kind of thick gas, filled with little droplets of hot spit and slime.
She coughed and spasmed, trying to claw her hands into the oesophageal walls
again, but since absolutely everything, including herself, was covered in
gelatinous slime, it was impossible to get a hold of anything. And so Vanessa
continued to slip deeper and deeper into the darkness, until the flesh tube she
was travelling through began to slope sidewards. Now sliding down an extremely
steep incline, still being pushed forward by the impatient peristalsis, the
shrunken girl started to hyperventilate once more. Her arms and her remaining
leg began to cramp as raw panic started to squeeze her chest. Trembling so
badly that it would have looked like a seizure to an outside observer, Vanessa
slammed into a tightly shut ring of muscles. Only a split second later, the
powerful sphincter opened up with a moist smacking noise and began to suck her
in, its tight muscles nearly crushing her chest.
The
shrunken girl howled in pain, only for a wet lump of chewed-up pizza dough and
cheese to drop onto her from above and forcing her upper body through the ring
of muscles as well. For just a moment, Vanessa feared that her aching body was
going to implode under the raw pressure, but then she was forced through to the
other side of the sphincter and quite literally spat into a gigantic organic
cavern. She still couldn’t see a thing, but nevertheless, she once more found
herself wishing that she would have just lost consciousness or been crushed by
Alessia’s teeth earlier. The moment she found herself in freefall again, her
eyes immediately began to burn, and when she inhaled, it felt as if her airways
had been lit on fire. Vanessa felt nothing but raw pain as she plummeted
through thick fumes of digestive gasses, her already burnt skin flaring up with
searing agony as it came into contact with the invisible clouds. The stench
inside this place, which she knew at the back of her mind to be Alessia’s
stomach, was unlike anything her olfactory senses had ever dealt with before.
It was unbearable blend of vomit, the ingredients of the pizza the girl was
eating, and hydrochloric acid.
Along
with the burning pain on her skin and her maddening fear at what was going to
happen now, this infernal smell sent Vanessa’s body into convulsions again. And
so she regrettably gasped for air once more just when she splashed into the
churning soup of digesting food and lemonade. Her mouth and nose immediately
began to fill with what essentially was a mixture of lemonade and Alessia’s stomach
juices, along with some smaller pieces of digesting pizza and shrunken human
beings like herself. But just when Vanessa thought that she was going to drown,
a massive object smashed onto the surface of the digestive stew above her,
displacing large amounts of liquid and sending a tidal wave rippling through
the stomach. Vanessa was caught in the shockwave, aimlessly kicking around
herself as she was smashed against one of the soft stomach walls. Then she
realised that her head was no longer below the waterline and took a deep breath
as she instinctively tried to fill her lungs with oxygen.
Instead
of being rewarded with cool, fresh air as she would have been if she had simply
fallen into a lake or the ocean, Vanessa once more inhaled the acidic fumes and
the disgusting smell of digesting pizza. Her airways flared up with searing
pain yet again and the muscles within her battered body cramped up once more.
She wanted to scream, but instead of giving voice to her pain and agony, her
body expelled the contents of her own stomach in a concentrated jet of hot
vomit, mixing with some metallic-tasting blood that had begun to ooze out of
slight ruptures in her airways. All of this soon blended into the thick sea of
puke Vanessa was now swimming in, and when she had finally emptied herself, the
shrunken girl gradually began to calm down just a little. Bumping into what
appeared to be a piece of chewed-up salami as she aimlessly drifted through the
bubbling soup, Vanessa held onto it to keep herself from being sucked down into
the depth below again by the swirling currents and vortices around her.
She
had been eaten. This was the inside of Alessia’s stomach, and for all intents
and purposes, there was no difference anymore between Vanessa and the piece of
salami she was clinging to as if it was some kind of life raft. She was nothing
than a piece of meat inside the stomach of her classmate, about to be digested
over the course of the next few hours. Unable to see in the darkness around
her, and with her olfactory senses overpowered by the acrid stench, the
shrunken girl only had her hearing left to make sense of her alien
surroundings. Somewhere high above her, she could still hear Alessia’s mighty
heartbeat and breathing, but the sound was not as loud as it had been in her
oesophagus. Now, the soundscape was dominated by the menacing gurgles and
groans of her classmate’s stomach, supplemented by a moist slithering noise
coming from the slippery walls as they kept contracting and expanding. For
Vanessa, these movements translated into choppy waves shaking her around with
her piece of chewed salami. Had it not been for the warmth and density of the
broth she was drifting through, she could almost have told herself that she was
a castaway out on the open sea.
But
she wasn’t. Somewhere above her, there was a powerful gulping sound, and just a
couple of seconds later, Vanessa could hear the cardia open up once more,
accompanied by a greedy wet smack. Then she suddenly heard a man crying out as
if in pain, the sound of his agonised voice rapidly descending down towards the
digesting swamp. It was cut off by a splash as he fell into the thick soup of
disintegrating food and stomach juices somewhere to Vanessa’s left, leaving her
to wonder if he was going to make it up above the surface again. She would
never find out, because now, the giant body surrounding her shifted just a
little and then was shaken by a loud, but also strangely muffled noise that
Vanessa couldn’t make sense of at first. Only when she recognised the cadence
of Alessia’s voice did she understand that the giantess was talking to someone.
Strangely enough, however, she couldn’t hear anyone reply, even though it
definitely sounded as if Alessia was having a conversation. For a while,
Vanessa listened to the voice echoing through the body around her, trying to
understand what she was saying.
But
although she eventually heard another female voice from somewhere beyond the
confines of Alessia’s belly, it wasn’t loud enough for her to identify as
belonging to anyone she knew. Vanessa found herself trembling again. The fact
that she was unable to understand what the booming voice was saying gave it an
especially ominous and threatening quality, almost as if her classmate were
some kind of ancient titan mere mortals such as herself could not hope to
comprehend. To make things worse, there soon was another gulp from above, again
followed by the cardia opening up and spitting a wailing shrunken woman into
Alessia’s stomach just a few seconds later. While the sobbing tiny splashed
into the bubbling stomach juices like her predecessors, the giant girl who had
eaten her simply kept talking, as if she hadn’t even really thought about the
fact that she had yet again swallowed a living, breathing human being.
Vanessa
shivered, trying to block out the anguished cries of the woman as she made her
way back to the surface, now coughing and retching just like herself when she
had arrived in here a few minutes earlier. While Vanessa wasn’t in that state
of frenzied panic anymore, she too was afraid like never before in her life,
her hands shaking almost uncontrollably as she tried to pull herself further up
onto the piece of salami. She didn’t really know what she was trying to achieve
by this, since it wasn’t going to help her get out of Alessia’s stomach. But
she felt like she at least had to do something, something else than simply
waiting for her classmate to digest her. Unfortunately, the soggy lump of
chewed meat was unable to support her weight, sinking dangerously deep below
the surface when Vanessa tried to climb onto it. Finally, she gave up on her
attempts, letting her body slip into the warm, acidic stew again.
“Fuck.”
She whispered to herself, frowning at the throbbing pain in the stump of her
left leg flaring up once more as it was submerged beneath the surface. “It
hurts so bad.”
The
girl who had devoured her simply kept talking, finally swallowing something yet
again. When the cardia admitted the next shrunken person to the undulating
cavern, Vanessa quickly could tell from the pitch of the screams that it was a
man. He too fell into the churning broth with a subdued splat and made it back
to the surface a couple of moments later, crying out for help that would never
come. Vanessa didn’t feel a strong urge to come to his assistance either. She
barely even knew where inside Alessia’s stomach she was herself, and if she
tried to help him – what would they do? The only way out of here was that tight
ring of muscles, but even just getting up there was impossible. The stomach walls
were slick and slimy, and even if she somehow managed to make it all the way up
to the cardia and squeeze through it, she would have to climb up the walls of
Alessia’s oesophagus again, and them somehow make it out of her mouth without
the giant girl noticing it. No, even thinking that it was possible to escape
from this place was ludicrous. Alessia’s stomach was the closest thing Vanessa
could imagine to actual hell, and all who entered here ought to abandon all
hope.
Even
though she couldn’t see, Vanessa closed her eyes. Feeling her trembling fingers
dig into the mushy piece of salami, she tried to tell herself to let go.
Drowning in this rancid soup of chyme and stomach juices was going to be an
agonising death, but at least it would be over in a couple of minutes. She
already was suffering unbearable pain from her severed leg, and her airways
burned up yet again as she inhaled more droplets of stomach acid, amounting to
what felt like the most excruciating heartburn imaginable. So it seemed only
reasonable to subject to a few more minutes of particularly gruesome agony, and
in return find everlasting peace. Just then, Alessia also appeared to have
stopped talking, leaving Vanessa listening to nothing but the steady sound of
her heartbeat and breathing again, as well as the sinister gurgling and
squelching of her digestive tract. Trying to focus on the sounds of the
colossal organism that she was going to be absorbed into soon, Vanessa let go
of the piece of salami, feeling the hot, acidic liquid wash over her face as
she sank below the surface. But as she began to sink into the depths below, she
was overcome by a profound, dizzying sense of dread. It was similar to the
unsettling sense of vastness one got from swimming in the ocean or a deep lake,
realising just how miniscule one was in comparison to the expanse and the
depths around.
This
sense of anxiety quickly turned into all-out panic again as Vanessa’s lungs
began to cry out for oxygen. The muscles in her body began to twitch and
convulse, and she found it more and more difficult to resist the urge to swim
back up to the surface. But then her increasingly difficult struggle against
her own survival instinct was interrupted by another loud gulp. For just a few
seconds, nothing seemed to happen, then the relative calm underneath the
surface was violently interrupted by a torrent of cold liquid streaming into
the stomach. This resulted in a tsunami-like tidal wave that carried Vanessa
along with it, smashing against the stomach walls and creating an uplift that
propelled her back to the surface. Now finding herself stuck in a stomach fold,
the slimy mucosa licking across her face like some kind of alien tongue as it
covered her in slime and bitter acid, Vanessa gasped again. The foetid air
within Alessia’s stomach made her gag once more, but it seemed she had somewhat
gotten used to the stench by now, adjusting to it after a few moments of
feeling the urge to throw up. Then Vanessa cried out in raw despair, pounding
her fists against the slippery flesh walls of her prison.
“Why?”
She cried, her voice cracking. “Why can’t you just let me die?”
Her
uncaring consumer, not even remotely having heard her outcry, swallowed once
more. Again, there were a few seconds in which nothing seemed to happen as the
girl’s oesophagus ferried another bolus of food to its destination, then a lump
of chewed-up pizza splashed into the frothing chyme. This sent another wave of
thick, semi-digested stew rippling through the stomach and smash right into
Vanessa’s face, leaving her coughing and spitting out chunks of Alessia’s vomit
as the tide subsided again. Frantically trying to wipe pulpy puke off her, she
reached into her hair, noticing that a whole bunch simply detached from her
scalp as she did so. Vanessa gagged yet again, both in disgust and fear as she
felt a renewed burning sensation on her skin. Her overalls had largely melted
away at this point, and Alessia’s stomach acid was now getting started on
eating away at her body directly. She was starting to get digested alive, fully
conscious to witness the process. Letting out a bone-chilling, horrified moan,
the shrunken girl tried to pull herself out of the stomach fold, which
ultimately released her with a wet smacking noise. Vanessa once again started
swimming through the odious liquid being churned around in her classmate’s
stomach, once more trying to muster the courage to dive below the surface and
hold her breath until she would lose consciousness.
But
no matter how often she tried dipping her head below the surface, an intense
fear of death always pulled her back, leaving her gasping for air in the
caustic fog. Vanessa didn’t want to die. She wanted to live. All she longed for
was to get out of this terrible place and be reunited with her beloved Nico
again. It was the thought of her boyfriend that gave her perturbed mind
something to focus on. What would he tell her if he were here? Surely he would
not want her to just give up like this. They had had so many plans for the
future. They had wanted to travel the world together, learn about other
cultures. They had wanted to make a difference.
Bracing
herself for the impact as Alessia swallowed again, sending another bolus of
chewed pizza into the depths of her belly, Vanessa tried to keep thinking of
Nico. She swam over to a lump of masticated pizza crust, holding onto it as the
next bite of the giant girl’s dinner was catapulted into the stomach, creating
yet another tidal wave that washed her new raft towards the stomach walls. When
it bounced off the undulating mucosa and drifted back towards the centre of the
gurgling swamp, she used the momentum to pull herself upwards. This time, she
succeeded in pulling herself out of the chyme, slowly rolling over onto her
back as she let out an exhausted groan, her thoughts still with her boyfriend.
Unlike Stefan, whose masticated remains were probably floating around in the
digesting broth around her, Nico had not been eaten by their classmate. He was
going to make it. Even if she didn’t, that was at least some small consolation.
Losing her wouldn’t be easy for him, but he would live.
Vanessa
forced herself to smile, blocking out the pain for a moment. “You can do it,
sweetie.”
***
Stefan
panted, feeling the air being pressed out his lungs as he continued to slip
deeper and deeper into the narrow space between Alessia’s breasts. By now, the
gigantic mounds around had almost completely enveloped him, leaving him with
little air to breathe and just a tiny bit of light falling in from above. But
he couldn’t see much of his friend’s face anymore, and so had to rely on his
hearing to understand what was going on around him. The dominant sound was that
of Alessia’s steady heartbeat, the powerful thump of which he could actually
feel on his body as it reverberated through her chest. The entire surface below
him kept lifting up and down as she calmly continued to breathe in and out, and
it made Stefan slightly dizzy to think that all of this vast body he was lying
on was really just his old friend Alessia. Rationally, he was aware that it was
her, but it still just didn’t want to sink into his mind how incredibly big she
was. Or, more accurately speaking, how small he was compared to her.
And
then there was another sensation he simply refused to associate with his
childhood friend. That of intense fear. This colossal being had just eaten
Vanessa, not to mention all those other shrunken people from the Vortex box she
had already consumed. And it was only due to luck that Alessia hadn’t eaten
Stefan as well. If she noticed that he was in here, it was quite likely that
she would just pick him up and toss him into her mouth, swallowing him before
he could even try to get through to her. Back when she had bought the box in
the restaurant, Stefan had still hoped that she would recognise him. But after
seeing how she had massacred dozens of shrunken people like himself already,
even eaten one of their classmates, he simply didn’t dare to draw the attention
of the giantess. It would probably be better to just think of her as some kind
of man-eating monster, not as a girl he had known for his entire life. But this
new approach had been extremely short-lived, since Alessia had soon after
received a phone call from Tanja. The following conversation between the two
girls had been disturbingly normal considering what Stefan had been through
over the course of this day, but it also served as a painful reminder that,
from Alessia’s perspective, none of this was out of the ordinary. And he
himself had observed her eating shrunken people from Vortex plenty of times. He
had just not assumed that he would once be one of those miniaturised people she
was devouring.
When
Tanja had mentioned that Stefan had apparently been ill today, he had come
close to a complete mental breakdown. All he had wanted was to kick and scream,
to call out to the two girls that he was right here. But he was too scared that
Alessia would not realise who he was and eat him, perhaps even swallow him
whole. He could just not take that risk. And so Stefan remained hidden in the
depths of her cleavage, listening to her gobble up shrunken people and slices
of pizza. Every time the young giantess swallowed, he could faintly hear and
sense her food travelling down to her stomach below the giant collarbone he was
lying on. What turned out to be particularly disturbing was that whenever she
swallowed a shrunken person whole, he could even hear them screaming and crying
as they slid down the oesophagus just below him, although the sound was quite
weak, and often drowned out by her heartbeat. And so, he simply waited while
Alessia continued to eat, slowly slipping deeper in between her breasts since
he didn’t dare to move in such a way that the girl would notice him.
At
some point, his friend seemed to have finished her pizza, resuming to pick up
crying and begging shrunken people from the box before she flicked them into
her mouth like peanuts. It was a procedure that repeated itself over and over
again. But since he was paralysed by fear, Stefan didn’t even try to escape. It
was only after another man’s cries were suddenly cut off, followed by the sound
of Alessia swallowing and a quiet sobbing passing down through her oesophagus
beneath him that Stefan realised he could move his legs more freely again. For
a few moments, he didn’t understand what was going on, but then he started to
feel the pressure on his lower body ease more and more. He risked turning his
head around, and then realised that he had slowly slipped through in between
her breasts, now looking at the vast expanse of her tan belly behind him. Like
her chest, this surreal landscape gently moved up and down with Alessia’s
breath. But while this sight and the sound of her gentle breathing alone would
have had an almost calming effect on him, some of the other views and noises
around him let the blood freeze in his veins. Further down on her belly was the
Vortex box again, almost all of its cubicles empty. And deep below him,
somewhere inside Alessia’s belly just below her left breast, he could hear
ominous gurgling and squelching. And a chorus of faint screams.
From
the corner of his eye, Stefan saw Alessia move her right arm. He began to panic
again, looking up at the giantess, but her face was hidden behind the soft
mountain range that really was just her two breasts, and so he couldn’t tell
what exactly she was looking at. However, it soon turned out that she was just
continuing to watch her series, and simply reaching into the box again to grab
another snack. Stefan’s eyes widened as her fingers slipped into one of the few
cubicles that still had tinies in them, pinning a middle-aged man between her
thumb and her index finger. Then the poor tiny was lifted out of his prison and
towards Alessia’s face, flying by right over Stefan’s head as he desperately
began to struggle against his fate.
“Please
don’t!” This man pleaded like so many others before, pointing down at Stefan
all of a sudden. “Look, this one is getting away! Eat him instead! Just please
don’t do this to m…”
He
began to cry as he vanished from Stefan’s field of view, his sentence cut short
as he was flipped into Alessia’s mouth and immediately swallowed whole. This
time, the shrunken boy felt a grim sense of relief that the girl wasn’t
listening to her food. He did still feel a sense of residual compassion when he
imagined hearing the consumed tiny slide down into Alessia’s stomach below him.
But since this one had tried to save himself by selling him out, he forced
himself to not give this one too much thought. What Stefan felt a lot more
conflicted about were the few shrunken people still left in the box. Some of
them had noticed him by now, and apparently seemed to think that he was coming
to help them, banging their fists against the transparent windows of their
cubicles and trying to draw his attention to them.
“Please,
help me!” A young woman barely older than himself shrieked. “This is some kind
of misunderstanding; I didn’t do anything wrong! Please, she is going to eat
me!”
Stefan
sorrowfully shook his head. He did feel an intense urge to run across Alessia’s
belly and try to help the poor shrunken woman. But all he would have ended up
doing would have been to draw the giant girl’s attention, and get eaten along
with this woman in the process. It didn’t make any sense. And yet, there also
still was the remote possibility that Alessia would recognise him, especially
now that she was eating single tinies as opposed to them just being toppings on
her pizza. There was a chance to perhaps end this massacre and save this woman.
But it would require him to risk his own life, and not just on a fifty-fifty
chance. Seeing how Alessia was devouring her dinner, getting eaten by his
friend was the most likely outcome to such an undertaking. And so, he closed
his eyes, turning away as he carefully backed against the underside of the
giant girl’s left breast. His eyes began to water when Alessia reached into the
box again, now grabbing the young woman and lifting her to her mouth.
“No!
You have to believe me; this is all a terrible mistake. Please, I want to see
my fami…”
As
short and impersonal their brief encounter may have been, Stefan couldn’t help
but break into tears as the woman’s voice fell silent forever, her desperate
plea for her life joining that of so many others that had gone unheard before
they were swallowed. She too would now fall into the digestive hell just below
Stefan as he still tried to block out the cacophony of screams rising up
through Alessia’s skin. He could only pray that Vanessa had been chewed up and
wasn’t still alive somewhere in there. Once more paralysed by fear, he just
kept his eyes shut and covered his ears, trying to focus all his attention on
the powerful heart beating inside the giant chest he was sitting on. Over the
course of the next few minutes, he nevertheless heard and felt Alessia swallow
some more times. But then, after a series of gulps that implied that she had
taken a few more sips of lemonade, the murderous dinner finally seemed to be
over.
Carefully
opening his eyes and taking his hands off his ears again, Stefan looked around.
The box was indeed empty, and Alessia was just taking it off her belly to place
it beside her on the mattress again. This allowed him to look even further
beyond her flat stomach, across her soft navel and down to her legs, which
appeared to stretch on into an impossible distance before parting around a slim
laptop on Alessia’s mattress. The laptop was still playing the series she was
watching, now at an episode Stefan himself had only watched a couple of days
ago. How he wished that he could just turn around to Alessia now and talk to
her about the most recent developments on the show. Just a couple of days ago,
he easily could have. But now, drawing his friend’s attention to himself could
easily mean death. And so, he anxiously glanced at the empty box and pizza
board again, both of them now entirely devoid of the food they had held save
for a few crumbs on the latter. It felt like looking at smoking ruins in the
aftermath of an intense battle. But as he listened to the subdued screaming and
gurgling below his feet, Stefan knew that it wasn’t over just yet. For some of
his fellow tinies, the worst was still to come.
He
was just about to try and think about what to do next when Alessia began to
lean forward, her breasts pushing him away as they were pulled down by gravity,
and her abdomen turning into a steep slope. Stefan began to panic again,
frantically trying to hold onto his friend’s tan skin. But it was too soft and
smooth for him to find a proper hold on anything, and so he soon found himself
sliding down Alessia’s belly as if he was slipping down the face of a mountain.
Almost gliding across her trained abdominal muscles, he finally slipped into
her belly button for just a second before his momentum made him shoot out again
at the other side, throwing him off his friend’s gigantic body. Then he smashed
onto Alessia’s mattress, bouncing off it one or two times before coming to a
complete halt. Still disoriented, Stefan anxiously began to look around,
fearing that she might have noticed him and would pick him up. But when he
looked up at the colossal girl again, she simply reached across him to tap the
pause button on her laptop and got up from her bed. Stefan gasped as Alessia’s
enormous buttocks moved over him just a hand’s width above his head, feeling
the oppressive mass of her entire body hover over him for a few seconds and
praying that she wouldn’t sit down.
But
she didn’t. Instead, she stood up and turned around, briefly giving Stefan
another scare as she reached down to put the empty Vortex box on the pizza
board. Just as she had lifted them up and was about to pick up her empty paper
cup, she stopped and raised her free hand to her mouth. Then a rumbling sound
travelled up from her belly to her throat and she let out a loud, satisfied
burp that made Stefan shiver. To her, it was nothing more than venting some
excess air from her stomach, but for him, it carried a grim sense of finality,
a visceral confirmation that the shrunken people she had eaten would now indeed
be digested. Nevertheless, Alessia seemed just a little taken aback as well by
how crass and vulgar that last belch had been.
“Excuse
me.” She muttered, pressing her fingers onto her lips and looking mildly
disgusted.
After
the initial surprise, however, she just shrugged and grabbed the empty paper
cup on her nightstand, walking over to the door of her room. She struggled a
little bit to open it, having to press down the handle with her elbow since she
had both her hands full. When she finally slipped out of the room, her booming
footsteps kept sending slight vibrations through the soft mattress as she went
downstairs, leaving Stefan alone for a moment. He was aware that this moment
probably was the freest he had ever been since he had been shrunken down, and
that he had to make the most of it. Quickly setting his sights on the
nightstand, he began to make his way across the mattress, which worked
surprisingly well. The ground below him was soft and even a bit springy,
allowing him to traverse the vast mattress quite easily. Only when he came to
the nightstand itself, which was a bit higher than Alessia’s bed, did Stefan
encounter the first major obstacle. He would somehow have to climb up to the
top of the nightstand, but he decided not to do this right now and hide next to
the pillows until Alessia fell asleep.
Indeed,
this turned out to be a foresightful decision. Just when he had crawled into a
tiny cave at the bottom of Alessia’s pillow, the mattress was shaken by booming
footsteps once more, and just a few seconds later, the young giantess stepped
into the room again, closing the door behind her. Then she went back to her bed
and lied down once more, leaning into her pillow as she hit the pause button on
her laptop again and resumed her series. Although still feeling a subdued sense
of dread at Alessia’s sheer size and the incredible power behind every single
one of her movements, he was out of her sight for now. Letting out a relieved
sigh, he leaned back into the soft fabric of the pillow as well. Now all he
could do was wait.
***
Vanessa
covered her ears, trying to shut out the shrill, agonised screams of the other
tinies as they were digested alive. She had almost made peace with her fate of
becoming nutrition for Alessia, trying to think of Nico while she began fading
in and out of consciousness. But that had been when most of the food that kept
dropping into the giant girl’s stomach still had been pizza and the occasional
shrunken person. Once Alessia had finished her main dish, she had moved on to
swallowing the remaining tinies in quick succession, filling her stomach with
dozens of screaming and wailing people. And while some of them eventually
calmed down like Vanessa, grimly awaiting their fate in silence, others only
became more hysterical as they began to fully grasp what was going to happen to
them. While the giantess appeared to have concluded her gruesome dinner by now,
this only seemed to make things worse. The constant stream of new arrivals
being spat into the churning organic sack also had provided for some kind of
macabre distraction, but now, nothing appeared to happen at all. But the air
seemed to be getting thinner and thinner, and the acid was getting increasingly
potent. The tinies were just left squirming and crying in darkness, waiting for
certain death.
“She’s
digesting us!” A man cried out right next to Vanessa, his screams making it
through to her ears despite her best attempts to cover them with her hands.
“We’re all gonna die!”
Just
shut up. Vanessa
thought to herself, tears running down her cheeks.
When
they dropped onto her lips, she noticed that they didn’t have their usual salty
taste, but instead a much more unsettling, metallic note. It was the same taste
she had had in her mouth ever since throwing up earlier. The taste of blood. It
only made sense, since Vanessa’s entire body felt like it had been set on fire.
She wasn’t even really aware of the fact anymore that she had lost a leg, since
there wasn’t a part of her that wasn’t in agony. Her hair had partially fallen
out, taking parts of her scalp with it as they stuck to the piece of mushy
bread on which she was drifting through the stomach. Her eyes, her nose, her
mouth, and even her ears were leaking hot fluid, most of it apparently blood.
Her scorched skin was blistering and peeling, likewise coming off and sticking
to the piece of chewed-up pizza crust. It almost felt like she was melting into
the soggy lump of food, and an outside observer maybe even wouldn’t have been
able to distinguish her from it anymore. But for some reason, she was still
alive.
Groaning
with intense pain as the stomach walls suddenly contracted again and compressed
the increasingly dense chyme further, Vanessa began to retch, coughing up more
warm blood and more solid bits that could only be parts of her dissolving
innards. She weakly spat them out, feeling the hot, metallic fluid run down her
cheek and neck before it flowed down into the bubbling stew of half-digested
food and stomach acids, becoming part of the amorphous sludge. But then, after
another sudden surge of excruciating pain that caused her to let out a
tormented howl, she began to feel an odd numbness in her chest, accompanied by
a tingling sensation that rapidly began to spread to her arms and legs.
High
above her, she heard another series of gulps. Already knowing what would come
next, the shrunken girl tried to take a deep breath, but only managed to inhale
a miniscule amount of sour, acid-laden air due to her chest having gone
completely numb now. Then there was a disgusting slurping sound as the cardia
opened up and vomited a waterfall of cold lemonade into the stomach, resulting
in yet another tidal wave that splashed right over Vanessa and her raft of
soggy pizza crust. The icy liquid sent a sharp pain shotting across her burned
skin, but after the initial shock, it actually provided some unexpected relief,
cooling the acid burns and washing away most of the stomach juices that had
been eating through her ravaged skin. But as the waves splashed back from the
stomach walls, the opposing currents created a powerful maelstrom right next to
Vanessa and her raft, sucking her underneath the surface. And then, accompanied
by a wet slurping noise, she was gone, disappearing into the sludge forever.
As
she sank into the depths of the acidic broth once more, Vanessa didn’t fight
it. The strange tingle and numbness had spread to every last recess of her body
by now, effectively leaving her paralysed. But just like her broken body, her
mind too had finally given up. While she sank towards the bottom of Alessia’s
stomach, hearing nothing but the sounds of her vast body all around her,
Vanessa’s thoughts went out to all the others who had shared her fate as well.
The thousands of people who had been eaten by Alessia already, and the
thousands who would still become her food in the future. She was only one of
them, a tiny piece of nutrition to fuel this colossal, strong body. Just as
this thought went through her dying brain, her body bumped into another solid
object floating through the dark abyss. Vanessa would never know this, but it
was the upper part of the skeleton of Klaus Helbig, yet another miniaturised
person whose body and very identity would now forever be lost to Alessia’s
digestive system.
Feeling
the last flickers of life leave her body, Vanessa opened her mouth, allowing
the dense chyme to flow into her oral cavity. From there, it forced its way
into her airways and her own oesophagus, breaking through the weakened tissue.
When it spread through her disintegrating body, she felt no pain, only an icy
cold that stood in marked contrast to the warm sludge she was sinking into.
Around her, the thick chyme was suddenly pressed together even further as the
stomach walls contracted, accompanied by a thundering burp reverberating
through the darkness. It was powerful enough to send Vanessa’s semi-digested
eyeballs flying out of their sockets, and break several of her bones. But the
shrunken girl felt none of this, her mind only fleetingly registering that
Alessia had belched. Vanessa had always wondered what her last thought would
be. But there was none, only a vague awareness of what was happening to her as
her heart stopped beating, her brain functions reduced to that of a lowly
animal before they ceased entirely moments later. Then Vanessa’s mind simply
disintegrated, not becoming part of a higher plane of existence or moving on to
some kind of afterlife, but simply ceasing to exist. Her body would soon
follow, sinking to the bottom of the stomach and breaking into several parts as
it settled in the pyloric antrum and awaited the next stage of digestion.
***
Feeling
her dinner slosh back and forth in her stomach as she headed down the stairs
and into the kitchen, Alessia was worried for just a brief moment that this
would make her belch again. It wasn’t that she had any particular reservations
about burping in front of her family, but she still wanted to avoid it, even
though it tended to happen when one ate Vortex menus. It only made sense, given
that the shrunken people probably stirred up a lot of air inside the stomach
when they kicked and thrashed around. But in her mind, it still was somewhat
gross, and one should at least try to stifle it when it happened. Unlike Tanja,
who didn’t even restrain herself in public and did it completely on purpose.
Alessia figured it was another aspect of this weird power thing she had going
on with tinies, that it was another way of taunting them for her.
As
she stepped into the kitchen and threw away the empty box and her paper cup,
she thought about the tinies digesting in her stomach. Since she was pretty
full now, she didn’t feel much of them except the occasional tingle beneath her
left breast. But because she was a lot more relaxed now, the feeling didn’t
bother her as it had after Tanja had fed that shrunken guy in her sandwich to
her, when it had been on a mostly empty stomach. Now, it simply served to
complement the sensation of being sated and content. And yes, there was an
undeniable sense of satisfaction of having put dozens of suckers in their place
in addition to having had a tasty meal. After all, if she worked her ass off
all day to secure the best possible future for herself, why should she give a
damn about people who couldn’t even take care of themselves? Or worse still,
who made life miserable for others too? When her mum and dad had first arrived in Germany, they come here fully qualified and to serve their own country, not to leech off government handouts. And they had done very well for themselves.
Alessia could only hope that one day, she would make them as proud of her as
she was of them.
Washing
off the pizza crumbs from the wooden board, she quickly dried it with a towel
and then put it back in the drawer beneath the counter she had taken it from.
Then she went back to her room, closing the door behind her and flopping back
onto her bed. Alessia continued to watch the series for a little, soft gurgles
emanating from her belly every now and again while her stomach began to break
down her dinner. She could already tell that the tickling sensation was getting
weaker, so there likely weren’t too many of the tinies still alive in there.
Alessia considered drinking a gulp from the bottle of mineral water on her
nightstand to finish off the stragglers, but before she could do so, her phone
buzzed again. It was a message from Tanja.
I’m
booored. U still watching? <3
Alessia
smiled. The girl really needed constant attention. Yeah. She
wrote back.
where
you at?? Tanja
replied.
Uh… Alessia
typed and then rubbed her finger across her laptop’s touchpad for a moment so
that the streaming service’s overlay would provide some additional
information. start of S4.
those
episodes are fun. Tanja wrote back. hey did u
get to the part where he cuts off the guys dick and then eats a sausage in
front of him?? i fuckin laughed my head off ;-D ;-D ;-D
that
was sooo disgusting. Alessia frowned, remembering that
particular scene.
<3 he’s my fav character!! Her friend’s next
message read.
why
am i not surprised. Alessia replied, gently shaking her
head. Ur a real sicko, girl ;-D
Anyway,
sry for interrupting. I think imma phone josie, see what shes up to.
you
do that. Alessia
typed. say hello from me :-)
will
do. cya tomorrow. Tanja wrote back.
Alessia
replied with a thumbs-up emoji and then closed the conversation with Tanja. She
was aware that she was once more dividing her attention between the show
running on her laptop and the text messages on her phone. But these were mostly
action sequences anyway, so she didn’t believe that she was going to miss out
on anything important if she didn’t pay attention for a moment. She briefly
checked the message she had sent to Stefan, but he apparently had not even
received it yet, and so Alessia simply assumed that he was sleeping already.
She just hoped that he wasn’t feeling too bad or anything. Then she wrote a
quick message to Florian, though she didn’t assume he was going to reply
anytime soon either, since he was meeting up with Konstantin and the other boys
tonight to play some videogames. He had taken her along to one of those
evenings a couple of weeks ago, but she just hadn’t seen the appeal of playing
football on a console. Also, she had lost almost every single match, and while
she had tried to shrug it off as just a stupid videogame, it still had mildly
bothered her.
When
she had sent her boyfriend some virtual goodnight kisses, she put her
smartphone back on the nightstand and continued watching her series for a bit
longer. Just like Tanja had said, it was very good indeed, keeping her hooked
for another few episodes before she noticed that her eyelids were starting to
feel heavy. Checking the time, she decided to finish watching the episode she
was currently at, almost dozing off near the end. When the end credits began to
roll across the screen, Alessia let out a long, hearty yawn and simply closed
her laptop, not bothering to get back up and put it on her desk again.
Snuggling against her warm pillow, she pulled her blanket up to her shoulders
and sighed blissfully. Meanwhile, her belly produced a series of gurgles as the
first globs of her digested food were sucked into her duodenum. This displaced
some air bubbles that had been trapped at the bottom of her stomach up until
now, causing Alessia to burp once more. But she was barely even awake at this
point, only taking passing note of it before finally drifting off to sleep just
a few minutes later.
***
When
Alessia had closed her laptop, the sudden darkness that followed had alarmed
Stefan a little, making him wonder if he was even going to be able to see
anything as he tried to climb up onto his friend’s nightstand. For a couple of
moments, it indeed seemed as if it was pitch black around him, but then his
eyes slowly began to adjust to the darkness. Moreover, he now noticed a few
orange rays of light fall into Alessia’s room through her window, coming from a
streetlamp just outside her family’s house. Since the normal-sized girl wasn’t
watching her series anymore, Stefan could now also hear the rain outside patter
on the roof and against the window. It seemed to be a cold and miserable night
outside, and if it hadn’t been for his dire circumstances, he would have almost
found the atmosphere in the room cosy and calming. He was in a warm, dry and
comfortable room, his best friend and secret crush falling asleep right next to
him. If only he wouldn’t have to watch his step so that she wouldn’t eat him.
Just
as that grim thought crossed his mind again, Alessia burped, tiredly smacking
her lips as she pulled her blanket up to her shoulders and rolled onto her
side. For just a fleeting moment, Stefan’s thoughts drifted off to Vanessa, but
he soon pushed the feelings of guilt and sorrow away. She was gone now, being
digested in the depths of Alessia’s belly. It was over for her, but he still
had a chance. And he would not mess it up now when he was so close. He calmed
himself and waited for another couple of minutes until Alessia’s breathing
slowed down a bit, even turning into a gentle snore at times. Then he carefully
rose to his feet and ventured out the small cave at the bottom of his giant
friend’s pillow, stepping out onto the vast expanse of her mattress again.
Since he wanted to make sure that the girl was indeed asleep and would not see
him when he started climbing, he turned around and looked up, gasping a little.
Above
him, resting on its left side, was Alessia’s gigantic face. She was obviously
fast asleep, her eyes closed and her mouth just a little open, sucking in air
and blowing it out again just a few moments later while she gently breathed in
and out. Even from here, Stefan could feel a slight suction and then a soft
breeze of warm air. But although it was a peaceful sight, he still felt a
profound sense of dread, especially when his gaze wandered to Alessia’s soft
lips and the ominous darkness between her pearly white teeth. Her face was the
size of a house from his perspective. How could it be that this sleeping beauty
could also be a man-eating beast? How could it be that dozens of people like
himself were being molten into sludge inside her belly right now? How could it
be that he was mortally afraid of his best friend?
Stefan
reminded himself that he had no time to lose. While Alessia would probably be
asleep for the next few hours, there always was the risk that she could wake up
again and notice him before he could make sure that their encounter would not
end with him being eaten. Turning around towards the nightstand again, he
walked over to the wooden wall he would now have to scale. It was quite flat
indeed, but at this scale, there were little bumps and notches all over that he
would be able to hold onto. And if he fell, he would at least be falling down
onto the mattress, so even a misstep wouldn’t necessarily kill him. Keeping
this in mind, Stefan took a deep breath, and then slowly began to climb,
feeling his friend’s warm breath in his neck.
Several
times, Stefan came close to losing his grip and falling down, but he always
managed to stabilise himself in time. He kept telling himself to calm down and
rush nothing whenever he reached for the next little protrusion or indentation
to hold onto, and after a while, he made it up to the wooden board that formed
the top of Alessia’s nightstand. This last part was a bit more difficult to
climb up due to the edge of the board being slightly curved, forcing Stefan to
lean backwards and then quickly reach around the curvature before he fell down.
Dangling from the edge of the board, he felt as if he was going to slip for a
moment, but this little surge of panic thankfully ended up providing him with
the necessary energy to pull himself up with his arms. When he finally pulled
himself onto the top of the nightstand, he rolled on his back.
For
a few moments, he just lay there, trying to catch his breath and stretch his
aching muscles. He wasn’t sure how long it had taken him exactly, but he likely
had been climbing for at least half an hour, and it was only now that he began
to realise how physically draining the whole endeavour had actually been on
him. Nevertheless, Stefan knew that he still wasn’t safe just yet. Suppressing
a groan, he rose up to his feet once again and carefully began to look around
Alessia’s nightstand. It was a bizarre landscape of various oversized everyday
items, such as a book, a bottle of mineral water, a half-empty plastic pallet
of painkillers, or Alessia’s phone. But what immediately drew his eye, and
which Stefan had been hoping to find here, were the pens, pencils and sticky
notes he had seen there before, when visiting his friend at his normal size.
After all, he had been in this room many times before, either just to catch up
or to study with Alessia. And she had mentioned to him before that she liked to
keep something to write next to her bed in case she needed to remind herself of
something when she got up.
Hurrying
past the gigantic items around him, Stefan glanced at the enormous digital
clock on the nightstand. It was five minutes to midnight. If Alessia didn’t
wake up in the middle of the night, she would sleep for another six hours or so
before going on her usual morning run. So he should have plenty of time to set
his plan to get her attention in motion. Fixing his gaze on one of the giant
pencils, he was just running past Alessia’s giant smartphone when he heard a
deafening buzz, accompanied by the wooden surface beneath his feet suddenly
shaking as if there was an earthquake. He was thrown off his feet, and suddenly
saw a ghostly golden light illuminating his surroundings as the display of
Alessia’s phone lit up. Hearing his giant friend rapidly inhale and let out a
slightly startled snoring noise, Stefan threw himself around and stared at Alessia,
his heartbeat rapidly speeding up as her silhouette moved around in the dark.
The
giant girl smacked her lips, rolling around in her bed for a moment before
turning around onto her other side. When her movements stopped and Stefan could
hear nothing but her slow, relaxed breathing, he concluded that she simply had
fallen asleep once more, or perhaps not even woken up at all. Still trembling,
he got back up on his feet and glanced over at the phone, the screen dimming
down a little again. On the lock screen, which showed a beautiful picture of
Alessia and Florian kissing in front of a gorgeous golden sunset somewhere on a
beach in Italy, he saw a single message preview. Looking a bit closer, he saw
that it was from Tanja.
u
still up?? It
said next to a picture of the blonde sticking out her tongue.
“That
girl is going to be the death of me.” Stefan whispered to himself, shaking his
head.
Feeling
his pulse slow down and the adrenaline being washed out of his system, he
proceeded towards the oversized pens and sticky notes once more. He briefly
turned around just to make absolutely sure that Alessia was still asleep, then
he put his hands around the tip of one of the pencils, pulling it up towards
him with all his remaining strength. It took him a couple of tries, but
ultimately, he succeeded in breaking off a chunk of graphite about the size of
his lower arms. Panting heavily, he carried it over to the block of sticky
notes, hoisting it onto it before climbing up himself. Then he grabbed the
piece of graphite again and slowly began to write down giant letters, taking
time to make sure that they would be at least as big as his own body so that
Alessia would be able to read them. Finally, he stepped back and checked his
writing.
ALESSIA!
IT’S ME, STEFAN. VORTEX SHRUNK ME. DON’T EAT ME. I’M UNDER THE DIGITAL CLOCK ON
YOUR NIGHTSTAND. PLEASE HELP ME.
Seeing
that he had spelled everything correctly, Stefan let out a sigh of relief and
dropped the piece of graphite. He had done it. Now, all there was left to do
for him was to wait for Alessia to see the note. And in order to make sure that
she saw it before she saw him, he now climbed off the block of sticky notes and
went over to the giant digital clock. Since it was standing on four little
legs, there was a small gap between it and the wooden surface of the nightstand
that allowed him to crawl underneath it. Here, he would remain hidden until
Alessia read the note and looked for him herself, so that she wouldn’t just see
a lone tiny and eat him.
Lying
down on the hard ground, Stefan looked over to his friend again, who was still
soundly asleep. Maybe for the first time ever since being shrunk, he wasn’t
afraid of her anymore. She was still an awe-inspiring sight in every sense of
the word, but he was absolutely sure that she was not going to be a threat to
him any longer. Stefan hadn’t been able to save Vanessa, and he wasn’t sure how
Alessia was going to react when she learned that she had eaten her. For a
moment, he considered just not telling her, but then dismissed that notion. It
would be unfair towards either of them to conceal the truth. And if Vanessa had
been right, Nico perhaps was still alive as well, somewhere in this gigantic
house. They would have to at least try and look for him tomorrow. But with the
help of Alessia and her family, that would be a lot easier.
“Goodnight,
Alessia.” Stefan whispered, then he closed eyes and drifted off to sleep.
***
Around
the same time as another burp echoed through the vast darkness of Alessia’s
stomach and the girl slowly began to fall asleep, a slurry of digested food and
various pieces of human skeletons was slurped through the pyloric antrum, among
them an amorphous mass of bones that once had been Vanessa. What little
remained of her body was torn up even further by the violent suction as it was
squeezed through the tight muscular valve, and then squirted into the first
section of Alessia’s small intestine, the duodenum. Mixing with other globs of
nutritious paste prepared for further digestion by the girl’s stomach over the
last few hours, the chyme was injected with digestive enzymes and bile from
Alessia’s gall bladder and pancreas. While the giantess continued to sleep
calmly, not even hearing the soft gurgles emanating from her flat belly as the
sludge continued to slip along the winding tunnel, these new additions slowly
reduced the acidity of the nutrient slop, preparing it for absorption into Alessia’s
bloodstream.
At
this point, nothing about Vanessa’s remains even remotely resembled a human
being any longer. She was nothing more than a disconnected group of bones with
some chunks of flesh, muscles and tendons still adhering to them, and even those
were being sucked off her skeletal remains by the peristaltic contractions that
ferried the sludge along Alessia’s intestines. Then the thick goop containing
not only the dissolved flesh and bones of Vanessa, but also those of Klaus and
dozens of other miniaturised people entered the middle stretch of their
consumer’s small intestine, the jejunum. At this stage, the tinies were nothing
more than part of the dense porridge that was being mercilessly squeezed deeper
and deeper into the undulating tunnel of flesh, and of course, there was no
light source whatsoever in here. But if they had been alive and able to
perceive their surroundings beyond just the ominous gurgling and groaning
noises that came with their descent into the darkest recesses of Alessia’s gut,
they would have found themselves in a truly bizarre, alien world. The girl’s
small intestine was a seemingly endless, winding tube that constantly
contracted and expanded, churning the digested mush from her stomach and
pushing it along further through this organic labyrinth. The walls of the
intestine were lined with billowing protrusions which meticulously combed
through the passing slurry, beginning to suck all the nutrients Alessia’s
healthy young body needed out of it.
It
was through this process that large parts of what once had been Vanessa, now
broken down into their chemical components, were resorbed into Alessia’s
bloodstream, being dispersed throughout her vast body. As the giantess was fast
asleep, only a tiny amount of the shrunken girl was burned off for energy,
whereas most of Vanessa’s former body was repurposed into nutrition and
building blocks for the organism of the girl who had consumed her. The water
extracted from her body would be repurposed to replenish Alessia’s bodily fluids,
hydrating her and becoming part of her blood, sweat, and spit. Roughly one
third of it would go to her bladder, being ejected from her as urine when she
went to the toilet the next day. The protein gained from digesting Vanessa
would serve to strengthen Alessia’s muscles, especially on her arms and thighs,
but also her abdominal muscles and her gluteus maximus. The multitude of
vitamins and minerals extracted from the shrunken girl’s remains would
ultimately end up in various different parts of her eater, serving to keep the
young athlete fit and healthy. And the carbohydrates and lipids that were
extracted from Vanessa’s body mostly ended up as part of the fat tissue on
Alessia’s butt cheeks and breasts, helping to complement her form, and being
stored away as additional energy to be used at a later point.
By
the time the dense paste was squeezed into the last part of Alessia’s small
intestine, the ileum, most of the soft bits that had once been components of
Vanessa’s body had been fully absorbed by the young giantess’ digestive system.
Nothing was left of her at this point except for a paltry amount of shrivelled
bones swimming in the pulpy soup, but even those were of a certain value to
Alessia’s digestive system. Weakened by the combined influence of exposure to
acid and enzymes as well as the constant mechanical grinding of the
peristalsis, even these bones soon began to splinter and dissolve into white
clouds of calcium-rich dust. These were greedily slurped up by the villi on the
inside of Alessia’s intestinal walls, soon repurposed to building blocks for
the swimmer’s bones and her perfect white teeth. Once the remains of the
shrunken people reached the ileocecal valve and were squirted into the lower
part of Alessia’s large intestine, even Vanessa’s bones were hollowed out, and
her skull had split into an array of smaller bits that nobody would ever be
able to reassemble, even if they wanted to.
The
only parts of Vanessa that Alessia’s potent digestive system had not entirely
obliterated were small bushels of hair, as well as her miniscule finger- and
toenails. Consisting mostly of indigestible keratin, they were the only
fragments of the shrunken girl’s former body along the hollow bone splinters
that now began drifting through her ascending colon. At this point, the thick
nutrient soup they had been a part of throughout their journey along Alessia’s
small intestine had been almost completely drained of everything useful. Now
even more so, it was a good thing that none of the tinies buried inside the slurry
were even remotely alive anymore, as it had transformed into an odious,
foul-smelling brown liquid. As it was sucked up through the ascending colon and
pushed around a sharp bend into the transverse colon, the vile soup was drained
of water and any remaining nutrients Alessia’s body could possibly use for
itself, thickening into small, soft logs of shit. These newly formed chunks of
ordure slowly slithered along the transverse colon during the early morning
hours, passing by right beneath Alessia’s empty stomach as it let out a first
tacit groan. The girl, however, didn’t hear this, instead just turning around
in her sleep again and smacking her lips as the nascent turds travelled through
the last bend on their long journey. Sliding down the descending colon, they
gradually landed on top of each other as they accumulated in the sigmoid
section of Alessia’s colon with moist splatting noises. Having nowhere to go
from here, the faecal mass grave containing what was left of the shrunken
people Alessia had eaten for dinner began to settle.
The
semi-solid mass of shit remained undisturbed for another hour or so, only
shifting a little when the girl woke up and rolled around in her bed for a few
minutes before rising to her feet. Under the influence of gravity, it then
descended a little further, displacing a few air bubbles that had been trapped
around the bend that led to the last part of Alessia’s colon, the rectum. The
air was ejected through the exit of her digestive system, passing through her
sphincter as a short fart which signalled to the girl that she needed to
evacuate her bowels. A little later, the colon gently shook back and forth as
Alessia started to walk, allowing for the faecal mass to slip past the final
bend of the sigmoid colon and into her rectum. Then the girl sat down and
relaxed her sphincter, allowing for the log of shit to slip down towards her
anus. It was in this moment that the skull of Faruk Şahin was finally
illuminated by daylight again, after spending almost two days inside the total
darkness of Alessia’s body. But it did not last long, as it now was mercilessly
squeezed out of the giantess’ rectum with the soft first turd to be expelled
this morning, splashing into the cold water of a toilet bowl mere moments
later.
***
Stefan
awoke with a start and shrieked, banging his head against a hard surface as he
was torn out of his sleep by an unbearably loud beeping noise. Rubbing his head
while he anxiously looked around, he tried to make sense of his surroundings,
or what that incredibly loud noise was. He was still not entirely sure what was
going on when he heard a loud, slightly annoyed groan from somewhere to his
right, and then the booming voice of Alessia.
“Yeah,
yeah, I’m awake. Jesus fucking Christ.” She moaned tiredly and yawned, followed
by a loud slam right above Stefan that shook all of his immediate surroundings.
Stefan flinched, but even though he didn’t understand what had happened, at
least the beeping had stopped.
Then
the memory of the past day hit him like a train. He had been shrunk. Bought by
Alessia and almost eaten by her. Vanessa was dead, devoured along with the
pizza Alessia had eaten yesterday. And now he was hiding beneath the digital
alarm clock on his friend’s nightstand. That beeping sound had to have been her
morning alarm, and she had just turned it off. Stefan also remembered that he
had managed to leave a note for Alessia, to make sure that she found him. But
the normal-sized girl wasn’t aware of what had happened to him just yet, and so
he would have to wait for her to discover the note. As much as he wanted to, he
couldn’t just go out now and talk to her, ask her for help. If he did that, he
ran the risk of being mistaken for just another Vortex tiny and being eaten. He
would have to be patient, at least for just a little bit longer. And so he
waited, peering out from beneath the giant alarm clock towards the girl as she
rolled around in her bed for a few more moments. Stefan shivered involuntarily
as she sat up and yawned loudly, looking past her sharp white teeth and right
at the back of her dark, gaping maw. He really could consider himself lucky
that Alessia hadn’t eaten him yesterday. The odds had certainly not been in his
favour, and poor Vanessa had indeed fallen victim to these unfavourable odds. She
had vanished forever now, become part of this giant girl.
Almost
as if to further remind him of what had happened to his classmate, Alessia now
rose to her feet, her large breasts gently bobbing up and down in her crop top.
Stretching for a few moments, she turned around, inadvertently filling nearly
his entire field of view with the truly spectacular sight of her huge, taut
butt cheeks jiggling around in her tight-fitting yoga pants. Then Alessia let
out a little fart, paying no further attention to it since she thought to be
alone in her room. Feeling both embarrassed at hearing his unaware friend pass
wind and horrified at the thought that her body was probably getting ready to
expel whatever was left of Vanessa, Stefan tried to look away. But at the same
time, he was captivated by the effortless grace and ease at which this colossus
of a human being moved around, feeling her powerful footsteps reverberate
through the wooden surface below him when she walked over to her wardrobe.
Mostly free of the fear he had felt at the sight of his giant crush yesterday,
and overcome by a severe case of morning horniness, Stefan found himself
furtively gazing at Alessia’s buttocks as it gently swayed left and right with
every step she took. Then he found himself running red with shame when the
giantess suddenly pulled down her pants and the thong she was wearing beneath,
fully exposing the firm, tan curves of her naked backside to him.
When
she took off her crop top as well, now standing in front of the mirror on her
wardrobe in all her naked glory, Stefan turned away, awkwardly gazing at the
surface of the nightstand. There was a temptation to look up again and take in
the marvellous sight, especially since he couldn’t do anything but wait for
Alessia to find his note, but it still felt awfully inappropriate to be peeping
on his friend like this. It was true that she had almost killed him yesterday,
but she hadn’t done so intentionally. And, he thought to himself with a touch
of gallows’ humour, if Alessia discovered him like this, leering at her naked
body, she might kill him after all.
So
Stefan waited while the giantess quickly got changed into another pair of black
tracksuits, readying herself for her morning run. Then Alessia came towards the
nightstand with another series of booming footsteps. The shrunken boy closed
his eyes and inhaled deeply.
“Please.”
He quietly prayed to himself. “Please, for the love of God, see it.”
She
didn’t see it. Picking up the phone and some earphones next to the alarm clock,
Alessia walked past the nightstand, shaking the ground beneath Stefan a few
more times as she went out the door and closed it behind her. Now left alone in
her room again, the shrunken boy let out an exasperated sigh. How much longer
would he have to wait? What if she didn’t see the note at all? Should he
perhaps do something else to get her attention? But what? How else could he get
through to her without taking the risk of her not recognising him in time?
Stop
it. Stefan
then thought to himself, trying to calm his nerves. She will see it
eventually.
***
Changing
into a fresh tracksuit for her own personal use, one that didn’t sport the
emblem of her sports club, Alessia put a watch-like tracking device on her
wrist and then walked back to her nightstand, picking up her phone and a pair
of earphones. Then she went out of her room and gently closed the door behind
her, aware that the other members of her family were most likely still
sleeping. But before she went downstairs, she would have to take care of the
sense of pressure in her lower abdomen first. Tugging the earphones away in one
of the pockets of her tracksuit jacket, she slipped into the bathroom and
locked the door. Then she went over to the toilet and pulled down her
underpants and tracksuit trousers, seating her naked buttocks. Alessia yawned
and unlocked her phone, then she allowed the muscles in her lower body to
relax, pressing just a little bit before a soft log of shit slipped out of
between her butt cheeks.
When
it landed in the toilet bowl with a subdued splash, she didn’t once think about
the fact that she had just expelled the last fragment of Faruk from her body.
Instead, Alessia frowned a little as she read a text message from Tanja, who
apparently had written to her yet again just before midnight, asking her if she
was still awake. Gently shaking her head as she typed up a response, she
allowed a wet fart to escape from her rectum, having noisily pushed itself to
the front of the line with a low-pitched rumble from her bowels just a few
moments before.
no.
I was asleep. how about yourself, r u awake now? :-P Alessia wrote back,
secretly hoping that Tanja had forgotten to set her phone to silent mode over
the night. Just as she was about to relax her sphincter again, her phone
buzzed, displaying a response from her friend.
WTF
GIRL!! IT’S NOT EVEN 6 AM! Tanja replied, followed by a series
of angry emoji.
Alessia
laughed out loud. oh no, did i wake u up? ;-D
u
sure af did. Came the response from her friend, this time
followed by crying faces.
just
go back to sleep. imma go running soon. The other girl
wrote back.
and
they call me a psycho. Tanja replied.
Alessia
answered with another series of laughing emoji, but then decided to leave her
friend alone. Switching to one of her social networks and scrolling through the
feed, she relaxed the muscles in her lower abdomen again and felt another,
larger turd press against her anus. This time, she pressed a bit harder and let
out a soft moan as the dense log suddenly slipped out of her anus, landing in
the bowl with a soft splat and leaving Alessia with a pleasant feeling of relief
in her rectum. When she farted again, she wouldn’t even remotely have
considered the possibility that she had just excreted the remains of her
classmate Vanessa, her bleached bone splinters strewn across the large brown
turd in the porcelain bowl below her. Then she felt a smaller piece of ordure
slip into her rectum, and allowed her sphincter to relax one final time. When
this smaller turd had plopped into the toilet as well, Alessia tensed the
muscles around her bladder and ejected the urine that had gathered inside it
over the night in form of a jet of hot yellow urine. Splashing onto the pile of
soft shit, it washed some of the bone splinters that once had been part of
Vanessa into the murky water, leaving them floating in the yellow pond.
Getting
up from the toilet seat and sliding her phone into her pocket for a moment,
Alessia took some sheets of toilet paper from the roll hanging next to her,
neatly folding them and pushing them in between her shapely butt cheeks. As she
cleaned herself, the soft fat tissue on her buttocks wobbled around a little,
but Alessia was not aware that she was also making a substantial part of her
former classmate jiggle around with it. Just like she had no idea that she was
wiping bushels of Vanessa’s hair and pieces of her former skeleton off her
puckered sphincter, along with the thoroughly digested remains of at least two
other shrunken people. Alessia only fleetingly took note of the white specks
stuck in the brown stain on the toilet paper and baked into the logs at the
bottom of the bowl, since it was far from an unusual sight for her. Still fully
unaware that she was conducting the undignified funeral of Vanessa, she dropped
the used toilet paper into the bowl and grabbed another few sheets, making sure
that she had completely cleaned herself. When she was done, Alessia let them
fall into the bowl as well and pressed the flush button, unknowingly sending
what little was left of her shrunken classmate off to the municipal sewers,
never to be seen by anyone again.
She
pulled up her sweatpants and then proceeded to thoroughly wash her hands,
looking up at the small milk glass above the sink that served to let some light
into the bathroom during the day. Alessia sighed. It still was completely dark
outside, and from the gentle pattering sound on the glass, she could tell that
it was raining once more. Or maybe it hadn’t even stopped during the night.
This was going to be one dismal run. But then again, if she was going to be
serious about this, she wasn’t going to wimp out just because it was dark and
wet outside.
Drying
off her hands, Alessia unlocked the door again and headed downstairs into the
kitchen, turning on a few lights on the way. Indeed, all of her family was
still fast asleep, leaving the house feel strangely quiet and empty while she
grabbed a packet of muesli from the shelf and then took a carton of milk out of
the fridge. Producing a bowl and a spoon from the drawers, Alessia sat down at
the kitchen counter and plugged her earphones into her phone. She then poured
herself a bowl of muesli and started to eat, listening to her usual wakeup
playlist. Her empty stomach groaned contentedly as the first mouthfuls of oats
and dried fruit splashed into it. Likewise, her digestive system now woke up to
another day of processing her food, having left no trace of the dozens of
shrunken people that had passed through it only last evening.
When
she had gone down to the kitchen to make her breakfast, Alessia hadn’t felt
particularly hungry, it was more something she did out of routine, and because
she didn’t want to run her usual ten kilometres on an empty stomach. But now
that her body was waking up and getting ready for her morning workout, she
ended up devouring her muesli within just a few minutes, even having to
purposefully slow herself down so that she wouldn’t feel bloated when she
started running. Greedily scraping the last mouthful of muesli from the edges
of the bowl, Alessia then lifted it to her lips and drank the remaining milk.
Getting up from her chair at the kitchen counter again, she put the empty bowl
in the sink and let out a dainty burp. Then she went into the hallway and sat
down on a bench next to the entrance door to put on her shoes.
Once
more, Alessia tried to slow herself down a little as she tied her slightly worn
and muddy sneakers, wanting to give herself a few minutes to let her breakfast
settle. But she was feeling particularly impatient and energetic today. After
waiting for just another couple of moments, she opened the door and stepped
outside, frowning a little as she felt the cold, drizzling rain on her face.
This was indeed going to be a drag, so it would be better to just get it over
with. Activating the little tracking device on her wrist, Alessia hurried
across the small, paved path that connected the front door of her family home
with the sidewalk, and then smoothly passed into a practised jog as she started
heading down the empty, dimly lit road.
The
morning run turned out to be even more miserable than Alessia had anticipated.
Not only was it terribly cold, the bone-chilling wind also kept blowing the
sleet drizzle straight into her face. Her tracksuit and her steady pace did a
good job at keeping her relatively warm, but that didn’t make the experience
any more pleasant. Moreover, the persistent rain over the last few days had
thoroughly soaked the ground and left large puddles everywhere, forcing her to
run in serpentines half of the time. Even then, she sometimes wasn’t entirely
able to avoid the murky puddles, inadvertently kicking up water and mud, so
Alessia was more than just a bit exhausted when she finally made it back to the
house. Checking her tracker as she stepped in the door again and carefully
slipped out of her dirty shoes, she shrugged off the poor time. It had taken
her a bit longer than her usual hour, but in conditions like these, it was more
of an endurance issue than a question of time. At least she had done it and not
chickened out.
Alessia
put her muddy sneakers onto a shoe rack to let them dry a little and then
checked the ground floor for signs of her family members again, but apparently,
none of them was awake just yet. So she went back upstairs, heading straight
for the bathroom once more. Locking the door behind her, she slipped out of her
wet and dirty tracksuit and put it in the washing basket. Then she took off her
tracker and stepped into the shower, letting out a sigh of relief as clean, hot
water began to stream down her naked body. For a few moments, she simply stood
in the shower and relished the feeling of her chilled extremities warming up
again, then she grabbed a bottle of shampoo and began to wash her long, silky
black hair. Once Alessia felt clean and refreshed, she turned off the water and
stepped out of the shower, drying herself off with a towel before wrapping it
around her damp hair. Then she slipped into one of her bathrobes and unlocked
the door again, heading back into her room.
When
she closed the door behind her, Alessia went over to her bed and flopped down
onto it, sighing again as she closed her eyes for a moment. What was next on
her list? She had gotten her morning run out of the way, and there was no swim
training today. Tanja was going to come over later to borrow her history notes
because of that test. She felt prepared for that, but there also was an English
exam on Friday she still had to do some reading for. Anything else? Wondering
if she had written something down for her to think of, she opened her eyes, got
up from the bed again, and looked down at her nightstand. And then she froze.
“What
the…” She began, her eyes widening with shock and dismay.
Reading
the clumsily written little letters on the sticky note again, Alessia felt her
heartbeat accelerate all of sudden, a sense of panic spreading through her
body. Then she picked up her digital clock. There underneath it was a Vortex
tiny, fearfully staring up at her. Alessia went down on her knees, intently
scrutinising him. When she recognised her friend, she gasped.
“Stefan?”
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