She was different. It didn't matter a single iota what I was; it didn’t matter to her.

If you passed a Super on the street, you'd never know. They look like us.

One people, One power...

I had to admit, it had a nice ring. It’s an idea that made me take the leap and apply, after months of agonizing uncertainty, and imposter syndrome.

We were the same.

The Paragon Academy believed so, too; they had a special intake stream for people like me – ‘category Z’. Sure, the stats were dire for Z’s; over 86% failed to graduate, and of those, 93% did not survive the first year post-graduation. But her effusive mantra kept sounding in my head as I read through the intake application forms. And then, again, when I finally received my acceptance letter.

“ONE PEOPLE! ONE POWER!”

She had hovered onto the grounds of the packed Hammerhead City stadium and declared this mantra to an additional home-viewing audience. Her diaphragm was so strong she did not need a microphone. I was watching on the TV, swearing she was looking down into my eyes, saying it directly to me, including me in her gated-off world. Then the moment broke as she did some mid-air aerodynamic twirls and spins -- like a gymnast on an invisible rope – which the social media commentators dubbed ‘space flipping’, and the stadium broke into cheering. Snapping the hypnotic hold she had over the stadium, she accelerated into the sky so fast it was like she’d been sucked up by an alien tractor beam moving in fast forward – but faster. And of course, there was the signature departure sound, a sharp spurt like a bottlerocket. The internet called it the ‘shuf!’ (like ‘shook’, not ‘shut’) and it spawned memes, which she at first said was ‘cute’ and later confessed irritated her, on a talk show:

“I’m still mystified that shuf! got the traction it did – I love those old retro comic text bubbles as much as anybody -- but for a little while it defined me and definitely had me questioning myself when I got up in the morning, my vocational choice, whether people were making fun of me, and brought on this deep, searching kind of identity crisis. Shuf! was on memes and t-shirts and everywhere but I realize now, I am not shuf! I am so much more than shuf!

At the Hammerhead City stadium, ‘shuf!’ caused a sonic boom, sending the TV broadcast to a ringing test pattern for ten minutes.

***

Outside, the sun hadn’t yet risen. My breath came out in a mist. Good thing I had grabbed a padded jacket last minute before leaving the house; I was wearing my Paragon-issue jumpsuit underneath, and it did little to shield the cold. These things were designed to vent body heat during physical exertion – glorified gym clothes – not get you through a cold winter.

A black Chevy rolled up and stopped in the driveway of the house next door, and an older man got out, with a dark crew cut. He’d moved here about a week ago. He was physically fit and I wondered if he was maybe a PE teacher or something.

This time he actually spoke to me:

“You live by yourself, Steve?”

He walked up to the dividing fence and leant an arm across it.

I wondered how he knew my name.

“Just me,” I nodded. “I haven’t been here that long, either, about a month.”

“I thought so. The neighbors didn’t seem to know who was living here.” He smiled. “I never caught you, but I knew there had to be someone because earlier this week those gadgets mysteriously appeared on your roof.”

He motioned up at my rooftop, where an array of outlandish aerials and satellites were set up. And what I used them for was even more outlandish.

When I didn’t say anything, he speculated:

“You must be able to pick up secret broadcasts from North Korea on those things. Unless you’re trying to talk to aliens.”

I always affected a projection of confidence when I talked about dangerous or sensitive subjects. Deflect suspicion with bravado or a joke. The problem was I relied on this strategy so much I was starting to create a very not-me alter ego. I answered non-committedly:

“Possibly one of those, yeah. But which one? Am I paranoid or am I crazy?”

“Well, kid, you tell me.”

He offered his hand over the fence, and I shook it. His name was Brandon Vega, and he was a forensic detective, a CSI cop. I wouldn’t have guessed, he didn’t seem like a cop. He seemed surprisingly patient and soft-spoken, and quick to smile. A real life Friendly Neighborhood Cop.

“This ended up in our mailbox by mistake,” he said, voice strangely hushed as if shy, as he handed me a letter. “It’s addressed to you.”

I did a double take. The letter was addressed to ‘Master Occupant’ and was indeed my address, and, alarmingly, had the Paragon seal. If Brandon was a detective, he would have known what it was.

“What a puzzle. I have to check with the post office. Looks like a mistake.” I stuffed it in my pocket.

Brandon just smiled, shrugging it off, but his eyes were very intelligent ad scrutinizing. It was obvious he didn’t believe this, and I immediately felt ashamed for trying to dupe him with such a dumb lie.

“Look, it’s the crack of dawn and I just got off my shift,” he said, mercifully dropping the subject, “and you look like you’re going somewhere, so we’re all out of sync. But if you’re free sometime, we have to get you on in for a meal – what do you drink?”

I imagined sitting around his dining table with him, probably his wife, as I tried to keep the conversation dancing around and around the Paragon thing, which he now knew, and I knew – and his wife probably knew – and it would be just another shameful dupe to pretend I didn’t know anything about it, while struggling to refuse beer or anything that would make me talk more freely.

“Water,” I said.

“So, you’d probably find us too boring,” he said ironically. He looked at me like he was reading my mind, in fact I sensed he knew more about me than I knew about him. And that wasn’t so far-fetched; he was a detective.

“Well, you know I talk to aliens,” I said quickly, “so you basically know all about me. I’m pretty boring myself, to be honest.”

“We’re boring too, so we all get along. You’ll be okay for dinner,” he reassured me. “And then there’s just my daughter,” he looked me up and down, “she’s about your age.”

Daughter? I thought. But I already had a girl in my life, and I didn’t want to do a thing to jeopardize it.

He carried on:

“It’s just a seat at the table, you don’t have to spill your guts. We’re not big talkers, either. Well, my daughter can be quite outspoken if she likes someone.”

“Okay,” I said, now stuck in my false projection and doubling down, forcing enthusiasm to breaking point. “Let’s do it!”

Pleased, he headed back to his front door.

“Catch you another time, Steve. And if you want to bring something, don’t. Just bring yourself.”

He waved a goodbye salute and shut the front door behind him.

*

The theme park was lit up against the red evening sky. Show crowds bustled under the neon signs; all the Natural kids enjoying their end of school year, high-fiving that final exams were done.

And we happened to have just started ours. We were about to step in and put our pens to the paper.

I parked the Academy-hire car on the other side of a line of carny vans, close to the exit.  Before switching off the ignition, I checked the fuel gauge. The car was gassed up in case we needed to flee. I turned to my associate, Summer.

She was a studious, even brooding blonde with brown eyes, and was a ballerina from age five, going on to win multiple Ballet competitions, until finally being disqualified from an adult show when the judges discovered her arabesque allongé had no anatomical limit. A family doctor certified that she was a Super; a super-contortionist, she could stretch and twist her body like rubber. She was a Flexer.

The Academy stuck us together as assignment partners, and we immediately clicked, being both high achievers and power-shy. I loved her policy of secrecy and that she had never, ever asked me what my power was. Purely businesslike, she assumed that when the time came, my power would manifest naturally for the correct job. We weren’t show-offs.

Now, we sat in the car, taking a couple of minutes to collect and prepare ourselves. The radio was jabbering: commentators offering their views on snippets of a speech delivered at the UN by a visiting Miss Venus.

Summer listened and then all of a sudden spluttered with laughter.

“What?” I said.

“Oh,” she sighed disdainfully, “those little microphone crackling noises you hear before the speech are the stilettos. The UN,” she repeated dubiously. “The shockwaves from her stilettos as she walked across the hall. Of the UN Assembly.” She said with mock grandiosity: “Could you imagine? Our newest Ambassador elect: Captain ‘choice footwear’.” Her voice got low and disinterested, “She dropped in from some arts and fashion festival.”

“Her glutes and quads would be made of steel to make those stiletto landings,” I pointed out, trying to appeal to Summer’s hobby, and added, “You have to admit, it’s very graceful.”

She countered a little testily:

“You don’t want steel pylons for a graceful landing. Steel can’t deform under pressure.”

I conceded:

“Okay, so you don’t follow her on Twitter.”

She gave a small sigh.

“She has this grand vision of ideal society where the rules are inverted. It’s called post-feminism and means trashy equals chic. I don’t follow that.”

Summer came from at least four generations of hardline, no-nonsense, drab-costumed, strictly utilitarian, ‘power-on-only-when-necessary’ Supers, and the new wave of post-Millennial showiness and increasingly skin-baring costumes seemed to quietly rub her the wrong way.

“She knows what she’s doing,” I suggested. “It’s clever. She’s so good at what she does, she can afford to wear a mini-skirt for a costume and not take herself seriously. It’s a calculating move to trick the adversary into underestimating her.”

She shot back:

“You mean she’s good at what she does? She’s the bouncy, cringey commercial break before the arrival of our next great Super.”

I winced inwardly and looked for a distraction. Luckily, the theme park provided many.

“Go time,” I exclaimed, unclipping my seatbelt. “Power ready!”

It was our last assignment before graduation, upon which our final grade hinged. I was practically trembling with excitement. I couldn’t help myself. The goofy, cavalier alter ego didn’t need compelling; it was coming out on its own from the excitement.

Summer on the other hand had nerves of steel (though her nerves were, literally, more like rubber) and merely scoffed.

“Leave the catchphrases until we get our grades. If we receive the top grade – as I anticipate we will – I will personally come up with a catchphrase for us. And you can figure out the cheer dance routine.”

“’Us’,” I repeated, catching her eye askance. “Are you possibly suggesting that after we graduate,” I swallowed, trying to sound casual and cool, like my ultimate Hero idol, Superblazar, “you want to team-up?”

“Let’s see you in action tonight, cadet,” she was being tongue-in-cheek since she too was only a cadet. “And then, if you impress, maybe there is a future for us working together. Wait until I make Captaincy,” she added coyly, “…and then hand in your application as my honorary sidekick.”

I remembered our mid-year exam, where I’d tried dismally to karate chop a gun, failed to disarm the actor-playing-bad-guy and almost got a dummy round blasted at my chest, when Summer – my exam partner – Inflated her body like a shield to catch the round (rubberizing herself made her almost invulnerable), saving the exam, and then shot me a very serious look that said ‘Why the hell didn’t you power-on?'

Back then, the incident felt very sour. But now, on reflection, it made me feel pride that she was my partner. Her response had been so fast, so reflexive, that maybe she wasn’t just trying to salvage our exam score…maybe she genuinely felt something for me, and was keen to save my skin or my feelings. She didn’t have to catch the bullet.

I replied:

“Honorary sidekick…” I repeated slowly, feeling for the sound of the phrase. “So, Captain Sagittarius and Cadet Rockwell.”

“Summer,” she said smartly and nodded at me, “Steve.” She pushed open the door. “Come on. Time lengthens…”

We got out of the car, both wearing our ordinary ‘civilian’ clothes. We wouldn’t get our official Superhero costumes until the grad ceremony. I’d had my measurements done and my costume was finished and waited impressively in the Academy showroom. I had designed it myself.

This was the first part of the test; get in fast. In a real life crisis, hostage lives were on the line. If we bought a ticket and waited in line we would have failed the exam.

Around the side, we stopped at an unmonitored barred fence away from the crowds, hidden around some tall bushes and below the metal scaffolding of the great serpentine ‘Booster’ gold rollercoaster. As fluid as water, Summer went thin through the bars, and twisting elegantly to reappear, reformed on the other side of the fence.

“While the sun is still up, Steve,” she said.

My brain was going a mile a minute. If the fence wasn’t barred I could probably have taken a running leap and ‘parkored’ up, but if I tried that here, my hands and feet were going to slip through the gaps.

“I know, ‘specialist’ power,” she drawled, reciting the excuse I’d given her so many times before. “I’d love a demonstration before graduation. The suspense is killing me. Literally, killing me.”

She was usually gentle, and kind of shy, but she was so grade-driven that exam settings turned her into a different person. But this was our last exam, then we could relax again.

The Booster rollercoaster clanked and hissed above, rounding with a chorus of screams.

Below, Summer’s legs stretched until her head appeared over the fence, while her arms ‘spaghettified’, arcing over the fence and coiling tight around my chest in a bear hug. My cheeks went hot, and not merely from having the air squeezed out of my lungs. I grabbed her arms for stability an instant before she gave a powerful, elastic full-body jerk to vault me at the fencetop. The top bar struck my abdomen, stopping me half over. Gasping, I pulled myself over and fell onto the ground.

Meanwhile, she was already hurrying into the park.

“Up and at ‘em!” she called back, giggling with nervous anticipation. The bubbliness was an act; she was trying to fit with the crowd. It was also really cute, unusual for her, and made my heart go faster.

I jumped to my feet and scraped the dirt off my hands. My hands were red and stung; she’d given me rubber burn.

Past the wheeling arms of the red ‘Tornado’ pendulum ride, there was a painted warehouse into a ride that was closed for maintenance. It used to house the purple ‘Phantom train’ ride, but the ride had been dissembled now, most of the ride parts and machinery hauled off site. Now the entry was roped off and a sign said:

Testing Zone 4A
Premises closed while testing in session:
X15SS; Z68SR

Those codes were our Paragon Academy student usernames.

“Summer, stop!” I called her. She doubled back, saw the board, and grinned.

“Nice find, Rockwell!” she said genially, clapping me on the shoulder.

I glowed.

We rushed past the testing sign, and a standing placard that said: You must be this tall to ride, before reaching the warehouse’s double doors, which was padlocked.

Summer cast a quick look around – the throngs of people moved briskly past us as we stood in the warehouse’s shadow – and in the time it took to blink, Summer stretched one finger very thin and picked the lock.

We cracked the door open and went into the building, where big ride props and machine parts stood in shadow.

“I think my back-up’s arrived,” a man was saying into a walkie-talkie. He was wearing a park maintenance outfit. “Uh, something weird is –” He came out of the dark and got a look at us. “Hey! You’re not allowed in here!”

One of Summer’s arms had already begun snaking around behind him. Lucky it was dark, her arm could flatten and trace the shadows. Her forearm lifted and made a sudden snapping motion, like an elastic band being released, which brought her fist into the back of his head. He made a small groan and crumpled forward onto the ground.

“Hey, not good!” I said, trying not to panic already. “How do you know he was a bad guy? He might be park staff! He might be a hostage sent as a messenger!”

Summer swept a hand impatiently over her brow, as if to neaten up her hair.

“Steve,” she tutted, “stop overthinking this. They’re not trying to slip us up. He’s a bad guy,” she nudged his shoulder with a foot. “This whole building is exam zone. They’re all actors.”

She beckoned me ahead.

“He came from that way. Come on!”

We passed the shelved ride parts and equipment to another locked door. A couple of voices murmured on the other side, a man and a woman. They must have been the actors playing the criminals we were supposed to take down, and probably guarding the actors playing hostages.

Summer turned her back against the door and stared at me.

“Last exam question, Rockwell: who handles the bust, and who pulls off the rescue?”

We’d talked about this earlier: one of us would go in and power-on create a distraction, give a signal command, and the other would follow, to confuse the bad guys.

I did everything possible to keep my voice assertive and level:

“I can go in.”

Literally, I could go in, but I would probably run into a bad guy with a dummy gun stationed across the other side of the room, and I had nothing up against that. It wouldn’t kill me but it would be humiliating as hell to drop before saving even one hostage.

Summer’s lips pressed together, seeing something in my expression. She was so businesslike and level-headed it was intimidating, but I felt another rush of gratitude she was my partner, even if she played loose with the rules sometimes, she always owned her decisions, and never panicked.

She was already picking the lock.

“No, I’ll go,” she said. “You take too long to do a perimeter sweep. It’s a criminal head count, not a rote memorization test. I know you want to check all the boxes by the book, but you have to learn to move first and then stop and think later.”

“We’ve got to move exactly according to plan,” I countered, “otherwise we’re going to surprise each other.”

“Try to be more flexible, Steve. Learn to improvise. Come in after me and we’ll finesse the plan as we go. And don’t be afraid to get power-happy, there’s no use-penalty in the grading criteria. Let’s start a small riot.”

She went to open the door.

My chest went tight. Desperate, I let out:

“Summer, wait…I don’t have one.”

She blinked.

“You don’t have a plan?”

“Power,” I said quietly. “No power. I don’t have one.”

Outside, the rollercoaster car clicked and rattled down the track, riders screaming. We both tensed, and relaxed again once it passed. Or, she relaxed. My tension didn’t lift.

She pronounced very slowly:

“Oh, you’re a Natural,” and looked at me as if she’d never met me before. “Hmmm,” she said under her breath. There was no heightened emotion in her voice, which was usual for her, but now it seemed oddly lacking. “I guess…that makes sense. I wondered why you kept going over the case studies so many times, like you’re terrified of making the tiniest mistake.” But she still looked puzzled as her eyes scanned my face. Her brows pinched above icy blue eyes. “How did you even get into the cadetship program?”

“I went through the category Z stream,” I said, stomach twisting into knots.

I had never planned to tell her I was a Natural, and now it just came out in panic like sand pouring out of a split sack. But if I hadn’t told her, we would get into another situation where I got into danger and she had to save me. This wasn’t a preparatory lesson, this was the real thing: the final exam. I couldn’t let that happen again. It was more important we were totally on the same page with each other, and that mean telling her the truth. If she thought I was keeping secrets from her she’d never trust me enough to let me work with her.

“The what category?”

“Z. The not X or Y category.”

Supers were admitted into category X for people with ingrained ability. Z stream was for people with no ability. There was also a Y stream for a rare slice of the Natural population who had been exposed to Super power, which had even less intake than Z stream, even more stigmatized as the bucket ‘dislocated’ students were dropped into because they didn’t fit into X or Z. The Zs and Ys made up such a tiny proportion of the student body the were practically invisible and most Super students just assumed everyone was X stream.

“Oh yeah,” she remembered out loud. “Holy shit,” she emphasized, sounding morbidly fascinated. I couldn’t understand it; she wasn’t angry. It seemed to be…okay.

“You wait,” she restated, in a kinder, maybe even pitying tone, “I’ll give you the signal, and…um…you do your thing. Honestly, two bad guys – what the heck examination board? Set us such a chill job. You’ll be fine.”

“Right on,” I said weakly, but she had already gone in, moving down a dark corridor, turning a corner and was out of sight. 

I waited outside the door.

Some shuffling noises echoed down the dark corridor. My heart thudding in my chest, I moved closer, as the sounds went from shuffling to feet scraping. No signal yet. Then a bang, like someone striking a wall.

“Summer!” I called under my breath. My steps began to speed up, down the dimly lit hall, turning a corner to an ajar door.  Someone was running over the floor, feet pounding. The door banged open and a bizarre sight emerged.

“Steve, get out of the way—!” Summer yelled. She never screamed when she was scared, she yelled.

She burst out of the darkness, completely naked, and pushed past me. Her legs stretched like elastic to take her further, faster. I’d never seen her run like that; she looked like some alien entity and in the dim light it looked freaky – and not helping was her lack of clothes. One second she was a speeding, stretching pale blur, the next second I was struck into by her fast moving Flexer body, like being body slammed by a huge basketball. I knocked into the wooden floor. The world went black and felt like it was still moving even after I’d stopped. She kept going.

I didn’t want to believe she said what she did. I wanted to believe she said ‘get out!’ and I had imagined the rest. Her voice must have echoed weirdly in the hallway, creating the illusion of extra speech.

She turned the corner and footsteps carried on over the floor, before the door to the corridor opened and then slammed shut again.

As I groaned and rolled over, a broad shadow descended over my body. I scrambled to get away, but a burly hand scrunched around each of my wrists and began dragging me into the darkness that Summer had just escaped from.

I was slung over a man’s back and carried into another, smaller room of the warehouse. A dirty fluorescent light strip buzzed on, the main light source apart from some dirty perfectly circular windows which glowed an eerie blue from the moonlight. There was broken glass around the floor, dirty used coffee cups, flecks of black dust and stubbed cigarettes, and a pile of Summer’s clothes. She must have stretched out of them.

I was dropped into a chair, my arms were wrenched behind me and tied with tape, and then my ankles were taped to the chair legs. My thoughts were going like a bullet train: I was worried for Summer; trying to work out why she’d bailed out of the exam like that. Performance anxiety? She’d never gotten it before. She must have seen something she hadn’t studied for. Would the board penalize her for aborting? She’d have to re-sit with another partner. Unless I deliberately failed, too, and we could re-sit together. That seemed like the thing to do – the only thing to do now. Except I was tied up.

The man appeared at my front. This guy wasn’t wearing a suit, but jeans and a hoodie, with the hood on, and underneath a mask, and weirdly, a backwards baseball cap underneath. The cap’s visor must have been cut off to fit.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not able to continue,” I announced. “My partner left the exam, so we have to reschedule.”

The man blinked slowly.

“Gonna to try something?” Then he bent in my face and roared: “Well, DO IT!”

I suppressed a flinch.

“Excuse me? Look, I just said that—”

A big-knuckled fist came flying out of nowhere and socked me hard in the face. My head snapped to the side and a blur of stars rushed past my eyes. The pain dug into my skull about a second later.

As the man slid a chair right up in front of me and dropped into it, a pair of pumps clacked across the floor.

When my vision sharpened again, a woman had appeared in the room behind the man, a woman I’d only seen on the TV news: a real life Stepford wife with a trim figure, flawless styled hair and dress, like some investment banker’s young wife at a luncheon.

It took a second to sink in.

She was a Reducer. Her name was Lucy DeLuca, and she had no place being here, in a supervised exam setting. The only place she should have been was behind bars in the high security Fangelburg Super Penitentiary.

I stared back at the broad-shouldered masked man, making the connection. The guy was also a Super, and Lucy’s henchman, Rodney the Reconstructor.

According to the archive of extensive case files I kept on my PC, Lucy and Rodney had been solo Supervillains until Rodney had a run in with Lucy’s husband, after a bar fight over gambling debt, Rodney had snapped and reconstructed him into a dollar bill and spent him. As revenge, Lucy had Rodney’s wife kidnapped, reduced, and put into a tiny world inside a glass bottle, blackmailing Rodney for visitation in exchange for being her henchman. She also implanted him with a special device to control his reconstruction ability. They were now on-off dating.

“Just listen, sweetie,” the prim woman held unblinking eye contact, “before you commit yourself to something you’ll regret.” She steepled her manicured hands in front of her face and her voice went down to a firm strain:

“If you have the Flexer deformity, like that girl, it’s time to drop the act.”

“What are you talking about?” I cried, “I’m not a Flexer! Let me go!”

Where was the test? Where were the crisis actors? Where was Summer? She must have recognized the villains. Rodney must have tried to subdue her and she stretched out of her clothes trying to escape. I’d never seen her do that before.

Lucy watched me for what seemed like a long time. Then murmured to her male henchman:

“Run the litmus test.”

Rodney jumped up and punched me in the stomach.

“No reflex,” he concluded, as I choked for breath.

The woman paced around my chair, heels clacking, but always keeping herself stationed safely behind Rodney’s bulk form.

“Then what do you do?” she sniffed down at me.

“Why would you want me? I’m just a Natural.”

Her look of puzzlement slowly turned into a smile that showed too many perfect teeth.

“Well, young man, I have a secret,” her voice simpered like I was a well-behaved child.

“I hate Supers. “Her mouth was smiling but her eyes were glassy and hard. ”They’ve watched all our traditional societal family values crumble and they won’t do anything about it. They stand back in the shadows, letting their powers grow dusty on the shelf. And ultimately, who pays the price? You Naturals pay for it, because the Super state has no interest in taking the reins from Natural leaders and trying to remake a better Natural world for them. If you want to know why your Natural society is such a disgusting, delinquent mess right now, you only have us to blame. Anyway,” she turned away, fussing over her hair. “You’re free to leave.”

I stared between her and Rodney, waiting to be untied.

She continued:

“Yes, there’s a very special way out of here. We have a little house for you down in my developing project neighbourhood, Locketopia. A little size-jigging and your new home could be anything from a condo to a castle. And best of all, no Supers. All your neighbors will be perfect, ordinary, law-abiding little Naturals. Your world has so many social problems but my development is crime-free. It’s just a slight scale adjustment, and it’ll feel l like home.”

“Where is it?” I said. All fear had left me since Summer had run out. The memory stung more than Rodney’s punches. 

She lifted her necklace, showing off the locket.

“Locketopia,” she explained.

I didn’t understand, at first.

“That’s too small.”

“Don’t be fooled by the current dimensions. It’s small to you now,” her voice rose and fell with mounting glee, “but wait ‘til you’re even smaller, then it’ll seem like a kingdom!”

Her pumps clopped closer and closer.

Unless she was totally deranged, she couldn’t really mean that the village was stored inside the locket itself. You’d have to be microscopic to live in a village that fit in the locket. Invisible to the naked eye, completely lost and forgotten to the normal size world.

You can’t shrink a person, I thought desperately. At least, you can’t shrink them all. You can reduce the body but the person inside stays the same. But my consciousness would be trapped in whichever micro hell my body occupied. My consciousness would be trapped somewhere tinier than a grain of sand. And the biggest insult; it would all belong to Lucy.

And who knew if the neighborhood inside the locket was truly perfect? It might have been a wrecked dystopia. There was no prove it wasn’t; no way for Lucy to know.

My voice came out in pure reaction:

“Fuck your tiny town! I’d rather die!”

Lucy gave a very thin-lipped smile.

“So be it. It’ll make us both better off, I suppose. Locketopia is an oasis from reality; there’s no room for problem-starters.”

Swishing around, she barked at Rodney:

“He’s a walking crime scene now. Make him a bug.”

One her polished pumps grinded over the floor in preparation.

The henchman grumbled:

“Enough bugs! Let me make him into a bubble and send him out into the park’s tot playpen.”

There was a good reason Lucy kept Rodney on a metaphorical chain. A Reconstructor was so much worse than a Reducer; not only could he change my size, he could transform me into whatever he wanted, person, animal, and inanimate object, and possibly worse of all, my new form would retain my consciousness.

This drew a darkly interested look from Lucy.

“I hate having to strangle plan A in the cradle, but that’s an awfully tempting plan B.”

“He’s not going to exist very long,” the man plunged on, bolstered by her compliment. “The kids are gonna try and snatch him. They might try and blow him around for a little while, but some kid’s gonna poke him and…pop.”

Lucy got to the point:

“And there’ll be no evidence, just a droplet on a child’s finger.”

The man suggested:

“Or tongue.”

Lucy’s explosive laughter rocked the air. She was definitely deranged, I decided.

The sound shook me as much as the thought of being popped. Would it hurt? Would I die or would my consciousness carry on as a speck of water? – and then what? Would I get absorbed into the skin of whoever popped me, or would I get swallowed? …And would I still be conscious in the stomach, maybe being turned into a digestive bubble forced through the intestinal tract? Just how long would my ordeal go on?

“Just let me go,” I strained, feeling utterly defeated, “I won’t tell anyone.”

Lucy’s face downturned over my head.

“Lying isn’t good for you, honey,” she barbed, having lost all patience and interest in me now that I had no further role in her vision. “It might even stunt your growth. Our little talk was fun. Now, Rodney’s going to get you fixed up. You’re going to feel very wet and fragile, then we’ll open up the window and let the draught do the rest. You’ll get sucked out into the grounds and we’ll take bets on the winner of ‘puncture the bubble’.”

Rodney stood over me, cracking his knuckles. I threw myself against the tape until my shoulders ached. Suddenly she stopped.

“It’s a shame,” she considered aloud. “I don’t want to hurt a Natural. I wish we could make the Flexer girl into a bubble instead.” 

She thrust a cell phone onto my lap.

“Call her up and invite her back in.”

I continued to strain against the tape. The phone slid off my leg and clattered onto the floor.

“You want to leave, yes?” Lucy grated. “Give us the Flexer, and you can. Call her.”

“She doesn’t have her phone,” I snapped. But she might, if she’d returned to the Academy van, where our phones were.

She spun away from me, pumps rapping as she passed over the wood floor.

“Rodney,” she commanded, “our guest needs to retire and have a little think. Pull up a house for him.”

The man pulled a cigarette out of his pants pocket and bent to place it on the ground. As he pinched it between his fingertips, the white stick expanded rapidly into a white block. Windows and a door appeared. When he stepped back it was a standing dollhouse on the floor. He extended one finger and gave the front door a poke, causing it to swing inward, revealing a miniature room inside.

Now Lucy was stepping over to me.

“You’re so confused,” she simpered. “Clear your head and get back to me when your priorities are straightened up. I’ll give you a couple of minutes.”

I stared at the ludicrously small house with a gradual dawning sense of realization.

“Don’t do this,” I cried, jerking myself against the chair.

She hesitated, but not in sympathy.

“I’m not as promiscuous with my power as Rodney,” she said. “He’s something of a hypnotist, too, you know, and I suppose I’m a magician. He’s going to put you into a deep sleep now, while I do a little magic trick.”

Lucy’s pumps traipsed back and forth, skirting me, while Rodney stepped around behind me.

Something smacked into the back of my head and all the lights went out.

I was in a white box, cloaked in shadow. A bedroom and I was lying on a plastic bed frame and cheap mattress that had no padding, just a hard board like a table top. Lucy’s suffocating, flowery perfume clung to the walls, though she was nowhere in sight, and the wispy trail of acrid smoke. My clothes were gone and I felt drunk.

My body was tight and cramped. It felt like someone had hammered little screws all over my body and wound them too much. It must have been from lying on this hard bed. I stood up and stretched but the feeling didn’t budge.

The light switch on the wall didn’t work. It was a painted plastic bump that didn’t switch. The glowing circular light in the center of the ceiling wasn’t in the ceiling. It was a hole, through which outside light shone through…from a much, much bigger light, the droning fluorescent bar.

A sound burst over the house: Clack-clack-clack-clack, like a steam train running right over the roof. Then the whistling screams of teenagers like an oncoming cyclone. It was like an earthquake rocking the house, but it was actually the rollercoaster passing by, but now loud like it was right out the window, or magnified by speakers.

And then a murmuring voice trembled through the walls, high and feminine and disdainful, but with dinosaur volume:

“…could have made a wonderful little citizen for my collection but he would have needed to be broken in…”

It was Lucy, but if she was trying to murmur, it was coming out at a shout.

I staggered over to the window and pushed, and the entire pane popped out. It was plastic; I was surrounded by plastic.

Shakily, I leaned out and stared around at the outside world, and it was a thrilling mix of familiar and strange.

My perception was stuck on the floor. I was viewing the dusty, dim warehouse room from the perspective of a shoe, gazing up at a cavernous interior, expanse as a multi-storey indoor mall complex. Each wooden floor plank was as wide as a car parking space, and seemed to elongate into a distant, blurry horizon on the other side of the room.

The two Supervillains stretched to the ceiling and were filled out . Lucy paced over the floor; every step one of her shiny, thoroughbred-sized pumps launched through the air and tapped against the wood panels, sending vibrations long the floor, all the way through the dollhouse.

Rodney’s even bigger dirt-stained sneakers squeaked as he rocked his weight back in boredom. His pant legs went up like tree trunks, sighting anything higher caused my neck to hurt.

I wasn’t tied to the chair anymore, but I was still trapped – possibly now even more trapped. Making a sprint across the floor could end in either of them stamping me flat under a shoe.

I was only six inches tall. My head spun. The air crackled again as Lucy’s megaphone-charged voice carried on:

“…but he’s different. He says he’s a Natural, but he was running around with a Flexer. He knows things about us. It might be catastrophic to let him loose in Locketopia and poison their innocent ways with outside Super culture.”

Her eyes wandered the room, until she picked out my face in the window. A smile stretched across her face.

“Hello, pygmy. What stellar diet results! I bet you didn’t know you could lose so much weight while you were sleeping. You see, I started shaving you down, and then I guess I just got carried away.”

She laughed down at my patent confusion.

“Don’t even think of trying to get away, or my heel is going to ‘reconstruct’ you into the floor.”

Her pumps seemed to leap-frog each other as they pounded over the floor to me, and with each seismic shudder, carrying her monstrously tall, thin figure way over my head. I took steps away from the window, wanting to gag in dread. It was impossible to look at her red lips pout and flex as she spoke, and not realize I was small enough to fit between them.

“Have we reached an understanding, minion?”

“You want something from me?” I said, in no doubt she was in full control of whatever happened to me now. My voice was a puny, feathery trill compared to her blasting commandment. “Are you serious? What could I possibly do for you like this?”

One of her giant heels slammed down right outside the window and held there, dimming the dollhouse room from outside. A floor draught carried the scent of sweating leather into the plastic, miniature room, and with no ventilation, it sunk there until I felt like I was practically inside the shoe, pressed into the scent.

“Quit the self-pity babble! ” The giant shoe lifted and stomped the floor right outside the window. “You demean my work only because you are so ignorant! The reduced body is beautiful, pure, innocent. It minimizes mess and waste and consumption. It simplifies logistics. It makes humankind manageable and orderly. Who do you think you are mocking, little man?”

Her pump lifted a second time, but this time it didn’t lower. The roof of the dollhouse made a squeaking sound in the corners as the plastic grinded into itself. Her shoe had parked squarely on the roof, and she was pushing down.

I ran to the open window again, only to be met with her other pump, which was standing right outside. I had a vision of climbing out the window and being stomped by it. But in the meantime, the dollhouse was about to collapse…

“I’ll help you!” I cried at the top of my lungs.

The leather heel creaked as her weight shifted. There was a metal click and smoke wisped into the dollhouse . She’d lit up a cigarette as she meditated on my response. Her pump rested on the dollhouse roof.

“Your first assignment,” she waved the cell phone in her hand over the roof of the dollhouse, now the size of a body board, “is to invite the Flexer girl back in.”

A cloud of cigarette stirred angrily in my tiny delicate lungs until I felt dizzy. I coughed.

“I don’t know her. She’s not my friend.”

Now, there was a weird vibration from another part of the warehouse, vibrating sensitively through my bones and growing. It felt like the rollercoaster swinging back around for another loop over the building. But it kept building and building and no track clacking noise, and no screams—

The shiny heel outside the window swished around, storming with its identical partner across the floor, and Lucy’s furious voice blasted over the top:

“When you work for me, the very first thing you need to learn, is that you are not running the production. Your job is to take orders.”

The air pressure in the building kept shifting, until the ceiling began to groan. In another room, a door slammed from a fierce draught, a shelf buckled and dropped its contents with a shimmering crash. Something struck a wall. I wondered what humungous theme park ride was starting up so close to the warehouse to do this.

Lucy shook her head at the disturbance, then stopped and turned from across the other side of the room and pinned me with a glare. I fought to not react, even as my insides were shrivelling up.

“Never you forget, my little underling, I’m the star of this show.”

With a crackling whoosh of air like a cap lifting from a giant soda can, a human-sized missile came bowling into her from behind, sending her flying across the room. I dove out the dollhouse window an instant before she crashed into the entire structure, smashing it to bits. As I hit the wood floor, chunks of painted plastic snapped over my head.

Rodney jumped up and tackle-rushed the intruder. The room burst into light as a hot pink laser cut across the wall like a knife. Then it was gone again, and Rodney’s head banged onto the floor, still wearing the cap, and then his body. The smoke of cauterized flesh wafted in the air, and metal tang of blood.

Then, odd silence. The air pressure disturbance had levelled out again, Lucy was a crumpled heap and made no sound.

I began sprinting at the door, cold draught flapping past. The sheer size of the floor created so much empty, airy space to cross, but I was light and agile now, on legs that felt more like precise springs. I was smaller, but still had a body that was built to support itself against a much greater gravity burden, and being so light now, it was like running on cheat mode.

But I was still not fast enough.

A stack of polished leather slapped the floor, closing the directly in front. I stared in wonder. It was a humungous black go-go boot with a fearsomely tall chunk heel. It was so close it seemed to fill the world. I skidded and face-planted into the toe section.

As I scrambled to my feet, the shoe lifted off without concern, covering the ceiling with its dark tread, before clapping down at my back, jingling my bones. Both the shoe and its mate carried on over the floor, like heavy duty machinery pistoning up and down, sending sharp pulsations through the wood floor.

They stopped at a pair of red-tinted shield sunglasses, which must have come off in the collision with Lucy, and skipped over the floor.

Then a voice filled the room, one I’d only ever heard carried through radio waves and from behind a screen. But now it was real-time, a bright electric burr that was smoky underneath. 

“A small fashion mishap,” And a toned, feminine silhouette dove and lightly took back the sunglasses, as her back dipped, her butt calmly pushed out to full breadth, each globe with unbelievable size and volume, “but I had the purest intentions.”

Her shoes squeaked as she twisted around to face me. Of course, she didn’t literally face me; her awareness floated in a faraway space toward the ceiling, while I was swished by the cold sweeps of air lifted by her calm saunter around the room.

My eyes were gravitated up the boots, up to a beautiful woman with dark hair in literally windblown waves that framed high Tatar cheekbones and icy violet-blue eyes. She wore a shimmery armored black bodice and skirt with red and blue racing stripes and white stars. Over that, a little incongruously, a red, hooded puffer jacket.

She put the sunglasses back in their natural place over her blue eyes, which tinted them red. Now she was watching me. I quickly covered my groin, half wishing to be back in the privacy of the dollhouse, or even for the great black tread to lift over the ceiling again and cover me up from view. I never wanted to meet her like this.

“You rolling with them?” she inquired.

“No,” I charged out. The pink laser had burned itself into my mind. Were the media accounts wrong? They never warned she would just…do that. I looked past the towering black boots to the humped form of Lucy, amidst the dollhouse rubble, and it came out without thought: “I was just going to take these guys into custody, but now you’re here, it could save time if we pooled our talents.”

She waved her finger as if running it up and down the length of my body.

“And what about this..?”

I squared my shoulders.

“I’m a Reducer. I had to hide from them, so I reduced.”

One boot tip landed on Lucy’s glowing-tipped cigarette and twisted the ember out. The final gasp of expiring smoke made my chest tighten.

“I see,” she replied. “Biding your time for the ankle bum-rush.”

She took a steady, unthinking step closer. But if she was trying to move closer to see me better, the problem wasn’t distance. I reflexively took a step back.

Her gaze seemed to be filtering out everything that wasn’t me, questioning my entire existence but in a way that didn’t seem unfriendly, “…very comfortable down there, aren’t you? You know how small you are?” Her eyes flashed past Lucy, “Are you completely insane?”

Her attention sat on me, so heavy it took effort to keep my head up to meet her eyes. She was so gigantic her gaze easily spanned me and more besides, keeping me prisoner by surveillance alone. There was no pretending I hadn’t noticed her, or nonchalantly escaping her notice. She could capture me entirely in direct view and still enjoy a lot of peripheral surrounding. She had a perfect visual lock-on of not only me, but a sweep of every surrounding place I could move to. I felt like a chess piece and she’d already figured me out three moves ahead.

I frowned up at her.

“I had this,” I said firmly, “I was luring them both into an elaborate trap.”

She stood over me with hands on hips. I forced my legs to not shake.

“Who are you?” she demanded, “tell me, before I elaborately trap you inside my boot.”

Her boots were so tall I’d never be able to climb out again. I forced out:

“Try anything and I’ll reduce you.”

One arm dropped from her hip, and she cocked her head at me.

“Big balls for a tiny little man. The whole world will ask where I went. What are you going to tell them?”

“You tripped and fell into the Bermuda Triangle and never came out.”

She seemed to be having an increasingly hard time containing her amusement.

“If you want to reduce me, you have to get closer.”

I didn’t move.

“You’re safe today.”

She gave me a smug look. She wasn’t threatened by me whatsoever, I thought. She was playing with me.

“Who is this new Reducer storming the district, anyway? Care to introduce me?”

“It’s Steve,” I replied.

In response, she drew herself up, placing a hand on her hip and giving an elegant flourish, and declared:

“Zamira Venus. No middle name.”

“I know,” I chirped.

“Steve,” she repeated. “I’m going to have to insist you at give me a little pose.”

I uneasily ignored this. No wonder Reducers were so power-shy, and rarely became Heroes, and no wonder they had a high incidence of going insane. I was starting to feel their pain. It was so hard to be taken seriously.

“No posing,” I replied, “I aim for efficiency in everything. Now I have to get this woman to jail.”

“Size up, Steve,” there was a flirtatious edge to her voice, “you’re just teasing me now.”

I couldn’t ‘size up’. I was trapped, tiny, naked. Then I remembered, with a sinking feeling, Summer’s change of tone after she’d learned I was actually a Natural, and wondered why I was playing this same make-believe character all over again. Pretending to be Super is what got me into this fiasco.

The words came out like air leaking out of balloon in small sharp spurts.

“Okay, look, I’m a Natural. I was reduced.”

Zamira studied me under the low, buzzing fluorescent tube. It was getting darker outside and she was starting to give off a faint blue glow.

“That’s very strange,” she murmured.

“Yeah, strange. I definitely feel very strange.”

Her eyebrows drew together in concern.

“Alright, Steve Natural. I’m going to take a look at what she did to you.”

It was a vision out of a surreal dream, her giant boots were clomping closer and closer, steadily expanding in view until they seemed to touch the walls. She was a walking skyscraper, and coming for me. I began to run to the door again, but my speed was pitiful compared to hers.

“Wait, careful!” My voice was nothing but a tiny, awestruck whine. “Stay back! I’m too small!”

Sensing my distress, she unplanted completely from the ground, hovered the last few feet, and snatched me up. It was like being nabbed by a giant eagle talon and taken up into the clouds. I writhed in her weightless hand, unsure where the ground was anymore. Her fingers curled and pulled tightly around my torso like a snug full body harness. The soft skin of her palm surrounded me all over like a sleeping bag.

My head poked between two bent finger joints, which hugged my ears, keeping my head fixed in place. I was brought in very close to the giant armored black bodice, sculpted suggestively over the projecting twins, each separately trumping my diminutive size.

A little higher, and suddenly her face was too close, and enormous. Her breath billowed, warming my face, which was the only thing sticking out of her hand. I tried to time my blinks to avoid getting what felt like a hairdryer blast into my eyes.

“This is going to sound pretty stupid,” she murmured, her eyes running down my body with appreciation, “but I’ve never actually seen a reduced Natural before. Because—” she emphasized as if it was so obvious it didn’t need stating: “—Reducers are so good at hiding them, or…making them disappear.”

Her fingers uncurled slightly as I was gently shifted back and forth, and squeezed. She turned my head to the side, then tugged and rotated my limbs. Her cool touch pushed about, her nail delicately poked at each of my ribs to check for damage, then her thumb ploughed into my stomach, jiggling to search my insides for irregularity, which was so ticklish and uncomfortable it literally took my breath away. I felt like an inanimate object.

I began to struggle in her grip, and without thinking, her touch began drifting around my torso with loving strokes to calm me. I stopped moving, but only because there was no escape from her intimate, curious probing. A drop from her hand would seriously hurt, or worse.

“I’ve never seen you before, either,” I said, feeling dumb but unable to think of anything else to say.

“Well then, eat me up while you can,” she said with a glint in her eyes.

This seemed to erode some kind of flimsy barrier between us. For her, much faster than for me. Her thumb lowered, making a sweep of my hips before it began to bury around between my legs. She pushed against my penis, and then lifted it out of the way to examine my balls. Then I was flipped over while her powerful thumb worked against my back muscles, and followed my spine to my butt. She pushed against the backs of my thighs, and then flipped me over again.

“I have a small problem, Steve,” she said, stroking my stomach thoughtfully. The burn of her red-lensed stare was sending all the blood between my legs.

She rotated in mid-air to face the two pieces of Rodney lying on the floor. Her voice became oddly hushed. “He wasn’t supposed to die. It’s so bizarre for it to ever even happen, but sometimes I’m in a rush, I’m not exactly thinking, the beams slip out, and these damn glasses…” she groaned, “…because I skip a fitting and buy them right out of the factory one time this happens.” She looked me in the eye. “How bad is it?”

I sighed.  

“You just made a mistake.”

“Yes,” she said, somewhat eagerly. “It was an accident! But there’s too many damn people out there who are going to run away with this.”

“It was very fast and he was intimidating. Just be honest about how you felt.”

She shook her head, disappointed.

“Talking about my feelings, oh, that’s just what I need.” She implored, “Make a statement with me, Steve. Back me up on this.”

“I’ve got a problem myself,” I replied, shifting in her hand uneasily.

“Gamma General could fix you under my plan.”

The Gamma General was a big Super hospital, and they did hair-raising tests and procedures on Supers which would maim and seriously injure Naturals.

“I’m not covered.”

“Mmm.” She realized aloud, “Right.”

She was roaming my body as she spoke, pushing and poking. There was something nervous and excited in the friction of her fingertips. She kept rubbing and spanning her fingertips against my flesh, making it stretch, and the skin was starting to tingle and burn. She glanced down at me again, and one polished, crystalline fingernail traced my jawline in what seemed to be a reassuring gesture. The spiky tip flirtatiously stroked my lips.  

“Steve,” she said in a honeyed tone, “just help me walk out of this clusterfuck. Can you do that?”

I wasn’t even sure how I was going to walk out of here when I could barely cross a single room without almost getting flattened or swept up in a hand.

Her touch kept shifting around my body, inconveniently searching for the softest parts of me to sink into. I looked up into her red tinted eyes, long lashes batting, and my insides turned to soup. She wasn’t going to let me go unless I had a very good response.

“I want to help you,” I said.

She gave me a dazzling smile and scratched my chest affectionately with her thumbnail. All this easy tactile contact and I was starting to feel less like a person and more like a little animal she was training for obedience.

“If you don’t want to talk for me, then let’s keep this simple,” she instructed. “Don’t say anything. I’ll manage it up front, and you just keep your head down.”

I swallowed and looked up at her giddily.

“Uh…Miss Venus? Can you – you know – give me an autograph?”

The charming façade dropped; she grew quiet for a moment, and I held my breath, reading to be politely dismissed.

“I have something honest and unique for you, Steve, to help you remember what we said.”

I breathed an inward sigh of relief.

“Okay. What is it?”

“It might hurt a tiny bit—”

“Wait, what!?” I squawked.

“—But if it’s too much,” she went on, ‘I have this secret power where I’ll give you a fuzzy little brain wipe to make you forget it happened. But you get to keep the souvenir.”

“Do what?” I yelped, “Brain wipe?” My case notes on her didn’t record anything like this.

“Let’s find out if you need it, shall we? What’s your favorite color.”

I was so dazed that for a second I didn’t know the answer.

“Radioactive blue. Cherenkov light. Why?”

She nodded.

“Like Rigel.”

As she said this, in her smooth, light patter, she jammed her nail into the back of my wrist and it was like liquid ice being injected into my vein. Her nail had turned so icy bright, like a welding torch flame, it burned my eyes. I helplessly looked away, up into her eyes. The pain was so great it felt like my arm was being melted down from inside out.

The air suddenly seemed too thin to be breathed, it went in and out of my lungs rapidly without sustaining me.

Then her nail lifted. There was now a glowing blue star system imprinted on my flesh. I stared at in fear and wonder, as the culprit of all that pain, and trying to work out how I felt about being used as a canvas for her UV glo artwork.

“Uh…” I nodded dumbly, “…what is it? What did you do to me?” I rubbed the mark in alarm. “Did you make me radioactive?!”

She thumbed my head, a little roughly, to get me to settle.

“You’re so jumpy, Steve. It’s just your autograph. I keep a tight circle, but now you’re practically an initiated Venusian.” She laughed. “But seriously, once this whole thing goes away…I think I might owe you.”

I was feeling like I was going to pass out. There were icy rings of pain still radiating out from the mark.

She read it right off my expression.

“That bad?”

All the tension had escaped my muscles.

“One of the most painful things ever. Is my arm still attached?”

He lashes dropped but her pupils fixated as if trying to memorize my face for later.

“Close your eyes and I’ll do my best to work a little magic spell over your mind, and if I get it just right, hit the sweet spot in your brain, it should make you forget everything…”

I felt so pale and tired my eyes closed naturally, without compulsion. The dark behind my eyelids was overpowering; I had to squeeze my toes firmly to keep from fainting completely.

The dark got bigger, deeper; she seemed to bend over me, or take me up to her face. Warm air washed over in rhythmic thrusts…in, out…Her breath battered my skin, driven by her famously powerful diaphragm, and I was nothing but a sheet of paper held up in hopeless resistance. Held between her hands, I began to tremble, and now my eyes were closed I was too afraid to open them. My eyeballs would only get lashed by each disarming exhalation.

What was she doing? Was she…trying to look at me in extreme close up? Another burst of heated air that broke over my head like a stormy current, and rumbled my ears. It dried up every last particle of moisture from my face, including my lips and the insides of my nostrils. Her breath was so strong it got everywhere; the back of my throat and sinus cavities tickled from dryness. I couldn’t swallow; my throat seemed to stick and ache. Each pounding exhalation pushed my eyelashes down flat.

Her head was poised right in front of mine, now I had to be so close, any closer and my face would be on her lips—

Something big and warm and soft captured my face and pulled with such desperate suction my whole face was scrunched up. An ache ran through my skull like my head was being fed into a compressor. Then, with a sharp wet squish, the tension popped free. But my head was immediately captured and reeled in all over again.

She was kissing me.

Zamira Venus was kissing me.

She had to be, but it felt like she was trying to eat my head without using her teeth. Her munching, sucking lips flexed and stressed the muscles around my temples and jaw.

Her lips parted to take in more of my face, and my own lips were bumped and nuzzled by what felt like a squishy wet fist, which sent a couple of playful flicks into my nose, before pushing my head back and forth, trying to powerfully roll it. The constantly shifting ‘fist’ broadened into a wet carpet that slithered under my throat to support my head from below, and continuing to play with my head. Stroke after stroke of the ‘fist’ kneaded my face over with sticky film. It was like being painted over with a roller, but instead of paint it was her saliva. There was so much power in her oral muscle my head strained against its brutish insistence. Terror started to well up inside my chest; my head was practically stuck inside her mouth like a baby dummy and I couldn’t unplug it. With a little extra pressure from her tongue, it was within her ability to squash my head with a single lick. Trying to endure the battering affection of her tongue took marathon patience.

When I was drawing on the last reserves of my breath, it ended.

“There,” her lips twisted with an ironic smile. “All wiped.” Hard to believe lips so freakishly strong were also capable to produce such a soft, tender expression. And only a moment ago, my face had been plastered on those same plush lips.

“Never said it was a Super power,” she admitted.

To my surprise, she then tore off a corner of the black costume skirt and wrapped it around me like a towel. It was soft but tough and stretchy, warm from her body heat and infused with her perfume.

Absurdly I was about to ask her to take me with her. I couldn’t go back to the Academy like this. The Admissions Head took a risk letting me into the Z stream. On the statistics, it wouldn’t shock them that a Z streamer crashed and burned, but I didn’t want to go anywhere near the campus for fear of running into Summer. It would be excruciatingly embarrassing at normal size. And I wasn’t normal size. Where was I supposed to go now?

She didn’t answer that question, but put me on the ground and went over to haul Lucy’s unconscious form out of the dollhouse rubble with ease, flopping the slighter, blonde woman in her arms like an oversized ragdoll.

“I have a little space left for you, Steve.” She gave me a foxy grin that shook my insides to soda fizz.

“Your hands are full,” I pointed out. Unless there was a pocket inside her puffer jacket.

“I’ll slip you inside my boot; you can choose: left or right?”

I swallowed.

“I’ll take my chances on the floor.”

Then she spun on her heel and accelerated out of the room, making the walls groan with the air pressure shift. The bluish fluorescent light bulb burst and the room blinked into darkness.

Time stretched as I paced over the floor in shock, five minutes, ten minutes, I lost count.

It broke over me like a cold wave; I suddenly felt ridiculous and sad. The idea she’d flirt with me over Rodney’s dead body seemed insane. She’d captivated me and kissed me without a lot of intent. She’d kissed me practically the way an older sibling would kiss a baby, because in the shock of being shrunk, I was tiny, obsequious and offered no pushback. Now she was gone, Summer was gone, my size was gone, and the exam was over.

The police soon showed up. Naturals just had police, it was the Supers who had Heroes. 

My arm glowed blue up until the police flashlights hit the room, the direct light cancelled the blue glow, and the star system went dark.

Dazzled by the skipping flashlight beams, I ran across the floor, trying to avoid the rapid passage of their massive shiny shoes as they congregated around Rodney’s body. As they radioed in, one of them noticed me and yelled.

The long beams of flashlights were like the pursuit of helicopters. Suddenly cops were diving for me; one of them pinched my chest and I was being winched up into the air. I gripped the scrap of black fabric around my waist like it was the only thing keeping me alive.

A voice rumbled my eardrums:

“Hey, look at this – he’s tiny!”

Zamira said she’d never seen a reduced person before. The Natural cops had never conceived of a reduced person. Reduced Supers went to Gamma General to be resized, and Reduced Naturals were ‘disappeared.’ I was an anomaly; to Supers, ‘strange’, to Naturals, a complete alien.

A police flashlight trained on my face like a stadium floodlamp.

“Put me down!” I yelled, clenching my eyes shut and thrashing against the muscular fingers that bound up my limbs. I had no hope of escaping when even the man’s pinky was thicker than my arms.

A pair of softer hands encircled my torso and the flashlight beam left my eyes.

“Okay, easy there, little guy,” a feminine voice came from above my head. It was a young female cop.

While the others hung back in the warehouse, taping off the scene, I was slipped into her pants pocket, where all was mercifully dark. A couple of empty gum wrappers crinkled around my feet.

It felt like being inside an upright sleeping bag that hugged her thigh. In the dark, the stars on my arm glowed blue again. Then something whumped down and patted my body from outside. It was the cop’s hand, checking I was secure. I resented being treated like her wallet or phone.

For a long time I was rocked and slammed upon the meat of her thigh, like a tiny basketball being dribbled in time with her steps. Her powerful walk took us away from the warehouse and back through the park. There was a sick plunging sensation every time her foot dropped to the ground, and sent a tremor through my entire body as it landed. I shifted and braced myself against every bumping footstep, never getting used to it.

From outside, the theme park rides had been powered down and the crowds had dissipated. Some bone-shaking footsteps later, insects chirped and car engines grumbled past, which meant we had reached the vicinity of the parking lot. I wondered vaguely if Summer had returned the Academy car.

“What do you say I get you out of here?” the cop said, getting off her phone and giving the outer pocket another gentle pat which swept over my face, chest and genitals. 

She pulled open the door of her squad car, and made a hair-raising transition from standing to sitting, pulling me onto my back and downwards sharply before bouncing against her hip. In sitting position, her tight pants tightened even more around her waist, squashing me against her muscular thigh, fixing me in place sideways.

Then the world seemed to whirl into motion as the car ran. Every crack in the road recoiled through my spine. I swallowed back my car sickness. Maybe I was being rescued but it felt like kidnap.

A call buzzed over the radio and she explained the situation to someone, and then someone else; a dispatcher and then another officer. Her voice calmed me somewhat. 

"Excuse me!" I called, remembering suddenly. "Lucy reduced a bunch of people and is keeping them inside a locket. She might be still wearing it."

The officer paused and then dialed the Hero Custody Center Lucy had been taken to for processing. She asked me some questions and relayed what I said to them.

The car stopped in a street right on Hammerhead’s border.  A wide glittering black river spanned to the lit skyline of the neighboring city, the more 'Super friendly', Ankylorhiza. That was where Zamira lived; she might have already flown back to her Fortress of Investigation, the 'Satellite Park' building to file a Hero incident report.  I knew the process; I'd written hundreds of practice Hero reports at the Academy. Still, no amount of reporting ever prepared me for being the subject of one. 

Once again, my body was bumped and pushed by the officer's fingertips to check where I was. Then her hand ventured in to fish me out, two of her probing fingertips accidentally bumped my head as they slid down to grasp my chest and tug me free. I resignedly let her yank me out, and came into the cool night air. We stood at the end of a driveway of a familiar street.

“This is your address,” she checked.

I stared up in despair at the imposing, magnified façade of my house, feeling unwelcome like I'd just been evicted. There was that dual sense of familiarity and strangeness again. It crashed on me in an instant: I was six inches tall, my house was too big to live in anymore: I couldn't open the front door, or any of the interior doors, I was too short to work the door handle, too weak to open the refrigerator to feed myself, too small to turn the shower on to wash myself, possibly too small to climb into bed to sleep.

“Well, Goddamn,” said a voice from behind.

The officer turned, bringing me in front of my neighbor, Brandon Vega, who had just come over from his place. 

“Detective,” said the officer. “You were briefed? We found this little guy scurrying around on the floor at BizarroWorld."

Brandon looked me over with only the vaguest surprise, no more than if I’d gotten lost and the officer was escorting me home again. He must have been told what happened.

“What’s it look like down there?” he asked. “You sure he’s the only one?”

“Units have been called in to assist with securing the scene. We only found him so far, but another four UTL.  You think they're going to get you down there?”

“Awaiting the call,” Brandon sighed. “You know we can’t take anything or do lab work because this is a Super scene, they’re going to get their own Scanners to walk through and run the thing before it goes red ball. Or next level: Foundation.”

The female officer lifted me up in front of Brandon as if presenting me to him as some biological curiosity.

“And if they want to scan this guy? Should I take him back to the Station?”

Brandon shook his head gently.

“Let’s not displace him any more than necessary. If the Super Squad want to follow him up, they can locate him at the normal address.”

Then Brandon reached down and ruffled my hair. It was extra gentle but still, the strength in his touch pushed at my head and made me feel childlike. This was the same soft-spoken man I’d waved to earlier that morning, now he was a muscular giant with very firm touch.

"Hello there, Steve,” he said, in a voice too bright and sharp for nine pm at night, “It’s Brandon, remember? Sure, you’re a little smaller than last time I saw you, and I’m probably a lot bigger…” rather than finishing the thought, he said: “I think you’d better come back with me.”

I eyed his enormous features nervously, my body pulsing with dread.

“Where are you going to take me, sir?”

"My place,” he said. He gestured across the road. He chuckled. “And boom, we’ve arrived.”

He didn’t wait for my reply. His huge hands circled my torso so just my head, arms and lower legs were sticking out. His thumbs dug into my ribs with accidental pressure and my chest protested. I writhed until he got the message and loosened his grip, spreading around my body to distribute the pressure equally, instead of just applying it in one place. Now my legs swung free with nothing to stand on. It was unnerving; I was flying through the grainy darkness, the cool night air over my skin.

Leaving the female officer behind, we headed across the road to a modern, shallow-rooved style house, and small relief, it looked nothing like the antique white dollhouse. I tilted my head back and took a deep breath, trying to expand my lungs in spite of the pressure of the detective’s thick, muscular hand surrounding my entire torso. Far above, the night sky was the only thing that looked familiar anymore, the stars were the only things that didn’t look any bigger or smaller.

The porch light flicked on and Brandon dialed a code into the security system. The lights were on inside and the house spread all around, with room for miles. It seemed to extend out from every corner, like a panorama, except it didn’t just extend out lengthways, but every way. We went down the vast length of a creamy white hallway, before another light switch flicked to bath a living room in warm yellows. I accepted that I couldn’t see everything and stopped trying to twist my neck to catch up. Being carried was even a little fun if I gave my sense of body up totally.

I was put down on a sofa seat. As his hand released, cool air slipped in. I wished I was inside his warm hand again. My little body had fit inside the curvature of his hand so snugly I was beginning to feel attached to it, like a glove. Embarrassed at my dependence, I pulled the torn skirt strip tighter, feeling naked again. Brandon paused to click the remote and put it down next to me, before leaving the room. The TV jabbered on, shuffled through channels, and then stopped on a news broadcast. My attention snapped to the screen showing images of the crime scene taped off warehouse, as a reporter said:

“--News just coming in as to the body of an unidentified man found dead at the BizarroWorld theme park. Cause of death still awaiting autopsy result, however it’s believed the man may have attempted to cross the ‘Booster’ rollercoaster while a ride was in session and was struck by an oncoming car. Believing him to be ride prop, a park staff member may stored his body in a disused ride warehouse—” 

Brandon re-entered, moving purposefully towards the door. Meanwhile, I suddenly had an idea. Or, not an idea, a desperate itch to not be out of the Super loop just yet.

“Sir?” I said. But my voice was quieter now, and easily drowned out by the TV. The detective interrupted me:

“Just Brandon.”

“Brandon, can I use your internet?”

Distractedly, he swooped me up from the sofa and put me down on the living room table in front of a laptop. Then he said:

“I’m sorry to dash on you, kid, but I have to head out on a call. I think you know the one.”

As he left the house he called back, “Just sit tight.”

And he was gone. Car noise came from the garage before fading down the street. Whether he meant it or not, ‘low down’ seemed like a pretty succinct summary of my situation now.

Desperate for a distraction, I logged into a special sign-in page on the laptop, and coordinated instructions to the TV via WiFi. I just hoped Brandon’s TV picked up the signals from the satellites on my roof. The news broadcast went to black.

It was not actually ‘black’. There was a menu screen in infra-color – wavelengths of light the human eye could not see. Neither could I. In order to navigate the invisible prompts, I had to go by memory: press down four times, then press ‘okay’. Right three times, down, okay. Right four times, down nineteen times, okay. My friend Tripp, a Waver, taught me how.

The news returned.

I pumped my fist.

“Yeah!”

It was a different news program than before, and a channel that had probably never played on Brandon’s TV. The newsreader was a different person; his eyes tracked oddly, like an android, his pupils shone too bright when they looked straight into the camera, and sometimes they flashed red like a camera themselves. I remembered his name was Kirk, and he seemed to have had way too much plastic surgery. And not just plastics, but silicon, circuitry and a lot of controversial internal programming.

He announced:

“A Reducer felon has been arrested and charged for attempted kidnap of two Paragon Academy students during a standard test. Lucinda deLuca hijacked the students’ final cadetship exam and performed a reduction on one of the students, Steve Rockwell. The other student, Summer Sagittarius managed to flee the scene unharmed. Captain Zamira Venus, arrived on the scene to arrest deLuca, however, deLuca’s accomplice, Rodney Vock, died in the conflict. Miss Venus claims Mr Vock rushed at her, and in self-defence she performed a complex, high speed airborne manoeuvre, however in the confined space this backfired and resulted in Mr Vock’s death. Shortly following the incident, Miss Venus was quoted:

”The man came for me, and, you know, I’m a Soarer; I do what I know, which is fly. When I landed, the man was down.”

Foundation has declined to investigate further, sparking protest by some critics.

This is not the first time the self-proclaimed ‘Aero-Yogini Queen’ has generated reaction for her public appearances in Natural spaces. Previously she drew accusation of gratuitous ‘power-flashing’ to a Natural congregation at Hammerhead City stadium. Political commentator, Milo Matheson, who unsuccessfully petitioned against the UN’s invitation to Venus to give an opening address at its recent Assembly, posted ironically on social media:

"She declares unity and equality with Naturals. She reminds them she can fly and they can't."

Suddenly I regretted changing the channel. The Lux Network was the biggest media station in town, and it was pure, unfiltered bias. It loved to pile-on Zamira, as it did anyone who was colorful and outspoken. I turned down the volume.

What was left was the quietness of the vast house. And the aloneness trickled in.

Had Summer tried to contact me? Maybe she was embarrassed about what happened – I sure was. And something told me I wouldn’t be resitting the assignment. It was painful to think I might not have a place at the Academy anymore, but even more painful that I might not have a partner anymore.

Most lifelong Super partnerships were forged at the Academy, and graduates tended to melt back into society, pretending to be Natural. Almost every Super pretended to be Natural. It then became extra difficult to seek out other Supers, go on some assignments together, see if you were compatible. And for someone like me, who wasn’t even a Super, it would be practically impossible to convince a Super to accept me as an equal partner, or even something marginally less.

While I sunk into a meditative stupor, the door swept open with a cool fan of air, and then was quietly shut. In a few bounds a humungous shape descended on the room. Still in a mental fog, I automatically thought Brandon must have returned.  

Not Brandon. It was a girl.

I went into alert mode. The house was no longer a secure space. It had become dangerous territory. Someone else’s territory.

I jumped to my feet, eyes bouncing around the room, from object to object, trying to find an escape. My nerves were still elevated from the shock and I wasn’t thinking clearly. Being seen by strangers at diminutive size was still new and terrifying and embarrassing.

The girl turned her back as she moved to the kitchen area.

Seizing my chance, I ran to the edge of the table. My brain was still in ‘normal size’ mode, thinking the distance from the table to the floor couldn’t be that high.

Now, a choice: Either take a flying leap onto the corner of the rug, to soften my drop, or slide down the table leg, or drop onto a seat, and then drop again onto the floor.

But I was already on hands and knees, dropping my legs out over the edge, trying to hug them around the table leg. My legs slipped and then I was falling.

“Oh fuck!” I yelled.

The landing was hard and booted the air out of my chest.

The kitchen went quiet. She must have heard me.

I lay on my back with the light too bright in my eyes. My ears rung and the floor was tremoring rhythmically into my spine like a truck was passing by. Then the light was shaded over by the girl’s silhouette. She was looking right at me.

“Steve…?” she said. Her voice was too loud, just like everyone else’s. A primal instinct in my brain was still commanding me to run, but with my whole body twanging, I stayed put.

Suddenly the air seeped back into my lungs and my muscles were sharp again. I snapped up and sprinted over the floor, and then commando crawled under the sofa.

“Uh, okay,” the girl said. Surprisingly, she was not surprised. In fact, she looked completely unimpressed. “What are you doing?” Her voice seemed to circle the ceiling, and shiver through the sofa, and run through the floor, like a surround sound speaker system.

Only her sneakers were visible; platform sneakers. As if she needed extra platform. The treads were white, the very bottom faintly grayed by dirt. The sneakers paced along the floor, only to be kicked off and shunted to the side, in a gesture that turned each shoe into a lethal missile if one had hit me. Now, unfortunately, traces of sweat and worn shoe odor floated in under the couch.

Now, a pair of socked feet approached the sofa, and slowly the rest of her came into view; first her hands, stabilizing against the ground, and then as she got down onto her stomach.

The sight of her brought a knot in my stomach. Dark liquid eyes staring out from beneath heavy lashes, wavy brunette hair spilling down her shoulders. She had expressive looks, the type that transparently showed her emotions.

And she was attractive. Big fucking problem.

I found myself being studied by her big expressive eyes as if she was trying to figure out what species I was. It was almost as if she had trouble figuring out the reason for my outburst of terror.

Simple: her.

“You want to come out?” she said.

“How did you get in here?” I said in a tiny voice, staring out at her in wonder.

In return, she gave me a very easy smile that made me feel as exposed to her as if she’d lifted the sofa clean off my body. Maybe she was just trying to be friendly but body language on the giant scale was so captivating, and oppressively intimate, it was almost painfully self-conscious. I didn’t feel like I was being looked at, but looked into, examined, mentally weighed and measured. In one look, the girl got a greater eyeful of me than I her, and as with Zamira, I got the sense she could capture my entire being in one evaluative visual sweep. She was so big and blown up, and I was fully in the spotlight of her attention, with no way of easily getting myself out from under that spotlight. But less a spotlight, more like a microscope.

“Well,” she replied, bringing the volume of her voice down to match mine, “…I live here.”

Past her head her body sprawled out with amazing breadth, not ‘fat’ but a very sensual, sexy kind of ‘cuddly’, widest at her jugs and hips. Her chest alone seemed a hazard, if one of those big puppers sunk on me, they were capable of easily squooshing me. I felt much smaller and tighter just trying to wrap my eyes around her magnificent girth.

“Did you do this so that we can’t spy on you anymore?” she joked, nodding at my diminutive size. “Cause you’re a lot harder to see now.”

“You spy on me?” I said, prickled.

Her response was only a slight, incriminating smile. Then she murmured:

“You can come out, I’m not going to hurt you.”

Her batting lashes and was sending a warm glow into the pit of my stomach. Feeling kind of stupid, I began to pull myself towards the edge of the sofa and stood. She moved back and rose to her knees.

“Welcome to our house, I guess,” she giggled. “I’m so unfair because I already know you a bit, Steve,” she went on, “and you don’t know me at all.”

Her folded thighs were boulderously large and seeming to burst out of the skin tight pants. It was painfully awkward that my eyeline seemed to hover around her hips. I forced my head up to meet her face. The lights haloing her head seemed too bright and I was looking at her hips again, and then the ground. My forehead was sweating.

“Your dad’s Brandon,” I deduced aloud.

“You little Einstein, you got it!” she enthused, sarcastically. “I’m Vittoria.”

“Vittoria Vega,” I repeated. “You could be a Super with that name.” I said it before I could help myself, and she rolled her eyes, making me feel lame immediately. The traditional Super naming conventions – leaning to the fantastical or alliterative – were getting out of vogue these days, like calling your kid your name and tacking on ‘Jr.’

She brushed it off.

“I like Tori…it’s shorter.” She poked me in the chest really fast, as if to see if she could get away with it, “Like you.”

With her warmth, dramatic flair, and overblown proportions Tori was like a curvy modern Disney princess giantess. Looking up at her, it felt like my larynx was in a vice. My voice was trapped. It would have been nice to meet her on any other day than the most humiliating day of my life.

I managed to get out:

“I think I need to go home and rest.”

She laughed as if this was a joke. My eyes dropped to the floor, and I twisted my hands. Realizing I was serious, she intook a sharp breath.

“My dad will kill me if he thinks I lost you!”

“I’m sure he won’t. I can take care of myself.” I resented being equated to a belonging that needed to be looked after. But just thinking this, I realized I couldn’t use the toilet.

She got over it quickly.

“Suit yourself, you rebel.”

Before I could react, her hand snatched around my waist and hefted me into the air. I yelled in surprise, even as the warm inside of her palm felt so good on my naked body. She rose from the carpet and went to the door.

Her thumb was on my chest and it was really big, feeling more like a foot resting there. She had black painted nails, but the polish was starting to chip, like streaked obsidian. Her other fingers were wrapped around my side, hugging me from every angle, but for a little extra grip, the tip of her pinky had hooked behind my butt and rested between my legs. The pressure against my sack sent shivers down my spine.

I sensed her gaze on me, but when I glanced up, she was scanning the night sky.

“So…” she squeezed me nervously without realizing, “…what happened out there?”

All I could think was the pink beams, the silent electric snap of the lasers in my ears, and the smoky copper tinge of blood in my nostrils. The phantom smell was so strong I sneezed.

Tori giggled and bopped me on the nose.

“Nothing.” I said this a little too quickly. There was a beat of silence, before I added: “I mean, nothing happened because Zamira Venus got in and shut everything down pretty fast.”

“Superstar.” She said this in a dismissive, weirdly ironic way. “She just left you like this? I mean, she couldn’t take you to a shrinking doctor?”

Back before I’d enrolled in the Academy, I’d been this naïve about power reversal, too. Supers were policed by a different system than we were. An invisible system with its own rules, and its own invisible lawkeepers. Sometimes Supers protested it, mostly they obeyed it. Or else.

“You need an active Increaser,” I explained. “‘Active’ is the hard part. There’s this thing about power use… like if you stripped naked and walked down the street. You might not be hurting anyone – maybe you even have a good excuse why you’re doing it – but you’re going to attract the police for causing needless alarm. Same for Supers but ten times worse. They attract the Hypers from Foundation and Paradox; the Super police, and that’s…really bad.”

“Yeah, well, it’s also royally effed-up. If it meant you grew again, I would strip naked for you in a heartbeat.”

I didn’t reply. All of a sudden she seemed twice as big.

She gave an unapologetic laugh.

“Okay, calm down,” she said quickly, “I know what I said.” She shook her head as if I was the one who said something risqué, but she was blushing. “Anyway, can’t they just explain to the Super police they were trying to help you?”

“It’s complicated,” I replied. “There’s a whole legal and licensing thing with power use.”  

“What is a Hyper anyway?”

“A Meta Super. Shadow people.” I shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly, I’ve never seen one. But we know they’re out there.”

“Whoa. Deep.” The curiosity had left her voice. “I saw her today, too, you know.”

“Zamira?”

“Zamiraah, darling,” she said in a fake Mid-Atlantic accent. “Yes. Captain Venus. Why do you call her that?”

“It’s her name. Anyway, you saw her?”

“On a cosmetic poster in the mall.” She laughed.

“Oh.”

"She just loves Hammerhead doesn't she?"

"Hammerhead loves her even more, and she just gives it back."

"Still waiting to see it on the big Welcome sign when you drive in: Hammerhead, officially adopted by Captain Venus."

I didn’t laugh. The word ‘adopted’ brought a flash of memory: being scooped up a giant hand with polished crystalline nails. The silence deepened. Tori could tell I was uncomfortable now.

Then we were at my front door. It might as well be a towering wall to me, since I couldn’t use the handle. Tori tried the front handle but it was locked.

“Check the gargoyle,” I said. There was a small gargoyle statue in the front yard, and the spare key was kept underneath, buried shallowly in the soil.

Tori dug it out and unlocked the door and switched the foyer light on. Then she hesitated on the doorstep, holding me.

“Nice house,” she said, pretending to admire the place. It seemed to dawn on her how big things must be compared to me. “You live alone, right? What are you, uh, doing for the rest of the night, Mr Rockwell?”

Coming from such an unsubtly dramatic personality, her attempt to sound casual was such a fail it made me laugh out loud.

“Settling in,” I said. “I just need some privacy.”

“I think…you could still be in shock,” she babbled. “I mean, what if? Maybe you shouldn’t be alone.”

She had a point, but I didn’t want to admit it. Particularly as part of the shock was from her boob being so close to my head, and dominating it in size.

“Goodnight, Tori.”

“That’s it, huh,” she sounded spurned and didn’t hide it. She very clearly wore her heart on her sleeve.

“Look, it’s just…Your dad should have warned you, I’m pretty boring.”

“Ya-uuhh, obviously,” she scoffed, gently putting me down, and my bare feet planted on the bare, cold tiles. “See ya.”

Awkwardly, I disappeared into the house. With the giant forms of furniture parked around, walking through the house was like walking through a yard of Mack trucks in the dark. I couldn’t believe I was supposed to live here. The shadowy floor stretched on and on, until I crept into my study.

“Open SciLab,” I called out.

An automated voice played out: “Denied.”

Frowning, I repeated.

“The Lab!”

“Denied.”

“What’s wrong?” I said. “Diagnostic.”

The AI voice, ‘Blue Sky’ replied:

“Input does not match authorized copy.”

But my voice was the authorized copy; if I couldn’t get in, no one could! I puzzled over this for a second before reaching the unhappy realization. Being shrunk must have changed the sound of my voice, and the program didn’t recognize it anymore. Like everything else, my vocal chords had been reduced, so it must have been higher, or lighter, or softer.

Tori had blushed and fluttered earlier, while Zamira had picked me up and kissed me. It was all starting to make mortifying sense. My voice must have sounded cute.

Lucky I had a failsafe in case I got locked out somehow. But I always imagined this would be due to a glitch with the AI, not me.

“Soon comes Mr Night,” I said. This was the ‘master key’ password phrase.

A wall panel slid away to reveal a doorway down stairs into a basement room. The lights automatically flicked on as I began to hop down each step, trying to marvel at the depth of each single stair, not even thinking how I might get back up again.

Each small drop lower it got slightly colder, until I was at the bottom, and staring up hopelessly at my work desk and PC, my ‘home security’ workshop.

“PC on,” I commanded, and the PC monitor flashed into life. “Run intel database. Update on Captain Zamira Venus media presence.”

Blue Sky responded:

“Matrix probe activated. Rebuilding knowledge cache. Synthesizing results. Outcome: Remaining discrepancies.” 

“List them,” I said.

“Virtual interrogation report: A scan of most recent news-based interactions of subject, ZAMIRA VENUS, finds irregularities in oculomotor activity and speech patterns. Does User wish to be provided analysis log?”

Blue Sky was suggesting Zamira had been dishonest on recent news media. The ‘analysis log’ recorded every little facial muscle twitch, pupil dilation, and a waveform tracking odd jumps in vocal pitch, and breathlessness, along with the AI’s percentage estimates of falsity. Usually I scanned this, but right now, for once, I really didn’t feel like seeing Zamira’s face blown up on the monitor. Particularly not with Blue Sky politely telling me she might be a big, flying liar.

Everyone kept saying things about her behind her back, and I’d always stood up for her. Was I the idiot here?

“No. Pend for approval,” I said, deciding to make manual updates of the file I kept on her. “New entry under powers: Beamer. Confirmed. Painter. Unconfirmed—”

I stopped.

What about the way Zamira had sped out of the warehouse room?...Well, what about it? If she was a Soarer she was merely using a trick known to every other Soarer above age 5, combining forward flight propulsion with running to make it look like she could run super fast.

Except she wasn’t every other Soarer. Tonight had made that clear.

I went on:

“—Racer. Unconfirmed.”

A Super who could race and fly and beam and…? – and what else? Even Blue Sky implicitly agreed; this was getting ludicrous. It said:

“New entries under power: denied.”

It only let the power section contain a single entry, but if my observation said otherwise, it was the program which had to change. 

“Override it,” I commanded. And then, added hastily: “For the Venus file.”

“Overridden. Receiving inbound call. Connecting—”

“No calls!” I wailed. The last thing I felt like right now was chatting on the phone to someone. I was standing on the floor below the desk, and my PC camera couldn’t even pick me up.

The monitor flicked over to a face cam view of the caller, a guy with metal studs in his lip and eyebrow, my friend Tripp.

He was a Waver; he could manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. But his power gave him seizures and he had to drop out of the Academy. He was obsessed with ‘Fits’ (Super slang for Cybernetics) and had invented Blue Sky, then something weird happened since he dropped out of Paragon and started working at the infra-news station, Night Watch, under boss and editorial director, Miles Matheson (the Zamira critic). Tripp became a conspiracy nut. He decided he didn’t like Cybernetics anymore, and Miles apparently had no objection to Tripp clouding the waves with half-ranting accusations of Fits being ‘bot boxes’ installed into Supers. I saved Blue Sky from almost being permanently disabled by Tripp, and ‘adopted’ it for use myself.

From the cam, it looked like he was in his home. His voice crackled in:

“Steve, are you there?”

“Hi Tripp,” I said, resignedly.

“Huh? Check your cam, I’m not getting a face.”

I sighed as he tinkered with his display.

“I’m definitely here.”

As I scanned the room for something to help me climb up onto the desk, he suddenly turned his head and called out:

“Honey, Lucy shrunk my friend! But I think he’s microscopic; come over here and help me find him!”

I shouldn’t have been surprised he already knew what had happened, he was better connected than I was.

Then a girl leaped over, practically falling onto Tripp’s lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and peered into the screen. She had golden brown hair and very red lips. Tripp always seemed to be with a new girl every time I saw him. The girl was cute but was one in a line of previous pretty girls that no longer seemed to stun Tripp by looks or otherwise. And I was a little peeved at her sudden appearance; what happened to privacy?

“Hello? Steven?” she said, scanning all over the screen. “Can you hear me?”

“Laura is a Projector,” Tripp explained. “We’re seeing each other.” Obviously. He then said to her quietly, “Can you check on him? I’ll give you a shunt to his side.”

“Oh are we doing this?” she giggled as if he’d put on some Karaoke and asked her to duet with him. Her voice also hushed, as if she didn’t think I could hear her. But at small scale, my hearing was much more sensitive now.

While Tripp concentrated on the screen, Laura sunk against him into a trance.

They were emerging.

It meant combining their separate powers to create a new ‘emergent’ kind of power. It was very rare; you had to find a Super with a power that complimented your own. Emerging with a lover must have felt amazing, a highly stimulating Super version of playing a duet, or having sex. A little sadly I realized I would never be able to experience it, I was Natural.

“Don’t move little buddy!” Tripp said. “Laura could find you if you were standing on a pinhead.”

The world turned steamy; light curled and bent in the corners of my eye. Unbearable pressure injected throughout my body, causing a tingling numbness to creep down my extremities. I could no longer stand, but something was holding me, keeping me upright, like I was being gripped. Paralyzed. My head felt like it was about to burst.

Steven, Laura’s voice was in my head, firm but calm, Thatta boy. Don’t fight me.

She sounded like she was trying to tame a mustang. From far away, Tripp said, unhelpfully: “She’s harmless, dude.”

I was just about to pass out and could no longer hold the growing dimness back. I gave in, but instead of passing out, the pressure subsided and there was a giddy calmness.

That’s when it got weird.

A wave of sensations battered over me: shock, then relief, then a kind of warm, curious friendliness. These weren’t my feelings, they were hers. The feelings morphed seamlessly into a cavalcade of rapid-fire thoughts:

My God so cute he’s a doll oh I just want to pick him up and squeeze him and oooh okay calm down—  

The sensations evaporated and the world was clear and sharp again.

On the monitor, Laura was out of her trance. It was strange to see her on the screen again and remember she hadn’t actually been in the room with me.

Of course Laura had to be weird, I thought ruefully, she was Tripp’s girlfriend. So many weird things had happened to me today it was starting to all wash together and my brain was accepting it all without question.

She laughed and said to Tripp:

“Oh, he’s little but he’s not microscopic!”

Tripp groaned with relief.

“You called me cute,” I said without thinking. I was still dizzy from her jumping inside my head.

“You called me cute,” she parroted mischievously.  Only, she meant it. With shock I realized when I had read her thoughts, she must have read mine.

Laura tilted her head into Tripp, keeping her eyes on the screen, on me, watching thoughtfully.

“Exactly how big are you now anyway?”

“Six inches,” I said.

“Your height, Steven,” she reiterated, giving me a quick wink that Tripp did not see. Ever the flirt it seemed. “Be honest.”

Rather than argue, I decided to show them directly. First, I had to climb up my desk, using the drawer handles as hand-holds. This was easier than expected; by standing on one handle I could pull myself up onto the next one. Finally, the monitor showed their faces in one window, and a twin window showed me, utterly dwarfed, standing on the desk like an action figure, red faced and panting.

They both stared with their mouths open. I was the first real ‘reductee’ they’d ever seen.

“You met Captain Venus looking like that?” Tripp burst out. “You’re smaller than a shoe, man!”

I stood right on the edge of the desk to keep them both in view.

“And you know how tall her boots are," I said.

At this, Tripp was reduced as well, to laughter, while Laura buried her face in his neck and giggled sympathetically.

He groaned as if the laughter was painful, and said:

“That is so awkward, dude!”

Laura said:

“That is so cute!” She leaned forward until her profile on screen blocked out most of Tripp’s, and her face was bigger than ever – but only a taste of how big she actually was. “Steven...creep in a little. I wanna see your face better...please?” her brows drew in ”—wait, are you wearing a skirt?”

Tripp grabbed her shoulders and eased her back.

“Okay, babe, enough.  Last thing he needs right now is for you to flirt with him. He’s smaller than your tit.”

His sleazy tone made it clear the two of them were past the honeymoon phase.

“I heard about your exam glitch,” he said seriously. “So the flying fire truck Shuf!fed in, and then…? The reports are saying she neutralized a Reconstructor.”

My mind raced. Tripp might have been younger than me, but he was smarter than he acted. It wouldn’t be unlike him to ask a deceptively simple question while already knowing the answer, like a good police interrogator.

“It all happened in a split second,” I said.

“So what did you see?”

My brow scrunched up.

"Look at my point of view!” I gestured at myself in a self-explanatory way. “I was hoping you’d know more.”

“My theory?” He said. “She's stashing a whole black-market of illegal powers.”

One of Laura’s eyebrows rose, and she tugged her hair self-consciously as if suddenly embarrassed to find herself sitting on his lap.

“Tripp, even for you, that’s insane.”

“Eh, you’re right,” Tripp reconsidered. “Not multiple powers. Fits. She’s a fembot!”

“I’m with Laura,” I said. “You’re crazy.”

"She's a fembot. And one day we're going to tear her face off and show the world what's underneath: a metal skull with glowing red eyes."

Glowing red eyes.  Smoky smell. Copper tang of blood. I uneasily swept the thoughts out of my head.

“I just remembered,” Laura said suddenly. “She once asked me to be her partner. I said no.”

“What?” I said.

“Well, she was novice and, also, I thought she was trying to ask me out.” She looked between Tripp and the monitor, at me.

“Honey, you’re novice,” said Tripp. “You’ve never not been novice. You dropped out of Paragon after one week.”

“Zamira never even went to Paragon,” I pointed out.

“I didn’t know who she was back then!” Laura said: “It was before she started dating Ben Flint.”

“Superblazar,” I said.

“Total power couple,” Laura nodded and then added, somewhat acidly. “Oh, except now they hate each other.”

Tripp shook his head.

“Enough about them. Right now, something more urgent is going on: Miles is talking a deal with Lux Corp to buy us. Night Watch is going to become a subsidiary of Lux.”

“What’s the problem?” I volunteered. “You might get a budget increase.”

“Well, there’s a rumor the Andromedas are planning a big takeover of Lux.”

The ‘Andromedas’ were the major shareholders of the biotech RightFit, which produced tech fittings and implants for Supers, comprising dad-and-daughter-duo CEO, Aaron Andromeda, and socialite, Alexandria Andromeda.

Tripp emphasized:

“If they get a hold of us, we’ll become a press shill for RightFit and then we can’t report anything critical about Cybernetics.”

“Okay then,” I said. He must have heard the disinterest in my voice. On one hand I was for freedom of the press, too, but Tripp’s anti-Fit position stretched the ‘freedom’ to breaking point. Fits rehabilitated disabled Supers; it was tone-deaf politics to question the Fit business motive. Not to mention the aspect the mainstream press so loved, the poignant irony that the Andromedas weren’t even Supers, they were both Naturals. It was like a modern day, fairytale Super-Natural alliance. What Zamira meant when she said ‘one people, one power’, the Andromedas were doing, real time.

“There’s going to be a party,” Tripp said. “Alex’s 23rd birthday at the Grand Cheval Hotel. One of our reporters is allowed in to write a gossip column piece, but he can’t make it. Now I’ve got a better idea.”

“What?”

“Well, I’m thinking you could go instead, find out if the rumor is true.”

“Me?”

“You could pretend to be our reporter. No one knows what he’s supposed to look like.”

Tripp chose not to mention the obvious, so I finally said:

“I’m tiny.”

His eyes fixed on me knowingly. The idea was expanding in his mind now.

"Exactly. Do you have a girlfriend, Steve?”

“No, why?”

“Then think of all those bored, rich girls looking for a distraction.”

“Wait, how would I get in?”

“Catch a cab to the building and I’ll get a contact to meet you.”

I thought about it. A billionaire’s birthday party. A real undercover job. Even if I didn’t agree with Tripp’s position, it could be interesting, and potentially supply a truckload of insider intel I could feed to Blue Sky. Maybe it would help the AI clean up some of those outstanding 'discrepancies' in its records.

Laura leaned forward to see me better.

“You really don’t have a girlfriend, Steve?” she pondered aloud.

I stared back at her, nonplussed.

“Yeah...I don’t.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Then who’s that girl in the room with you?”

“What?”

On my camera window, there was a figure coming down the stairway.

“Steve?” It was Tori. “Dad said – whoa, what is that—?”   

“Blue Sky, disconnect!” I said. “Security protocol!”

I turned but forgot I was standing right on the edge of the table. Suddenly there was no tabletop anymore, just air, racing all around my body— 

The ceiling light was like a bright sun.

I shut my eyes again.

My head was gently tipped back for something to try and wedge into my mouth. Cool liquid poured down my throat, tanging with electrolytes.  When my stomach started to fill, I coughed and shook my head, and the liquid accidentally dribbled down onto my chest, quickly covered and wiped away with a tissue. I relaxed.

Warmth and light crept in under my eyelashes. It wasn’t the basement, or my house anymore. On the opposite wall, between the blind slats over the window, it was still dark. The window was a fraction open and the low buzz and hum of passing cars crept in. I dropped my head back, trying to not imagine how big cars were compared to me.

Something gave me a gentle prod. I curled in. The air resonated with Brandon’s voice, only a mutter, but with cinematic vibration:

“Where is that girl? She dump you on your door step?”

I was picked up and carried through the house. It was familiar but as overwhelmingly vast as before; like a basilica. A wood panelled floor that expanded out like a football field; white walls that rose to the heavens. Not to mention ogre-sized furniture: immense chairs that I had no hope of climbing up to sit on; a coffee table big enough to house an entire tea party; dining table that I could have comfortably sprinted across; a potted bamboo houseplant that looked like it belonged in a pine forest.

But my house was no smaller, I reminded myself.

It was Brandon’s steady stride took me past more rooms and corridors until I found myself looking at a white panelled door that opened to reveal a bedroom, femininely styled, in pastel colours.

Below, smoky carpet stretched in every direction, half covered by a shag rug that was lime green, imitating grass. Against one wall a white wooden desk like a cliff-face; even the handles of the desk drawers seemed to resemble the hand-holds of a bouldering wall. The desk held an array of hyper-size stationary straight out of a novelty gift store. It was strewn with crumpled gum papers the size of scrunched A4 paper. The back panel of the desk housed a row of books as tall as doors. There was also a corkboard tacked with study-related memos and a couple of photos. Beside the desk was a small plastic flip-top trash can.

The green shag stopped at a swimming pool sized bed, showing up the faint dents from knees, legs, palms or a butt, like Tyrannosaurus footprints compared to me.

It took a while to take in the surroundings. It was obviously Tori’s room.

I slowed as I drifted through the room, scrolling over the shag rug, passing the bed, before being lowered onto a stretch of grey carpet with a small thud that jumped up through the soles of my feet like a shudder.

Now Brandon’s pant legs utterly dwarfed me.

“Tor?” Brandon called out.

A pause.

Then heavy padding racing up the hallway. A tall, shapely figure appeared in the doorway and stormed into the room like a restless pony. From my perspective, two bare legs flashed past, casting their shadows long over my head.

“Dad!” Tori groaned. “Get out of my room! Now!”

Her bellowing assaulted my tiny sensitive ear drums. Watching her feet rage over the carpet, I drew my body in tight.

Her figure passed us in a flash, going straight for her bed, where a book – a diary – was open on the quilt. She snatched it up and slid it under her pillow.

“That’s no way to address me, young lady,” came Brandon’s taciturn reply.

The girl’s bare feet stood evenly spaced apart, black glossed toenails digging stubbornly into the carpet. I couldn’t see her arms, but I could imagine they were folded.

“Why you home so early?” she sniffed.

“And she calls this ‘early’. Teenager. The case was transferred. Patrol wrapped. So, no trouble back here?”

Tori gave the singsong reply:

“How would I know? Juuust in the bather-room straight-en-ing my haaaair…”

“You know what I call that, kiddo?” He nodded at her. “Arrow straight hair.”

“Dad, duh, I know that,” the younger girl drawled, giving her tresses a disdainful flick. “I want wavy hair.”

“Well, I’m not an expert but as your sole parent I have to know a couple things outside my expert zone: don’t you use a curling iron for that?”

“I want wavy hair not curly hair. Like really really slightly wavy. Like…messy.”

“Go to sleep and in eight hours, I give my word, you will wake up with your dream hair.”

“Sexy messy, not gross messy. Daddy, just stop. You will never understand that this beautaaayyy does not happen by magic.”

“Why do you need to style yourself up so close to midnight, Cinderella? You weren’t talking to Prince Charming on the phone when you should be studying?”

“No, dad, of course not, and news flash: the only Princes at my school are all Princes of stupid and it’s none of your business anyway.”

“Young lady,” Brandon said sternly, “enough of that tone for tonight. I’m going to shower. Finish up in the bathroom, and then serious dad-to-daughter time.”

“Okay,” the girl sighed, and skipped out of the bedroom again without so much as a look in my direction. As she’d pranced back and forth over the carpet she hadn’t even seen me. Was I that small? I blushed and felt my chest tighten and sink in.

Brandon shuffled towards the door after her. He stopped in the doorway and glanced at me.

“Take five, Hero guy. Or a nap if you want. I get it.”

The bedroom light flicked off as he left.

Motionless in the dark, I heard the steady pounding of his shoes recede back down the hallway. Meanwhile, the sound of a door thumping shut as Tori must have secluded herself in the bathroom again.

Now I was alone in the dark in the vast bedroom, and it was very quiet. The low murmur of the TV floated in from the living room, trembling my eardrums more than producing noise, like audio leakage when standing just outside the cinema after the film has started. The murmuring drone of deep, grainy TV voices was soothing…why did characters always murmur their dialogue in tense dramas…?

….

Brandon’s voice came down the hallway:

“—Careful, Tor. Focus on your studies. And then…” his voice became a hesitant shrug, “eh…maybe you wouldn’t be worrying over who to take to senior prom.”

My head jumped up off my chest and my eyes snapped open. I was sitting with my back against the wall. Still dark, still surrounded by a teenage girl’s shadow-draped lair, a street-sized landscape populated by furniture-shaped buildings. I was like a discarded doll. Maybe when I awoke in Lucy’s dollhouse, on some level I never really left it. The thought that I’d been turned into a doll seized me so completely I pinched myself to remember I was a person.

The conversation was still playing quietly, blissfully removed from my plight:

“I’m not worrying,” Tori sounded mortified.

“There’s a good kid out there who will go with you. We just need to find him and borrow him for one night.”

“Sappy, dad,” she said flatly. “Sooo not talking about this right now.”

A chair squeaked and then the sound of footsteps plodding and swishing over the floor, getting louder as they cut a rapid path to the room.

The door creaked, the bedroom suddenly ablaze with light. I blinked rapidly and drew my legs up as a great long shadow dropped over the floor as the girl must have stepped closer, cooling me slightly, or at least my skin broke out with tiny bumps.

A big pair of fluffy white bunny slippers faced me.

“Huh?” Tori exclaimed. And then let out a laugh. “Oh, just you. Crazy, I forgot how tiny you are.”

The floor creaked as I got sight of her shapely ankles bowing in front of me, her long legs bending in two as she crouched down. She was now wearing nothing but a pyjama tank top, panties and the bunny slippers.

Her curiosity peaked, she peered into my face. At least she didn’t seem upset, but somehow her interest in me was demeaning. If I was normal sized surely she would be horrified to find me in here without permission. It was like I was a kitten that had stumbled in here by accident.

“So …” she said casually, sliding her pointer under my chin to tilt my face up at hers “…why are you in my bedroom again?”

For an instant my brain was jumping ahead, trying desperately to reconcile that this was what my life looked like now. Being toyed with by the casually dominating curiosity of a teenage girl.

The floor trembled with close footsteps as Brandon emerged into the bedroom, stopping and inclining his head down at me. Tori glanced as he entered, keeping her fingertip poised under my head. My stomach curled with embarrassment.

“Why don’t I give you two a proper introduction?” he said, reaching past her.

Before I could react, his enormous hand thrust at me. My back instinctively pressed against the wall before the hand was upon me, wrapping securely around my middle, pinning my arms to my sides.

I yelped as I was lifted off the floor, wrenched into the full view of the two of them, under the warm lights of the expansive bedroom.

Tori jumped to her feet.

Once again face to face with Brandon’s teenage daughter, I felt a powerful rush of different emotions: nervousness, indignity, fear.

I felt like I was being presented before her, in the way a boy might ask a girl to a dance, and wait nervously for her approval. This was ludicrous, as there was no equality between us: I was an Academy graduate, whereas she was still high school age. Not to mention our outrageous size disparity. In that moment, I had less in common with a guy propositioning a girl for a dance, than I did a guy propositioned as sacrifice for the giant King Kong.

“Dad!” she shrieked. “Why do you keep doing this! Why do you keep barging into my room!”

“Tor, listen. It’s been a tiring day. Can we just do the happy family thing tonight?” He went to sweep his arms around her.

“Okay, dad.”

The blood drained out of my face as the girl’s giant figure expanded at me like an oncoming truck. I was a hair’s breadth from being crushed between the two enclosing bodies, before Brandon smartly swung me out of the way, bringing his arm up and around the great hump of his daughter’s bare shoulder.

Then my face became tangled in the dark, downy curtain of hair flowing down her back, and Brandon adjusted his grip around my torso, pressing into her upper spine. I tried not to move in order not to become even more tangled, while doing my best not to inhale hair strands. The thick strands oozed with the aroma of whatever fruity shampoo the girl had recently used.

The two of them pulled back again and I was returned to my position suspended in front of Brandon’s chest. He trapped me on one side, and she faced me on the other, and combined their focus was a laser beam on me.

His voice thrummed:

“The little guy here is Steve, our neighbor.”

Tori shifted her weight from one side to the other, and pulled a face.

“Yuck. It doesn’t suit him.”

“His name?”

“He needs a new one. Steve is blah.”

Her eyes narrowed in close study of my face, as if testing names in her head.

I shifted in Brandon’s grip uneasily, but was still paralysed by its constriction, as helpless as a doll. His fingers, curled around my back, kept my arms pressed into my sides. Then the carpet rose up to meet me, the soft but slightly worn and flattened fibres pressing gently under my bare feet as he placed me on the floor. The two of them both gave me a look to check I didn’t try to run off.

Being on the ground was even worse than being held. With the two of them towering over, I felt vulnerable and too exposed, too afraid to move. My immediate company was Brandon’s huge lace ups, blocking the path to the door. Tori had swished over and dropped back onto her bed.

“Why is he such a little ‘fraidy cat?” she said. One fluffy white rabbit was planted firmly on the carpet, with the smooth shaven leg rising like some great monument. The other leg lifted and crossed at the ankle. The suspended bunny bobbed up and down. Then she pulled the slippers off and threw them across the room.

“Play nice,” Brandon said, putting his hands on his hips. “He’s Samira Rockwell’s kid. So you can bring the attitude down a couple degrees.”

My mouth dropped open. Then I remembered he would know, he was a detective.

The girl had snatched up a nail file from her bedside table and was scraping it back and forth against her nails somewhat boredly. Her head tilted at Brandon.

“Who’s Samira Rockwell?”

Brandon explained.

I never knew my mom but I knew she loved to boat on weekends. When I was a baby she had taken a kayak out on a remote flatwater lake. The kayak was recovered on the shore, but there was no trace of my mother anywhere. Authorities suspected suicide, but if so, she left no body, as if she had just become one with the sea foam.

The story about my mom had sobered Tori a little. Still, unimpressed by his daughter’s stubborn air of teenage disdain, Brandon proceeded to give her a parental lecture: study, be courteous, etc. She was leaning sideways, propping herself on one palm. Her head nodded vaguely, but her eyes kept flicking from her dad’s face down to me, standing at his ankle.

I missed half of what Brandon said. Tori’s foot on the floor was pointed at me, the long slender toes scrunching against the carpet in a slow deliberate way, barely concealing her restless excitement. The toenails were like slabs of streaked obsidian, and the surface of her big toe’s nail was large enough for me to lay my head upon. Because her feet were so comparatively big, the sight of her polished toes committing these rhythmic muscular motions was hard to drown out. Like a kind of private performance outside her dad’s view, sent directly to me. I stood still as a statue, as my stomach seemed to float untethered inside my torso, and felt warmth radiating throughout my body. Feet were things all in themselves now, and moved almost with independent will. Looking at a pair of feet now took up my entire attention, the rest of the body – especially someone’s face – seemed miles away.

It didn’t take long before the daughter noticed me looking at her foot. The ghost of a smile crept over her face as she began twirling the big toe of her lifted foot in big arcs, while wiggling the other toes as if to entertain or distract me. The measured way she was waving her foot back and forth, it was like she was trying to hypnotize me.

There was a growing firmness between my legs. I couldn’t believe it. I was getting turned on by a teenage girl’s foot. This was the lowest point in my life. Flushing madly, I forced myself to look away, anywhere else. I gazed up, searching for Brandon’s face, somewhere way up, eclipsing the bedroom light. I was trying to work out how to ask him to pick me up again; my chest was starting to become tight with dread of being vulnerable on the open bedroom floor. But caught myself. How to explain to him that the source of my unease was his own teenage daughter?

Without warning she uncrossed her leg and extended it. Quick as a flash, she traced the perimeter of my face with the soft swipe of her toeprint. I got an unwelcome whiff of the natural aroma of her foot, before jumping back, startled. The girl stifled a giggle at my expense, and crossed her leg again.

I moved back until I was out of reach of her foot, and forced my eyes elsewhere.

Brandon finished his sermonizing, to his daughter’s relief.

“Enough chat. Come out for dinner when you’re ready.” He was talking to Tori, not me. “It’s the best kind: incredibly lazy but tasty.”

He gave me a small salute.

“Rocky.”

His pant legs swished by and the door shut softly, and the doorknob would require a flagpole climb, I couldn’t open it again.

*

On the same day Samira Rockwell had gone missing, in the small country town of Marston, a childless farmer called Marcus Venere stepped out of his barn and looked to the twilight sky, where the final fiery rays of sun were bleeding out to violet, and the first stars just beginning to wink into sight.

He was superstitious and used astral phenomenon to make predictions about upcoming seasonal patterns. What appeared to be the planet Venus, a pinkish-white dot, was in levitation just over the darkening horizon. As Marcus stared, it seemed to expand in size, and the twinkling bloomed into a pink flare.

“Mother of God!”

The spark of light flickered with a white halo like a welding torch before the parallax kicked in and the light, now dominating the night sky, bent at the ground and impacted with dull boom like the footstep of a fairy-tale giant.

When the farmer went over to investigate, he found a crater in the bare tilled earth, now emitting curling tendrils of dust and smoke. In the center was a big hunk of obsidian rock, but cut super fine. It was a very strange looking meteorite.

Coming closer he realized it wasn’t a meteorite. It looked like some kind of black time capsule. There was an engraving on the front, in some Latinised print like an inscription on a stone tablet in a museum, and somehow out of place on this futuristic space metal.

It said:

Under its glassy dome there was a baby, with its eyes shut. As Marcus stared in disbelief, the baby curled its toes and made grabby motions with its hands. When he placed his hand on the glass dome, a laser flashed over his palm and the air pressure lock disengaged and the glass shield (there was a little sound like someone let off a soda can lid, Marcus later recalled)

The Veneres rushed the baby to the hospital to consult a paediatrician, who confirmed the baby was a she and completely healthy. Then the paediatrician made a small painful cry. The baby had grabbed her finger and squeezed – very hard – and had to be plied away with a toy before she let go.

The Veneres never wanted kids, and the will outlined the farm would go to their nephew. But Marcus took the baby as a superstitious augur and insisted they would raise it. He thrust a scribbled note into the Latin-versed doctor’s hand and she hesitantly decoded the capsule inscription from its archaic “Ancient Greek gibberish” to English: Ibidem Samira.

It made no more sense to the Veneres. Nevertheless, an awed, superstitiously-inclined Marcus announced the star-sent baby’s name would be exactly as inscribed on the capsule: Ibidem Samira.

The doctor chuckled at what she saw as Marcus’s bumpkin ignorance, and told him that, in her scholarly experience, ‘Ibidem’ wasn’t a proper name. Embarrassed, Marcus’s wife, Sandra, chided her husband, and finalized the baby’s name herself.

When they returned to the farm, some strange people from out of town had taken the capsule away. The stablehand said they were special cops from some ‘Foundation’ but otherwise he was too spooked to say any more. So Sandra never saw the inscription on the capsule herself, only Marcus’s scribbled recollection, in which the Sigma was around the wrong way, and so what she ultimately wrote on the infant’s birth certificate was Zamira Venere.

With Brandon’s departure down the hallway, the house turned quiet.

I looked to the closed bedroom door with rising dread. The door handle was located tantalizingly some tens of feet out of my reach. And even if I could climb up there somehow, my puny pencil-thin arms were too weak to operate it or pull the door open.

This morning – so, so long ago – my biggest worry had been passing the Academy final. Now I was reduced to being thoughtlessly trapped inside a teenage girl’s bedroom. The change was crushing.

The only person who had the power to let me out of the room was sitting on the bed, twirling her foot lazily. As she meditated on what her dad had just said, her eyes wandered over and gave my unimpressive height a condescending examination.

What had happened to the warmth, the gently mocking Mid-Atlantic accent? She looked at me with distance greater than her stunning height, as if we'd only just met, and even the hint of a mischievous sneer. All because I told her I didn’t want to hang out? She had taken it to heart – deeply – and now wouldn’t let me forget it. Lesson: never stoke the spite of a teenage girl.

I took a deep breath, hugged my bare chest and tried to get my thoughts together. So I couldn’t escape, I couldn’t navigate the house on my own. And if I did, I wouldn’t get far down the street anyway.

Brandon seemed like a nice guy, how could he do this to me? Maybe he was too nice. So nice that he was right in his daughter’s lap. Parents could be the most blind to their kids’ indiscretions.

Sure, I’m reduced, I thought indignantly, but I’m not lesser. I was still a person, the exact same person as before.  All my Academy training was intact, if my height wasn’t. Still, my heart pounded in my chest from shock.

The bed creaked as Tori shifted.

From my vantage point on the carpet, the view made me breathless. A prodigious vision of precocious womanhood half-reclined on the bed like a Homeric siren on the rocks, unbearably irresistible and ominously dreadful at the same time.

The foot that was in the air now dropped onto the carpet with a muted crash. I flinched. She leaned forward and –her eyes on me the whole time—extended one finger to beckon me. Her lips smacked with a kissy noise.

It wasn’t an attempt at flirtation–not a deliberate one—but a gesture that resembled a girl trying to win the favor of a mistrustful puppy.

But I was smarter than a puppy to not fall for it. My feet remained rooted to the spot.

She showed no sign of offence. But snapped to her feet suddenly, towering over me like a stone golem.

Letting out a thin shriek, I jolted into action, attempting to run across the carpet, with no plan, no idea what I was doing. Under the bed was the most obvious choice, but she stood between me and the bed.

Pushing on madly, I found myself faced with blank walls bordering every side.

Cool air whisked at my back. I jumped around and surrendered to the most basic instinct left at my disposal; cowering as her grasping hand rained down and closed around my middle—pinning my arms to my sides, as Brandon had done—and hefting me into the air. It was not a comfortable or dignified way to be picked up.

“This time, you stay right where you are.”

I was awash in her warm breath that fanned against my cheeks as I was moved right up in front of her face. It was so unexpectedly degrading my chest quivered.

“Don’t act like you can’t understand me.” Her voice played my tiny ear drums like timpanis. She grinned. “Sure, your brain got reduced to the size of my thumb. Doesn’t mean you can pretend you have no idea what I’m saying!”

She pivoted on her feet, causing the bed to rotate back into view.

“I wanna see just how teeny you are!”

For the next several minutes there was a fervor of inexplicable activity as she went around the room collecting various sized objects in the bedroom and gleefully placing me or holding me against them, observing the size comparison. Anything on hand within reach was employed as a quick measuring tool just for the fun of it.

She stood me upon the wood surface of her titanic desk, snatching up a pencil and holding it upright against my side. One fingertip rested squarely on my forehead, keeping my head affixed to the pencil. Embarrassingly, the sharpened lead point went over my head. It was a standard 7.5 inch. I was only 6 high.

All my strength went into peeling myself away from the stick. A hair’s breadth from my eyes, the pencil shaft was dented with a couple of big chew marks. The moon-shaped dents suggested teeth the size of honeydew melons. On the upside, the way her soft lips broke out made me feel giddy inside. On the downside, her smile was provoked by my humiliating stature. That pulled me back down to earth.

Next, she stacked me up against her smartphone. This comparison didn’t offer much more than the pencil, being that her smartphone was pencil-length, but the width of the flat screened phone dwarfed my width at least twice fold.

Barely having time to process the phone, she then fished out an object from the wastepaper basket on her desk. An eaten apple core, 4 inches tall. It must have been eaten a while ago, the remaining chunks of apple pulp were stained brown. Without hesitation she pressed me up against it. I cringed at the stale apple aroma, and the feeling of the dry scratchy leftover pulp poking my skin. Seeing the chunks that had been ripped out of the apple gave me appreciation of the frightening power of the girl’s jaw.

You know my friend’s dad eats the core,” Tori said casually, either to me or maybe no one. “How weird is that?”

I wish she hadn’t said that. It was too visceral to imagine. People could fit cores in their mouths. And that meant people could fit me in their mouths, at least my head and chest. Nausea flashed through my system. Every person on the planet had an entire moist cave inside their head that could function as a prison for me. I felt like the guy in the Ray Bradbury story who is terrified to realize his body contains its own Halloween decoration.

With a jolt of urgency, I wrestled against her grip vainly. She just clenched her hand more firmly around my middle.

“You can’t fight me with those widdle chicken wings,” she said, giving my bicep a couple of little squeezes between her pointer and thumb.

There were more demeaning size comparisons. She lay me on my back on a piece of paper and – keeping my chest pushed down with her fingertips, ran a pen closely around my outline, which tickled a little.

She was Natural, and people didn’t just get reduced everyday. I guess to her I was like some little fairy person and she was still caught up in the giddy whirl of disbelief that I existed. I was like some astonishing magic trick and her curiosity was anchored on me, trying to figure out how I worked.

But the reduction was still so fresh and bizarre for me, it was like salt in the wound, rubbing in my face how diminished I was compared to normal people. I wasn’t really a ‘Natural’ anymore, nor a ‘Super’, but something in between, what the Academy called a class Y person. Tori probably didn’t even know what a class Y person was, or seen one in real life. Maybe she’d never even seen a Super in real life.

And I didn’t like being her learning tool. She confined my waist in a pinch to shift me on the paper. I began to struggle against her domineering hand, as the pen tip rounding my foot and starting running up my thigh, trying to close the gap between my legs as tightly as possible. I felt the pen delicately shape my groin onto the paper.

Done with sizing me up, she dropped back into a sitting position on her bed. Dumping me on her lap, she me onto my back so I was looking straight up at her enormous face. Her eyes danced over my form, keeping me transfixed. It seemed like she’d had a change of heart and was keen to win me over again.

Then Brandon’s muffled voice trailed through the house.

“Tor!” he called out. “Dinner.”

“Oh!” she jumped to her feet, and put me back down on the bed. “Back real soon!”

She disappeared out the door, closing it softly behind her, leaving the light on, and me engulfed in her bedroom.

For a little while I paced around on the surface of Bianca’s bed. My weight was so negligible, the soft quilt barely depressed under my tiny feet. Then I dropped back onto the bed and lay staring up at the ceiling.

What to do now?

One thing was certain, I definitely couldn’t live in my house on my own. Disturbingly, the Vegas seemed to have no interest in helping me there. Or Brandon, realized what I had, he was too uncomfortable to say it out loud.

But even if I had an idea about how to escape, I was too tired at the moment to carry out plans. I got down into a reclined position, propping my head up on one hand. But before long, my arm started to slacken, my head going limp and sliding forward.

Then I pulled myself up into a cross-legged position, grabbing my ankles. If my eyelids dropped too much, I pinched the skin of my ankles. Still, my head began to nod…

It was difficult to tell how much time passed, as my perception of time was interspersed with jolts of micro-sleep. I estimated half an hour went by…and then an hour…

What was taking them so long. Maybe the girl had finished eating dinner and now she was watching TV, or doing her schoolwork downstairs…

Then again, was I so eager for her to return? Not really; I enjoyed the rest and peace and freedom away from the probing study of giant penetrating eyes.

Not that I had a lot to use the spare time for. There was nothing to do on the bed except rest, and I didn’t feel confident about trying to climb down the side of the bed, which was over a storey tall. Even if I managed that, where would I go? The bedroom door was shut.

I briefly considered hiding under the bed. The girl would not easily be able to retrieve me. But what if the girl leaped on or stood on her bed, and the frame buckled slightly, smashing down on me from above. It freaked me out too much to try.

Plus, there might be all sorts of ways the girl could try and get me out from under the bed. She could send a vacuum cleaner nozzle under there and suck me out.

I resolved to stay on the bed until one of them returned.

*

Rapid footfalls thudded up to the room. I started into awareness, uncurling myself from my lying position on the bed.

The bedroom door swung open gently, and Tori’s enormous face peered inside. Making sure I wasn’t on the ground immediately before the door, she then stepped inside, shutting the door again.

She was holding a small plastic tray in one hand, and crossing the carpet, she placed it down on the ground next to the bed. Curious, I crawled over to the edge of the bed and looked down.

The tray carried some upturned jar lids with small piles of broken up food inside. One contained what looked like cooked mincemeat, another torn up pieces of bread, and a third contained some thinly shredded lettuce.

Before I could react, she reached across and snatched me up; her fingers curling under my front and the pressure of her thumb between my shoulders. I found myself flying through the air like a little wingsuit glider – her hand being the wingsuit – before coming to a rest, upright on the carpet just before her feet.

“What are you waiting for?” she exclaimed, getting onto the ground and crossing her legs. “Eat up!”

The meat looked like brown popcorn, and smelled undeniably enticing. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch time that day. I had no idea what time it was now, but it must have been past nine ‘o’ clock at night.

As I ate her finger brushed my hair and her sing-song rung out above me:

“Mmmm, yummy! So good!”

But she quickly grew bored and started tugging on my hair until my scalp began to tingle. I tried to eat faster.

Once I had finished, her pointer finger darted out at me to poke my stomach. Refusing to be degraded again, I successfully dodged it, but she chased me, and there was nowhere to run to. As it came for me again and again, I vaulted over it and smacked it away. In frustration, she snatched my hair and had me effectively locked in place by the most fragile part of my body. The power she had over me took my breath away.

I’d started to become cagey about speaking up. That was ironic. I was so small my voice was simply not powerful enough to get the attention of a normal sized person, unless I yelled out, or they brought me right up to their face or ear. Which only reinforced my helplessness. If I was standing at ground height I had no way of communicating to anyone normally.

Tori was getting sick of my silence.

“Say something! Say ‘That was nummers. I’m just so in love with you right now!”

“That was nummers.”

“Say it properly! The last part wasn’t my words.”

“That was nummers,” I said tonelessly, “I’m just so in love with you right now.”

My scalp prickled and stretched as she twisted my hair with unbearable affection as if trying to bend my head around her fingertip.

“Ouch.”

Her voice bloomed with excited volume.

“Your voice is so funny! Okay, fine. Good boy. Fine, fine, fine.”

Triumphant, she poked my stomach to gauge how much I ate, then, taking the tray up, left the room again.

My posture slackened in defeat. It seemed like my status in the household was reducing faster than my height.After she left my eyelids closed for what seemed like only a moment, but in reality must have been over half an hour. It was the weird feeling of knowing time had passed without knowing how I knew.

The ground shook. I blinked my eyes open to see Tori’s enormous smooth creamy feet, launching through the air towards me.

Her voice filled the room.

“Sorry I was gone so long, Rocky. But you know – ice cream at room temperature. Once you start it doesn’t mess around waiting.”

Before I knew it, there was a twinge of pressure around my middle and I soared into the air.

“Too bad for you; we don’t have any tiny beds! – so we have to be creative!”

She placed me down on her bed so she could search the room for some appropriate size bedding. Cupboards, drawers and cabinets were opened and rummaged through, before the girl returned to the bedside. A fuzzy white sock was in her hand. She waved it in front of my face. Seeing my proposed bedding flap around in the air with ease made me feel dizzy.

At my look of uncertainty, she said:

“You’ll fit in this for sure.”

That was true, but it didn’t make the sock any more appealing to sleep in. With a flicker of distaste, I noted the large gray smudge marks – sweat stains – as well as some balding patches caused by a combination of rubbing and sweat. By the looks of it, she had worn this sock frequently for school athletics, and I felt offended she couldn’t offer me something better.

“All my socks are in the laundry,” the girl shrugged blithely. “So you gotta sleep in this one. I wore it to school today, though.”

Without hesitation her huge hand splayed out at me, capturing me in the fist, and I was launched into the air.

She went and opened the tall sliding door near her bed, which revealed a dark walk in closet, filled with clothes on hangers. The bottom of the closet was lined by a row of shoes, including sandals, strappy stilettos, chunk heels, tall leather boots, slip ons, and sneakers. Some of them looked almost new, while others looked ratty and worn.

There was a small bare patch of carpet in the corner of the closet, next to the first in the row of shoes: a shiny pair of stilettos which seemed astonishingly adult for a teenage girl.

Before I could react, I was zooming forward, deep into the closet, and placed down on the bare space in the corner, next to the stilettos.

There was a faint trace of shoe leather and sweaty feet that hung in the air, trapped inside the insulated closet and left to fester. Maybe the girl was so used to it she didn’t notice it, or maybe the smell didn’t travel high up enough to reach her; if so, it was concentrated at ground level – exactly my height. And this smell was going to accompany me all throughout the night.

“I can’t sleep on the floor!” I raged, balling my fists.

“Guess you’re right,” she said, turning away.

To my right, a big fluffy white bunny slipper went thump on the ground.

“This is your bed tonight,” the girl said happily, dropping the worn white sock down next to me. “And that’s your sleeping bag.”

I looked up at her plaintively. Her towering frame was in silhouette, filling up the entire closet opening, blocking the bedroom light, but I could just make out that her head was tilted down.

“No!” I cried.

“This is my room, so I say so!”

“It’s gross, you just wore that slipper.”

“And you’re gonna wear it now, and all night!”

“No way!”

“Looks like I have to tuck a guy in,” she chided. “Is that what you’re waiting for?”

Her hand surged down and ensnared me in her powerful fist. I was lifted up out of the closet and into the bedroom light once more. The sock opened like a mouth and began to swallow my body. She pulled the opening up to my throat and then observed me with satisfaction. It was new sock with intact elastic, and held around my form snugly. My arms were wrapped at my sides and I looked a little like a mummy but with my face exposed.

She stopped and chuckled.

“Wait…” she said after a moment of consideration, “…I almost forgot to kiss you goodnight!”

My heart sunk as her huge smiling face came into direct view as it lowered to meet my tiny imprisoned face. Her smile ballooned into a cushy pink pucker as she impatiently ran my face into her lips. Her hand was scrunched around my torso and I couldn’t turn my head away before it was handled by the buds of moist flesh, which pressed my head tight like a pair of firm palms trying to mold clay.

There was still some ice cream coating her tongue. The tight seal of her lips parted slightly, a mass of wet muscle budged into my face, painting it with saliva and the melted ice cream that coated her tongue, slightly soured from mixing with remnants of dinner.

A wild burst of arousal ran through my manhood. I breathed deeply, trying to keep it under control, but it thickened into a steel rod. As her hot, sticky breath rushed downward over my groin, tickling my thighs, the proximity of her warm lips and my member was too intense to ignore.

Then her firm hands pulled my body like she was trying to remove a sticker; with a sloppy wet smooching sound, my head unstuck from her big lips. My sock-bound body was quickly slipped into the opening of the bunny slipper, gulping up my body up to my head.

Then the slipper rested in the corner of the closest, with my head poking out.

“Night, Rocky,” she called happily as she slid the closet door closed.

In the dark, I rested my head against the back of the slipper. The sock’s fuzzy texture surrounded my body. It was slightly moist from perspiration. There was a faint wet squelching as my weight shifted along the slipper’s sole.

The fumes of the closet were beginning to make me feel dizzy, so I shut my eyes and tried to breathe through my mouth.

It was graduation day at Paragon Academy. But no time to celebrate at the grad ceremony, I had work to do.

I got up and went out through my backdoor pet flap into my backyard, through the hole in the wood fence, across the Vegas’ backyard and through the backdoor petflap into their laundry room. Brandon had installed the pet flaps.

Tori made a bath in a small food storage container, and put it on her desk. I bathed in it while her shower ran in the next room. Finishing, I dried myself with a hand towel and put on my new Paragon-issue Hero Cadet costume, sent in a regular sized envelope. I wondered if they reduced my existing one, or had one re-made.

Across the room, a glass front cabinet showed my reflection in it. My costume was utilitarian, a pure white jumpsuit with black accenting, like a slim-fitting astronaut suit, to be worn under my dinner suit.

Most cadets’ costumes weren’t very original, but every imaginable design had been done before. Junior costumes tended to borrow designs from idolized Heroes: red like Carnotaurus, blue like Polaris, gold like Octane 99, black like the Flying Fox, white like Superblazar.

All male. For some quirky reason, female cadets costumed in feminized versions inspired by the costume of a bigger male Hero (except outright super fan favourite – and Superblazar’s mentor—Galetrix, but she had been MIA and legally dead, for several years now). Even Zamira’s costume (‘v2’ at least, v1 consisted of a cutoff crop top, Adidas trackpants and a baseball cap) borrowed from Superblazar’s red and blue racing stripes.

“I wish I was seven again so I could play with dolls. How random, right?”

Tori’s bare legs filled up the doorway. She was wearing a dress that pulled around her hips and a big grin. I tugged at my close-fitting costume and self-consciously noticed how it outlined my bulge.

Her stifled giggles came out at the sight of me.

"You're not supposed to laugh,” I said uneasily.

She strode past me, nudging my stomach with her big toe on the way to her closet.

"You are cuter than a l'il bunny! And I have the best idea, I just—”

“He’s on a case.” Brandon’s voice reverberated from the end of the hall. “You’re not going with him, Tor.”

She spun around and put her hands in the air.

“Never said I was! I was just…going to offer him a ride…Dad, he’s a spy, this is a top secret communication– stop listening in!”

“What part of it is secret? You told me five seconds ago you were going to go ‘deep party’ with Steve at a Hotel. Alexandria’s birthday, right? I’m sorry, sweetie, but that’s not happening. You were heading out with your friends tonight. Still are.”

She groaned at the ceiling.

“I’m just going to give Steve a ride to the Hotel. That’s it. Ya happy?”

“Jubilant.”

Tori’s huge foot stamped in front of my face as she spun on the spot and glowered down at me.

“Did you tell my dad about the party? – why?!”

“Why did you have to tell her, Steve?” Brandon lamented. “This is what happens.”

“I didn’t tell anyone!” I cried out. “Your daughter interrogated my artificial—read files on my pc—and compromised my plans.”

Tori rolled her eyes.

“I did not tell my dad. Promise! I was telling my best friend on the phone and dad overheard me! – and I only said I was going to the Hotel for a totes bourgeoisie ball! I didn’t say why.”

“I figured it out from there,” Brandon quietly. “Sorry, Hero guy.”

*

That evening, Tori’s bike was idling in the driveway when I went over to their house. It growled impatiently as she sat astride, waiting for me, her helmet on. Her party dress was covered up under some loose pants and a leather jacket.

I walked up to the grumbling monster sized bike, the wheels alone stretched over my head, and was impatiently snatched up. Her nails were done and dug a little into my diaphragm – the pincer of her fingertips always seemed to accidently find the softest parts of my torso – but then everything went black as I was tucked into a zippered breast pocket on the inside of her leather jacket. She kept the zip down, exposing her cleavage and also my face, so I could look out.

The bike vibrated into motion and her tremendous boobs jiggled against my spine as the street scrolled by in a whoosh of cool air.

From my house, Ankylorhiza was a twinkling pixelated grid. Across the bridge, it engulfed us as a shifting tablet wrapped in advertising, neon lights and faint haze.

As the bridge and the Harbor zoomed away, we passed a cluster of powerhouse corporate buildings: one for the news, Lux (where news anchor Kirk worked), the R&D hub of RightFit (where Kirk’s optics were designed), the Museum of Xeno-Archaeology, and then, for a brief instant, a modern chrome tower, the ‘Satellite Park’ or ‘SatPark’ building. On one of those floors was Zamira’s office.

A block down from the Hotel, Tori jumped the curb and cut the engine. As I stood on the motorbike seat, she stripped off her jacket and pants, revealing her ‘party’ clothes, a sleek dress, plus a pair of heels from her backpack.  

Still warm and half squashed from the ample spread of Tori’s butt, the motorbike seat gradually reformed under my feet. Then she swooped me up again, and I felt light as a feather. I was flying like a Soarer – I just needed a giant hand to provide the lift.

With her hand tightly around my middle, she took the street to the Hotel. The traffic flickered past in a stream, and then a congregation of chatter called even before the Hotel came into view.

In pairs, guests in suits and gowns were filtering into the tall building. Laughter spilled out, while finely dressed people stood outside, puffing on cigarettes.

Tori stopped to eye the Hotel. She was a high school girl and this was an adult party.

“Wow.”

A stranger emerged from the stony portico.

“Hello,” he said. He wore a suit. “I’m Frankie. Tripp told me you were coming. Bruno Warne, right? Intern with the Night Watch gang.”

I repeated the totally made up name in my head before realizing it was supposed to be my alias.

“Yeah…” I said. “That’s right.”

Meanwhile, Frankie bent forward and took in my entire length against the span of his outstretched thumb and pointer, which were pressed to my forehead and feet. Then he chuckled and straightened again.

Frowning, I gestured at Tori and added:

“This is—”

Frankie interrupted me, now gazing into Tori’s eyes.

“And you are…ravishing.” He took her hand – the hand holding me, turning me sideways – and kissed it. Her hand grew warmer and without meaning to, her thumb rubbed my chest. She made a sound of amusement while my insides were curled by her tightening grip.

“Georgina Bardot,” she said.

“I – uh – ” I stuttered. “Yes.”

Then Frankie interlinked his arm with hers; the one holding me – I was jerked a little – and guided us towards the entrance.

“Well, Miss Bardot – here’s hoping you’re a ‘Miss’ anyway – for the next zero-two hours, prepare to be dazzled. While we let Bruno do his thing.”

I pulled at my jacket sleeve to cover my Hero costume underneath.

Frankie glanced down at me for a fraction of a second.

“So you get paid to attend these.” His voice sparked with the faintest envy. Then his eyes locked onto the crowd and he was hostlike again.

“My guy, look at all these beauties.”

He nodded towards some girls in rhinestone chain dresses with plunging necklines, fixing their makeup before going on in. “But –shame! – you don’t see the beauty right in front of you.” He gave Tori another appreciative look. I narrowed my eyes.

A couple picked him out of the crowd. He waved and then we were striding over.

“Let me introduce you to Lux’s newest intern. Mr Bruno Warne. A cute little picture, ain’t he?”

“They have an…interesting hiring policy,” the man said.

“Actually,” I said, “I work for Night Watch.”

“A tiny joke, Bruno,” Frankie slipped in.

“Of course,” the man remembered aloud, “Lux want to eat up your ‘little fish’ company. And if the Andromedas have their way...Which they always do...”

My mouth had dropped open. The man didn’t finish.

“I hear they haven’t even arrived,” the woman said. “They’re coming from a UN CyberFit-Rehabilitation fundraiser.”

The man mumbled, shaking his head:

“This thing’s going long into the night.”

The woman looked down at me and gave me a lofty smile.

“So, Mr Warne, you say? My, aren’t you just a tiny sweetheart.”

I forced out:

“Nice to meet you.”

She reached down and unashamedly touched my face. Her fingertip trailed my hairline and brushed my cheek. It wasn’t flirtatious but as if she was checking that I was real, and not a talking toy. She seemed to want to say more, but the man was already ushering her towards the building. Her hand swept down again and quickly petted my head before they left. A pit grew in my stomach.

Inside the Hotel it was a fusion of ancient and modern, Roman, Renaissance, and Futuristic, domed ceilings and Venetian marbled surfaces with chandeliers, but also glass columns and steel arches with lasered inscriptions. The Andromedas owned the Grand Cheval and decorated it according to their own tastes, which were postmodern.

“That woman,” I said. “She… patted me!”

“She didn’t exactly lie.” Tori said.

Frankie chuckled:

“The Kleines are so wealthy they could practically buy him if they wanted.”

Past an archway, the foyer opened into a low lit hall casually arranged with some white clothed tables and leather sofas. Guests were still flowing in, and mostly stood, working the room.

I felt like I was floating around the foyer like a tiny ghost, or strapped into an on-rails ride that was slowly taking me around the premises. Frankie greeted some more guests, and many of them mistook Tori for his girlfriend, and me as Frankie’s eccentric Reducer friend who liked to power-on at a party for no apparent reason. And there were more head pats.

I listened for names and some kind of close business association with the Andromedas. Many weren’t even friends, but friends of friends of friends, much less business insiders.

We drifted across the room in increments, and into a darker area, lit by tabletop candles and LEDs projecting lava lamp patterns on the wall. A waiter passed by with a lifted platter of glasses and snacks, and Frankie took a glass. Tori put me down on a table to try some snacks.

“Have anything in size for my friend?” Frankie asked.

“I’m not hungry,” I said. “And I don’t drink. Not on a job, anyway.”

The waiter was already gone. Frankie knocked his drink back and then bent to my head level.

“Here on business, Mr Warne,” he whispered just to me, “you have to go native. Do what the Romans do. And the Romans drank wine. Over there, she’s making eyes at you. Don’t look.”

Over the sound of laughter, I glanced over. There was a man and two women on the sofa. The man was chatting and flirting. Red lava light oozed behind their heads, turning purple and then blue.

One woman was painstakingly outlining her lips with red lipstick. Her friend, a beautiful woman with strawberry blonde hair, had her arm comfortably along the low backrest. In the shadows her eyes were a blur of darkened eye makeup, but – Frankie was not mistaken – her gaze had wandered onto me. She leaned forward slightly and then seemed unable to tear herself away.

I felt as warm as the blushing lamp light. At normal size, I had never been looked at like this before. It was objectifying. And beauty was different now. Women were different. They weren’t less beautiful but rawly, powerfully beautiful. And they could walk up to me and seize me if they wanted.

Feeling uneasy, I looked away.

“It’s just your imagination.”

Frankie shook his head. Tori was getting curious.

“What are you guys talking about?”

When I next looked, the strawberry blonde had vanished from her seat. I wondered if she wanted to come over and pet my head too.

“Let’s keep it moving,” I said anxiously, hurrying over the table to keep close to Tori. She automatically swept a hand around me. We didn’t know each other well, but in this entire Hotel, we only knew each other.

Frankie’s phone began to vibrate and he answered it. I fidgeted on the table, trying to avoid more accidental eye contact.

Lowering the phone on the table, he said:

“Your editor.”

As the phone was pushed towards me, Tripp’s voice emanated:

“Agent, this is your handler reaching out for a status update.”

“I’m inside,” I replied, kneeling next to the phone speaker.  “No leads yet. So what now?”

“Lay low and listen in.”

“I’m tiny, not invisible. People have noticed me.”

He ignored this.

“Laura said if you have any trouble talking to people, she’ll talk for you. I’ll shunt her down the line, but she might make you giggle and flirt.”

“I’ll handle this,” I said firmly.

“Offer stands. Base out.”

While I was talking, Frankie had been making eyes at Tori over my head. Taking his phone back, he adjusted his tie and gave me a small poke in the chest.

“Don’t mind if I steal away your lady, Brooster?”

I glowered.

“I’ve got a job to do. So, I guess not.”

Tori gave a snort of feigned offence.

“Come with us, Bunny!” She reached down and wiggled my nose with her fingertip. I swatted her hand away.

“Bruno. Just Bruno.”

“Fine!”

Without warning Frankie picked me up and I was floating hurriedly across the room. Then the firm surface of a bar counter formed beneath my shoes. Frankie placed his hand on Tori’s arm, gently steering her from the table.

“All stand clear. Let the reporter do his job. Show ‘em a knock-out for the Pulitzer. And I’m going to take this knock-out and show her a good time.”

They went on past some pushed-together tables to the back of the room. I watched them. They stepped out onto a wooden patio viewing the river, as black as the sky, and the glimmering lights of the entire Hammerhead city strip. Tori giggled and gripped Frankie’s arm.

Her snort of offence had not been play-acting, I realized.

Live band music started up from another part of the hall. With no hope of overhearing an important conversation, I would have to talk to someone.

I sized up the woman waiting at the bar. She wore a shimmery chain dress with a V neckline that plunged to her navel, and boobs with almost too perfect projection, like boxing gloves. Maybe they were Fitted.

This part looked easy. It was just talking. People were mega-sized now, but they were still people.

Pushing out my chest, I launched forward, following the length of the bar and stopping at the woman’s folded arms.

“Hi,” I said, “I’m Bruno Warne, a reporter for Night Watch—”

Her head dipped to take in my tiny face, and one plucked eyebrow arched.

“You are?”

“—I’m writing a color piece on the party, featuring the Andromedas. Do you know them?”

“Another gatecrashing reporter,” she yawned. The warm air fanned my cheek.

“Well, my company was personally invited.”

At this, she switched gears seamlessly.

“Tell me about the Warnes, are they all Reducers, too? The family reunion must be hilarious.”

She reached for her tumbler of scotch, too eagerly, and her hand accidentally swept past me, knocking me off my feet. I got up and dusted myself off. She seemed to have had too much to drink.

Several more guests passed by the bar. More failed interviews and I started to realize ‘oh no, another reporter…’ was an act to make guests sound more important than they actually were, as if reporters had swamped them the entire night.

An important looking man approached. I walked up to him, preparing to ask a question. He pushed me aside with a giant palm to lean over the bar and take a bottle.

“Heads up, tiny.”

The woman in the fur scarf giggled and gave my shoulder a light tap. Then something big and fuzzy swept around my body. The woman had lassoed her fur stole around my neck and, holding either end, started reeling me in. My shoes slid over the polished bar surface. Her puffed up breasts were imminent.

“Mr Warne. I might have what you’re looking for…” a smile spread slowly over her face, “…for a price.”

“How much?”

“Guess again.”

Her lips blossomed into a pucker. When I didn’t reply, she smacked them.

I tried to ease myself. At least Frankie was distracting Tori.

“Okay.”

With the scarf holding me, she moved right in and gave me a big drunken smooch. Her moist tongue muscle swished around my lips, determined to enter into my mouth, but only the tip fit.

A voice called over. The woman drew back suddenly, swishing her head. I jumped away before her wave of hair smacked my face.

“Javier is crushing your boyfriend!”

I was snatched up and the party swirled by. Then my feet were dumped on wine red cloth. A poker table stretched around me in a circle, with piles of chips like big stacks of books. Some of the piles were taller than I was. Three hills bordered the edge of the table, the shoulders of the three guys playing, all clean shaven and suited, probably the kids of magnates and politicians.

One of them laughed.

“The pot just grew…by about six inches.”

The woman met her boyfriend’s eye, giving me a sidewise look.

“Win him for me.”

“Is this a joke?” said a man with a shaved head sitting at the poker table. This was ‘Javier’. A woman stood behind him, massaging his shoulders. “If not, I’m down.”

There were two other guys playing. One of them was the boyfriend of the woman who’d put me on the table, and he looked miserable.

While I stood around on the table, they played another round and took draughts of their drinks while a live singer crooned along with the band. I waited for the alcohol to kick in and the gossip to pour out, but the air stayed tense. So I started reading their faces for ‘tells’.

Blue Sky could have scanned all these guys’ faces and told me who was lying. But since being reduced, people’s faces were bigger, and I made out detail others missed. I wasn’t as good as Blue Sky, but with a newly expanded view of faces, it was easier. Expressions were projected big like on IMAX.

Javier occasionally smiled for no reason; small tight smiles which flickered on and off like a faulty light bulb. As I stared at him, I realized.

His eyes had a look of overconcentration. His pupils didn’t contract muscularly like normal eyes, they calibrated like machines. Maybe he was on drugs, but he seemed too lucid. Maybe he had stayed up all night, but he seemed rested.

He had to have optic Fits like Kirk.

Now he was studying the backs of their cards for longer than he looked at his own…like he could see through to the other side. A Fit which handicapped Scanning ability would be capable of that. Scanners could detect wavelengths of light Naturals and other kinds of Supers could not, including waves of irradiated particles which passed harmlessly through objects.

He was cheating. No wonder the boyfriend was so down.

The piles of chips stacked up as the bets ran large. Javier’s girlfriend was acting as dealer and bank, her huge manicured hand huge came in and pushed me back and forth over the table to make more room for the chips.

The woman’s boyfriend’s forehead shone with sweat under the focused lights. Suddenly, he put his cards down and got to his feet.

“I’m done here.”

His girlfriend wrung his arm.

“Get. Back. here!” she wailed.

The boyfriend stormed off. She threw me one last look of anguish and then chased through the crowd after him.  

Now it was between the three remaining guys. I tensed up.

I began striding towards the table edge. Javier’s girlfriend grasped the back of my collar, jerking me off my feet.

“Where are you going, shrimp?”

One of her fingertips slipped in beneath the back of my jacket, and ran up my spine. “Too bad you don’t have a little off switch under here.” I was hovered back onto the middle of the table and dropped amidst the piles of chips.

Javier listed off on his fingers:

“I’ve won a car. I’ve won a date. I’ve won a Rolex. I’ve won a lot of gold jewellery. I’ve won a woman’s shoe. Panties. Bras. And I’ve won a pet dog.” He thought for a fraction of a second. “I’ll win a person. Hot damn.”

“Excuse me.” A fiery, feminine voice projected over the party noise.

She parted through the crowd. I caught a glimpse of a vision of golden tan skin, flaring hips and breasts in a shimmery white cocktail dress before she slid into the remaining seat at the table and glanced at everyone under piles of strawberry blonde hair. It was the same woman who had been watching me earlier, only now the focused lighting sharpened her features. Her brows and lips were thick and sultry and offset her blondeness, and she had amazing blue eyes, as radiant as a cloudless sky.

“If it’s all the same to you boys, I’d like a hand in this round.” She was already dealing herself cards.

The men grunted.

“You chose the wrong game, darlin’,” said one. “Javier’s out for blood tonight. Gunna make you bleed like your time of month came early.”

“You gentlemen better hope not,” she said calmly. “You wouldn’t like to see me on my time of the month.”

“I’m Javier,” said Javier, giving her a generous eyeballing.  Over his shoulder, his girlfriend was also staring at the woman, and turning her lip up. “And I hate to tell you, but the moment your fine ass hit that seat, you already lost.” Javier’s lopsided smile grew. “The little guy’s in my pocket. Just watch how it’s done.” He nodded and grinned down at me like I was some dollar bills in a roll.

I turned away from his leer and found the woman observing me silently, as if deducing how much I might be worth for resale. I caught her eyes lightly travelling from my chest, down my stomach, and stopping at my bulge.

Then she looked up at Javier.

“Give me your best.”

The next round commenced. At intervals, someone came by to refill the glasses. The men accepted. The woman politely refused. She kept fixing her hair, or running her fingers around her bustline to adjust her bra. As she tugged the fabric, her full breasts jumped and her black strapless brassiere peeked out. My eyes got stuck on her chest. As I stared, she lifted her inky lashes from her cards and our eyes locked. Her bee stung lips curved sensually at me. I swallowed hard, trying to focus.

Javier kept raising. One of the other men folded. Then the other. Then there was just Jaiver and the woman left, and Javier’s bank girlfriend, hovering at his shoulders, massaging his neck even though he shown no outwards signs of stress.

Neither did she. Her coolness was unnerving. I was beginning to sweat. If she only knew…

With my back turned to Javier, I made eye contact with her and subtly jerked my thumb in his direction, made an ‘X’ with my fingers and pointed to my eyes.

Her mouth and eyes went hard. There was only a one in ten chance she was a super, and would understand what I meant. But if she understood, she didn’t show it.

I mentally ran through my SciLab records on Scanners…Light was radiation, and radiation was blocked by lead…

“Excuse me.” I gazed up at her. “Do you have any red lipstick or eyeliner?”

She blinked up from her cards.

“Both – of course. Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious…? I want to give you my number.”

“What do you need to do that for?” Javier leered at me. “Since you’re coming home with me.”

A shiver went up my spine. I hurried away from him.

“Shucks. Hate to disappoint.”

“Not to interrupt,” his girlfriend said, staring daggers at the back of Javier’s head. “But you know I’m standing right here.”

“You’re still my queen of hearts,” he reassured her. “But I know you like your toys.”

Her cheeks blazed pink. Then her hand flew out to slap him, but he caught it, lightning fast.

“Save that kinky stuff for later,” he tutted her.

Someone was tapping on my shoulder. I spun to catch a glistening fingernail drift up from my face.

The strawberry blonde was passing a tube of lipstick into my hands, comically oversized. Actually, I was the comically undersized one.

Standing on the red cloth before her upper figure was crushingly objectifying. My view was totally unnatural, like a surreal dream. The bottom half of my world was swallowed up by the entire table, so I had to crane my neck up constantly to see anything, and a player loomed like a broad hill. The piles of striped chips inescapably reminded me how tiny I was.

I dropped to my knees and hastily began scrubbing red lipstick over the backs of her cards, particularly the corners, where the numbers and letters would be, and where the faces of royalty would be.

“Hey,” Javier barked through clenched teeth. “Git him away from there.”

“You should stop that, little man,” she said down to me. She didn’t understand, and tried to brush me away with a hand. I raced to the next card and scrubbed faster.

“They’re fine,” I said. “You can still play with them.” Finishing with the red, I grabbed the eyeliner wand, wrenched the top off and began scrubbing again, in black.

“You have to be kidding me.” Javier shifted around in his seat, his mouth twisting with concentration. He was trying to see through the woman’s cards. He leaned to the side, tilting his head, grimaced.

“Quit tampering with the game you little sonofabitch!”

High heels clomped around the table and then my head was encased in pressure and darkness. Javier’s girlfriend grabbed my head up like a tennis ball and tossed me. I bounced over the center of the table, feeling a sting and a small whoop of relief. The woman’s cards were lead shielded. Now all Javier had at his disposal was memory. And judging from the empty tumblers of liquor framing him, he couldn’t rely on that anymore, either.

She surveyed him through narrowed eyes.

“Now who’s tampering with the game?”

“Game?” he said sarcastically, looking around as if searching for something. “I don’t see a game around here. Oh, you mean this?” He slapped the table with both hands. The tremor ran through my feet. “This is a con. Your helper monkey is in on it. He saw my cards somehow and wrote ‘em on the back of yours.”    

She leaned back.

“Really, he didn’t,” she said flatly. “See for yourself.”

Javier didn’t move. Only his girlfriend wandered over to look.

“He just drew a little on the back there.” Her posture relaxed again and she returned to Javier’s side of the table. “We're safe, Jav.”

She didn’t understand; she didn’t know, I realized.

“Felicity. The principle of it: I refuse to play a crooked game with a crooked fake blonde wigged out gitano slut.”

“You fold?” the woman inquired.

Javier stood and tossed his cards.

“Oh, suck a dick.”

I watched him and his girlfriend stride away. Then turned to face a hand zooming at me, unnaturally fast for something so big. There was a tightening in my chest as it was captured and lifted from the poker table.

The party swept past as the woman headed for an empty table covered in a trailing white tablecloth. She took a seat and brought her hand closer to her magnificent face, as I stood on her cupped palm.

“So you came to run a story?” She inquired. She knew more about me than I realized. While I was standing around trying to eavesdrop, I didn’t consider other people might be doing the same.

“Yes,” I replied. “Night Watch. My name’s Bruno Warne.”

“Well, that’s interesting because I know all the reporters here. Why haven’t I heard of you?”

I met her piercing eyes for as long as I could stand.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She broke the contact to gaze across the room.

“Dia Amir.”

A single outstretched finger lined up with my chest. I wrapped both hands around her fingertip and shook it. Her fingernail was perfectly glossed and cut. Catching the sleeve of my jacket with her polished nail she peeled it back, just enough to show the white sleeve of my costume.

“Miss Amir,” I launched on, yanking my arm back and shaking the sleeve down, “there was a Fit fundraiser earlier," I noted. "Did you go?"

"I did."

"Well, I saw you earlier. You must have got here fast."

She leaned forward over the table edge to hear me better, and a strand of hair at her temple fell down. Her hand shot to the side of her head and swept the strand back delicately, as if anxious to prevent messing up her hair. It had to have been expensive to get done.

"I left early,” she replied, distracting herself for a moment to fix her hair with one hand while I was standing in her other. She took out a small mirror from her bag and began to touch up her cosmetics as she carried on speaking, giving me quick distracted glances.

“You're not the only one here on business," she said.

"What do you do?"

She gave a vague shrug.

"Well, I guess...if the guests feel relaxed and looked after, thank me."

"You're a hostess."

"Not quite.”

The mirror was put away and she shifted me from the table. There was a glimpse of her toned, tanned thigh through the slit in her dress before my feet touched the floor.

“You were going to tell me what you do, Mr Warne,” she prompted.

“I already did.”

The white tablecloth bunched and one of her feet pulled out from under the tablecloth, wearing a heeled sandal with straps that criss-crossed up around the ankle. Compared to me, her foot had the breadth and brute strength to rival a muscled bodyguard, in a slender womanly package. Tiny stones winked from silver toe rings around her second and fourth toes.

The foot lifted and rested the tip of its big toe into my chest.

“How are you feeling right now? Relaxed and looked after?”

As her foot retracted, the nail tip briefly flicked my chin. Probably by accident.

“Hey,” I said, startled.

“Oops,” she murmured, sweeping the offending foot aside. “So clumsy.”

Meanwhile, the skin of my jaw tingled where her nail had touched.

The live band music pattered through the floor and fired relentlessly inside my chest. I had to fight to speak over it, although the woman seemed to have no problem hearing me.

“So, then,” I said, eager to keep the interview on track, “you might have seen the Andromedas at the fundraiser.”

I was looking straight up at her, bathed from the floor light, as if she was the moon. My neck twinged.

She nodded. Her fingertips curled loosely around the table edge and once again I noticed her shining nails as they silently tapped. Then she reached down deftly shed the strappy sandal, leaving her foot bare. A dizzying wave of shoe and foot scent flushed through my senses, but unnoticed by anyone over a foot tall.

“They’re really improving Fit accessibility,” I went on, “and more people need…um, you know, understanding, because there’s still a lot of uneducated pushback.” I waved my arms vaguely. “What they really need, I think, is a broader media exposure, to normalize it.”

She was silent, seeming to think this through. Maybe even on the cusp of letting something slip. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath.

Her big toe gave my shoulder a friendly jostle.

“Speaking of exposure,” she inclined her head, “You’re running hot, Mr Warne. Let me conceal you.”

I stared up at her, puzzled. Dia reclined in a shady corner of the room and no one seemed to be looking our way.

“Keep talking,” she said reassuringly. I had gone silent and was trying to recollect my thoughts. She must have also perfumed between her toes; it mixed with an earthy perspiring foot odor sat ripe and thick in my lungs. If she was at the fundraiser she must have been wearing those heels a long time before now.

Damned if I’d let this woman dazzle me and twist the interview out of my control.

“Done talking. Miss Amir, would you like to dance?”

Her bright blue eyes held on my face for an indecisive moment. Then the corner of her mouth tugged with a humoring smile.

“I have to warn you, I’m a pushy dancer. But I’ll do my best not to tread on you.” 

My hand was at my side and something was brushing it, like a comb. I looked down. She’d turned her foot in at my side and her bulbous big toe was scratching my hand with the white tip of its impeccable nail. I stared at it in disbelief.

“Let me practice some footwork with you first.”

In that brief instant, her foot lifted and lined up against me, as if comparing my height to the length of her foot. Her toes opened as wide as possible and inched closer. Then the space between her big toe and second toe was quickly filled up with my head.

My voice came out in a whoosh:

“Hey, what—?!”

Her toes clapped together firmly around the circumference of my skull and I went silent. My temples were given a soft but inexorable squeeze, and suddenly the ground dropped away from my feet as she held me comfortably up by my head and moved me in under the table. The tablecloth was dropped all around, keeping me hidden in shade below her legs. While I dangled, stunned, her other foot approached.

“You’re not a reporter, are you, Mr Warne…?” she murmured knowingly.

Her toenail played around my chest for a moment before drawing its tip down my belly, and rested the soft pad over my groin. Then the pressure shifted downward again as her toe snuck under my balls and lifted them, testing their weight. And then caught the bulge of my pants and began to massage it, trying to tweak it away from my body. I could barely focus as she lifted my arousal to near agony using the smallest of touches.

She took my leg into the clasp of her toes and began pinching my thigh, gradually running down to my foot. Then she took the other leg and repeated the process. The hot crush of her toes around my head was making sweat break out on my forehead.

Finished with my lower half her toe ran back up my body, pushing and prodding every step of the way to satisfy her relentless curiosity. There was a flare of perfume as the flat underside of her big toe bumped my face briefly before returning to my torso, as if by accident, before continuing its exploration.

Outside the tablecloth, the sounds of the party floated around obliviously, laughter, the chime of glasses and the relentless passing stamp of shoes on the floor, back and forth teasingly, without knowing I was right there, captive under the table. With me safely stashed beneath the tablecloth Dia had complete freedom to subject every inch of my puny, immobile body to an intimate foot probing, and my dick was so painfully stiff she could have used it to floss between her toe spaces.

My body was battered around all the soft parts of her foot. A line of toes adeptly swept my arms aside to pat in under my armpits, tapped my ribcage up and down, and pushed at my chest and stomach. 

Her toenail glided around and traced at my back, making ticklish digging motions as if searching something. It systematically went down my back, checking everywhere, before landing on my butt. A toenail then swiftly wedged between my legs, separating my legs a little to nudge around between my thighs, and brushing my ballsack as it did so. As it was carelessly tickling my balls it inadvertently gave my balls a sharp poke, momentarily causing me a flash of blinding pain. Caught despairingly between her toes, my skull began to throb.

“You’re a plant," she said. "But who planted you?”

She was patting me down for concealed objects, I realized. Probably searching for bugging devices.

The woman wasn’t a guest or a hostess. She had to be counter-intelligence on the Andromeda side, or possibly even a ‘honeypot’, oozing feminine charm to trick me into revealing myself. She must have heard something compromising about me. But how? Maybe Frankie slipped up while en route to the bathroom.

If I was normal size I would have left the party, but that wasn’t an option. My skull was caught like a stone between her toes, which even rolled my head slightly to turn my body.

“Dia…” I said weakly.

Her toe stopped probing me. But it turned out some other guests had come upon her and stopped to chat. I couldn’t see them, but their shadows shifted around the bottom of the tablecloth and the air shimmered with their voices. It sounded like a couple of men. It didn’t sound like they knew who Dia was, but they liked what they saw.

While the three of them talked, I was held aloft the entire time. It was not even marginally better than being poked and rubbed; I felt like a shoe that was being dangled from the end of her toes. Sometimes she wiggled my head without thinking, or fed my temples with a series of tiny squeezes.

The conversation sounded casual, all three flirting. I tried to listen in, but Dia’s toes were also pressing against my ears, partially blocking my hearing. Then the pressure lifted. She seemed to have successfully fought them off. Now her attention was solely upon me again, hanging from her toes.

“What’s your objective?” she demanded.

I took a deep breath.

“Okay. You win. I’m not a real reporter. I’m just here for the champagne and strawberries and gossip like everyone else.”

“Steve.” She paused to let this sink in, “I’m giving you one last chance to come clean with me.”

I thought quickly.

“Or what?”

She waved me back and forth, and in little circles, in a mesmerizing way, enjoying the power she held over me.

“I’ll take what I want from you whether you like it or not.”