Chapter 10 – Protective feelings

Laure groaned. It had been a few days since she had sent Alicia and Rick to the Northern Docks and in spite of the great pleasures Dragos had given her – several times now, she was starting to get a headache. She was still stuck reviewing the whole force, doing her best to clean it up, and now she had a monster on her hands. A monster she couldn’t deal with, not with her officers at least.

It was truly a nightmare. Giants knew all too well how Normals were terrified of them. Titans and Gigantics rarely interacted with them. They were simply too distant, even when travelling the regions of the Europe-sized nation, to have a meaningful relationship with the ant-sized peoples at their feet. After all, a Gigantic could crush an entire bus with one foot without even realizing it, so any interaction was fraught with danger anyway!

But Giants – and Giantesses… They were massive, of course. Fifty meters tall on average was still far more than what most Normals found comfortable. There was something truly scary in the way something so huge could move as swiftly as they did and see them with such an ease. At least, that’s what Dragos had revealed during a particularly cuddly session of pillow talks. She could understand it, of course.

But her kind had spent the last centuries making sure that all the unfounded fears Normals had when it came to Growns were just that, unfounded. She had looked over the archives, perused them even, and it was clear there had never been so much as a cover up of a Giantess or bigger assaulting Normals. Smalls or children of the taller kind of peoples sometimes had nasty behavior when in the hicks of the nation, but nothing else.

And now they had a maneater on the loose. Laure sighed and massaged her temples. How was it possible? Giantesses were hardwired to find the very notion absolutely disgusting. She knew some Normals were aberrant, either because of abuse endured or some sort of genetic mutation compounded by often uncaring societies and familial circles. But the Growns were supposed to be different!

“Send Mike Roughfeather!” she almost barked into her interphone.

She gritted her teeth in frustration, mostly at herself. She owed her team to be calm and composed – they did a wonderful job. But she was truly on edge, and the man she was set to review was one of the big reasons, almost as much as the reveal that a devouring anomaly was roaming free – for now – in her city. After all, he was truly the first of the biggest dirty players in the force.

And he knew it, she realized, when Mike entered the room. Most of the peoples who had some dirt or skeletons in their closets were terrified going in to meet her. She had made quite clear that she wanted a clean police force in Gigantopia and that no amount of bribes, threats or anything of the like would stay her hand. Corrupted cops would be booted, and she’d make sure it was known why.

Mike Roughfeather should have been shaking in his boots, trying his best to pretend that he was not one of the worst influences in the force. Instead, his square-jawed face as split by an arrogant grin, as if he knew more than her on something that mattered. It was ridiculous, of course, but Laure couldn’t help but feel a tinge of worry. Something was very wrong here and she needed to find out what, sooner rather than later.

“Good day to you, Commissar, how can I help you?”

Laure’s eyes narrowed. That little asshole was tipping his hand already. She wouldn’t even have needed her superior intellect as a Giantess to understand it. That bastard believed he had something on her. Something he could leverage to walk out of it scot free and thus destroy her whole effort to make the police something worthy of respect, able to do its duty without corruption and violence.

“Mr. Roughfeather, you can start to take a sit” coldly stated Laure.

“In a moment, I need to climb your desk first” chuckled Mike.

“Where you are” icily added the Commissar, stopping him on the spot.

“There is no chair here” he replied, and his veneer of calm frayed, if only a little, as his tone betrayed his sudden anger – or was it embarrassment?

“Then stay standing. I assure you it makes next to no differences for me when little men like you are sitting or not. You all look the same, really.”

Now he was angry. He didn’t made much effort to hide his feelings on his face, probably because he believed – as most Normals did – that she couldn’t really see his face too well. It was, he probably reasoned, far too small for her to see anything but a blur. He was wrong. The larger the Grown, the better their eyesight. Gigantics probably saw more details when looking at a Normal kilometers away than his lockstep friend did.

In her case, no frown, twitch or sudden flash of red on his face escape Laure’s gaze. She was, however, leagues better than him to hide her feelings. She wanted so badly to just step on that little bastard, reducing him in a dirty red paste, but she couldn’t do that. She needed to follow due process – and to fish out for any information he would give her, willingly or not. She needed to confirm her hunch, after all.

“That’s a strange choice of words” he replied, his fake cordiality returned. “After all, from what I’ve gathered, not all Normals look the same to you, Commish.”

“That’ll be Commissar Carin for you, Mr. Roughfeather. And I’m not sure I understand your insinuations – nor do I like them. They sound suspiciously like a threat.”

“Well, that’s because they are” chuckled the man, dropping his mask for a more honest disdain. “I guess what they say about huge bitches like you is true, Commish. You do get things fast. And yet, you’re still poking the hornet nest. You’ll get stung soon enough.”

Laure had to give it to him. He did sound genuinely threatening, for another Normal at least. She didn’t doubt that for the little fellows, the sudden change in tone and behavior would be both jarring and frightening, and the not so veiled threats probably added a layer of shock and horror to his usual victims. Sadly for Mike Roughfeather, she was anything but a Normal, as he would soon discover.

“Mr. Roughfeather. It seems your working habits with the previous Commissar have given you a wrong impression of what one in my position can do to the likes of you. I am warning you. Call me Commish again, and you’ll regret it. Less than what’ll happen next, but still. Avoid the unpleasantly it’d entail, if only for the sake of our city’s healthcare system.”

“Oh really? And what can you do to me?” he smugly asked, before being violently thrown to the ground.

“Something like that for starter” growled Laure, her frightening – for Normals – eyes almost alight with fury.

She had simply thrown a well-worn out eraser at Mike. It was a small piece for her, barely large enough to grip correctly. And she had thrown it at a speed she knew would be neither fatal nor even dangerously injuring. But for Mike, it had been a piece of gum twice as large as he was tall, and several time his mass hurled to him at such a speed he was sent back several meters away. Without the implant, he would probably have died. Sadly for him, he was implanted.

“You crazy bitch!?” he roared, as he tried to get up, but froze when an ominous sound, the feet of an enormous chair, scratched the floor.

Laure felt a strange tingle in her body as she looked at the terrified little man on the floor. She didn’t want Normals to be terrified of her, but she couldn’t deny the power trip it gave her that they were. But unlike with Dragos, Roughfeather’s terror as she moved toward him, her face cold and grim, there would be no shared pleasure from what she’d do, if needed. She couldn’t hurt him too badly, but she could terrify him enough for him to spill the beans.

“You will hold your tongue, Mr. Roughfeather. You may believe that you have ways to harm me. You have none. Your veiled threats are transparent to me. I know very much who you think you could hurt or worse to force me into compliance with your nasty behavior. Sadly for you, I have very strong protective feelings. And I never act without planning first.”

As she had talked, she had moved closer to his prone form, pinned under the tiny bit of eraser, which proved too heavy from his to lift, at least fast enough. He bleached as her heel-clad feet came to a rest on each side of his body, probably because he realized how utterly minuscule he was compared to them. Laure was not smiling; her face a mask of cold fury, and Mike Roughfeather started to wonder if he hadn’t made a huge mistake. But he was too boorish to surrender without a fight.

“You huge moron!” he spat, failing miserably at looking threatening with so much of his body covered by an eraser. “I know where that barista live! Where he works! I just have to send a message and he’ll be dead! Or even stay silent, and my guys will off him also!”

Laure snorted a depreciative laugh. That that man had been able to threaten his previous Commissar, blackmail his superior officers and generally abuse his position in the police told more about the weakness of the institution than any power or influence of Mike. And she had told him the truth, she never acted without planning. She had known perfectly well that revealing her feelings to Dragos would expose him.

“You really are stupid. You truly think I don’t know how scum like you behaves in a pinch? I am a Giantess, the thinking process of little peoples is boringly easy to predict. I knew you’d threaten Dragos. It was thus extremely easy to ingrain peoples tasked with protecting him at work and near his home. Being a Grown has a lot of perks, Mister Roughfeather, and especially being a Giantess.”

“What? I… You’re lying!” screamed Mike, his voice shrill now.

“No, I don’t. Only pathetic little men like you need to lie. I am, literally, above such behavior. Now, let us be clear. You’re finished. You will be expelled from the force, and spend a lot of time behind bar. Now, you can make it a little more agreeable to yourself by revealing what you now. We both know that you are an important player in what went among the cops and the gangs. You better speak now, really.”

“Yeah, sure! Andrea would kill me if I told you anything, bitch!” spat Mike, making Laure sigh.

That idiot didn’t even realize he was giving her something to work with. Whoever was that Andrea, she was important enough for Roughfeather to use her as a threat to a Giantess. She wondered if she was of her size herself – she was convinced that no Titanic or above had any interest in the little dealings of the Normals. And even her kind was supposed to not care about them either – she was unique among Giants, for that.

Well, almost, she corrected herself. Whoever was the monster eating Normals alive, she was also focused on them and what they did, in her own twisted way. And judging by the man she had at her feet, spitting insults and empty threats at her, she was certain he’d have alluded to that Giantess if he had known her. This meant that she was probably a new player in town that added to the danger of the situation.

“Mister Roughfeather, shut the fuck up” she finally sighed, putting on right foot on top of him and simply stopping his attempt to move the eraser out of him. “You are clearly not understanding what’s happening. You will tell me everything you know. I will use it to clean the police force of Gigantopia even deeper. I will reforge it into something the people can trust and respect, if not love.”

“You’re insane!” spat Roughfeather. “You think you’ll be able to find anyone doing that work in that kind of institution? The police is the only place Normals can feel powerful, not under the thumb of freaks like you! You’ll fail!”

“We shall see” almost purred Laure, who enjoyed both Mike’s fear and anger but even more his ability to give him an even better understanding of what drove the corrupt cops.

Not all of them shared into this vision, of course. She had purged peoples who were only into it for the wealth they could amass, or to help friends in the gangs, who had simply joined to protect them from the arm of the law. But some had had another edge, she had never been able to pick up – mostly because she hadn’t needed to, to have them expelled if not arrested. But now, she realized she’d need to work even more than she had.

“That will be all, Mister Roughfeather” she stated coldly as she increased the pressure on the eraser, just enough to push the air out of the Normal man’s lungs. “You can remain silent for now, you will have to undergo a very thorough interrogation. I know who will be doing that. But just so you know. If anything happens to Dragos, even a ruffled hair… you and every associate will be crushed. And I am not talking metaphorically. Am I clear? Oh yes, you can’t answer, can’t you?”

She smiled as she noticed Mike Roughfeather’s losing consciousness and removed her foot from over him. She picked him and the eraser, exited her office and dropped him, just a tad too hard, onto the ground in front of the officers she had tasked with the local detention cells. They looked at each other’s and the one on the right side sighed and gave a handful of pieces into his friend’s extended hand.

“A bet?” asked Laure, amused in spite of herself.

“Yeah, I expected that one to not make it out alive of your office, Ma’am” explained the first cop.

Laure laughed it off, shaking her head. But as she returned into her office, she realized that he would have won his bet if Mike had been dumb enough to hurt Dragos. God help anyone, even a Gigantic, who would threaten her love, because she’d crush them all, no matter how she could achieve it. And when it came to Normals, it would be extremely easy to do so. She paused suddenly.

“Perhaps that’s what our monster feels about” she realized, as a deep sense of dread befell her.