When Theo thought about it, really, It was his own fault.

He hadn’t even applied to Olympia Interplanetary University. Hell, he had barely heard of the planet Alcmene, somewhere near the rim.

They offered Theo a full ride for engineering, two years into his schooling. All this despite his notably inconsistent grades. Certainly it seemed too good to be true, but apparently the school was for real. They were producing heavy duty work there, planes, ships, even space stations. It was perfect. He just needed housing.

His financial aid paperwork came back late and it put him in a terrible position. All the dorms were snapped up. With six weeks until fall semester, everything was taken except the ridiculously expensive luxury dorms.

He was wondering how long he could sleep in the library, cleaning with handi-wipes, when they called him about the wait list.

Two spaces had come available. One bed opened up in a six person dorm on the edge of campus. He'd have to share a ten by fourteen bedroom.

The other one was just past the other edge of campus, even further out than the other. It was set off in his own area, like a miniature campus of its own.

When he saw the size of the private room, for almost the same price as the other, he though it was a misprint: Thirty by forty feet. How was that possible?

“I had to double check this slot, it's not usually open to a male,” the young woman from the housing desk told Theo. “And it's in the Atlasian Village, all slots are first come first serve for citizens of Atlasia. Their female student backed out.”

“So my roommates would be female?”

“Yes. Two Atlasian female roommates. They opened up the room for all genders. Are you okay with that? Do you know anything about Atlasians?”

Theo didn't know anything. He believed Atlasia was a manufacturing base out past the rim. That was it.

“Sure, just never met one in person.”

She laughed, and said, “Yeah. They're just... on the statuesque side.”

“Yeah,” Theo replied, chuckling dumbly.

In hindsight, she was probably trying to be funny.

He arrived on a Wednesday. He first noticed them at the at Burgess Station, a small spaceport on the surface of Alcmene.

He saw what he assumed were basketball players, these two very tall young guys going through customs. Way past seven feet, both of them. He passed by then at baggage claim closer up. They didn't even look related, one a blond white guy, the other looked middle eastern.

Shit, he thought. He was eye level with their stomachs.

It wasn't until he saw another group of the giants, at least five of them, a couple topping eight feet, that he became suspicious.

Theo boarded the crowded campus shuttle. It was two hours to campus. When no one was paying attention he asked the driver, “Have you seen these super tall guys around the spaceport?”

The driver looked like an upper class student to Theo. “You mean the Atlasians?”

“Oh. That's... wow.”

“Oh, you never seen Atlasians before?”

“No. I mean sure, of course,” Theo said. Which was true, and he had heard they were somewhat tall. “Just not close up. I'm actually, I'm moving into the Atlasian Village though.”

The driver-student just whistled long. “Couldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Just... I don't need to be a tough guy or anything but I hate to walk into a room where everyone could toss me around like a volleyball.”

Theo got it. He's seen only a few, and his gut reaction was to be intimidated. At the same time, people were just people, right?Theo said,”I actually have two female roommates though, so I'm not too worried about that.”

Theo saw the driver tilt his head slightly then looked at him quizzically. Looked at him just long enough Theo was about to point him back out to the road he was driving on.

The driver chuckled, and chuckled louder, shaking his head at some private joke. “Oh, man. Wish I could be there to watch this.”

Theo reached campus at ten at night. It was pretty vacant still, with five days until the start of the fall semester. He was impressed at the size and grandeur of it up close.

The library was six stories and the size of a shopping mall. The computer lab was the size of his high school. The athletics complex was a suburb of its own.

The Atlasian village was like that. An isolated suburb in a valley. It was quiet when he reached it, near midnight. Theo had his backpack over his shoulder, and his motorized luggage cart following behind. It was hugely overloaded, at least two hundred fifty pounds on a hundred fifty weight capacity. One of the wheels was starting to hang up, and he'd have to stop, push it to get it unstuck.

He could hear a concert or something like it happening in the distance, with music he didn't recognize.

When he reached the dorms, he was impressed with the design. They were newly built, and each took up the space of a full city block. They were strong-looking, with conspicuous steel and reinforcements. At the same time, they managed to be simple and clean.

There was a huge park toward the middle. Theo saw a couple of boys, tall as the others, tossing a frisbee u see the street lamps.

He had reached his dorm, which was even taller than most others he saw, across from the park. A flash of long hair caught his eye, and he responded to the deeply male instinct of being drawn to a hair flip. Curly, blonde, long. A girl was sitting with a book, her back against a tree. She had noticed him. She was looking at him across a distance Theo wasn't sure of.

He froze for just a moment. It struck him as strange, a woman looking at him and continuing to look at him. Was it interest? They were far enough away he couldn't tell what she looked like. But she seemed close, at the same time.

He turned away and walked to front door of the dorm. The doors were over ten feet high, inset In a glass structure over twenty feet high. Theo realized after a moment that the glass structure was actually an even bigger set of doors, with a release bar just above the top of the main set.

The bar for the main doors was chin high, but Theo found it locked. The buzzer was just above his head on the right. He pressed it, and waited.

He looked back at the girl across the way, who had gone back to her book. She looked back up and he reflexively looked away.

Why?

He heard movement and saw the towering shadow approaching the door. It opened slowly, and a huge figure loomed over him.

“Hey,” came the voice two feet above him. It was bright, friendly, guileless. “Can I help you?”

Theo looked up at the man. Blonde haired, white, looked like a surfer type. Theo gestured to the backpack and the motorized cart behind him. “I’m actually moving in?”

He looked puzzled, but moved out of the way to let Theo pass.

“I don't wanna give the impression we’re discriminatory or racist or anything,” he said, laughing. “The facilities are specialized for Atlasians, because, you know... low ceilings everywhere. These rooms are at a premium for us.”

"Cool," Theo said. "Thought you might have a thing against Afro Latinos."

"Uh huh," the guy said.  He didn't seem to get the joke.

The ceilings were sky high. He'd though it to be two stories, even as high as a ceiling for eight foot residents needed to be, but it was just one floor, over two stories high.

They entered the lobby. The man arrived at a reception window. He went through a door into the office, leaving Theo on the other side. The bottom edge of the window was just below his chin, but the window went all the way up, from his vantage point.

“Oh,” the man said, looking at a computer screen. “Theodore Ramirez?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’m Luc.” He had a strange look in his face, like he didn't quite believe it. He turned, opened a cabinet behind him and came out with a small package. “You're with Camille and Roxanne this year?”

“You know them?”

The towering student chuckled. “Camille knows everybody. And Roxanne,” his eyes widened dramatically for a moment. “is hard not to notice.”

Theo opened the package. There was a keycard, some forms, and a small fob. “What's this for?”

“The side door is heavy, this activates the automatic door.”

Theo figured the other residents had no issues with the doors being heavy. He looked up at the huge windows and said, “Luc, can I ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

Theo asked in matter of fact manner, now acutely aware the men around him would see him as small and weak, “How big do you guys get?”

It didn't phase the giant surfer. He knew some variation of the question was coming. “I’ve met a couple of guys about two point eight meters.” Luc shrugged.

Theo did the math. Two point eight meters was past nine feet. There was some Atlasian guy running around over nine feet tall. And Theo’s last couple years of college was going to be spent around guys like that. That was gonna mess with his ego.

Theo didn't put much stock in being macho... but say a nine foot tall guy gets fresh with your girl right in front of you... Seriously, what’s the move?

Okay. This didn't have to be a death sentence. He was in the Atlasian Village. It was a small amount of land for a campus this size. There were four hundred thousand students here. And until Theo had arrived in the Village, he hadn't seen many eight foot students.

Only one Atlasian female at all, so far. He found that strange. He'd seen a dozen or so males, one female. But it was still nearly a week before the start of classes.

Theo had not talked to his roommates by phone or chat. He had, however, looked through the student directory to find photos. He found the student photo of Camille. She looked Asian, perhaps a Pacific Islander. She had straight Blonde Hair, and even in the one, simple photo she radiated confidence. There was no photo on file for Roxanne.

He wasn't sure how he felt about that. Two female roommates, at least one of them hot. Especially as now, he pictured them over seven feet in height. It did explain why two knockouts were okay letting some strange guy move on with them. He probably wasn't much of a threat, physically.

He had been thinking attractive roommates would have really hot friends. Now, he was thinking as a little dude he’d have to fight like hell to avoid friend zones. But there was a strategy for that, he was sure. If they tended to overlook him, they might not see him coming. And Theo felt his game was quite deadly at close range.

It whatever was here because he needed a room. He had a huge room, two tall beautiful roommates. Anything beyond that, just a happy accident.

He made his way down the hall, seeing the towering doors all around him. He turned the corner toward his apartment and heard the motorized cart miss the turn, push itself into the wall. The bad wheel had given out, come loose from its mooring. When he tried to pull it, a second wheel broke loose.

“Shit,” He said in the empty hall. He wasn't going to drag this down the hall. He was all the way at the end, and the cart outweighed him by a great deal. He was already aching from the journey.

And the journey in a place like this was not like a normal hall. This hallway was about two football fields, American football fields, long. He grabbed his backpack and started walking.

The door to his dorm apartment was different. The other doors were all crazy, obscenely tall and solid. His door had a smaller door, only seven and a half feet high, set on the larger standard door on the hinge side.

The inside was vast. It felt like walking into a warehouse, with the wide space and ceilings well over 20 feet high. There was one closed bedroom door to the left, another on the back wall to the right. Then a small open lanai.

The furniture was much too big for him. The arm of the couch was even with the top of his head. The seat cushions reached his mid chest.

Then there was a smaller couch, his size, sitting on a three foot riser.

“A booster seat,” he said to himself, and laughed. Then he shuddered. Man, he did not want to be seen sitting in that.

Theo wandered over to the kitchen, wondering how he was supposed to cook on a eight foot stove?

For that matter, he was wondering, how would an eight foot tall person use it? It didn't make sense.

He turned to go to find his room, at the back of the apartment, when he heard a click from the door on the left.

He turned back, looked up and readied himself to meet a seven foot or even taller, female roommate. He willed himself not to be dumbstruck.

This would be awkward. Luc had bordered on threatening, just from his size alone. And he had been nothing but accommodating. Totally nice guy. What if she was as tall as he was, and less friendly?

No matter how pretty this girl was, this was where Theo was going to live. And he didn't want to come off like a creep.

But with his eye trained at about seven feet, he waited to see a face... the beautiful and exotic Camille, or the unseen Roxanne. But he didn't see a face.

He saw a rib cage. A narrow, slender rib cage disappearing into a pink half tee.

At seven feet.

The figure shifted, and the outrageously long legs, in gray sweatpants, carried the girl... the Girl? forward. Closer. He looked up, and up.

Holy fuck.

And up a little more…