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.”