“Something I don’t get,” Gina suddenly said as the two of them lounged on the couch, “if you could do magic this entire time, why didn’t you just refill the juice bottles so I wouldn’t keep nagging you?”

“That’s hard.”

Gina sat up and stared. “I’ve seen you stand on the ceiling and you’re saying that making orange juice is hard?” Ashley looked away and scowled.

“Look. Magic is based off a very archaic language — “

“Does this language not have a word for ‘juice’?”

“ — that wasn’t constructed for use of communication,” Ashley gritted out, “but for the specific purpose of channeling the energy needed to produce a desired result.”

“So this language doesn’t have a word for ‘juice,’ is what I’m hearing.”

Ashley frowned, but continued on. “There are different methods to channel energy, and different regions even developed different languages. You hear about a few people who can do magic without the support of gestures or speech or written word or whatever, but that’s supremely hard.”

Gina mulled this over. “It just sounds like you can make up a word for ‘juice.’ Or even use the actual word ‘juice.’ Since apparently everybody made up their own magical language or whatever. Dunno why you guys went through all that trouble making up weird words when the English language is right there.”

She was met with a terse silence. “It’s complicated.” Gina took this to mean ‘it’s bullshit.’ But whatever, it was better to not press any further.

“Alright. So then what are some words?”

This at least seemed to cheer Ashley up some. She snatched up a notebook and leaned against Gina to let her see what she was writing. “Right, so, ‘i’ is the word for ‘self,’ basically, and ‘nu-i’ is…I guess you can just say, ‘someone else.’ If you want to get more specific, you sort of need someone’s true name and all that. Those indicate the target of the effect, and they always come at the end because you want the spell to wait until you’re actually done specifying the effect before it shoots off. Generally, a spell starts with, like, I guess, a verb? That says the basic effect it's supposed to do, like 'float,' and then maybe an adjective, like — “

“Oh, so it’s like coding.”

Ashley paused and stared at Gina like she had just suggested nuclear war. “No it’s not!”

“I mean, you have your functions, then — “

Shooting to her feet, Ashley shouted, “Magic is a complicated force that mere mortals cannot comprehend!”

“So you’re immortal?”

Ashley paused and said, “Not yet,” as though she meant it to be a threat. “Anyways, coding can’t do nearly the amount of things that magic can!”

“Yeah, but there’s a logic to it, there’s multiple coding languages, and using it results in an effect.” Gina shrugged. “I bet I could figure out a way to refill an empty carton of orange juice with whatever magic words you got.”

Before Ashley could get any more offended, Gina took her notebook and started writing. “Like, there’s a word for ‘copy,’ right? So if there’s some sort of phrase that means something like, I guess, ‘object that is highly similar to target,’ and a word that can refer to the inside of that object…”

With a flourish, Gina handed the notebook back to Ashley, who took it and read it over numbly. After a moment, Gina rubbed the back of her head. “I mean, it probably isn’t accurate, I don’t know the words or anything. There’s a lot of conditionals I haven’t touched on with this either, but something like that might create orange juice?”

“I can’t believe it,” Ashley said, voice hollow. “Magic is basically coding.”

“Um. Are you gonna be okay?”

Ashley looked over at Gina. “Do you have any books about coding around?”

She did. She even let Ashley borrow them, despite her sudden sense of unease.

“Hey Gina,” Ashley said, greeting her at the door in a swivel chair. Gina merely grunted, stomping snow off her boots and skimming through the mail.

“Why’d you wheel your chair out here?” she asked without looking up. But the way Ashley raised her arm in response rang some alarm bells and, after uttering some sort of weird phrase, she aimed a finger at Gina, who shunted down a couple of feet. The mail flew out of her hands and scattered onto the floor as she disappeared into her clothes. Her hat and scarf, devoid of support, followed the mail soon after, and, once gravity caught up to her heavy coat and it landed on her shoulders, Gina joined them as well. It took her a moment, sitting in the melting snow, for her to register what had happened, and then she scowled. “The mail is getting wet.”

Gina didn’t even get to pick up two envelopes (now looking the size of book covers) before Ashley hooked her fingers in the belt loops of her jeans and hoisted her up next to her chair and measured her against it, leaving Gina to shake off the biggest wedgie she had ever received. “Ooh, looks like it worked!”

“Whoop-dee-doo. You did a shrinking spell again. So impressive.”

“Not a shrinking spell, a size change spell.” Ashley raised her chair a bit and chanted the same thing as before, and Gina found herself at least a few inches taller. “See? It can grow stuff too! I was thinking about what you said about spells basically being coding and I was like, what if that means you could actually use the language like code, string together words to make all these new, specific spells? Like, the way magic is taught right now, nobody has really done more than basic combinations, and so we just keep learning the same spells people've done for centuries and centuries because there's only so many basic combinations you can make! But look!” Ashley, practically vibrating, gestured at the chair. “I just basically invented a whole new spell that makes the target the height of the closest chair! Think of all the innovations this’ll cause! I mean, obviously this is gonna be dangerous, like, if you don’t form a spell good enough who knows what’ll happen, but I mean, isn’t this just amazing?”

Gina looked down at herself and then at the chair, which was, in fact, exactly the same height as her. “So magic doesn’t have a word for juice, but it has a word for chair?”

“You really know how to suck the excitement out of everything.”

“It’s just sort of hard to be impressed when this super special totally new and complicated spell you made up just makes someone the height of a chair.”

“The closest chair,” Ashley corrected. Gina rolled her eyes as she finally shouldered her coat off and tried to hang it up. She was at least able to snag the coat hanger standing on her toes, but this did mean she couldn’t quite put it back, and she stood there in silent frustration before turning around.

“Okay, so your new spell worked. Can you make me normal sized now?”

“Hmm…I dunno. I think this is the highest this chair goes,” Ashley said.

“With a normal growth thing, stupid.”

Ashley grinned slyly at her, fingering the chair lever. “What’s your rush? You’re real cute like that, you know. The baggy and bundled look really suits you.” She pressed on the lever and slowly descended.

Gina rushed her, taking care not to trip over her pants. She hadn’t quite thought of what she meant to do — probably either try to cover her mouth or grab her hand, whichever was the easier way to stop her from casting anything. But too little too late. As soon as the chair hit minimum height, Ashley shot her dead on with her chair-height spell (or whatever stupid name the stupid thing was going to have). Gina blanched as she withdrew further into her clothes mid-dash, her feet wheeling in the air instead of hitting the floor. The only thing she could see through the tunnel of her collar was Ashley’s smug face before fabric obscured her vision and she fell with a thud —

Or actually, fell into Ashley’s arms. Ashley hoisted Gina up by her shoulders, her pants left behind and her underwear barely hanging onto her hip, spun her around, and sat her on her lap. Gina flailed her arms as she tried to bunch her sleeves up to free her hands. But the laws of physics conspired against her; her sleeves slid off her instead, allowing her collar to fall around her, and her shirt pooled on her lap. She couldn’t even bring herself to feel embarrassed. “Why do you always shrink me, huh? You know how weird that looks?”

Ashley shifted Gina slightly as she adjusted her chair to a comfortable height once more. “I mean, it’s the easiest way to make sure you can’t escape or fight back, duh.”

“That’s an extremely villainous thing to say.”

“It’s too bad this chair couldn’t go any lower. You’re still bigger than a kid.”

“Not even going to acknowledge that, huh.”

“Which is whyyyyyy…” Ashley drawled as she wheeled them towards the living room. Right next to the couch was a new chair, something that Ashley must have bought today. Unlike a regular chair, it was bright pink and made of hollow plastic, making it light enough for a toddler to move. Because, of course, it was a chair for a toddler.

“Hey, hang on,” Gina protested as Ashley picked her up (there went the rest of her clothes) and plopped her down on the chair. Despite her diminished stature, her knees were forced to curl up to her chest for her to sit on it. “Stop,” was all she was able to get out before, in one second, her butt went from dwarfing the seat to being dwarfed by it. Gina found herself facing Ashley’s calves, her legs dangling off the edge of the chair and her back unable to rest on the back of the seat.

Okay. Now she was embarrassed.

Gina bit her lip and stared downwards as Ashley chuckled above. “The ironic thing is once you’re the height of a chair, you’re actually too short for it.” She wheeled closer, the sudden sound making Gina flinch back. “Never thought about that until now.”

“Shut up,” was Gina’s eloquent response.

A hand big enough to engulf her entire head patted her gently. “Being grumpy makes you even cuter, you know.”

“Shut up,” Gina repeated, but mumbling this time.

“Anyways,” Ashley said, scooping Gina up and resting her in the crook of her arm, “come with me for a bit.” As if Gina had any agency in the matter.

It turned out their journey was to Ashley’s room. And Gina had never really been inside it much, but she was definitely sure there hadn’t been a dollhouse before. “Okay.” She gestured emphatically. “This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder about your weird fixation of making me smaller.”

Ashley set her down on the table, right next to the dollhouse. Standing beside it, Gina was slightly taller. It was a bit disorienting to stand taller than a house inside a room several times bigger. A gaudy and plastic house, but a house nevertheless. There was still a sense of satisfaction of being able to lean her elbow on the roof, though. Feeling bigger actually wasn’t so bad when she wasn’t squeezed inside walls. Ashley mirrored her position, only on the table. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gina glared up at Ashley, tapping her fingers on the fake shingles. “A dollhouse is a pretty big purchase. If shrinking me is just to make it easier to use me for magical experiments, you don’t need this.” Crouching to look inside the tiny rooms, Gina pointed out, “You even made the effort to furnish it…”

She paused, trailing off as her eyes landed on a little chair. “Oh you fucking piece of shit.”

The spell hit Gina before she could let go of the roof and she yelped as her feet left the table with alarming speed. It was amazing that she didn’t just lose her grip on the roof immediately, but she wished she had. She was getting so small that the roof got too thick for her hands and she slipped off, falling for a (dollhouse-sized) story before Ashley caught her.

She fit quite easily in her palm. As Gina lay there, Ashley’s fingers loomed above. Further up was Ashley’s face, examining her. It glanced away for a moment and then refocused on her as another hand approached, carefully laying something next to her. Gina turned to look. As expected, it was a dollhouse chair. “Looks exactly the same,” Ashley said, looking satisfied. The chair ascended away and Gina took the chance to push herself to her feet.

Ashley’s fingers were still taller than her, even curled protectively as they were. Gina glared at this insult. “You don’t have any smaller chairs, right?”

Ashley sighed, forlorn. The exhale pushed Gina into her finger. “If only.”

“So, we’re done here?” Gina said, standing up again only to fall back on her butt when Ashley moved her down to the table. Ashley chuckled before depositing her in front of the dollhouse and hooking the door open with a pinky. Of course.

Approaching the dollhouse made it apparent that she was relatively small for it. Not terribly small, thankfully, but probably something like kid-sized. The doorway was just about twice her height. Inside was similarly scaled. Gina meandered around tables that reached as far as her shoulders and counters that her head could barely peek over, all colored different shades of pink. The cabinets were all stickers. Some of them were starting to peel — maybe Ashley got this from a secondhand store.

Gina staggered up the stairs, having to hoist herself up some of the steps. These hadn’t been made to be used by anybody, of course, and the architecture was a little off. Ignoring the smooth plastic bed, she strolled up to a window and peered out at a giant eye. God, she even had to strain a bit just to look out a window. Of a goddamn dollhouse. Being too small for a toddler’s chair seemed pretty okay now. This was far more humiliating. “How long are you gonna keep me like this, huh?”

“Just a little longer,” the eye replied. “I want to see you struggle some more. It’s cute.”

“That’s the second villainous thing you’ve said today. In the span of, like, ten minutes.”

“Well if I’m so villainous, maybe I’ll just keep you in there.”

“And pay the rent without my salary?”

Ashley paused. “Good point.”

“Glad you understand.”

“But I still don’t know where I’m gonna find a six foot chair.”

“Ashley…”