“So, I’m learning enchantments,” was what Ashley opened with before chucking a ball at Gina’s head.

There was a bright flash of light, and then Gina found herself curled up in a cramped space with barely any room to move. She had never considered herself claustrophobic, but this was putting up a very convincing argument for it.

“Ashley!” Gina shouted, but stopped herself from saying anything more because what if there was limited air in here? But that thought made her breathe even faster, and she twisted herself into a better position to start kicking out at the walls around her. Two solid stomps, and she caught sight of a crack and concentrated her efforts there. And with a few more whacks, half of the room snapped off and she sat up, gasping, only to topple onto the floor because her sudden movement rocked the hemisphere underneath her too far.

Before she could get her bearings, two huge pillars of arms shot down to either side of her at the same time that a pair of knees crashed in front, causing such a quake that Gina bounced into the air and landed in a graceless heap.

“Holy shit, you broke it,” Ashley whined, bringing the two halves of the ball she had thrown up to her face. Gina sat up again, looking around, at the wide expanse of their apartment and the towering form of Ashley. It looked like she was maybe six inches tall.

Gina had never been so small so suddenly — it had only ever been increments, enough time to settle into a size before getting somewhat smaller. To go from six feet to six inches in a flash was dizzying, even if she had been even smaller than this in the past. She couldn’t stop twitching and glancing around, at distant furniture, at floating dust, at the course carpet. It was all much too overwhelming. Well, at least her clothes shrank with her this time.

“Man…now I have to make another one,” Ashley said, forlorn.

“Ashley! Why am I small?!”

She glanced down. “Oh, you are. Didn’t expect that.” Ashley scooped Gina into a hemisphere from behind, sweeping her off her feet. Gina gripped the sides of her seat as she found herself ascending to Ashley’s face. “I mean, you would have been full-sized if you were released normally, but you broke the capsule instead. So that’s probably why you stayed small. Really, it’s your fault.”

“My fault?!” Gina spluttered as she tried to find a comfortable way to sit in her perch. There was no back to lean against, and it was too small for her to tuck her legs in. The height of the wall forced her to almost lie down completely so that her legs could bend over the lip, but staying in this position was going to make her back sore, she could tell. “You basically threw a pokeball at me!”

“I prefer to call it a portable transport sphere. PortaSphere, maybe.” Ashley wasn’t even looking at her anymore, instead pulling out her notebook and starting to write something down. The problem was, she wasn’t paying attention to how she was holding Gina up, and her hand was absentmindedly starting to tilt.

Gina tried to scrabble backwards (upwards?) from the edge. “Ashley!”

“Whoops.” Ashley tilted her hand back. “Man. I can’t write one-handed like this. Alright.” Without explaining, Ashley plucked Gina up, rolled her on her back, and placed her between her lips, like a pencil, before continuing to write.

Gina stayed there for a second, flummoxed, staring at the sheer cliffside of Ashley’s nose. She considered flailing and demanding to be put down, but the drop dissuaded her. At least Ashley wasn’t using her teeth, though Gina could still sort of feel them behind the folded lips, pressing on her midsection. The regular breath from Ashley’s nose kept tickling her as well. And her tongue was pushing against her side, which meant she was going to have to change her shirt when this was over. Gina’s only consolation was that she was definitely too big for Ashley to accidentally swallow her.

Gina was stuck in this position, uncomfortably close to Ashley’s mouth, for about a minute, before Ashley finally took her out. She didn’t put her down yet, though, just held her loosely in her hand, her pinky hooked around a leg and her thumb pressing on a boob. “Alright,” she said, eyes directed at Gina again. Gina grimaced at the attention. Everything wasn’t as overwhelming, but she wasn’t fully calmed down yet. “So what was your experience?”

“Can’t you grow me back first? You don’t need me to be small. You didn’t even expect me to be small in the first place.”

Ashley pursed her lips in thought. “Well. I’m still peeved that you broke my PortaSphere.”

“You’re peeved?” Gina grumbled. But she wasn’t gonna get any closer to full size by complaining. “It was really cramped. I could barely move.”

Ashley grinned. “So you’re saying…”

Gina realized her mistake as Ashley trailed a circle on her belly with a finger. “No, don’t you dare — “

“…you needed to be smaller?” Gina felt herself withdrawing into her clothes as Ashley’s hand started to engulf her body. Her socks disappeared into her sweatpants before dropping off her feet and down a height she could barely fathom, destined to be lost on the floor. Her pants bunched around her ankles before following suit. Her shirt only stayed on by the grace of Ashley’s expanding fingers, which kept it in place while her arms disappeared into the fabric. Her collar drooped past her chest, however, so her modesty certainly didn’t stay intact. Her feet now dangled without any support. The only things holding her up were Ashley’s tree-sized finger and thumb pinching her sides.

To Gina’s dismay, this was starting to become untrue, as Ashley slowly shifted her grip so that she was just pinching a sleeve. Given how small Gina had gotten, she immediately started slipping out the bottom of the shirt, only saved by clinging to the fabric. “Ashley!” she wailed, upset. Mostly because she was now dangling at a terrifying height, but partly because she was now fully naked again.

Ashley lowered her until her feet touched the cool plastic of the PortaSphere again, then let go of the shirt. It fell on top of Gina, immediately knocking her down with the sudden weight. As she struggled under her own shirt, Ashley closed the other half of the sphere on top and turned it this way and that, examining it. “Looks perfect,” she announced, opening the sphere again. Gina, tangled up in her shirt after getting tossed and rolled around, couldn’t help but disagree.

Ashley rolled Gina back into her hand, giggling as Gina thrashed her way free of the shirt. “Having trouble with your own clothes? Imagine getting lost in mine.”

“I’d rather not.”

Ashley shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

After a dizzying trip downwards, Gina found herself sliding off Ashley’s hand and onto a different surface, slightly bumpy, like a milder sort of gravel, but pale. Noticing a blue line spanning across the ground, she deduced that Ashley had set her down on her notebook.

“Okay, so what else? Clearly you were still aware. Did you feel numb? Hungry? Cold? Whatever comes to mind.”

“I mean…I wasn’t thinking much about any of that. Mostly about how cramped it was. I was afraid I’d suffocate. But I guess the plastic did feel cold and hard — “ The words had hardly left Gina’s lips before a tall, metal pillar crashed down on her right, making her yelp. It moved towards her in a sort of zigzag, making a loud grinding sound throughout. Gina pedaled away from it and then jumped out of its way. Only when she looked back was she able to recognize it as a pen. Then she got knocked flat by an arm, because of course there was an arm. Pens, by necessity, needed arms.

Ashley looked focused on her writing, but that was definitely a smirk. Bastard. Gina slid all the way to the end of the notebook before Ashley started a new line. At least she didn’t have to worry about being skewered by a pen after that. She draped her shirt around herself and waited.

“…Right. I suppose I’ll either have to make the sphere more robust. Or change the enchantment a bit to prevent this from happening.”

“So what are enchantments?” Gina asked, mostly out of politeness. Besides, if she got Ashley in a happier mood, maybe that would get this over with faster.

As expected, Ashley visibly brightened. “Oh, you see, enchantments are things you place on items to provide some sort of bonus or utility or something. You know, how like in video games there’ll be equipment that’s like, ‘plus two strength’ or it shoots a fireball spell or whatever? It’s like that. It’s really useful for benefiting from spells without having to cast them every single time.”

“Right. So it’s just a good version of a curse.”

“It’s not. Curses inflict themselves on people. Enchantments…maybe the right way to say it is it confers upon a user the benefits only when you’re using it.”

“I’m still not sure that fits this. It’s certainly not equipment,” Gina said, nodding over to the broken ball. Ashley’s eyes narrowed. Maybe it was a bad idea to bring her attention to her ruined project again.

“Oh, well, I was thinking enchantments could provide utility other than simple buffs or accessible spells,” she said, her tone airy. “I mean, if someone’s hurt and you need a safe way to carry them, wouldn’t having a PortaSphere be great? I was even thinking that I could adjust it to heal or invigorate any occupants. Maybe put them in stasis, so they wouldn’t have to worry about hunger or whatever.” Ashley sighed, lowering her hand around Gina like a cage. Her palm rested right on top of Gina’s head, not quite tall enough to give any space. Gina broke into a sweat. “But I suppose that’s on hold until I can rebuild the enchantment and find a proper object.” The cage snapped shut, squeezing Gina lightly, though her legs stuck out of Ashley’s loose fist. She felt her cell turn in the air, so that the ceiling became the floor and vice versa, and then it opened up in front of Ashley’s face once more. Gina was thankful she still had her quilt-like shirt to huddle in.

“Ashley, you’re being a bit…rough,” Gina said slowly. “Can you be more, um, careful? Please?”

“Oh, sure, no problem. What shouldn’t I be doing? This?” And then Ashley tossed her in the air.

It wasn’t a light toss either (though even that would have been pretty significant from Gina’s perspective). It could probably be called a full-on throw. In the next second, Gina found herself tumbling in the air, far above Ashley’s head, and it was only at the apex of her flight that she thought to start screaming.

She landed in Ashley’s cupped hand, bouncing once. Her heart dropped further than that before springing back in place, thumping furiously. Her breath hadn’t quite caught up yet.

“Is this also taboo?” With a start, Gina realized that she was approaching a sheer wall of flesh with alarming speed. It crashed into her, filling her vision, before something else thwacked against her back. It felt like elastic. When she shifted her head and looked up, she could see Ashley’s chin looming directly above. Judging from that, she was probably near her armpit, held in place by a bra strap.

“Ashley, stop it!” Gina wriggled against her restraints, but this was a bad idea. She dislodged herself, and with no proper support, rolled down Ashley’s breast and slid right into her cleavage. She scrabbled at bare skin to no avail — all she managed to do was sink even deeper, until only her head and arms were poking out. Her only solace was that Ashley seemed to be just as surprised, shuddering with a squeak as she struggled in between her breasts. “Come on, you’re being unfair! You can’t just take your anger out on me!”

Thankfully, before Gina could slip all the way down, Ashley dug her out and dangled her in front of her face. Gina just hung there, panting, clinging to Ashley’s thumb as hard as she could, in case this was just a prelude to dropping her or something. As Ashley examined her, her expression became downcast. “You’re right…I’m sorry. This really…god, I’m kinda being a shit.” She finally sat down and set Gina on the coffee table. “I didn’t mean to scare you or anything…well, I guess I kinda did. But I just wanted you to apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?”

Ashley scowled. “For breaking my project!”

Gina spluttered. “But that was an accident! And what did you expect would happen if you just tossed me in there without warning?”

Oh, maybe that was testing Ashley’s patience too much. It was somehow a little too easy to forget how vulnerable she was at the moment, even when she got a reminder only a few minutes ago. Gina braced herself, but Ashley didn’t move towards her, just crossed her arms.

“Well, how would you feel if I accidentally knocked a drink on your computer and broke it, and then I said, ‘Well you shouldn’t have left your drink so close to the computer’ instead of apologizing?”

Oh. Honestly, it was a bit of a false equivalence, but there was a good point in there. Gina sighed, looking down at her feet. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Is there a way I could help fix it?”

“I appreciate the offer, but probably not.” Ashley leaned on her arm, trying not to loom too much over Gina. “It’s gonna be annoying to fix it, but it’s fixable. I just wanted an apology.”

“Alright.” Gina shuffled her feet awkwardly. “Can I be normal size now?”

Ashley huffed. “I guess…”

“You don’t have to look that disappointed.”