Apollo very nearly passed out. It was as if the aggressive, teasing motions of Aura’s tongue had directly rammed every last thought out of his brain, bashing them into submission in some dark, obscure corner. The powerful muscle, effectively the size of his whole body, continued to explore from his midsection to his upper body even as he collapsed against Aura’s lower lip, going limp.

His mind faintly registered the continued tickle of warmth from Aura’s exhales just above him, but nearly all else inside his head had been put on temporary hold.

Apollo was a little bit like an awkwardly-shaped lollipop like this. Aura rolled her eyes with amusement at the sheer ease with which she’d just coaxed him over the edge; already he’d come all over the tiny area of her tongue that his cock was resting on, and now his struggles had halted in a hurry with his body limp in her mouth. At his current size, she could barely even detect anything on her tongue, only the slightest trace of semen striking her notice through her own fluids she’d spent the time lapping off of Apollo’s body.

She glanced backward - the bath wasn’t even halfway filled yet. Aura slipped two fingers beneath Apollo’s limp arms and dragged him slowly out of her mouth, stopping at his knees. “Wasn’t expecting you to feel so at home in my mouth, Apollo,” she dryly remarked. She heard him groan. “Bet you’d do some good for me as a snack...”

His senses had been creeping their way back to him gradually, but all at once Apollo discovered an as-of-yet untapped well of motivation to resist at the feeling of Aura sliding him back inside of her mouth, this time with a finger planted on his face to get him all the way in. His knees bent out of reflex as he suddenly found himself sealed into a pitch-black space, Aura’s lips sealing in his blurry vision.

He made a noise of alarm and shook back to full attention. This only happened just in time for Aura’s huge tongue to flick back and strike his face, finding its way to the side of his neck and beginning another uninhibited exploration of his whole body.

“A-Auraaa!!” Her mouth didn’t afford his voice many places to go, and so it just reverberated painfully around him.

He was running her words through his mind again, and they were not giving him hopeful signals. She couldn’t mean to... Aura wouldn’t actually eat him, would she...? It was completely insane.

Apollo lurched in an attempt to move forward. His left elbow painfully struck against an extremely solid molar and he winced, his blank vision helpfully providing a clear canvas for his imagination to flash up an involuntary vision of Aura’s teeth closing on his arm in a crushing, unstoppable vice-grip and reducing it to--

(Stop, no more of that.)

He banished the mental image, but it was immediately replaced by others just as deeply unpleasant. He hoarsely called out to Aura a few more times, but she just kept on batting at his body and rolling him forcibly around inside the pitch-darkness of her mouth until he was too dizzy to have any hope of finding his way out.

Once she was bored of this activity, Aura stood over her sink and eased Apollo back out of her mouth. He nearly flopped out of her hand before she caught him, transferring him to the sink and moving to turn on the faucet.

Apollo hoarsely shouted what sounded like it was geared up to be a very vulgar sentence for his standards before he was stifled by a blast of warm water from the tap.

Aura ran her hands over his tiny, frantically-breathing body to wash most of the saliva covering him away.

Fitting him into her mouth at all had been a challenge. With Apollo presently standing at around six inches tall, she’d needed to make him curl up a little in there just to get her lips closed over him.

“Oh, simmer down, Apollo,” she said, running a fingertip over his head. By now, all of their activities had washed every last trace of his hair gel away, leaving his brown hair a messy mop all over the place. “I wasn’t about to make myself choke to death on you.”

When she held Apollo with his face out of the stream of water for a bit, he managed an outburst at last.

“A-Aura, I’m-- d-damn it, I said I’m done, just let me go home already!”

She considered it. “So, head outside and leave your puny arse out in the car park? I’d get a laugh out of it, but I think we both know it’s better if you let me finish up here before I let you find your way home.”

Aura looked back over her shoulder, ignoring whatever Apollo said next. The tub was getting close to full enough now. There was just a little more time to kill.

“Speaking of your arse, Apollo,” She gave it a light pinch to a generally negative vocal reaction, “it’s gorgeous. Is it all that time on your bike?”

On his back in her palm, Apollo irritably kicked her fingertip to shove it away. He looked adorably frustrated.

“Hey,” she said, lifting him up to near her face, “let’s compare.”

“What...?”

Aura heard no more from Apollo as she let her arm swing down to her side, no doubt dizzyingly rushing him along like a rollercoaster. She spun on her heel and lowered herself to the floor, settling on her front with Apollo still secure in her grip. With both hands en route to her lower body, she gave an amused sigh. Yes, it was excessive, but Apollo still had enough in him to provide a bit more fun for her before she thought about letting him go.

“F-fuck, no, I’m not-- aaugh!!”

Apollo was launched forward, tumbling into a space he very much did not want to visit.

Aura had dropped onto her front on the bathroom floor, bringing him down to her backside, where her stained panties were only loosely covering her rear, and with only a second for her other hand to slip the undergarment away from her skin, she carelessly flicked her wrist to toss him onto her exposed ass.

He crumpled on the spot, landing with his face directly between the soft, twin domes of Aura’s ass cheeks. He jerkily rolled to one side to get leverage against one side of Aura’s rear, pushing off with both hands. After all the shit she’d put him through already since he made the horrible, horrible mistake of letting her play with his size, all those humiliating abuses, he was not about to put up with Aura rubbing him all over her ass.

“Ah, ah...” Aura could be heard chiding him. Apollo managed to get one bare foot down in the gorge between his hostess’s cheeks and push himself upright, but the low ceiling of her panties resisted his effort to stand, his shoulders and head pushing against the tent-like fabric.

Aura struck him from behind with a fingertip, and he awkwardly flopped onto his front all over again. Worse yet, he was deeper into the back of her panties now. He found his midsection wedged uncomfortably into the plush gorge Aura had sentenced him to, with his arms much less able to push off of anything now that he was staring down a declining slope toward her thigh gap.

The scent of sweat was filling his lungs again. Aura’s probing fingertip touched down on his back and slid down to plant itself on his ass, where it teasingly wriggled back and forth a bit. Aura said something, but at this point Apollo was too deep in the back of her underwear to hear it properly from beneath the fabric ceiling of her panties.

He muttered several dejected swear words just in time for Aura to make things worse. Not entirely unlike when he’d been wedged down her top, between her breasts, Aura began to squeeze at her ass from both sides, sandwiching his body between the cushy masses of her posterior and locking him in place even more completely. Aura kneaded him back and forth for a short while, and the best Apollo could do was squirm and utter muffled protests, the soreness in his limbs creeping quickly back to remind him of the feeling that his arms and legs were ready to fall off and be replaced with less damaged ones.

Aura stopped, and by this point, Apollo had at long last retired the idea that she couldn’t easily find a way to make his situation any worse. His choice was validated a second later, when one of Aura’s hands could be felt re-entering the back of her panties. A solid index finger came down on his shoulders from behind, and Apollo’s eyes shot open wide in horrified comprehension.

He screamed, but only for a split-second before Aura pushed his face right down into the sickening company of her anus.

Aura indulged herself with a laugh at the immediately renewed energy Apollo discovered when she pinned his tiny face against the opening. He barely had room to do anything in there at all, and yet his flailing, protesting movements had suddenly returned in full force.

This had gone on long enough by now; the bath was adequately filled, and at this point she was just bullying Apollo for no real reason. Showing mercy, she dragged him back out of her panties, running his tiny face all the way up through the space between her cheeks, and got to her feet. Without looking at Apollo, she flicked her wrist to toss him into the bath. While he disappeared with a light splash, she slipped her underwear down to leave it on the floor and stepped into the water for herself.

Apollo might have vomited again if his mental faculties hadn’t so quickly needed to switch focus over to preparing to crash down in a small lake.

Aura was evil. There didn’t seem to be any two ways about it - he had made the mistake of handing his shrunken self over to an evil woman because of a stupid sexual fantasy he hadn’t been firm enough to shake, and this was his due for it. Whatever cruel, humiliating, and unbearably uncomfortable whims Aura felt any urge to subject him to, he couldn’t stop them. It was strange how much self-reflection one could be forced into feeling by the sensation of spending a few seconds having one’s face forcibly buried in the contours of an anus the size of a throw pillow.

He splashed into the bathwater after Aura let go of his ankle, and his spluttering return to the surface came just in time for Apollo to watch Aura’s towering, gorgeous legs descend into the bath with him.

Many of those who knew Apollo knew that he was not a talented swimmer. Certain traumatic experiences in his recent past had led him to practice more, and he had improved, but still he splashed and gasped on the surface of the bath for half the time it took Aura to settle down in the water, her entry causing ripples powerful enough to drag Apollo around with them. Once he recovered and managed to settle into awkwardly treading water, he found himself looking across a short space to Aura’s upper body.
Her large breasts were half-submerged, the shifting water tracing over them and the rest of her body outstretched beneath the surface, bringing to mind the sight of fallen and forgotten trees at the bottom of a lake. Once his gaze flashed by the trimmed tuft of Aura’s violet pubic hair, he tore his eyes away to finally look up at her face overhead.

Aura sat in the bath with one arm resting on the tub’s edge, bent at the elbow to let her lean a cheek against her fist.

“Should’ve brought you a raft,” she said. “let me know if you’re getting tired.”

He was already tired. Exhausted and sore all over, in fact. Aura probably knew that and just wanted to balance any moment not actively spent toying with him with verbal teasing.

Was this evening with her almost over? There was an aggravatingly sensible voice in the back of Apollo’s mind telling him that he’d had literally no discernible reason to believe that deliberately allowing himself to be shrunk in size again would result in anything but misery, and he sighed in frustration at recognizing he was indeed angry at himself foremost for letting his sexual urges get him into this easily-avoidable situation in complete, abject defiance of his better judgment.

To his surprise, Aura seemed to notice his exhausted paddling and crossed one of her legs over the other, positioning the higher of the two in such a way that he could settle his feet on her skin and stand in the water, the ripples just bobbing around his chest. His breaths made him shudder, and he closed his eyes, waiting for the aching soreness he felt in nearly every inch of muscle in his body to melt away in the considerable warmth of the bathwater.

“Hm.”

Aura didn’t say anything else, choosing for the moment only to observe Apollo. She tried to keep her leg steady under him as she slipped a fairly new bar of soap from its little shelf above the bath’s edge. Running it over her left arm, she mused over the events of the evening. Whatever subconscious, horny feelings had brought Apollo to her door this evening, carrying in hand the perfect tool for allowing her to take complete and utter advantage of him, she supposed they had probably been beaten to death by now.

She was still feeling the same light buzz from the wine she’d gone through. It was good that she hadn’t had any more, although in any case she felt a bit like she ought to have used the toilet before settling into her bath.

She finished running the soap over her arms, and her eyes fell back on Apollo. He could certainly stand to be cleaned, after everywhere he’d been this evening, but of course, there were certain higher priorities to consider.

“Hey,” she said, making him twitch in his spot on her leg, “new job for you.”

With that, she snatched Apollo from his spot and adjusted her position. Moving to flatten her upper body a bit, she deposited Apollo onto her right breast. With her other hand, she flicked some soap suds in his direction. They splashed randomly onto her skin and his body.

“Make yourself useful, would you?” She pushed the soap to her breast and slid it along her skin, forcing Apollo to scramble awkwardly onto it to avoid being knocked over. Smirking, she let him get upright again. “There, you’re all set. Think of it like you’re scrubbing a floor, and get all those suds everywhere you can reach.”

Apollo hesitated, first looking down at the layer of soap suds now coating his front and then blinking in disbelief at her. “Sure…” he grumbled.

Satisfied, Aura relaxed, leaving Apollo to get down on his hands and knees to scrub the soap suds all over her breast. “Hit the other after you’re done,” she added, and closed her eyes.

Apollo worked in silence, the soreness in his limbs creeping back, particularly in his legs as he sat on his knees. He resisted the urge to outright glare at his half-erect cock between his legs. Even after everything Aura had subjected him to, he couldn’t ignore the fact that he was getting a hands-on experience with her incredible breasts all over again, and Aura wasn’t even smacking him around or forcing him inside of her anywhere this time.

His skin felt sticky in the lightly steamy bath air. Even if he got himself cleaned up like this, he would be sweaty the moment he was towelled off. Still, for the moment his generous coating of soap suds had any scent of sweat effectively extinguished.

He lurched, making a startled grunting sound at a sudden touch to his back. Aura audibly chuckled to herself.

“Take it easy, Apollo,” she said. She had brought up one index fingertip to gently rub it over his back. It was… oddly disconcerting to register she was actually being gentle with her touch.

Continuing until he had to move over to Aura’s other breast, Apollo took in the sight of her violet hair fanning out in the bath all around her. Despite all she’d put him through this evening, Aura was, he still couldn’t deny to himself, a stunning woman in the looks department. Fairly tall (certainly taller than he was), in good shape, and had a particularly toned upper body thanks to over a decade of physical engineering work with her robotics equipment. She had beautiful hair she maintained very well, and, of course, her tits were gigantic. More than he liked to admit, that last detail had to be one of the primary culprits in his ending up here this evening at the behest of his frustrating sex drive.

(Well, Justice, you complete horny dumbass, that just landed you one of the most humiliating, miserable evenings of your entire life, and you’re gonna be lucky if it’s even over yet. Aura must still have six or seven places left she’d find it funny to shove your face…)

He felt a distinct aversion to the idea of getting his hands near Aura’s nipples at this stage, the idea of her starting to become sufficiently aroused to restart her… use of him enough to act as a deterrent, but on Aura’s urging he did so.

“Alright, out,” she said once he had finished his assigned job of washing both of her breasts. His palms felt like they were going to end up uncomfortably dry and raw. Aura set him on the edge of the bath, a bit of water still dripping at his feet. He sat down, waiting as his hostess began to put on a deliberate show of running the soap over the rest of her body. He caught a malicious smirk on her face in the split-second he spent turning away when she lifted a leg high off the bath floor to wash it, water running smoothly down her skin.

In a few minutes, Apollo was down on the bathroom floor, very pointedly refusing to look up at Aura looming over him. She had dropped a small hand towel on the floor and moved him down to it before grabbing her own towel to dry off.

It was silly, Apollo recognized as he did his best to towel himself off with the cloth, to feel all that emasculated by the way Aura simply stood over him now, very deliberately positioning her towering legs on either side of him. This was easily one of the least humiliating actions she’d taken toward him in their evening together. Still, considering everything else the roboticist had done up to this point, it was hard not to feel concerned that a far worse amusement at his expense wasn’t far from her mind.

He spotted a single wiry violet hair lying on the floor near him and grimaced slightly. It was clearly a loose pubic hair. The sight brought his mind back to the very, very brief period of hazy, blissful arousal he had experienced when first dropped into Aura’s panties, before she had given him such a brutal reminder that he was only having any kind of sexual experience with her entirely on her terms. For a stupid moment, his mind flashed to the question of what the evening might have been like had he simply come over to Aura’s place without the Skye Device. Would she have laughed in his face and turned him away? Dragged him to her bedroom for…

Fortunately for him, a different thought heroically arrived to beat the previous one to death and hurl it out a window of his brain; assuming Aura didn’t suddenly have the brainwave for some other new and horrible way to torment him, she was finally about to call the evening done and restore his size.

(… OK, heck of an assumption to make, but hey, there’s still something to be said for optimism…)

He didn’t feel clean. Well, parts of him did, but Aura hadn’t ever really let him wash up properly, just dropping him into the water for a short time and then putting him to work cleaning her body instead. Two reasons for taking a cold shower as soon as he got home.

The floor thudded around him occasionally with the upward and downward motions of Aura’s feet as she went about drying her towering legs. Apollo was struck with a stray droplet now and then, and each time he groaned and re-dried the affected area of his body.

When at last Aura finished with her own bath towel, she closed her fingers around his sides and carried him away for the... he’d forgotten how many times this evening it had happened, actually. To his relief, she was a bit more careful about the motion this time, sparing him the usual dizzying rush upward.

“Nine,” Aura said once he was dangling in front of her face.

Apollo hesitated. Nine...? What did she mean by “nine”? Was it nine o’clock already? There was no way. Sure, he felt like the torment Aura had elected to put him through had gone on forever, but there was absolutely no way it had been seven hours since he grabbed the Skye Device from Athena’s bag in the office, so-

“Earth to Apollo,” Aura went on, “I didn’t knock your brain loose at some point, did I?”

“Uh...”

Aura rolled her eyes, giving an amused sigh. A damp lock of her violet hair fell from its place and crossed over her cheek. “You’re a nine,” she said, “but what the hell - let’s say I get you back here sometime, maybe you can bump that score up.”

(I’m-...) He registered the meaning after a second and resisted the urge to groan.

“Free advice - wouldn’t hurt you to show a little more enthusiasm next time. All that protesting when this whole thing was your idea is a bit of a turn-off.”

Back in the main room of Aura’s quarters, Apollo was set down on a coffee table. In previous, less... distressing visits to Aura’s place, he’d sat down on the small couch which now sat at the far end of a huge gorge of space before him.

Aura had put a set of panties back on, but Apollo was uncomfortably confident they were the exact same ones he’d been inside of not all that long ago. They had to still be damp, and in all likelihood sticky. Didn’t she have other sets to wear? She was otherwise wearing a very, very worn-looking t-shirt - like the tank top she’d worn earlier, it was emblazoned with the familiar GYAXA logo, although this one was so faded it had practically disappeared.

After finding the Skye Device over on her desk, Aura approached him to move him down to the floor.

“Right,” she said, “about time for you to shove off anyway.”

Apollo stared up at the staggering sight of Aura’s full height looming over him like an office tower once more. For the last time this evening, thank God. Actually, the last time he ever would, he was confident. In fact, he felt like he needed at least a few weeks of no contact with Aura Blackquill at all. The nighttime fantasies he had failed to subdue that drove him to put himself into the position he now stood ready to finally escape from were dead and buried, and unless he suffered some kind of brain injury so severe as to destroy his capacity for reason, Aura Blackquill would never touch the Skye Device again.

“One, two, three-”

...

Apollo blinked. Aura was pointing the device right at him, but nothing was happening. She had pulled the trigger, hadn’t she? Was--

A twisting lurch in his stomach nearly caused him to double over. He felt like someone on control of his life had just slammed their hands down on half the keys of a piano at once, producing a horrible, discordant tone of dread. A sweeping wave of cold seemed to crawl all the way up his body in spite of the room’s heated floor.

Above him, Aura twisted the Skye Device around in her grip, puzzled. Apollo’s vision blurred for a moment, Aura’s towering figure becoming a haze before swimming back into shape.

“Is there-... oh.”

Automatically, Apollo’s gaze turned to the spot he remembered standing in when Aura had first reduced him to this size. He couldn’t have... there was no way, he would’ve heard it clattering on the--

There. His breath escaped in a horrible, shuddering gasp. Across the wide expanse of the floor he could see a single one of the power cells Ema had designed for the Skye Device. The cells only ejected when they were spent, and that meant...

(B-but Athena wouldn’t just... why would she just have it there with only one charge, she wouldn’t be able to reverse-...)

Aura’s laughter forced him back to attention.

“Well, fuck!” the roboticist said, sounding so amused it ought to have been illegal. She crouched toward him, her body seeming to take up so much room she could’ve been encircling him entirely. Apollo’s knees nearly gave out. “Apollo, if you wanted to stay with me all night, you didn’t need to be so shy about saying it.”

No. No. This was not going to happen.

“Aura, I...” He cursed quietly. Aura just gazed down at him, waiting. His instinct was to start whatever he was going to say with the word “please”, but that would just make it even easier for Aura to pounce on a sign of weakness or uncertainty. “I... I swear there was still at least one more charge in that thing, so...”

What the hell was he supposed to do? He’d stolen the Skye Device from Athena’s bag to start this entire mess, but it might as well have been an empty tin can for all the use it provided without a power cell. He stood there in silence, desperate to think of anything, until Aura interrupted.

“Sounds like you need my help,” she said, “and you know what? I think I’m feeling a rare spark of generosity.”

Aura stood upright again, her socked feet shuffling around before him with her balance.

“Suppose I’ll just... give the little princess a call, let her know what’s happened.”

Apollo wouldn’t have believed the horrible feeling twisting around inside of him could possibly have gotten worse before this moment, but here it was.

“She won’t mind coming ‘round to help you out, right?”

He would’ve protested, but Aura had already turned on the spot to go and retrieve her phone. As she moved, she clearly made a deliberate motion to let her ass sway with her steps. Apollo stared after her for a second before sinking to the ground in defeat. Athena was... she was going to find out about everything. She was going to know he’d taken the device from her bag, and that he’d brought it here with the express purpose of letting Aura shrink and have her way with him. He could lie, but what possible good would it do? There wasn’t much point in trying to argue the fact that he was right here, in Aura’s private quarters, nude at six inches tall. Aura couldn’t exactly have brought the thing here herself, much less talked him into whatever this had been.

(Well. ... I guess Athena’s respected me for a good while, at least... Nice while it lasted...)

He winced, forcing his eyes shut at the sound of Aura’s voice.

“Athena.”

This was it - he was absolutely never going to live this down.

“Yeah, listen - I’m not exactly excited to be calling you, Princess, but we need to talk. ... Is there anything of yours missing?”

Apollo felt a bit like curling up in a small corner somewhere to just die, forgotten. Aura could be heard prodding Athena along a bit more until she seemed to arrive at what she wanted.

“Right - as a matter of fact, it’s actually in my hand right now.”

Apollo winced again, hearing a faint sound of Athena reacting over the phone in her customary loud manner to any such unexpected piece of information.

“Mmhmm... oh, please, as if I’d stick my neck out just for that. Apollo took it, actually. ... And brought it to me, yeah - you should’ve heard him; I guess that whole mess you two got into at my place really stuck in his horny little brain. He came running over here, handing the thing over and begging me to use it on him.”

He resented Aura’s use of the word “begging”, but not as much as he resented the fact that it was true. He stopped listening moments later, when Aura began to describe what she’d done with him this evening. He could practically hear the vile grin on her face.

When Aura came strolling back over to him, she crouched at his position, her huge body consuming all the space around him yet again. He shakily looked up, his gaze tracing past Aura’s thighs (and yes, her panties definitely were still damp...) and her bulging chest to reach her smug face.

“Well, sounds like Athena will be over soon to pick you up. Tonight was fun, Apollo; if you ever want another round, feel free to come on over and throw yourself at my feet again.”

Apollo maintained eye contact, Aura’s much larger, grey eyes fixed with amusement on him. She was probably giving him a second to think of something to say. He didn’t have anything.

After a moment, she shrugged. “Nothing? Then let’s just get you back off that floor...”

Her fingers circled around him and the familiar lurch of vertigo set back in, Aura back to taking little caution with her speed.

“I should tidy up - you left your things everywhere. If you weren’t so small, I’d tell you to pick up your shit for yourself, but this once I’ll take care of it. As for you, get comfy.”

Aura’s other hand was sliding down to brush over the waist of her panties.

Athena clenched her fists at her sides, and then relaxed them again. She’d done this at least... six times.

She was staring at the door to Aura’s quarters. She hadn’t done anything else since arriving. Aura had to still be inside, waiting.

(... With Apollo.)

She repressed a shudder. Maybe it wasn’t impossible that Aura was just messing with her. This whole idea was so messed up - Apollo was a bit of a weirdo sometimes, but he wouldn’t just steal the Skye Device for the sole purpose of...

This time she couldn’t stop herself shuddering. Whenever technology got around to the point of being able to target specific memories and erase them from a person’s brain, she had a few new additions to the list of things to permanently blast from her mind. It was impossible not to remember Aura’s vivid, awful descriptions of everything she said she’d... used Apollo for since he’d...

Well, the fact that the Skye Device was definitely missing from her bag and not anywhere else in the office seemed to erase most possibilities besides “Apollo stole it”, and the only way Aura would know that had happened would be for Apollo to have told her.

So what, did he get some weird, perverse enjoyment out of the experiences he’d been through both of the previous times he’d been accidentally shrunk? She didn’t even want to approach the mentality behind that. Psychology skills or otherwise, Athena wanted no detailed knowledge of what got her friend and co-worker Apollo turned on, least of all when it had come from a protracted series of near-death experiences.

Shaking her head (and accomplishing absolutely none of the mind-clearing she hoped to in the process), she brought up a hand to tap on the wall panel interface that acted as Aura’s doorbell. She waited, and the door slid open.

Aura was dressed for bed, by the look of her tattered t-shirt and pajama pants. Her violet hair wasn’t tied up in its usual display like an ancient TV’s rabbit-ear antenna, but instead hanging freely down her back in a similar way to how Athena’s own did when she neglected her favourite ponytail. She looked... well, not drunk outright, but like she had a few drinks in her, at the very least.

“Hm. Got here quicker’n I expected, Princess,” Aura remarked. She leaned lazily against the doorframe. In one hand, she had the Skye Device dangling from her fingertip by its trigger guard. “Here.”

Aura flicked her wrist, and Athena hastily threw her hands up to catch the device. Glancing it over, suddenly halfway suspicious that the roboticist had tampered with it somehow before concluding it was unchanged, Athena stuffed it into her bag.

“Well, go on,” Aura said after a moment passed in silence. She waved a hand. “Fuck off.”

Athena let out a tired breath. She’d driven all the way here in an incredibly embarrassed, unsettled mood, and wasn’t in any state to be generous toward Aura’s attitude. She arched an eyebrow.

“And Apollo?”

Another moment passed. Aura laughed.

“Oh, alright,” she said, “thought you might just decide he was better off with me, but fine.”

Whatever Athena had expected next, it wasn’t Aura stuffing a hand shamelessly down the front of her pajama pants, her wrist tugging her panties away from her skin before she retrieved the wriggling form of Apollo from inside of her underwear.

Athena couldn’t help it - her mouth fell open in disbelief at the sight of her shrunken friend coming into view in Aura’s grip, completely naked and having obviously just been snugly pinned beneath Aura’s crotch until he was retrieved.

“Take him, I’ve had my fun.”

Athena was almost surprised to find her hands hovering before her, ready as Aura deposited Apollo in her grip.

“Toodles.”

With that, the door to Aura’s quarters zipped shut. Athena blinked, just standing there with a very small, naked co-worker in her hands. She finally looked down.

Apollo was pointedly avoiding eye contact. He didn’t say anything, either. Athena waited several seconds. What the fuck was she supposed to say? Apollo could be stupid sometimes, but this? What could she possibly say in a situation like the one he’d now put her into?

“A-”

She didn’t even get a syllable out before the door in front of her opened again. Athena saw Aura for only a second and a half before something collided with her face, blinding her. She stumbled, protesting, but by the time she got Apollo secured in one hand and pulled the item obscuring her face away (Apollo’s jeans?), the door was already shut again. Her ears pricked at the sound of something rattling on the floor. She had to chase Apollo’s bracelet for a moment to retrieve it, and finally she flopped to the floor, her back to the wall.

Apollo was now sitting atop a messy pile of his own clothes, in her lap. Athena stared down at him, immensely relieved no one else was in the corridor. There were no security cameras in the immediate vicinity to see them, either. Apollo was using both hands to hold up a fold of fabric over his crotch. Athena had never seen his face so very red all at once, nor his entire being so completely clammed up in shame and total humiliation. She might have felt sorry for him, if it hadn’t been for... everything. Apollo had created this situation for himself and now she was stuck rescuing him from it, and--

... Was he damp? She had a sudden and intense urge to puke, not to mention wash her hands. Twice. Apollo was a complete mess, and if even half of what Aura had described was fact, he was probably still soaked with some truly unspeakable things. Athena took a breath, steadying herself.

“... Okay, Apollo. First, what... second, the ffffuck?”

THE END