When it comes to exercise, what do you do? Sports? Gym equipment? Something else?

When it came to sports, I had a preference for basketball back in high school, but I was never stuck with it so I never was on a team. Even so, it was a fun way to get a workout in with friends on campus. And when it came to going to a gym, heading to one always gave plenty of options to work out whatever part of my body that I wanted. All you have to do is ask someone or search up online how to use the equipment properly. And with our university, the campus gym was free for students to use. 

Of course, there were other methods too and some of these could be done without having to head to a gym. Going for a jog or a walk around the neighborhood could be refreshing, which was Lori’s preference.  Indoor exercise was a possibility too. There were video games nowadays that promoted exercise, and, because Lori had made sure to buy those, we occasionally played them together. Aside from that, Lori had a yoga mat and exercise ball stored in the closet because she occasionally did yoga, and I had my own personal weight set at home too. We’d sometimes motivate each other into working out together.

Of course, that was all before I was 3 inches tall at the apartment. I was limited to exercising outside of the home because there was no way I’d be able to operate a game controller or lift my weights when shrunken. Honestly, going around the house while tiny was exercise enough, but it was a bit of a nuisance to be unable to workout the way I wanted to when I wanted to…

… at least until now.

“Ten… Eleven… Twelve…! Done! That’s the sixth set.”

“...Sixth? Six sets of twelve… 72? Wow. You did so many, Remy? You sure are strong…”

“Err… It’s not really much, Alice, especially compared to what you’re holding.”

“Huh? But this is only a three pounder…?”

Wham!

I was grateful I had gotten off my bench because, as soon as Alice dropped the pink dumbbell onto the box I was on, the shrunken barbell with a combined weight of 160 pounds I had been using was knocked off the rack and fell off with a heavy clang that sadly was not was impactful as Alice’s normal sized dumbbell.

After Lori figured out a way to use Aunt Shelly’s machine to shrink my weight set without damaging the device, I was finally able to use my weight set again. While I would’ve preferred we leave everything in my dollhouse, we still hadn’t finished shrinking the heavier weights down, so Lori had placed them on an empty cookie tin in front of the machine temporarily. I had impatiently wanted to start lifting again now that I had the chance, so I went ahead and started in our public living space anyways.

“Nggnn~! It’s a three pounder to you, Alice, but that thing’s probably a couple dozen tons to Remy,” Lori answered Alice’s question while seated on a yoga mat right beside my box. 

“Eh…?” Alice gasped in surprise.

“No kidding. It felt like a truck just fell from the sky for a second there. I’d do more than 160 pounds if we had shrunken down the bigger weights, but I’m not insane enough to use a non shrunken weight,” I agreed with my sister but also started to cover my nose now that I was done with my sixth set. “But seriously, Sis. Did you have to put your feet so close?”

The low lying cookie tin was only half way up Lori’s foot, so I was in the shadow of the rest of it as it stood high up above me like a wall. My own sweat wasn’t a big deal for me, but my sister’s foot sweat and stench stung my nose.

“Just deal with it. I’m switching to my next pose soon anyways…” Lori replied. She was doing yoga in her black sports bra and turquoise yoga pants. Unlike Alice who had only been watching, my big sister was joining me in exercising.

“I’m surprised…,” Alice remarked. “...Do you two usually work out together?”

“Sometimes. I thought Lori had plans for today, but she just plopped right next to me after I started,” I answered Alice while walking back to the center of the cookie tin. The collapsed barbell was going to be a pain to pick up, “Oh boy, this’ll be a pain getting back on.”

I tried to think of how to get the fallen barbell back onto the rack safely. Just when I thought to slide off the weights that I had added, Alice’s fingers descended from up above. The 180 pound barbell was pinched between her fingers like a twig and lifted up the same way she would have picked up a lollipop. Honestly, Alice could have snapped the entire bar like a toothpick if she tried. Even she was surprised at how light the shrunken barbell I had been using to train my muscles was to her. She picked the ground crushing 3 pound dumbbell she had plopped onto the tin earlier and compared the two.

“Wow…! The weight difference is super insane. This was heavy for you, Remy? It only feels as heavy as a nickel…”

“You’re just that strong in comparison, Alice,” I didn’t deny how weak being shrunken made me. Seeing Alice scoop up the rest of my shrunken weight set in her hand and hold them with ease like they were pebbles was a bit emasculating, but I had learned of the power difference between us by now. 

 “Oh right… I guess that’s true,” Alice knew of it too. She kneeled back down and picked each and every dumbbell and barbell weight off of her hand one by one like a piece of candy. She rearranged the entire weight set with no effort whatsoever and started playing with my barbell between her fingers like she would a pencil. “Somehow, that makes it cute seeing how hard you were trying to lift this, Remy… Here.”

“Cute? Give me a break,” While I would have normally been happy to see Alice smiling, I realized she was actually teasing me. Even when she lowered the barbell back down to the rack, she pulled it back up for a split second the same way a bully would dangle something just out of reach. “Hey, that’s uncool. Give that back, Alice.”

“... Okay, Remy,” Alice giggled when she finally put it back. She was treating me lightly. Now satisfied with inspecting what I was doing, she stood back up to her full height. Her legs stretched high up above me and her face became completely distant. If I had to be honest, while Alice was certainly talking to me more, there was a gap between us that this highlighted. 

“Jeez, you sure are a bully Alice. Just because I can’t win a fight against your toes doesn’t mean you should show off how much strong you are than me,” I purposefully played the victim.

“...Hey, Remy! I said I was sorry for throwing you in a second time…!” Alice huffed, thinking I was still angry about what had happened the previous week.

“I wasn’t talking about that. I’m just being objective here. I can’t even lift a pencil at this size,” I replied, knowing full well I had riled her up. “Although it was a pain to that stench off me…”

“Oh yeah, it must’ve been nasty with how much sweat builds up in a boot, huh?” Lori agreed. “Though I can’t say you didn’t deserve it for trying to prank her. I bet Alice did that on purpose.”

“... It wasn’t on purpose!” Alice tried to explain herself to my big sister, but our smirks made her realize she was being teamed up against. She grumbled. “Hmph… If you keep bringing it up, maybe I should actually pay you back for trying to prank me than, Remy…”

“Uh… No, thank you, Miss Alice?” I didn’t expect Alice to threaten me as payback. Our cousin’s pouting was as adorable as ever, but I did not want to spend more time as her insole ever again. She could easily follow through on her threat if she wanted too.

“Oh right… What time is it?” Alice realized she had been talking to us for too long. “The bus should be coming soon…” 

“It looks like it’s 11:20. The bus usually gets here on the half-hour. You still have time,” my sister answered, having a full view on the clock from her position and pose.

“I want to save a seat for Nikki since she’s on the same bus line, so I’ll head out… Bye, Lori... Bye, Remy!”

“Bye, Alice!” “See you later, Alice!” Lori and I shouted before Alice got out the door but my voice was drowned out by my sister’s. Our cousin had only been passing the time watching us exercise before the bus came. Now she was headed off to her class, leaving me and Lori alone.

Of course, our first order of business was to talk about Alice behind her back.

“She’s been a bit more talkative these days, but she’s really messing with you more now, huh?” Lori shared her observations as she stood up to pull up her yoga pants that had been a bit too low for her during the entire time she was doing the Sphinx pose.

“So you realized too?” I decided to not go back to the barbell and went over to my shrunken dumbbells instead. I definitely wasn’t going to lift the shrunken multi-ton 3 pound dumbbell Alice had left on the cookie tin. “I’m happy she’s warming up to me, but I can’t help but think she’s looking down on me… and I mean not just literally.”

“It’s your own fault there,” Lori got back down onto the carpet to begin her next yoga pose. “You’re the one who was acting like a brat trying to prank her. She probably thinks of you as an immature kid now.”

I couldn’t argue with my big sister there. I hadn’t been acting mature in front of Alice at all. Still, my cousin wasn’t the only one who had been treating me differently. “I get your point. But is that why YOU have been ‘helicopter mom’-ing over me this whole week? I was actually hoping to get a private workout in today.”

“Hey, this is what you get for scaring me last Saturday. You’re not leaving my sight,” Lori made sure I knew she was not leaving the yoga mat that was right next to me. She was worried about leaving me alone.

“It’s been almost a week…” I appreciated my sister’s concern, but she had been getting uncharacteristically overprotective of me when I was shrunken down. For several days now, when she got home, the first thing she did was check where I was. If I wanted to leave my dollhouse, she stopped what she was doing to take me out of the room. Even now, when I had wanted to use the weights, my sister decided to abandon her plans to do some yoga with me. “Alice didn’t think too much about it, but you’re still overreacting, Lori.”

“Like hell I am. It bothers me how Alice let it go so quickly, but I’m more annoyed how you’re not making a big deal of what happened at all,” My big sister decided to change her yoga pose and turned in my direction. I was a bit startled when she got on her back and pulled her knees up. Instead of her feet facing me now, I was getting a good look at her butt in the tight baby blue yoga pants she was wearing. I was intimidated by the scenery consuming butt that rose up to my level on the box. Without even talking about the thighs that stretched across my entire line of sight, I was dwarfed by the curves of my sister’s rear end in the taut yoga pants.

“Woah… Lori?”

“Well? Did that freak you out?” Lori knew she had flustered me. “That’s right. You should be scared. This butt could pin you down and I’d never notice. You get what I’m saying, Little Bro?”

“That’s not a pretty picture to imagine.” I talked back to Lori, but it was clear that my sister was not taunting me. “But, you do have a fat ass. It might not be too painful.”

“Huh?” Lori was caught off guard for a moment and almost lost her balance. “Don’t tell me you’re into getting crushed. Come to think of it, you didn’t ever get mad at me and Alice for stepping on you.”

“Hey, I wasn’t talking about the getting crushed part,” I pretended to sound offended. My sister’s imagination was acting up. “Honestly, it couldn’t hurt to lighten up a little.”

With her chance at intimidating me a failure, Lori grew silent. She changed her pose once again from the wind-relieving pose to a leg cradle. She kicked both of her legs out so that they surrounded both sides of the box my weights and I were on and then pulled her right leg towards her. I felt the air shift as her leg zoomed overhead like an airplane that had gotten too close.

“... Trust me, you have no idea how scared I was when I broke into Alice’s room and couldn’t find you,” my big sister spoke seriously as she kept posing. “I may mess with you, Remy, but you’re still my little brother. I don’t want this whole shrinking deal to be why you end up missing or dead. I honestly wanted to call off our deal with Aunt Shelly right then and there if Alice didn’t find you so quickly.”

“Hey, I made it out alright in the end, didn’t I?”

“Do you WANT me to list out what could’ve happened that’s even worse than being stuck in Alice’s boot?

“Guess I’ll just have to bulk up some more to be able to do something when the time comes then! Hahaha!” I knew my sister was worried about me, but I still tried to treat things lightly because I had gotten out of things just fine.

This time around, my sister did not appreciate my easy-going nature.

“Wagh!” 

I was plucked off the cookie tin to be taught a lesson. My big sister got on her back and pulled her legs up to her stomach. Unlike earlier when she was hugging her knees, she brought her feet up and kept them flat in the air. With her feet side by side, Lori dropped me on top of them… a hundred feet above the ground from perspective. 

Whoosh!

“W-Whoa!” I grabbed on to my sister’s toes, not wanting to fall off. Even though Lori was doing her best to keep still, her legs swayed unconsciously. I didn’t want to risk falling off and plummeting, so I held on tightly. It felt gross to wrap my arms around my sister’s sweaty bare foot, but it was better to endure the salty odor and sticky, damp feeling than it was to be dropped a hundred feet onto the floor.  “So high…”

“High? This is just me holding my feet up, Remy. You’re not even up at my full height,” my sister told me from below. “Do you really think weight training is going to make much of a difference at your scale? Being able to lift twenty more pounds at your size isn’t even an ounce more to Alice and me. In fact, do you even weigh an ounce? There’s a reason Alice and I can’t really feel you.”

“Well, if weights won’t help, there’s always cardio, righ-Mgff?!”

“Heh, cardio? You’re small enough to have to walk across my foot. You won’t get any far running at your size either. No matter how far you run, Alice and I can pass you in just a few steps,” Lori scrunched her toes, pinning me between them in one simple action. “What good is any training when it doesn’t show any results while you’re shrunken?”

I knew my sister wasn’t making fun of me. She was being realistic and trying to make me see the reality that I couldn’t stand up against anything while shrunken down no matter how much I trained. It wasn’t like I didn’t know that. My mouth was just speaking before my brain thought. I had plenty of time to think now because Lori was covering up my mouth with her big toe. The horrible taste of foot sweat pouring into my mouth stopped me from talking immediately.

“Pwah!” I gagged and gasped for air when she finally let me go. “Fine… I get it. I get it. I’ll be serious for once.”

“Sorry, Remy,” Lori sighed. “No matter how strong you are, everything’s a danger when you’re ankle height. I want you to understand that so you’ll be more careful.”

Lori had a point. Shrinking was all fine and dandy in the home where it was more controlled, but the second I fell off Lori’s and Alice’s notice, I was helpless. And outside of the house where everything was already 24 times bigger, I definitely wouldn’t be able to survive as a rat sized man.

“... I wonder if Aunt Shelly knew all this would happen,” Lori frowned, glancing at the machine.

Keeping my grip on my sister’s toes before I glanced down at her face, I answered, “I doubt she would’ve planned that far ahead for my safety. She only cares about Alice.”

“More like she only cares that Alice is always under her thumb. How the heck is she Mom’s sister…?”

Lori’s scowl was even deeper than mine. Lori and I cared for Alice, but neither of us liked our aunt. We siblings wanted to let Alice have a proper college life and for her to be more independent of her mother, so we were both doing our best to make sure Alice could stay. After what had happened though, Lori seemed to be having regrets.

“Lori, I’ll be fine,” I told my sister seriously. “I won’t be as reckless as before, so let’s keep this up so Alice doesn’t have to worry. Trust me, I can deal with this, so let’s show Aunt Shelly we can handle these stupid terms of hers.”

“... That’s not very persuasive when you’re clinging to my toes for dear life,” Lori remarked. She reached her hand back up and plucked me off of her foot. Slowly, she lowered me back down to the cookie tin that my weights were on, and then she sat up. “But I get it. I’ll stop messing with you too to make it easier on you. We’re both doing this for her after all.”

“You? Not messing with me? That feels weird to hear.”

“Pfft! What, do you actually want me to? So I was right after all!” 

“As if you are. I’m just saying that there’s no way you wouldn’t be messing with me. It’s ingrained into your DNA.”

“... You’re not wrong. So tell it to me straight. I might actually forget and then pick on you unless you tell me otherwise.”

Lori and I gave up on working out as we wrapped up our little talk laughing. As much as I was the victim of being shrunken down, Lori was just as involved as me when it came to our troubles with Aunt Shelly. At the very least, the argument we had was now mostly resolved. We were once again on the same page of living life however we could under Aunt Shelly’s conditions.

My sister’s nerves had settled.