Asking for permission, hesitating to act, waiting and fretting over whether or not she should do something - when it came to restraint, Alice had a lot of it. Whether it had been ingrained into her from her time with her mother or if it were out of respect to Lori and I who let her stay in the apartment away from the woman, Alice was the type of person to think before she acted.

Well, that was the case whenever Lori was around. With only me, Alice had gotten a lot more willing to do whatever she wanted. She was unshackled from the need to ask for permission if only I was around. This was clear enough after our third movie of the day.

“So what do you think of this one compared to the other two, Alice? This one had them down to a quarter-inch the whole time. Lots of crazy stuff happened, right?” Nikki asked Alice for her thoughts. There were a lot more movies about shrinking than one would expect, and we had only gone through a few of the classics at this point. In my opinion, they were still fairly strong at showing what a smaller scale was like. The special effects were a little rough compared to modern movies, but perhaps that was just because I had experienced the real thing the past few months.

My opinions on the movies we watched weren’t as important as Alice’s though. My cousin’s eyes had been sparkling with interest and curiosity every second of every movie Nikki played for her. “... It was pretty cool with how small they were… I liked the cereal scene…

“I sure didn’t. It’s not fun thinking about being eaten.”

Alice giggled at my squeaks from atop the plush whale doll on her lap. She was in a good mood after that movie so she was ready to poke fun at me. “Ehehe… Were you scared, Remy? You’re lucky you weren’t small enough when Lori tried to do it that one time…”

“Seriously? She tried eating him?” Nikki was shocked at the revelation. I was tempted to correct Alice that I was still actually an appropriate size to be eaten, but that would just open up another conversation that I didn’t actually want to have. “... So how did he taste? I’m a little curious.”

Nikki jokingly opened her mouth and leaned forward towards Alice. Unfortunately for me, my cousin followed up on her friend’s joke and plucked me off her plushie by my shirt. The collar of my T-shirt was yanked back as well, briefly choking me as my world accelerated upwards. “Ehehe… Did you want a bite, Nikki…?”

Hearing those words, I shuddered, but a cold sweat ran down my back when Alice’s hand finally stopped moving. Looking down, I saw an open mouth with a large pink tongue laid out like a red carpet waiting for me. I was being hung right above the dark chasm that was Nikki’s maw. A strong gust that smelled of buttered popcorn buffeted me as Nikki breathed out with her mouth.

“Whoa, hey, she didn’t actually eat me!” I shuddered as Alice dangled me over Nikki’s face awaiting a morsel. Even if they were joking, it was real enough to me. I didn’t want to be tossed into Nikki’s mouth the same way she had been throwing and catching popcorn into her own mouth. “This isn’t funny, Alice!”

“What, did you think we were serious? Ahaha! You’re a real riot!” Nikki withdrew after hearing me panic. She held her stomach because she was laughing so hard that it hurt.

As an actual shrunken person, I could confirm that the scenes described in the movies were all possible and would be terrifying to go through in reality. I had actually gone through a few of those experiences, albeit at a larger scale than the people in the movie, and thus did not want to have my cousin and her friend emulate any of those using me.

I would’ve preferred to be ignored by Alice and Nikki as they got along and conversed literally over my head, but because the movie topic had been about shrunken people, there was no way I wouldn’t be forcibly involved. The only person who hadn’t gotten involved this whole time was my sister Lori. The reason why was pretty obvious.

“Zzzzzzzzz…”

“So that’s why she wasn’t helping me,” I groaned when Alice lowered me onto her palm and let go of my shirt. Now that both girls had stood up, I could see why my sister hadn’t intervened or even spoke up the entire time the two girls had been messing with me. It was the same reason why Alice had no qualms playing around with Nikki like nobody else was around too.

“Zzzzzz…” 

The gentle snoring of my big sister blended with the orchestral music playing during the ending credits. My sister had finally been knocked out. Even with caffeine in her system, the allnighter had been too much for her. Watching the movies in the dark room on top of Alice’s soft bed made it all too easy for her to fall asleep. I don’t know when she fell asleep, but Lori was out cold on her stomach with her face buried in one of Alice’s pillows. The volume of us talking as well as the movie playing never woke her up, so she was completely dead to the world.

“Wow, that’s some drool,” Nikki didn’t bother keeping her distance from my sister and leaned in close to the pillow to get a look at her face.

“... Ehehe… Lori’s a little cute when she’s asleep…” Alice poked my sister’s cheek with no hesitation as well. Lori’s head rolled just slightly, showing her sleeping face. My sister did her best to maintain a composed and respectable ‘elder sisterly’ vibe around Alice, but the face she was making at that moment was far from respectable.

“You two should just let her rest,” I suggested from Alice’s other hand which was holding me close to her chest. “Don’t worry about waking Lori up. She’s out like a light. It should be fine for us to watch the next movie even if she’s sleeping.” 

Alice and Nikki ignored my words. They were both looking up and down Lori’s defenseless body for some reason before they turned towards each other with identical smiles.

“Don’t you think she’s lying down just like…?” “Ehehe… Yeah…”

“Uh, girls?” I made my suggestion to Nikki and Alice because Lori and I would both feel bad if Lori’s sleeping interrupted their plans to hang out. I should’ve been more concerned about my sister instead of those two, though. The look in their eyes made it clear that they weren’t going to just let my sister be. 

Before I could even think, I started to descend as Alice lowered her hand down to the bed. She put me down on the mattress. She didn’t simply put me down for no reason, though, my cousin had decided to sit down as well. It was a swift and simple motion to Alice, but at my size, everything was magnified by our 24x size difference.

I watched from below as her massive body turned around. Alice’s hoodie rode up when she bent her legs. Because she never put anything other than her hoodie on over her underwear earlier when Nikki arrived, I was given a clear view of Alice’s white panties and her butt. Both seemed to rapidly grow as they got lower and lower.

Whaaam!

“Whoah!” I shouted when Alice’s butt hit the bed. Alice had sat down on it gently, but the weight of her body still caused the mattress to slightly dip. It was practically unnoticeable to her, but to me, a sinkhole had suddenly formed. For a moment, I found my entire body pulled towards Alice’s left butt cheek. I would have slid down into it if her hoodie didn’t drop back down her butt. However, I still ended up smothered by the green cotton hoodie and had to struggle to pull myself away from it. “Mgff! Gah! Get off!”

“Oh? What’s the matter there, little guy, having trouble?” were the first words I heard when I succeeded half a minute later. It sadly wasn’t by my own power as those words were accompanied by a hot gust of wind that smelled strongly of popcorn. Alice’s hoodie had been pulled up slightly by Nikki.

“Geh!” I reflexively grimaced. Immediately after getting away from Alice’s butt, I found myself staring at the massive structure that was Nikki’s face. Nikki had knelt down on the ground and rested her arms and head next to Alice. She had clearly done that so she could get a clear view of me on the white sheets of my cousin’s bed.

“What, not even a thank you?” laughed the girl. 

“Uh, yeah, thanks,” remaining composed was something I would’ve liked to do, but I was not happy to be right in front of Nikki’s mouth. I covered my nose to block out the popcorn breath and started backing away from her, not wanting to get close to her mouth again after the eating scare. Backing away from both Alice’s butt and Nikki’s face, though, sent me in a third direction. My legs ended up hitting something big, causing me to fall backwards. “Wargh!”

From the sensation of my landing, I didn’t fall onto the mattress sheets. I tripped and my back and head landed on a warm, wet, uneven surface. I could feel my shirt dampen and my nose crinkled when a salty odor that wasn’t Nikki’s popcorn breath hit me.

“Hm? Wow, I guess you do have a foot fetish,” Nikki chuckled when she saw what I fell on. Alice had sat down closest to where the mattress met the wall and Nikki had blocked off the middle with her arms and head, so I, who was between them, ended up backing up to where my sister’s bare foot was. I ended up tripping on the pinky toe of her right foot and falling backwards onto the rest of them. “We didn’t even have to put you there ourselves.”

“Just my luck,” I grunted, trying to pick myself up off of Lori’s foot. My head had landed right next to a big toe which was bigger than it. I hoped my movements wouldn’t alert Lori and cause her to move inadvertently.

“Do you like feet after all, Remy…?” I heard Alice. Looking up and in her direction, I realized she had actually been looking the entire time, watching me back away from her friend with amusement from above. She had seen me fall too and was giggling at the sight of me lying down by my big sister’s massive toes. 

“Don’t mess with me, girls,” I tried standing up, using my sister’s toes as a crutch. My left leg was between Lori’s second and third toe while the right leg was between her third and fourth. My body was so light that she probably couldn’t feel me that easily, but I still carefully attempted to step through the gaps so as to not trigger Lori’s reflexes. Unfortunately, Alice ended up doing what I had just told her not to do. She poked Lori right in the middle of her foot.

“Zzz… Snrk?” “Uwargh!”

Lori grunted in her sleep. The sudden sensation on her bare foot caused my sister to scrunch her toes. Her toes squeezed together, binding my legs in place. At the same time, her foot jerked, knocking me over onto the smooth ball of her foot.

“Ehehe… Lori’s the one who caught you, Remy… Not us…” Alice giggled. 

“Can you get out?” Nikki smirked. “You’re definitely at a bigger scale than how it was in the second movie, but it’s sort of like the climbing scene that was in there.”

This was what the two had mischievously shared glances at for - making me go through the scenes they had watched. Nikki and Alice had gotten overly invested in the topic of shrinking after three straight movies and were having fun doing more than just talking about it. They weren’t just simulating scenarios in their minds. Like young children who would mimic action scenes after a TV show, the two girls had wanted to try those things in reality. I could see why the two of them got along now, but unfortunately, because I was the small one here, my involvement was already mandatory.

There was no way that I could argue against them at the size of a mouse. Without Lori awake, these two freshmen girls were in charge. They had free rein to do whatever they wanted, and they wanted to play around with me as their toy.

“Fine, I’ll do it,” I grunted, knowing I didn’t have a choice. I struggled to pull my leg out from my sister’s clenched toes and started to climb up the slope of her foot up to her heel.

“Wow, really…?” Alice seemed ecstatic that I didn’t reject the idea. Did she think I could say no in my position? She was the one in control here.

“You agreed so quickly. Well, it should be easy since you’re pretty big compared to what was in the movie,” Nikki picked her head off the mattress and started watching me properly. I could feel her observant gaze watching my movements with amusement.

With their gazes fixed on me with deep interest, I ascended my sister’s right foot. It wasn’t vertical enough that I had to climb, but I had to lean into the foot and take short steps just like I was hiking up a hill. Still, I wasn’t happy about the odor wafting upwards from my sister’s sweaty feet. Being surrounded by her scrunched up toes earlier had already covered me in the stench, but even then, I didn’t appreciate the fact that there was still no fresh air for me to refresh myself.

“There, you two happy yet?”  At the very least, even at my size, the climb thankfully wasn’t too long since Lori’s feet were only around 3 times my height. I made it to the tip - to Lori’s heel - without her reacting, likely because the pitter patters of my tiny body were too light for her. I hoped that would satisfy my cousin and her friend.

“You didn’t do much, Remy…” Alice laughed off my accomplishment. Well, it definitely didn’t look like I did anything in her eyes considering the distance I traveled was literally less than a foot in both senses of the word. There was disappointment in her voice that I didn’t appreciate, though. “And it wasn’t as fun as it was in the movie…”

“Well, that’s just how it is - reality and movies aren’t exactly the same, Alice,” Nikki knew better than to expect copying a movie to turn out the same in the real world, but the look on her face also told me she was disappointed. “I mean, it’s not like he’s the same size as how small they got in the movies or anything.”

“... If only he were smaller…” Alice mumbled with a pout. Those words gave me chills, especially when her friend came to a realization that I had hoped she never would have made. 

“Oh! Wait, Alice, there’s a way!”

“... A way?” Alice pondered for a moment before coming to the same conclusion as Nikki. “A-Ah…! Would that work?”

“I don’t know. Those machines SHOULD be able to make things smaller than three inches tall. I want to try. That's okay with you?”

“... Lori would probably say no, but she’s asleep right now… I think it’d be fine…” 

The spark in Alice’s and Nikki’s eyes as they exchanged glances. They were both on the same page. They wanted to continue replaying the moving scenes in reality using me. ‘I think it’d be fine?’ Alice wasn’t asking for permission anymore. She was straight up skipping over that step. She was as gung ho as Nikki was. Shouldn’t she have at least asked me? My opinion seriously didn’t matter any more to her, did it? Was Alice being swept along with Nikki’s pace or had she had a similar line of thinking as the girl all this time?

“You two, calm down for a second here. Lori! Hey, Sis! Wake up! A little help here?” I gave up trying to not stir Lori. I wanted her awake at this very moment. Desperately, I tried jumping up and down, stomping on Lori’s heel as hard as I could. I hoped she’d feel me and wake up as the two girls. 

Sadly, there was no time and no way for me to wake her. The two freshmen girls were too excited to be stopped.

“... It’s okay, Remy. It’ll only be for a little bit…,” Alice didn’t even bother to ask me. Her hand was already reaching towards me before I could answer.

“Mgaah!” I was smothered by Alice’s palm. My world went black and everything started moving at high speeds as my cousin followed her friend out the bedroom and into the living room. My own savior, Lori, was not going to wake up and was left behind on my cousin’s bed.

Click. Clack.

Beep. 

“Really? Two buttons and two switches? That was all this thing needed? That’s easier than I thought.” 

“It’s very easy to use… I have to regrow Remy all the time, but I never used the shrinking button on him because he always shrinks himself when he comes home…”

I heard Nikki’s muffled voice through my cousin’s clenched palm. They were already at the shrinking device and it was apparently easier to figure out to her than she had expected. This was bad. The two of them were actually serious. They wanted to try making me smaller.

“Waaah!” 

Alice unceremoniously released me from a foot in the air. I fell a distance of 24 feet from my scale and landed roughly on a hard steel surface. 

“Urgh… That hurt… Uh… Huh?” picking myself up, I was greeted to the familiar sight of the metal shrinking platform. I gulped. Looking up, I saw my towering cousin and her friend standing next to the buttons for changing my size. I was used to seeing Alice there because this was how it always looked whenever she grew me back, but with Nikki with her now, I knew that things were going to go the opposite direction. “Wait, Alice! Think about this! I’m already small enough!” 

I wasn’t sure whether or not they actually heard me from the ground. If anything, my squeaks seemed to only make the two girls giggle. They weren’t going to stop. Nikki’s hand was already hovering over the button.

Unlike Alice who was just waiting with baited breath, the movie loving girl did Alice try to speak to me. 

“Hey, just bear with us for a bit, okay? We just want to see if this works.”

Bear with it? Being shrunken even more? That was not something to take lightly at all. Even if the technology had been proven to work, didn’t they care about my wellbeing? When we were talking before the movie, Nikki had said she wouldn’t go too far, but didn’t this count as going too far?

It was no use. The two girls were on a post-movie emotional charge. Two college freshmen girls with more energy than they knew what to do with were a force to be reckoned with. Freshman year antics were something I already knew could get insane, so I would’ve accepted that as something that would be fine to let Alice go through normally. Unfortunately, the situation wasn’t normal. On my scale, that spirit they had was twenty-four times more dangerous.

And it was about to get another 24 times more threatening.

“It’s this one, Nikki…”

“Don’t do it! Don’t push that!”

Wrrrrrrrrr!

Alice and Nikki pushed the shrinking button on the platform together. The massive world around me rapidly started to expand again. The stadium like platform grew into a plain of gray steel as the ceiling, walls, and furniture shot higher into the heavens and zoomed further into the distance. I went from 1:24 scale to 1:576 scale - shrinking down from 3 inches to an absolutely miniscule 1/8th of an inch.

In contrast, my cousin and her friend had became even more powerful to me - going from over one-hundred foot skyscrapers to over 3000 feet mountainous beings. I was utter stupified at how far back at how much I had to crane my neck back to even see Alice’s waist let alone her head.

“A-Alice?” I shouted but my voice cracked from uncertain panic.

 Rumble! Rumble!

“Whoaaah!” I fell when a powerful earthquake shook me and the world around me.

“He really shrunk again…”

“Y-Yeah. Wow. I can’t believe it worked. I mean, he was already proof that it did, but I mean worked AGAIN!”

That rumble, to my dismay, wasn’t even caused by Alice approaching. The two girls had only turned towards each other to talk, and that alone was enough to cause the ground to tremble on my level. Their voices boomed in my ears and all around me like thunder. I flinched as I tried to decipher what they said.

“Do you think he’d be small enough now…?”

“Honestly, I think he’s too small, but yeah, it should be better like this. He’ll be fine, right?”

“Yes… It’s Remy, so he’ll be okay… This should be fun, Nikki…”

Even after watching me shrink again in front of them to such the size of a speck, the girls didn’t seem to be regretting their actions in the slightest. In fact, Alice seemed even less concerned about me than Nikki.

“Damn, I was pretty sure this would happen eventually, but I didn’t see this coming toda- Waaargh!”

Whaaaaam! Rumble! Whaaaam! Rumble!

Alice crouched down on the platform and squinted her eyes to properly spot me. Her massive body descending was the equivalent of a meteor crashing down to me. I couldn’t do anything except be thrown about by the shaking of the platform and the displacement of the air as my cousin’s shadow fell over me and darkened the land.

“Remy, let’s play…” a fearful, childish statement let me know just what was on Alice’s mind at that moment as two fingers as thick as buildings descended and surrounded me. From the size of them, was I even on the same level as a bread crumb to my cousin? 

Even if I wanted to escape, I couldn’t pick myself up or run fast enough to avoid the titanic fingers that pinched - or should I say smothered - my entire body off the floor. Alice didn’t even have to keep her thumb on me to hold me down. I was small enough that the pressure from her ‘gentle’ pinch and the sweat on her fingers were enough to adhere me to the surface of her index finger. My entire body was subjected to G-forces even astronauts wouldn’t ever experience on my trip upwards to a green eye over 3 times bigger than I was tall. It was even bigger than the distance I had to cross on Lori’s foot earlier.

“Ehehe… I can barely see that it’s you, Remy…” Alice giggled. As innocent as she would’ve sounded, her powerful voice roared in my ears and reverberated throughout my entire speck sized body.

I had confirmed that my tiny size had made me less of a person and more of a plaything in Alice’s eyes, but now, I had become utterly insignificant. How did she see me now? I almost didn’t want to know, but I knew I would find out soon. 

Until Lori woke up, my life would be at the mercy of two overly-excited freshman girls - my cousin and her friend.