At my size, getting into any room was an impossibility. The doorknob was an impossible climb above my head and the door was a meteoric weight that couldn’t be pushed.  I wasn’t small enough to crawl through the crack under the door either. That meant that, as long as I was 3 inches tall, a closed door was not something I could get past even if it were unlocked.

“You really can’t get under there? You really are helpless at that size.”

“I knew that already. So are you going to help me or not?”

“I’m not an accomplice here. You’re just sneaking in when you have the chance under my notice like a bug.”

“Way to insult me and shove the blame onto me in one shot…”

Getting Lori and Alice to crack their doors open even just a little was not going to be an easy task, and both girls could easily close them even if they wanted privacy anyways. That meant I was always going to need help getting anywhere. That was why, in order to get into Alice’s room, I needed Lori’s help to open the door or at least get Alice to come to the door. The plan was simple enough for sneaking in - once the door opened, I’d run in before it closed again.

Knock! Knock!

“Alice, are you in?”

“... Huh? Lori? … You can come in! It’s unlocked…”

Lori opened the door to Alice’s room when she received permission. Pushing the door in and walking inside, my titanic older sister left me in the dust in a single step. Thankfully, she purposely kept the door open and did not swing it back, giving me ample time to trudge through the carpet to head into our cousin’s room. 

At that time, my sister took a good look at Alice who was on her bed hugging her whale plushie. Her laptop was on her bed and she had been lying down staring at the screen. Because Lori had come in, Alice sat up to pause what was on it.

“Oh? What are you doing, Alice?”

“Uh… My lab partner mentioned a movie she liked. I have to go see her later, so I thought I’d watch it before I leave so we could talk about it together…”

Hearing those words, Lori sat down on the bed right next to Alice and gave our adorable cousin a happy pat on the back.

“You’re trying hard to make friends, huh? Good girl.”

“H-Hey, Lori!” Alice was flustered at being praised and even more embarrassed when my big sister began ruffling her hair. Her embarrassment was still in full drive as my sister tried to pull the girl in for a hug. Naturally, Alice withdrew, but not simply because she was flustered. “... Ngah? … Um… Lori, you kind of smell…”

“Pffft!” I couldn’t help laughing when I saw my sister physically stumble at our cousin’s words. “That must’ve stung.”

“Damn, you too, Alice?” Lori couldn’t believe what Alice had said. “I was only exercising. My sweat can’t be that bad.”

“... Sorry… It’s pretty strong…,” Alice chose not to lie. She pulled her pillow up to her face to cover her nose.

“Ouch. Fine. I guess I’ll take a bath now then,” Lori continued to take visible damage from Alice’s words. She stood up off the bed. “I just wanted to check up on you, Alice. Enjoy your movie.”

With those words my sister walked out of the room, shutting the door. 

“... Was that all she came here for?” Alice mumbled to herself. She returned to her movie by lying down on her pillow and hitting a key on her laptop. She was getting comfortable again now that she was in her room alone.

… Or so she thought. I was on the carpet by Alice’s bed, right where she had left her backpack, two shoe boxes, and a stack of textbooks. I was completely unnoticed by my cousin the entire time I navigated my way around her expansive room.

“Okay, up we go. Hup!” I grabbed onto the blanket that was dangling off of Alice’s bed. When Lori was getting close to her earlier, she shoved the blanket aside. Whether it was on purpose or not, I wasn’t sure, but it was the perfect way up for me. 

As my goal was to give her a little scare as a prank, I had to get moving. I did not know how much longer Alice had for her movie, but if it ended soon, I wouldn’t be able to do anything because I knew it would take some time for me to get up to her. If she got up and walked away to go meet her labmate, she’d leave me behind and I’d end up trapped in her room. Even Lori wouldn’t be able to get me out if Alice locked it because she would have the only key.

That was why I had to work fast. I was a 3 inch tall man scaling my younger cousin’s bed like a mountain. I had used the rock climbing wall at the gym before a few times, but this was more of a challenge because the blanket was not a pre-designed course. There was a distinct smell coming off of the cloth that caught me off guard too. While Alice complained of Lori’s body odor earlier, I had to admit that I could smell her sweat from the blanket as well. I was sure Alice hadn’t been taking the blanket along with her to do laundry since she moved in.

“She’s slowly getting more stuff in here,” I noticed when I had to take a short break half way up the bed. The shoe boxes I had been near were new to me, although one of them was open to reveal literal towers from my perspective. They were the pair of brown boots I had seen Alice started wearing lately. She was apparently trying to take good care of them by placing them back in the shoebox. Asides from that, the walls of her room were decorated with a fish themed calendar, a school poster, and a cork board that had her class schedule pinned on it, but I had seen those during the weeks I was massaging her feet.

“Well, I’ll tell her about that later… Hurk! Up we go…! Made it!” I finally got to my destination after several minutes of exhausting climbing. The plateau of such a long climb was only the top of Alice’s bed, but that was such a significant achievement for my tiny self. Sadly, that did not mean I was done. My work was directly in front of me: the two bare legs of my cousin that were bouncing up and down as she continued watching her movie.

Whoosh… Thud! Whoosh… Thud!

The rhythmic rising and falling of Alice’s legs as they kicked up and down felt more dangerous than when Lori was tapping her feet. Each movement displaced the air with a noticeable sound on my scale, and each time her foot hit the bed, the entire mattress bounced and shook like an earthquake. Of course, Alice didn’t notice this at regular size, but it was startling to the miniscule me.

“Okay, how should I do this? I could always make it feel like a bug just brushed past her leg…,” I shoved my concerns to the back of my mind as I stubbornly set out to complete my mission. I contemplated what was the quickest but best way of getting a reaction out of Alice. “I guess tickling’s the best choice here.”

With Lori, I had failed using a paper clip because I didn’t think just how small and light it was compared to her foot. For Alice, I at least had some prior knowledge from all of the times I had to massage her feet. I couldn’t go easy on her if I wanted her to actually feel me, so there was really only one thing I could do and that was to tickle her using my whole body.

Whoosh… Thud! Whoosh… Thud!

Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. Alice knew I was there whenever I massaged her, so she never moved her feet when I was around. However, because she didn’t know I was there, she was happily bouncing her feet and legs in bed without a care in the world. It was good that she could act like a normal girl when nobody was around, but I was risking getting flattened into the mattress by trying to approach the enormous moving masses of her legs.

“Wah no!”

Wham! Wham!

“Woah!” I was sent flying several feet in the air from my perspective when Alice suddenly slammed both legs  one after another into the mattress. The mattress dipped from the impact and then reformed immediately, sending my super light body up with it. I landed unceremoniously back down a good two seconds after.  “Urgh! ... Huh?”

“Uwah. Is that-? Yes, go!” Alice was getting into the movie. It must have been getting to its climax. I would’ve liked to know what movie she was recommended, but I had more pressing concerns at that moment.

“... She hasn’t felt me? I-Is she going to move?” I had landed right on Alice’s left foot. It had to have been because of how light I was, but Alice did nothing as I sat up on the ball of her foot. The smell wafting off of them wasn’t as intense as my sister post-workout, but the salty aroma of sweat still accompanied each breath I took. Her foot was many times my size, so I was sitting on it the same way I would a bed, only this foot bed was even bigger than the mattress Alice was resting on. My survival instinct was telling me to get off as soon as I could, but the curling of her toes and the sudden jerking as my cousin watched the movie made it unpredictable what would happen, causing the rest of my body to freeze up. 

At the very least, though, I was right where I wanted to be originally. All I had to do now was to get Alice to feel me and she’d likely jump in shock. I tried to look on the bright side so I could get started when my body recovered from the shock of earlier.

Rumble…

Before that could happen, though, Alice’s right leg, foot and all, rose up high above my head. Recognizing the pattern of what had been happening so far, I knew what was going to happen next and I couldn’t avoid it. “Huh? Wait, Ali-”

Whoosh…! Thud! Whoosh…!

“Ugoah!”

 Despite stopping the pattern for just a moment when she got into the movie’s climax, Alice’s leg bouncing continued again. After her right foot lifted up and landed, her left one went next, taking me along with it. The sudden acceleration sent my entire body back into Alice’s foot - my face kissed the ball of her foot painfully and was glued to it by the g-force.

This was just an unconscious movement of my distracted cousin, so, unlike Lori who knew to slow down and control her speed whenever she picked me up, Alice moved as she wanted to. After the sudden pressure of the acceleration, I quickly found myself feeling weightless before Alice’s foot suddenly dropped back down again.

Thud!

“Ugwaah!” I was knocked off of Alice’s foot from the impact and sent airborne again. The world around me became a blur as my body spun through the air. I wailed as I flew off of my cousin’s bed, but Alice heard nothing as she was watching her movie with earbuds.

Then, the world turned dark.

“Urgk!”

And then I hit the ground.

“... Ouch… That was rough…” Although I was fine due to the resistance boost from shrinking, I was still physically exhausted. It took me a while to stand and for my eyes to adjust… Or rather, they had already adjusted but all I saw around me was darkness. “Huh? Where am I? Cough! Cough!”

Looking around was difficult when I couldn’t see anything at all. Had Alice turned off the lights? No, even if that were the case, I’d still be able to see light through the windows because it was still daytime.  Somehow, I had fallen into a dark cavern with no light.

“Cough! Wait, this smell is…” Actually, that was wrong. There was light in the cavern. I only saw it when I turned around and saw a single circle in the darkness illuminated. I saw an impression of a heel in the circle that told me exactly where I was “... Alice’s boot?”

I had fallen right into my cousin’s right boot that had been upright next to her bed. What kind of pro basketball skills did Alice have to be able to kick me into it without me even hitting the sides? This being her boot certainly explained the thick, murky odor that surrounded me and was making me cough.

“Let’s get out first,” I knew my priorities and ran over to the wall that was the inside of Alice’s boot. Much to my dismay, though, I found that, unlike Alice’s blanket, I couldn’t get a good enough grip on the smooth material her boot was made of. “No way. I’m stuck?”

This was bad. What was I going to do to get out of Alice’s boot? If I couldn’t climb out, I had to get her attention somehow.

“Alice! Hey Alice!” I shouted upwards. “Alice! I’m in here! Alice! Cough! Cough!”

Calling her name was the only thing I could do. At 3 inches tall, there was no climbing out of the stuffy boot on my own. Sadly, so long as Alice was paying attention to the movie, my cries went unheard. I didn’t know how much longer the movie had until it finished, but I was stuck wandering the darkness of Alice’s boot and looking up at the distant light that was the unreachable exit.

“Alice! Cough! Cough!” I tried again after what I believed was fifteen minutes. It was only then that I got a reaction.

“Huh?” Alice had finished her movie so she had finally taken off her earbuds.

“Alllliiiiiccccceeee!” I called out again. “Allllliiiiccceeeee!”

“Did I hear something?” I hoped Alice would figure out where I was, so I kept calling her name out over and over again. However, I didn’t realize just how muffled I was inside her boot. “I must be hearing things. I thought that ghost in the movie wasn’t a big deal, but was I actually scared?”

“Allllice! Come on! Allliiiiiccccceee!!!”

Buzz! Buzz!

“Hm…? A-Ah! She’s already at the library? I should get going then. I don’t want to keep Nikki waiting.”

My attempts at getting Alice to hear me fell on deaf ears as she hopped off her bed to get ready to meet her lab partner. I couldn’t see what was happening, but I could hear enough ruffling and rummaging outside the boot to tell that Alice was quickly changing her clothes.

“Oh no, that means- Whoah!”

Rumble!

I couldn’t finish my sentence before Alice grabbed the boots I was in. I lost balance when the flat ground suddenly rose up, becoming an impossibly steep slope. I tumbled down until I hit the toe of her boot, face first in the impressions her toes had made in the insole.

“Wait wait wait! Alice! Down here! Down he- Uwargh!” Of course, it didn’t end there. Why would Alice have grabbed her boots if she wasn’t putting them on? The one light in the dark cave of my cousin’s boot disappeared when her black sock clad foot entered. The expansive boot I was able to walk in could barely hold the massive foot that filled up everything. I found myself buried into the insole by Alice’s foot. “Mgggfff!”

If I were to say that’s newly put on socks and her relatively new boots didn’t smell, that would’ve been a lie. The dense choking air of her boot earlier had proved that. Now that the entirety of her boot was filled with her foot, though, I was treated to an even stronger sensory overload. The weight of Alice’s foot pressed down on every part of my body. I felt my body imprinting itself into her insole. All I could see when I opened my eyes was the threads of my cousin’s socks and the toes surrounding me, keeping me in place. Opening my mouth filled it with sock lint and sweat that was already starting to come out of Alice’s foot because of the heat and pressure of the enclosed boot. And any fresh air that there had been inside the boot had been displaced by only Alice’s foot.

And this was all before Alice had even taken a single step.

Stomp!

“Mgrkf!”

Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!

“Okay. When’s the next bus? ... Five minutes?!” Alice’s question to herself reverberated through my entire body. She was checking the bus schedule as she walked. Every step she took, I felt. I was crushed under the weight of my cousin’s foot inside the boot. If the shrinking hadn’t raised my durability, I likely would’ve popped like a grape with how many hundreds of tons each impact felt like.

Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!

“Mgff!” my shouts for Alice’s attention were now muffled by her sock and drowned out by the deafening thuds of her footsteps.

“Hm? Alice? Where are you going?”

“L-Lori! … S-Sorry! The next bus comes in five minutes…”

“Huh? Wait, what about Re-”

Alice didn’t even give Lori time to finish her sentence. My sister couldn’t stop Alice in time as she ran out the door. This was bad. Lori likely would’ve thought that I failed to get her attention and that I was left in her room. She wouldn’t have realized that I had fallen into Alice’s shoe and was now getting repeatedly grinded under her foot as she ran to the bus. 

“Mgff… A…lice…!” I should’ve learned my lesson the first time with Lori. Much like with my big sister, my cousin also didn’t feel my miniscule weight beneath her feet. At best, I would’ve felt like a wrinkle in her sock or a rock in her boot. 

I had wanted to prank Alice, but this had become a prank gone wrong. All I could do now was endure.