It was a warm, late September Saturday morning around 11 AM, and Max was just waking up from a long, restless night's sleep. As of today, he'd officially been attending Ventus University for one full month—and so far, things weren't exactly going the way he'd always hoped.
After spending most of his senior spring fantasizing about heading off to college in the fall, his first taste of the "best four years of his life" had been average at best. He hadn't tried out for any teams or clubs, he hadn't made any friends aside from his roommate (who was stuck with him all year either way), and, worst of all, he hadn't been invited to a single party. While many of these problems likely stemmed from his innate shyness, social awkwardness, and fondness for staying holed up in his room, playing video games and watching anime whenever he wasn't in class, he had a feeling his choice of school wasn't doing him any favors.
Like most former women's colleges, Ventus's student body still skewed overwhelmingly female—and when Max had started the application process, that had sounded like a huge plus. With four girls to every boy in any class, he assumed he'd have a much better shot at getting a girlfriend and finally losing his virginity. The school's strong academic rankings, athletic performance, postgraduate job placement numbers and sunny Southern California campus didn't hurt, either. The only real downside was its infamously idiosyncratic House System, a network of powerful sororities that dominated all aspects of student life.
According to the school's website, at least 80% of female undergrads belonged to one of the major houses — Diana (the "Jock House"), Minevera (the "Nerd House"), Juno (the "Goth House"), Fortuna (the "Hot Girl House"), and Proserpina (the "Loser House") — and by the end of his orientation weekend, he could tell that the limits of the campus social scene ended pretty clearly beyond their doors. Barred from official membership in any of the houses as a male, his only way into the school's biggest and best parties seemed to be befriending as many affiliated girls as possible—and for a guy who still had trouble making anything more than small talk with members of the opposite sex, that was increasingly feeling like a pretty tall order.
As a result, his first month at school had mainly consisted of going to class, studying, gaming, sleeping, and waking up to do it all over again—which didn't represent a significant shift from the way he'd spent most of his teens. The only difference was that now he was constantly surrounded by reminders of everything he was missing. Every night, as the campus came alive with at least five separate parties, all he could do was sit in his room in the Unaffiliated Students Dorm and long for some kind of breakthrough. Yesterday, he'd finally gotten one.
When he'd returned from classes, he'd found his roommate, Zeke, eagerly waiting for him. While Zeke was every bit as much of a goofy, dorky gamer and anime aficionado as Max, he was also noticeably more good-looking and better at talking to girls. Perhaps owing to these qualities, the stocky, fluffy-haired Mexican-American nerd was blossoming into quite the campus social butterfly. He was already getting invited to parties at all the major Houses, and he never missed an opportunity to rub it in Max's face.
Last night, though, Zeke's message was very different. He was about to head out to yet another party, but this time, he'd gotten the go-ahead to bring Max. Faced with the prospect of entering an exciting new social situation with only his roommate of four weeks for company, Max then did what many introverted, anxious college-aged young men might do. Egged on by Zeke, he decided to pre-game—and by the time they finally left for the party, the far less experienced drinker of the two had more "liquid courage" than he knew what to do with.
Now, about fourteen hours later, his memory of the rest of the night was one big blur. If the pounding in his head and the queasy feeling in his stomach were any indication, it seemed like all he had to commemorate his first big college party was the mother of all hangovers. Then he opened his eyes, and everything got even weirder.
"What the…"
Right away, three things became frighteningly clear. First, he wasn't in his dorm room. Second, he was naked. Third, and most importantly, he had shrunk.
"Oh, fuck…"
Like any modern teenager, Max was no stranger to news stories about people getting dosed with drugs at college parties. Still, he'd never heard of anything like this. He was lying on a vast expanse of dark black wood — seemingly the top of a giant coffee table — and based on the relative size of his immediate surroundings, including several fountain pens and a half-empty can of Red Bull, he couldn't have been more than three inches tall.
The more he saw, the more questions flooded into his mind. How had this happened? Was there any cure? And where the heck was he?
Rubbing his eyes and taking another look around, the freshly-shrunken freshman immediately got several clues about that last part. To his right was a wall of decades-old photos in ornate black frames, almost all featuring classes of gloomy young women standing in front of an austere Victorian mansion. To his left was a massive TV resting on a claw-footed black wooden cabinet, stuck on what appeared to be the DVD menu of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Behind him, above a black velvet-upholstered couch strewn with handcuffs and eyeliner pens, a gigantic oil painting depicted several other gloomy women sitting or standing atop collared, empty-eyed men. Putting all of this together, it didn't take a genius to figure out that he had woken up in the common room of House Juno—the sorority known to everyone else at Ventus as the "Goth House."
If the jocks in House Diana were the strongest girls on campus, and the nerds in Minerva were the smartest, the kooky, kinky young ladies of House Juno were easily the scariest—an eclectic mix of artists and academics united in their love of black clothing and hatred of men. They were also often quite attractive — enough to give the average House Fortuna influencer a run for her money — although most male Ventus undergrads knew better than to try asking one of them out. After all, the majority were loud and proud lesbians—and the ones who harbored any attraction to men tended to see them primarily as a means to assorted kinky, generally uncomfortable and humiliating ends.
While many of these young ladies arrived at school as fully-fledged misandrists, their chosen sorority's peculiar heritage and even more peculiar customs definitely didn't do them any favors. Originally the residence of Ventus founder Volumnia Ventus, a wealthy Gilded Age heiress obsessed with elevating future generations of women "above and beyond" the level of men, the place had always been a magnet for students who shared her ideals—but in the hundred years since its inception, it had mutated from a dorm for "independent-minded young ladies" into an organized cult of female domination. It was also quietly one of the wealthiest and most influential institutions within the university, which was why the goths had never been kicked off campus for their love of harassing — and, sometimes, abducting — male students and faculty members.
Realizing where he was, Max winced. Waking up in a place like this would have been dangerous enough at regular size. The only question now was whether to stay where he was or try venturing into the hall in search of someone to help him out—and, hopefully, avoid ending up in some particularly zealous Juno acolyte's stomach. Fortunately, or unfortunately, before he could spend any more time trying to game the whole situation out, he heard the door opening on the other side of the room—and when he turned around, he let out a long sigh of relief.