Once inside the building, Ben considered stopping at his blend tech work station to put together a mental battle-plan, but decided against it. This couldn’t wait. In the elevator, he rose to the fifth floor and marched confidently toward Ms. Hoshoku’s office.

            Or at least, he thought he was. That boldness took a hit when he reached the door, the same one from seven short days before, and saw a new name on it. “Mr. Blaine Johnson.”

            Wasn’t Blaine Johnson the director of productions? What was he doing down here, on the fifth floor?
            Then Ben remembered. Ms. Hoshoku’s off-hand comment about rising in the ranks, and possibly in the immediate future. Could she have literally meant within the week? Biting his tongue and taking the off-chance, Ben returned to the elevator and shot up to the eighth floor this time.

            When he emerged in the well-lit space, he found he was faced with a secretary, just as statuesque in height and luminous in her ample curves as every other woman out on the street. At least, he assumed she was a secretary; he didn’t know much about the finances of Blend, but he was pretty sure a secretary wouldn’t be able to afford the kind of Tiffany jewelry and designer handbag she displayed so prominently on her person.

            Still, this was the right place: Ms. Hoshoku’s new name plate was emblazoned on the door behind the secretary.

            The auburn-haired woman barely acknowledged him on approach; it was only when he stood in front of the desk and knocked on the wood that she even looked up to him with a raised eyebrow.

            “Yes?” she cooed, as though speaking to a lost child. Her desk nameplate read Shauna Brown. “May I help you with something?”

            “I need to speak to Ms. Hoshoku.”

            “I’m afraid she’s busy at the moment. But I’ll certainly take a message for you and see she gets it at her earliest convenience.”

            “This can’t wait, I-” Ben insisted. His gaze diverted behind Shauna to the office door, which cracked open at that moment.

            “Benjamin,” said Ms. Hoshoku, poking her head around the corner. “I thought I heard your voice. I’m glad you found my new office. You must be here for our meeting.”

            Meeting? Ben ticked back through the previous fifteen minutes in his mind and determined he’d arranged no meeting post-panic, nor had he seen anything in his email inbox. But it didn’t matter how he got in that office; he just had to confront her.

            “Yep. Yes, that’s why I’m here,” he said.

            “Then I suppose you’d better come in, hadn’t you?”

            For the third time in two weeks, Ben filed like a schoolboy through the open door of his superior’s office. And for the third consecutive time, he was nearly bowled over by the sight that met him. A hanging jaw didn’t quite cut it anymore; this was the kind of view that could put people into cardiac arrest.

            Ms. Hoshoku was enormous. There was no other word for it. Not that he needed the further evidence that something was amiss in the general population, but the women downstairs, while massive in scale compared to their dwindling male counterparts, were within the bounds of his perceived reality. Women could grow to be six feet, after all. It wasn’t common, but plenty existed.

            The enchanting Japanese business shark of a woman who now stood before him was in a category aside. She stretched up in shocking contrast to Ben’s stature. She, the mastermind of ForLit’s secrets and the new director of productions at Blend, was at least six-foot-six. If not several inches higher.

            Frankly, Ben couldn’t quite make it out exactly from so far down, because he was staring straight at her abdomen. This was hardly a woman; this was a monument. And a bedevilingly alluring one at that. It took all the willpower the shrunken man had left to peel his eyes away from Ms. Hoshoku and all her newly formed hills in the tit and ass ratio. It was almost too much.

            No. He had to focus. Not on her, not on this beguiling citadel of a woman, but the problem at hand. His lost height. The very-real health crisis in this nuclear beverage they’d crafted.

            “Well, Benjamin,” the beauty said as she languidly took a seat in her new chair. She spread her arms wide in indication of the obviously larger and more luxurious office, complete with brand-new mahogany furniture, decoration, and high-society niceties that Ben knew couldn’t have cost any less than a cool fifty thousand. The bonsai still stood in the corner.

            “Ms. Hoshoku-”

            “Don’t just stand in the middle of the office like a lost puppy. Come over here to my desk and speak to me like a normal person.”

            Nodding, Ben did as he was told and crossed the lengthy carpeted span of the office. He doubted anyone on earth was capable of actually talking to Hoshoku like a “normal person.”

            “Good,” she said when he’d come to stop in front of her desk.

            “Ms. Hoshoku,” Ben began at last. He cleared his throat, going over the words he’d rehearsed to himself in the elevator, and pulled the second chair out in front of the desk. “I don’t mean to sound like I’ve come here to throw accusations and unproven claims around. However, as part creator of ForLit, I have a real responsibility to point out to you that-”

            “Excuse me, Benjamin,” Hoshoku cut in sharply, her voice at needle-pointed as ever on each syllable. “But I don’t recall offering you that chair.”

            “Oh,” he said, practically leaping away from the furniture as though it had caught fire. “As I was saying…”

            “Why don’t you go ahead and just take a seat here, beside me.”     

            “On…” he mumbled. “On the floor?”

            Ms. Hoshoku rolled her entrancing almond eyes as though it was the most foolish question to have met her ears in a lifetime. “Yes, on the floor, Benjamin, unless you see an invisible chair in my office I’ve not been made privy to? I admit, there have been many additions to my personal quarters in the weeks since ForLit went live, but even I don’t have the capital yet to invest in perfectly transparent furniture.”

            Ben felt his throat contort with confusion again, reminded of the mysterious financial windfalls it seemed every woman, especially Hoshoku, was enjoying so readily. However, he stayed on target. Patting down the folds of his slacks, he took a seat on the floor, in front of Ms. Hoshoku’s swivel chair. He didn’t even question the position again, so intent was he now on getting through his point.

            “Now…” she drawled. “Come closer.”

            Ben obeyed. Ms. Hoshoku lifted her strong, winding left leg up, then her right, and crested both over Ben’s thin shoulders. She set her calves down against his back, her supple thighs now relating most of their considerable weight to the frailer man’s shoulders.

            Trembling from the surprise and added girth suddenly borne by his back, Ben opened his mouth to continue the rant. To start the rant. No sound came out.

            “Oh, and there’s the hanging lips again. Didn’t your mother ever come up with some old wives’ tale to frighten you into manners, Benjamin?” Ms. Hoshoku asked sternly as she squeezed her quadriceps a few inches closer around her employee’s narrow neck.

            Another two or three inches, and she’d have him in a full headlock, the air constricted in his windpipe. Ben was never more aware of this fact than right now. Especially because he doubted he’d be able to stop her if she did so just then.

            The warmth of the woman’s nyloned legs was transforming Ben’s very body temperature. He could feel her steady, relaxed heartbeat through the veins beneath her firm flesh. Netted fabric bristled against Ben’s skin and the hairs of his neck. Muscle, carved by some Olympian, flexed casually through the threads of the nude stocking.

            “I… I, uh…” he stammered. His back twitched with the weight of her hanging legs. She’d melted him right back into a puddle.

            “Don’t tell me you can’t be a team player AND speak your mind at the same time, Benjamin,” Ms. Hoshoku interrupted again, when it was clear the man was only going to sputter. “Out with it. Yes, obviously we didn’t have a meeting scheduled. So why don’t you quit wasting both of our time, mine especially, and tell me why you’ve come to see me today with that little chest of yours puffed up like a peacock?”

            The woman’s thighs were bending lower, bowing Ben closer to the ground and nearer in toward the apex of her endless, toned limbs. Partially out of exertion from the weight of her legs, and partially due to lethal curiosity, Ben inhaled sharply rather than answer the question.

            He was greeted by the same tantalizing green tea aroma, spiced by the heat of her spotless skin and downy nylon fabric. When he took another whiff, he caught something new. Feminine odors, oily and sweet in his olfactory senses. It emanated from just ahead, within the guarded confines of her panties and, beyond, those positively titanic ass cheeks. His erection was at full stand inside his pants, and there was no way the woman couldn’t see it if she chose to glance down.

            SMACK. The crack of skin on skin. Ben, flustered, shook his head from side to side, at least as far as Ms. Hoshoku’s python-like thighs would allow him to.

            She’d slapped him right across the face and nearly given him whiplash. He could still feel the stinging hand-shape tattooed on his skin.

            “M-Miss-” he warbled.

            “Excuse you, Benjamin. But just as I don’t recall instructing you to take a seat in a chair when you entered, I don’t recall offering you permission to sniff your superior’s pussy like a stunted little pervert,” she scowled in a flinty whisper. “Are you truly this incapable of waiting to follow simple directions?”

            Ben realized, at this moment, in perhaps his purest understanding of the situation, that he was in well over his head. Last time was a silent, surreal encounter of the kind he assumed would never occur again.

            Today was different. There was no dawdling, no toying around with whether or not she was pulling a prank. Because she wasn’t. She was putting him down. And she wasn’t afraid to look him in the eye and tell him she was doing so, while she did it, with legs fastened around his neck in a chokehold.

            “Do you say you’re sorry, Benjamin?” she asked. Her thighs clamped harder around the man’s neck, her powerful calves easily pulling him nearer into the orbit of her body on the throne.

            “Yes!” he bleated. He could feel his face turning red from humiliation and air loss.

            “Yes, what?”

            “Yes, I’m sorry!”

            “Sorry for what?”

            “For s-sniffing… sniffing y-you… there!”

            “Good enough, I suppose,” she sighed, and at last relented the flushing grip of her gently vibrating thighs from around her employee’s bruised neck. “But we’ll have to work on your articulation next time.”

            “N-Next time?”

            Ms. Hoshoku smirked. Her hand, close to double as wide as Benjamin’s own, descended. It briefly blotted out the light above and came to rest on his forehead. Fingernails teased at his scalp, threatening to scratch, but only gripping him by the tufts of his sandy hair.

            “Now, Benjamin… after how far we’ve come in this business partnership… you’re honestly going to say you wouldn’t like to continue our arrangement?” she inquired. Though her voice was low, it echoed ominously in Ben’s cranium. “Surely you wouldn’t want to halt the progress of your career?”

            Ben swallowed. Was she threatening his job? Or was that only the very least of what she was threatening?

            “No, ma’am… I mean, Ms. Hoshoku. No, I would not.”

            “Then I suppose you’d best run along now, hmm? Find something to busy yourself with down in the blending offices. Perhaps you’ll discover a new flavor. Green Tea ForLit, maybe?”

            Dumbfounded, Ben crumpled back on his haunches upon the carpet where he’d just been so casually abused by his boss without so much as a raised voice or a question of intent. It was clear this woman simply took what was required. Nothing less and nothing more. Well, maybe a little more.

            “But first tilt your head up for me,” Ms. Hoshoku instructed. She rose up from her chair, making herself into a veritable valkyrie standing above, with Benjamin sprawled around her shins.

            “Huh?”

            “What did we just say about following directions?”

            “Sorry,” he said, and pointed his face toward the ceiling and the alpine visage of his curvaceous business teammate’s ruthless rumps, fighting against the lower seams of her skirt.

            “Now breathe all the way out, and then you’ll have that sampling you were wanting.”

            “That samp-”

            “If you could divert enough blood flow from your cock back up to your brain for just a moment, Benjamin, you’ll recall I never suggested you would not have the opportunity to sample the atmosphere of my ass. Simply that you would have to wait for permission,” she explained. Her long thumbs slid up the back of her skirt, fumbling with the band of her panties. “Now, do as I said. Exhale, and take a nice, healthy whiff of your boss’s cheeks, if that’s what you came up here to do.”

            It wasn’t what he came up here to do, though. Ben was still seething with the very-real terror of the fabric of humanity being altered by the mad proliferation of this beverage he’d inadvertently helped frankenstein together. He’d gotten nowhere except onto the floor at his boss’s feet.

            Yet he exhaled. Heavily. He blinked, unable to believe his insane fortunes as Ms. Hoshoku planted two snow-shoe soles beside either of his ribs and tucked into a squat. Her fingers tugged the stretched fabric of her underthings down her jiggling, pale thighs, revealing her bare, moon-like fanny below. The curved surface of it was gifted by flawless olive skin, just like the rest of her massive form. It drew nearer and nearer toward Ben’s face, like a sinking planet, and he simply laid still in preparation.

            “Now breathe,” Ms. Hoshoku said callously. Her fingers drummed against the shimmying, liquid-esque surface of her rounded skin. “Breathe all the way in. Hard.”

            Ben obeyed. He inhaled for all he was worth, filling his dried lungs up to bursting. Every magical note of the woman’s aura was absorbed into his nostrils and throat. The green tea was only a faint ghost of soapy flavor now; the earthier zest with a hint of sour acridity now tantalized Ben in full as the woman’s ricocheting butt cheeks hovered a mere two inches away from his face.

            Sweating and quaking now with the novelty of it all, his erection quivering for release in his pants, Ben languished on the darkly stale scent of Ms. Hoshoku’s lovingly maintained and cleansed but nonetheless complicated, richly satisfying ass. Only then did she descend that extra few inches, brushing Ben’s nose directly through the valley of her heavenly ass cheeks, cupping the sides of his face by her moldable flesh.

            Ben thought he might faint.

            Her long, ramrod fingers were digging into his hair again. Nails on his scalp. She was dragging him up to his haunches as easily as a ragdoll.

            “Stand up, Benjamin” she instructed pleasantly. He did so, though her hand remained clasped possessively to the top of his head as he stumbled up. At his pathetic full height, he was reminded again of the fact that he had to look up to get a full glimpse of Ms. Hoshoku’s breasts bulging through her top. He could even see the button stitching pull. “Do we have an understanding now?”

            “Y-Yes, Ms. Hoshoku,” he said out of instinct. “T-Thank you.”

            “You’re welcome, Benjamin. Now get the hell out of my office, if you please.”