Ben awoke each day that week wondering how he was able to live with himself.

            He was still shrinking, after all. They were all shrinking. The men, or what was left of them. So many had disappeared from the Blend offices, ostensibly because their shorter statures made them unfit for the rigors and potential dangers of the scientific workspace. Perhaps a dozen men, at most, remained in Blend’s employ.

            And yet Ben had done nothing.

            He’d come to work every day that week to find a message from Ms. Hoshoku instructing him what time, exact to the minute, such as 12:17, to arrive at her office door. In he’d go, be amazed yet again by the multiple inches the woman had grown overnight, and then set to work. Sometimes she used him as a silent footrest, and sometimes as she had in their most honest encounter, by resting the entire bipedal mass of her luscious legs over his shoulders and back.

            And, of course, each session ended when Ben was given the option to ask nicely to be brought closer to that magnetic ass attached to the back of his towering boss. She always obliged, tugging down her panties and sweeping the crescent mass of her derriere along his unworthy face. It almost had its own gravitational pull. Ben could barely breathe from how blessed he felt he was, at least in that fleeting experience.

            On the last day of the work week, Ben had come in with the full intention to finally confront his dominating superior about the secret ingredients of ForLit. But on that day, he had been allowed to plant a single, gentle kiss on Ms. Hoshoku’s butt cheek. The warmth of her hourglass tush and sweet aromatic of her olive skin met Ben’s lips, sending a crackling signal of desperate desire through his heart, and after that, he knew he couldn’t bring up ForLit’s mysteries again to her. Not if he wanted another smooch.

            Three-foot-eleven. Four weeks after that first sip of the cherry beverage. Ben hadn’t been that short since preschool.

            And he was one of the lucky ones. Many of the men he’d seen, before they inexplicably vanished from the office and streets, were wandering around at all of two feet in height wearing oversized doll clothes like little clowns. Precious few of the men still lingered in the halls of Blend, and those that did were constantly bumped by the misplaced knees and rotating asses of female coworkers. The boys were knocked aside, tripped by broad-soled pumps, and shouldered out of the food court line. And the worst part was, Ben couldn’t say how much of it was on purpose by the giggling giantesses he called coworkers and how much of it was the clumsiness he realized now infected him as a byproduct of the size divergence from the female sex.

            He was afraid. Of them. Especially Ms. Hoshoku, more than any other.

            His fear ran as deep as the arousal he now felt simply by conjuring the image of her cruel smile in his mind and the impending global totality of her pale, meaty ass cheeks descending on his face.

            Ben took a different route into the building these days, which allowed him to avoid the amazonian female crowds. It was too embarrassing, especially as he was one of the few remaining men making their way in the public surrounded by women who were literally bumping their heads up against the seven-foot mark. Nearly double his entire height.

            Through the parking garage back entrance, Ben sidled into the elevator, but was always first given a good glimpse of the menagerie of luxury vehicles which lined the garage in chrome silver and hotrod red. There were increasingly more of these luxury vehicles now, humming mechanical beasts which surely cost their owners close to or in excess of a million dollars.

            Ben sighed in the elevator, trying to smooth out the obvious wrinkles in his secondhand suit jacket he’d purchased from the used clothing store after his primary attire no longer fit. It was probably once owned by a five-year-old attending a wedding who outgrew it after one use.

            If only he’d jumped aboard the stocks when they were within his price range. He wondered if he could even afford to buy one share today. The odds weren’t with him.

            The metal doors opened on the second floor, and there in the hall, standing at a mind-mangling seven feet tall, stood Mariah Tennyson, no longer wearing her lab coat, but instead dressed in the kind of custom-fit crimson-red business vestment similar to what Ms. Hoshoku was so fond of flaunting.

            Ben didn’t even need confirmation; it was obvious she’d been promoted. After he’d heard the quality manager, male of course, took indefinite sick leave earlier that week, someone else had moved up the ladder. Clearly, the slot had gone to Mariah, and now, she was Ben’s boss.

            “Well, well, well,” Mariah said, her elegant fingers twiddling with her jeweled rings in anticipation as she grinned victoriously down at her former rival. “Look who’s still coming to work even though he’s too short to reach the elevator buttons.”

            “Hello,” Ben said. “Yep, still here.” Begrudgingly, he stepped aside to make room. Mariah ducked below the archway, taking up most of the space in the metal box as the door slid shut, trapping them inside together.

            “I suppose I owe you a major thank you, Captain Einstein,” she said after a moment of awkward pause. She bunched her palms beneath the silky heft of her highlighted blonde locks, raising it in a series of sexy sworls and cascading golden trails down her neck.

            “Oh?”

            “Oh, yes. You see, before your little science experiment put Blend back on top, I was just trying to keep on top of the rent. Now… well, as you can probably see, I’m moved up a social class or three.”

            “Yes,” Ben coughed, nodding in her general direction. He focused on the floor. The sooner this interaction could end, the sooner he wouldn’t have to look at Mariah and be reminded of not only how much taller and stronger she’d become than him, but how much wealth she’d accrued by benefiting from his invention. Not to mention she’d since developed those irresistible boobs and succulent ass, like immense ripe fruit, begging to be held and squeezed. They were calling to him.

            “So maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you’re actually just some sort of knight in shining armor. A gentleman who puts himself second, and the ladies first,” Mariah continued. Cramped as she was inside the elevator at seven-feet tall, she had managed a compromise, propping herself back against the wall handles. She bowed her blonde crown down under the lights so she could glare squarely at Benjamin, where he was shoved to the corner by the bulk of her legs and hips.

            “Who knows,” Ben said.

            It would not do to say something snippy. Not here, where she had all the advantage. It was hard enough just trying to keep his mind off the sizable bulwark of Mariah’s warm, curvaceous abdomen in a sleek red top pressed up against him. He could feel her pulse quickening, maybe even faster than his.

            “I know, Ben,” Mariah corrected. She jabbed a pencil-length finger under the man’s chin, forcing him to look up. “I know.”

            “So maybe you do,” he grunted.

            “Now as kind as it was of you to do all that work, just so I could earn more in a week than you made in the last two years, I do have one more favor to ask of you, little Ben, if that’s not so great a thing?” Mariah wheedled. Her fingers tickled at his neck, her palm flattened to his cheek, if only to remind him just how much of her hand could cover his narrow countenance. How she could cup her palm over his mouth and nose and suffocate him, if the mood struck her.

            The elevator cables creaked somewhere above; the car had stopped moving.

            “Just a teeny, tiny little favor,” Mariah repeated under her breath.

            “What’s that?” Ben muttered, feeling lower than ever.

            “Would you be a gentleman and give up your seat for a lady?”

            “My seat? W-”

            Ben’s foolish wonderment was quickly answered and then silenced as Mariah shifted her entire backside upon the man’s helplessly crumbled body. Her tanned ass cheeks, barely contained by a perilously short skirt, stretched out beyond their fabric bounds and cruised heavily down upon Ben’s back. It felt like having a dozen sand bags thrust over his spine all in one fling. Instantly, he was pancaked into the cold-steel floor, with Mariah’s considerable heft concentrated down on him.