- Text Size +
Story Notes:

Earth Physicist Pacho Saldarriaga finds himself in Lur, the Land of the Giants.

Author's Chapter Notes:

An exciting addition to a boring afternoon for them... uncertainty for him.

—“Sooo booring”. Said Cantlutloche.

—“Soo hot” whined Fisotrano.

—“Soo whiny, you two”, complained in turn Mal-Jabloki.

The three young women were in the small park near their boarding house, playing catafis over an oversized tarp spread on the lawn. As befitted the very warm summer, they were dressed in rather revealing and loose garments. A radio on a leather holster, running on batteries, was nearby, broadcasting the latest hits with occasional interruptions from a radio announcer for commercials or news. A mostly empty bowl of fruit was lying nearby.

All these girls’ mood was rather surly, since they were quite broke. And the month was barely beginning. Paychecks from their jobs would be still a few weeks in coming. And most of their money had already went into paying a hefty fine they were slapped with because of a raucous party they had held just five days before.

They were outdoors because at this time of day their small shared apartment was simply too hot to bear. No money to travel, to go eat ice cream or amuse themselves whatsoever in this beautiful day.

- “I told you the music was too loud”. Said Mal-Jabloki.

- “I did not hear you”. Answered a sullen Fisotrano.

- “Of course you didn’t. You did not even hear the neighbors knock to complain; nor did you hear the patrollers.” retorted Mal-Jabloki. “That is why we are eating fruit in this lousy park instead of going to the beach with the guys. We’ll be lucky if we have a dime to spend on groceries by the twentieth…”.

Cantlutloche , or Tloche for short, was fed up with this quarrel and did not join in the bickering, which continued as an indistinct drone to which she was not paying attention. With a sigh, she lay on her back on the tarp, scooting on her back until she was out of the sun, choosing to be in the dappled shade offered by the Tolu trees overhead, their big, heart-shaped leaves rustling in the wind. Arms behind her head, she watched one of the red, fist-sized blossoms detach from a high branch and flutter to the ground lazily.

Tloche was majoring as a health professional but had always liked trees and birds. While her roommates squabbled pointlessly in the background, tired of arguments and fruit, she found herself thinking of a big, juicy steak (knowing one will be long in coming at this rate), and watched the birds fly around, trying to see if there were any new species she had not seen before. None were apparent. She then started to watch the trees, counting the species around her, when something caught her attention in a nearby branch of a Tolu tree. I’m bored out of my mind… wait a minute… is that a bird?

She sat up and looked intently at the branch. Something was crawling alongside it. A lizard? It was green colored, and with no wings in sight. It clearly was having difficulty navigating the spiny bark of the Tolu trees. But it was difficult to focus on it, backlit as it was. The shape and movements are really odd…

-“Um… guys?”

-“What?” the annoyed Jablo and Trano said in chorus.

Now Tloche was on her feet. Pointing with her slender, shapely hand, she signaled at the branch.

- “There is a really interesting animal up there”.

- “I don’t’ see anything”

-“It’s not big. See that white blotch of lichen there?  Follow it to the tip right past that yellow leaf with the hole”.

-“I still don’t see anything”. Said Jablo. An exchange student from the far West, she did not have good eyesight, and being an aspiring businesswoman, did not have much interest nor practice in observing nature.

-“Uuuuu! Is that a frog? Big! What’s it doing up there”. Said Trano in turn. She was an engineering student, and more curious than the unimaginative Jablo, or at least that how Tloche saw her. Coming from the warm North, Trano was not really a foreigner, like Jablo, but not a local like Tloche.

-“It does not look like a frog… the shape is all wrong…” By now Tloche was walking up to the branch. The animal had apparently realized it was being watched and was doing its best to remain motionless and inconspicuous behind a leaf and in the upper side of the twig it was clinging to.

-“It stopped moving” said Trano.

-“I want to see what it is” said Tloche decisively. I’ll jump to grab that part of the branch and will start to bend it down. Please keep watching the animal to see if it jumps and where it lands”.

-“What if it bites you?” said a disgusted Jablo. “Or if it pisses on you? Mi brother once tried to put a frog in my hair but as he raised it, it pissed right on his face!”

-“I’ll be careful… it’s rather sluggish,… it does not seem to be very agile” said Tloche, trying to disguise the fact that she had not considered such a disgusting but not entirely unlikely outcome.

It took two tries, but Tloche managed to catch a handful of leaves with her fist. Trying not to rip them right off the tree, she pulled carefully until she grasped a twig, a slender one with few spines. Then she continued to pull on the branch, trying to avoid being prickled with the spines, until the animal was close. But the sun overhead and the leaves did not let her see it well enough yet. Suddenly, the branch she was holding half-snapped. The two girls behind Tloche shrieked in chorus at the unexpected noise.

Tloche almost squealed herself, but she was too busy trying to catch the small thing that fell off the branch as it snapped. She gave a quick half-step forward, her two hands shot up and forward and… I got it! She exultated. It was almost weightless, warm and dry, very delicate and fragile in her half-closed fists, held together as a basket. Turning around to face her friends, and bending her head to peer at what she was holding, she started to open her hands, which were quivering in excitement, ready to close them if the little wriggling thing tried to jump off, ready to fling it away if it tried to bite, scratch or jump to her face. Her jaw dropped.

 -“Is that a…” started a squinting Jablo.

-“… man?” ended Trano.

****

Francisco “Pacho” Saldarriaga had just spent the worst night of his life. It seemed the day was not going to be much better. In the space of a few hours, he had gone from excited at being invited to a novel research project, to being on a doomed airplane he had to jump out of in the middle of the night, to be stuck in a tree until dawn. And now there were these three.

At dawn, his parachute had long been torn off by the wind from the branch he had fallen on top of. He thought things would be getting easier as soon as he could see better. Boy, was he wrong. the branch he was clinging to was full of nasty pyramidal thorns which quickly tore his pants and shirt in shreds when he tried to move around in the dark, so he was forced to just hang in there in the dark. Daylight showed him he was over 30 meters off the ground, above a very faraway grassland.

The branch he was in was one of the lowest, and the tree seemed to stretch infinitely upwards in the sky. Its trunk was incredibly thick and stout, and that was not even the biggest tree around that he could see. In the distance, he thought he could hear the sound of traffic and perhaps human voices. At least, he thought, I did not land in the middle of the jungle. But any hope of normalcy had quickly dissipated as he saw (and heard) the three women approach.

He watched them, in increasing terror, as they ambled by. They were taller than most trees he had known (until this day), with voices as loud as thunder, walking with ten-meter strides. They were laughing, chattering in a completely incomprehensible prattle. One of them, the dark-haired one, extended a maroon tarp big enough to set a circus tent on top of, and sat down to play with a kind of spinning top the red-headed one took out of her pocket. The blond one set down the bowl of completely unknown fruits she was carrying, and they set down to talk, eat and play. For hours. When will they leave?!

Although the branch he was in was higher than the giant women were tall, he judged they could still probably reach it with their outstretched arms, so he judged it prudent not to catch their attention.

His predicament would be far from over when the women left. The branch he was in joined at a fairly straight angle to the trunk of the very thick tree. The next branch was meters above. In the trunk, the spines were sparser than on the branches, and he was not sure he would be able to climb down over 30 meters to the ground just holding to such impractical and sharp foot and handholds.

Pacho was, however, not prone to either sulking nor panic. He just clung there, advancing slowly and carefully in the branch avoiding the spines, trying to get to the main tree trunk. He also looked down on the unsuspecting women. Even if they were of Olympian size, he could appreciate they were all quite pretty.

The blond one was the shorter one, if still probably above 20 meters tall, and waifish-thin. She had very pale, unnaturally yellow eyes, matching her silvery gold tresses, and deeply tanned, almost orange skin. The redheaded one was almost buxom, extremely well endowed in the chest department. From his privileged vantage point, feeling like a peeping tom, he could see very well down the dark cleft of her deep cleavage.  Her hair was cut rather short - barely reaching her shoulders. He could not see her eyes well, but they seemed to be blue.

The dark haired one had quite pale skin, contrasting nicely with her raven-dark hair, smooth as silk, reaching the small of her back. She was slender and nimble, with shapely arms and legs, well displayed by her flowing, sleeveless white beach dress (as were the curves of her breasts, seen under the holes of her sleeves. The dress was  attractively split down her skirt, showing a good deal of toned thighs and beautiful knees and calves. She was tall, serious, quiet and introspective, and apparently unwilling to participate in the animated nattering of the other two. She even seemed bored. Her eyes were dark and unsettlingly piercing and intelligent. Her small mouth was very red, her nose proud. Clearly, this girl had caught Pacho’s attention more than the other two young women.

As the hours stretched in forced idleness, he had time to relive the last hours and moments of normalcy he had lived. He had been invited a few weeks ago as a geophysicist in a monitoring flight of the magnetic anomaly that had been detected over the Caribbean. This was a suborbital flight, and the anomaly had been appearing all over the northern hemisphere, on and off, during the last two years, in a seemingly random pattern. It rarely lasted more than an hour before dissipating.

But Pacho had analyzed the wake of the anomaly and correlated it with his own measurements on the magnetic field of Earth. He managed to predict with a certain amount of precision the next appearance of the anomaly. So a team was hastily put together by the National Geophysical Research Institute in India, and he, as a former alumni, was invited aboard a research flight mission to perform measurements on the anomaly, hoping it would appear again where predicted by Pacho’s model.

Little did Pacho think that the anomaly would tear the plane apart even from a distance, and that he would be sucked out of it through a hole in the hull… towards a pink maelstrom that quickly and thankfully, faded before he went through it. Good thing Dr. Padhy had foreseen there could be dangers in approaching the anomaly and insisted all wore parachutes at all times. Pacho wondered if the plane had made it back safely.  Pacho was now also wondering if he had really been spared by the eldritch whirlpool. Clearly, he was not in the Caribbean anymore.

After a while, feeling like a voyeur, Pacho recommenced his slow crawl to the only opportunity he saw of getting down the tree. The next time he looked down, his blood froze when he saw the dark-haired woman was sitting up, looking straight at him intently. He almost pissed himself with fear when the female colossus spoke to her friends, pointing right at his branch; soon, the three mega-girls walked until they were directly below him.

Despite his best efforts, he knew his attempts at concealment were now futile, but he clung to the dim hope of being overlooked or that the women tired of catching him, so he made himself as small as he could, hiding between the leaves and on top of the branch. No such luck. Pacho’s stomach churned in panic as he saw the giant woman jump to grab the branch and start pulling on it. He held for dear life in mute and complete, abject horror at the huge but delicate fingers getting closer. He looked right into the dark eyes of an unfathomable, titanic being intent on catching him. So beautiful! So terrifying! He watched in wonder at the incredibly beautiful and pale visage of the giantess.

She squinted against the sunlight, thankfully still unable to see him clearly. Looking down in rising panic, Pacho still found time to gawk down her blouse, where the half revealed hemispheres of her breasts jiggled and bounced as the dark haired girl, with raised arms, jumped once more right below him, and then she started to pull carefully. I’m going to fall to my death and even now I’m getting a boner by looking at the biggest tits I’ve ever seen, was his last coherent thought before the branch snapped. The branch did not fall, but Pacho lost his hold and slipped off the branch, his pants tearing in a last, impertinent, defiant thorn. His stomach felt the sickening void of freefall. Thinking his family would never find out what happened to him, he only managed to utter a gasp before a pair of giant hands closed over him.

 

You must login (register) to review.