Shrinking was the most surreal thing that Tiffany Standish had ever experienced.

One minute she was feeling a little woozy and overheated while pouring coffee into her travel mug and then one short blackout later, she found herself spread eagle on the inside of her own panties. The smell of her own detergent and previously enormous body had overwhelmed her when she came to, making her cough and gag as she thrashed about through a light blouse, or at least what she considered a light blouse when she got dressed that morning. With a little more thrashing and shifting, the now tiny woman freed herself from the confines of her own clothes and stared into the sky.

She could just spy the edge of her phone's case hanging off the kitchen counter, a counter that sat atop a cabinet that seemed to stretch over her like a small building. Terror surged through her and a wordless scream shot out from between her lips.

Tiffany's wail turned to sobs and her little legs gave way as she crashed down onto her knees.

It didn't make any sense, she was supposed to be Immune. Her parents had gotten her tested in high school, as soon as the test was made available. Her mother was susceptible but she had managed to inherit her father's immunity. She remembered the paper that stated she was Immune, it had helped her get into a better school and even been a determining factor in her first job out of college.

For the past decade she had been walking around safe in the knowledge that this was not supposed to happen to her. She had stepped over tiny little beggars on the street, or tossed them scraps of her food absentmindedly in Washington Square Park while on her lunch break. Within a year at her job she had been in charge of a few shrinkees, a few proud little analysts who refused to quit after they had shrunk below a foot. Her first 'office' was technically the team's, but her desk had dominated the space, and more than once she had flaunted her size over the tiny men and women, stretching out her legs and letting her feet loom over their shoulders.

Bile rose in her throat as she realized that some of those former colleagues were now bigger than her.

She was thankfully able to swallow it back down but she found that she didn't know what to do with herself. With her phone far above, the only other way she had to contact someone was her laptop, which was still sitting atop her bed from where she had left it while watching Netflix the night before. Tiffany had been on climbing walls a few times and it had been fun but she didn't have any confidence in her ability to scale her bed frame and mattress at her current size.

Worse, she realized that there was no one for her to contact.

Her parents lived back in Ohio, which meant at best they were several hours away and the thought of being a little pet daughter to her parents was heartbreaking. Years of independence swept away in an instant. The friends she had made over the years in New York ran through her head, and her body started to shake in fright.

All of them were Immune and she knew they would have no sympathy for her plight.

Tiffany could still remember a night three years ago when Ashleigh picked a man off the street and carried him back to their apartment. She had doused the three inch tall man in vodka to 'sterilize' him before eating him whole. The girl had cackled around his blood and guts as she chewed, and Tiffany had captured the whole thing on video. They had uploaded it to Instagram with all the usual hashtags.

Kim, who was so sweet to every normal sized person she met, was positively brutal to a shrinkee girl she 'protected.' Tiffany had never pried too deeply into the situation but she knew that Kim never spoke to the shrinkee in English, only shouting commands down at her in Cantonese and the few words that Tiffany recognized were not particularly nice. The thought of being enslaved by the petite girl, who she had teased about her height on more than one occasion, made her stomach twist and turn again.

Even her best friend, her sorority sister from college, Victoria wouldn't offer any sympathy. She had kept a pledge who shrank when they were in college, and Tiffany still remembered the feeling of the tiny pledge painting her toenails. She had never seen the girl after graduation, and Victoria had never even acknowledged the pledge's existence afterwards which lead Tiffany to think she had killed her. Worse, Victoria was married and freshly moved to the suburbs with 'the hubs', an enormous dad-bodded guy named Jake who had definitely checked her out on more than a few occasions. She did not want to be trapped in an enormous home with him, especially after their birth announcement a few weeks ago. If Victoria was going to only grow larger while she stayed trim, she'd either be at the mercy of a gigantic hormonal pregnant woman or her horny husband. Neither option felt particularly safe to her.

“Emma!” Tiffany shouted with glee, thinking about her nice friendly intern.

She was already running across the vast hardwood plains of her apartment before she thought through her interactions with the young woman. Then her legs started to slow as a conversation they had the previous week started to play out in her head.

“I'm just glad I got tested when I was in my last year of college,” the smiling girl had said, “The chance of a false positive dropped by, like, forty percent in the past two years.”

Tiffany had simply nodded along, more focused on an email from another team lead than whatever the intern was chatting about, “Is that so?”

“Yeah, the chances of it are practically zero now. Not like when you were my age, right?”

Tiffany had simply shrugged, her fingers flying across the keyboard, more annoyed at the intern making her sound so old than anything else, “I guess.”

“Apparently the tests back then messed up, like, half the time?” Emma had giggled, “Can you imagine if you shrunk after so many years?”

Tiffany remembered the nonchalant, “I guess it'd be pretty scary,” she had offered.

“Mhm, if it happened at work, I guess then I'd be your boss, huh?”

The girl's laughter had set her at ease at the time, and she had gotten so used to the casual cruelty that all the Immune people she knew displayed that she didn't even think about it, “Guess so.”

Tiffany stopped in her tracks as she thought of the interaction now. The cruel and superior glint in the girl's eyes, the way her fingers had clenched slightly, and the briefest bite of her lower lip. “Oh fuck,” Tiffany whispered to herself as she realized what the little intern would do, “Not Emma, never Emma. Not Emma at all.”

She stood in the center of her floor, trembling.

Staring out across her own apartment, she stared at the towering pieces of furniture and slowly pivoted about taking it all in. Years of keeping everything neat and tidy meant there wasn't so much as a crumb on the floor. The fact that the apartment was a nice newly built luxury tower meant that the leaky pipes she could have drank from in her first New York City apartment were non-existent. The only upside was that there were no vermin or creepy-crawlies for her to deal with at her new small stature.

That offered Tiffany little comfort though as she realized she was going to starve.

She stared across her apartment at her front door, suddenly wishing that she would shrink more and be able to fit under its threshold.

It was either that or face one her gigantic Immune friends.