“Sometime today, Honey?”  The court officer questioned, not even looking up from her phone.

        John panted heavily, struggling with the pen.  At just seven inches tall, the pencil was a foot shorter than him, but nearly half his girth.  He finished a misshapen cursive ‘s’ and dropped the heavy ballpoint pen/log onto the sheet.  He inhaled rapidly, checking his ugly signature, “Connor James.”  The woman sighed in relief, as though his struggles were hers.  She placed her hand palm up next to him.  He hopped on, her other hand moved in to form a partial barrier before bringing him to the floor.  The wall of a hand moved away and Connor jumped off, the officer straightened back to her skyscraper height and resumed looking at her phone.

        Connor turned from the colossus, belittled even more than he thought possible at this height.  He jogged towards the nearby back wall and then across the normal sized classroom.  He passed by seven normal sized desks before coming to the eighth, his smaller desk underneath.  Every desk had a smaller one below, situated near the front.  He put his bag to the side and sat down angrily. 

        He looked back at the other desks and was relieved that he had come early.  This was his fifth day in court ordered sexual harassment training.  On the first he had chosen the nearest shrinkie desk, only to find the constant pounding of feet from the normies coming in unnerving.  Several times giant shoes, sandals, and occasionally boots, had come within inches, shrunken inches, of him.

        He watched as the line that had previously been in shrank, literally.  A court clerk pointed a gun shaped device and shrunk each, one by one, before lifting them to the table where the shrinkies then dragged a pen towards the sign-up sheet.  After finishing the Herculean task, the accompanying court officer lowered each to the floor, with just as much indifference as Connor.

        He really hated being shrunken, much like the other gloomy looking shrinkies he saw jogging to the remaining desks, but the trade off was worth it.  Due to a lack of space and cutbacks, many court facilities offered time off of sentences if the person agreed to be shrunk during the classes.  Connor had shoved a woman to the ground and been ordered to attend three weeks of anger management.  It didn’t matter that the woman had kicked a female shrinkie like a football, sending her into the blades of a push lawnmower.  The judge made him pay a fine and mandated sexual harassment counseling.

        “Attributing human emotions to objects, either your sense of morality is skewed or you’re mentally unstable.  Had I the time, or the state the resources, we could accurately diagnose what’s wrong with you, unfortunately $500 and 3 weeks sexual harassment counseling is the best treatment available at this time,” The judge had admonished him while sentencing.

        He clenched his hands tightly, tears forming, he didn’t care if what the woman had done was lawful, it wasn’t fair.  He slammed his little fists onto the wooden desk, releasing a bit of his frustration.  His feelings on miniaturization were due to his parents suffering.  His father had shrunk on the job and been claimed by a coworker, and a year later his mother had also been reduced.  Even worse, his 18-year-old sister had found her first and assumed guardianship.  The memories of how she treated their mother, her own flesh and blood, still haunted him.

        Being shrunken shaved off two weeks from his sentence, and only reinforced his views of how cruel people were.  He watched as the normies walked in.  They signed up next to shrinkies who hadn’t come in early and signed their own names next to them, sometimes even taking a pen from one, or swatting them aside like annoying insects.  They then strode nonchalantly towards their desks, the shrinkies scurrying quickly to avoid the footfalls.  The giants knew that they were normies, but even being temporarily shrunken made them little more than rodents.

        Fortunately, shrinkies were far more resilient to pressure due to some science-y explanation Connor had not been able to comprehend, so being stepped on or kicked was not a death sentence, but it was still painful and, with enough weight, injurious.  A few shrinkies were accompanied by a guardian who lifted them after the initial shrinking, signed their names for them, and then brought them to a desk, avoiding the current chaos of the mice sized humans dodging for all they were worth.  Several shrinkies were clipped by the enormous shoes, one found herself stepped on by a woman in sandals.  The giant stopped, leaning her weight onto that foot and scrunching it back and forth before lifting it and giggling at the traumatized female.

        “Ha, ha, sorry, didn’t happen to see you there.  Be more careful or next time you might get stuck.”

        Connor’s forming scream was interrupted by two large black pumps dropping around him.  He turned his head, examining the right shoe, before following the thick silo of a leg skywards to see a plump Hispanic face looking down at him.  The woman was leaning to the right, peering down at her “deskmate.”  She looked to be in her mid-thirties, her face smiling motherly at Connor.

        “Hello, my small friend, my name is Teodora!”

        The woman’s voice was deep and sounded older than she looked, yet exuded warmth and caring.  He couldn’t help but smile back at her.

        “Connor!” He yelled upwards.

        “Very nice to meet you my small friend, I hope you don’t mind my feet so close to you, I can try to squeeze my legs against the desk if that helps?”

        Connor thought for a moment, her pumps were almost right next to him.  He looked at her thunder thighs and far larger hips already squeezing to fit under the desk.  He could smell the leather of her pumps, and a tanned leather smell which he assumed was her sweat.  While not a preferable situation, this wasn’t that bad.  Normies were only told not to touch their smaller deskmates (a rule frequently unenforced unless the giants were outright squishing shrinkies between their feet).  There was a large plexiglass barrier behind him that curved to allow humans to rest their feet above the shrinkies.  Looking around he saw several giants place their bare feet on those while allowing their toes to dangle, sometimes brushing the shrinkies beneath.  Connor considered for a moment.

        “Nah, that’s alright, d…”

        “Oh gracias!”  She exclaimed, visibly relieved at not having to squeeze further against a desk intended for someone with only one chin. 

        Connor smiled cheerily at her exuberance.  There was a soft ringing alerting the start of class.  A pasty academic type took up a marker and began his lecture on sexual harassment.  He wrote while speaking in a monotonous mumble, no one was really listening anyways.  What accounted for counseling these days was nothing like it had been Prewave, thanks to the change true counselors were few and far between.  Nowadays counselors tended to look sharply at their patients and say something like, “Man up, or if you prefer woman up, either way shut up, and find something to do other than bitching.”

        The history Postwave was not pretty, so Connor understood why things had changed so much, but he felt that humanity had lost their moral compass, sacrificing ideals and humanity for pragmatism and repression.  Yeah society was reestablished, but it was cold and hard, you swam, or you sunk.  If you sunk, no tears and no whining, unless that’s what your owner wanted from you.

        Connor continued his musings for two hours straight as the professor droned on slightly audibly.  The bell rang again, announcing an end to his hell.  A few normies rose only to be stared back into their seats by the now active security officer.  While people who shrank by chance were fair play for capture, people shrank for official business were not.  All shrinkies were to leave first to allow them to be properly counted and restored to normal height.  If any were missing the classroom would be put on lockdown and everyone searched until all the signatures were accounted for and the tinies restored to normal height.

        He stood up with his bag, eager to leave.

        “Till next time Connor!”  The cheery voice bid him adieu.

        “Goodbye Teodora!”  He replied, waving before jogging towards the court clerk at the door.

        All the shrinkies were restored, their names checked off the official sign in sheet and further checked against another indicating who was supposed to be present.  The clerk handed every shrinkie a sealed envelope.  Conner knew from the four days prior that it was just a notice telling them how many days they had left; in case they couldn’t count.  He shoved it into his pants before quickly leaving, jogging down the courthouse corridor.  It was childish, but he felt uneasy at being seen afterwards by his normal sized cohorts.  He took a corner too fast, bumping his shoulder against a balding man in a dark blue suit.

        “Sorry ‘bout that!”  He called back, not even turning his gaze as he ran towards the entrance.

        “No problem,” The gentlemen said heartily, watching the younger man until he was well out the courthouse doors.

        He smoothed his rumpled suit before crumping the envelope in his hand.