The ride was dizzying.

Aura’s grip on their surroundings was fairly slack. Considering that she was obviously completely unaware that she was also carrying two shrunken attorneys, that made sense, but both of her unnoticed passengers would certainly have appreciated a bit more care.

Apollo had been making nervous, panicked noises for most of the trip. Athena’s arm had remained locked in place over his front for just as long, pinning him to the solid wall at their backs, but he had to imagine that she was getting a bit tired, holding it in place that way.

Fortunately, Aura at least wasn’t swinging her arm at her side too much. Their perch was only drifting forward and backward lightly with their host’s movements, though the rocking motion was still enough to shake them up a bit, on account of their utterly puny size. It didn’t help that their view of the outside was so limited, with two of Aura’s gigantic fingers obscuring most of what was visible beyond her fist, leaving only blurred glimpses of the space centre’s long hallways.

At last, Aura came to a stop.

-THUMP-

“Ack...!!”

A sudden movement all around them had jostled Athena out of her position holding Apollo in place, and he staggered forward.

“Apollo!”

He felt a solid grip clamp down on his right arm, and Athena forcefully yanked him back toward her. They collided, Apollo crumpling against his co-worker’s sturdy upper body. He made an uncomfortable noise immediately, trying to shift to Athena’s side again.

“I-it’s alright, just wait a second...”

-THUMP-

This time, Athena was caught off-guard as well. She lurched, instinctively grabbing a hold on both of Apollo’s shoulders. The pair had nothing else to support them, Apollo’s hands flailing uselessly in the space just behind Athena’s midsection as he fell backward.

He coughed as they struck the ground, Athena’s full weight dropping on top of him.

“Ow... sorry, Apollo...!”

Just getting back up was already proving to be a challenge. What were these repeated impacts that kept knocking them for a loop, anyway...?

Aura let out a slow breath, idly tapping the gadget in her right hand against her thigh as she waited for the automated door to her living quarters to open. It was moving, but so slowly...

Totally oblivious to the discomfort she was causing to a certain pair of defence lawyers, she stepped through the doorway as soon as the two halves of the door had retreated into the sides of the frame. The door made its usual whoosh sound as it closed again behind her. She shook her heeled shoes off of her feet immediately, letting them drop just a few steps from the doorway.

It was lucky that she’d needed to make a stop in the lab for a few minutes this evening, or she might not have realized until a much less convenient time that Athena had managed to walk out the door with one of her belongings. At her side, her fingers shifted idly against the small device while she walked across the central room of her living quarters.

With this generously-sized main room, accompanied by a personal kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, her quarters made for an acceptable place to live, now that she wasn’t confined to prison any longer. She doubted she would ever take to liking it as much as her own house from prior to her arrest, but it was adequate.

Passing by a small desk positioned against the room’s right wall, halfway between the entry and the doorway to her bedroom, Aura set the item she’d retrieved from the lab down, not even looking in its direction as she carried on. It rolled slightly before coming to rest, finally spelling the end of the dizzying ride its two stowaways had experienced all the way here.

“Excuse me while I puke... somewhere...”

“Ugh...”

Two dazed, battered lawyers stumbled out onto a solid floor, finally free of the shaking, unsettling motions they’d experienced as Aura carried them around, oblivious to their presence. While it was hard to argue against the move’s necessity, Apollo was deeply regretting the decision to catch a ride to Aura’s private quarters in such conditions.

His knees were shaking beneath him. He stumbled, catching himself with one palm against the floor. They had arrived, at least, right? He looked up again, finding that the world seemed to be rocking a bit in his field of vision.

He hadn’t been into Aura’s private room very many times. Two or three, at most. Still, this looked like the place he remembered. It was much bigger now, of course...

“Athena...?”

“Hey.” she replied, sounding about as comfortable as he did. “First-class, that sure wasn’t...”

Apollo scoffed, trying to lighten the mood at least a little. “Like you’ve ever flown first-class.”

“Hey, we can’t all be international heroes...”

[And only some of us like to brag about it!]

Widget’s outburst earned a laugh from the pair. Athena arrived at Apollo’s side, offering a hand to help him up.

“Gotta say - I sure wasn’t expecting to be back in here so soon.” the redhead remarked.  “I hope Aura’s not mad.”

“I’m more concerned she’ll be drunk.” Apollo responded. “Does she hit the bottle often when you visit her?”

“I don’t know.” Athena answered. “I mean... she doesn’t try to hide the stuff from me, but she’s never seemed too out-of-it when we’ve talked before.”

“Well, hopefully she didn’t decide to change that tonight, of all nights.”

The last portion of the pair’s dizzying journey had been spent lying in a heap on the floor of their perch, with no good way to regain a stable footing. In the time they had now spent catching their breath and recovering, Aura had crossed the gigantic room of her quarters, moving about on her own.

“OK...” Athena said, watching the towering roboticist in the distance. “So, we’re pretty much back where we started, aren’t we? We’ll need to make her notice us."

“Yep. Open to suggestions. She didn’t even glance at us, back in the lab.”

While Apollo continued to carefully watch Aura’s movements across the room, Athena once more took a look at their new surroundings. This seemed to be the desk she remembered seeing in Aura’s quarters. They’d been placed fairly close to one of the corners. There were a few books nearby, which could naturally match the size of small buildings. It was still a strange feeling, seeing something so mundane towering over her. A pen with the space centre’s branding on its side was fairly close to their position, as well, resting partly on top of a scrap of paper. She wondered what Aura had been writing or drawing. Perhaps some concept work for one of her robot projects? If she and Apollo weren’t quite so ridiculously small, they might have been able to lift the pen and write out some kind of message to Aura. She imagined drawing a collection of scribbled arrows on the paper, all pointing to a spot where she and Apollo could position themselves, waiting for Aura to spot them.

Hearing a groan, she turned toward Apollo again.

“She’s still drinking.” Apollo said, his tone somewhere between irritation and dismay. Athena frowned, looking out at Aura again. Indeed, she could see now that the roboticist had picked up a halfway-filled glass of what looked like red wine from somewhere else in the room. Aura took a generous sip from her drink.

“If she ends up totally hammered, there’s no way we’re getting any help tonight, is there...?”

“Got that right.” Apollo agreed. “Good thing we’re at least up on this desk. I’d hate to be on the floor while she’s walking around.”

Athena shuddered at just the thought. The fact that she and Apollo were comparable to bugs at their current size made for some seriously unpleasant mental images when she allowed her mind to drift toward the implications of getting herself into danger. Being stepped on and crushed by an oblivious Aura was not the kind of undignified death she would ever be comfortable with accepting.

Aura drained the last of her glass of wine, her fingertips tapping gently against the underside of the glass.

She’d been doing her best, but it was hard not to feel a bit preoccupied with the long conversation she’d been through with Athena. She really didn’t hate the redhead anymore – growing past the animosity she’d once felt toward Athena had been of great benefit to her mental health, finally free of the years of dread she’d experienced awaiting her younger brother’s execution. There was no point in denying that she owed Simon’s freedom at least in part to Athena, as well. Still, she wasn’t the biggest fan in the world of these regular visits from the young attorney against whom she’d spent the better part of a decade imagining taking revenge for something that she’d been wrong to blame Athena for in the first place. Athena had gotten so damn smart during her studies overseas, easily catching and countering her irritable remarks and snarky asides whenever they talked.

Aura grabbed the bottle resting on the table beside her room’s couch, pouring herself another glass. She wasn’t sure of how many this was, now. The familiar buzz of inebriation was definitely making itself at home in her mind, putting her thoughts into a haze. Another sip, and she turned around, pacing across the room, back toward the desk. It was strange to reach the end of a work week like this and simply find herself unsure of what to do, now that she finally had some free time. As long as she kept her alcohol intake reasonably reserved tonight, she would be able to enjoy a good Saturday morning without a severe hangover beating her skull senseless. Of course, this was a train of thought she’d taken and thoroughly failed to follow more than a few times in the past, so she would just have to see.

She set the wine bottle down on the desk with a heavy thunk, her eyes briefly flashing across the notes she’d scribbled on the one scrap of paper resting beside the spot. That project hadn’t gone anywhere in a while. For a moment, her usual go-to thought of “I’ll do more work on it next week” flitted through her mind, but she only needed a second to admit to herself that she’d said the same thing for the last three Fridays running. At this point, she had half a mind to just crumple up the notes and forget about them for good.

Another sip from her glass, and she set it down. She needed to make a quick stop in her bedroom before anything else.

The wine bottle might have been the height of a small tower, but the two shrunken lawyers on the desk could still spot just what an alarming portion of its contents Aura had already gone through. Had it really all been from just the time since Athena’s departure?

“Didn’t take her for the alcoholic type...” Apollo remarked, concern bubbling up in the back of his mind. If Aura kept drinking like she appeared to be at the moment, their window of available time to draw her attention was going to end up being quite short. It was impossible to imagine having any success with a drunken version of her. They were going to need a method for making themselves visible in a hurry.

“I’d bet she’s gonna sit down here,” Athena said. “If she put both her glass and the bottle here on the desk.”

“Hopefully.” Apollo replied. “If she does, that’ll at least get her face a bit closer to us, and she’ll be sitting still.”

Aura had left the room, heading into what Athena was fairly sure was her bedroom. Her childhood memories of living here in the space centre sometimes felt a bit hazy, but if Aura’s quarters were anything like the space she and her mother had occupied back then, her guess ought to have been right.

“So, any ideas?” Apollo inquired. “Seeing as you got us into this mess, I’d appreciate it if you took a little initiative.”

“I already said that I was sorry!” Athena responded, frowning. “I know I messed up, but we’ll figure this out, OK?”

“I’d consider ‘messed up’ a pretty generous way to describe it.” Apollo said with a groan. “... But you’re right. Giving up isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

Thinking the situation over, Athena ran a few loose ideas through her head.

“Say, you’re pretty loud, Apollo. You wanna just try screaming at Aura once she sits down?” she suggested.

“I’m pretty sure even my Chords of Steel won’t carry all that far like this.”

“Hmm... well, it’s still worth a try. I could try making Widget flash some bright colours or something, but unless Aura turns the lights down in here, I doubt she’ll notice.”

“Has he got a laser pointer function? You could try shining it in her eyes. It’d probably just piss her off, though.”

Athena quietly laughed. “No go, but that’s probably for the best. Aura’s already a little low on patience whenever I’m around.”

The pair continued to pitch random ideas for the minutes that followed. Some seemed at least slightly more likely to work than others, but overall, just about everything they could think of was going to require more than a little bit of luck.

Their discussion was eventually interrupted by the sound of Aura exiting the bathroom again.

[Heads up, everyone!]

For someone so unbelievably gigantic from their perspective, Aura moved at a staggering speed. In a familiar move, she was heading straight for them, approaching the desk with the same mildly intoxicated look on her face that Apollo had recognized back in the lab. Her steps weren’t audible as anything more than a faint rumble, now that she’d removed her heeled shoes.

Aura arrived, and once more, the lawyers found themselves taking in the astounding sight of her upper body looming high over their heads. Unfortunately, they hadn’t managed to reach any sort of conclusion on what might be the best available method for drawing the attention of their oblivious host, so for now, they could only hope that Aura was planning to sit here at the desk for at least a reasonably long time.

They could hear the wheels of the chair in front of the desk against the polished floor, far below them.

“W-wait a minute.”

Athena turned her head, wondering why Apollo suddenly sounded so concerned. Sure, she was nervous about this as well, but her friend’s tone had suddenly taken on a note of plainly-audible fear.

Past Apollo’s position, she could see Aura reaching to pick up her wine glass from the desk again.

“A-Athena, move!!”

She blinked, still confused.

“But we’re...”

Apollo’s meaning suddenly became clear, and her blue eyes widened in alarm.

They were still standing near the centre of the desk, quite close to its front, where Aura was now sitting down. While this would, in theory, leave them right in the middle of the roboticist’s field of vision, there was something Athena had failed to consider until this very moment. Aura probably wouldn’t quite be sitting up straight, given her current state of inebriation, and therefore the most likely posture for her to assume would leave her extremely prominent chest resting right on top of the desk.

Right where they were standing, if she wasn’t mistaken.

Apollo had started to run already, and she followed his lead. Like usual, she overtook him in barely a couple of seconds, glancing at his terrified expression as she passed him by, her running speed far eclipsing his.

(Speaking of eclipses...!)

A shadow had fallen over them. Aura was settling down in her chair, and that meant that her chest was coming straight down at them, the unimaginable weight of her breasts only a split-second from slamming down.

-WHUMP-

The shock hit like a strange sort of earthquake. The ground had shuddered at the moment of impact, accompanied by a booming noise and a gust of displaced air that had to be imperceptibly tiny to any normally-sized person, but that proved powerful enough to knock the shrunken Athena right off her feet. She screamed, her ears faintly ringing, and tumbled onto her front. The landing was hard and clumsy, but she was pretty sure that she wasn’t dead.

“A-Apollo...? You OK...?”

She looked to her left, hoping to spot him. She was lying on her front, only just pushed up from the floor of the desk. There was no sign of her friend. Feeling her arms shuddering a bit, Athena pushed upward and got her feet back on the ground. The faint ringing in her sensitive ears was still going on. It made her wince.

Apollo was behind her. She spotted him as soon as she turned, but immediately found her focus pulled away from him and instead drawn to the utterly astonishing backdrop that had just appeared, completely covering the entire stretch of desk they’d been standing on.

Aura’s breasts could’ve crushed half a city block, now that she was seeing them up-close. They loomed ominously, their unbelievable size only seeming to be enhanced by the tank top Aura was wearing. Athena realized that her mouth was hanging open after a few seconds of stunned staring, and she shook her head.

“Apollo!”

She moved forward, her practiced strides nowhere in sight. Staggering to Apollo’s position, she felt an awful twinge of horrified realization at seeing just how very small a space remained between him and the edge of Aura’s top. If Apollo’s reaction to run had been just a second or so slower...

(W-we’re lucky to be alive...!)

She couldn’t focus on that right now. Apollo was lying on his backside, his hands braced to the ground.

“C’mon!” Athena prompted him, crouching to take a grip beneath his elbow. She winced, seeing the way all colour had drained from his face. He was clearly just as aware as she was at how narrowly he’d just escaped a very sudden death. Neither of them would have stood the slightest chance against the bulk of Aura’s breasts. “A-Apollo, c’mon – we’re OK, so just keep moving!”

He was shaking like crazy. Biting back her dismay, Athena helped him to his feet.

“O-oh my God...” he choked, his voice coming out in a ragged manner to match the way his heart was most likely thundering wildly in his chest. He made a sudden, startling move, grabbing onto her shoulders in a shaky attempt at a hug. While Athena was scared for herself, she couldn’t hope to imagine just how terrified Apollo had to be at the moment. In what couldn’t have been more than ten seconds, they’d gone from observing Aura’s movements and planning their next move to this stupefied daze, all too aware of how horribly close to death they’d been just seconds ago.

Her legs were starting to feel like jelly again. Athena forced herself to move, helping Apollo stagger away from the immediate impact zone of Aura’s chest. Her breasts still loomed over them like a small mountain, completely obscuring their view of her face above.

She felt a bit like she needed to throw up. Until now, despite the passage of more than two hours since she’d accidentally caused herself and Apollo to shrink, it had been surprisingly easy for Athena to rationalize their situation in her head and move forward with the “simple” goal of contacting Aura for help. The unsettling sense of shock she was feeling now, however, was rippling through her entire body and replacing all of her usual optimism with something much closer to dread.

If Aura had almost crushed them both to death just by sitting down in front of them, oblivious to their presence, it was terrifying to imagine what other dangers they might encounter by staying close to the colossal roboticist. And yet, doing so was, by all appearances, their only real option.

------

Aura had been glancing down at the notes on the desk, though without really giving them any particular focus, but now something had caught her attention. Her mildly-glazed, halfway-lidded eyes blinked, noticing what looked like a small bit of debris on her desk, right between her chest and the small pile of notes. Not thinking much of it beyond registering mild annoyance at the sight, she set down her wine glass and picked up one of the pages at its edge. With a simple, though slightly shaky wrist movement, she swept the page along to one side and carelessly brushed the unidentified bit of detritus off of the desk, where it immediately dropped out of her view. From there, she simply flicked the page back down. It gained slightly more speed than intended, gliding along the desk before being cast straight off its edge and ending up on the floor. Aura grumbled with irritation, but didn’t bother standing up to retrieve the page. She could get to it another time.

Totally oblivious to the true nature of the “debris” she’d just sent to the floor, she returned her attention to her drink.

Once again, things had happened too quickly for either Athena or Apollo to properly register them.

In his peripheral vision, Apollo had spotted Aura’s gigantic hand moving. In an instant, she’d lifted up one of the huge sheets of paper resting on the desk, turning it partly onto its side, and from there, the sheet had become like a vast, sliding wall, unstoppably rushing toward him and Athena. He had felt his breath freeze up in his throat, and felt Athena’s muscles tense against his shoulders, but it was already too late by then.

The page had collided with them, and despite its seeming flimsiness, instantly knocked them both into dizzying motion, and before they knew it, they found themselves out in the open air, an incomprehensibly vast space spreading out all around them, and with nothing to support them any longer.

Apollo had screamed, and he was fairly sure that he could hear Athena doing the same, but it was all he could do. The world around him became a vague blur, his own voice disappearing into the roar of the air rushing past him as he hurtled toward the floor, once too far below to even guess, but now rushing toward him at a horrifying rate.

-WHAM-