Field Research - Chapter 13

Amanda stared down at me, hands clasped over her mouth. I smiled awkwardly, taking a step back so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck quite so hard to look up at her. When we’d seen each other a week ago, I’d come up to her chest. Now, I was roughly knee-high.

Two feet tall. I was now only two feet tall. More shockingly, my weight had dropped all the way to a mere 8 pounds; I weighed less than most of the bulk-order groceries Amanda had brought up to the cabin with her. 

I’d only shrunken once more since the big breakfast feast our first morning here. Jenny wanted to adjust my dosage, reduce how much each pill shrank me by so that we could savor the process a little longer, and besides, those full-size pills were getting real hard to swallow. The chemical and physical phenomena that powered the shrinking process were complex enough that it was hard to calculate exactly how much less to give me, and her first attempt had still had bigger effects than what she’d hoped for, knocking another full six inches off of me.

I knew full well that I was getting smaller—I couldn’t go two seconds without encountering another reminder, the world around me looming larger and larger all the time—but there was always something about seeing someone other than Jenny for the first time that really drove it home. Amanda wasn’t a titaness, wasn’t some impossible creature of myth made real through a miracle of science. She was a completely average woman, a little petite even, if I remembered correctly, and even she was like unto a goddess to me at this point, probably outweighing me by a factor 20.

“Uh… hi.” I shifted my weight and adjusted the blanket I had wrapped around myself, willing away the erection I could feel stirring between my legs. “We figured that it might freak you out a little less to see me first, rather than Jenny.”

Slowly, Amanda lowered her hands, swallowing deeply, bending down slightly to stare at me in awe. “Are… What…”

I laughed nervously. “Jenny’s out back, she can help you unload. Just, take your time.” I turned to head toward the back patio where Jenny was waiting, and immediately tripped over my blanket, hitting the floor face-first and exposing my entire backside, prompting Amanda to shriek.

“Sorry! Sorry! Ah, jeez…” I blushed, pulling the blanket tightly around me as I climbed to my feet. “I’m really sorry about that, I didn’t mean to flash you.”

“No, it’s… oh my God… your body…” I looked up at the giant woman, brow furrowing as I saw the look of horror that was drawn across her face.

“What about my body?”

“It’s… It’s covered in bruises.”

“Oh. Oh! Hahaha, yeah, yeah, I’ve kind of been taking a beating. It’s fine though, really, none of them are all that serious.”

Amanda glanced toward the massive window, Jenny’s shoulder just slightly in view. “Is she… I mean, are you safe, Sean?”

I didn’t understand her meaning for a moment or two, and when I finally did I burst into laughter.

“Oh my god. No, no, okay. That’s…” I started laughing again, and quieted myself. “That’s very sweet of you, Amanda, but no. I’m completely fine. First off, she hasn’t given me all of these. The world’s just kind of a rougher experience at this size. It’s honestly kind of inconvenient right now, I’m too small to, you know, navigate things like a normal person, but I’m still a little too big to walk around on countertops and stuff without constantly banging into shit. I have hit my head on that cabinet over there more times than… well, anyway. I’m fine.”

“...You said she hasn’t given you all of those bruises. So… she’s given you a lot of them.”

“Of course she has! She weighs more than a hundred times more than me at this point, and I mean, you know what we’ve been doing up here all week. I’m more delicate than I realize, she’s heavier and stronger than she realizes, accidents are gonna happen! We’re figuring it out as we go.”

Amanda still looked skeptical, and while I appreciated that her concern was coming from a well-intentioned place, I couldn’t help but be a little annoyed as I started leading her toward the back door.

“...Alright, listen. This is TMI but you’re the one who’s broached the subject. When I was 16 years old, I had to go to the emergency room with a broken nose, because Jenny sat on my face too hard.” Embarrassment quickly started to overtake Amanda’s concern. “She felt awful about it, but I’d asked her to do it. God, that really did suck though. I had to wear this like, cast, mask, thing for like two whole months, and my eyes were all black and blue, way nastier than any of the bruises I have now. And explaining what happened to my parents had to have been the single most awkward experience of my life. Not even the painkillers could make it less uncomfortable.

“My point is,” I said as I stretched up on my toes to reach the knob to the back door, “that this really isn’t anything new for us. So, again, your concern is appreciated, but unnecessary.”

It still surprised me how much muscle it took to do something as simple as turn a doorknob, or, more accurately, how little muscle I had that turning a doorknob was so difficult for me. The door cracked open a hair and I released the knob, pressing my shrunken fingers against the edge of the door to pull it open with better leverage. Amanda slowly followed me, and I was worried for a moment that she might faint.

Jenny was lying naked in the grass, sunning herself. All eight feet and 941 pounds of her; she’d been deeply annoyed that she’d come up shy of quadruple digits after her last growth spurt.

“Hey, hon! Amanda’s here.” I approached her as she sat up, suppressing a little shudder as her shoulders rose over my head. She lifted me up for a quick kiss, then nuzzled me into dropping my blanket. She couldn’t quite close her fingers around me yet… but she’d be able to if my build was a little thinner.

“I was just telling her about that time you sent me to the hospital.”

“Ugh, why would you tell her about that?! It’s so embarrassing…”

I grinned mischievously, turning back to look at Amanda, who was still watching the two of us with stunned awe. “You embarrass me all the time, it’s only fair I get a little bit of payback sometimes, right?”

Jenny affected a pout, then rolled her eyes. Getting a sudden sense of disorientation and vertigo as Jenny threw me around was something I was gradually getting more accustomed to, but I still let out a little yelp when she rose up just enough to stuff me under her ass, grass pressing into me from below and an endless expanse of womanly flesh pressing down on me from above. We’d figured out that Jenny was soft enough that she could do this without hurting me, not seriously anyway, but feeling nearly a thousand pounds—more like twenty-six thousand pounds in my distorted reference frame—nevertheless triggered an instinctive reaction in me, and I helplessly tried to squirm and flail my way free. It was no use; I couldn’t budge an inch under the pressure of her colossal ass.

I could barely hear what was being said from down here, every sound nearly drowned out by my own breath reflected back at me from my prison of flesh. If I calmed myself and focused, I could just about make out what was being said.

“Sorry about him. Anyway, how have you been, Amanda?”

***

The food processor had quickly become my best friend. 

I just didn’t have the body strength to chop things up anymore, and even if I did, a kitchen knife was nearly half as tall as I was now, there just wasn’t a sensible way to handle it. Even working the food processor required a noticeable amount of effort, a forceful shove to flip the switch.

On my hands and knees, I jammed my palm down on the button to get it to stop blending my soup, then carefully rose up as much as the cabinets would allow me. God I couldn’t wait to take another dose. Sure, it would make me even smaller and weaker, and turn cooking into an even bigger logistical challenge, but at least I’d be able to walk around freely on the countertops.

“Hey! I need some help in here!” I cried out. Jenny was big enough that a portion of soup for her was measured in gallons, especially when she was planning to grow, and I could only make about a quart at a time. The main compartment of the food processor could detach, allowing the contents to be poured into a pot to warm up, but it was way too heavy for me.

I wasn’t sure if my voice just wasn’t carrying like it used to, or if Jenny was too absorbed in her work to hear me, but there was no response to my call for help. That pinged a small bit of panic in me; I was fine right now, but what if I’d hurt myself, or put myself in danger? Every round of shrinking made me more and more dependent on her, and I needed a reliable way to get her attention. Suppose a week from now I’m small enough to fall back behind the oven; how would she ever find me?

I made a note to bring the concern up to Jenny, and inhaled deeply to shout for her again, when she suddenly squeezed herself through the doorway to her makeshift office, her eyes full of worry.

“We have a problem.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

Jenny ignored me, moving instead to start tearing cushions off furniture, lifting up lab equipment to look under it, getting onto her hands and knees to inspect the rug.

“Uh… did you lose something?”

“The pills. I printed another dose for each of us this morning. I’m positive I did, and I just double checked the numbers on our raw materials. I weighed everything to be sure, I’m not misremembering, we’re down by exactly as much as we should be. But I can’t find the pills anywhere. I keep ‘em in a case in my office and they’re not there.”

Worried, I slowly sat down, throwing my legs over the side of the counter and dropping down as gently as I could. It was a far drop for my size, but even so, at 8 pounds the impact wasn’t too bad. I hurried over into the living room to help her look.

“I just don’t get it. You know me, I’m meticulous about this kind of thing. What could I have done with them?!”

I recoiled slightly; I trusted Jenny from the bottom of my heart, but seeing a creature as massive as her upset and agitated nevertheless triggered an instinctive fear in me.

“Uh, okay, well… you printed them this morning, and, as far as you remember you put them in the case?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, okay… what did you do after that?”

“I went outside and took a nap in the grass. And then, you… woke me up…” we both slowly turned to look at each other, a rumble tearing through the cabin as Jenny dropped from her knees onto her butt.

“And then Amanda got here.”

I rubbed my chin, eyes going wide. “You… you don’t think she would have… I mean she wouldn’t have stolen them, right?”

“I, I don’t… I mean, no, I don’t think she would do that. But I can’t think of anything else.”

“Is it possible that you took them outside with you by mistake?”

Jenny’s face rose to an even higher level of panic. “Oh, god, I hope not.”

I ran outside, jumping to grab the knob as I went, and started combing through the grass in the dark. Jenny followed behind me more slowly, the doorway a bigger obstacle for her.

“I mean, it’s dark,” I said after a few minutes of hunting, “so I can’t say for sure. But I don’t see anything.”

“If I left them out here then something might’ve already come along and eaten them. Shit, shit shit shit.”

“Hey, hey! It’s okay, it’s just one dose, right? I mean, worst thing that could happen is a squirrel the size of a raccoon, right?”

Jenny sighed deeply, closing her eyes. “First of all. They’re not formulated for anything but human metabolism, so I can’t say with certainty what would happen if another animal ate them. Secondly, what if something ate both of them?”

I nodded in understanding. “Then… It’d die, right? That’s, sad, but I mean, it’s a wild animal, it was just as liable to get hit by a car—”

“Sean. Those pills break down the atoms in the subject’s stomach and use the fissile energy to change the state of dark matter. What do you think would happen if two opposing reactions took place at the same time?”

“Uh… I mean, I don’t know, but, you’re making it sound like… what, like, it’s gonna go up like a nuke?” I briefly felt horrified that I’d been taking so many of these things.

“That… probably wouldn’t happen.”

“Probably wouldn’t?”

“Probably.”

“Okay,” I shuddered, finally understanding why this was alarming her so much more than Amanda betraying us. “How about, um, you go back inside and keep tearing apart the living room, you can move the furniture around and I can’t, and I stay out here and keep looking through the grass?”

Pale as a ghost, Jenny started worming her way back through the door, and I got back on my hands and knees, looking even more frantically for the pills. A part of me was idly annoyed that my soup was gonna get cold, but this clearly took precedence. I might be out here all night.

The thought had no sooner crossed my mind when a massive pair of hands clamped around me, squeezing the air out of my lungs as I was carried away. I tried to scream but my assailant rapidly changed their grip on me, tucking me under one arm and smothering my mouth with their hand.