Section 1 #
To say that Helen was pissed would have been an understatement. Being the executive for EchoLocate international required both personal sacrifice and absolute commitment to her work, a requirement that the bat expected all her employees to follow equally. And over the past week, recent hire Kylie had not been living up to Helen’s lofty expectations. Misplacing files, showing up to work a few minutes late, and frequent breaks caused the Giraffe to quickly rise the ranks of Helen’s shitlist.
Which made it all the worse for her to now be at the complete mercy of the ruminant, now towering above her unaware.
When planning to give the giraffe a personal firing as Helen tended to perform on less savory employees, having temporarily turned off the office’s security cameras to mask her actions, disaster struck. The shrink ray suddenly malfunctioned just as she pulled the trigger right behind the employee’s back. Instead of hitting Kylie, the device instead blew up in Helen’s hands, releasing all of its energy into her as she instantly shrank to its maximum possible setting.
Never having been on this end of the process before, it took Helen a few seconds to fully realize what had happened. She knew that she had shrunk, especially with the shrapnel of the destroyed shrink ray littered around her in metallic heaps the size of a car each, but was still unsure by how much. It wasn’t until she saw her intended target that she realized how screwed she was.
The very concept of centimeters laughed at the bat, now barely the length that a single strand of hair, lying on the floor a couple feet from her position, was long. Unable to vent her frustration any other way, Helen kicked the hair only to collapse in pain. Of course that only managed to piss her off more, realizing that she was now seemingly weaker and less significant than a microscopic discarded piece of trash, too meaningless to even be noticed by someone whose job it is to clean this up.
Come to think about it, her new perspective allowed Helen to realize how dirty the floor truly was, with dust, dirt, and various blemishes littering the landscape surrounding her. Helen was about to take note to have a small chat with the janitor, perhaps even shrinking him down to her size if only to throw him out with the trash, before she realized she was distracting herself from her current predicament.
The one silver lining to her situation was that Kylie had no idea that any of this had happened. Helen had hoped to surprise the giraffe by blasting her from behind, so once the bat was able to escape from this situation there would be no fear of retaliation from the unaware giraffe. That silver lining unfortunately doubled as a detriment, given that the one person who Helen could reasonably ask for help was now a living mountain to the bat, with no idea that shrinking technology even existed, let alone that Helen had been subject to it.
It was already 5:30 PM, and Kylie was quick on her way out of the building at the end of her shift. Most other employees had already left for home, the only reason Kylie remained was so that Helen could fire her in private. If Kylie was to leave, Helen would be stuck at her diminutive form for the entire weekend, practically a death sentence. She had to gain the giraffe’s attention before she left somehow.
But how?
From where she was, there wasn’t much that Helen could do to make herself known. Objects littering the floor surrounding her were either too heavy or miniscule to be seen from any giants viewing from above, assuming they even bothered looking down instead of focusing on their daily lives. Lives that now seemed so much greater than the pathetic bat who just an hour ago ruled the company with an iron fist.
Helen realized she would need to gain her dimwitted employee’s attention from up close. The task seemed nearly impossible, not only because of the bat’s diminutive size, but because Kylie already had proven herself to not really look at the smaller details of the work Helen had tasked her with in the past. How the hell would someone like her even think to closely observe a speck’s speck? But as much as the bat refused to admit it, this giraffe was her one hope.
Before Helen could take flight at her new size however, a large shadow formed above her before crashing down. The force of impact just a few feet away was more than enough to knock the bat onto her back, only able to look up at the spire now towering above her. Thick black rungs were adhered to the equally dark tower, although Helen knew very well that the object before her was far more organic than metal.
Because she was staring at the massive leg of a housefly.
The revelation of course disgusted Helen, a creature as pathetic as a fly now towering far above her once magnificent figure, however she begrudgingly admitted that it may be her one path to salvation. Her own wings could only take her so far, and as Kylie continued her path out of the building, she wasn’t even sure that she could catch up to the oblivious behemoth. But if she was able to use the large beast to her advantage…
To attempt climbing the leg, go to section 2
To attempt flying off on your own, go to section 3
To look around for another means of travel, go to section 4
Section 4 #
No, there has to be another way out of this. Even if the fly could somehow get her to Kylie, the thought of climbing onto its hairy legs was too much for Helen to stomach. And in the few seconds it took for the micro to try thinking up a less gross plan, the giraffe continued her stride and eventually left from view. Her one lifeline to the macro world severed, Helen knew that her one hope would lie in the chance of another employee deciding to stay late, but for the time being the bat was alone.
Or she would be, if not for the living monument she had momentarily forgotten about, and was now shifting its colossal hulking form towards her as it noticed a slight movement just at its feet. A brown speck that was moving erratically unlike a flake of dust, one that looked just about edible to its microbial brain.
Helen of course was so heavily focused on trying to find a way to regain her size that she didn’t even notice the fly change its position, its legs retreating only to be replaced by a massive head, beady compound eyes focused directly on the unaware bat. Helen’s fate was already sealed once the fly took notice, however what happened next only sealed the deal.
A geyser of digestive fluids diluted by saliva shot out from the fly’s mouth right onto the micro, not powerful enough to knock her onto the ground, but temporarily blinding her. Immediately taken from her concentrated trance, Helen felt a wave of disgust wash over her, both from the viscosity of the liquid coating every inch of her, alongside an unimaginably putrid stench that a thousand showers could not erase.
The smell was the least of her concerns however, as discomfort quickly gave way to a mild sting as the goop’s digestive properties began to take effect. Not concentrated enough to do any real harm, it only singed at Helen’s wings, a larger problem revealing itself when the bat found herself unable to unfold them, adhered to her sides.
Immediately realizing what was about to happen to her, Helen attempted stumbling in a blind dash to anywhere that her predator couldn’t reach her. Predator. The mere thought of the word disturbed the micro to no end. She was supposed to be the top rung of the food chain, someone who lesser beings ran from in fear. Now she was nothing but an easy meal for a housefly. She would have cringed if not for the immediate danger, one that was gearing to make the killing blow.
Not even having the brain capacity to toy with its food, the fly took to work snatching the incapacitated speck up. An elongated proboscis shot down to meet the ground below, enveloping the bat completely. Helen was puny enough to not even brush against the sides of the mouth as it prepared for the inevitable. Before finally, it inhaled.
The digestive fluids coating Helen and pooling at her feet helped to draw the fly’s meal upwards, using the proboscis as a straw to suck up the liquid alongside the microscopic straggler. Helen could do nothing but flail in the rising liquid as it quickly traveled up the mouth and into the fly proper. And in under a second, the bat was erased completely from the outside world, her status as a sentient being stripped from her as her place on the food chain became lower than a simple insect. Just an easy meal.
It only took a few seconds for the throat to give way to a far larger chamber, spewing Helen and the regurgitated fluid through the sphincter and into the depths below. Landing in a mixture of wet manure and whatever else the fly had recently swallowed, she immediately knew that it was the stomach, her final destination. The chamber jolted heavily as the fly surrounding Helen took flight again, exiting the building through an open window into the world beyond and knocking the bat into the muck.
Helen could do nothing but break down in tears. All her hard work in managing EchoLocate was completely wasted, her entire life amounting to nothing more than fly droppings. Face first in the stomach contents, the stench was amplified tenfold to shut down any sense of rational thought the bat could have conjured. Helen wasn’t even given the peace of slipping into unconsciousness, simply writhing in horror and pain as she was digested alive, her final moments spent in worship of the godly beast far greater than her.
As Helen’s skin began to peel off and her flesh began to boil, she wouldn’t even be given the dignity of becoming droppings. The fly that consumed her within the hour allowed its instincts to guide it into a scented fly trap, ensnaring it alongside hundreds of others within the plastic bag. It quickly drowned within the liquid just as Helen took her final breath, her grave falling still in a sea of countless others, before the bag was replaced the next week, the last digested remnants of the expired CEO finally extinguished.
Section 2 #
Despite how smooth the fly’s leg first appeared the microscopic hairs covering it were more than easily able to act as handholds to Helen. Seemingly unfazed by its new passenger, the insect continued its mindless wander across the office floor before taking flight, noticing a massive form in the distance that could potentially lead it to an easy meal.
And just as well, because as much as Helen tried from her position of the flys leg, she could not control its trajectory in the slightest. Hopelessly dependent on the whims of a mindless insect that only relied on the most basic of instincts, the bat could not possibly feel lower than her current situation. But at the very least the fly was going where she wanted it to go. Once close enough to Kylie she could easily dismount and complete the journey to the giraffe herself.
But fate would not be as kind to give her the opportunity. Veering slightly off course to better reach the behemoth, the fly failed to notice a window just to the side of the glass doors that Kylie was effortlessly strolling through. Helen barely had time to react once the fly crashed into the glass pane with a thud, yet softly enough to only disorient the insect for a few moments rather than send it plummeting to the ground in shock.
Unable to see anything apart from the leg she was tightly gripping, Helen didn’t even see the glass pane until it was too late, the force nearly enough to knock her from her perch. A single hair rammed into one of her wings with enough force to puncture a hole in the limb to render the bat completely flightless. A relative mile off from the ground, Helen was effectively stranded on the leg, gripping onto it lest she fall to her death.
Wincing through the sharp pain that filled her miniscule body, Helen didn’t even notice Kylie continue her exit from the building, unaware of the pain she had caused her former boss as she faded from view. By the time that the micro reopened her eyes, she was utterly alone with the fly, hovering aimlessly as it canceled its pursuit and flew elsewhere in the office lobby in search of food.
It took about a couple of minutes before something caught the fly’s fancy. An almost tangy scent that was designed to be utterly irresistible to its miniscule brain’s senses. Helen was still in no position to leave the fly, her wing still immobilized through the hair poking through it, so she could only watch in horror as the fly began its descent to something that Helen had walked past hundreds of times, yet never properly observed.
A single strip of flypaper.
From her position impaled by the fly’s hair, there was little Helen could do to even get the beast’s attention, let alone redirect it from what was clearly a death trap. So she could do nothing but watch in horror as the fragrance invaded the fly’s puny brain and overrode all other sensations apart from a need to locate its source.
Upon landing, it appeared to the fly as though nothing was out of the ordinary. The long proboscis darted onto the paper in search of food to eat, the mind clouded by an overwhelming scent. Or least until the insect finished its prodding, and attempted to free its mouth from the tape only for the snout to remain trapped in place.
Even knowing what was about to happen, nothing could prepare Helen from the severe whiplash caused by the fly’s struggles to escape from the flypaper, jolting it’s legs back and forth in a rapid motion that ripped the bat’s arms from the appendage, the only thing keeping her from plummeting onto the bed of resin being her wing, still held in place by the hair that punctured it.
But that too would not last, a single quick jolt being all it took for the hair to cleave through Helen’s wing as though it were a sheet of paper. Now with nothing to support her and no means of flight, she helplessly plummeted towards the ground below. Luckily her miniscule size alongside the relative softness of the adhesive platform helped to prevent further injury, but as Helen landed, her fate had been sealed.
She was stuck.
Still in a state of shock, Helen could do nothing but look upwards to see the fly’s struggles. Being only a few relative feet away from the twitching leg, it would take just the smallest movement for it to turn her into a red stain, and in her immobility Helen had never felt so helpless. Even the minute twists and turns exerted more force than she could ever hope to produce, movements being more powerful than her entire being.
And then as if to twist the knife in further, the fly succeeded. Fierce winds rushed over the bat as the insect somehow moved its limbs in just the right way to free itself from the surface, powerful wings pushing Helen into the adhesive resin further as it rose above the flypaper, then out of view entirely. The once proud CEO found herself alone on the strip, none of her accomplishments and prior power mattering as she found herself more pathetic than this common housefly.
Pain consuming her senses, Helen instinctively looked towards her right wing. The fly’s actions had come close to tearing it completely in half, only the bone and a small patch of the membrane connecting it. While the bat had lost a great amount of blood both from the initial puncture and tear, she would not bleed out, only due to the glue that she remained trapped on helping to obstruct the lesion. It seemed as though fate itself was disallowing Helen to die, at least not yet.
Helen attempted to move the broken appendage to see if it was still at least somewhat functional, and while the first seconds of effort seemed to produce some movement, before long her radius gave out, and the bone finally snapped in two. Already in so much pain from her other injuries, Helen’s vocal cords disallowed her to scream, only letting out a faint whisper.
Now sure that any attempt at escape would be hopeless, Helen knew that the only way she would be getting out of this alive would be if an employee were to notice her, yet with it being Friday, that would mean staying trapped over the weekend at the size of a dust mite with no food, water or way of defending herself. Her life depended on the hope of other insects not being dumb enough to move onto the flypaper in an attempt to eat her.
Knowing this, Helen tried to move her head upwards to at least achieve any sort of rest in her pained state. However, looking at her wing forced her neck onto its side, trapping it on the sticky surface to gaze upon a permanent reminder of her failure. And as afternoon turned into night, it was a sight that helped to humble her to how fragile she really was, to all the employees she had once shrank to that size.
Not that the self reflection helped at all. Helen wouldn’t ever be in a position to fire employees again in this state, as even if freed she was still far below the status of even her lowest employees. If a single fly could overpower the former bat, imagine what Kylie would have done unaware to such a speck. In a more lucid state, Helen would have been horrified at referring to herself as a ‘former’ bat, but her focus was now on a far more pressing matter.
As the hours passed and the sun had long since set, the temperature in the building had plummeted by more than ten degrees. To a normal person it would have been described as a cool breeze, but to Helen, the weather’s effects were magnified tenfold. Not only had her shrinking provided the bat with less protection against the cold, the ambient breeze of her office’s air conditioning mixed with the chilled air from outside had created conditions akin to a sub-zero hurricane.
Completely exposed to the elements and unable to move, Helen could only moan and shudder in place until finally, dawn broke with the mite just barely managing to avoid freezing to death. Having been awake for over 24 hours by this point, 14 of them being in agony, Helen’s body finally gave out as she fell unconscious. Her last thought was not that of Kylie, or even wanting a way out of this mess. She only wished that she wouldn’t wake up, for her suffering to not be prolonged any longer.
Fate would not be so kind on her.
Two days had passed during Helen’s sleep, and employees were back in the office. By now the CEO’s disappearance had made national news, but since HR was mostly separate from managerial duties, as well as the fact that the company still had products to sell and quotas to fill, everyone had continued as normal, heading into the lobby and walking towards the elevators past a seemingly empty strip of flypaper.
While no insects had joined Helen in her prison, that didn’t stop dust from easily collecting onto the strip. Both the bat and flypaper were coated in a layer of gray, some larger clumps rivaling Helen’s own size. A loose hair easily the length of a train carriage had landed on top of her to further obscure the microbe in the debris, so that even if someone was looking directly at her, not an indication of the missing executive would be visible with the naked eye.
It took the massive, earth shattering quakes formed by footfalls around her for Helen to awaken from her two day coma. Despite being asleep, she felt no more rested, still in a state of delirious shock and pain. While most of the holes in her body had been plugged by the glue, much still managed to seep out and leave her severely hypovolemic, less than half of normal volume still rushing through her pained veins.
No longer having the ability to speak with her vocal chords dried up, or even move apart from the occasional twitch, the bat was trapped in her own mind with only the hooves, feet and paws of her employees to gaze at as they walked past her eventual grave without a care in the world. She could recognize the vague patterns of zebras, elephants and collies, but only then, barely having memorized the names of the employees who now towered over her. Each footfall was enough to send a massive shockwave of displaced air towards Helen, the action being loud enough to deafen her, if her auditory perception hadn’t already shut down.
Even if someone was to notice her and provide the best medical attention possible to the speck, Helen was already far beyond saving, most major organs having ceased function and only cruel chance keeping her barely clinging onto life, but as the next few hours rolled around and the janitor entered the building, Helen would finally get her wish.
It was a monotonous job for Mark, constantly sweeping for dirt and disposing of insects, only for the mess to replenish itself by the next day. It was a boring, thankless job, but at least it paid the kangaroo well enough. Knowing that the CEO was off somewhere for the day, he thought it wouldn’t hurt if he plugged his headphones in and listened to some music to make the job at least somewhat more tolerable as he headed to replace some of the many flytraps littering the EchoLocate office lobby. Not that it would have helped Helen if he had kept them off.
Her vision mostly fried and her brain in the process of shutting down, Helen perceived the massive paw reaching down to replace the strip she was trapped on as though it were the hand of God sent to take her to some sort of afterlife, although in some way she knew this was untrue. At least no matter what happens, this will be her end.
To Mark, there was no grandiose nature to this action. He was not snuffing out the life of his former boss, but simply picking up a sheet of flypaper, wasted as it had collected dust and dried up before collecting any insects, and replaced it with a fresh one. As he made his way to a nearby trash can, the roo casually rolled the strip into a ball to momentarily stave off boredom. And it was this act that finally brought an end to Helen’s pathetic existence.
Within an instant, the floor that Helen was embedded within contorted so that it folded up to simultaneously become her ceiling. And as the god above her closed his fingers to crease it in half, both sides tightly compressed, Helen’s surroundings collapsing in on itself into an endless darkness. The adhesive quickly stuck to itself, and once Mark rubbed his finger and thumb together to further ball up the strip, Helen’s position was pinned between two walls of what to her may as well have been solid steel.
Helen’s ribs were the first things to be destroyed, each bone snapping as though they were twigs. What came next was the utter collapse of her lungs, simultaneously punctured by the broken bones and equally flattened by the finger press. The rest of her organs quickly followed, Helen’s head finally crushed into a thin, red paste, her consciousness snuffed out with the destruction of her brain.
And in under a second, it was over. Mark tossed the compressed ball of flypaper into the wastebasket and went about the rest of his day. Nobody discovered Helen’s corpse, nor would they have reason to search through the trash for a speck of dust who had been their former boss. Once the trash filled, it was taken outside, the final resting place of the decomposing mite simply a random landfill to be forgotten.
Of course, authorities searched both her home and the office’s security tapes for any clues of what may have happened to the bat, but with the cameras no recording when Helen was shrunken, there was no indication for what happened to her. Some suspected foul play, but by the end of the year Helen had vanished from the public consciousness, occasionally popping up in some unsolved mystery youtube channel, and her position had been long-since replaced, functioning perfectly well without the bat at the helm.
Section 3 #
Perhaps it was best for Helen to not place all of her faith in returning to normal in something as simple minded as a fly, knowing that it would only put her in more danger than she already was in. So instead, Helen decided to take flight on her own, lifting from the ground and racing towards the giraffe who got her into this mess to begin with.
Despite being a bat, Helen had little proper experience with flight. Private jets were able to take her wherever she wished on a moment’s notice, so why use up all the extra effort to take the trip herself? Said negligence of these skills caused Helen to barely keep up with the mindless strides of the giraffe, much of her energy already by the time the two left the office and into the outside world.
The parking lot was an entirely different story, several hundred feet away and the ambience of the office’s air conditioning replaced with the unpredictability of natural weather. While not as heavy as the storm earlier in the day, it was still slightly drizzling. Momentary gusts of wind threatened to sweep Helen impossibly far from her target, and raindrops many times the bat’s size were just narrowly dodged.
Just as Helen was ready to collapse from exhaustion, Kylie finally reached her car and opened the door. The momentary change in atmospheric pressure was more than enough to suck in the bat hovering just near the giraffe’s shoulder, the thought of something so simple having such a momentous impact on Helen frustrating her to no end.
“Firing isn’t enough” she muttered to herself. “Once I grow myself back, I’m killing that giraffe with my own claws.”
Humiliation at her microscopic stature was the least of Helen’s problems however, as once Kylie entered the car after the bat, she sat down on her seat with meteoric force and started the ignition to kick the car’s air conditioning into gear. Heavy blasts of cool air shot out from the numerous vents with enough force to counteract Helen’s steering and send her perilously close to the car’s intake system, a fate that would be unsurvivable.
Already drained from her trip to the car itself, Helen knew that she couldn’t hold out forever, especially as her world shook further with the car gearing into motion and leaving the parking lot. Still hovering in front of the monument of an employee, she slowly admitted that her one shot at survival relied on resting on the giraffe’s body, if only for long enough to regain her stamina.
Kylie’s face would have been far too dangerous, as each relatively soft breath taken would risk Helen being inhaled like a speck of dust and ending up as nothing but the giraffe’s lunch. Plus, if by some chance the macro noticed her, what good would it do if she was still driving? Kylie could lose focus on the road in shock, and crash her vehicle to kill them both.
No, she needed to be somewhere secure, somewhere that she could cling onto as a hitchhiker until she felt confident enough that Kylie was in a position attentive enough to both notice and accommodate her. As undignified as it was, there was only one place that fit that description. The depths of Kylie’s cleavage. The thought of course disgusted her, being nothing but a flea clinging to the breast of her employee, but Helen’s wings were growing tired and she needed to land immediately or risk freezing to death in the depths of an air conditioner.
As she landed on the soft flesh, relief flooded all of Helen’s senses, not just from finally resting her wings after minutes of strenuous flight, but also by how soft and warm her surroundings were. The ground sank slightly as she kneaded her claws into them instinctively, and a layer of impeccably clean fur rising up to the bat’s ankles gave the texture of a winter blanket.
Much of the cleavage below was obscured by a white and peach bra, one that Helen knew that if she slipped into, she may never emerge from. But despite the danger and discomfort of crawling around on a living being thousands of times her size, Helen felt almost comfortable. And with the ambient motion of the car’s movement only adding to it, the bat slowly drifted off to sleep…
It took until Helen woke up hours later for her to even realize that she had drifted off in the first place, her host having long since left the car and now resting in her bedroom after a long day’s work. Still lost among the plush fur close to where she first landed, the bat was at first surprised that the giraffe’s motion while she was asleep failed to dislodge her, before realizing she was at such a small scale, the giraffe’s bosom acted almost as a planet to her, adhering Helen through it’s sheer gravitational force.
And as she slowly regained her senses lost through this lapse of consciousness, said giraffe was in full view, at least her upper half staring back at Helen from a bedroom mirror above a cabinet littered with clothing and candy wrappers. Kylie’s focus was directed at her own reflected face as fingers the width of highways applied makeup to her face, Kylie preparing for a night out on the town.
Continuing to gaze at the giraffe’s reflection, Helen focused on her cavernous cleavage, trying to see just how small she was in comparison. But even with her sight having fully returned to normal, there wasn’t even a hint of what should have been a brown speck struggling against the brown and peach fur. Just how small had Helen gotten?
Helen wondered for a moment how long she had remained asleep for, the light outside Kylie’s window dining as it began to dip below the horizon. It felt oddly voyeuristic, being able to observe her own employee at her most personal moments. Of course she did so with zero hesitations at her workplace through security cameras, but this felt different to her somehow.
Shaking her head to clear these unimportant thoughts from her head, the bat tried to get back to the matter at hand. Getting the colossal giantess’ attention as a sentient being, and finding a way to grow herself back. Still within the giraffe’s cleavage, Helen readied her wings and flew upwards. The casual breeze of the air conditioning was magnified to a level where flight became harder, yet before long she became used to it and maintained a hover near Kylie’s head.
Now what to do next?
To attempt getting Kylie to hear you, go to section 6
To attempt getting Kylie to see you, go to section 5
If you wait too long, go to section 7
Section 5 #
Kylie had never been the most observant employee since first being hired by EchoLocate. Misplacing files, losing track of time and usually tripping over employees below the giraffe’s eye level were used as justification to fire her, giving Helen an ironic punishment as she struggled to be noticed by the behemoth.
Even so, the bat was sure that even someone as unperceptive as Kylie would be able to recognize something as vividly brown as herself, even if only as long as it took to realize her speck sized form was something out of the ordinary and decide to observe it more closely. But as Helen approached the eyeball, she could not have been prepared for just how minuscule she was.
A vast wall of purple and black took up her entire vision, an oppressive sight that took far too long for Helen to realize was just Kylie’s iris and pupil, an endless ocean seemingly miles across. The employee no longer appeared as a mere mortal, but instead a single part of her body now a monument, a deity far surpassing anything that the bat would accomplish. And though Helen wouldn’t admit it, a small portion of her brain began worshiping, hoping that through this act of faith she would be discovered.
Not that her prayers were answered, the god before her seemingly omnipotent yet uncaring as the pupil didn’t show the slightest hint of dilation, instead jolting around erratically as Kylie focused more on the more important task of getting herself ready, seemingly microscopic movements becoming continental shifts. Horrified at her irrelevance, Helen realized just how fucked she was being this close to what was effectively a sentient natural disaster just before she became subject to the worst case scenario.
Kylie blinking.
The involuntary action immediately forced out a gale force of wind from the sudden change in air pressure, one that Helen couldn’t be prepared for in the slightest. The giraffe’s eyelashes, now with weight and strength stronger than any steel, performed the task that they were designed to do as any loose dust was instantly caught up and brushed aside. Helen’s infinitely weaker frame would have instantly been shattered, and it was only by sheer luck that she missed one of the pillars by a literal hair’s width.
Helen didn’t have time to even register the apocalyptic force until it was already over, the blink elapsing in a timeframe measured with milliseconds. However, even if she had time to realize what had happened, by the time the bat first reached the eye it was already too late for her. The winds produced by the blink were far more powerful than anything Helen could produce on her own, and it took just a single slip of her balance to start tumbling through the air.
Once the eyelids yawned open, any air pressure released by their opening was brought back towards the cornea, the flightless bat dragged in without any way to steer herself. Unlike the blink, this action seemed to draw on for minutes with Helen now realizing her impending fate and focusing every aspect of her brain on it. Closing her eyes and holding what would be her final breath, there was nothing left to do, no action that could change the course of her now minuscule life.
Splashing down into a lake of newly replenished tear film, Helen easily dropped several meters before coming to a stop. The viscosity of the liquid allowed Helen to be embedded in place akin to a fly in amber, and upon finally managing to reopen her eyes, she was forced to gaze directly into the black hole of Kylie’s pupil.
Despite her diminutive nature, Helen found to her horror that her weight was just enough for gravity to take hold and force her further into the eyeball, eventually breaking through the membrane and entering the cornea proper. Unlike the watery film, this portion of the eye was thick enough to prevent any further movement downwards, ensuring that this microscopic invader couldn’t irritate the sensitive organ.
Her mind becoming delirious from lack of oxygen beginning to take hold, Helen wouldn’t dare open her mouth to take a breath, knowing that the fluids entering her lungs would be far more painful a fate. And so she simply stared downwards at the magnificent showing of black, purple and white, constantly moving around as while Helen was directly in Kylie’s direct vision, the goddess simply saw through her.
Suddenly, everything went dark. An overwhelming force filled the chamber that Helen was trapped in, the gels compressing to squeeze the life out of Helen. The endless abyss of black caused the bat to believe that she had in fact died, before realizing that dead people shouldn’t feel as overwhelming a pain as she was subject to. It was as if her ribcage, pelvis and skull were all being crushed simultaneously, and despite the thoughts in her dying brain growing more sluggish, she realized what this was.
Another blink. One far more dangerous than the last.
And Helen would barely have the time to survive until the next one, the pressure forcing her mouth open and allowing the gelatinous fluid to pour into her punctured lungs. Already too far gone to make a recovery even if immediately extracted, what happened next was an act of mercy, even if Kylie was unaware of her actions.
Feeling a slight irritation from a much larger speck of dust, Kylie for a moment neglected her evening preparations and rubbed her eye softly to get rid of it. The eyelids pressing into the eyeball itself was all it took for Helen’s surroundings to further compress around her, and finally in an instant cause her to pop. All that was left once Kylie reopened her eye was a slight unnoticeable speck of red, one that would soon be cleared out by a single tear days later alongside some more meaningful irritants.
Section 6 #
At barely the size of a speck of dust, Helen doubted that even in Kylie’s full view she would be noticed, and even if Kylie was able to see her meager form, she would be perceived as nothing but a persistent pest to be exterminated, and not as the giraffe’s boss. So the only option that made sense to the bat would be to traverse inside her ear instead.
Giraffes have large ears, so they must have good hearing!
Right?
Even for such a large target, however, the flight up to the ears was far more perilous than Helen could have predicted. Kylie’s application of her makeup caused her to constantly brush her long hair out of her face to her side, massive strands easily the width of bridge cables swinging directly in Helen’s path as she continued to soar upwards.
Describing it as a jungle would not have been inaccurate, as each hair alone of Kylie’s was as thick as a tree branch, with a weight to match. Despite not having trained for stunt flying as some of her peers in college had, a mixture of adrenaline and luck gave Helen the edge she needed to survive through the maelstrom of brown hair. A few seconds was all that it took for the bat to make it through hell, and finally arrive out on the other side.
Helen had thought that the hardest part of her journey to discovery was over, but upon finally reaching Kylie’s ear, she realized that she still had her work cut out for her, yet again underestimating her minuscule size. The monolithic tower of Kylie’s ear appeared at the height of an aircraft hanger, before collapsing into a black hole of a tunnel that was impossible to see then end of.
Landing just at the ear’s base, Helen attempted to yell into it for any form of response, only for not even an involuntary flicker as her reward. The diminished CEO wondered if it would even be worth further venturing into the ear, only for Kylie to finish the readjustment of her hair, a brown, impenetrable wall falling to block Helen’s exit. With no other options, Helen gathered her wits and began her long trek into the dark cavern.
Despite her clothing having shrunk with her, Helen had neglected to bring her phone to what should have been a routine firing, a decision that haunted the bat as she sorely missed the flashlight feature as the light behind her began to fade as she trekked onward, yet never rendering her blind with artificial light still flooding into the chamber.
The first few minutes were thankfully uneventful, albeit slow due to the shifting nature of the cavern as Kylie made microscopic adjustments when freshening herself up. There was initially little in the way of debris to block Helen’s path, but as she neared the eardrum, boulders of ear wax began to grow into small hills, and then mountains.
Before long, avoiding any of the wax became impossible as a thin layer now covered the floor leading up to the end of the chamber, Helen’s miniscule size being the only thing stopping her from falling through and becoming stuck within the goopy swamp. Her brown skin had become soiled with the yellow-ish wax, the weight of it noticeably dragging her down slightly.
By the time that Helen eventually reached the end of the cavern, the bat was nearing exhaustion, but a sense of adrenaline filled her upon reaching the thin membrane before her. Or at least it was thin for Kylie. For Helen it was a wall just as thick as any other, impossible to penetrate by claws and words alike. But she had to try anyway, and so Helen screamed as loud as her tired body could allow.
At first there was seemingly no response, Helen worried that even this close to the source of Kylie’s hearing, she was too imperceptible to be heard. But the only thing that would further seal the bat’s fate than not being heard, is being heard but not recognized. Because Kylie was able to hear a faint sensation from within her ear, one that she attributed to either her imagination or a mild itch.
To rid herself of this mild irritation, Kylie simply grabbed a loose Q-Tip from the cabinet top, and stuck it into her ear to remove any excess wax that may have caused it. Helen was barely able to notice that something had happened as her surroundings stilled for a second, her shouts redoubled in celebration of finally being noticed. However said celebration was short lived as Helen’s surroundings quickly darkened, the exit from the chamber replaced by a massive cotton asteroid.
As the Q-Tip dragged its way across the floor of Kylie’s ear canal, the wax that Helen had struggled through was displaced as easily as water, becoming a tsunami of fluid that within a second crashed into the bat, pressing her up against the drum she had spent so much effort getting to. Helen should have been turned into a red smear from the immense pressure, but she was not so lucky to have that be her fate.
Instead, the Q-Tip allowed the wax to compress Helen into its mass, forever lost within the endless waves as it swirled around the inner ear. Her prison simultaneously liquid and solid, Helen was powerless against what was effectively a biblical flood directed entirely at her, death only prevented by sheer luck. The seconds that Kylie cleaned her ears were stretched into hours of unquantifiable horror, pain and force, the only two sensations that the bat was allowed to feel.
And then, it was over. Kylie, satisfied that she had gotten rid of her itch, simply withdrew the Q-Tip from her ear as she always had. Helen lost beneath what she felt was miles of gooey impenetrable wax, was able to feel the movement as a rumbling force, and came close to accepting her fate to be lost at the bottom of a trash can somewhere in an employee’s bathroom, having expired in her natural refuse.
However, instead of extracting the wax that had accumulated, Kylie’s efforts only managed to drive it deeper into her own ear, scraping off just the top layer of the wax and leaving the rest behind, compressed against her eardrum. Still lost beneath the surface, Helen was unable to see the Q-Tip retreat from the ear canal, but its absence was felt all the same. Whatever window of opportunity she may have had was gone, the bat now forever stranded just out of reach of being discovered, for if Kylie couldn’t hear her when unencumbered by wax between her and the eardrum, the chances of being heard now was impossible.
The outside world became muffled, the gooey barrier helping to shield Helen from any amplification of sound that the outer ear would have performed. Not that it did much mood, the drawbacks of being completely immobilized easily outweighed any silver lining that the bat could think of. As the wax quickly hardened without the disturbance of the Q-Tip, her surroundings had become akin to a claustrophobic sensory deprivation tank, unable to see, hear, more, or even perceive time.
Life simply moved around her as the hours drew into days, and then weeks. Kylie had in fact been let go by EchoLocate, but not in a way that Helen would have expected. After the disappearance of its CEO, the interim director did their best to keep the ship afloat while authorities searched for her, but it did little good once word got out about the bat’s ‘controversial’ methods of handling unruly employees. Lawsuits from family members began to pile up, and before long the company had gone into a downsizing period, one that slashed the workforce by more than half, Kylie being one of the casualties.
Not that it was of any concern to Kylie, her association with Vander assuring that she wouldn’t need to work a day of her life. In fact, the only reason she decided on joining EchoLocate in the first place was due to the Vaporeon’s suggestion, saying that the results would be ‘interesting’. Kylie frankly didn’t see what he could be referring to, a couple weeks of menial intern work before unceremoniously being laid off was a far cry from interesting. In time, she gave her employment little thought, just as she did her missing employer, far closer than she ever knew.
Helen was in hell, or at least the closest living equivalent to it. Aided by the giraffe’s natural body heat, the wax prison surrounding her was set at a constant 36 degrees celsius, cool enough to survive in, but not comfortably. Dehydration had come close to killing the bat many times over, only surviving due to a thin vaporous fluid that gathered on the walls in front of her. Even that was not enough to prevent permanent damage, her vocal cords having both dried up and torn from constant screaming and pleas for help to render the bat forever mute.
By this point, Helen wished to die rather than be discovered, just something to allow her torment to end. But each time Kylie’s attention drew to her ears to clean them, she only managed to drive another layer of wax to strengthen the prison. Helen even tried starving herself to death, having tasted the rancid yet edible wax, but no matter how long she tried holding out for, survival instincts took over, allowing her just that bit of sustenance to keep her unwittingly kicking.
Each day was another reminder that at this size, Kylie had become her entire world. For such a lowly employee to become both shelter, food and water disgusted Helen to no end, nothing more than a parasite. In the absence of a voice, she mentally weeped at her pathetic state, her former self nothing but a shadow and far removed from what she was forced to become. Unable to see, speak or hear, she relied on touch alone, no different than the countless single celled amoeba littering the giraffe’s ear, the only differences being both her brain and that at least Helen was just that much larger, not that it mattered much.
Weeks eventually became months, and Kylie’s dirty habit of just pushing the wax deeper into her ear with a Q-Tip finally caught up to her. At first it was barely noticeable, her hearing within her left ear just that much more muffled, barely any change noticed as it progressed through the months. It wasn’t until the Giraffe felt an acute pain that she realized that anything was wrong. Not wanting her discomfort to continue, she quickly headed to her local clinic to have the ear professionally cleaned, any blockages to be eradicated.
Still in her delirious state, Helen was unable to hear exactly what was happening from within her prison, but knew that it had something to do with the giraffe deity’s ear, it being prodded and poked at more often than normal to disturb Helen even in her protective prison. Being starved of any stimuli apart from heat and pressure, her own thoughts had long since driven the bat mad. But buried deep within was still the slightest glimmer of hope that whatever disturbance Kylie might be feeling was of her doing, and that there was some chance she would get out of this alive.
She didn’t have the ability for her hopes to be dashed however, for once Kylie sat down in the otolaryngologist’s office, he got to work in removing any excess blockage. Using a pressurized irrigator, warm water was blasted into the ear, helping to liquify and loosen the top layer of wax. Before Helen even realized what was happening, enough wax had been sanded off for the jet stream to reach her, utterly erasing the bat from existence.
Skin, guts and bones alike were vaporized instantly, the only hint that Helen was ever there was a red mist which the forceful stream immediately scattered around the ear with its power. Diluted and mixing with both wax and water, by the time the softened clump of wax was retrieved from the ear and thrown out with the curette, there wasn’t a microscopic hint of her left. Kylie simply left the clinic as though nothing was out of the ordinary, continuing her life after unwittingly snuffing out another.
Section 13 #
Luckily for Helen, the failsafe that she had installed into the office’s security system kicked in. In the rare cases that one of the bat’s competitors somehow managed to get the upper hand on the C.E.O., any shrinking or transformative effects inflicted on her would immediately be reversed, inflicted instead on those wishing Helen harm.
Even if it was the weapon’s malfunction that caused Helen to shrink in the first place, her intention was clear, and the failsafe triggered on the person the beam was intended to hit in the first place. Kylie. Just as Helen reemerged at her full height standing atop her prior discarded clothing, the giraffe found herself shrunken to a far more manageable one inch. Easier to both keep track of, and dispose of.
It was simple for Helen to pick the surprised giraffe out from the cup of her bra that she had fallen into. Squinting, the bat chucked at the fear she saw in her employee’s face, now wanting to be much more cruel to her ex-employee for the simple act of causing her a few seconds of potential humiliation.
Perhaps Helen could shove Kylie into the insole of her heels, seeing how long it would take until the giraffe was crushed by the pressure. If she survived the walk home, perhaps a week of use as a makeshift loofah or Q-Tip would teach Kylie that she’s better use as an object than she ever was as an employee.
And once she outlived her usefulness, it would be just as easy to dump her into the toilet and flush her away, subjected to the same fate as the rest of her waste, a fitting end for this new pest. Eve’s daydreaming caused her grip on Kylie to tighten, already starting to crush the giraffe’s ribs as the bat walked out from the lobby, beaming with anticipation.
Section 7 #
Helen was frozen in fear at seeing her former employee hold so much power over her, to not even be a flea in terms of significance to the giant. Unable to make a decision on how to get noticed by the giraffe, she left herself completely defenseless as Kylie unexpectedly took a deep breath, one easily strong enough to rip Helen from the relative safety of her hover and towards the now-opened maw.
However Helen’s fate was not to be eaten by the giraffe, but to instead suffer a far more torturous and humiliating fate. Just as she was being sucked in, Kylie completed her inhale, yet too late to stop Helen’s trajectory towards her. Preparing for the worst, Helen simply moved her wings in front of her face and closed her eyes.
Just from feel alone when crashing, Helen could immediately tell that she had plummeted into a lake of saliva. The goopy, disgusting liquid managed to get into every crevice and orifice before she even had time to open her eyes to confirm her position. Directly on Kylie’s freshly licked lower lip.
Temporarily immobile through the viscosity of the saliva adhering Kylie’s freshly licked lips, Helen struggled to get herself free. Her efforts were temporarily halted as the giraffe exhaled, a blast of warm air washing over her meager form and slightly drying the lips to make escape even more laborious.
To remoisten them, Kylie was quick to smack the lips together, the popping sound formed nearly enough to blow Helen’s microscopic eardrums as well as burying her deeper within the sticky lake. Its viscosity was a double edged sword, keeping Helen trapped, but having enough bubbles and partitions between liquid and air for the bat to breathe through, albeit with only her head above water, struggling for seconds to get more of her body free.
And that was all the time needed to seal Helen’s fate completely, as while the bat was stuck trying to free herself from the thin layer of spit, Kylie had finished tending to her cheeks and had grabbed a small vial of lipstick to make herself look as good as possible. Still trapped within the prison, there was nothing that Helen could do as she gazed upwards to see a massive wall of red plummet down onto the ground several relative miles from her location, then begin barrelling towards her.
While never impacting her directly, as the vial of lipstick was applied, Helen became trapped under a literal red sea. Thick strands of wax danced downwards through the web of saliva to create a labyrinthian network of artificial caves, ravines and tunnels. The top layer quickly starting to dry when exposed to the open air, the top layer had hardened into an impenetrable wall of red, all light that reached Helen muted and toned.
Only too late, Helen was finally able to free herself from the strand of excess saliva before the wax could finish mixing with it to become an inescapable tar pit. Falling backwards onto a further dried portion of her prison, the bat couldn’t help but gaze in wonder at her surroundings, now an alien world in itself.
With the saliva itself hardening when mixed with the wax, the lips themselves became accessible, a fleshy expanse that at least seemed more stable than risking falling through what was effectively an ice lake of solid and liquid lipstick. At least here there was nowhere to go but across, beneath the canopy towards the eventual end of the lips. Helen wasn’t sure how well Kylie had applied her makeup, but was sure that the prison wasn’t entirely airtight.
Traversing through massive valleys that made up individual wrinkles of skin, as well as small hills formed by flakes of both dried lipstick and skin, the voyage was by no means easy, but adrenaline helped the bat, alongside somehow being able to remain upright on the vertical surface as though Kylie had her own gravitational pull to her, now an entire world in comparison.
Kylie of course had no idea what she was putting her employer through, long since having finished her preparations and currently driving to a popular nightclub to spend the evening at. Mostly sober, she enjoyed going primarily to just have a good time both dancing and meeting new interesting faces, ever curious and excited as to what the night could bring.
Within the expanse of red, Helen could clearly hear the giraffe’s new locale even with the dampening of sound provided by the layer of lipstick. In fact, it was due to this muffling that the eardrums of the bat did not burst from the auditory assault. Kylie’s own speech when conversing with other nightclub patrons was far worse however, being this close to its source. Helen didn’t even have the luxury of clasping her ears in those cases either, for the lips crashed against each other as consequence of every word spoken, an earthquake that Helen had to navigate lest she become lost forever in a single wrinkle.
The surroundings around Helen were forever constant, an alien world of pure red, no ending in sight. If not for the rocky terrain and lakes of saliva she had to traverse, she would have been able to travel miles with little change, just an endless roof that would prove impossible to pass through, making that idea of a horizon where the lipstick broke her only hope of escape.
Eventually, the giraffe had felt her lipstick becoming somewhat dry on her face, licking at her lips just to confirm and remoisten them in preparation of applying another layer. Still stuck at the base of the lips and trekking towards the side, Helen looked upwards to see the sky come apart, the massive organ of Kylie’s tongue a behemoth that sent flakes of dried lipstick hurtling towards her. In an attempt to dodge, Helen tripped over her own feet and plummeted down into a single wrinkle, micrometers deep from the giraffe’s perspective.
It would have taken minutes to climb out of this trap, minutes that Helen no longer had as Kylie applied the next layer of her lipstick. Painting over where the sky was visible, the giraffe was sure to press harder so that the lipstick lasted longer. The tube easily rolled over the surface of the lips, flattening any existing lipstick and saliva down entirely to mask imperfections as the avalanche approached Helen’s location Before the bat had time to escape, the entrance to the wrinkle was quickly covered by the hardening lipstick, entombing her entirely.
There was no chance now for Helen to escape, the only thing stopping her from suffocating within the wax being that the canyon of Kylie’s wrinkle was too small for it to seep down into. With barely any space to move, there was nothing to do but wait for Helen to get home and wash the lipstick off in her shower that night. While Helen by no means wanted to be washed down the drain, it would at least be an escape from the giraffe, one that would lead her to someone who must be able to notice her.
Right?
As midnight came and went, Kylie realized that it was probably about time she headed home. While she didn’t need to get back into work until the next Monday, there was nothing wrong with keeping a somewhat consistent sleep schedule. And so Kylie quickly returned home. Eager to get back to bed, she removed most of her makeup, wiping it with nothing but a damp tissue.
From Helen’s perspective, nothing particularly interesting had happened, being subject to nothing but the darkness of her prison apart from whatever light bled in from the roof above, tinted red. The sounds that Kylie made from her cavernous maw were boosted to such an extent that Helen could never make out their meaning, and had long since stopped any attempts to. Tired from her exploits yet unable to drift off to sleep, the bat was in such a delirious state that she didn’t even realize that the music from the nightclub had ceased before she was snapped out of it from the telltale sound of a sink being turned on.
Still set on her idea of Kylie washing the lipstick off in the shower, Helen failed to tell the difference between what she thought she was hearing and the far more harsh splattering of water hitting the inside of Kylie’s bathroom sink, a mistake that would soon cause her end. Assuming that the warm water would help melt the wax above her, she began climbing out of the wrinkle to prevent drowning when the wax trickled downwards, only for the layer to remain as solid as ever.
Confused as to why Kylie hadn’t gotten in the shower yet, Helen continued climbing upwards, past through a crack in the lipstick formed from hours of wear, and back into the maze of wax above. Before she could make any headway on her escape however, a planetary shift occurred as an immense wall of white immediately swept across the landscape through Helen’s location. Not given any time to move, a sharp pain filled her entire being as she was immediately knocked onto her back as it continued its rampage, picking up saliva and makeup alike as the bat was seemingly barrelled through.
It was only when the massive object lifted up, filling Helen’s entire field of vision with the red remnants of lipstick laid out on the white expanse in the shape of a kiss, that she realized what had happened. Instead of showering to clean her makeup off, Kylie had simply opted to wipe it all off with a tissue. Helen thought herself lucky that she barely missed a one way ticket to the trash can, but as the pain failed to leave her body and she looked down to assess the damage, she realized it didn’t miss her at all.
It was at first hard to tell due to how much of her own body had been covered in red makeup, but there was no mistaking the fact that the bat’s legs simply weren’t there. Whether they were simply flattened by the force of the tissue, or were severed and brought up with the rest of the lipstick no longer mattered. Helen was well and truly fucked, and at the complete mercy of the unaware giraffe who was still actively removing her makeup.
Her fate would come in the form of an immense spray nozzle, one large enough for the hole in its center to be a house sized geyser, ready to bring about Helen’s doom. It was a simple enough solution, designed to chemically remove any irritating makeup that managed to survive the first wipe. And so Kylie, uncaring as she sentenced her prior boss to death, apathetically pressed the nozzle.
Blasting through saliva, makeup, and bat alike, the solution worked fast to dissolve it into a red slurry, easy to both wipe up and dispose of. Kylie had chosen the brand both for its antimicrobial properties, alongside the fact that it had been proven to be harmless against small animals.
Unfortunately, Helen learned that she was closer to a germ than any other living being, the soap dissolving through both flesh and bone as she agonizingly melted into nothingness. Kylie never felt anything out of the ordinary. After all, she had done this hundreds of times before. And as she washed the suds and remaining makeup away, wiping down her face with a tissue, she was finally ready to get to bed, sleeping soundly for the rest of the night.