Chapter 8: Public Submission
The air in the Grand Ballroom was a solid thing. It was heat and noise and the cloying sweetness of a thousand perfumes crashing into each other. Emerald velvet draped from ceiling to floor, embroidered with gold thread that caught the light from chandeliers the size of compact cars. The tables were indeed tiny, arranged in a bewildering maze. From my vantage point on the custom-built, three-foot-high podium, the room looked like a dollhouse designed by a deranged luxury brand.
My voice, amplified and clear, cut through the murmur. “...and so we are not a tragedy. We are a demographic. A market segment with disposable income, refined taste, and a profound understanding of spatial efficiency.” A ripple of nervous laughter, the kind that comes from people who aren’t sure if they’re allowed to laugh. I adjusted the microphone, a sleek rod that felt like a baton in my hand. “Lady Glo recognizes this. Our new ‘Petite Privilège’ line isn’t about diminishment. It’s about concentration. The essence of luxury, distilled.”
I could see Seraphina at a front-row table, her smile carved from ice. She’d fought this keynote, arguing that putting me, a “living reminder of the instability,” front and center was a brand risk. Anya Voss, watching via a crystal-clear live stream from Stockholm, had overruled her. This was my proving ground.
As I wrapped up, the host, a sinewy man with a practiced grin, bounded onto the stage. His hand engulfed my shoulder in what was meant to be a congratulatory squeeze. It felt like being pinned.
“Wasn’t he magnificent?” the host boomed. The applause was polite, layered with a fascinated unease. “And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The results of the Foundation’s first annual ‘Pinnacle of Proportion’ survey, sponsored by LuxeLook Media.” He brandished a golden envelope. “To determine the man who, in this new chapter of human diversity, best embodies the ideals of grace, style, and yes, handsome appeal!”
A drumroll from the tiny orchestra. The pocket-sized violins were silent. The anticipation in the room curdled, turning from professional interest into something hotter, more prurient. My stomach tightened. This was part of the program, but knowing it didn’t lessen the feeling of standing on an auction block.
“The title of Most Handsome Tiny Man Alive,” the host shouted, tearing the envelope with a flourish, “goes to a visionary who is redefining presence, no matter the altitude! Mr. Herc Ether!”
The applause this time was different. Sharper. Mostly from the women in the audience. Whistles cut through the clapping. Lights swung to focus on me, blindingly hot. The host presented me with a crystal statuette—a absurdly proportioned, muscular figurine. It was cold and heavy in my arms.
“Speech! Speech!” chanted a few voices.
I leaned into the mic, the facade of confidence my only armor. “I’m honored. Though I suspect my tailor deserves most of the credit.” Another wave of laughter, easier this time. I held up the statuette. “This is for every man navigating a world that suddenly bought the wrong-sized map. Remember: the view might be different, but the skyline is still ours to claim.”
It was a good line. It got a roar. And then the carefully structured event dissolved.
As I stepped down from the podium, aided by a discreet set of miniature stairs, they descended. A tide of silk, sequins, and fervent eyes. The “meet and greet” line dissolved into a soft, scented siege. My two security minders, massive men who looked profoundly uncomfortable, tried to maintain a perimeter.
The first wave was polite. Executive wives, their smiles brittle, asking for a photo “for my daughter.” They’d lift me, their hands under my arms, holding me at arm’s length like a strange, damp kitten. The flash of cameras was constant. Click. “Smile!” Click. “Over here!” Click. My cheeks ached.
Then the tone shifted.
A woman in a backless silver gown, her breath sweet with champagne, knelt. Her eyes were glassy with intent. “I voted for you,” she slurred, her voice a confidential whisper that carried. “Fifty times. I have fantasies, you know.” Her gaze dropped, lingering below my belt. “I bet everything works just fine.”
My minder stepped between us, guiding her away with a firm murmur. She pouted over his shoulder, blowing me a kiss.
Another, older, with a sharp, calculating face, simply handed me her phone, already set to the camera. “Put it on my thigh,” she instructed, hiking her sequined skirt to mid-thigh. She didn’t smile. It was a transaction. I placed the cold device on her warm, powdered skin. She took the selfie, examined it, and walked off without a word.
A trio of younger women, maybe interns, surrounded me. Their energy was giggling, invasive. “Oh my god, your hands are so perfect!” one exclaimed, taking my hand in hers, marveling at the size. “Like a little action figure.” Another ran a finger down the lapel of my custom tuxedo. “This fabric is incredible. Can you feel the difference? Does everything… feel more intense?” The third just stared, biting her lip. “You know, on the forums, they have whole threads about… logistics. With a guy your size. It’s fascinating.”
My responses became automatic. A grin that didn’t reach my eyes. A “thank you” that tasted like ash. A signature on programs, on napkins, once, horrifyingly, on a woman’s cleavage with a provided metallic Sharpie. The heat of her skin radiated through the pen. She giggled, looking down at me. “Permanent ink,” she said. “So you’ll always be with me.”
The sensory overload was brutal. The crush of bodies, the overwhelming scents, the fragmented, invasive dialogue. It was a carnival of my own reduction. I wasn’t Herc, the strategist. I was Herc, the collectible. The living fetish.
Then, a lull. The crowd parted slightly, and I saw her. A woman standing apart, leaning against a marble column. She was tall, willowy, in a simple black dress that screamed expensive silence. Her dark hair was swept back. She wasn’t smiling. She was observing. When our eyes met, she didn’t look away. There was no hunger in her gaze, only a deep, unsettling assessment.
My security took the moment to steer me toward a promised “private reception” in a side gallery. As we moved, a final woman, dressed as a server but with a fierce grip, slipped a folded note into my hand. She leaned down, her whisper hot in my ear. “Room 2140. The penthouse. I want to see if the trophy is just for show.” Then she was gone, lost in the crowd.
The side gallery was quieter, cooler. It was filled with display cases showing the history of the Tinykins virus—sanitized, corporate. A portrait of Roquita Tinykins, smiling benignly. The irony was a physical nausea.
I unfolded the note. It was a hotel key card, taped to a sheet of embossed stationery. On it, in elegant script, was written: A discussion on concentrated luxury. Anya Voss wishes to continue your conversation. 11 PM.
Anya. Here? Not in Stockholm.
Before I could process it, a familiar, venomous scent cut through the room’s florals. Seraphina appeared, a glass of champagne in her hand, untouched.
“A popular little prize,” she said, her voice smooth as oiled glass. “Tell me, does it feel empowering? All that desperate attention?” She sipped her champagne, her eyes cold over the rim. “The Voss woman is here. She didn’t inform me. She informed you. That’s a interesting chain of command, isn’t it?”
I slipped the key card into my pocket, the crystal statuette heavy in my other hand. “It’s called leverage, Seraphina. You should try acquiring some.”
Her smile didn’t falter, but her knuckles whitened on the glass. “This gala is a grotesque puppet show. And you’re the prettiest puppet. But remember who holds the strings when the music stops.” She leaned in, her voice dropping. “Zuri Belle. Grocery clerk. Cute. Does she know her champion is a party favor for bored socialites?”
The mention of Zuri was a calculated detonation. The memory of her room, her skin, her uncomplicated demand—it was the only real thing in this hall of mirrors. Seraphina saw the hit land, her satisfaction barely concealed.
“Stay away from her,” I said, the control in my voice fraying.
“Or what?” she breathed. “You’ll have your fan club write me nasty notes?” She straightened up, the benevolent mask back in place. “Enjoy your audience with the queen, Herc. Do try not to get stepped on.”
She glided away, leaving me standing alone by a case displaying the first airborne strain of the Tinykins virus in a small glass vial. A neat label, a world of chaos inside.
I looked down at the statuette in my hands, my own grotesque reflection distorted in its crystal facets. Most Handsome Tiny Man Alive. The title was a gilded cage. The adoration was a form of consumption. The key card in my pocket was a summons to a higher, colder power.
And Zuri… Zuri was a friend I couldn’t afford to lose but we are just friends that have sex together. The orchestra in the main hall struck up a waltz. The sound was tinny, distant, like music from a world that no longer existed. I set the heavy crystal trophy down on the display case, right beside the vial of the virus. They looked oddly appropriate together. Two sides of the same catastrophic coin.
I turned my back on both and walked towards the gallery’s exit, the city’s night waiting beyond the glittering walls. The momentum of the evening wasn’t towards applause. It was towards a choice. And for the first time since shrinking, every possible path forward felt perilously narrow.
And for the first time since shrinking, every possible path forward felt perilously narrow.
I left the crystal statuette on the case and walked towards a service exit, the sounds of the waltz fading behind me. The corridor was all concrete and humming utility pipes, a stark relief from the perfumed ballroom. I needed air that wasn’t traded for whispers. My phone buzzed again. Anya. The key card in my pocket felt like a shard of ice against my thigh.
I pushed through a heavy door marked ‘FIRE EXIT’ into a loading bay. The night air was cool, tasting of diesel and city grime. It was empty, lit by a single flickering sodium lamp.
Then I heard it. Heavy breathing. Not one set, but two. Labored, wet-sounding, coming from the shadowy alcove to my left. I turned, instincts pricking.
They emerged from the dark like a single, rolling mass. Two women, vast and imposing, their figures straining against identical, stained pink tracksuits. Their faces were flushed and slick with sweat, their eyes wide with a frenetic, predatory gleam. They moved with a startling, coordinated speed.
“There he is,” one wheezed, her voice a high, giddy whisper.
“Pretty little thing,” the other rasped, her breath coming in shallow gasps.
Before I could move, before I could shout, a thick, synthetic bag yawned open before me. It smelled of vinyl and stale popcorn. A meaty hand, slick with sweat, clamped over my face, crushing my nose and mouth. I kicked out, my small dress shoes connecting with soft, immense flesh. It was like kicking a mattress.
“Got him!”
My world tilted violently. I was scooped up, my body compressed against a soft, vast bosom that smelled of old grease and sharp deodorant. I thrashed, but my limbs were pinned. The heavy breathing was all around me, hot and damp through the fabric of the tracksuit.
Then I was falling, tumbling through the air into a dark, confining space. The vinyl bag. The opening cinched shut above me, plunging me into suffocating blackness. The air grew hot and thin immediately.
“Careful! He’s squirming!”
“Just get in the van!”
I heard a vehicle door slide open with a rattling bang. I was swung, then thrown. My body slammed against a hard, corrugated metal floor, the impact knocking the wind from my lungs. I gasped in the stifling, plasticky air. The bag shifted, but the knot held.
The van doors slammed shut. The engine coughed to life, a diesel roar that vibrated through the floor into my bones. Tires squealed on asphalt as we accelerated, throwing me against a wheel well. The motion was nauseating, a reckless series of turns and stops.
From the front seats, their voices carried over the engine whine.
“Told you he’d come out that way. Saw it on the little map they gave us.”
“Is he breathing? He better be breathing. We paid a lot for the inside info.”
“He’s fine. Just little. Look, he’s moving.”
I was. I was clawing at the slick interior of the bag, searching for a seam, a weak point. My fingers found nothing. Panic, a cold, sharp-edged thing, began to saw at my ribs. This wasn’t a corporate play. This wasn't Seraphina’s polished cruelty. This was something raw and stupid and terrifying.
“Where to? The warehouse?”
“No, no. My place. I got the room all set up. With the special chair and everything.”
“You said we’d share him! You promised!”
“We will! But my place first. I did most of the grabbing.”
Their bickering faded into the roar of the engine. I forced myself to be still, to listen past the hammering of my own heart. The statuette, the autographs, Seraphina’s warning about being a party favor—it had all been prelude. This was the price of the title. I was a trophy in a vinyl bag, bouncing in the back of a van, owned by nothing but someone else’s desperate fantasy. The key card to Anya Voss’s penthouse dug into my hip, a cruel joke from a world that now felt galaxies away.
The van lurched to a halt. My body slid forward, my shoulder striking something hard and metallic. The engine cut, leaving a ringing silence broken only by the wet sound of the two women catching their breath. Doors slammed. Heavy footsteps crunched on gravel, moving to the back of the vehicle.
The vinyl bag was ripped open. Light, harsh and yellow from a bare bulb, stabbed my eyes. A hand, immense and smelling of cheap peach lotion, closed around my torso and hauled me out. I was dangling in the air, my tuxedo ripped, the city’s glittering skyline visible over a sagging roof of a derelict bungalow. We were in a weed-choked backyard.
“See? Told you he was pretty,” the one holding me said. She had a round, moon-like face, her hair pulled into a tight, frizzing ponytail.
“He’s gonna be prettier when he’s ours,” the other one said, unlocking a peeling back door. Her frame was even broader, a mountain of flesh moving with unsettling purpose.
Inside was a cloying wall of heat and the smell of fried food, stale incense, and unwashed laundry. The living room was a shrine to clutter: piles of discount store bags, empty chip bags on a stained sofa, a giant flat-screen TV playing a reality show on mute. In the center of the room stood a single, stark piece of furniture—a oversized, plush velvet chair, like a throne for a child’s giant.
The woman holding me didn’t put me in the chair. She carried me into the small, steaming kitchen. She set me down with a jarring thud on a sticky linoleum countertop next to a bubbling deep fryer. The oil smell was nauseating. Her friend blocked the doorway, arms crossed, watching with a hungry smile.
“Hold him still, Tara,” the first woman said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
Tara, the one in the doorway, lumbered forward. Her hand, slick with sweat, pinned my shoulders to the counter. Her grip was absolute, a hydraulic press of soft, hot flesh. I struggled, a useless, frantic tensing of muscles.
“Get off me,” I snarled, the command sounding pathetic in the thick air.
The first woman ignored me. She rummaged in a drawer, sending cheap utensils clattering. She pulled out a small, clear glass vial filled with a viscous, amber liquid. She held it up, the oily fluid catching the grim light.
“This is for you, handsome,” she cooed, her eyes bright with a terrifying excitement. “A little welcome drink. From my family.”
She uncorked it with a pop. The scent hit me—cloyingly sweet, like rotten honey and chemical cherries, with an undertone of something bitter and medicinal. It was the same wrong-sweetness that had lingered in the Foundation’s display hall, near the portrait of Roquita.
“No,” I said, clamping my mouth shut, twisting my face away.
Tara’s other hand came up, her thick fingers seizing my jaw. They pried with brutal, insistent force. My teeth ached, my jaw screamed in protest, and my mouth was forced open.
“Easy now,” the first woman murmured. “Just a sip. It’s good for you. Makes things… fun.”
She tipped the vial. The liquid touched my lips. It was warm, syrupy. It flowed onto my tongue. The taste was an assault—a synthetic, overripe sweetness that immediately coated my throat, followed by a burn like cheap liquor and a final, awful hint of copper, like blood.
I gagged, but she kept pouring until the vial was empty. Tara released my jaw, and I coughed violently, my body convulsing, trying to expel the poison. The sweetness clung to every surface inside my mouth, a sickening film. A strange, immediate warmth bloomed in my stomach, spreading outwards, a false and alarming comfort.
The woman with the empty vial smiled, a wide, proud grin. She wiped her hands on her pink tracksuit.
“I’m Kimbella,” she announced, as if we’d just met at a coffee shop. She jerked a thumb toward her friend. “That’s Tara. We’re gonna be your new best friends.”
Tara giggled, a high, nervous sound. “Yeah. We’re fans. Big fans. We saw you win. You looked so lonely up there with all those skinny bitches.”
The warmth in my gut pulsed. My head felt strangely light. The grimy kitchen seemed to tilt, the edges of my vision softening. Kimbella leaned in, her vast, perspiring face filling my world. Her breath smelled of the same vile syrup.
“Auntie Roquita wants to see you,” she whispered, her tone confiding. “But I think we’ll have a little visit first. Don’t you?”
The false warmth in my gut twisted, becoming a cold, invasive thrum. It vibrated up through my bones, a tuning fork struck against my spine. My vision swam, the greasy kitchen blurring into streaks of foul color. Kimbella’s grinning face melted at the edges, her features elongating and swelling.
“Whoa,” Tara breathed, her grip on my shoulders tightening. “Lookit his eyes.”
The world didn’t just tilt; it stretched. The crack in the linoleum next to my hand yawned into a canyon. The brushed steel face of the microwave, once at eye level, now soared above me like a cliff wall. A distant, logical part of my mind screamed a single, coherent thought: It’s happening again.
A sharp, metallic taste flooded my mouth, overwhelming the cloying syrup. My joints ignited with a deep, aching fire, as if my bones were being heated and compressed in a vise. I gasped, but the air felt thin, insubstantial. Kimbella’s hand, which had been a giant’s mitt, now looked like a flesh-colored boulder, her fingers like sausages.
“Is it working?” Tara asked, her voice a booming echo from a distant tunnel.
“Shh! Just watch.”
The compression was internal, a horrific vacuum pulling me inward. The countertop beneath me, once just below my waist, now rose to my chest. The texture of the linoleum, previously a pattern of faint swirls, exploded into a topography of deep, grime-filled valleys and peeling, mountainous ridges. I watched my own hand, resting on the sticky surface, dwindle. My cuff, perfectly tailored two hours ago, slid down over my fingers.
A wave of nausea, worse than any sickness I’d ever known, wracked me. I doubled over, dry heaves convulsing my shrinking frame. Each spasm seemed to squeeze me smaller. I was a living fist, clenching in on myself. The roar in my ears was my own blood, a torrent rushing through canals that were collapsing.
Kimbella leaned in, her giant eye a swirling, curious pool of brown and yellow. Her breath was a hot, damp wind. “It’s so fast,” she murmured, not to me, but to the phenomenon. “Faster than the video said.”
I tried to speak, to curse them, but my vocal cords were changing, tightening. A strangled squeak was all I could force out. My tuxedo jacket became a heavy, woolen sack, collapsing around my diminishing torso. The panic was no longer an emotion; it was a chemical fire in my shriveling veins. This was beyond the initial, shocking reduction. This was eradication.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
The aching fire in my bones cooled to a dull, persistent throb. The vertigo settled, leaving the horrifying new reality in sharp, monstrous focus. I was sitting in a puddle of my own exquisite, now cavernous, tuxedo. The countertop was a vast, stained plain stretching into a distant, terrifying horizon of dirty dishes and the humming deep fryer. Kimbella’s face loomed above me, now the size of a truck cab. Her single eye, peering down, was a gelatinous moon.
“Aw, it stopped,” Tara said, a note of disappointment in her thunderous voice.
Kimbella’s gigantic fingers reached down, not to grab me, but to flick at the empty glass vial near my feet. To her, it was now the size of a trash can. To me, it was a translucent skyscraper. “Must’ve been a weak batch,” she sighed, then shrugged her mountainous shoulders. “Or he’s tougher than he looks. Still cute, though. Even tinier.”
She bent lower, her face an eclipse blocking the flickering kitchen light. Her whisper was a gust of rotten air. “You’re about the size of a action figure now. A real fancy one.” She turned her head, her voice booming. “Tara, get the chair. It’s time for our guest to get comfortable.”
My mind, scrambling for purchase, clung to one fact. The shrinking had stopped. I was still here. But here was a sticky wasteland, and I was now smaller than I had ever been. The key card in my pocket was a useless postage stamp. Zuri’s touch was a memory from another lifetime. The crystal statuette and Anya’s summons were artifacts from a lost civilization.
I was alone in a crushing, hot silence, awaiting the whims of a giant.