Mike came home to his apartment one evening after a long day at work. He was looking forward to spending some time in front of his TV, playing video games and relaxing. He almost tripped over a pile of workout clothes and half fell into a stack of partially full boxes from the last time he had moved. He flipped on the lights to avoid another collision. Even he would admit that the place was a mess. He kept telling himself any day now he would clean things up and work on getting a girlfriend.
"Hey!" a small voice called to him from somewhere.
He looked around the room, wondering if he had left the TV on or something.
"Hey, you! Big guy!" It was definitely a girl speaking.
He struggled to find the source of the voice and said, "Hello? Who's talking?"
The voice sighed. "Look up!" it said.
He did. Immediately, he spotted something wriggling in one of the spider webs around the edge of the ceiling. "What is that?" he said as he approached it. It looked like it might be a small doll rolled up in the web, but somehow it was moving. It seemed to have only one arm free, and it was waving at him.
"Ah!" it said. "There you go. You found me. Good work!"
He stood there staring at it for half a minute trying to wrap his mind around what he was seeing. There was a spider hanging from the web, clearly dead, with a tiny, needle-thick dagger stuck in its head. Above it in the web, was the tiny woman. He could see her wide eyes standing out brightly from the dark makeup that surrounded them. He could see her pointy ears and her loose Mohawk. She was two inches tall, she was alive, and she was kind of cute.
"Hey!" she shouted. "You planning on leaving me hanging here or what?"
"Um..." He was at a loss for words.
She groaned in frustration. "Fine!" she said. "I understand. You're looking for a favor before you'll help me, right? Well then, you've got it. I'll owe you a favor if you set me free from this damn web." Then, she held up one finger on her free hand and added, "With one stipulation, you will never say a word to anyone about finding me here like this. That would be too embarrassing. Deal?"
"Um... Deal... I guess," he said.
"Sweet!" she said. "Now, get me down."
After pulling up a chair to stand on, he reached for the web.
"Careful!" she said as his hand encircled her body and detached her from the rest of the web.
He gently carried her to his kitchen and set her down on the counter by the sink.
"Good," she said. "Now, get my dagger. Would you? I think it's still in the spider."
He returned to the web and gently pulled the little sliver of a blade out of the spider's head.
"Give it here," she said, holding out her hand as he approached her. He set the dagger on the counter and pushed it over to her with one finger. "Ah, thank you kindly!" she said as she took the blade and proceeded to cut herself free of the webs that bound her.
Mike was glad she was capable of freeing herself since he would have really struggled to help her without potentially hurting her in the process.
"It's the damndest thing," she said as she cut the webs around her legs. "One moment, I was flying through the Western Woods on a simple errand, just everyday stuff, and the next moment, I passed through some kind of portal to this room. I flew right into that stupid web and got tangled in it." She finished freeing her legs and got to her feet. Then, she started cutting around her back. "The spider was easy enough to vanquish, but the fucker took my dagger with it when it fell." A pair of wings, like a dragonfly's, unfolded from her back and buzzed and flapped until all the web was off of them.
As he watched, Mike felt dazzled by her. He thought it was a pity she was so small. She was just Mike's type: punky, aggressive, cute face, nice figure.
"Much better," she said as she sheathed her blade on her thigh. "Now, would you mind telling me where the hell I am?"
"Um," he said. "You're in my apartment."
She looked around herself and frowned at the dirty dishes and empty beer bottles in the sink. "Nice place," she said. "I take it you live here alone."
"Yes," he said, feeling a bit stung.
"No pets?"
"What?" he said. "No. I had a plant once. It died."
"Well then," she said in a way that indicated she was ready to change the subject. "Let's get our formal introductions out of the way." Her wings became a blur as she lifted off into the air and hovered a couple of feet in front of his face. "I am Fizzle, the warrior of the west, slayer in the south, and bane of arthropods everywhere." She did something like a flying bow to him and then waited silently until Mike realized it was his turn to speak now.
"Oh," he said. "I'm Mike."
She smiled at him in a slightly patronizing way. "Pleasure to meet you, Mike," she said and then gently landed toes first on the counter. "Now, we should discuss the boon I owe you."
"Wait," he said. "Can I ask you something first?"
"Certainly."
"Are you a pixie?"
She frowned. "Who are you calling a pixie?"
"Oh, I mean, a fairy?"
"Fairy?" she said. Her voice was icy now. "I am fae. That is what you call me. Understand?"
"S-sorry. I didn't realize it was offensive. I've never met any fae before. I've never even heard of anybody meeting them. This is amazing."
She looked confused. "Never?"
"Wow," he said, pulling out his phone. "Can I take a picture of you?"
"What do you mean?" she said reaching for her dagger and lowering herself in to a fighting stance. "Are you trying to capture me? That would be a bad move. I might have blundered into a web, but I could handle you easily if you try anything suspicious."
"What? No," he said, holding up his hands. "I would never try anything suspicious. I swear."
"You had better not," she said as she relaxed her stance. "You have been warned."
"It's just a phone," he said. "I can take pictures... images of things with it. It's harmless. Really."
"I've never heard of a 'phone' before." She looked around the room. "Where am I? What realm is this? Am I in Jotunheim? Are you a giant?"
"No," he said. "I'm a human. This is Earth."
"Earth?" she said. "You mean Midgard?" She looked around again. "Well, that's a new one. I didn't even know it was possible to get to Midgard anymore. It's been closed to us since... ancient times."
Mike took a photo of her with his phone. He knew there was no way anyone would believe this without proof. He held the screen of his phone out to her. "See?" he said. "It's just an image."
She stepped up to it and looked at herself in it. "How clever this is," she said. "You said this is only an image of me, right? You have not captured my spirit in there or any other magical trickery, have you?"
"Nothing like that," he said. "We don't have magic like that on Earth. We just have technology. I guess that's a kind of magic. It's safe, though."
She smiled, "I like this 'phone' you have."
He set his phone on the counter on its back and fizzle floated up onto the screen and stood there on it admiring her picture below. She took a few steps and accidentally closed the camera app. She paused as the image changed beneath her. Feeling curious now, she carefully stepped on another app, which opened and began playing music.
She yelled and flew off of the phone, drawing her dagger again. "What is this?"
"Music," Mike said. "You started the music app."
She landed next to the phone and sheathed her dagger and listened as the song "Gigantic" played. She started to bob her head to the beat. "I like this," she said, smiling up at him. She hovered above the screen, reading the text, and said, "Wait, I thought you had never heard from the fae before. The 'phone' says this music was made by pixies."
"The Pixies," he explained. "That's just the band's name. They're not actually..."
"Shh!" she shushed him. "I want to hear this." She listened and did a little aerial dance to the beat. When the song ended, she said, "Wait, no! I want more. Play it again, 'phone.' Play it again."
"I'll set it on repeat," Mike said and pressed on the screen. The song started over again.
"Thank you, Mark," she said, landing back down on the counter.
"Mike," he said.
She ignored his correction, getting lost in dancing to the music again. When the song ended this time, she said, "That was great. Wow! I fucking love this fae music. Unfortunately, I can't hang around listening all day. I should be trying to go home soon. First, though, I have a debt to settle with you, the boon I owe you. How would you like it paid?"
"Um," he said. "I don't know what you can do. What would you be willing to do?"
"Well," she said. "You did save my life... in a way. I would do just about anything you want that is in my power. I owe you a great favor."
"Do you... grant wishes?" he asked and immediately felt dumb for asking.
"I'm not sure what you mean by 'wishes' exactly, but I do have some magic I can call forth." She held her hands up in front of her and a bright sparkle flashed between them. "Whoa," she said. "I didn't mean to do that much. Strange." She licked a finger and held it up in the air as if she were testing the direction of the wind. "There is very little magic in this realm," she said as she lowered her hand. "Normally my spells are working against the currents of magic that exist around me. Here, my own magic can flow much more freely it seems. I might be able to manage something big. Fascinating."
"So, you could cast a spell for me?" Mike asked. He had an idea of something he hoped she could do.
"Yes," she said. "What would you like?"
"Could you make yourself bigger?" he asked. "Like as big as me?"
She looked off into the distance for a moment, deep in thought. "Honestly, I don't know," she said. "I've never transformed myself with my magic. I'm not sure if I even can. I have made other things bigger and smaller before. It's simple magic and very useful when I'm trying to get clothes to fit me. Still, to become as big as you... I truly don't know."
"Would you try?" he asked.
"Well," she said. "I can try." She flew down to the floor of the kitchen. "You may want to give me some space."
He stepped back, as she started to quietly chant. Light sparkled and flowed around her in a small tornado. There was a faint tinkling sound he could hear over the music coming from the phone. Mike squinted as he tried to watch. Then, there was a bright flash, and Mike fell into unconsciousness.
He woke up to find himself laying on his back in some unfamiliar landscape. The sky was pale and bright and there seemed to be three suns above in a triangle. He looked around him at a vast flat desert valley, bounded by distant mile-high sheer cliffs of a strange brown color.
He stood up, and tried to figure out what had happened and how he had gotten here. "Fizzle!" he called. "Where am I? Where are you? Fizzle!"
"There you are!" she called back, and he saw her approach from above him.
As she got closer, he realized that she was bigger, much bigger. In fact, she seemed even bigger than him. When she landed in front of him, shaking the ground beneath him with her weight, he realized she was, in fact, a giant now. She towered above him like a skyscraper.
"Wow," she said as she crouched down to look at him. "You're so little. You're, like, toe sized now."
"What happened?" he asked. "Where am I? Why are you so big?"
"Hold on a moment," she said and reached for him with fingers thicker than his own body. As she lifted him up in the air between her finger and thumb, he clung to her thumb for dear life. "That's better," she said when she was standing up straight again. "It's a real pain trying to talk to someone who's below your ankles."
His mind struggled to deal with the giant in front of him. She was the biggest living thing he had ever seen by wide margin. Just her thumb felt like a fleshy car pressed against him. He realized if she pressed too hard, that would be the end of him.
"Are you unharmed?" she asked.
He stared at her mouth as she spoke and figured that she could fit his whole body inside there now. He was almost too terrified to speak. "Where are we? What went wrong?" he managed to ask the giant.
"Well," she said a bit too loudly. "As it turns out, I don't know how to transform myself."
"What do you mean?" he said. "You're huge now!"
"Actually, what happened was... You see... Here," she said. "Let me show you. Hold on."
Her jumbo jet sized wings began to flap, whipping up a hurricane around them, and they took off into the air like a rocket. He shut his eyes until the wind died down as they stopped moving. Then, he looked around himself as they hovered in the air. "What is this?" he said. "Is this... my apartment?"
He looked down. The ground he had been standing on was thousands of feet below them, and now he could see the desert had actually been the tiles of his kitchen floor. The brown cliffs were his kitchen cabinets, and the suns above him were his kitchen lights. Fizzle was not a giant. He was tiny, even smaller than her by a large margin.
They landed on the broad expanse of his kitchen counter not far from his phone, which was still blasting out that same song. The phone itself was at least the size of a football field now.
"You shrank me!" he said.
"Yeah," she said. "Sorry about that. It was kind of an accident."
"Why would you make me smaller? I didn't ask for this."
"You see," she said. "I focused on what you asked for, me being bigger. I guess the magic was only able to make me bigger by making you smaller. 'Bigger' is a relative term, after all."
"But, why am I smaller than you?"
"Well, you did want me to be as big as you were, and I am relatively as big as you were compared to me before."
"I can't believe you did this," he said. "Turn me back, now."
"Uh," she said. "About that. I used up a lot of magic casting that spell on you, and now I have to recharge. It's going to take me a while to gather up enough magic for another spell that powerful."
"How long is 'a while?'"
"A day," she said. "Maybe two days... probably no more than a week."
"A week?"
"Yeah," she said. "And, there's another problem for you."
"What is it?"
"I don't really owe you another spell now. I repaid you the favor I owed you."
"What are you talking about? This isn't what I asked for."
"Well, you asked for me to be bigger, as big as you, and I am bigger at the same scale as you were compared to me. I have fulfilled your wish as you worded it."
"Oh, come on! This is not what I meant, and you know it! You still owe me!"
She shook her head. "Nope, as far as I'm concerned, we're square now. You should have been more careful about what you asked for."
He hung his head. "You're really going to leave me like this?"
"No," she said. "Don't worry. I won't leave you for dead here. I suppose I could find someone to look after you or something, what with you being so helpless and all now." She reached her other hand out to him and sort of petted his head with her giant index finger. She smiled. "You know. I've never felt this big before. I've gotta admit. I kind of like it." She kept petting his head, and he got an uneasy feeling due to the way she was looking at him now. She said, "Maybe there is some favor you could do for me that could earn you another spell."
Mike thought he knew what she meant, and he wondered if he would survive it.
"Well," she said, changing the subject. "It'll have to wait. I don't have the magic for any spells right now." There was a loud vibration below. "That's my tummy rumbling. I'm going to borrow some of your food," she announced. "You won't be needing much of it now anyway."
Then, she stuffed him down the front of her shirt between her breasts, and said, "Get comfortable down there, Mark. You could be in there for a while."
He was fighting back panic now as he stood on her underwear and leaned against her warm skin, feeling her massive heart rapidly beating away behind her sternum, as her whole chest rose and fell with the swelling and deflating of her titanic lungs. He was flanked on both sides by breast flesh as voluminous as his apartment had been. He wanted to escape, but there was no way out but up, and that was out of reach. He was trapped, trapped between her breasts.
"Hey!" he heard her say both from above and through the reverberating hollowness of her lungs. "You've got some candy here. Sweet!" There was the sound of a wrapper being cut open and then the sound of a blade chipping away at something. He looked up at her chin as she put a piece of peppermint candy in her mouth. "Delicious!" She grabbed another piece and this time a few crumbs fell from it down to him. He took one of the pieces and sucked on it, realizing that it might be the only meal he would get that night.
Then, he heard an unexpected sound: she was humming. Soon, she was singing along with the endlessly repeating song on his phone:
Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Hey Paul, let’s have a ball
Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love
Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love