"Phew..." Looking up at the huge goth girl in the doorway, Max couldn't help breathing a sigh of relief. Of all the big, sadistic, man-hating monsters in House Juno, the first young woman to stumble upon him was the only one he knew—and possibly the smallest undergrad at Ventus.

At a school that over-indexed on big and tall female students, Ophelia Kidd was almost inexplicably short: 4'9" on a good day, elevated to a full 4'11" with the help of her usual black platform Doc Martens. What she lacked in stature was made up a little in curves — relative to her size, her pleasantly bottom-heavy figure and C-cup breasts were quite ample — but she was still head and shoulders below most of her housemates. Even elsewhere on campus, where the girls tended to be smaller and less scary, she was always the short one out. In her and Max's shared Intro to Bio class, this was no different.

Based on their limited classroom interactions, Ophelia had always struck Max as being charmingly naive—at least, compared to all the other members of House Juno. She'd only gotten into the house as a legacy, thanks to her mother, and seemed eager to earn her place there. Still, it seemed like she had yet to fully embrace the house's infamous misandristic ideology, which made her a very welcome sight to her three-inch-tall male classmate.

Right now, it looked like she'd just rolled out of bed. Her usual choker, black Invader Zim T-shirt, fingerless gloves, black pleated skirt and fishnets had clearly been slept in. Her heavy black eyeliner, mascara, lipstick and ghostly white foundation seemed like they'd been in a losing war with her pillow all night, and her short black bangs were far from their usual laser-perfect state. Judging by the way she shuffled into the common room, she was just as hungover as Max—and that was saying something. 

"Hey!" From his perch on the coffee table, it was all Max could do to raise his voice loud enough to be heard. "Ophelia! I-it's Max!"

"Max?" Ophelia's ears perked up—and when she glanced over to find the source of the greeting, her eyes went wide. "Oh, crap!" 

Before Max could try to greet her further, the pale, pint-sized goth rushed over to the table and scooped him up in her hand. "Whoa, I-"

"Shh!" Ophelia put a finger to her lips. "I can explain, just... gimme a second, okay?" 

Dazed at the sensation of being picked up so effortlessly by someone so much bigger than him, Max simply nodded his head. 

"Good," said Ophelia, bringing him around to the waistband of her skirt. "I'm gonna have to hide you in here until we're back in my room. Sorry."

Staring down the biggest ass he'd ever seen in his entire life, Max went white. "Wait. Do you mean... WAIT-"

Of course, by that point, it was already too late—Ophelia had started lowering him down into her lacy purple panties. Carefully securing him against the crack of her plump, curvy rump, she snapped her underwear and skirt back into place and hurried out of the common room.

"Crap, crap, crap," she said, speed-walking down the hall toward her room. "Super crap. Triple crap. Crap!" 

Meanwhile, down in her ass, "crap" wasn't far from Max's mind either. While Ophelia was actually one of the cleaner female undergrads he'd met so far in his time at Ventus, always showing up to class conspicuously well-kept and frequently scented with fancy perfume, she clearly hadn't done her usual self-care routine since last night. The crevice between her ample cheeks was an overwhelming mix of sweat and butt funk, and in a matter of seconds, it was all that he could smell. Compared to that, the fact that this was also his first time getting up close and personal with a girl felt like a pretty weak consolation prize. 

pfffoooottttt

As a short, silent fart slipped out of the pint-sized goth's pucker, Max was inundated with even more stink than before. Hopefully, he thought, this was an accident—and not part of some kinky Juno ritual. He had less than zero interest in ending up as some kind of mindless slave for his Bio classmate, especially if it involved huffing her asshole.

Thankfully, it only took another minute for Ophelia to get back to her room. Owing to her mother's substantial connections to the house, she'd lucked into her own space right off the bat—a spacious bedroom decorated in Juno's usual sumptuous gothic style, furnished with an ornate four-poster bed, several chests of drawers, an old-timey writing desk and a wardrobe. So far, her only contributions to the space were several posters of her favorite shows and bands — Hazbin Hotel, American Horror Story, Invader Zim, My Chemical Romance and the Cure — and several stacks of textbooks for her Biology, Psychology, Sociology and Gender Studies courses. Still, true to her mom's word, it was slowly starting to feel like home.

Locking the door and drawing the big, dark purple silk curtains of her windows, Ophelia finally peeled her shrunken classmate out of her ass. At this point, he was totally covered in her butt sweat, and the accompanying funky odor was enough to make her wrinkle her nose.

"Oh, geez," she said, using a finger to wipe some of the sweat off Max's face. "Sorry about that." Then, realizing she'd technically just shown mercy to a member of what her housemates saw as the weaker sex, she rushed to correct herself. "Uh, I mean... yeah, you like that? You stinky little butt bug?"

Down in her hand, Max had absolutely no idea what was going on. Already, this was the single weirdest day of his life. "Ophelia... w-what the fuck is going on?"

"I..." Right away, when subjected to the slightest pushback, Ophelia's tough-girl act fell apart. "Sorry. I guess I owe you some kinda explanation."

"It's... okay," said Max, doing his best to stay on the good side of the only girl in House Juno who had any chance of taking pity on him. "Do you know how I got like this? I can't remember anything about last night." 

"Oh, brother." Ophelia sighed. "Well, you were here. So was Zeke."

"We were?" Max froze. When his roommate told him he'd gotten a plus-one to a party, he'd neglected to say it was at Juno. Even he knew the house's gothic ragers were openly, unapologetically dangerous for male guests. "What happened?"

"Well..." Ophelia pursed her full lips. "How much do you know about shrinking serum?"

Max scowled. While the name seemed fairly self-explanatory, it was the first time he'd ever heard of it. "Uh... not much?"

"Okay," she said, setting Max down on her desk and crossing her arms. "So, Juno has this... tradition. The first big party of every semester, the new members get to pick a guy, and, uh... claim him." She smiled. "You always seemed pretty chill in class, so I figured you'd be a good choice. That's why I told Zeke to bring you along."

In any other context, Max would have found this flattering. He'd always found Ophelia pretty chill, too, and she wasn't bad to look at by any stretch of the imagination—but the vast disparity in size between them gave the word 'claim' an undeniably sinister double meaning. "Oh... gotcha. But... 'claim?'"

"The idea is, you talk a guy into coming back to your room and eating you out." She blushed. "But I got nervous. So I went down to the chem lab and got some shrinking serum."

Muscling through the discomfort of learning that Ophelia had apparently dosed him with some kind of size-changing chemical, Max squinted. "The school chem lab?" 

"No," said Ophelia, "Juno has one, too. Mostly for mixing up performance enhancers to help break guys in." 

Max swallowed hard. "B-break?"

"Hey," Ophelia shrugged, "I'm just trying to keep it real with you." 

"S-so..." Max couldn't believe he was having this conversation. "You shrank me?" 

"Yeah." Ophelia blushed again, flashing an empty vial with a label covered in gothic script. "I slipped this into your drink while we were talking... and then you wandered off. It seemed like you were pretty drunk." Setting the vial down, she exhaled. "Honestly, up until a couple minutes ago I figured one of my sisters had found you." 

"Okay," said Max, trying not to think about whatever fate he might have met if his giant classmate had waited a little longer to check the common room. "So how do I get back to normal?" 

"Well, uh... the thing is..." Ophelia winced. "You can't."

Max's jaw dropped. "What?"

"I'm really sorry, Max." She sounded like she meant it. "That serum is permanent." 

"What?" While Max knew he didn't have much room to get openly mad at someone twenty times his size, it was hard to conceal his disbelief and outrage. "Are you serious?"

"It was impulsive, okay?" Ophelia sighed, audibly defensive. "Honestly, you should be thanking me!"

"For what?" Max was almost shouting. "Ruining my life?" 

"Look..." Ophelia scowled. "If it wasn't for me, you'd probably be neck deep in Kali's ass by now. Or Miss V. Or Vanessa. Or literally anyone else in here. Now, do you want me to help you out or not?" 

Now, it was Max's turn to sigh. While this was, quite unambiguously, all Ophelia's fault, she wasn't wrong about her housemates. "I... fuck. This is insane." 

"Yeah," said Ophelia, chuckling despite herself, "seriously." 

"Ophelia?" Before either of the two freshmen could say more, a third voice broke the silence between them. It was right outside Ophelia's door, and, judging by its impatient tone, eagerly expecting a response. 

Hearing this, Max froze. "W-who is that?"