As the tremors of your titanic, younger sister’s footsteps gradually fade away, you turn towards the tiny entrance, and try to prepare yourself for the path ahead. “Well, here we go again,” you say with a sigh, your voice echoing softly off the barren cement walls ahead. Though the poorly maintained passage offered few amenities for the facility’s flea-sized students by comparison to the halls inhabited by Picout’s more behemoth patrons, its walls and skylight ceiling were sturdy enough to survive even the strongest of impacts, accidental or otherwise. Stepping forward into the dim shadows, you begin making your way through the miniature maze past simple signage and posters intended to trick puny passersby into believing the building were somehow safe. However, by now you knew better. After all, the world simply wasn’t made for someone your size, and all took it was a single look skyward to see the truth.
Glancing up past the reinforced pad of glass above you, you watch the soles of shoes several hundred times bigger than your bed rise and fall with an unfathomable force. Did they really have to design one walkway directly beneath the other, you wonder, watching the flock of woman fly by, their boots and bodies blotting out what little light leaked down into the tiny tunnel. While it was humiliating having to hide in the shadows in between class, a part of you knew someone like you could never navigate the normal world above without winding up dead before the day was done. Thankfully, you didn’t have to.
Stepping into the atrium of a room adorned with dozens of doors, you casually find your place in line behind a small crowd of shrunken students. Though Picout wasn’t perfect, its complex system of elevators, catwalks, and contraptions provided ample means for puny pedestrians to travel within the university’s walls and colossal classrooms. After a few minutes of waiting, you walk into a vacant elevator, and search a sea of buttons for the one piece of plastic that would whisk you away to your first class of the day. “Come on, come on, where is it?” you ask yourself, hand hovering past hundreds of small switches. “Aha!” you exclaim excitedly. “Natural Sciences, Biology Lab 3.”
With a quiet chime, the doors close, and you begin your journey up, down, and all around the brick building. Where a normal everyday elevator ride might be measured in seconds, yours more often than not took multiple minutes, if not nearly half an hour. Inconvenient, no doubt, but that was the price you paid to skip several days worth of walking. A short eternity later, the doors open again, and you step foot onto a wooden walkway lined with desks and crudely crafted chairs. To the untrained eye, the room may not have seemed much like a lab or lecture hall, but if one dared to stare past the thigh-high guardrails, they’d realize the room was more than just a cramped catwalk.
To your left, a few stories below, a preposterously large plywood plateau extends a mile in either direction, its pine patina littered with leviathan pieces of paper and an assortment of other equally large objects. Though the sea of stained wood is an unsettling sight for someone your size, its the woman hovering beyond its horizon you’re most afraid of.
“So kind of you to join us,” a voice booms from up above.
Craning your neck up towards the source of the sound, you spy the face of your ten-thousand foot tall biology professor, Ms. Mayweather, staring down at you, the annoyance in her expression amplified by the magnifying material situated above you and all the other shrunken students stranded atop her desk.
“Well, you see,” you stammer, your pathetic voice projected high into the heavens by one of many nearby microphones.
“The only thing I see is that each and every one of your small-statured peers have already found their lab partners for the day, which means you’re going to have to volunteer to venture out of that silly shelter if you want to pass the project,” the titanic teacher teases, tapping the top of the enclosure with the tip of her one-hundred foot wide finger. “Oh, and you had better find a partner fast, or you’ll have to settle for me,” she laughs, leaning low to take a closer look at you.
Massive and mature, the middle-aged woman was everything that your mother was not. While at home, your family hardly ever made you feel small, the faculty of Picout had a habit of treating you like a lab rat, rather than a puny person, and the behemoth biology professor was the worst of them all. Since the first day of the semester, she had done her damnedest to let you know you were lesser than your larger classmates in every way that counts. Whereas a normal sized woman would simply fail the subject for subpar grades, Ms. Mayweather would make a snack of any shrunken student unable to pass her class, and then excuse the accident as an experiment gone wrong. Of course, despite countless complaints, and dozens of deaths, nothing ever seemed to change. The sad truth was, you were food first, and a student second.
“Well, what’s it going to be? Are you going to hide in your hovel, or come out and play? We’re all waiting on you,” Ms. Mayweather asks, a steaming whirlwind pouring past her lips with every word.
As the enclosure begins to fog with the woman’s breath, the professor vanishes from view. A lab partner, you think yourself, what a joke. Though you somehow managed to get along well with your colossal classmates, nothing in the world could convince you that you were anywhere close to their equal, let alone call them your partner. With a long weary sigh, you turn away from Ms. Mayweather, and gaze out into the distant land of desks and goliath girls. If your professor’s desk was an island all it’s own, the room beyond the guardrail was a continent too large to conquer, and its inhabitants seemed more eager to eat you than make your acquaintance.
“Fine,” you say, finally accepting your fate. “Who needs a partner?” you ask, your meek, mouse-like voice echoing softly from the speakers.
Suddenly, the far-off faces begin to turn, and the room fills with talk of who will do the honors of working with you.