Alice has always wanted to be a professional photographer. The world, to her, was full of beautiful but fleeting moments, and she wanted to capture and immortalize them. Most of all, she was inspired by the people around her. A good photo could tell a story on its own, she thought, and so she would often go on urban hikes with her trusty Nikon to try and see all the different and unique people in the city and capture a tiny portion of their lives. She also offered her services to her friends and family as a photographer. She was proud of her work and by the time she turned 23 she built up a sizeable portfolio.
The novel Shrinktech was taking off around that time, and many photographers jumped on the opportunity to make use of this new technology. Most of them immediately focused on working with shrunken women; the classic story of Thumbelina was reimagined in a thousand different ways in a matter of mere weeks. Alice, creative as she was, decided to take a different approach. She could instead take a look at the world from a tiny point of view. She could investigate how did people look from a bug's perspective. The idea was incredibly alluring to her. There was only one problem: advanced technology did not survive shrinking.
But this didn't stop Alice; a friend of hers, Emily, was one of the first victim of the original shrinking virus, and after becoming small she joined a company making things for tiny people like her. With Emily's help, Alice acquired a tiny camera - it wasn't particularly amazing, some things were really off, but overall it would do the trick. Alice promptly got access to Shrinktech and installed the app. She decided to go out and make a name for herself as the Tiny Photographer. Since this was very new to her and she simply wanted some experience, she asked around her circle of friends if she could pay anyone so that they would allow her to wander around their house while shrunken, with the intent of snipping some cool shots. Another one of her friends referred her to Eliot. When she stalked the guy on Instagram, she couldn't believe her luck: the man was handsome, athletic, and even in the casual smartphone pictures she could see that he radiated confidence and charm. He'd be just perfect in the giant role!
Clearly, he thought so too, because when they met to discuss Alice's proposition he seemed pretty excited about it.
“I’ll only take two hundred”, he said, smiling at Alice. “I’ll have some requests, though”.
“Anything you want”, Alice beamed. She was a bit flustered. “I just want to test it all out and see what kind of material I can get”.
“See, my ex-girlfriend was one of the original shrinkees”, he told her then. “I was always wondering how’d she see the world from her size. She was trying to be affectionate, but she barely reached above my toes, and since she mostly spent time on the floor, for the most part she just was at my feet.”
“Makes sense”, Alice slowly nodded. “Can’t always hover over the tiny, can you?”
“Exactly! She mostly fended for herself down there.” he mused. “So yeah, if we’re doing this, I want you to focus on the feet. Think you can do that?”
Alice laughed and couldn’t stop herself from glancing down. They were at a coffee shop, the table top was made of glass, and she could see his crossed legs extending all the way almost to her chair.
“Sure thing”, she said.
Several days later Alice gave him the money - for the sheer concern of having a shrunken person around - and the access code to connect their Shrinktech apps. That would allow him to bring her back in the evening. A standard safety procedure in case the automatic timer doesn’t work.
She had already tested shrinking, so she wasn’t too unphased by the process.
But the way Eliot looked from down here was absolutely astonishing to her. The man, already a hunk, turned into an almost godlike figure of untold proportions, his pillar-like legs rising far above her. He winked down at Alice. She pulled up her camera and took the first picture. The second one came just as he decided to step right over her, so she managed to get a good shot of the dusty bare sole over her. She felt her knees going weak. Several dust motes landed on her and around her.
For most of the day, Alice skittered around on his floor, taking picture after picture, feeling like a spy. He didn’t seem to pay her any mind as he went around his housework and meals and leisure, and sometimes she’d had to catch up if his chores brought him around his spacious apartment a lot faster than her little legs could carry her.
She focused on his feet, and that felt rather natural as anything else seemed almost distorted from her floor-level point of view. Alice never really thought of something like this before, but she discovered that his feet had a story to tell, too. They were wide, meaty, with a tough heel and ball, which she could tell without even touching them; these were the feet of a man who stood firmly on his two legs and played a lot of sports. There was a healthy masculinity to them. The more pictures she took, the more she wanted to take, overwhelmed by the absolute difference in size and power between herself and this immense man, and she couldn’t believe that recently she’d spoken to him as an equal, and now she was nothing but an almost invisible critter on his floor, and had to jump aside any time those imposing feet with their thick soles slapped against the floor next to her. She shuddered just thinking of what would happen if she was a bit too late with getting out of his way. She wasn’t keen on getting flattened.