Shrunk! Shrunken First Semester: Trapped with the Goths chapter 1 by maximally

Max woke with his face mashed against cold plywood.

 

The wood was rough enough to leave a grain pattern across his cheek. His head throbbed in time with his pulse. Every muscle felt wrung out. His stomach twisted like it was trying to digest itself. Stale beer and something faintly chemical clung to the back of his tongue.

 

He kept his eyes shut for another few seconds, hoping the headache would ease. It didn’t.

 

Saturday, September 30th. One month into his first semester at Ventus University. Four weeks of classes he was barely passing, zero parties until last night, and a roommate who never let him forget how much better he was at talking to girls.

 

He had spent most of senior year imagining college would fix everything—his own place, new people, maybe even a girlfriend. Instead he had spent most of his free time in the Unaffiliated Students dorm room with Zeke, gaming and rewatching the same three anime series. The four-to-one female ratio that had looked so promising on the brochure only made the isolation worse. Every weekend the campus lit up with parties he was never invited to. Last night Zeke had finally dragged him to one.

 

Zeke was a stocky, fluffy-haired Mexican-American nerd—just as much of a dorky gamer and anime addict as Max, but way better-looking and far better at talking to girls. Thanks to that, he was already becoming a campus social butterfly, racking up party invites at all the big houses and never missing a chance to rub it in. Yesterday afternoon he had been waiting when Max got back from class, grinning like he’d won the lottery. He was heading to another party, and this time he’d gotten permission to bring Max along. Faced with the prospect of walking into a new social situation with only his roommate for backup, Max had done what a lot of anxious, introverted college guys might do. Egged on by Zeke, he pre-gamed harder than he should have. By the time they left, the less experienced drinker of the two had more liquid courage than he knew what to do with.

 

Now, about fourteen hours later, the only thing Max had to show for his first big college party was the mother of all hangovers and a complete blank where the rest of the night should have been.

 

He forced his eyes open.

 

The light stabbed straight into his skull. He squinted, waited for the room to stop spinning, and then the three facts hit him at once.

 

He was not in his dorm.  
He was completely naked.  
He was tiny.

 

The plywood under him was the top of a coffee table. A half-empty can of Red Bull sat a few inches from his shoulder—taller than he was. Two pencils looked like fallen trees. Cold air crawled over every inch of bare skin. He shivered hard enough that his teeth clicked.

 

“What the…”

 

His voice came out thin and wrong. He pushed himself up on trembling arms. The relative size of everything around him made the truth impossible to deny. He was three inches tall. Maybe less.

 

Panic rose fast and hot. He had heard stories about people getting dosed at college parties. None of those stories had ended with the victim waking up the size of an action figure. His heart hammered against his ribs hard enough to make his vision pulse. The room kept tilting. He could not make his thoughts line up.

 

How long had he been like this?  
Was there a cure?  
Where the hell was he?

 

He turned his head carefully, taking inventory of the space while his stomach tried to climb into his throat.

 

To the right, a wall of old photographs in ornate black frames showed decades of gloomy young women posed in front of a Victorian mansion. To the left, a massive television sat on a claw-footed cabinet, frozen on the DVD menu of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Behind him, above a black velvet couch littered with handcuffs and eyeliner pens, a huge oil painting depicted several of those same gloomy women standing or sitting atop collared, empty-eyed men.

 

House Juno.  
The Goth House.

 

Max’s mouth went dry. Even at full size, waking up naked in Juno’s common room would have been dangerous. The house’s reputation was no secret: artists and academics united by black clothes, a deep dislike of men, and a long, quiet tradition of turning that dislike into something practical. Originally the private residence of Ventus’s founder—a wealthy Gilded Age heiress obsessed with elevating women “above and beyond” the level of men—the place had mutated over a century into something closer to a cult of female domination. It was also one of the wealthiest and most influential institutions on campus, which was why the goths had never been kicked out for the things everyone whispered about.

 

He was three inches tall, naked, and alone in their living room.

 

Stay on the table and hope someone kind found him first, or try to reach the hallway and risk running into the wrong person. Neither option looked good. His legs felt rubbery. The cold plywood bit into his bare feet when he tried to stand.

 

The door on the far side of the room opened.

 

Max froze.

 

A short figure shuffled in, backlit by the hallway light. Black platform Docs, black pleated skirt, fishnets, an Invader Zim shirt that had clearly been slept in. Heavy eyeliner and white foundation smeared across a pale face. Short black bangs sticking up at odd angles.

 

Ophelia Kidd.

 

Four-foot-nine on a good day, four-eleven in the boots. The only girl in Juno who still sat near him in Intro to Bio and sometimes said hello. The only one who had never looked at him like she was calculating how long it would take to break him. She was a legacy—her mother’s connections had gotten her in—and she still seemed to be trying to earn her place rather than simply owning it the way the rest of them did.

 

Relief hit so hard his knees almost gave out.

 

“Ophelia—” His voice cracked. He pushed it louder. “Ophelia! It’s Max!”

 

Her head snapped toward the table. Her eyes went wide.

 

“Max? Oh, crap!”

 

She crossed the room in three hurried steps and scooped him up before he could say anything else. Her fingers were warm and careful, but the scale difference still made his stomach drop. One second he was standing on plywood. The next he was sitting in the soft cradle of a palm that could have crushed him without noticing.

 

“Shh.” She put a finger to her lips. “I can explain. Just… give me a second, okay?”

 

Max nodded. He did not trust his voice.

 

Ophelia glanced toward the open door, then brought him around to the waistband of her skirt. The back of her lacy purple panties filled his entire field of vision. The soft, pale curve of her ass rose on either side of the fabric like two massive hills.

 

“I’m gonna have to hide you in here until we’re back in my room,” she whispered. “Sorry.”

 

Max’s brain finally caught up.

 

“Wait—do you mean—”

 

Too late.

 

She lowered him carefully into the warm, humid space between her cheeks. Soft flesh closed around him from both sides. The elastic of the panties snapped back into place. Her skirt fell over everything. The world became darkness, heat, and the sudden, overwhelming smell of unwashed ass.

 

Max’s lungs locked.

 

Ophelia had always shown up to class clean and lightly perfumed. Whatever routine she kept had clearly not survived the party. The crevice was thick with sweat and the deep, musky funk of a body that had danced, drank, and slept without washing. The scent coated the inside of his nose and mouth in the first breath. He gagged silently, fingers digging into the soft wall of her cheek.

 

Then a short, soft sound vibrated against his face.

 

pfffoooottttt

 

A warm puff of air washed over him, thicker and more concentrated than the ambient smell. It forced its way into his lungs before he could turn his head. His eyes watered. His cock, traitorously, twitched against the damp fabric.

 

Ophelia was already moving—speed-walking down the hallway, muttering “crap, crap, crap, super crap, triple crap” under her breath. Every step made her cheeks flex and grind him deeper into the crack. Max pressed his face into the softest part he could find and tried not to breathe too hard.

 

He had been conscious for less than five minutes in his new body.  
He was already learning what House Juno smelled like from the inside.

 

It took less than a minute for Ophelia to reach her door.

 

Max counted the steps by the flex of her cheeks and the way her platform boots hit the floorboards. Each impact sent a soft jolt through the soft prison around him. The funk thickened with every movement, warm and close, until he could taste it on the back of his tongue.

 

She shouldered the door open, stepped inside, and locked it with a quick twist of the deadbolt. Heavy purple silk curtains scraped shut a second later. The room dropped into a dim, purple-tinged gloom.

 

Only then did she reach back, hook a finger under the waistband of her panties, and carefully peel him free.

 

Cool air hit Max’s skin like a slap.

 

He was coated. Thin, glistening sweat from the deepest part of her crack clung to his arms, his chest, his face. The smell rose with him—concentrated, personal, impossible to escape even outside her body. Ophelia wrinkled her nose the moment the full scent hit her.

 

“Oh, geez.”

 

She used the pad of one finger to wipe a smear of moisture off his cheek. The touch was surprisingly gentle. Then her expression shifted, like she had just remembered she was supposed to be someone else.

 

“Uh… I mean… yeah, you like that? You stinky little butt bug?”

 

The words landed flat. Max stared up at her from the cradle of her palm, still dizzy, still naked, still three inches tall. The tough-girl line hung in the air between them and immediately collapsed under its own weight.

 

“Ophelia…” His voice came out rough. “What the fuck is going on?”

 

The act dropped completely. Her shoulders slumped. She carried him over to the old-timey writing desk and set him down carefully among a scatter of textbooks and black gel pens. At this height the desk felt like a polished wooden plateau. Around him the room came into clearer focus: an ornate four-poster bed, several heavy chests of drawers, a wardrobe that looked older than the house itself. The only things that clearly belonged to Ophelia were the posters taped and pinned to the walls—Hazbin Hotel, American Horror Story, Invader Zim, My Chemical Romance, The Cure—and the uneven stacks of Biology, Psychology, Sociology, and Gender Studies textbooks. True to her mother’s promises, the space was starting to feel like home, even if it still mostly felt like a museum of someone else’s gothic taste.

 

Her face, when she leaned in, filled most of his vision—pale foundation still smudged, heavy eyeliner feathered from sleep, full lips pressed into a worried line.

 

“I… I’m sorry. I guess I owe you some kind of explanation.”

 

Max stayed very still. The residual smell of her ass was still thick on his skin. Every breath reminded him exactly where he had just been. He kept his hands at his sides, trying not to think about how easily she could close her fingers and end the conversation.

 

“It’s… okay,” he managed. “Do you know how I got like this? I can’t remember anything about last night.”

 

Ophelia exhaled through her nose and rubbed the back of her neck, the nervous gesture of someone who still wasn’t sure she belonged in the room she was standing in.

 

“Well… you were here. So was Zeke.”

 

Max’s stomach dropped.

 

“We were? At Juno?”

 

“Yeah.” She looked away for a second, then forced herself to meet his eyes again. The heavy eyeliner made the nervous flicker in them even more obvious. “How much do you know about shrinking serum?”

 

The name was self-explanatory and still completely foreign.

 

“Not much.”

 

“Okay.” She crossed her arms under her chest. The black Invader Zim shirt pulled tight across the C-cups that already looked enormous from his new perspective. “So Juno has this… tradition. First big party of every semester, the new members get to pick a guy and claim him. 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.”

 

The word claim sat in the air like a stone.

 

At regular size it might have sounded flattering. At three inches it sounded final.

 

“The idea is, you talk a guy into coming back to your room and… you know.” A faint blush rose under the white foundation. She rubbed the side of her neck again, the same nervous tell. “But I got nervous. Really nervous. So I went down to the chem lab and got some shrinking serum.”

 

Max’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again.

 

“The school chem lab?”

 

“No. Juno has one too. Mostly for mixing up performance enhancers to help break guys in.” She said it almost casually, then seemed to hear herself and winced. “I’m just trying to keep it real with you.”

 

“So you shrank me.”

 

“Yeah.” Ophelia reached into a pocket of her skirt and produced a small empty vial labeled in dense gothic script. She set it on the desk beside him with a soft click. Up close it looked longer than his entire body. “I slipped this into your drink while we were talking. You were already pretty drunk. You wandered off after. Up until a couple minutes ago I figured one of my sisters had found you.”

 

Max stared at the vial. The polished wood of the desk suddenly felt too smooth, too exposed under his bare feet.

 

“How do I get back to normal?”

 

Ophelia’s face pinched. The tough-girl posture she had tried to hold collapsed completely.

 

“You can’t.”

 

The words hit like a second dose of the same chemical.

 

“What?”

 

“I’m really sorry, Max. That serum is permanent.”

 

He tried to stand. His legs shook. Outrage and disbelief warred with the simple physical fact of her size. She could have covered him with one hand and ended the conversation.

 

“Are you serious?”

 

“It was impulsive, okay?” Her voice climbed a register. The legacy insecurity flashed across her face again—the same look she sometimes got in class when a professor called on her and she wasn’t sure her answer was good enough. “Honestly, you should be thanking me.”

 

“For what? Ruining my life?”

 

Ophelia scowled, but the expression looked more defensive than angry. She glanced toward the posters on the wall like they might offer backup, then back down at him.

 

“Look… if it wasn’t for me you’d probably be neck-deep in Kali’s ass by now. Or Miss V’s. Or Vanessa’s. Or literally anyone else in this house. The rest of them don’t hesitate the way I did. Now do you want me to help you out or not?”

 

Max’s shoulders sagged.

 

She wasn’t wrong. He had heard the stories. Kali Chandra’s name alone was enough to make most unaffiliated guys cross the quad rather than walk past her. The idea of waking up between those cheeks instead of Ophelia’s made the current situation feel almost merciful by comparison. The residual smell of her ass was still thick on his skin. Every breath reminded him exactly where he had just been, and how much worse it could have already become.

 

“I… fuck. This is insane.”

 

“Yeah,” Ophelia said, a short, helpless laugh escaping her. “Seriously.”

 

For a moment the only sound in the room was the low hum of the old radiator and Max’s own uneven breathing. He could still smell her on him—sweat and deeper funk that no amount of wiping had removed. His body felt hyper-aware of every inch of exposed skin, every shift of air, every tiny movement of the giant girl who had decided, on impulse, that he belonged to her now. The posters loomed over both of them like silent witnesses. The stacks of Gender Studies textbooks looked suddenly less academic and more like instruction manuals.

 

He opened his mouth to ask what “help” was supposed to look like when a third voice cut through the quiet from the other side of the door.

 

Flat. Impatient. Already too close.

 

“Kidd. Open up. Now.”

 

Ophelia’s face went the color of fresh paper.

 

Max felt the temperature in the room drop even though nothing had changed.

 

“Oh, crap,” she whispered. The nervous energy that had been simmering under her skin the whole conversation finally spiked into something close to panic. “That’s Kali.”