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Mini Mason - Chapter 31
🕑 Added 2024-07-06 21:21:03 +0000 UTCBetween Nicole’s fingers was the chair that she’d accidentally and unknowingly broken just a few minutes ago when she’d sat on the edge of her desk. Though he’d played no role in its damage, Mason still felt guilty for some reason, and had meekly reported it to her before they left for the second floor. After heaving it between his arms to lift it up to the giant woman (as if she needed any help picking it up—although Nicole had long since observed that tinies often attempted feats of “strength” so that they wouldn’t seem as useless as they felt; it was, to some degree, impressive to see what 3-inch tall people could lift, but only impressive within the context of remembering just how pathetically small and weak they already were), Mason watched Nicole effortlessly grab it between her fingers. After gazing down on it for less than a moment, she simply remarked about how fragile and flimsy tiny furniture always was, before crushing it between her fingers in the same motion that she threw its remnants into the trash.
He hadn’t realized she was holding out her palm for him to step on, instead gazing into the garbage below and thinking about how easily she’d crushed it. But Nicole didn’t like waiting for him, so she plucked him between her fingers for a moment and set him down on her palm, a move that freaked Mason out and caused him to stumble onto his butt as soon as she set him down. If she’d crushed a piece of wooden furniture so easily, it clearly wouldn’t be hard for her to squish a human body like his (even though he knew she never would). “God, you know how I feel about being picked up,” he yelled out, “especially by the same fingers I just watched you crush that chair with!”
Nicole smirked, his outburst admittedly making her feel strong. “You were right next to the edge of the desk, I could’ve pushed you over and let you fall into my hand instead. But I figured you’d prefer this way more.” Before he could argue back, she went on to say, “I’m at work, Mason, I don’t have time for you to dilly dally and daydream while I have places to be. You had the last 19 years to marvel over how huge I am, or the 128 other hours in the week that I’m not working.” Of course, arguing didn’t matter much. At this point, how she treated him was how she treated him; at least he could be thankful she treated him relatively well.
Upon stepping out of the elevators on the second floor, Mason observed a large wall that boxed in the reception area, made mostly of frosted glass thicker than his entire body. But the floor to ceiling doors were transparent, and through them Mason could see hundreds of tiny cubicles, and even a handful of high-rise buildings that were scattered around them. “Hey Marcello,” Nicole smiled, handing her badge to the man at the front desk. He returned her greeting as he scanned her card, buzzing her through. Mason was too preoccupied staring through the doors to notice the man giving her a knowing smile.
But once the two stepped through the doors, the world inside opened itself up even more. While other floors of the company’s headquarters seemed primarily built for normal people, with tinies treated as secondary employees, the second floor saw more of a mixed use environment. Here, it was the huge and cumbersome people who had specifically quartered-off walkways and work areas, since there was just too much infrastructure built for shrunken people everywhere else. Some of the miniature buildings were even as tall as Nicole herself, making her and any other regulars who got a chance to walk through the floor feel almost like Godzilla walking through a city. Just like in Bayview, tinies on the second floor didn’t seem like an afterthought—they were the main idea.
Even though there was a narrow, red-painted pathway along which Nicole was permitted to walk and tinies were discouraged from crossing, there were so many of them using it anyways that the woman had to look down for every single step she took, walking slowly (and a little impatiently) as all the tiny people took their time getting out of the way. There was less fretting here, less of a hurry to move so that larger people could be accommodated. Many of them looked up in awe at Nicole’s size, but they didn’t run to the sides like they were about to be stepped on. They simply meandered along, and for every step she took Nicole either had to try and step over them, or wait for the next few feet to be clear altogether.
“Is that a train track?” Mason asked, pointing to a rail station located off to the side of the walkway. There were a dozen people standing on the platform about 9 inches off the ground, and they turned as a shadow overtook them and a clacking set of heels drew nearer.
“Yep, we have two trains that run all through the building,” she explained, walking over to it to show the boy. She noticed that the other side of the track was clear of any tinies, so to take a quick shortcut, she stepped clear over the train station. Before anyone down below could yell up at her about breaking the rules, she continued explaining about the train to Mason, detailing its design and logistics, and how the track went all throughout the building and facility. Many of Bayview’s residents would ride it to the second floor to get to their job.
Just as Nicole was about to keep walking, she heard a voice calling up her last name from somewhere on the ground below, and in truth she would’ve just pretended not to have heard it, had she not glanced down and recognized the person yelling up at her. “Oh, Rachel! How are you?”
“Good morning Miss Jeffries, I’m doing well,” a tiny woman said from down on the ground, unflinching as Nicole squatted down to talk to her better. “What brings you by our neck of the woods?”
“Well I’ve gotta talk to Jack about that incident with the protestor last week,” Nicole scowled, “but I also wanted to show the place off to Mason here.” As she said this, her palm lowered enough that Rachel was able to see the boy standing atop it, and he hopped off, the two tinies introducing themselves to each other. “Hey um, Mason, you might not be allowed into the conference room while I meet with legal, so how about you wait here while I go deal with them, mkay?”
Mason wasn’t sure if she was expecting him to wait with this new woman he’d just met, but he felt like it’d be rude to impose upon Rachel in case she was wondering the same thing. “You don’t have to watch me… I’m 19, so,” he awkwardly told her. “I can wait by myself.”
Rachel laughed, but said goodbye to him and went on her way, leaving Mason to watch as the monolithic woman strode confidently down halls of the miniature cityscape.
I should come by here more often, Nicole was thinking as she walked away, envisioning herself taking a lunch break surrounded by hundreds of tiny people who gawked up at her. Dealing with Mason at home, or on the top floor, or really just about anywhere in the world didn’t make her feel special; it made her feel like he was. But here on the second floor, where she was one of a handful of regular-sized employees allowed inside, where over a thousand tiny people worked and milled about around her, she felt powerful. Even more-so since she was one of the highest ranking people at the company. The combination of her size and her role resulted in an absolute demand for attention and respect wherever she went. Only other executives at her company, and people at similar companies in similar positions, could really understand just how formidable she was made to feel on a daily basis, and it was a thrill knowing that she was one of the very few humans on the entire planet who got to feel that way.
Musing on how important she felt, she had completely forgotten to look where she was walking, and was oblivious to the man pushing a mail cart down below. Like many on the second floor, the tiny man had expected her to be watching where she was going, and didn’t realize until the last moment that she was wholly ignorant to him. He screamed upon coming to this realization and dove out of the way, as she seemed to traverse the length of a football field in barely two seconds, cluelessly but ruthlessly stomping on his cart beneath her stiletto.
Nicole stopped suddenly, having felt the thin metal snap beneath her foot, and looked down, mildly annoyed to have her fantasy interrupted but relieved that nobody had gotten hurt. “Oh. Sorry about that,” she mumbled with a sigh. “Are you okay?”
The tiny man took a moment to compose himself, watching as the gigantic woman bent over to take off her shoe. Her nylon-clad leg slammed back down so close to him it was as if she couldn’t see him all over again, and he jumped in alarm, before looking back up and seeing that the woman was inspecting the bottom of her heel. “Um, yeah, I’m okay,” he called up to her. Without even glancing at him, she quickly wiped the bottom of her shoe against the side of her skirt, a few pieces of debris falling by her wayside just a stone’s throw from the man, and then blew on the sole to clear off anything that still remained.
“Good,” she finally said, as she put her heel back on. “Then clean up this mess. You know the rules about tinies crossing the pathways meant for normal people.” The rules in question stated that walking across the red-painted path was akin to jaywalking, and tinies were meant to use the striped intersections if they needed to get from one side to the other, just like a crosswalk. However, given how fast the woman was walking, the man was pretty confident she wouldn’t have slowed down or stopped for him no matter where he’d crossed. But he knew who she was, and who he was, and since she was already walking away it didn’t matter. He could only curse her name, resigned to pick up the pieces of her accident all by himself.
~
Apparently, the collective noun for a grouping of lawyers was an ‘eloquence.’ A pride of lions, a deck of cards, a school of fish, and an eloquence of lawyers. Nicole had learned that years ago, during a conversation with one of her company’s litigation attorneys. Regardless of what they were meant to be called, there was an assortment of them grouped around a long table at the moment, discussing the possibilities of the company’s pending lawsuit.
As a tiny person could attest, there were so many earthquakes caused by normal people that accompanied the surroundings of wherever a tiny went, that all tiny people learned to simply grow used to them. Even now, as the room gently shook, nobody looked up from their paperwork or broke off from their conversations.
“I’ve heard a group of lawyers is supposed to be a ‘huddle,’” Nicole remembered one of the other employees telling her all those years ago, which the attorney sitting next to her hadn’t been too pleased to hear as a retort. Although it was certainly less defamatory than many of the other words he’d been called throughout his career.
In the conference room, the tremors grew bigger and snappier, and soon enough it was clear from how quickly it was growing that someone big was headed straight towards them. Several of the lawyers knew who Nicole was, so they knew to get extra nervous as their cups of water vibrated and their rolling seats shifted unpredictably. One by one, their heads turned to watch as she walked towards them, until her figure blotted out the lights and cast the entire conference room in an ominous shadow. For a brief few seconds she stood there, and all that anyone could see of her was the hefty curvature of her breasts, which were mostly modest, but still revealing enough at the top that every man and woman in the room found themselves looking awkwardly at the giant woman’s cleavage.
Upon approaching the building where the tiny employees of her company’s legal department worked, Nicole gazed through the 6-inch windows that adorned the top floor, where tiny men and women in tiny suits and blouses sat talking around a table, and remembered that she’d agreed with the second employee. She liked ‘huddle.’ An eloquence doesn’t seem fitting for people like them, she thought. She had a hard time thinking of anyone tiny as eloquent, since it was hard to take seriously most things that a 3-inch tall person said. Plus it sounded a lot like elegant, which she was sure was a coincidence but basically meant something that was aesthetically eloquent. And these lawyers that she stood before definitely weren’t elegant either, for the same pea-sized reasons that they weren’t eloquent, with their pipsqueak voices and cheap sets of clothes that could pass for a doll’s. But ‘a huddle of lawyers’ seemed to fit. She knew some people called lawyers things like rats or bugs or vermin. And huddling was something that all those little creatures would normally do.
“Miss Jeffries, thank you for coming,” one of the little men said as an assistant slid the windows back and Nicole squatted down, allowing them to all speak together instead of the little lawyers speaking to her bosom. This happened a lot, but was never on accident. Nicole knew that, in case her position in the company or size relative to the tinies didn’t command enough attention, her beauty was typically the final nail in the coffin. Regardless of gender, whether on a runway or in a conference room, everyone knew that pretty people go further in life, so Nicole had always shamelessly but secretly taken advantage of that. It wasn’t something she flaunted, of course; be too brazen about it, and nobody will take you seriously. But she appreciated the idea in short, subtle bursts.
Jack Fleming, the company’s chief legal officer (one of the only tinies in the company with a high ranking position), walked up to the edge of the building. “Hey Nicole, I assume you’re here about the protestor lawsuits.” He was also one of the only tinies to be on a first name basis with Nicole.
“Yes Jack, I am,” she replied, somewhat irritated. If it wasn’t evident from her voice, Jack was smart enough to know that the only reason Nicole would have to come see them in person instead of communicating over a call was to drive home the gravity of the situation. This early on in the development, there wasn’t much to discuss with her. “Have their lawyers given any terms yet?”
“No ma’am,” replied one of the lawyers, “but we’ve been in touch, and they’re expected to deliver their terms by the end of the day.”
“Oh, great,” Nicole sighed. “I’m sure we’ll receive it around 4:50. I expect you all are planning to stay late today, right?” The heads all nodded, disappointed but unsurprised. “I might even need to come in tomorrow,” Nicole added, although she doubted she actually would. That was their job. She planned on relaxing on her patio with a margarita, kicking her feet up, while all her little minions poured over papers here at the office.
Jack looked back at his team. “We’ll be able to handle it without you, Nicole.” There it was, the permission she didn’t need. The endorsement for her to relax while they spent their weekend devising a counteroffer.
“Good. I want this wrapped up by the end of next week. The quicker we get this settled, the better chance we have at this issue ever escalating further than the tiny media.” The huddled heads all agreed with the giant woman, and she stood up straight again, placing her hand on the roof of the building. “It should’ve never even gotten this far to begin with. So the next time I’m back down here, if you all don’t have good news to tell me, then I might just have to see about physically relocating your department to somewhere that I can keep a better eye on it.” She gently shook the top of the building, and even though it was bolted down, she was still able to rattle the structure enough that it felt like an earthquake to everyone inside. Someone on one of the lower floors even screamed in surprise. “There’s even a spot right outside my office. Or… inside it…”
The lawyers all looked at each other nervously, save for Jack, who chuckled at Nicole’s comment, albeit with an uneasy tone. “Don’t worry. We’ll get it handled quickly.” Nicole only nodded, and once she turned to leave, the huddle of lawyers were finally able to sigh with relief.
~
Several blocks away, Mason had glanced briefly down a long corridor bordered with buildings where more tiny employees were working and going about their day. At the very end, what seemed like half a mile away but in reality was only 100 feet, was Nicole seemingly lecturing some more employees. She wasn’t dressed scandalously, but her dress pants seemed fairly tight, and they only tightened even further around her butt when she leaned over. Even with it covered, he wondered what it was like to look out your window and see some woman’s huge ass right in front of you. But I probably shouldn’t stare, he reasoned, soon turning away. I feel like someone might catch me at home, and here I’m actually surrounded by people.
He continued to explore, or at least that’s what he’d been determined to do. Only a minute later, as he was walking along the edge of the red path, he saw Nicole suddenly turn the corner in front of him. She seemed to be walking back to where she’d dropped off Mason, and although her eyes watching her step, they weren’t exactly scanning the floor in detail. So there was a moment when she, dressed in an expensive pantsuit, as tall as a giant, with a stern look on her face and an aura of confidence and power surrounding her, briefly looked at him for a split second as her eyes surveyed the dozens of tinies below her, before immediately moving on and she eventually walked past him. And he instantly felt some type of feeling that was new to him, an exciting and thrilling feeling that also hinged on a sense of humiliation that was exacerbated by his size. That Nicole wouldn’t be able to recognize him in a crowd, and would simply walk on by as if he was nothing to her, was a strange yet salacious feeling that he’d never quite experienced at home. He’d had her or Skye or Mikayla be unaware of his presence a thousand times before, but there was something unique about it now, while he was amongst the crowd, and while he was in the midst of a landscape that she seemed out of place in, instead of him feeling out of place like at home. Oh God, am I developing some type of feelings for her? he wondered. But it was a rhetorical thought. Him noticing her body was one thing, but that was shallow, and to be expected of anyone his size anyways. This was something deeper.
But then she started calling his name upon seeing that he wasn’t where she’d left him, and he called back to her, and then she was turning and sighing and coming back over to him, the look of recognition and glimmer of love returned to her eyes. “I told you to stay with Rachel,” she said, ignoring the people on the sidelines who hurried out of the way as her ass squatted down above their heads.
“I didn’t wanna make her babysit me. I’m an adult, and we’re not anywhere dangerous. You can leave me alone for a few minutes.” After crawling onto her hand, she stood back up, checking her watch on her other arm.
“We have a little bit of time before I gotta get back to work,” she said. “I can show you the R&D department.” But she only made it a few steps before she came to the corner Mason had seen her come around. And just as she did, a miniature van came barreling around from the other direction, crashing right into her toes. “Ow, shit!” Nicole muttered, stepping back in surprise and glaring down. “The one time I wear open-toed heels in the office, and some idiot runs into them,” she muttered, absentmindedly placing Mason down on the floor as she slid her heel off for the second time that day to inspect it. She examined it up close, wanting to make sure the crashed van hadn’t gotten any scuff marks on the polished, shiny material.
Mason jogged over to the van to see if the people inside needed any help, but without warning, a giant finger crashed in front of him, and suddenly the van shot up seemingly hundreds of feet in the air with so much speed that the two passengers would’ve hit their head had they not been buckled in. From the ground, as Nicole slipped her shoe back on, Mason could only watch as high above, she clenched her teeth and scowled through the windshield.
“What the hell were you two doing?” she practically shouted, causing the two people inside to wince. They tried responding, but Nicole couldn’t hear the feeble voices inside the car. “Roll down the damn window,” she demanded, rolling her eyes when the two inside gestured that it wasn’t working and they didn’t know why—they couldn’t even open the doors. “God, so pathetic… these cheap machines,” she growled, correcting herself so any onlookers wouldn’t know she’d been talking about the utter helplessness of tinies. In a heartbeat, she wedged her fingernail into the crack of the door and ripped it off with so much force that it went flying somewhere behind her. Then she turned the vehicle on its side and moderately shook it, not a crazy amount, but more than hard enough to dislodge the two inside and cause them to fall out onto her palm. “What were you doing coming around the corner like that!?” she huffed down to them. “It’s one thing to jaywalk, it’s another to do it right at a corner where normal people couldn’t possibly hope to even see you.”
Of the two tinies, a man and a woman, the man tries to speak up, unable to look into Nicole’s glaring eyes and stuttering as he spoke. “There a-aren’t that many c-crossing sections. It’s faster…” He scratched his head as he said it, knowing right away it was a bullshit excuse.
“So you risked your life to save a couple minutes? Your jobs aren’t valuable enough or time sensitive enough to ever necessitate you breaking the rules to save a few minutes.” She set the two back down on the ground, placing their van next to them, and then rested the front of her heel on the top of the car. It creaked and groaned from the weight, the roof threatening to dent. “Do you know what would’ve happened had you two come around the corner just a second sooner?” They gulped, and tried to say yes, but it was drowned out by the massive woman ordering them, “Watch.”
They turned to look as the woman raised her shoe into the air, before dropping it back down on top of the car, instantly crushing it to half the height it had been before. “I don’t want to accidentally step on anyone,” she continued, leaning forward now so that more of her weight centered on the front of her heel, flattening the van even further, until it was reduced to a crumpled heap. “And you two don’t want to be stepped on. So next time, take the long way around.” Then she picked Mason back up and continued on her way. I remember why I don’t come down here that often, she thought. Because nobody here knows how to get out of the way.
On the other side of the second floor, past the hub of tiny employees and their offices, was the company’s research division, which (on paper) developed products to be used by tinies across the globe. But they also had their hands in pharmaceutical projects that were either made for tiny people, or developed by studying them and how their bodies differed from normal folk. Nicole was proud to show off their projects as she carried Mason around, as if they were her very own.
“And here’s the genetic engineering wing,” she announced, carrying him through one last set of doors. “Our scientists have made a lot of breakthroughs over the years, not just in tiny science, but for several general applications.” She sounded like she was giving a presentation to investors. “Turns out genetically altering cloned animal embryos is a lot easier when they’re grown in conjunction with the same genetic code that makes people like you so small. We’ve practically invented brand new animal species in here.” She smiled, approaching a terrarium approximately 10 by 15 feet, littered with a host of minuscule cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and goats—there was even a pair of llamas sequestered off on one side.
As Mason was marveling at it all, Nicole reached in and plucked out a pig, setting it down on her palm next to him. “This is incredible,” the boy said, smiling and kneeling down to pet the animal. “I can’t believe I had no idea about stuff like this. Does Bayview have animals like this?”
“Not yet, that’s why you haven’t heard of it before. The public doesn’t know. But once we get government approval, our plan is to introduce them in the coming years to tiny cities all over, to help places like Bayview become more self-sufficient. You probably don’t realize that the meat you normally eat isn’t meant to be that chewy and tough, because a regular animal’s meat has so much connective tissue for a person your size. Remember that time you tried beef jerky and you couldn’t even rip a piece off? That stuff is to big people like what normal meat is to small people. Hopefully though you’ll soon be able to eat meat that actually works well for a person your size.” She reached down and picked the pig back up, tilting her head back and slowly raising the tiny animal over her mouth. “Because based off our experiments so far, these things taste amazing.” Mason watched with a horrified expression as the pig he’d been cuddling just moments ago was now inches above her gaping mouth, squealing and squirming so ferociously that Mason was worried it’d accidentally cause itself to fall in.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” he yelled.
“I just told you, we’re raising these things to be eaten. The mini pigs anyways. They’re not pets. You’re not a vegetarian, don’t be a hypocrite.”
She continued to open her mouth even wider, and Mason had to rip his attention away, unable to watch. “DON’T!”
“Relax, I wasn’t going to actually eat it,” she sighed, lowering her head again as Mason turned back around, just in time to see her snap her teeth shut in front of it and smirk at its reaction. “It’d be a waste to feed something like this to me, I’d need to eat a dozen just to put a dent in my appetite.”
“That wasn’t funny,” Mason scowled as she put the pig back in the terrarium, where it immediately ran off. “Didn’t you see its face? It was scared.”
Nicole realized Mason was serious, and could empathize with how he must’ve felt having seen her pull that (even if she did secretly want to eat it). “OK, I’m sorry Mason,” she grimaced. “You’re right.”
There was a pause of awkward, tensive silence between them, as they both looked down at the animals, before the door opened behind them and a scruffy looking man in a lab coat walked in.
“Miss Jeffries,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m glad you came down here. I need to speak with you about something.” He glanced uneasily at Mason, but Nicole nodded and placed the little man down in the terrarium with the animals.
“Here, you can pet them some more, I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, and followed the scientist behind a plastic flap door. Mason couldn’t hear specifically what they started to talk about, but he could hear their tone gradually increase as they argued with each other. Through the glass of the terrarium and the transparent plastic, he watched as their arm movements became more agitated and exaggerated over the course of several minutes, until finally the man left in a huff, shaking his head.
“Um… what was that?” Mason asked her once she came back to retrieve him.
“That,” Nicole sighed, “was Dr. Lewis. He’s basically our lead scientist; he answers to the CTO.”
“Why was he so mad?”
“Well, he’s been trying to gain access to a formula we developed back… actually Mason, I’m not sure I should really be talking to you about this.”
“Why not, I won’t tell anyone?”
Nicole laughed; that’s what everyone said. “I know sweetie, but I signed an NDA relating to a lot of the stuff we develop down here.” She paused, “Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure I’d be allowed to bring you into the labs.”
“Oh. Well, that’s okay. We can head back.”
She grimaced, bringing her palm up close to her face, and for a moment Mason was reminded of the pig she’d pretended to almost eat. “Seriously Mason. It was my mistake for bringing you here, but you can’t tell anyone about it, not even your sisters. Thank God most of the people here work from home on Fridays.” She took a deep breath, as if reassuring herself, and then lowered him back to a normal level. “Now let’s head back.”
