The Aftermath-Chapter 17 [gts, be, nwo]

Hi, everyone. I hope you're all doing well. Thank you to the user who gently reminded me after my last cross-post to include tags in the title and my apologies for omitting those before. Here, at last, is the final chapter of The Aftermath, along with links to chapters one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen.

The Aftermath's subscriber-exclusive epilogue is available now to subscribers on my Patreon and DeviantArt, along with the first look at my next story, Subversion, which tells the tale of a world in which all women are infinitely modifiable simply through the descriptions of men, where an authoritarian regime rose up in the wake of a rampage by a 600-mile-tall giantess.

As always, thanks for reading!

Full tags: mini-gts to giga-gts, be, ag, gentle, sm, mpg

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“It’s going to be okay, Anna. I’m here. I’m with you.” Jeremy put his hand down on Anna’s alarmingly sallow, mile-wide cheek. “I’m going to help direct you.” He tried to keep his voice as steady as he possibly could. The trembling of Anna’s body—she had stopped crying out in pain, as even that now seemed to be too much effort for her—had still been enough to make the approach in the helicopter incredibly difficult and turbulent.

“Jeremy, what if I fall? So many people—“

“If you’re more comfortable crawling, you crawl. They’re evacuating everyone in your way.”

“Plus every population center surrounding Lake Superior.” Medha clipped yet another anchor rope to her climbing belt and grabbed hold of two of Anna’s 4’-around eyebrow hairs. The helicopter had, at her instruction, deposited her half a mile away from Jeremy, on the supraciliary arch above Anna’s right eye. As she spoke, she checked her parachute and supplemental oxygen tank. “Our biggest priority is to get some water in you so you’re safe.”

Jeremy nodded, even though he knew Anna could not see him. “Your only job is to worry about getting there, okay?” Jeremy fell back as Anna nodded in response. _His_ parachute cushioned his fall. “If you think you can tolerate standing, I think you should probably walk. It’ll go faster."

“But you’re on my head. The air—“

“Medha and I are both prepared to be that high up, lover. We have air tanks and those big puffy coats with the fur-lined hoods that you see in the nature documentaries about Antarctica.”

Anna smirked and blew a short, amused blast of air out of her 1,300’-wide nostrils. “I bet you look cute.”

“I really do. So let’s get you a drink and you can see.”

Anna nodded again, wanly.

Medha did her best not to panic as the “ground” beneath her shook with the same force and amplitude as a Pre-Auctus carnival slingshot ride. She noises from her paracord ropes straining against the pitons did not help her nerves one bit. “O…ho. Hoo. Okay. Okay! Anna, you’re going to walk basically in the direction your feet are pointed right now. Got it?” Medha pointed towards Anna’s feet as she spoke, but in truth, could not see Anna’s feet due to the curvature of the Earth and the five-and-a-half-mile-high swell of Anna’s hips.

“Yeah. I’m…hang on. I’m going to walk. So I can see it.”

Medha squeezed the eyebrow hairs tighter. She was about to say, “See it?” out loud, as she had envisioned what Anna would look like from the ground, but not what Anna could see from her vantage point. The idea that Anna could see Lake Superior with the naked eye from central Ontario therefore was something she had not even considered. But then, Medha was focused solely on using the Anti-G Straining Maneuver that one of the pilots had hastily taught her and Jeremy as they were gearing up to fly to Anna. That occupied so much of Medha’s attention that she did not realize she’d lost her grip on Anna’s eyebrow hairs and was basically hanging straight out from the titaness’s brow by her ropes, like the swings on another pre-Auctus carnival ride.

Despite the fatigue, pain in every limb, and fuzziness in her head, Anna rolled onto her front and pushed herself up onto all fours. Her body added a 24.3-mile-long, shallower crater to the Earth next to the 15-mile-long, deeper one she had made while curled up in the fetal position. She nearly chuckled ruefully at the sensation of her 120-billion-ton breasts propping her upper body up off the ground. She had always resented them a little for the additional difficulty they presented with push-ups, but now it felt like they were giving her a head start. Anna pushed her palms into the ground to either side of her body and worked her way up as she pulled her knees in towards her waist, one after the other, to stand. Her hands crunched a half mile further into the crust, once again melting the rock to lava, and her knees and shins carved mile-wide, six-mile-long, three-quarter-mile deep gorges in the ground. Then, with a hesitant breath and all the resolve she could muster, Anna got herself, unsteadily, to her feet.

Medha wanted to scream the whole way up. She was now well-aware that she was hanging from Anna’s eyebrow by nothing but her ropes. But, once again, she had to focus on her AGSM to avoid passing out. Her only cogent thought as she all-but-literally rocketed up through the clouds, into the stratosphere, and finally so high above the Earth that the blue sky around her actually began to thin and dim away to the blackness of space, was that German must have a term for the combined feelings of wonderment and abject terror. Once Anna was fully upright, Medha struggled to put on her oxygen mask. None of the muscles in her hands or fingers wanted to work. But the thinness and cold of the air made it imperative, so she managed it. Once she had a deep breath, Medha’s eyes went wide. She was looking out over a 500-mile-wide arc of North America. It was beautiful. It was—

Anna took a single, 10-mile-long stride, and immediately stumbled. It took 45 seconds for her knees to impact the Earth. The only thing that prevented the shallow, magnitude 10.2 earthquake that rippled out from where her knees hit the ground from destroying every inhabited area within 700 miles was that it was a single impact. The “aftershocks” of her palms impacting the Earth, one after the other, as she caught herself, caused merely magnitude 7 earthquakes.

Jeremy found himself shouting, “Anna! Are you okay?” before he knew whether he was still attached to her cheek. The jarring motion had caused him to black out and he was still regaining his vision. Once it cleared, he was glad to see that his ropes had held and he was not plummeting towards his death.

“Yeah. Yes.” Anna grit her teeth. It was just a few steps between her and that glittering, blue, fresh water. She needed it. She would reach it. _She could do it._ Anna heaved herself up once again, paused to steady herself this time, ignored everything her body was screaming at her, and half-jogged towards Lake Superior. This time, the earthquakes were, in fact, devastating. Twenty magnitude 9.2 temblors—each carrying the energy of nearly 20 Krakatoas—literally rippled out across the Earth, once for each footfall, each seconds apart. Superheated plumes of plasma and ejecta formed around Anna’s feet and shins as they tore through the atmosphere at nearly 150 times the speed of sound. Tornadoes formed in her wake, as did lightning storms like those triggered by volcanic eruptions. In front of her, a sustained gale built up, then intensified to unprecedented levels, over a 500 mile-long cone in front of her body. Her movements perturbed the jet stream enough to destabilize the polar vortex. That, in turn, caused a historic cold snap over much of northern Europe in the coming week.

For the volunteers, Department of Intersize Affairs staffers, and Auctus Institute personnel on the ground, the spectacle of Anna approaching was terrifying, majestic, arousing, and eerily silent. The first thing to come into view was her head, like the sun rising. Then her shoulders, then her massive, bouncing, swaying breasts, each a mountain in its own right. Then her narrow, twelve-mile-around waist and twenty-mile-around hips. As her lower legs rose above the horizon, they appeared to onlookers on the ground as wreathed in light. She looked every bit like a goddess.

Then the earthquakes caught up to them, and after that, the deafening noise and devastating winds. The largest giantesses scrambled to cover men and smaller giantesses, who, in turn, were using their bodies to shield as many men as possible. Nearly everyone without available hearing protection covered their ears and averted their faces from the painful wind. Tents and aircraft were stripped away by the winds; buildings that were not earthquake-hardened collapsed. Not a window in Ontario or Wisconsin survived.

And for the one, stubborn fisherman on Lake Superior who had ignored the repeated and stark warnings to evacuate, the sight that presented itself after he was able to pick himself up from the deck of his tsunami-tossed boat was incomprehensible. To his north, a pale, nine-mile-wide wall of breasts, which were pressed so hard into the ground that they were rimmed with the glow of lava, rose three and a half miles into the sky. Beside them were the also three-and-a-half-mile-long columns of her forearms. And above him—three miles directly above him, five miles off shore—were Anna’s 1,300’-thick lips. The fisherman shielded his head in an involuntary and utterly pointless gesture as he saw Anna’s eyes close and her lips begin to descend towards the surface of the Earth’s largest freshwater lake, creating a gale-force downdraft that mercifully blew his boat away from their point of impact.

The feel of the water on Anna’s lips was heavenly. It was pleasantly cool, and, more importantly, wet. Anna began to drink hungrily, sucking the lakewater in through her puckered lips, thousands of gallons per eager draw. She was so dehydrated, and so anxious for an end to that suffering, that she forgot all semblance of moderation.

Whereas the water closest to Anna’s lips bowed up due to suction, cohesion, and surface tension, the water at the coasts of Lake Superior drew away like time-lapse video of a drought. Although the lake was more than 325 miles longer than Anna’s body at its widest, it was, at its deepest, merely halfway up her pinky toe. The water level dropped by tens of feet with each of Anna’s gulps. Deep, enormous whirlpools formed from the violent currents now drawing everything in towards Anna’s mouth.

“Everything” included the lone fisherman and his boat. The initial blast of air had pushed him away from Anna’s mouth, but the current quickly drew him back with ineluctable force. He lost sight of her—of everything—as he was pulled back into the black-as-night shadow under her face, and, based on the trajectory he was on, braced for the fatal collision with the 1,400’-high, 1,200’-wide monolith that was the tip of her nose. But then he was thrown back against the stern of his boat. Both gravity and acceleration pulled him tight against it. The boat was riding up the current into Anna’s mouth. The fisherman screamed and covered his face again as he was drawn up past her lips. The last thing he saw in the glow of his port sidelight was the dim flash of quarter-mile-long canine tooth.

Anna finally stopped to catch her breath. The headache was still there, as were the aches and fatigue. It felt to Anna like she had just run a marathon (and, in truth, she had just run about ten). She relaxed down onto her chest, sighed, and opened her eyes. Then she gasped. Fully half the water in Lake Superior was gone. “Oh! Oh, um…sorry?”

Medha removed her supplemental oxygen mask. Now that she had been through Anna standing twice, falling once, jogging, and laying down on her stomach (and boobs, if Medha was being accurate), she was confident that her anchor points above Anna’s eyebrow would hold. “Don’t be. Better this than you dying and leaving a body this size to decompose in the middle of the continent.”

Anna gave Medha the sixth-most-jarring ride of her life by raising her eyebrows in surprise. “Oh, my god! I didn’t even think about that! Did—did you?”

Medha shrugged. “It was one of my first thoughts. But I see it as a positive. The threat of that would help me justify everything else we needed to do to make this work. Plus, once we were in for that penny, the only choice was to stick with the pound.”

Anna put her fingertip under where she roughly estimated Jeremy to be and smiled as he called out that he was standing safely on it. She moved it to in front of her eyes and could just barely, barely make him out. “She’s a little scary, isn’t she?”

Medha scoffed. “I’m extremely scary, thank you very much.”

Jeremy nodded. “I’m with Medha.” He held up his arms to the side as if to show off his outfit. “So, were you right? Do I look cute?”

Anna grinned, despite the flare of pain that the movement of her facial muscles shot back over what felt like a rubber band stretched from her forehead to the back of her neck. “I’m certain that you do.” Anna turned her attention, but not her head, to Medha. “Do we have time for me to take a nap? I still don’t feel great.”

“Yes. We need the time to move the volunteers to the secondary staging area. So feel free. I could use some rest myself.”

“Okay, then. I’m going to roll over onto my back.” Anna returned Jeremy to his anchor points on her cheek and waited till he was clipped in, then, with a series of Earth-shaking _whooms_, rolled onto her back and adjusted herself as best she could to be comfortable. Then she propped her head up on one forearm and used her other hand to lift Jeremy up to see her face, this time on her thumbnail. She lowered her voice to speak with just him. “Um. So. I still feel like shit.”

Medha looked at them in confusion as Anna’s voice suddenly became impossibly quiet. “How in the hell does that work?”

Jeremy nodded in understanding. “That’s more than understandable. You’ve been through hell, Anna.”

“Yeah. That said, this is a fantasy of yours, and I am committed to making the most of the time we have left. Remember how Medha told you you’d be able to fuck one of my pores?”

“Uh, yeah?” Jeremy scratched the back of his head. “The hair follicles look, um, uncomfortable, though.”

“What about, say, a nipple?”

Jeremy swallowed and nodded vigorously. “Yes! God, that would be fantas…I mean—“ Jeremy cleared his throat and tried to play it cool from there. “—if you want me to, yeah, I could be game, I guess.”

Anna’s lips curved into a 5,000’-long smile. “Trying to convince me you’re not just into me for my mountainous tits?”

“Exactly right. How am I doing?”

Anna licked her lips with the tip of her reassuringly moist, 1.2 mile-long tongue. “Poorly.” She slowly (to her and her alone) brought her thumbnail down the four miles from her face to her nipple. “But I’ll give you a pass.”

Jeremy stumbled down onto the dusky pink plateau of Anna’s 1,550’-wide nipple. He stared into the yawning, 28’-wide cavern that was its central milk duct. Even his 16’ penis would not span it lengthwise, let alone come close to filling it with just his girth. Earlier in their relationship, Jeremy would have felt at least a pang of his old size anxiety. Now, he dropped his pants, clapped and rubbed his hands together, and said, “Alright. Time to get creative.”

Ten Minutes Later

Medha went over her numbers again, even though she was certain they were right, to make certain they were right. Her radio crackled. The voice of her wife came through. Her tone was businesslike, which meant that other people were around. “Dr. Parthasarathy? Do you read me?”

“I do, Madam Secretary.”

“What’s your status?”

“Subject Theta appears to be sleeping soundly and is recovering. We should be good on our end to move her to the staging area shortly.” Medha looked at her radio when it was silent for longer than expected—longer than it should have been—and felt her heartrate start to pick up. “Madam Secretary, do you read?”

“Doctor—Medha, it is not going to be possible to move all of the volunteers to the staging area. The highways leading to it, the roads, they’re impassable. Most collapsed. The earthquakes were just too much. And we don’t have enough aircraft to move that many people.”

The radio went silent again, but Medha did not respond. She could feel that more was coming.

“And…and the Prime Ministress has, despite the…decomposition issue…prohibited us from allowing Anna to move any further. The destruction is just…it’s too great. We’re already certain that the infrastructure repair costs will be in the trillions.”

Medha clicked the radio on, squeezed her eyes shut as proof against the upwelling tears, and clicked it off again. She wanted to rage back, point out that Anna dying here was undoubtedly worse than her dying in (and contaminating) an enormous swath of Ontario, call the Prime Ministress a coward. But she knew what had motivated these decisions. It was fear. Perfectly justifiable, immediate, well-illustrated fear. It was the same motivation that had prompted her to demand the evacuation of cities a thousand miles away. She sighed, then clicked the radio back on. “Roger, Madam Secretary.”

One Hour Later

Eun-seo stood with her hands folded across her chest, pointedly blocking the exit of the DIA/Auctus field operations tent at the primary volunteer staging location with her sheer size. The Secretary of Intersize Affairs glowered up at her; Eun-seo tapped her foot in front of the 30’-tall, high government official hard enough so that she knew the Secretary could feel each tap. “I don’t accept that. And I’m sure your wife doesn’t, either.”

“Ms. Choi—“

“Isn’t it Omicron to you?”

“—this isn’t what I want, either! But I don’t get to countermand the Prime Ministress.”

“Anna does. She could just _come here_. Who’s going to stop her?”

The Secretary’s nostrils flared. “No one. And then what? Do you force the volunteers—the volunteers! to stay while she approaches? Compel the ones who even survive that to take on more size without their consent?”

Eun-seo flinched as if she’d been slapped. She’d just lost the argument and knew it. “I…it’s just—“

“She’s your friend and you care about her. She sacrificed herself for you.” The Secretary put a hand on Eun-seo’s chest-high shin. “This isn’t what I want, either. We just can’t get people to her, and it’s too dangerous to move her.”

Ryan, who was sitting on Eun-seo’s shoulder, shook his head. “There has to be something. There has to. Can’t we use all-terrain vehicles? Some other form of transport? Hell, can’t people just walk?”

“Mr. Hayashi, believe me, we’ve considered all of those options. Some of our volunteers aren’t in the shape to walk that distance. Some aren’t willing. Numbers are obviously critical here. And even if they all were willing and able, you know the old saying, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’”

“Well, why not ‘Hands Across America’ it, then?”

Eun-seo and the Secretary of Intersize Affairs gave Ryan the exact same look, and the exact same, “What?”

“Hands Across America. It was this fundraising stunt to form a human chain across the United States dreamed up by the same advertising executive who helped Coca-Cola with the roll-out of New Coke, the reversion to Classic Coke, and the simultaneous, comparatively silent launch of Cherry Coke.”

Eun-seo said, “How do you know this?”

“Oh, well, the whole ‘New Coke-Classic Coke-now there’s a Coke that does at least some of the work as cherries or cherry liquor’ had a host of consequences in the world of cocktails, so he’s actually a pretty significant figure in—“

Eun-seo held up a ten-foot-long palm. “Getting to the important part, your basic suggestion is a human chain?”

“Yeah. I mean, does the contact have to be direct, after all? You got your size from Anna after years of it being stored in the Cock Silo’s gigantic penis.”

Eun-seo arched an eyebrow at Ryan’s use of Anna’s ex’s stage name and gave him a knowing look.

He blushed. “Um.”

At Eun-seo’s foot, the Secretary had her hand to her forehead and was nodding vigorously. “That could...someone get me Med—get me Dr. Parthasarathy on the horn!” She rushed back into the operations tent.

Eun-seo closed her eyes, sighed, and stood up straight. She put her hands on her narrow hips and turned her head to look at her lover perched on her shoulder again. “Ryan, if your cocktail history obsession is what ends up saving Anna, are we ever going to hear the end of it?”

“Nope.”

“If we find a semi-private place for me to fuck you silly right now, can we change that to a ‘yep’?”

“Maybe?”

Six Hours Later

IASec called out to the volunteers around her, making sure her presence served its intended purpose as a source of reassurance that the whole operation was safe. She was at the midpoint of the 38 mile-long human chain stretching back from the closest point to where that the Prime Ministress had, upon learning of this plan, begrudgingly allowed Anna to move from her previous position. The Secretary reiterated what the volunteers had now been told multiple times. “Remember, we must keep our hands linked at al times! If there is a break in the line, all of the size will flow into those still in contact with Anna. And that will create exactly the problems for the world that you think it’ll create.”

The giantesses around the Secretary—the smallest of whom stood the Auctus minimum of eight feet tall, and the tallest of whom was right at the volunteer cut-off of ten feet—nodded in recognition.

Nineteen miles further north, Anna was smiling down at the 10-footer who had been brave enough to lead the line of volunteers, and who was now standing a safe distance back from Anna’s outstretched, 860’-high index finger. Anna was lying stomach (and boobs)-down on the ground. “Thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

The ten-footer looked up at Anna’s finger, out at what she could see of Anna’s boobs and ass, and then down at her own body. She’d often described herself as “pencil-shape” before Auctus, and as a “novelty giant pencil-shape” after it. “You’re welcome. It might mean a lot to me, too.”

Medha finished her latest check of her correct-from-the-start numbers. “Okay. We’re good to go. Anna, we have 25,534 volunteer giantesses.”

Anna nodded. “Got it. So 5.0216965614 feet to each volunteer.”

“Exactly.”

Back in the operations center, a 49’-tall DIA staffer said, “Isn’t our headcount 25,533?”

The Secretary’s grim-faced attaché shook his head at the 8.5-times-his-size woman. “There was a slight—very slight—miscount. To be expected in an operation of this speed and size.”

“But—“

“Miscount.”

“Yes, sir.”

Medha radioed the DIA/Auctus task force. “Ready.”

Jeremy, who was once again inside Anna’s ear, patted her antitragus. “I’m here with you. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Let’s hope this works.”

On command, the helicopter hovering over the head of the giantess chain launched the flares to signal the order to begin the steps forward, in unison, towards Anna. The chain moved as one, as planned, towards the cliff face of Anna’s index finger. But then, just before the last step, just as the lead giantess volunteer was stretching out her hand to touch Anna’s index finger (and imagining herself as a buxom, hippy 50-footer), disaster struck. The eight-footer at the midpoint of the line, the very same one who had had a private conversation with the Secretary of Intersize Affairs on the walk out to this point, stumbled. Her grip on the hand of the nine-footer in front of her broke. The chain was severed. Over twelve thousand giantesses were about to be forced to grow not five times larger, but ten.

In that instant, and in what the news would report as an entirely selfless, heroic act, the Secretary of Intersize Affairs lunged forward. The soon-to-be 150’-tall giantess grabbed the forearms of the 8’ and 9’ giantesses who had lost their link. She gasped as the transfer began.

Anna did not feel the ten-footer’s hand meet her index finger. But she knew they were touching because she felt the incredible, ecstatic connection with all these women who had (actually) selflessly volunteered to save her life. In that instant, all of them knew each other: Their histories, their triumphs, their failures. The pain of relationships lost to Auctus. The joy of the relationships that survived, and evolved, because of it. The uncommonly high concentration of women in the chain who maybe, kind of, had longed for a few extra cup sizes, or inches around the hips. The love for family. The desire for stability, for agency, for fulfillment. They were, all of them, far more alike than they were different.

At first, the contraction of Anna’s body against the ground made it rumble violently enough that the tremors threatened to break the chain of giantesses. But the unity achieved through their shared connection allowed them to move and help one another in all of the necessary ways to keep together and adapt to Anna’s rapidly-changing size. She shrank away no less quickly than Eun-seo had, at a rate of hundreds of feet per second. But because Anna was so much larger than Eun-seo had been, the process took just over ten minutes.

As she grew smaller, Anna reveled in the sensations on her body returning to relative normalcy. The Earth once again felt flat. It also felt less like sand and more like solid ground beneath her breasts as they retracted from the size of Everests,to Rockies, to Appalachians. And she could sense less and less of a temperature gradient from her hips up to the peak of her curvaceous ass as it, too, dwindled down through the atmosphere.

A helicopter collected Jeremy from Anna’s ear when it was deemed safe to do so. It then swung to get Medha, and hovered close to Anna to allow her continued access to Medha’s abilities as a lightning calculator.

Finally, Anna ended the transfer. She had given away all of the size that she could give away. She was still 80’ tall and kneeling to keep her finger in contact with the 10-footer leading the line, but she was, for the most part, herself again. Anna smiled at the woman leading the line and gently stroked her cheek with her fore-knuckle. “Thank you. And I think she’s right for you.”

“Yeah. I do, too.” The ten-footer, like the other 25,533 volunteers down the line, broke her grip on her neighbor. “When, uh, after I grow, I think I’m going to ask her to…” The ten-footer furrowed her brow and put a hand to her stomach. “Oooh. Wow, that was—aaah!” The giantess arched her back, not in pain, but in bliss, as her breasts swelled from B-cups to L-cups and her growing hips and buttocks burst open her jeans. Similar scenes played out for all of the volunteers as each of them gained, in various measures, Anna’s “morphology.”

For the Secretary of Intersize Affairs, who was twenty feet taller than the next tallest giantess in the line, those morphology changes happened on a much grander scale. They also seemed to happen more grandly. The Secretary grew N-cups to match Anna’s right before her ass swelled until it put to shame the butt of a particular bartender at a particular sizeist dive bar for hobbits.

Jeremy, who had only just run up and put a hand on Anna’s calf to get her attention, did not even break eye contact with the line of newly (or, in some cases, now even more) buxom, huge-assed giantesses that stretched as far as the eye could see when Anna cradled him against her fingers and picked him up. And, in his defense, neither did Anna. She stared at the line of giantesses appraising their new assets and nestled him to her cheek. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Is that what I look like from the outside?”

“Um.”

“Oh, no, that line belongs to Ryan. Is that really what I look like, lover?”

“You pull it off best?”

“Thank you.” She blinked. “It really is kinda hot, isn’t it.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s incredibly hot.”

Anna snorted. She leaned her face over so gravity would pull him down onto her hand, then brought the hand in which she was holding him away from her face and together with her other to hold him up in front of her eyes. She beamed down at Jeremy as a smile competed with the urge to cry for control of her facial muscles. The tears finally started welling in her eyes and her chest convulsed with happy sobs. “We did it! Jeremy, I’m going to—we can—!”

“Yeah, Anna. We can.” He rubbed the skin of her merely 5’-wide palm. “And we will.”

Anna pinned him to her palm with a kiss that covered him from merely face to stomach.

Six Months Later

“No.” The 164’ Eun-seo shook her head and swapped out two cards from her hand. “We are not doing a double wedding. I’m not getting married. Ever. The institution of marriage is an antiquated relic of the patriarchy.”

Ryan indicated that he was not trading out any cards, and smirked when Jeremy immediately folded. “You will if I tell you to, woman.”

Eun-seo scoffed, then poked Ryan with a finger longer than his entire body. “Nice try. That’s not how that works.” She used her very significant height advantage to sneak a peek at Ryan’s cards. “Also, I fold.”

“You can’t—did you look at my cards!?”

“No.”

Anna, who, at 80’, was half Eun-seo’s size, laughed heartily. “See? This is why Jeremy sits on my boobs when we play. It makes it harder for me to see his hand.”

Ryan shook his head. “Oh, is THAT why.”

Jeremy was scrambling to pick up the cards that he’d tossed up involuntarily when Anna’s bosom heaved with her laugh. He wanted to avoid said cards sliding down her cleavage. He failed. “Yes. I’m a master strategist. Um. Lover?”

Anna giggled as she fished the cards out from between her boobs. “I still think you two would make a cute married couple. And that a double wedding would be great. Plus, it would justify the guest list.”

Eun-seo arched an eyebrow. “Which is?”

“Our families, your families because you’re getting married, too—“

“Are not.”

“—that .04”-tall fisherman, Medha, Medha’s wife—the Prime Ministress-elect, I should say—and…”

“And?”

“…and 25,533 extremely curvaceous giantesses of between 40 and 50 feet tall, many of whom have partners with problematically enormous penises.”

Eun-seo shook her head vigorously. “No. No! One, Ryan already has way more cock than I can take and he’d get jealous if he’s out-dicked.”

“Hey, don’t put this on me!”

“Two, again, I’m not doing a double wedding because I’m not doing a single wedding!” Eun-seo added, in a mutter, “I also don’t know why in god’s name I’d subject myself to 25,000 versions of you. You’re enough reminder that I don’t even HAVE boobs for my lover to sit on.”

Anna sighed heavily. “Come on, Eun-seo! What’s a better end to this whole saga than a fairy-tale wedding?”

Eun-seo rolled her eyes. “Anything. I’m not doing it. No wedding. End of discussion.” She snorted, half to herself. “Best I can offer you is a foursome.”

Silence reigned. Anna and Jeremy on the one hand, and Eun-seo and Ryan on the other, alternated stares at one another. Finally, Ryan said, “Anna, I’m all in. Get loans from Eun-seo and Jeremy. Bet everything.”

“Okay?” She shrugged at Eun-seo, then down at Jeremy hard enough that _he_ slid down her cleavage. “I’ll see—”

“Great. You have two pair, eights high.”

“How did you—!”

“I’ve got three of a kind. Game’s over, I win, everyone else loses. Looks like the rest of our night just freed up.”