Woke (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

“Go on. If you want, tell them why you’re here,” Erin said. Though a first-year herself, the girl had clearly been accepted as some sort of quasi-leader for this university branch of the EquiSize movement.

“All right,” Kayla agreed, going pink in the cheeks. She pursed her lips, sighed, then continued. “To tell you all the truth, I… don’t know much about this cause. Where I come from, where it’s mostly just people like me, there’s not much discussion about what goes on between others, not many Alphas and especially not Betas. But, now that I’m here, and I took a class this morning that really… broke my heart… I wanted to do something about it. And I don’t know how on my own. So, here I am.”

A murmur rolled over the group. The mood of Kayla’s listeners seemed accepting, maybe even positive, but also, though it was still tough for her to divine exact moods on faces so small, the Omega thought she detected some bewildered surprise as well. What for?

“Is everything all right?” Kayla asked in aside to Erin, though her voice was just as loud.

“Oh yeah,” the Alpha agreed. “I think they’re just not used to an Omega… you know… caring about this.”

Kayla’s eyes widened. Her tongue lapped at the corner of her lip in thought, grappling with information that suddenly made her wonder about her own class as well as the Alphas. While, as far as she knew, Omegas were never known for capturing or snuffing their lesser-sized compatriots, the suffering of Betas was evidently far enough off their radar that Kayla had no idea about it until today. As best as she could, she understood and sympathized with their reaction. Maybe they didn’t have so great a view of Omegas as a result of that perceived apathy to this important cause, but Kayla knew it was now her job to turn those opinions around through her own actions. Starting with showing them that, though she was a mile tall, with her own designated walking-path stones set around a campus smaller than the length of her body, with the requisite strength to at least partially rip the stadium right out of its stone foundations, she was a normal and perfectly nice ally.

“So, do you ever have… Betas attend these meetings, too?” Kayla asked, curious just as much as she wished to establish a friendly rapport as soon as possible. She squinted down at the already-miniscule Alphas, putting on her most affable smile and remaining hyper-conscious of every whispered word so she didn’t accidentally blow out somebody’s eardrum. “I haven’t gotten to meet any yet, even before I moved here.”

Again the gathered club looked to one another with a mix of bewilderment and muted amusement that even someone as big as Kayla could read on their diminutive faces. Then again they cracked all at once, chuckling heartily and clutching their sides, with even a few guffawers. For the second time in so few minutes, Kayla frowned, worried again she’d made a faux pas, and this time one she couldn’t explain away. She looked to Erin, the only one in the stands not laughing. The Alpha sportingly approached the rail again.

“Did… I do something wrong?” the Omega murmured. “I’m sorry if I did, I just-”

“No, no, no…” Erin said, suppressing a giggle of her own. “It’s just… more than half our movement is made up of Betas. You’re just a little bit too… um… you know…”

Shocked, Kayla returned her attention to the cluster of tittering Alphas with renewed zeal and eye-straining focus. Was she just being gently hazed for her first meeting? Being put-on? The conviction in Erin’s soft voice, and the mirth of the crowd, told her otherwise. Still, even with the knowledge that there were apparently Betas already present and listening to her every word, unnoticed, it was like trying to find a hay-colored needle in a sea of hay. Only after the Omega whipped out her phone, utilizing the magnifying app to zero in on the tinies in HD vision, did Kayla become aware that most of the Alpha members of the university’s EquiSize branch were in fact holding Betas in the palms of their hands, some even with multiples onboard. They looked nothing like the poor lowly souls Kayla expected to find: more like average, smiley, kind-faced individuals who just so happened to be small enough to fit into the hand of people themselves small enough to fit under the keratin lip of Kayla’s fingernail.

For someone who’d never witnessed a Beta in the flesh before, and in fact still technically had only “seen” them through a screen despite sharing the same stadium airspace, Kayla was thoroughly taken aback at the normalcy she saw reflected in her phone. Granted, most of them looked a little timid, shaky in the knees while standing in the overwhelming presence of one so large, but still determined.

“Here,” Erin said, catching her recruit’s attention again. She held up her hand over her head. “Why don’t you break the ice and meet your first Beta?”

Only then did Kayla realize Erin too was cradling a micro-citizen in her hand, and redirected the digital magnifier over her spunky friendly-acquaintance instead. Sure enough, after zooming in far enough, the Omega spotted a paltry young man perched in Erin’s upheld palm. He looked to be their age as well, probably eighteen or nineteen, and just as green on campus as the group’s brand-new mile-high member.

“Kayla? Meet James,” Erin said. The Beta in her hand, fidgeting and shifting his feather-weight from one foot to the other atop the squishy terrain of his keeper’s hand, offered a nervous single-flutter wave of greeting. “James? Kayla.”

“Hello!” Kayla boomed. The minute she’d spoken with any energy and joy at all, she regretted it deep in her soul.

The blast of the Omega’s voice, no matter how well-meaning and sweet, toppled James flat on his butt. Thankfully Erin’s hand was more than expansive enough to keep him from coming anywhere near the edge, but immediately Kayla clapped both hands over her powerful lips, tremoring almost as violently as the boy she’d bowled over with just a single word.

“OH!” she moaned into her palms, damming the sound and the fury. In her surprise and personal affront, Kayla almost welled with tears again. That, too, seemed like a bad idea in the moment, though, especially since a misplaced drop onto Erin could send little microscopic John, or any of the other Betas milling around in open hands, down an impromptu rapids stream of Kayla’s eye-saltwater. Muffled by her hands, she trembled: “I… am… so… sorry!”