For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 24) (Patreon)

“Am I looking at this agenda right, little one? Did you really approve these five exploratory ventures, with these kinds of outrageous expenditures two months ago?” Lillian asked, stern but polite, as if she was addressing her husband from across a board room table, rather than nakedly slung from a red-yarned gimp suit and pressure-stickered to the underbelly of her exquisitely pedicured foot. She’d spun the laptop around so Tony could see the points of interest to which she was referring onscreen, tapping at the troubling numbers while her other hand kept him stretched sufficiently distant from her sole to even read the figures. “Look, I may not have as much on-the-job experience as you yet, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s such a thing as taking calculated risks, and then there’s just plain-old stupidity. Throwing money in a fire just because you’re curious to see what happens. Though… I suppose we both know you have a history of sometimes choosing a little of column A, a little of column B. Mostly column B. Just tell me, though. Did you really think these were smart decisions, or were you just trying to remind your former subordinates who was in charge, no matter how foolish your choices? You know, the same way a yappy little dog marks territory by peeing down its own leg.”

Tony would’ve found it difficult to offer an explanation more complex than a few words even if he was in the mood to defend the decisions made about his own goddamned company to his own goddamned wife, though, thanks to the perilously low level of air in his system right now. Which he supposed was by design on Lillian’s part. The worst part was that she wasn’t totally incorrect; while the five projects she was pointing out (that he alone had approved) weren’t such extreme no-chance money sinks like she was making it sound, they were certainly all big gambles, and ultimately choices that Tony might, in hindsight, have made differently. Though such ventures still numbered very low on the long list of professional and personal regrets he now wished too late that he could reverse time and amend. Hearing the sharp-tongued giantess narrate the arguable foolhardiness of these decisions, ironically some of the last major calls he ever got to make as CEO before his single-minded fetishism damned him to this eternal sole-cucking fate, was essentially just pouring salt in all his wounds. And Tony had plenty of wounds to go around, even if his rebootable shrunken physiology could patch all the physical ones back up following many sustained hours of appalling bloodcurdling skeletal-mulching trounces below the lovely-soled monster he had inadvertently created.

So a begrudging noise of gruff confirmation to her question was all the little fellow could manage in response.

“I’ll take that as a wholehearted yes, dear,” Lillian said, shaking her head in condescension. She let go of the foot harness again, which caused an especially conking reunion between her husband’s face and her lusciously pulpous pearly-pink giant sole when his six-inch shape resumed its flesh-tight parallel posture with his formerly most-prized part of her body. In a flash, she carried on reviewing documents and proposals, tsking each time she happened upon another of Tony’s debatably intelligent business decisions on the laptop, and bobbed her foot whenever the shrinker was allowed too much time to wheezily catch his precious breath. “Remember, now, the more you cooperate with me like this, the more charitable I’ll feel. Your good manners, sweetheart, are the only reason I’m giving you this little treat right now, when I could just as easily be sitting at the desk instead, with you down in my shoe. Yes, having you in there does make it a little less convenient whenever I need another helpful tip for running what used to be your company. But honestly, after some of what I’ve seen in these last files, I’m probably doing myself a disservice by taking your opinions into account at all. How you managed not to run this thing into the ground years ago, I really can’t say. But don’t go letting that scare you into thinking I have no use for you, little one, even if you’re not cut out to be my personal business guru. You’ll always have a place around here. Just… lower down the ladder. Much, much lower.”

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There was noticeably greater urgency in Lillian’s footsteps today compared to her usually easier-going yet weightily ponderous gait. This was unfortunate news for Tony, since he happened to trapped at the repeating ground zero site between said footsteps and a specialized adaptable insole, which was ostensibly made from the same forgiving material as the foam mats at home, though he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn this one was made with a secret added ingredient of concrete. While under Lillian, all mushy textures and buoyant materials in the known universe were rendered severely hard. Even stuck down in the dark, acutely overheated, feeling like his bones were getting crunched to gravel, muscles sprained like a slinky strung out into a straight line, and having the breathable lifeforce continually hunted and squeezed out of his every airway by the vicious uniformity of squashing sole pressure, the six-incher had lived through this podophobic horrorscape enough times over the past couple of miserable months to recognize when something was different. And this was.

Not that Lillian was exactly racing toward her destination, either, but there was palpable determination to reach a specific locale on this occasion, rather than the normal unnecessary slow-arched meandering she so often did around the house with nowhere in particular to go, while her barely-regenerated miniature husband battened down the hatches inside her slippers or sneakers. And since she’d made a point of choosing a more formal professionally-appropriate vessel in which to trounce Tony today, a novelty after all the practice they’d had with more casual footwear, it wasn’t hard for the little guy to surmise that they had finally left the house, literally for the first time since he shrunk. Though because he still couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t catch even a gasp of fresh outdoor air, and was experiencing each reliably cranium-compacting ounce of the usual behemoth clout from his diabolical life partner’s sumptuous naked underfoot region just like always, they might as well have been going to the goddamn moon, or still standing on the balcony back home, for all it mattered to him now.

Over the days and weeks and what frankly felt like years in terms of humiliating disempowered stress below his one-time subordinate spouse’s peds, Tony had started to build up some minor resistance. Nothing remotely in the realm of being actually desensitized to it all, of course, in the same way that even history’s most battle-hardened soldier likely couldn’t stand at the precipice of a nuke’s blast radius without some considerable flinching. But he was grateful, at least at first, to discover that his transformed body’s hyper-specific evolution to resist permanent underfoot degradation wasn’t limited only to rebooting him back to relative physical well-being, no matter how tortuous the trampling session with Lillian. There were, in fact, longer-term “benefits” to being smushed day in and day out like this, aside from redefining just how much of an avalanche of smashing burdens he could apparently endure without passing out below the robust pressure points of the giantess’s heels, toepads, and the balls of her feet especially. He was automatically creating defenses, little by little.