It took everything she had.
One final push, arms trembling, legs burning, lungs rasping with shallow breaths, and she broke free from the towering forest of her bedroom carpet. It happened faster than she expected. One heartbeat she was climbing through the last stubborn bramble of synthetic thread, and the next,
The ground was gone.
She gasped as her forward foot landed on nothing, and her center of gravity betrayed her. With no time to catch herself, she tumbled out of the carpet’s lip and dropped.
It wasn’t far, maybe an inch or two in normal terms, but to her, it was a ledge. A cliff. And she fell like a stone onto the hardwood below.
The impact knocked the breath clean out of her. She hit with a sharp thud, first her knees, then her elbow, then her ribs, and slid a few inches on her side before coming to a full, motionless sprawl.
She lay there for a moment, face pressed to the smooth floor, stunned.
Even falling hurts differently now.
Everything was louder, sharper, heavier. Her bones didn’t break, but her whole body rattled with the shock of the landing. She gasped, tried to sit, failed, then gasped again as her lungs caught up. The air that entered her chest came fast and shallow, her tiny heart pounding like a war drum in her ears.
Eventually, she managed to roll onto her back and blink up at the ceiling.
It was too far away to mean anything.
Her hallway, her hallway, stretched out in both directions like a corridor inside a stadium. The walls soared on either side of her like the facades of high-rise buildings, and the floor beneath her glowed with muted reflections from recessed lighting far overhead.
She sat up slowly and looked around.
To the left, her hallway stretched toward the landing that overlooked the stairs. To the right, it curved gently toward the guest rooms and the linen closet. She had walked these halls in bare feet and high heels, in pajamas and party dresses. She used to command this house.
And now?
She was a speck. A mote of dust, cast onto the vast expanse of flooring like an insect that had wandered out from under a cabinet.
“The ruler of the house…” she whispered bitterly, “reduced to a bug.”
Her arms hugged her sides as she sat there, cold air slipping across her damp skin. A faint breeze swept past—possibly from the heating vents in the ceiling, but it felt like a windstorm at her scale, pushing at her shoulder and hair with just enough force to make her shiver.
She swallowed hard.
Then lifted her chin.
“HEELLLPPP!” she screamed. “IS ANYONE HERE?!”
The sound ripped from her throat, sharp and strained. It felt huge to her, like thunder in her skull. But as it left her mouth, it dispersed into the vast hallway, swallowed whole by silence.
She paused. Listened.
Nothing.
Her own voice, once strong enough to fill rooms, to command attention, to silence crowds—was barely a whisper now in the architecture of her own home. Her shout didn’t even echo. It was too small. Too insignificant to bounce.
That silence, the vast, total quiet of a house in waiting, pressed down on her like a weight. The lights hummed somewhere overhead. The walls didn’t move. The floor didn’t shake. No footsteps came. No voices answered.
She was alone.
And for the first time, hearing her voice like that, she knew it.
Not just intellectually. Not just with fear.
She felt it in her bones.
She was alone in her house. Trapped inside a world that no longer saw her. And there was no guarantee anyone would see her again.
Someone will find her….. I hope.
It does beg the question, though. How are undocumented littles tracked in this universe?
It’s kind of a weird answer. The ones that aren’t found i imagine dont survive very long on their own sadly. it’s a hostile environment for them.
the ones that are found though, at least in the states, are supposed to be immediately reported. Asuka and Lethal brought it up a very long time ago, but it is a massive legal offense to harbor an unregistered little, and age doesn’t seem to matter in this case, you’ll go to jail regardless. with a harsh sentence.
i guess the best answer is that because testing is mandatory, there is a central repository for those results, and if someone that’s vulnerable is reported missing, the special task force that handles littles is probably dispatched to locate them and turn them over to generitech or a holding facility and contact their immediate family or whomever in that space that isn’t vulnerable
that’s how i see it at least
That would make sense.
I would think Sara would find her because Sara saw charity not at school for a day and said something to Chole she would tell Sara about her call and that would lead Sara to run over and fulfill her giant Saras kink dreams buy being picked up by her giant famine hand lol. Also Sara is Tied into the Little network so she would be called about a underbred not being seen =)
Kink dreams??? We reading the same story??