Chapter 5: The World's Biggest Woof

Aru greets him with a low whistle as he comes in. There is a light dusting of snow on his shoulders, and he stamps his boots on the welcoming mat. He moves stiffly; his sheets are thin, and he’s getting older. The cold has crept into his bones.

“You clean up pretty nicely, Jaune,” she tells him, looking him up and down. Her tone is wry, almost rueful, but her eyes are sprightly. She’s having fun. “Ready for your hot date?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” He scratches the back of his head. He feels self-conscious in this outfit. They’re the best clothes he has (his wardrobe is full of clothes with bullet-holes in them), but only because he wears them so infrequently. A dress shirt with little pewter cufflinks he got as a birthday present, a yellow tie with a discrete silver clip, and a heavy green jacket that he thought was a lot warmer than it actually is. The pants and boots are a sore spot; they have no holes or singe marks, but they’re definitely sliding him a lot more towards the ‘casual’ bit of smart-casual.

“Bet you’d feel a lot better with a hot drink, though. Tea or hot chocolate?”

She doesn’t offer him coffee; she’s infamously awful at making it. When the tea comes, it’s honestly pretty awful too. The base elements are there – water, sugar, caffeine – but it doesn’t really taste of anything. He wonders if hot drinks are just a concept that is beyond her, and if so, how far that extends – can she make soup? Stew? Can she cook at all? If he asked, he’d probably get a nervous giggle and a non-answer, so he doesn’t bother. Instead, he just warms his hands on the side of the mug.

“So, what brings you to the shop today? Just figured you’d wait for QP in the warm rather than the cold?” she asks.

“Kind of,” he says, and slips a little brown envelope out of his jacket pocket. In it are his wages, or most of them. “I wanted to ask you to deliver this, if you have time.”

“Oh, right! I did say I could take things to your family, didn’t I?” She looks to the side and chews her lip, which he’s started to recognise is a sign she’s… not lying, necessarily, but very carefully considering the phrasing of what she says next. “I should be able to get it to them soon. This is the time of year I, um, do most of my travelling.” Her expression clears again. “But why are you worrying about it right now?”

“I didn’t want to get carried away today and spend more than I should.” He tales a sip of the tea. Still flavourless. “This way, I know it’s taken care of.”

“Do you see yourself getting carried away, then?” she asks.

“It’s QP, so…”

“Fair point.” Her nose wrinkles as she laughs. “Do you need any pointers?”

“About dating? I just thought I’d do what comes naturally and try to enjoy myself.”

“I meant sewing. When it comes to QP… well, it’s not a good idea to come wearing clothes you’re attached to. You might have to patch a few holes before the end of the day.” He laughs again, more lightly. “How’s your stop, drop and roll? You may want to brush up before you go.”

“She can’t be that bad,” he says, although it sounds less confident out loud than it did in his head.

“I’m just kidding. It’s probably smart to expect some adventure, though.” She takes a sip from her own mug, winces, and sets it down on the counter. “I’m a little jealous, to be honest.”

He lets that float in the air for a while. Her tone says she doesn’t want to be asked questions, because she might find herself answering them; for his part, he’s smart enough not to fill his head with thoughts of of Aru before he goes on a date with another woman. Whatever is going on, it can keep for a few hours.

About twenty minutes before the start of the date is due, the bell above the door of the R-Bit Room (a real bell that looks like it belongs in the hand of the town crier) tinkles, and QP steps into the shop as if she owns it. Perhaps, in a sense, she does; according to Aru, she’s the sole regular customer for the R-Bit Room’s admittedly niche services. She’s wearing a velvet winter dress the colour of evergreen trees that contrasts nicely with the vivid auburn of her hair, and ends at the knee. He can see the tip of her tail poking out from under the hem, wagging happily now that she’s out of the cold; below that, she’s wearing a set of thick pantyhose and a pair of brown leather boots that reach up to the middle of her calves, with shiny silver buckles. He can smell just a hint of foundation on her skin. When she sees him, she stops. Takes a breath. Starts walking again.

“Hey! Looks like you had the same idea I did,” she says, sliding onto a stool next to him. She doesn’t ask Aru for a hot drink. She knows better than that. “You look good in, uh, real people clothes.”

“As opposed to the fake people clothes I was wearing before?” he asks, arching an eyebrow.

“As opposed to, like, army clothes.”

He doesn’t tell her that the dress shirt, the pants and the boots are all leftovers from his military days, but accepts the compliment. There are ways to interpret it charitably, he decides. You look good as a civilian. That’ll do.

“You look great as well. Not that you don’t usually,” he adds swiftly, “but I’ve only ever seen you in a hoodie or your gym clothes. You’ve got a more feminine look today, and… well, I like it.”

She leans forward quickly, palms on the countertop, ears on full alert. Her eyes are narrow, suddenly intense. “It is feminine, isn’t it? Like, super feminine? You wouldn’t mistake me for a guy, even at a distance, right?”

If he’s honest, he could probably tell she was a female from a mile away, provided he was downwind. She doesn’t have the heady, irresistible smell ‘heat’ smell she had when they first got to know each other, but there’s still something distinctive and alluring about her scent that the foundation does nothing to erase. “Of course not. I don’t know anybody who would.”

“I do,” she growls. “There’s some real weirdos in this town.”

Although he feels like there’s definitely a story behind that one, he lets it slide. No sense starting off a date by stressing her out. Before long, her expression bounces back into a familiar, faintly excitable smile.

“Since we’re both early, why don’t we get going? Aru probably doesn’t need us hanging around her shop flirting with each other,” he suggests.

“I wouldn’t normally mind, since it’s not like I expect to get any other customers… But I should probably sort out the decorations today.”

For a moment, the bunny looks sadly around the shop. There are still vinyl stickers of pumpkins in the windows, and little cut-out banners that look like a procession of witches on broomsticks hanging from the ceiling. Even the potted plants are housed in little plastic cauldrons. Although winter is undeniably closing in, it seems she isn’t quite ready to say goodbye to Halloween.

Apparently making up her mind, QP hops to her feet and smooths the wrinkles in her dress. He follows suit, thanking Aru for the tea and making his goodbyes. Without any hesitation, QP slides his hand into hers and squeezes, dragging him along out of the door.

A few minutes pass. Aru counts the time by the ticking of the clock, and when she’s quite sure they’re away on their adventures, she sighs.

“Haaaaaah… Dang it. They really are cute together,” she murmurs. “Guess I’d better see if I can find the fairy lights.”

Turning, she starts to reluctantly attend to her work for the day, hoping that busy hands will ease a restless mind.

What amazes him is how natural it feels.

QP is equal parts confident and aimless. Within two minutes of leaving, she has happily admitted that she has basically no plan about what they should do for their date, save for wandering the streets in search of anything interesting. He is quietly amused at the turn of events; he appreciates the idea that a dog’s idea of a good first date is to take him for a walk.

As they stroll along, she talks – an animated stream of anecdotes and stories, one for every street corner. Here, she pulled a friend out of the path of an oncoming bus (shortly after she suplexed her into the path of the bus to begin with); in this alleyway, she fought a supervillain with an iron mask; there, she ate ramen with a friend after getting roped into doing the flying trapeze act at the circus.

Some stories she stretches longer than others. She has a lot to say about the haunted house incident and the phantom pudding thief, but often she will point to a spot and say, brusquely, “I fought Yuki there once” or “I beat up some weird guy on that corner”, before moving swiftly onwards to the next. To him, it seems there are a lot of spots like that – a lot of battles fought, and people beaten.

He wonders if any of her unlucky opponents have ever thought about taking revenge, a question that disappears as they travel onwards and the same names pop up, again and again. Of course they have. They just lost. Again and again and again, until they gave up. As far as he can tell, Yuki is the only member of the ‘rogue’s gallery’ outstanding. One day in the future, she’ll probably give up, too. But it’ll take a lot longer. Most people QP fights (from what he can tell) are actually, well, sane. Yuki is addicted. She’ll continue spinning the roulette wheel until it hits the result she wants, or she runs out of chips. Even he can tell that much.

Underneath everything, though, he is acutely aware of the feeling of her hand in his – and, more pressingly, how calm and comfortable he is with it. Of course, he isn’t a high schooler at their first prom – he doesn’t exactly expect to have damp palms and heart palpitations over a little hand-holding. But there should be some nerves, somewhere. Even just his sense of self-preservation, ever craven yet reliable, screaming at him to get away from the extremely dangerous dog leading him to an unknown location to do who-knows-what.

But it isn’t. Somewhere in his brain, there is a dizzying sense of rightness. It’s less like he’s trying to navigate his way through a new and strange romantic experience, and more like he’s found something he’d always been missing but never realised. On some level, it terrifies him. Is QP’s scent or whatever really this powerful, or is it just a perfect storm of personal and physical chemistry? He’s definitely been interested in women and gotten emotionally attached, but never quite this quickly, or quite this much.

But as his mind tries out explanations, the rest of him is luxuriating in the sensation. She’s taking charge, but he likes it that way. She sets the pace, but it’s the right pace for him. When she giggles, he finds himself laughing without thinking about it, or smiling gently back when she looks over her shoulder at him. It’s not just easy, but effortless.

“Oh, dang!” All of a sudden she snaps the fingers of her free hand, and comes to a dead stop at the corner. A pair of city folk – he can tell by the way they walk, more purposeful and harried than small town people – brush by, making sounds of mild annoyance. “I just realised, I’ve been talking about myself the whole time!”

“That’s fine. You’re an interesting topic.”

He sees the tip of her tail wag at that, underneath the hem of her dress. He notices that she very pointedly doesn’t disagree with him.

“Besides,” he continues, a little cautiously “I thought you might talk about pudding the whole time.”

It’s a bit of an experiment. Pudding is something like a Pandora’s Box to QP; once the lid is opened, it can never be closed, and when pudding is mentioned, it becomes the only topic. That’s his theory, anyway. He watches as she bites her lip.

“I was trying not to,” she admits, almost sheepishly. “Pudding’s great. Pudding’s the best. But not everybody is as interested in it as I am, and… and I’m trying to accept that.”

“Hah. Thank you for your sacrifice,” he jokes dryly. She very pointedly doesn’t disagree with it being a sacrifice, either. “I like pudding – well, your pudding, at least – but probably not enough to fight over it.”

“Hmm,” she murmurs, as though not sure if she can believe him. He doesn’t take it personally. Her world view seems to struggle with the idea of a person who wouldn’t fight over pudding. “Oh! But speaking of fighting, you were in the military, right? What, uh, position did they have you in?”

He grins wryly at that. ‘Position’, as if it were a soccer game, or he were on a baseball team. Of course, when it comes to QP, there are a few positions he’d like to talk with her about eventually, although only in terms of bedtop sports.

“Well, by about about halfway through my first session of Basic, they already had me in the fetal position. Took a few weeks before I could get through morning training without throwing up.”

“Ah? I mean…” She blinks, and hits him playfully on the arm. “You know what I mean!”

“I wasn’t rank and file, if that’s what you’re wondering. They found out I could operate computers without filling them with bullets, so they shipped me off to the information division. Lot of comms work, staring at blue screens, and swearing that I’d track down the programmers and burn them alive.”

“Really? I kinda thought you’d be a sniper or something.”

“It was on the table for a bit. I had the raw ability, but being a sniper takes a lot of responsibility and discipline. Since you’re the guy with the vantage point and the high end scope, you’re responsible for relaying info to the ground team. On top of that, you usually have a spotter and a flanker with you… A lot of lives can get lost if you make a tiny mistake or reveal your position early. And it’s not like you can just fire at will – doesn’t matter how high-value a target is, if command hasn’t told you to fire, you don’t fire.” He shakes his head. “I’d prefer to be on the ground, close up. It’s scarier, but it’s a lot simpler, in my opinion.”

“Huh. I didn’t realise it was that complicated.” There is a blank, open innocence to her face; evidently, the military isn’t something she’s ever thought deeply about. Good, he thinks. “So, what do you do for fun?”

“Nowadays? Uh… Well, it’s not so much like I do stuff specifically to have fun. Fun finds me.” Fun usually found him desperately trying to run away, because generally Danger and Excitement got to him first. Ebimanyou Town was a hell of a place. “But back home, we did all sorts. About this time of year, we’d probably go down to the lake and try some ice skating.”

“Ah!” she barks, and then looks sheepishly around. He’s not sure why – a lot of her charm comes from being honest and excitable. “So, so, you can actually ice skate, then?”

“You won’t catch me doing a triple salchow, but I can stay upright and move around, yeah.”

“That’s amazing!” she says. Her bar for ‘amazing’ seems a lot lower than he thought it was. “We have an ice rink come to town at about this time of year, but every time, I just end up falling over. Nobody I know is really good at it, so I can’t even find anybody to teach me. You should totally give me lessons!”

It doesn’t sound like a bad plan. If nothing else, it would be an excuse to hold her by the waist while she’s learning to skate. There’s something very attractive in the prospect – and he can’t say no to her while she’s wagging her tail like this. “Sounds like a nice idea for date two.”

She seems pleased by this. By now, they’ve started walking again, and are heading, inexorably, towards the park. Occasionally, she will turn them randomly at a corner and explore a backstreet or an alley where a particularly interesting food shop lies, but they quickly return to circling the park like a pair of starving sharks inspecting a life raft.

“Hm… But you said ‘we’, right? Was it you and your friends?” she asks.

“Not so much. I was shy as a kid, so it was mostly me and my siblings.”

He hears a sharp intake of breath, and wonders if he said something wrong. Qp’s grip – comfortable and oddly familiar, up to now – suddenly tightens.

“You have siblings? Multiple siblings?” she asks, in a breathless, awestruck tone. Her eyes are almost glittering with sheer excitement. “Ahhhhhhhhh! I was an only pup, so I always wondered what it’d be like to have brothers and sisters to play with!”

He smiles, but the smile quickly becomes a frown as he considers it a little more deeply. An only pup. Of course. The warning signs were all there. A desire to have other people acknowledge her and stroke her ego. An obsession with a food that totally eclipsed any feelings she had for other people. An eagerness to use violence to solve her problems. People like that had showed up in training, only instead of pudding, they loved alcohol. They never lasted long. The thing with picking fights was that, in the army, you didn’t pick fights with a person. You picked a fight with the squad. The squad invariably won, and then got away with it when the time for discipline rolled around.

He wonders where exactly in the picture QP’s parents are, but he doesn’t ask. Some bears don’t need to be poked.

“What’s wrong?” QP asks, peering quizzically at his frown. Quickly, he arranges his face back into a smile, but the damage is done.

“Nothing much. Just wondering how they’re doing. I left them back in the old country. Things there aren’t… uh, great. Politically speaking.” He chooses his words very carefully. “I send some money back to them from time to time. Aru delivers it for me. If I can, I’d like to get them to move over here. This town’s… unique, I think, but it’s more stable than where they are now.”

“Ah, yeah. Aru’s unbeatable when it comes to making deliveries,” QP says idly. He feels as though there’s something deeper behind the sentiment, but he can’t see what it would be. “I hope I can meet them one day.”

The conversation breaks off as they hit the park proper. Quite recently, they were throwing frisbees here; now the grass is a little damp with melted frost, the dirt still hard and compact with cold. The seasons seem to change so quickly here. At the top end of the park there’s a fountain, with benches to observe it (running water being the next best thing to watch after television), and it’s there that they stop.

“How are you feeling?” he asks. “Not too cold?”

“Nah.” She kicks her legs idly as she sits on the bench, and suddenly he can’t tear his eyes away from them. He wonders if she knows what she’s doing, or if it’s a happy accident. “I’m pretty fit, so the cold doesn’t bother me.”

“...I don’t follow.”

“Well!” she begins, eagerly accepting the chance to flex her biology grades, “even though body fat helps insulate you, your body uses your muscles to generate body heat. So if you’re toned like me, you don’t really need a lot of fat to keep you warm.”

“Huh. Good to know that my morning exercises are giving me some benefit, I guess.” He sits down beside her, a little closer than he would with a regular girl. Without pausing, she slips her hand back into his. “How are you feeling so far? About the date, I mean.”

She thinks about this for a moment, which seems to stretch onwards and onwards into eternity. It probably isn’t a good thing that she’s deliberating so much over her answer, he thinks, but nothing has gone wrong so far.

“It’s… puah. It’s hard to explain, but I like it. It feels good, and kinda comfy, and I’m having fun even though we’re not really doing anything. It’s just… nice. To be around you.”

He gazes very deliberately at the fountain. There’s a patina of coins at the bottom, bronze and silver and even a little gold, almost a mosaic. Fascinating. He’s definitely not looking at the fountain because QP is blushing furiously and he’s trying to save her the embarrassment. And he’s definitely not doing it because he might be blushing himself.

“I kinda suck at dates, though. I never went on that many, and even when I did, we just got attacked by robots and stuff so it was weird. I don’t know what normal people do on dates,” she sighs.

He reaches over, and gently scratches the spot behind her ears, where he knows he’d enjoy being scratched himself. “Don’t worry about normal people. I’m not dating them. I’m dating you. Just do what comes naturally. If that’s just hanging around and enjoying each other’s company, that’s fine by me.”

To his surprise, she shakes her head to dislodge his hand, and hits him with a pout that is too adorable to take seriously. “You say that, but I bet you’d be having a lot more fun if I were taller and had bigger…” She motions to her chest. “Right? That’s your type. Aru told me.”

Traitor, he thinks, although he’s sure Aru has her reasons. “Well… That is my type, yeah. But I think that the right type isn’t as important to me as the right person.”

Although he wasn’t thinking ahead when he said it, it feels good on his tongue. It feels true. If he were just conforming to type… well, it probably wouldn’t be QP sat on the bench next to him. It would be Aru. She was taller, more buxom, with long hair and legs you could dream about for weeks, if you were so inclined. Even in terms of personality, he loved the calming, nurturing aura she gave off, and the way she’d so easily extended a hand to help him when he first arrived in the city.

The only thing that Aru lacked – and lacked was an unfair word – was that she wasn’t QP. That’s it. That’s all he can think of. Whatever QP has – whether it’s pheromones, natural chemistry, or, and he hesitates to consider the notion, just love at first sight – it’s something he can’t put down to just physical appearance or surface level personality. Sure, the dog girl has her own charms, which, as his own personal experience tells him, are quite potent enough. But it’s that mysterious ‘something extra’ that puts her ahead.

“Well, at least you’re honest,” she sniffs, a little over-dramatically. It looks like she’s messing with him a little, and enjoying herself doing it. “But lucky for you, I can get long legs and big boobs. Bigger and longer than anybody’s.”

His ears flatten, worried. “Are you talking about surgery? It might help the, uh, chest situation, but I don’t think they can extend your legs. Not that I’d advise it in the first place.”

“Not surgery. Watch.”

She hops lightly from the bench and saunters off the path and to the grass, her tail held high enough to lift the hem of her dress just a tiny bit. She has the look of a stage magician about to perform a particularly amazing trick; when she looks at him over her shoulder, it is an unspoken demand for his absolute attention. When she’s quite sure he’s watching – and he definitely is – she mutters a few words under her breath, far too quietly for him to grasp the form of them.

He wonders – and the idea fills him with a guilty thrill – if she, like Aru, has figured out how to tap into whatever mad voodoo Krila uses to make her stuffed toys into giants. But nothing happens, at least as far as he can see. It’s a little disappointing, and the look of quiet befuddlement on QP’s face says a lot more than words ever could.

Oddly, though, he can taste marzipan all of a sudden. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t eaten any today, since he skipped breakfast (and only a madman would eat marzipan for breakfast anyway), so he toys with the idea that perhaps he accidentally added cyanide to the breakfast he didn’t eat. Not that he’s ever tasted cyanide either, although that shouldn’t come as a shock.

QP looks back at him, now blushing and flustered. “W-wait. Just give me a minute, okay? I don’t think it worked. Maybe if I try it again–”

He smiles, and ambles over to her. “It’s fine, QP. Honestly. You’re perfect just the size you are,” he says, and scratches her ears again.

Then he thinks about it. His eyebrows furrow. Doesn’t… Doesn’t he normally have to reach down a little bit to scratch her ears? He’s not a tall guy, but she’s on the short side – maybe a head shorter than him, or so he thought. But right now, she’s at eye level.

He glances down at her shoes again. Still the brown leather boots with the silver buckles. They didn’t have high heels two hours ago, and they still don’t have high heels now.

It occurs to him that he is now reaching up to scratch QP’s ears.

“Oh, boy,” he murmurs, and takes a very smart two paces backwards to a safe distance.

His mind – so far lulled into a comfortable, lazy stupor – begins to race.

The problem, he thinks, is that the park has no cover. When Aru grew, there were alleyways to duck into, shadows to hide in, and eventually, sanctuary in the R-bit Room itself. Here, there’s nothing of the sort. Even the foliage is thin and sparse, the leaves shorn by the changing of the seasons.

Aru’s clothes, he very vividly remembers, did not survive her sudden growth spurt.

Apart from the impending problem of a giant, naked QP, he has the problem of a giant, naked QP. Aru is a local business owner; people nod their heads to her if they’re from the same block or so, but she’s hardly famous. QP seems to have had a fight on every street corner, an enemy in every gang. The amount of attention she’ll attract will be massive, like many other things about her. He doesn’t have any idea how to solve that problem. Perhaps a solution would be easier to find if the blood weren’t flowing very much away from his brain.

Meanwhile, every second that his brain falters, the problem is getting… well, bigger. The girl that used to be a head shorter than him is quickly approaching twice his height. To her credit, she doesn’t seem worried about it. Perhaps QP is just enjoying the new and strange sensation of being tall. She still counts as ‘tall’, rather than monstrous. Just about.

A passerby who was walking their dog in the wrong place and at the wrong time drops the lead in shock. The dog does not particularly mind, because it has met QP before and ascertained that she does not compete for trees to pee on regardless of her size, and therefore is not a territorial threat.

As QP very quickly advances towards the point where the human mind stops perceiving her as a living thing and starts categorising her as geography, a few things occur to him. The first is that her clothes seem to be growing with her, rather than bursting under the strain of containing so much QP all at once. In fact – as she begins to tower over the trees and grow level with some of the taller buildings – it’s quite an interesting spectacle. Both the fabric and the gaps between them have grown to match QP’s proportions; her pantyhose now look like very soft venetian blinds. Soon, they’ll be more like cables holding up a suspension bridge.

The second is that physics do not seem to be particularly bothered by her ambitions of being a mountain. The earth is not cracking under her weight, and unlike Aru, she’s not radiating waves of body heat that make the space around her into an open-air sauna.

Somebody on the street – the boundaries of the park now make little difference – holds up their phone to take a picture. In a town where being attacked by a giant tree is not especially out of the ordinary, QP has become a certified event.

He wonders, quite idly – his mind does often concoct things to occupy him at times like this – how many faux-cows would have to have died to make her boots, which, at this size, are very obviously not made of genuine leather. He wonders how many faux-cows you’d have to kill to make a house. The numbers can’t be all that dissimilar at this point.

The taste of marzipan washes once more through his mouth, and for just a second or two, all his teeth ache at once. Without really questioning it, he understands this to mean that she’s reached the apex of her growth.

There aren’t really words in his brain to describe how massive QP has become. He wonders how she’s feeling about it all, but he can’t really see her face; if he cranes his neck, he can just about catch sight of her chin from this angle, although it’s mostly obscured by a bust that could crush an automobile. Her sports bra must be putting in a lot of work right now.

“Huh. That worked better than I thought it would!” she says.

Physics, again, seem to have given up on policing QP, because her voice is neither as loud as an erupting volcano or so deep it can’t be heard by human ears. In fact, it’s basically the same volume as he’s come to expect from her (as in, a little on the loud side), but it feels like it’s coming from somewhere just inside his left ear rather than out of her actual mouth.

“So, what do you think?” she asks. He can’t see her expression, but there’s more than enough smugness in her tone of voice to suggest her personal opinions on how impressive she is.

He gazes upwards, toward the heavens, and considers his words for a moment. Ponders them. Drinks in the situation for all that it’s worth. Ruminates on it.

“I think,” he says levelly, “I’m getting the best upskirt shot that mankind has ever known.”

It really is stunning. With her being so tall, and so huge, there’s nowhere else to look, just straight upwards at the heart of the beast. Every detail – every toned muscle of her thighs, every curve and undulation of her skin – is rendered in perfect clarity by the sheer size; it is easy, laughably and delightfully so, to pick up the raised contours of something lacy and translucent and sinful underneath the pantyhose. Those are not the kind of underwear you pick unless you expect them to be seen, although he really doubts she expected to give front row seats to so many people.

“W-wait! You’re looking there?”

“Not like I can really look anywhere else,” he replies, although to be fair, he’s not exactly making the attempt.

“Ahhhhhh! You weren’t supposed to see these yet!” she groans, and tries to flatten down her skirt with her hands. It doesn’t do much good, considering the angle.

He tries very hard to ignore the implications of the word ‘yet’, and what exactly it and the choice of underwear suggests about QP’s expectations of their date. QP already has the growth department pretty well handled – he doesn’t need his junk to get in on the action, at least until he knows how much of a problem this is all going to be.

He can tell by the shifting of her body that she’s looking around frantically, and probably taking stock of all the people who just got a sneak preview of her undercarriage. It’s probably too many for her personal tastes; crowds are starting to draw in, after all. He doubts she’d mind the attention if she was wearing pants, but that would have deprived him of a truly special memory, so he’s glad she decided to go with the feminine look today.

“Ahhh…. Jaune, there’s way too many people. Let’s get out of here,” she says.

She kneels down, laying a massive hand flat on the grass for him to climb onto. Her face looms into view; not only can he count her individual eyelashes, he could probably use them as fishing line. For a moment, he considers lingering; she doesn’t seem to have realised that by getting closer to eye level, she’s giving him a much more frontal view of her lingerie choices. But prudence wins out, and he scrambles across the grass, hauling himself up onto her fingers as if they were climbing walls in boot camp. When he’s made his way to the centre of her palm – surprisingly tricky, since the inside is concave like a half pipe – she cups her hand around him, bathing him in the shadow of her fingers.

“Hold on tight,” she mutters. “We’re taking off.”

His stomach sinks as gravity cheerfully waves her off and her massive frame soars into the air. He knew she could fly. He just didn’t think he’d be along for the ride. He closes his eyes, curls up into a ball, and tries to think about something that isn’t a thousand foot fall bereft of parachutes, or the steady onset of airsickness. Just a little something to distract himself.

In his mind, on the dark canvas of his eyelids, he traces a swooping floral pattern of translucent lace.

When the world stops moving again, the smell of Ebimanyou Town – a cocktail of mild pollution, baked goods, and pure old-fashioned chaos – has been replaced by the scent of evergreen trees and compacted dirt. The shadows of QP’s fingers recede; light streams against his closed eyelids. It takes him a moment longer to stretch out again and greet the waking world.

As QP lowers her palm closer to the ground, he scrambles out of her hand and takes to the earth with wobbly legs. Without pausing, he immediately starts to pace out a circle, tail swishing, trying to take in his surroundings.

It is, unsurprisingly, a forest, with all the usual forest-y bits. Twigs, dirt, some pine cones that he could probably start a campfire with if he needed to. Nothing remarkable, besides enough space for his ‘chauffeur’ to land in the first place. He tries not to think about how she’s bigger than even these towering trees, and how even a forest is not particularly sufficient to hide her.

Actually, he’s trying not to think about a lot of things right now. The first is how many people just saw QP flying across the sky like a luxury jumbo jet, and the second is how on earth he survived the flight just now. His giant friend seems to be able to suspend physics whenever she likes, but he usually plays by normal people rules, which suggest he should have both frozen to death and starved of oxygen in his brief trip through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. He’s not complaining about his continued existence, but he’d rather not question it just in case the work decides to fix the oversight.

He’s brought back to himself when he hears QP sigh – one of those long, tired exhalations that come only after a massive mistake. When he turns around, she’s sitting with her legs stretched out, leaning carefully back against a brace of trees. They don’t struggle with her weight, but he’s just about ready to give up questioning it.

“Ahhh… This sucks! I blew the whole date…” she groans. Now that she’s lower to the ground, he can see her ears drooping. “It was all going well, too, but then I had to try and show off, and then the whole town saw my underwear…”

It’s rare to see somebody so big, and so powerful, sound so petulant. Still, he doesn’t find himself disliking it.

“Hey. Don’t worry too much about it,” he says, although any rational person would be worrying furiously. “It could have been worse.”

“How? How could it have been any worse?”

“Well,” he begins cautiously, and then stops. “Uh… Well. I don’t know if you know this, but something similar to this happened to Aru a little while ago, and–”

“I know,” QP cuts him off, miserably. “That’s where I got the idea, since she said you seemed way too into it.”

Although he’s not sure it’s wise to let that particular comment slide, he ploughs on. “When it happened to her, there were a few differences. For one, when she grew… well, her clothes didn’t.”

He lets this sink in for a few seconds, and watches as the cogs turn behind QP’s eyes.

“That doesn’t very sound convenient,” she murmurs.

“That’s putting it lightly. We had to go back through town the next day looking for the shreds.” That in itself had been a lot of work, as he recalled. Aru was very strongly of the opinion that just because her underclothes had been reduced to confetti, that didn’t mean she should be letting people look at it or pick it up. “So, yeah. When you first started to grow, I thought you were going to end up huge and naked, right in the middle of town. You got much bigger than I thought, but a lot less naked.”

“Why do you sound so disappointed by that?”

“Do I? I hadn’t noticed.”

She narrows her eyes at him. He can see every little whirl and pattern in her iris; he often hears people compare eyes to precious stones, but he never realised how closely the patterns can align.

“Still… I’m sorry. I ruined the whole date,” she says, capping it off with another rueful sigh.

“Sounds like a good excuse for another one later down the line. Besides, this is probably the most memorable date I’ve had. In all sorts of ways.”

It’s not much, but her ears spring back into something approaching their usual perkiness. Good. He doesn’t know her all that well yet, but he feels like she’s the kind of girl who shouldn’t be unhappy for more than a second or two at a time.

“What do we do now, though?” she asks. “Even if I shrank back down, it’s not like we could go back into town easily with all the fuss.”

“Well, we could experiment a bit with figuring out the rules of this growth thing you’ve got going on,” he says. “Or you could tell me a bit more about that underwear I wasn’t supposed to see until later.”

“You really are way too into this,” she grumbles. “What kind of experiments were you thinking about?”

He grins. He thought she might be interested in some testing. After all, sports science has probably taught her some respect for the scientific method, and she’s probably curious about the potential of more discrete applications of… whatever the hell it is she did.

“Well, just to start, what about taking one of your boots off?” he asks. “I want to see if the clothes keep their size once they’re away from you.”

Her eyebrows lower. “Are you sure this isn’t just a sneaky way to get me undressed?”

“I wouldn’t call just straight-out asking you to do something ‘sneaky’.”

She mulls it over for a few seconds, but reaches for her boots. He stands back to watch. It’s fascinating to see her hands work work at this size, and the muscles in her calves tensing and un-tensing as she moves her legs. Besides, there is something deeply enjoyable to him about seeing her sliding the boots gently, gracefully off. She’s definitely playing it up a little, he can tell.

“There,” she says, holding the boot up with her thumb and forefingers. “It’s off.”

She moves it carefully away from where he’s sitting, and loosens her grip. As soon as the boot leaves her fingers, it seems almost to disappear – but then he spots it tumbling through the air, just the same size as any other shoe. (He’s aware that all shoes are not the same size, but relative to the size of the boot she’s still wearing, they might as well be.) It hits the ground with a thump.

“So, they shrink again when you take them off. That’s interesting.”

“I… uh. I’m not gonna be able to put that on again, am I?”

She has a good point. He doesn’t think she could even pick it up at her size – just touch it gently with the tip of one finger. It doesn’t seem like just touching an object does anything, since the trees at her back haven’t set any world records for size in the last five minutes.

“I’ll carry it,” he says, and picks it up. It’s well-kept, he notices. Probably new. “I was surprised, though.”

“At what?”

“You, uh… take great care of your feet.”

Although it’s still covered by the sole of her pantyhose, at this size he can still tell she’s taken the time to have a pedicure – and not just a last minute one for the date. She is, after all, an athlete. Her feet wouldn’t be in good condition if she didn’t take the time to care for them regularly.

“Of course,” she retorts, and folds her arms. “A girl’s charm is in the details. Your feet, your hairstyle, how fluffy your tail fur is… it’s the subtle stuff that matters.”

Nothing at this size is subtle, he thinks, and even at her regular height, a lot of her charm comes from the drama. He’s not sure how she’d react to being told that, though.

“So, what do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. “We could just sit around and talk until all the fuss quiets down, I guess. It’s a nice enough forest.” Her tail wags just a little. He decides to strike while the iron is hot, and make a joke to cheer her up. “Unless you have any other clothes you want to take off?”

She snorts. “Wow. I didn’t realise it at first, but Aru was right. You’re… kinda pervy.”

“Only when it comes to women infinitely bigger and more powerful than I am, apparently,” he shrugs.

“Hmph. It’s the first date, so I don’t wanna do that kind of thing unless you’ve really earned it,” she sniffs. But there is a coy blush forming on her cheeks, and absolutely no way for her to hide it. “So if you want to see me without clothes on, you’re going to have to undress me yourself.”

He looks at her – at the vast expanse of pantyhose covering her feet and legs, the stiff velvet fields of her dress, the faux-leather monolith that is her remaining boot. It would probably take five men just take off one article of clothing. But he’s done dumber things with worse odds, so he makes a point of rolling up his sleeves to let her know he’s serious.

“If you want to take it back,” he says, putting a hand on her leg, “now’s the time to do it.” He feels her goose-pimples raise at his touch.

“Like I said. If you can manage it, at this size, you’ve earned it. The entry fee is ten cups of pudding, though,” she says. “Oh. And don’t tear anything. If you do, I’ll… I’ll stick you somewhere weird.”

“Looking forward to it.”

As he scrambles up onto her body, he doesn’t think he’s going to make much headway. But he’ll probably enjoy the attempt.

* * *

Space, QP used to believe, is a peaceful place. Nothing much happens there, when you think about it; mostly, it’s a lot of nothing, threaded together by stars and bits of rock.

But that means that, once you’ve seen it a few times, there’s nothing to really distract you if – for example – your boss calls you into upper earth orbit to chew you out.

“I can’t believe you’d be so irresponsible, Sweet Guardian.”

QP looks at the blonde woman in front of her, and knows she is lying through her teeth. Of course she can believe it. The Sweet Gods are not, as a rule, the most responsible people. Some of them try, but generally they’re either too laid-back or just comically inept.

But it sounds damning. If there is one thing that Sweet Breaker is actually good at, it’s sounding very unimpressed.

“Do you know how much damage you might have caused? How many memories I had to melt away to protect you?” the blonde asks ominously. “There were people worshipping you. You had a cult.”

Again, to QP, this doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. Gods and cults go together like peanut butter and jelly, or a cup of pudding and another, larger cup of pudding.

“I was just practising,” she whines. “I didn’t think I’d get that big.”

“You were showing off,” Sweet Breaker retorts, glowering back. “Abusing your power as a Sweet God just to flirt.”

This was, of course, true. But it was very unfairly phrased, QP thought. She didn’t know how she’d phrase it more gently, but there was definitely a better way of saying it.

But Sweet Breaker is, right now, dancing around a very large and obvious question: what, exactly, she intends to do about it. It’s not like there’s a paycheck she can garnish, or that she can just magic away the power that pudding has bestowed upon QP. She also – and this is a point that both of them are very conscious of – doesn’t stand all that much chance against QP in a fight.

Finally, Sweet Breaker coughs.

“I’ll thank you to be more careful with your behaviour in future,” she says. “I’ll be observing you more closely from now on. You and that… guy.”

She’s not sure how she feels about having a celestial stalker, but it’s hardly the most bizarre thing that’s happened to her lately, so QP simply nods. “Did I really have a cult, though?”

“Yes. The Devotees of the Beast God, apparently. It was extremely difficult to wipe all their memories clean, but I dealt with them all,” Sweet Breaker sniffs. “...probably.”

With that, QP’s well-earned scolding concluded.

Twenty thousand miles below them, Syura drools as she sleeps slumped over at her computer desk, her browser open to a social networking site. Her post history – usually cluttered with game screenshots and pictures of noodles in imminent danger of being eaten – has spent the last twelve hours or so conspicuously clean.

But somewhere, hidden in a folder deep in the darkest depths of her computer, is a collection of blurry pictures archived from her smart phone. In two or three days, she will come across them once again – and be greeted by a tasteful album of her giant best best friend, with upskirts of her correspondingly giant ass.