Saida & Autumn 5: Volunteer Work

“Are you humming under your breath?”

Autumn frowned down at the hyena who’d asked the question, a broad-chested, thirty-something dude in tight blue jeans and an equally tight purple tee. Tom stared right back up, unfazed, grin even more maniacal than usual.

“Yeah.” She resumed her work—watching little volunteers at a dozen tables within her reach repacking bulk dry goods and produce, from rice and beans to fresh fruit, into family-sized bags for distribution. The tables sat to one side of a warehouse floor, the work area partitioned off into a “room” with no ceiling; she sat just outside that area on the main warehouse floor. The rabbit’s job was to see when they’d either emptied one of the bulk boxes and move a new box over to them, or filled up one of the distribution boxes and move the finished product to the receiving area. As one of the food bank’s few paid staff members, Tom’s job was handling all the actual shipping and distribution coordination. And, apparently, giving the giantess shit. “So?”

His grin got even wider. “Are you…happy?”

“We’ve been over how my fashion sense isn’t a subtle statement of existential despair, right? I’m a happy person.”

“You’re not a humming happy person.”

Rolling her eyes, she hurried to move a few more boxes into place. “Look, I just happened to be humming.”

A grey fox vixen glanced up from the rice she was weighing out. “So I guess you had a good date last night?”

Autumn nearly dropped the box she was holding between thumb and forefinger, staring down at her.

The vixen’s ears lowered. Autumn didn’t know her name, but she recognized her—always immaculately professional-looking, someone you wouldn’t guess would be volunteering monthly at a food bank. “I’m...assuming?” She cleared her throat nervously.

“Autumn went on a date?” Tom’s grin grew even more. “Oh, come on, who’s the lucky guy?”

The vixen made an uhh noise, then cleared her throat again and went back to her rice.

Autumn sighed, reaching down and tapping a black claw on the concrete floor by the woman. “Out with it.”

The vixen jumped, barking, sending a scoop of rice flying into the air, then looked back up at the rabbit giantess, tail between her legs now. “I didn’t mean to—I mean—I saw you and your friend last night because you’re both—” She waved her hands up and down expansively. “Impossible to miss.”

“True enough. And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Her nervous expression shifted to sheepishness. “I’m sure you didn’t, you’re just...huge.”

Tom put his hands on his hips. “Oh, you don’t date normal-sized people? I thought I had a chance! Have you been leading me on?”

Autumn sighed again, returning to her box-moving task. “Sometimes you’re lucky I like your boyfriend.”

“I like him, too,” he replied in a sing-song voice. “All right, everyone, five more minutes.”

Five minutes later on the dot, Tom led the volunteer group—everyone but Autumn—off the warehouse floor into a no-doubt charming lobby area she couldn’t see into, much less enter. Other than the vixen, she didn’t recognize anyone from past shifts. That wasn’t uncommon. A lot of white-collar managers took their work groups to the food bank for a shift as some kind of team-building exercise; while there’d always be people who’d enthusiastically talk about coming back on their own, almost no one ever did.

Her own entrance and exit was less dignified, crawling on her hands and knees—carefully—to a set of giant rolling doors barely big enough to accommodate her when she crawled through on her stomach. It took slow, careful wiggling to make her way out, and occasionally, some frantically yelled “No! No! To your left!” commands from the staff.

By the time she made it outside and dusted off, Tom had walked out, too, setting down a can of Diet Dr. Pepper. She traced the power-drawing rune in the air—sloppily, Snep would tell her, but it’d become second nature to her at this point—and muttered the focus words under her breath, then tapped the can carefully with a claw tip. It shimmered, expanding to her scale. “Thanks.”

Tom waved a hand dismissively. None of the other volunteers were given free snacks from the staff break room, but the food bank’s operations manager had calculated that shifts Autumn worked on ran close to three times more productive than the average. “Four today.”

“Four, huh? Is that a record?”

Tom had taken to reporting on how many volunteers—or staff—were, quote, “ogling that cute giant puff tail.” She’d grimaced and rolled her eyes and half-heartedly told him to stop it, but he’d correctly guessed she was less offended than conflicted. She didn’t want to be objectified, but over two years post-transition, it could still be annoyingly gratifying to hear people thought she was sexy.

“Maybe.” He laughed. “I think the coyote in the blue floral print shirt was all but drooling.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. He was looking up at my chest when he thought I wasn’t noticing.” She shook her head.

“But I shouldn’t be bothering you with this anymore, should I?” He punched one of her toes. “Tell me about your date!”

“It wasn’t…I mean, it was a date, yeah, but we just went out for coffee.”

The hyena crossed his arms, looking up expectantly.

She sighed theatrically, rolling her eyes. “She’s a cat I met at the Student Union.”

“Oh. Oh.” The gears turning in Tom’s head might as well have been clacking like a switchyard. “Another student?”

“No. She’s a professor’s cousin.”

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know.” She took a long drink of the soda.

“Older than you?”

“Yeah.”

He wagged his tail. “Rich?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

He clasped his hands. “Oh, you’re so wonderfully nonchalant about that.”

She looked down at him reproachfully.

“No, it’s charming.” He held up both hands. “And I’m just trying to suss her out remotely, that’s all.”

“She’s some kind of executive, and it sounds like she’s on call a lot.”

“I would not have bet money on ‘high-power capitalist’ being your type.”

“She’s not like that. I mean, she must be doing well, since she lives and works…wherever Rhas live, and rents a studio here. But she’s sweet.”

“Rha?”

She waved her free hand. “Giant cat. I guess. Professor Thorferra and Saida are the only cats I know who use the word, and I think they’re both from another world or something.”

Both of the hyena’s brows shot up skeptically. “Another world. Seriously.”

“Yeah, explain to the giantess sorceress-in-training you’re sitting here talking to how that’s completely crazy.”

“Point.” He shook his head, looking back at the warehouse. “Speaking of that, any luck on coming up with a spell that multiplies food instead of just making it bigger?”

The question of why the spells that enlarged food to her scale didn’t let wizards breezily solve world hunger hadn’t led to heated arguments when she and Tom first met, but only because he was still too terrified of a real live giantess to dare contradict her. By the time he was comfortable enough to contradict her all the time, he’d come to understand she wasn’t bullshitting him when she said it didn’t work. Giants could eat little food without a problem, at least if it was made on a scale their size, and littles could eat “naturally made” giant food, if they dared. But as far as digestive systems were concerned, magically size-shifted food didn’t play by the same rules. Relatively minor changes in size made it unprocessable (and sometimes unpalatable).

So the next obvious question: why can’t you take a bag of rice and cast a spell on it that makes it ten bags of rice? “No. The only textbooks I can find on it don’t go into detail about why it doesn’t work, though. Half of them try to make it sound like a moral question and the other half make it sound like an impossible physics problem, which is probably closer to the truth.”

“You’re an impossible physics problem.”

She grinned wryly, taking another sip of the soda. “I know. But enlarging objects is easier than multiplying them. It’s transmutation versus creation. I’ve researched turning inedible material into food, too, but it’s not promising. Turn a brick into a pear and you can get something that looks, smells, and tastes like a pear, but it’s still going to digest like a brick.”

“Yuck. And transmutation isn’t easy, even though you’re an expert at it.”

“Not an expert, just...some kind of savant. There are common first-year spells I’m terrible at.”

“You’re selling yourself short. Ha!” Tom waved a hand. “But back to your mystery date. When do you see her again?”

“That’s up to her. She’s supposed to give me a call when she’s back in town.”

“You didn’t get her number?”

“I gave her mine. I don’t know if she even keeps the same number between visits.”

“Oh, girl. You go out of your way to make your life difficult sometimes, don’t you?” He sighed and patted her toe again. “I need to get ready for the afternoon volunteer group. You staying?”

“I can’t. Too much school work to do.”

“Got it.” He snapped his fingers and pointed up at her. “Speaking of work. Did you ever write that letter?”

“No.”

“It’s been a month.”

“That depends on how you measure it.” Her parents had sent a birthday card two years ago; it took her nearly six months to work up the nerve to write back and correct them on her name. Next year she got two birthday cards: one from her sister addressed correctly, the other from her mother—not her father—addressed to her dead name. She hadn’t written them since. Or heard from them, until the email from her sister.

“You can’t avoid it forever, dear.”

“I can do whatever I want. I’m a giantess.” She downed the rest of her soda, then pushed herself up to her feet. “See you next week.”

Maybe Tom was right, and she should have gotten Saida’s number. In the moment, making Saida promise to call had seemed romantic, but maybe she should have opted for practicality.

She’s not like that. Yeah, but she didn’t know that, did she? She had no idea what Saida was like, other than cute and endearingly shy around her. The cat was, no matter how she demurred, a rich executive. An older rich executive. Autumn had probably caught her eye because the rabbit didn’t look like anyone in…whatever circles rich executive cat women traveled in. Having someone look at her way Saida had—seemed to have—was thrilling, but people like that didn’t get seriously involved with people like her. Did she want to just be a fling?

She made her way through the parking lot carefully, then picked up speed on the empty street. The food bank’s warehouse sat close to the DMZ, just a few minutes from the campus; she’d seen other students volunteer occasionally, although never any other giants.

When she reached the gate where she and Saida had shared their first—and so far, only—kiss, she stopped, looking across the campus in the direction of the staff housing, then back out across the city.

“I should have asked for her number,” she muttered, and walked through the gate.