Sylph in "Slumber Party"

Okay- sorry for the delay in getting this out.  The American Independence Day has been devouring a lot of my independent writing time…  More from the large lovable lass with a body of iron and a heart of gold…

Sylph in “Slumber Party”

  <knock, knock, knock>

“Whup!”

<bump…CRUNCH!>

“Shoot!  Every time…  Be right there!”

There was the sound of heavy footsteps, then of something very big being dragged away from the door.  Finally, the door swung inwards.  Framed in the doorway was the most massive person Kalida had ever seen.  The woman was neither tall nor fat, Kalida saw immediately, just unnaturally wide.  Large breasts rested atop a pectoral shelf that appeared to be over a foot deep.  Deltoids larger than basketballs were crowded against trapezius muscles that looked as if they had been drawn by an overenthusiastic geometer.  Her triceps didn’t appear to be horseshoes; rather, it looked as if someone had decided that it would be less wasteful if they simply shoved the entire horse under her skin.  In fact, all of her muscles appeared to be absurdly hypertrophied.

Tearing her gaze away from the woman’s body, Kalida looked into her face.  The incongruity of such a youthful, delicate face on such an obviously powerful body was almost too great to comprehend.  Her hair was a rich chestnut color, not extraordinarily thick, but not too thin, either.  Her eyes were an interesting shade of watery green and very large set into a face that had the high cheekbones and aristocratic nose of a Tolkien elf.  After staring openly for a few moments, Kalida found her voice.  “Forgive me.  I did not mean to be rude.  I am Kalida, your neighbor.”

“No need to apologize,” the giant woman said.  Her voice was rich and melodious- a low soprano or a high alto, Kalida guessed.  “I’m Sylph.  Won’t you come in?”

Sylph stepped back from the door and motioned for Kalida to enter the room.  Kalida’s first impression of the room was that a very comfortable living space had just had a collision with a disastrous train wreck.  The room itself was quite large, originally intended as a triple or possibly even a quad.  Of course, given Sylph’s enormous physical presence, it made sense that it had been converted into a single.  There was all of the usual furniture, but none of it was made to regulation specifications.  Looking again, Kalida realized that wasn’t quite true.  All of the standard furniture was present, but most of it was neatly stacked against the east wall.  The exceptions were pieces that appeared to have been victims of a ruthless toddler with power tools.

For example, there was a bed against the west wall, but it was an obviously custom-made contraption, with extra-heavy bars and bracing, and thick lag-bolts securing the pieces so that it would take truly cataclysmic forces to so much as shift the frame.  The mattress and box-spring were both king-size, and Kalida suspected that that barely made it wide enough for Sylph to sleep on comfortably.  The original bed, while still in the room, had been separated into two distinct parts.  The mattress was leaning against the east wall, while the frame appeared to have been bent into a letter ‘V.’  A spider’s web of cracks spread out from the nadir of the ‘V’-frame where the point had been embedded into the concrete floor by what appeared to be about six inches.

“Interesting sculture,” she commented.  “How did you get it into the floor?  And isn’t the administration going to object?”

Sylph reddened slightly.  “Sculpture?  Oh, the bed.  When you knocked I was in the process of moving it.  You distracted me and I tripped over a box of my warm-up weights and fell on it.”

“You did all that,” Kalida indicated the twisted, mangled heap of steel, “by simply falling on it?”

“Well, I didn’t mean to,” Sylph grimaced.

Sylph looked a little embarrassed and quickly cast around for a new subject.  “So, um…  What brings you here?”

“Well, uh, a couple things.  I noticed you came back to your room before they started serving dinner and you’ve been sort of cloistered in here ever since…”

“Yeah?”

“Well, they stopped serving dinner about an hour ago, and I made some pastitsio and some dolmathes.  I thought you might like something to eat.”

“Hey, that’s really sweet of you,” Sylph said, looking genuinely pleased.

“Well, it’s over in my room- I’m just across the hall in one of the suites, and we have a pretty good kitchen.  Why don’t you come on over and we can eat?”

“Sure.  Would you mind waiting while I change into some clean clothes?  I kind of ruined my dress earlier today, and I figured I couldn’t hurt it any worse moving furniture and stuff around, but I wouldn’t want to go anywhere in it, y’know?”

“Go ahead,” Kalida smiled, noticing for the first time what appeared to be oil-stains on Sylph’s shoulders and bosom.  Sylph flashed another quick smile and quickly skinned out of her dress.  If it was possible, Sylph seemed even larger now than she had when she was fully dressed.  Sylph’s waist, Kalida realized, was actually larger around than Kalida’s entire torso, although it seemed almost waspish sandwiched between the dual pillars that were her legs and the monolithic superstructure of her chest.

Kalida watched as Sylph rummaged in her chest of drawers, eventually pulling out an enormous pair of very stretchy drawstring shorts and a vest that looked as if it could have served to cover the entire offensive line of NYU’s football team.  Sylph sat on the edge of her bed and carefully pulled the shorts up over calves that more closely resembled full-grown steers, past her surprisingly dainty knees, and then gently, oh-so-gently stretched them to near-transparent thinness over her upper legs and butt.  Standing once again, Sylph let out a deep breath and shrugged her arms into her vest.  There was a slight popping sound as some of the threads around the armholes gave out, and Sylph looked despairingly at the overtaxed garment.  “Looks like I’m going to need to insert another panel in the shoulders,” she mumbled as she tied the front together with a long leather thong.

Now dressed in clean clothes, Sylph joined Kalida and walked across the hall.  Kalida’s suite was a bit larger than Sylph’s if you included all six living spaces, the small lounge area, the kitchen, and the dining area.  There were no lights on, so Sylph waited in the hall until Kalida found the switch.  Sylph was surprised to note how bare the entire area looked.  “None of my roomies have arrived yet,” Kalida explained.  “It gets a bit, um, lonely late at night.”

Sylph shook her head.  “I imagine.  I hate being in an unfamiliar place alone at night.  It always seems so creepy.”

“Creepy?” Kalida asked.  “Why that?”

Sylph laughed self-consciously, shrugged her shoulders.  “Mom says it’s called achluophocia- an irrational fear of the dark.  You probably think that’s pretty silly coming from me.”  To her surprise, Kalida did not look in the least scornful, or even surprised.  Instead, the emotions Sylph saw were those of sympathy and relief.

“Do you know,” she began weakly, “I thought I was going crazy the first time it happened to me.  This fear doesn’t happen when I am at home, or when I am with a friend, but if I am alone, it can be very strong.”

Sylph found herself nodding as Kalida spoke.  She remembered how her dad had given her Mr. Rickles and told her that the bear was a magic knight that would protect her from the night terrors when they moved into their new house.  It was a silly story, of course, but she was six, and it got her through the first couple nights until she could become acclimatized to their new home.  She knew her fear didn’t follow the typical pattern exactly, and it sounded as if Kalida’s phobia was very similar to her own.

Kalida shook her head.  “Wow, that was uncomfortable.  Let’s get some food on the table.”  She went to the oven and pulled a large pan out.  The slightly spicy aroma from the pastitsio filled the room with the scents of tomatoes and cinnamon.  A second covered tray held the rolled grape leaves, which Kalida placed on the countertop.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Sylph asked.

“Sure.  Can you go down the hall and get some ice?  I thought we might have some iced tea with dinner.”  Sylph nodded and headed down the hall to the ice machine.

Kensington Hall was one of the newest dorms on campus, and a number of incentives had been made available to students who chose to live there as part of the university’s way of promoting the chem-free lifestyle.  Among the luxuries provided were hotel-style ice machines on every floor and brand-new high-capacity coke machines.  When Sylph got to the small vending room, she saw that the workmen responsible for stocking and repairing the various machines had been through recently.  This was apparent mainly because the new soda dispenser had been placed directly in front of the ice machine, completely blocking it.

Sighing, Sylph gently placed an arm on either side of the giant vending machine and squeezed lightly to get a secure grip.  Squatting slightly, she lifted the half-ton box straight up and started to walk in over to a blank space on the wall.  As she started walking, she felt the flat sides starting to slip in her grip, so she squeezed down slightly harder.

<krnk…sprang!>

<thud.>

<thud.  thud.>

<thudthudthudthudthudthud.>

First one, then a couple more, then a torrent of Coke bottles issued forth from the vending bay, bouncing off Sylph’s knees and rolling around on the floor.  With her vision completely blocked by the large dispensary, Sylph accidentally stepped on one of the loose bottles, mashing it flat and spraying the contents all over the room, but not before she completely lost her footing and went over on her back with a tremendous crash.

“I just can’t win,” Sylph grunted, still holding the Coke machine up over her body.  Shifting the weight of the thousand-pound soda cooler, Sylph crunched her abs into a sit-up position, then brought her legs under her cross-legged.  Finally, still with the giant box parallel to the floor, she stood straight up.  There was another loud crunching noise, this time from the ceiling being compressed by roughly a foot.  The overhead fluorescent lights exploded in a shower of sparks and the metal beams folded and accordioned, dropping broken plaster and dust in torrents.  Sylph winced and slowly, carefully, set the Coke machine back on the floor to the side of the ice maker.

Looking at the ice maker, Sylph was chagrined to learn that there was a work order taped to its face.  Looking over the work order, she discovered that the ice maker was due for maintenance because the blades which were supposed to chop the ice had malfunctioned, causing the machine to jam.  The machine was still plugged in, though, and still connected to the building water supply, so Sylph guessed that there was probably still ice inside it.  Examining the machine, Sylph figured she could probably get to the ice hopper easiest by stripping the top off it.  The machine was not originally designed to be opened in this way, of course, but, at this point, that wasn’t really a huge concern.  Digging her fingers into the metal side of the ice maker, Sylph carefully rolled it back as if she were opening a can of tinned meat, neatly tearing the metal apart from the front and back of the machine as she went.

Peering inside, she saw that the hopper was, indeed, full, but the ice had melted and refrozen into a giant lump.  For anyone else, it would require either a long time with the power off or else a hammer and ice-pick to slowly and painstakingly remove the ice.  Sylph grinned suddenly and cracked her knuckles.  Balling her hand into a tight fist, Sylph plunged her arm deep through the mass of solid ice, causing the entire block to splinter.  Taking her ice bucket, Sylph filled it from the shattered fragments left in the hopper.  Setting down the bucket, she set about undoing the damage she had caused to the best of her ability- she flattened out the top of the ice maker, collected up the dropped soda bottles and set them next to the machine, and left a twenty dollar bill taped to the front of the Coke machine.

Returning to Kalida’s room with the ice, Sylph saw that Kalida had set everything on a low table in the lounge.  “I noticed that you didn’t have any normal sized furniture in your room,” she explained, “and I figured the chairs in our dining room are pretty rickety, so I thought we might eat Asian-style.”

As they ate, Kalida and Sylph talked about a variety of subjects.  Kalida mentioned that she knew Wade from high school- he was a few grades ahead of her- and had always had kind of a crush on him.  Kalida was, apparently, a year older than Sylph, but had spent a year after graduating high school in Greece with her grandparents, thus putting them in the same class in college.  Sylph mentioned that she was planning to major in visual arts and Kalida said that she was planning on studying dance, although she was concerned that she might not have the strength needed for modern dance.

“I can help you train, if you want,” Sylph offered.  Kalida looked her up and down, obviously somewhat intimidated, and Sylph laughed lightly.  “Don’t worry- I don’t think you could get as big as me if you wanted to.  I have pretty exceptional genetics and I’ve been training since I was six years old.”

“Well, okay,” Kalida agreed, “but you have to promise not to kill me- I’m not superwoman, y’know.”

Sylph smiled gently.  “Of course not.  We’ll take it slow and easy at first.  You’re probably stronger than you think you are, though.”

After they finished, Sylph helped Kalida clean up, then got ready to go back to her own room.  Pausing at the door, she turned back to Kalida.  “Um,” she began hesitantly, “I don’t suppose you’d like to come over to my room and spend the night, would you?”

Kalida paused in what she was doing and looked up at the much larger girl.  Sylph reddened slightly, embarrassed.  Finally, Kalida nodded decisively.  “Sure.  I’m glad you asked, really.  Let me grab my covers and you can set up the spare bed so that we both have a place to sleep.”