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.Protected	By : keithcompany Category: G through L > Land of the Giants Views: 1771 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Land of the Giants show, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Protected
- 1
She cried, the first time I bathed her. I told her to lay back, relax, leave everything to me. I tried to be reassuring. She covered her face with those ghastly hands and quivered, trembled in the pot. The lightest touch, gentlest stroke caused more tears.
But it's not like I could just let her alone.
I'm the last person in the world you'd expect to find an Earthling. I'm SID, and Little People are a big part of our mission statement, but I'm not a field agent, I'm an accountant.
Yeah, I do the accounts for the archives. I can't get extra cash by claiming we've found a terrorist cell, a grass roots movement or a scientific breakthrough. Just records, trend analysis, mad scientist lairs and uncovered caches.
Other agents actually ferret out the criminals, the treason, the Little People. Agents like my brother.
He called me one night. There had been a sighting, a spaceship falling to Earth. "I need you to look around the north side of Forrest Mountain," he said.
"Why the north side?"
"That's the only side that hasn't been searched."
"Why ME?" I pressed. "I'm not a field agent."
"No, but the agents have another priority. This is just a follow-up. I need your help, Asertanley."
"You only call me Asertanley when you're cheating at something," I said.
"Okay, TANLEY," he growled. "I'm on a stakeout that could be a major bust against 3^rd Nation Radicals. Just wander around out there and keep track of where you're at."
"This stakeout...does it involve liquor, women or gambling?" I asked.
"I don't drink on duty," he said primly. Leaving the other two possibilities untouched. I snorted and agreed.
I'm just down the road from Forrest Mountain, so I drove over after breakfast, while lunch cooked in the longpot.
The first thing I saw was two foxes slinking through the woods. I knew if there were Little People in the area, they'd be very lucky to live long enough to be taken into custody.
So I wasn't expecting to find anything, anyone, one way or another. My main concern that day was being able to accurately map my search area. I followed a handy trail that paralleled a ridge, eyes scanning left to right.
Another fox was startled by my walk and a snake or two. Really not good recovery conditions.
So it was with low expectations that I tripped and fell over a spaceship. I was stepping over a rotting log when my foot slipped. My heel whanged off of something metal and then I fell.
Face-down on the ground, my eyes were about six inches away from an open hatch on the side of one of the Earthling's luxury transports.
And a woman was staring out at me. She didn't look happy, but she didn't run away. I lifted myself up on my elbows. "You have to come with me," I said.
She raised her hands and I noticed they were covered with bloody bandages. "Please," she said. "Please take me."
Karen Nora Price was taken into SID custody at 10:93 a.m. The agent in charge of the search reported that she was fully cooperative.
----------
I put her in my pocket and the spaceship in my truck. She was the only living Earthling on or around the ship. I marked the location carefully on my map, for a followup to my followup.
I didn't think they'd survive long without their shelter, but SID rules are very clear. The tech was going back.
Karen was another story.
I got home just as the longpot finished the stew. I fished a bit of meat out and separated the softened fibers. She watched patiently.
Both of her hands had been burned in the crash, so I had to feed her. I teased a morsel clear and dangled it in front of her face.
Tears welled in her eyes, but she ate ravenously.
"Thanks," she said between bites. "I've, uh. I haven't been able to... Well, the guys were taking care of me. But they went out to find food and....
"They were probably caught by some of the other searching agents," I assured her. She smiled slightly. I don't think she believed me, but she accepted the story.
When she was fed she lay back while I ate. Then I found a little dish to make a potty out of and teased her pants off. It was a little humiliating for both of us, but she was pretty desperate by then.
Wiping her off after made her burst into tears. The other Earthlings had dressed her in a set of sweats that were too big for her by a couple of sizes. That made it easier for them to help her. And it made it really easy for me.
Just, you know, humiliating as I said.
I tried to talk to her, to distract her. But she only gave terse answers. I guess getting your ass wiped with fingers bigger than your leg is more distracting than your name, your profession and what technology you can offer SID engineers.
She wasn't able to talk at all while I replaced her bandages. I had grandpa's jeweler's loupe and great-grandmother's dental tools but it was slow work.   She cooperated, sitting as still as possible, but it clearly hurt.
And having a doctor bigger than a house pick at your wounds with steel spikes can't be relaxing.
I didn't have any Earth made bandages, and the first aid kits were in a cabinet on the spaceship that neither of us could reach. I looked around and found that the caps from tubes of disinfectant crème cupped her hands almost perfectly. I filled them with liquid skin and taped them to her wrists.
She gave one gasp and looked, really looked at me for the first time. She'd been staring at my hands like they were individuals. I suspect it's easier for Earthlings to look on our hands as big pink crabs than to try to contemplate just how gigantic we are.
Anyway, the skin started to bubble on contact, foaming before I applied the medical tape. I know it itched for a second or two, but then cooled the nerves. Karen looked up as the pain subsided. "Thank you, Stan."
I ran water for a bath after that. She'd been alone in the ship for a long, long time. Even she agreed she needed a bath, and that she needed to be bathed. But getting undressed again, before a big menacing stranger, that was difficult.
She wasn't allowed to pause, though. Her clothes were peeled off and set aside in soapy water. And only part of her stink went with them.
I found her coloring curious. I'd expected to find tan lines where her skin was more natural, but there weren't any. She really was the color of tea poured onto Valley City porcelain.
She was shaved of body hair, in the Earthling fashion, which made a close examination much easier.
Her tears broke off as she opened her eyes for a quick peek then shrieked. "Sorry," I said. "Before I wash you, I wanted to be sure I wasn't going to rip out any odd piercings."
"Nothing like that," she said. Her hands had started to cover herself, floated aimlessly, then lifted up out of my way.
"I do..." She swallowed. "I do appreciate this. But it's still... Like rape."
"I understand," I said. "So. What does a personal shopper do?" She explained and it seemed quite an odd profession. I didn't know anyone that would avail themselves of the help.
But Earthlings, huh? Who knows why they do half of what they are reported to do.
"What's going to happen to me?" she finally asked. I had rinsed her off and was drying her off.
"Well, you're half-starved and helpless. Disoriented, afraid and pretty pitiful. Just the sort of person SID likes to interrogate."
"But I don't know anything!" she protested.
"I know," I said. "But maybe you just don't know what we'd find interesting that you DO know." SID always had a use for Little People. If only to threaten them and get other Earthlings to cooperate. But I didn't tell her that.
---------
They were happy enough with the spaceship. There was no weaponry, but some of the engine profiles seemed updated past anything in the files.
Karen.... My brother, Eechentsy, glanced over her and nodded. We went to see his supervisor.
I described how I found her, and how I'd treated her hands. And we explained just how shallow her knowledge of Earthtech was.
"Earthtech?" Supervisor asked. (I wasn't introduced. Agents at certain levels of authority stopped having names until they advanced or were demoted to less sensitive positions.)
"That's how she put it."
"So it's an Earthism," he asked, firing a suspicious glance at me.
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. It'll never happen again."
"Sorry," Karen said. He ignored her, though my brother gave her a nod.
"Well, if what you say is true," Supervisor said.to me, "she's not worth much hassle. I suppose if we left her with you, she'd still technically be in SID custody."
"If what she says is true," I gently corrected. He nodded and lifted something out of his desk drawer.
"Place her on the desk." He tapped a spot and put a box down next to it. I was just about to offer Karen a reassuring nod, but then I remembered where I was. SID was not interested in reassuring the Little People.
I put her down and watched as Supervisor put a glass dome over her. It looked like it was off a cheese tray. There was one hole drilled into it.
She looked at that with anxiety. Her face glanced up at mine. I tried not to give her a look, anything that might bother Supervisor.
He pulled a powder puffer out of the box and put the mouth in the hole. He squeezed it and a greenish-pink cloud filled the area under the dome.
Karen coughed a bit, then suddenly stopped. She stood still, loose but still awake.
"She can't lie, now," Eech said.
I watched as he put in a different puffer and sucked the smoke out. Karen never moved, even after he lifted the dome and replaced it in his box.
"What is your name?" he asked Karen.
"Karen Nora Price," she said in a monotone.
"And what is your profession?"
"I'm a personal shopper." She had to explain that to him. It took a while. He finally nodded.
"Earth decadence," he said dismissively. He asked a few questions about her education and her job.
"She's cute," he finally judged. "But she's not terribly smart."
"I'm the best personal shopper Hugg and Florence has ever had." It sounded like a boast, or it might have, without the monotone delivery. But she was still under the influence..
He made a dismissive gesture, then leaned back. "Yes, well, there's nothing there that'll help the Directorate.
Supervisor gestured, dismissing Karen. "Take her." He assumed a formal tone. "SID places this Earthling in your custody, charging you with her. You will produce her if and when requested." More brushing movements.
I pocketed Karen and acknowledged my orders.
------------
I took her everywhere with me. I had to. She could do nothing without me, not with her hands soaking in a new layer of skin.
And I couldn't... I couldn't stand to leave her alone for even a second.
First thing, she wanted to improve my wardrobe. I took her out to the shops and she took over. At first the sales ladies thought it was cute how she ordered me around.
But the first time I came out of the changing room, they nodded at the suit. The selection fit me, they said. And they started listening to Karen.
It was odd, kinda. No one had ever complimented my clothing before. Now they noticed what I chose and how I wore it.
It got so where I couldn't get to work in the morning without her verbally laying out my suit for the day.
Work changed. She lived on my desk as I worked numbers each day. Guys teased as I asked THEM to leave the room so Karen could use the potty.
But she quickly charmed them and they stopped resenting my protecting a Little Person's privacy. As much as I could, that is.
The guys even went out and bought a screen I could close around my desk as necessary.
And we watched TV and I explained jokes and she described movies and shows from Earth. All decadent, of course, but long and involved narratives.
I saw that she was becoming very dependent on me. Even beyond the physical restraints of her condition.
We term it the 'grooming leash.' A man can own a horse, the stable it lives, the track it runs on and the jockey it carries. But it's the lowly stablehand that gives the horse oats each day and mucks the stable and brushes his sides.
When you do that much for people, they stop treating your relationship as it should be and... They take emotional shortcuts. The information sources in the jails come to depend on the torturer. Sure, he hurts them, but he's also the one that decides when to stop. And when they eat. Sleep.
He runs their whole life.
The day came that I untaped Karen's covers and she didn't think her hands looked 'gross to the max.' She went potty by herself that day. And she fed herself.
But she didn't want to bathe herself. "I kinda like just laying back and letting you have your hygiene way with me," she said.
"Ah. That's not really....healthy."
"Yeah," she sighed. "But Stockholm's only a problem when you return to your...real life." She waved her hand, indicating the entire planet. "That's not much of a risk, is it? So? Please? Make me clean, Stan?"
"How can I refuse such a plea," I said. And picked her up to lower her into the water.
She took up sculpture about then. Something she'd always wanted to do.   Metal and plastics, wires and other media. I made her a little portable studio. She'd work on designs and build stuff. Mostly rather ugly paperweights, but I and the guys always accepted them graciously and put them somewhere prominent on our desks.
It kept her quite occupied if I was busy, but didn't take her out of my reach if I needed her. I mean, if she needed me.
I couldn't get any power tools in her size, of course, but I did teach her how to use the cutting pen.
She didn't believe me at first. I used a pencil and a ruler to draw a line across a little plate of scrap metal. Then etched the cutter stylus down the line.
We sat and watched the metal start to glow then shine. "The chemicals in the pen react with air to.. Oh, I don't understand what all it does," I told her. Her eyes were bright as she stared at the line. "What matters is..."
When the glow faded, I picked it up and easily snapped the metal into two pieces.
"Ooooh, BABY!" she whispered.
Soon after she started making sculptures, she started exploring ways to make her own paints, glazes and decorations. There was no chemical she wouldn’t take into her studio to see 'what could come of it.'
And that was our life. For about a year. Very pleasant custody of an enemy to the state.
In fact, one of the guys teased her by saying I should try to capture a Little Man to join her in her little studio.
Karen drew herself up into a haughty, straight line. "Two's custody," she said primly. "Three's a crowd."
As time went on, her little studio got more and more cozy. Eventually she made herself an icebox, a bathroom, a firmer bed... I realized she had everything she needed for a night and decided she didn't need to sleep within arm's reach.
So as bedtime I asked where she wanted the studio left for the night. She stared, her eyebrows trying to hide somewhere in her hair. I explained my realization. And how she didn't have to sleep next to my bed. Not really.
"And where would you like it?"
"Where it fucking belongs," she finally said. "Right where I can keep an eye on you."
"Okay, you're forgetting who's protecting whom,but I understand. Let's go to bed, okay?"
"Damn straight."   Then we laughed together as I carried her to the bedroom.
--------
About six months after she came into my custody, my brother stopped by. He showed up about dinner time and sat down with me. I scooped a bowl for him and we ate.
"What is this?"
"Chili!" Karen said in a chipper voice. She likes Eech. He's rather indulgent of my custody of her and he was part of the effort to keep her out of the Earthling kennels. She started telling him what was in the food, and what substitutions she had to make.
"...and of course you don't really have chilis on the plant, not real ones, or at least not that Stan can find, so we experimented with lots of different flavorants. Some were pretty gross, but the others..."
"That's a fine grasp on the scientific method for an airhead," he said in a dangerous tone. She shut up and covered her mouth with both hands. He smiled, sudden and forced. "Sorry. SID. We're naturally suspicious."
"My dad said the scientific method is throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks," she said quietly.   "Even I can do that."
"Yes, you can," he said. "But I'd recommend changing it to luck. Lots of luck. 'We tried the cadedda root and got lucky.' That sort of thing. Just to avoid suspicious bastards like me."
"Yes, Icky. Thanks, Icky." She was quiet after that.
It was a pleasant visit, after that little bit of drama. When he was leaving, he dropped something into my kitchen junk drawer. I didn't notice, but it's hard to slip stuff like that past Karen.
What's a surreptitious drop of a tiny case to us is a 50-gallon drum bouncing out of a pickup to her.
"What's that?" she asked. Her voice oozed innocence, alerting me to her interest.
"Oh, uh..." I reached for it and he snatched it back up. "It's part of an investigation I'm working on. Evidence. I don't want to turn it in just yet, but I can't leave it at home."
"Are bad people going to look for it here?" she asked. I was still playing catch-up, wondering who Eech was worried about in his chain of command.
"They've... I think people have been in my place," he admitted. "But their searches are going to be restricted to my car, my office, my home, not an accountant's."
"Okay," I said with a shrug. Karen opened her little mouth to argue with me. I spoke a little more forcefully, not quite ordering her to obey my decision. "Whatever we can do to help SID interests." Her mouth clapped shut in an instant.
He nodded, handing the small metal cylinder over. After he left I moved it to one of my little hiding places.
Karen didn't know where to start. "Why do you have a pooka?"
"Everyone does," I said. "Everyone's got something they hide from everyone else."
"From SID?"
"Or enemies of SID." I shrugged. It was life on my planet. OUR planet, now.
"Well, what is it? Is it dangerous? I mean, not only from the targets of his investigation, but is it dangerous just to be in the house with it?"
"He didn't tell me, I didn't ask."
"You should have!" She seemed very riled.
"He'd have said it was classified."
"All the more reason to know what it is!"
"Karen, I don't have a need to know."
"STAN! You're going to be HOLDING it! That's a need!"
"All I need," I insisted, "is that my brother asked me for a favor."
"Only when you caught him! What if you'd just found that in the junk drawer?"
I laughed. "Karen, no one ever finds anything in that drawer."
"That's true," she said with a quiet tone. After a moment, she threw her hands up in the air. "Okay, FINE! BE that way. I can't protect you from yourself, after all."
"Sweetheart, you can't protect me from anything."
"Did... " She twisted in my hand, staring up at my face. "Did you call me your sweetheart?"
"I, uh... I guess I did."
"Does that mean the same thing on this planet?"
"I don't know what it means on your planet," I hesitated. She forgot about the canister entirely. We spent the evening discussing why I'd absently called her by an intimate term. And how I felt, and how it made her feel, and how her declaration of feelings made me feel...
Somewhere around hour twenty six, I finally put her down on the dresser. "Karen, dear, if you ask me 'how does that make you feel' one more time, I'm going to put you in the chili."
"Sorry," she said. "I'll shut up. But tomorrow, we're going to ask Icky some pointed questions about this responsibility."
Okay, so she didn't quite forget about the canister. Not entirely.   But at least she shut up about it before midnight.
---------
I woke to violence. I felt the attack before I was even fully awake. When I knew what was happening, I was pinned to the bed. A large man knelt atop me, a great shadow in the darkness.
A long bar pinned my throat down, and his weight rested on my chest and my upper arms. Knees and ass pressed painfully into me.
"Where's the box?" he asked. The voice was just above my head. My SID training wasn't as deeply programmed as the field agents got, but I was primed to resist.
"What box?" I asked.
"Your brother doesn't have it any more, he must have given it to you. Where is it?"
"Oh, that box! We call it a canister. Or I did. He called it a case. Although that might mean that it was something to do WITH a case he's working on. He may call it-"
The bar drove down harder, cutting off my air.
"Enough cute shit. You wanna find out what your Little Friend calls it? Maybe she'll tell us what we want to know as we grind her in the food press into-"
There was a loud popping sound and the bar pressure eased. Just as the weight of the body on top of me collapsed over my face.
It was a dead weight, and I was in no position to lift it. I did manage to shift and slither and come out from under it on one side. That dumped me to the floor. I stood and turned on the room light.
A man I didn't recognize was sprawled awkwardly across my bed. Part of his skull looked cracked, bone sticking out of torn skin. There was a baseball bat under him.
And Karen was armed.
"Are you okay?" she asked. I dropped to my knees beside her.
"Are you okay?" I glanced from the...weapon, I guess...that she held to the dead body. The blood was oozing, not bleeding out of him. "Um, thanks?" I pointed at her weapon.
It was metal, about as long as she was. It sort of looked like a rifle. There was a wire frame for the stock and trigger. The barrel was a finger's length of metal rods held by triangular plates.
"Hit him with the bat," she said.
"What?"
"The gun fires a sort of force-field bullet. If there's no blood on the bat, no one will know how you overpowered him. If there is, it'll match the story we're going to tell them."
"Ah." I stood and tampered with the evidence to her satisfaction. We made sure some blood spattered on the t-shirt I was wearing.
"Okay. CSI would find holes, but I don't think your people are even going to look closely. Now, take the bat and let's go find Icky."
"Yeah, sure." I looked at the bat. "Do we need the bat for your plan?"
"What? Well, you need a weapon." She shrugged. I reached over her head to open a hidey-hole in the bedroom wall. I pulled out my service pistol.
"I AM SID," I explained. "Accountant, true, but an SID accountant."
"Oh! Good, because I don't know for sure how many rounds I have." She smiled up at me, then gestured towards my PJ bottoms. "Let's go! Get dressed."
"I have questions...."
"On the way to Icky's!"
As we coursed through town, I was watching the roads ahead and behind. We hadn't found the car of my assailant, so they might be following.
But that was my training. My mind was on Karen. "Okay. Okay, who and what are you, and how did you resist the truth gas?"
"I didn't," she said. She sat in the cupholder on the dashboard. "You guys just suck at interrogation."
"He asked..."
"He asked about my current job. He did NOT ask me if I had been a weapons developer for the CIA. He did not ask if had lost my job due to budget cuts and an asshole director offering to save my weapons job for a hand job and something we'll call anger management issues.
"And he most certainly did not ask if the CIA had sort of a witness protection program, and set me up in a brand new nonviolent career. New name, new job, no security clearance."
She stroked the rods of her weapon. I almost drove off the road, watching her do this.
"So...the art... That was materials for your gun. The chemicals... That's your power supply. And I'm...."
"Not my target," she promised. "Never my target. You're fine sweetheart."
-------
Eech's place was dark. No cars in front or in the driveway. I walked up the drive to the back door. I leaned against the wall next to the door and held Karen up to the top.
"I hear breathing-" she started to report.
Gunshots fired through the door somewhere around where my chest would have been if I was stupid. Karen screamed, high and shrill.
I yanked her back. More bullets crashed through the door. Then there was silence. I waited for the shooter to either come out and finish me off or to run out the front door. She whimpered, shivering in my hands.
"Scared?" I whispered. I lifted her to my ear and tried to hold her reassuringly.
"It's usually been theoretical!" she snapped at me.
"Me, too," I replied. There was movement inside. Footsteps crunching on little bits of the door, glass. I readied my weapon, aiming for about waist high. He might come out low. There was a low whine by me ear as the blunt-force gun powered up.
The door flew open. Something flew out but it was too high.   I waited for a real target, my training throbbing in my head.
Karen went ahead and fired at the first thing that scared her.
--------
Supervisor stood by the body. Eech and I stood in his kitchen a few feet away. Karen crouched in my shirt pocket, peering through the button hole.
"So let me get this straight," he said, rubbing his forehead.   "You got the jump on a trained assassin who tried to kill you in your sleep."
"Karen screamed," I said. "I woke up primed to protect her."
"By wresting the bat away from him and killing him with one blow to the head."
"He really likes Karen," Eech said.
"Everybody does," I added.
"I know," he said, shaking his head. "So then, you assume your brother is in trouble and come straight here."
"Someone nearly killed me," I explained. "I naturally blame my brother." Eech nodded.
"So you arm yourself, grab your protected Earthling-"
Karen popped up into view. "I told him I would be scared if he left me home alone with a killer's body!" She shouted and ducked back down.
"Well, who wouldn't be?" Eech asked.
"Right. So you don't call for backup, you charge towards danger with the Earthling you're supposed to protect and draw the bad guy's fire."
"It seemed logical at the time," I told him. I glanced at Eech. He nodded, accepting my comment.
"And with a gun in your hand, a Little Person in your pocket, when the bad guy comes out to shoot you dead, you wrap your fist in a throw rug and punch it so far up his mouth that he chokes to death. Well, that and the blood flow from the tonsils that were torn out from the strength of your punch."
"He really feels protective about me, too," Eech said. We stared at each other for a while. The silence stretched.
"Oh, hey, Chief!" Eech suddenly added, "I've got that data pod from the Deposit Investigation!"
Supervisor's eyes went from face to face, even dipping down to where Karen hid. "Go home," he told her. They flickered up to me. "Take her home." Then to Eech. "Start talking, Icky."
"Well, sir, you asked me to keep track of-"
He was talking quickly, but not as fast as I was walking. We were halfway home before I remembered to breathe.
I sat in the car for a minute after I got into my driveway. "Witness protection?" I finally asked.
"Uh huh," she said. I lifted her out of my pocket and held her in front of my face.
"What's your real name, Karen?"
"Whatever you want it to be," she shrugged.
"We'll stick with Karen, then," I nodded. She smiled. I lifted her to my cheek for a hug. She nuzzled her face against mine. Too late, we remembered how long it had been since I shaved.
"Ow!" she cried.
"Good thing your gun's still under the driver's seat," I muttered.
"Again, I could never target you, Stan. No matter how big and stupid you get."
"I'm a giant!" I pointed out. "I can't help but be big. To you, anyway."
"And it's not like stupid is your fault, either," she noted. I carried her back into my house.
Our house. "Spoken like someone who's tired of warm baths," I said.
"You wouldn't dare."
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