The battery charge on a model ж786 biological life-form cryogenic unit will last an average of seven to eight years of continual use, depending on maintenance and regular access to sunlight.

The unit containing Elena Machado was buried in a bag in a storage room at a spaceport. The battery on her unit managed to last over five years before finally failing.

A hiss of evaporated cryogenic fluid escaped the small metal tube as the battery power on the unit fell to zero and the hatch popped open.

The human woman inside gasped her first breath of air in a long time before she sat up and tumbled from the cylinder of metal and glass.

Elena landed on a rough cloth surface and looked around in groggy confusion. Where was she? Her vision was blurry, though she was in a dark place so it hardly mattered. It felt like she was in a cramped space, as if she were underneath several heavy blankets. And her head… her head pounded worse than any other hangover she’d ever had. What had happened to her anyway?

She stumbled around in the darkness, trying to find anything that would allow her to get her bearings. The last thing she remembered… the last thing she remembered was the bus breaking down, and then having to walk along the highway. After that, she remembered the loud noise… and then nothing.

A barrier that felt like a tarp, impeded her search and she couldn’t find a way to get beyond it. Was she dead? Was this some sort of purgatory?

After several minutes of groping about in the confusing blackness, Elena managed to catch a glimmer of light out of the corner of her eye. Seizing on the one thing that wasn’t frustrating darkness, she tried to pull herself up along the unknown terrain around her and towards the tiny speck of light above her.

It took a long time and more than once she lost her footing in the darkness and slid back towards the bottom. It was fortunate that whatever was surrounding her was soft.

Eventually she made her way towards the small hole and peaked out cautiously. The first thing Elena felt was a small whisper of fresh air, which was a welcome sensation after the stuffy environment inside of… wherever she was.

Unfortunately, as she put her eyes to the hole, she didn’t get the necessary answers that she sought. The outside of whatever container or prison or purgatory she was in… didn’t look like much. With a growl of frustration, Elena decided that whatever dangers might lie outside had to be better than another moment in the stifling darkness.

She wiggled her hands through the hole in the cloth wall and pulled with all her strength. At first, it didn’t seem like she was accomplishing much, but then the hole grew a little bigger.

Elena was encouraged by the tiny ripping sound and continued to try and widen the hole in front of her, shoving more of her fingers inside. The tear grew bigger again and Elena pushed her arms through up to her wrists.

Little by little, Elena pushed until she was able to slip her head through, along with her arms. After that, it was a simple matter to squeeze her shoulders through and then her torso. Her hips took a little more work, but once she managed it, she slid right through and onto the floor outside of whatever had been confining her.

She squinted against the bright light, which only seemed to make her excruciating headache worse. For about a minute, she blinked at the illumination and waited for her eyes to readjust.

When Elena was able to finally see, what she saw did very little to alleviate her confusion. She appeared to be in a massive room that appeared to be big enough to hold several city blocks. She was on a shelf, of some kind, surrounded by large objects that almost looked to be shipping crates.

None of this made any sense. Elena ran to the edge of the platform and looked down, to find herself about eleven meters above the ground.

“What the hell happened to me?” Elena muttered to herself. She could feel her heartrate increase and she stepped back from the edge a bit as her vision swam a bit.

Elena sat and curled her legs to her chest. She took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. It didn’t help much, but it let her focus herself a little better.

“Okay… okay…” Elena groaned as she clenched her fists to keep her hands from trembling. “First things first, I need to get down from here. Then, I need to figure out where I am… and then…”

Elena shook her head. She had no idea what to do after that. She took another deep breath and pulled herself back to her feet. One thing at a time. She walked back to the edge of the shelf, or whatever it was, and peered down at the ground below. She figured her original estimate of about eleven meters was correct.

The question was how was she going to get down? Elena looked to either side and saw the legs of the shelf. It was a large steel pole, thicker than her body. Fortunately for Elena, there seemed to be oval shaped holes cut at regular intervals down the beam. If she had to guess, Elena figured they were to adjust the gaps between shelves. Although, she didn’t know of any piece of equipment large enough to do so.

Just one more mystery to add to the pile.

Right. She was stalling. Elena took another deep breath and stepped up to the edge. She gripped one of the oval holes and swung herself out into the open air.

There was a brief and terrifying moment when her feet couldn’t seem to find purchase on the hole below her and Elena thought for sure she was going to lose her grip and plummet to the ground below. Thankfully, after a few seconds, the toe of her sneaker managed to find purchase on the pole belowe her. She was also immensely thankful she’d decided not to wear heels or sandals to the festival.

Once she was sure of her position, Elena lowered her left foot and poked around until she found the next hole down and then, very slowly, she transferred the weight from her right foot to her left.

Elena let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She could do this.

Slowly Elena descended down the side of the shelf. She took her time with every step, making sure she had good footing before trusting her weight to it. At least the pole was steel, or some similar metal, so she could be reasonably sure that it would hold up her weight.

She was almost to the bottom when a thunderous sound ripped through what had previously been an almost oppressive silence. Elena let out a scared yelp from the sudden noise and lost her footing. She fell the remaining two meters to the hard ground below, letting out a gasp of pain as she landed on her shoulder.

Elena shunted the pain to the back of her mind and half-crawled, half-pulled herself through the thick dust on the floor to the relative safety underneath the bottom shelf as she waited to see what had caused that immense sound.

Biting her lip both from the pain in her shoulder and to keep herself from crying out, Elena peeked out from underneath the shelf. If she thought what she’d been through thus far that day had been strange; it was nothing compared to what she was about to see.

On the other side of the room from where Elena hid, a massive hole opened up in the wall. There was no other way to describe it, a vast portion of the wall slid away and then the light from the other side of that hole was blocked as something entered the room.

It was only because of the vast distance between herself and the creature that allowed Elena to make any sense of its form. It looked human. A woman with dark skin and a cloud of curly dark brown hair atop her head. From that distance away, she looked perfectly normal.

But that was the problem: from that distance away.

The ground underneath Elena trembled as the being at the other end of the room moved further in. As she stepped closer, she seemed to grow taller. And taller. And taller. Elena felt a sort of primal fear that up until that point had been buried in her subconscious by millions of years of evolutionary advancement into an apex predator.

Elena had been forcefully knocked back down the food chain and felt the fear of a small prey animal.

The giant walked between the shelves, which now looked normal in comparison to her gargantuan frame.

“¿κwoδ wopnoэ δε мvf ҍvz.” The voice of the enormous woman reverberated through the air as she shouted something. It wasn’t any language Elena recognized.

“Aмpoэ.” Another voice yelled from beyond the door.

“Aмpoэ.” The giant woman repeated incredulously. “Παyyα ҍvz εxzi Aмpoэ.”

The giant’s footsteps shook the ground underneath Elena as the giant neared closer and closer to where the human woman hid. Elena peered cautiously out from underneath the overhang of the shelf above her and watched as the enormous woman pawed through the bags and boxes- the strange structures that had surrounded Elena when she’d first awoken- before picking up what looked like a large black duffle bag.

The woman hefted the strap of the bag onto her shoulder and stomped out of the room, with the tremors caused by her footsteps becoming smaller as she got further away.

Elena sat up in the dust on the floor and hugged her knees to her chest. She took several deep breaths and tried to get a handle on the sudden panic she felt. What the hell was going on? Where was she? Had she… shrunk somehow? None of this seemed possible and Elena once again revisited the idea that she might in fact be dead.

“Okay… okay…” Elena muttered to herself as she rubbed her arms nervously. “Until something tells me otherwise I am going to work under the assumption that I am not dead, and would like to remain in that state. I’m not going to get any answers hiding here in the dirt, so the first thing to do is to get out of this room.”

With a herculean effort, Elena pulled herself out from under the shelf and assessed the situation. She figured her safest bet was to stick as close to the shelves as she could, in case she needed to hide again. She didn’t know if the giants meant to harm her or not, but again she intended to ere on the side of caution until something informed her otherwise.

She moved as quickly as she could, once again being very grateful that she was not wearing heels. She got about halfway across the room when she felt the rumble of the door opening again. Instinctively, she dove back under the shelf, watching the door intently.

It was a different woman who entered than before, although she seemed to be wearing the same uniform as the first. This one had skin that was a lighter shade of brown than the woman who had entered before. Her magenta hair was bound up into a bun at the back of her neck. When Elena craned her neck just right, she could just see the woman’s curiously purple eyes.

The newcomer’s footsteps shook the ground underneath Elena again as the massive feet clad in practical looking shoes drew ever closer to where the human woman was hiding. Elena sucked in a breath as the black rubber soles pounded the floor and brought the enormous woman ever closer. Elena’s heart beat faster with every step the giant took.

The woman paused directly in front of where Elena was hiding. Her feet landed on the ground, sending a gust of rubber scented air washing over Elena. The human hoped that she hadn’t been spotted somehow.

Elena’s breath caught in her throat as the massive form in front of her seemed to collapse in on itself as the titanic woman squatted down. A hand with long fingers lowered to the ground and braced against it to help the giant maintain her balance.

Breathlessly, Elena waited for the hand to reach out and drag her from underneath the shelf. It seemed like hours that the enormous person stayed there, while Elena’s eyes stayed fixated on the hand in front of her.

Finally, Elena heard the monstrous sound of something scraping against the shelf above her as the woman found whatever she’d been searching for. A large box landed on the floor and with a groan the giant pushed herself back into a standing position. Briefly, the hands reappeared grasping the building sized box on either side before whisking it into the air at a speed that defied logic.

The black shoes, and the giant who was wearing them, moved on and Elena finally felt it was safe to breathe again.

Elena sat back and took in several gasping breaths, inhaling through her shirt so as not to swallow the dirt and dust that surrounded her.

She had to get out of there. She didn’t know what was waiting for her on the other side of that door, whether it would be better or worse than where she was now; but she had to leave that room.

Though her legs felt like they were made of gelatin, Elena climbed to her feet and ran towards the massive door as fast as her apparently tiny legs could carry her. She was very thankful her father had pushed her into cross-country running during her school years, because the distance to the door seemed to grow the longer she ran.

Eventually, Elena made it to the monolithic entrance to the room. She fell to her knees in the corner by the door and tried to catch her breath after the mad dash across the enormous floor. Before she could fully recover, the portal rumbled open and the first giant entered the room again.

Elena’s heart seized with fear until she was certain that the giant woman had not seen her. Once the strange being had walked past her, Elena dashed through the open door before it decided to seal itself once again.

What she saw on the other side made her heart freeze in terror.

There must have been dozens of them. Hundreds. Crowds of giants rumbled past her, their footsteps buckling the ground underneath her and threatening to send her tumbling to the floor with each passing second. Elena only just had the presence of mind to step away from the doorway before the original giant came back and crushed her under an errant step.

Mindlessly, Elena sought the relative safety underneath a stall in a darkened and abandoned corner. She sat against the leg of the edificial table and tried to collect her thoughts, even as the monumental people rumbled past her on the walkway, completely oblivious to her existence.

Where was she? Elena’s mind screamed. How had she gotten here, and how in the hell was she going to get home?