Andrew had never imagined his life would end up like this, sweating to the point his eyes were constantly stinging while climbing up the steep vertical walls of his little brother's naval. This was worlds away from that one crisp autumn afternoon, when he was simply a regular high-school teen helping his dad set up Halloween decorations. Just about every other house on the street had already set theirs up, so Dad was dead set on making sure that they worked all weekend to ensure that their house would be the spookiest on the block. So far, Andrew's house had a novelty skeleton hanging on a noose set out by the withered old whicker tree they had prominently displayed in the front yard, along with several prop gravestones all lined up in neat rows besides it with the words "R.I.P" and "SEE YOU SOON" written on them in goofy cartoon fonts. In front of the graves were a set of severed hands that he and dad handcrafted themselves, their withered plaster palms grasping out from the brown mulch they had set out around them.
They had just finished setting up the initial wave of decorations and headed back inside when Aaron had burst in through the front door and dragged Andrew to his room to tell him all about the latest money-making venture he had cooked up with his friends. He had been so excited when he rolled out the poster outlining his "magnum opus to end all magnum opus-eses": a bona-fide haunted house, located right in the abandoned mansion two blocks down from his middle school. Andrew didn't have the heart to ask Aaron how a regular haunted house constituted a "magnum opus" as he laid out his extensively detailed plan for how the whole thing would be structured, with different routes being priced at different tiers based on the type of experience you wanted to have. There was an easy course for the "infants and scaredy-cats" who wanted to simply have fun on Halloween, as well as a medium course for the people who were here for the classic haunted house experience. The thing that Aaron talked the most breathlessly about by far was the "EXTREME" tier, the most expensive item. Andrew couldn't even remember how many hours had passed as Aaron explained in exhaustive detail how his friends would really pull all the stops to make sure the experience was really something to remember. Around the time Aaron started rambling about a "McKamey Manor" and throwing barbed rocks and chasing people out of the house with real chainsaws with the chain still on, Anderw began to wonder if Aaron hadn't mixed "haunted house" with "torture chamber".
However, before Andrew could use his big brother voice and gently remind Aaron that bringing a live, unaltered chainsaw without the chain removed to a public business would almost certainly violate several local laws, Aaron had yelped out in pain and started complaining about how his shirt had suddenly gotten tight on him early in the afternoon. The next thing he knew, Andrew was looking up with his jaw on the floor as his brain processed the sight of his little brother, who had come up to his chest barely two seconds ago, nursing a headache from having slammed straight into the ceiling, his clothes in tatters and plaster littering his hair and sprinkling down to the floor like a light snowfall.
It hadn't gotten much fanfare at first. Giants were far from being a new phenomenon, and Aaron himself already had plenty of friends who were giants themselves, with one boasting a height of around 49 feet and 11 inches, and another being tall enough that they had to designate special lanes for him just so that he wouldn't end up bumping against the skyscrapers whenever he needed to get to and from places. If anything, Aaron had been ecstatic that he'd be able to finally interact with them on a one-to-one basis. He'd even drafted up new plans for all the schemes he could do with both his giant and normal-sized friends, his haunted house idea having long been left to gather dust in the upstairs attic.
But then, over the next couple of weeks, Aaron started to sporadically grow out of nowhere, often during times when it would most inconvenience him. In class, he would get a growth spurt and end up shoving his classmates out of the bounds of the open-air classroom with his enhanced volume (and later eliciting more than few giggles when he told everyone about how the teacher had ended up being pinned against the blackboard by his butt). In band practice, he would suddenly find himself flutily attempting to handle a trombone that may as well have been a particularly fragile thumbtack, all the while his bandmates attempted to worm their way out from under his thighs. At home, he would find himself suddenly wearing the heavy-duty canvas tent the neighborhood association had set up as a makeshift toga, forcing him to stare down at his breadbox-sized home and shiver as he was left with little other choice than to his own body heat to keep himself warm during the cold autumn evenings.
It continued like this, on and on and on, until the adults started speaking to themselves in hushed breaths, until news copters from all over the world came descending upon them like locusts, until their family had little choice but to leave the neighborhood before Aaron ended up accidentally rolling over it in his sleep.
Andrew couldn't recall having a single moment of rest since then. Because Aaron was constantly growing, his family was always on the move, always being herded towards more isolated locations under the ever-watchful eyes of the US Intelligence Community. They would go to a secluded town with a breathtaking scenic view, hoping against hope that this would be their new home, before Aaron inevitably marred the landscape with his expanding mass, and the whole cycle started all over again. All the while, your little brother carried his entire house, your family and all, within the palm of his expanse of a hand, which was getting to be more and more like an alien, isolated island unto itself with each day that passed.
Now here Andrew was, just now clambering out of the dark hole that he voluntarily chose to confine himself in for a sleepover, and he looked out and saw nothing but an ocean of flesh. There was nothing at all to indicate that he was standing on a living being, let alone that this was meant to be his little brother. It was just him and the endless plane of pale that beckoned out and promised nothing but a fate of wandering for all of eternity.
Not that this deterred Andrew. After all, Aaron was only a mile tall (and boy, did it say a lot about his life that "only" being a mile tall was something he could say unironically), which meant that he only had to walk about 10 minutes before he reached the ear. There was no guarantee that he would have this luxury forever, though. If he looked down, Andrew knew he would see entire stretches of oaks and maples stretching dozens of feet high being effortlessly mowed down like blades of grass to a lawnmower, or yards of crops to an industrial grade combine harvester. And they were only getting smaller and smaller by the hour, becoming minuscule almost to the point where they may as well have been individual grains of sand on a fuzzy green beach, infinitely numerous and futile to distinguish from one another.
If his growth didn't stop soon (and it had to stop at some point, it always did), then it would only be a matter of time before he'd start having to compete with airplanes for space. He could already imagine the commercial airlines and private jets alike getting entangled by strands of hair thicker than the Eiffel Tower, tossing its occupants into a dark, untamed wilderness beset by beasts beyond the comprehension of man. It was something that he could tell Aaron about later; he'd get a kick out of it.
Andrew couldn't even begin to imagine what Aaron would be like as he got older. The image of him delicately navigating across entire states, attempting to flutily tiptoe around stretches of urban sprawl that amounted to little more than grey, crunchy crystalline lining, was one that Andrew had ended up seeing in his nightmares more than once. Too many times, if he was being honest - the whole thing was starting to get a little repetitive for his likings. He had to wonder if it was one of those precognitive dreams he always heard about, where and then it comes true in the next few days. It was kind hard to call it a premonition, though, considering the predictions amounted to basic extrapolations of cause and effect.
That didn't make it any easier to think about, though. Already, it took several days and hundreds of thousands of dollars of military equipment just to something as basic as getting him clean. It was still a little hard for Andrew to take it all in whenever he passed by Aaron during his bathing sessions as he was laying down. Just his rear alone was two entire mountains unto themselves, massive fleshy orbs that compressed swathes of land around the size of Times Square with ease. The constant vibrations that you could feel as you got closer while Aaron was shifting around, miniature earthquakes that left you unsteady on your feet like the air was composed of pure alcohol, were something Andrew had never gotten used to. Dozens of crop dusters would pass by, dumping what had to be gallons upon gallons of soapy water, and heavy equipment machines retrofitted with industrial strength hoses would travel along the sides spraying away at the accumulated grime, thoroughly cleaning every last pore.
Andrew couldn't even begin to imagine how Aaron felt all about all this, being such a massive beast that millions, if not billions had to be spent just to wash him down properly. He did have a few ideas, however: even though he may have been too small for Aaron to see or feel, he was still Aaron's older brother, and if there's one thing he knew about Aaron, it was that he was...
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