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The view from Harold’s office was usually one of very few things he actually liked about his job. It gave him a nice view of the city, and it didn’t even point towards the wide-scale destruction that had occurred as of late from the giant attacks. But now that giant had placed them in his satchel. The same satchel he had seen this monstrous man put countless buildings into before on the news.
At first, the spry, lithe young man had come to them naked and curious. His destruction was random and unorganized. But soon that began to change. The first building he ever stole instead of destroying was a textile factory. He disappeared for a long while after that until he came back in an absolutely luxurious robe. He continued splattering a few people and destroying things until one day he took his second building, a smelting plant. The city had expected that the pattern would repeat, that he would leave for some time and return with a new tricket. How wrong we were!
The giant came back the next day on a mission. He went to the trainyard and started ripping up the track. This wasn’t too strange a behavior for the giant, but was strange was that he didn’t make much of an effort to ruin the rest of the trainyard. Valuable cargo was left untouched, innocent civilians were left unharmed, and the station was left undamaged. He would simply tear the tracks from the ground and drop them into the then-knew satchel he had about his waist. The reason for this became clear when he came back a few days later with elaborately designed bangles, crafted from the metal he stole from the trainyard.
More things were stolen from the city in the following month. The clock tower was turned into a watch on his wrist. The commemorative statue in the park became an earring. An apartment complex adorned his anklet. But the strangest thing he robbed was the subway.
He ripped up the ground near Main Street to get at the subway tracks. As the train reached the station, he grabbed up the train and started pinching the doors on each of the subway cars so they wouldn’t open. He moved from station to station until something even stranger happened. Because of the rampage, the subway closed down and nobody was in the train when he picked it up. Up to this point, he hadn’t actually taken any people in his rampages except for at the textile factory and smelting plant. Yet upon seeing he had a train with no passengers, he smashed open a hotel and started scooping people out to fill the train cars. Once they were full, he pinched the doors shut and dropped them in the satchel.
Even more bizarrely, Harold went missing for days after the subway incident, and when he came to pick Harold’s office building up, he hadn’t had even a glint of the trains with him. The location of the strangers was completely unknown.
Finally light shone into the satchel as a large hazelnut eye loomed in my window.
“Wow, look at that beauty. The structure, the craftsmanship, the way the light catches it and makes it glimmer! I definitely chose the right jewel to crown my masterpiece! So I bet you little runts want to know why you’re here. And to that, I congratulate you. You’re about to become part of something wonderful. My magnum opus!”
He took us to his table, where we saw the subway trains he’d stolen earlier. Shockingly enough, everybody on board was still alive, despite them being gone for days. Tubes fed in and out of the train cars. Food and water made its way to the victims, and the waste was carted away. What was even stranger about them was that they had all been bent to form chain links. The tiny captured citizens ambled about in a haze. They were surviving, but hardly living.
In the center stood a giant rectangular ring. A ring almost as large as their office building. No, Harold realized, a ring exactly as large as their office building.
“You see, I have so much pretty jewelry despite my magnificently large exterior, but I’ve never really had anything really unique to me. I’m so large, yet there isn’t a piece of jewelry that couldn’t be replicated by a regular person. That’s when I came up with an idea. A living necklace! You little mites are going to become part of my jewelry, a living symbol of my greatness!”
The building was a tight fit. To make Harold’s already bad day even worse, the ring completely covered his window, trapping him in darkness. He tried to leave, but the hallways were complete anarchy. People ran around freaking out at the declaration of intent. Harold decided it was for the best to just stay put until the crowd settled down.
The titan pulled out a welding torch and began to weld metal bracers to the building. This had the dual effect of keeping the office snug in his necklace, as well as block the doors. He worked with the delicacy of an artisan, so precise and detailed was he. When the metal cooled, he held the necklace up to look at it in the light of the sun. The windows shimmered in the setting sun as the mammoth man gazed in awe at his work.
For a time, the giant’s necklace was the forefront of his wardrobe choice. He would wear them proudly around his neck as he rampaged across the city, but over time his obsessions shifted, and he crafted other pieces that took his time more. Eventually, the giant put his necklace into the jewelry box and forgot about it, never to put it on again, leaving the tiny population inside the trains and office to live in darkness forever.
Harold peered out the window of his office. There was nothing to see out there, but it wasn’t any worse a view than anybody else’s.*
The second place winner of my prompt competition, and this one’s a nice short story. It’s nice to have a project that hasn’t ballooned out of control and can be a nice, self-contained experience. One of my more SFW outings as well. Let me know what you think.