Marielle took in a deep breath, looking up to the cloudless blue sky as the trees surrounding her home in the little town of Celci stood motionless. She adored the outdoors, and normally on a Sunday she’d be out wandering and exploring the local area in an attempt to discover something interesting and new. However, she had something else she wanted to do with the rest of her day – inside the walls of an air-conditioned home. A mote of inspiration had hit her earlier when she looked up and saw a cloud in the shape of a dragon. Her fur made it seem exceptionally worse as she took the last drink of water from a reusable bottle while wishing the wind would blow.

No matter… The half-vixen jogged up the cobble steps of the old home and opened the front door, expecting to be hit in the face by a wall of cold air only to be met with oppressive mugginess. Her ears lowered as she closed the door behind her, stepping out of her sneakers and setting them neatly next to her father’s worn work boots. Her soft socks patted across the floor to the kitchen after, consciously moving her tail again to make some sort of airflow.

“Dad?!” Marielle shouted, “Daaaaad!”

“Here!” A muffled shout came from the basement, “Welcome home! Do not worry!”

Marielle sighed as she set the empty bottle near the sink and wandered towards the open basement door. It was somewhat cool downstairs, comparatively speaking. The stairwell went straight down before turning right against another stone wall. She could hear some movement and tools tinkering downstairs as she leaned against the frame.

“What happened to the air conditioning?”

“One moment, dear!” Her father shouted back.

As promised, her smiling father climbed up the steps just a few moments later. He leaned against the wall half-way up the stairs, patting dust and cobwebs out of his fur. Oleksandr was shiba-inu, with dark black fur accented by light gray and orange. He was starting to gray more around his muzzle, and his black hair was slicked back between his ears. The man sighed as well, tapping his paw on the ground and looking back down to his work in the basement.

“It would seem we were living luxurious life for too long. It's just old, like me,” He laughed, “Stone homes like this are hard to work with, especially running any sort of cooling systems after they’re built. Remember how surprised I was to hear it had air conditioning to begin with?”

“Can we fix it?”

“Unfortunately, no. The blower’s broken, but there are a lot of other things that look… Not good, inside of it. I’ve done everything I can.”

“So… We call someone to fix it?”

“Replace, probably…” Oleksandr said, before walking up the stairs. He gave his daughter a hug, before turning off the basement light and entering the sauna that was their home, “I already brought up a fan for your bedroom, little gem.”

“Okay…” Marielle said, looking down into the dark basement for a moment before shutting the door. She followed her father into the kitchen, “When can it be replaced?”

“We cannot afford it, not right now,” Oleksandr said, slightly defeated, “I’ll take the car to Tallinn, perhaps get something for your bedroom that matches better. A window unit or two. After, I’ll inquire around town to see if I can get a few more jobs to help finance it.”

“I can go back out and open up the kiosk,” Marielle suggested, opening up a closet to grab a mop and bucket. “After I get the floors cleaned up.”

“No, no,” Oleksandr chuckled, “Just relax with your fan for the day, write your stories. I’ll cook lunch before I leave for you, and maybe pick something up on the return trip.”

"Still cleaning though."

"Okay. Clean, while I cook. We are having borscht, I picked up some red beetroot yesterday!"

Marielle happily nodded, running some water to fill the bucket before following that up with floor cleaner. Oleksandr reached over to a decades old stereo system and opened up the tape deck, seeing that it had exactly the tape he was looking for. He closed it, pressed play, and the home filled with the sound of classic rock. Marielle opened all the windows, though the air was still quite stagnant, and she helped to clean while her father cooked a meal for the two of them.

First was her own bedroom. She brought up her rug and began to wipe down the floors, still able to hear her father’s music downstairs clearly. Humming along, she had no idea Mathew was on the floor. The tiny man had managed to fashion some clothes from grass that he found near the home’s entryway, and his adventures through their abode led him here. Waving his tiny arms, he watched as Marielle dipped her mop into the water, ringing it out before slapping it on the hardwood floor and beginning to scrub. Her paw stepped back, nearly crushing the little one and knocking him over. He landed on his back, looking up to the happy shiba-inu vixen as she went about her day. The blue-haired bug tried to stumble to his feet, before her mop slid right over him. He yelped, taken along for a ride as she drug him along the ground again and again. He held on as tight as he could, not sure what he should do in the meantime before she brought the mop back into her bucket and submerged him. The tiny one held his breath, gasping as the strands of the mop tightened around him, before he was back on the floor – near her desk. Exhausted, he lay still, watching as she finished cleaning before she left again…

Later that day.

Marielle pulled the rug off her bed, putting it back down onto the hardwood floor of her bedroom. Her pads were soft, but having a rug helped out a lot with the tough floor that spanned through the entire home. Her stomach full, the floors cleaned, and everything in order, she began removing bits of clothes and throwing them aside. The sound of Oleksandr’s old Lada driving off echoed through the open windows as Marielle looked over to her table filled with various notebooks and her open laptop. The fan Oleksandr had brought up for her was there as well, already on and trying its hardest to circulate air in the room for her. The bedroom was one of the first few rooms she cleaned up, and now it was time to relax and get to work on her own personal projects.

The heat was still awful. She wandered over to her chair and took a seat, forcing the fan to point towards her directly. Leaning back, Marielle closed her eyes and simply enjoyed the sensation of moving air against her fur and over her hair. She felt… Something, under her tacky paws, but didn’t think anything of it. It barely registered over the soothing feeling of air – even warm air – blowing over her.

Mathew, on the other hand, was in his own little heaven. He hadn’t moved from before, dazed still from his experience in the mop before the soft paw pad of Marielle’s left foot came to rest on him. The smell was fantastic, the perfect level of musk from her long day as the sweat stuck him to her paw pad. As her toes gripped into the wooden floors, the pad lifted up a little, taking him along for the ride. The tiny one was aroused, trapped where he was as she gathered the energy to do anything other than bask in the cool air passing over her. Every movement of her paw was intensely pleasureful for the little one. That was, until her weight shifted directly onto him. Her paw pad went from pillow-soft to rock hard as her right paw slid forward, her toes flexing into the ground as her weight pressed down on him more. All he could do was let out a tiny squeak. He was seconds from his own little climax, snuffed out a moment too soon. The pop broke Marielle out of her trance though, as she slid her left paw back to rest her ankles together slightly.

“Huh? I washed the floors at lunchtime!” She complained, feeling Mathew’s body stuck to her paw pad. She didn’t lift her foot though, at least not much. Instead, she looked around the room to see if there was anything else she missed, before finally scooting forward to her laptop, “Whatever.”

After powering on her laptop, she clicked through a few folders until she got to her latest little short adventure story. With the air blowing directly on her, she smiled – her tail wagging as she began to write. Inspired by the clouds high in the sky, she began to shift her story in that direction. The heroes found an artifact that would bring them to the plane of air, a place where clouds are solid enough to walk on and homes were built from magical stone mined from floating mountains… As her mind wandered, she tapped her paw on Mathew’s tiny body, further smashing him into her musky paw unwittingly. Later that night, after finishing with what she was writing, she’d shower – washing him away with the sweat of the day…

Never knowing the thing she crushed earlier, was a tiny person…