This Is How The Movie Should Have Gone After I Shrunk The Kids (But It Would Have Been Very Short)
By Juxton


"Have you worked the bugs out yet, dad?" asked Nick as he examined a splatter of exploded apple on the wall as if it were a piece of artwork.

Wayne Szalinsky looked up from his soldering in surprise. "Nick! I didn't hear you come in. OW!!" he shouted as he absent-mindedly burned his thumb with the soldering iron. He put it in his mouth, sucking on it....his thumb, not the soldering iron. He's not that absent-minded...really....

There was a long silence. Nick waited patiently. After a moment, Wayne looked up again. "Did you say something?"

Nick smiled. "I just asked if you'd worked the bugs out? I'm really looking forward to trying this thing out."

"Oh!" Wayne suddenly grew solemn. "Not yet. So far I just have a very large, very expensive applesauce maker."

"Neat. But maybe it has something to do with that utterly pointless laser that shoots through that pointless lens on the side and seems to drastically heat up the ray," Nick pontificated.

Wayne thought about this for a moment, looking at the aforementioned lens. "Hmm...nah, it's a useful plot point. Without it, the audience wouldn't consider me a pathetic, scatter-brained mad scientist that accidentally bungles upon great discoveries without knowing much about what he's doing. Besides, the way the lens refracts the laser and causes it to heat up to a much higher and ultimately more damaging temperature looks spectacularly cool!"

"Good point, dad," Nick smiles broadly, pushing up his glasses. Szalinsky pushes his own glasses up, himself smiling, and ruffles Nick's hair. "Now what do you say we try blowing up a few more apples without making any real progress in our quest to solve the apple-blowing-up-thingy? Ow!" he burns himself with the iron again, looks at it, frowning, and thoughtlessly shoves it into his pocket. "Ow! Now Nick, OW!, take this apple, OW!, and put it, OW!, onto the stool, OW!"

"Take the soldering iron out of your pocket, dad."

"Okay. Ow!" he grabs it by the hot end and just tosses it on the table. grabs an apple, he hops gleefully over to the apple-spattered stool (almost slipping and falling onto his backside in apple remains), and places it there. "Man, we sure do spend a lot on apples," he thinks to himself. Professor Szalinsky is aiming the giant ray at his son's back. Nick turns around, sees the little red dot on his shirt marking where the ray will shoot, and steps to one side, shaking his head. "Okay, Nicky, lets see if my soldering did any good."

"What did you solder together, dad?"

"I don't know. Just a couple of wires I found on the floor. They're lying over there on the table."

Nick nods. "Neat."

"Here, Nicky. Put these goggles on. They'll protect you from being blinded by the inevitable flying appleseeds."

"Neat."

"Stop saying that."

"'K."

"Ready? Here goes." He pushes a button, causing a lot of humming, some rumbling, and quite a bit of steam to come off of the ray-gun. "Dad's right," Nick thinks. "That pointless laser is going to look really NEAT in all that steam."

"Stop saying that."

"Sorry.....Neat! You read my thoughts!"

"Nicky!" then, a perfectly timed baseball came crashing through the window behind the gun, ricocheted off of several expensive and highly sensitive pieces of equipment and causing a lot of damage but at the same time somehow not enough damage to prevent the machine from working the way it should, and landed in the pointless lens just in time to block the pointless laser from being refracted into a much higher and ultimately more damaging temperature. Luckily, however, this caused the baseball to start burning and shaking which provided more smoke and it was still a cool effect, though not as spectacularly cool had the ball not been there. At the sound of the baseball making its entrance, Nick and Prof. Szalinsky dodged away in fear, and unfortunately for them but fortunately for our readers directly into the path of the oncoming ray, which they discovered was by far a cooler looking effect than that dinky little pointless red laser. As the beam struck them, they instantly shrank out of sight. Wayne felt dizzy and disoriented, but immediately understood what was going on.

"Oh no! We were exploded into little pieces by that stupid red laser!" Well, maybe understood what was going on was the wrong choice of words.

"No we didn't, dad. The machine worked. We've been shrunk to...well...I'd say 1/4th of an inch tall."

"How do you know that?"

"Because we're standing next to a ruler conveniently placed here for the benefit of the audience."

"Oh. Neat."

"Hey!"

"Sorry, Nicky." Wayne looks around him, then up at the ray gun. "Well that's weird."

"What?"

"I thought I was building a teleportation ray."

"Oh." For the purposes of moving the story along, they suddenly began to hear and feel a loud booming noise, followed by an ungodly roar. They covered their ears and looked toward the source of the sound: the attic door. With a great rush of wind, the door opened, and in stepped a giant version of Amy Szalinsky, Wayne's daughter and Nick's sister. She had on her usual attire of a shirt and blue jeans with tennis shoes. We'll make them white Nikes since we don't know what she actually wore. "Wow! She must be...." Nick did some calculating in his head while this author did it on his calculator and most likely got it wrong, "...let's see, subtract the 1, carry the 12, divide by .22348, Wow! 1560 feet tall."

"If you say so, Nicky, I don't know. Don't they have a website that does that for you?"

"Yeah, but I forget the url."

"Ah. Should we get her attention?"

"Well, dad, at our size I calculate our chances to be about 1560 to 1/4 against us and the chances of our meeting a horrible and gruesome death beneath her shoes very likely, but what the hay."

Off they ran, waving and shouting at the tops of their lungs, toward the towering blond who was at that moment scanning the attic trying to figure out what had caused that loud crashing sound. "That's strange," Amy said, "Dad only leaves the machine running when he wants it to randomly point at anything that enters the room and blow it up. Wonder why it's running now." She continued to move further into the room, regardless of the ray randomly pointing at things in the room and shrinking them out of sight, which she chose to ignore since they weren't blowing up like they usually did. Nick, being younger and thus having more energy than his dad, had sprinted well ahead of his old man and was fast approaching Amy who was in turn fast approaching him, though she didn't realize it. With at least a little apprehension as his giant sister's shadow fell over him, Nick stopped in his tracks and simply stared up at her. She was absolutely colossal. Her white shoes seemed to stretch up forever, and then her blue-jean clad legs took over, stretching up another forever where they met her white shirt, which didn't quite stretch up forever since her body was shorter than her legs, and then to her gigantic but seemingly small, because of the 2 and not quite a 3rd forevers from Nick, face. Nick noticed with even more apprehension that her face was not looking anywhere near him, and in fact was staring uninterestedly at the various objects around the room which kept shrinking for some unknown yet spectactularly cool looking reason. And, she was still walking toward him with great, booming, fast steps.

"Not neat," Nick muttered, his jaw hanging slack and drool beginning to dribble over his lip. He didn't even move, but did soil himself, as Amy's enormous right sneaker lifted up, then over, then down upon him. "I hate being right," Nick whispered, staring up at his sister's dirty shoe-sole and noticing the small pebbles, bits of some matter that might be used gum, and perhaps even part of an insect smashed into the tread while we're adding to the fantasy. And then Nick met Nike (c'mon, you know I had to say it).

Wayne stopped dead, but not as dead as his son. He watched in slow realization as his daughter's foot covered the minuscule form of Nick so quickly that it defied comprehension. Luckily, the crunch and splatter of his son's death was drowned out by the loud, earth-shaking boom created by Amy's step. "Wow. Guess Nicky was right about the waving and shouting thing. Now, where was I? Oh yeah. AMY!!!" Wayne resumes waving and shouting. Lucky for Prof. Szalinksy, Amy had stopped moving as soon as she stepped on Nick. Of course she hadn't noticed stepping on anything, but she had just decided that was a good place to stop...right in the middle of the attic floor....right in the perfect line of fire for the shrink-ray. Wayne ran up to his daughter's toe and began pounding on the rubber of her shoe-sole.

"AMY! AMY, IT'S YOUR FATHER! LOOK DOWN HERE!" Amy didn't look down, but she did shrink down as soon as the ray finally settled upon her. Suddenly she found herself standing a few feet away from her dad, who was for some reason pounding his fists in the air and shouting while looking up at the ceiling.

"Hi, daddy," she said. Her dad kept shouting something about her looking down, so she did. "Hi, Nicky." flattened brother said nothing. A puzzled look came over Amy's face. "You don't look so good, bro. Something wrong? Daddy, what's wrong with Nicky?"

Wayne stopped shouting and looked in surprise at his daughter. "Amy? Oh, hi. What? Nick? Um, you stepped on him, honey."

"Huh?"

"My teleportation ray shrunk me and Nick and you stepped on him like a bug."

"Weren't you building a bread slicing machine?"

"What?"

Amy looked back down at Nick's corpse. "A bug, huh? I stepped on him?" She then giggles and toyingly scrapes the toe of her shoe on Nick's flat face, poking at his smashed glasses. "Well, I always thought those glasses made him look kinda like a bug. Wish I could do that to those two annoying boys next door." Both then heard some more loud booming noises and rumbling sounds. They looked at the attic door and saw Mrs. Szalinsky come pounding into the room dressed much like her daughter, but she was wearing brown loafers and a corduroy jacket along with her shirt and jeans. Very stylish...uh, sure.

"Look, Amy, it's mom. Let's run at her while waving our arms and shouting."

"Does that work?"

"Nick didn't think so, but nothing's been proven so far." Amy decided to just watch to see if it did work.

Mrs. Szalinsky knew what had happened as soon as she walked into the attic and saw the ray-gun pointing randomly around the room. "Guess Wayne finally got his giant balloon inflater to work."

"IT'S A TELEPORTATION RAY!" shouted Wayne.

"Are you sure it's not a bread slicer?" asked Amy.

"Ew! A bug!" cried Mrs. Szalinksy, and instinctively lifted her right foot and stomped on her shrunken husband. She gave him a few twists, smirking in satisfaction, then admired her handiwork. Amy stared at the squashed remains of her dad, watching as they first stretched out, being partially stuck on her mother's sole, then snapped back into place. "Bummer," she said, then her face screwed up in concentration. "Hey, wait a minute! That's not a bread slicer!" She ran over to the Wayne-splotch. "Daddy! You invented a shrink ray, didn't you?" And then she heard a roar above her.

"Ew! Another bug!" Amy looked up to see her mother lifting her huge ked up and over her. Fortunately for Amy, unfortunately for the rest of the world, and again fortunately for the audience, the shrink-ray took that moment to center on Mrs. Szalinsky, and another perfectly-timed baseball took the same moment to come crashing through another pane of glass, ricochet off of some more expensive and delicate equipment, hit a precise sequence of numbers and letters on the machine's keyboard, pause a moment to press the backspace and correct an error, bounced off the enter key, then fell uselessly to the floor. Another not-so-spectacularly-cool-looking-since-we've-seen-it-several-times-before ray of...uh, ray shot from the machine and hit Mrs. Szalinsky in the chest, throwing her off balance and thus saving Amy's life.

"Oh no!" she thought, "I'm going to be inflated and I'm not a balloon." And she began to feel a rising sensation as the room shrank around her. Amy watched all this happen, and when her mother began to grow, she herself grew confused again. "Darn, guess I was wrong both times. It's not a bread slicer and it's not a shrink ray. Hmmm....Ah!...no....Is it a washing machine? No...."

And now we shall leave her to ponder the nature of the machine. We last see her bending over her father's remains in an attempt to get the answer from him.


And what about the sequel Honey I Didn't Blow Up The Kid But I Blew You Up But Really I Didn't Even Do That Since Right Now I'm Just A Stain On The Bottom Of Your Shoe And It Doesn't Matter Anyway Because It Was Supposed To Be A Teleportation Ray In The First Place?