Faith sat in her bed, focused on her current task: painting her nails. She had decided that he toes should match her fingers, so as she applied a second coat of Deep Purple she replied to her friend Kyra’s inquiry.
“Of course you should ask Leo out. He is like, totally hot with those blue eyes, you know? And he must keep in shape, being on the football team. And his smile…”
Kyra, who had been sitting at Faith’s computer desk reading the latest issue of Vogue, slapped down the magazine and opened her mouth in mock outrage. “Damn, maybe I should back off? It sounds like you have been checking him out enough for the both of us!”
Faith, having finished her toes, just shrugged her shoulder and bent down to blow her toenails dry. “What can I say…I guess I just have a thing for pretty guys.” She then looked up to Kyra, who was grinning at her from her seat at the desk. “What are you smiling about anyway? Not worried I’ll snatch Leo from you?”
Kyra continued grinning. “No. I was just thinking. I guess I got the same weakness that you do. You know, for pretty boys. Like your brother. You think he’d give me his number?”
“Oh please. Don’t be dumb, Carson? That’s just…gross. You shouldn’t even be thinking about my brother that way. Barf city.” Faith sighed, disgusted, as she rose from the bed and moved over to the computer speakers, which was blaring music almost too loud to hold a conversation over. She turned the volume down, which drew protests from Kyra.
“What are you doing? I liked that song.” Kyra’s eyebrows arched, her singular expression of anger or annoyance. It just made Faith smile.
“Well, I thought you might like to know,” Faith began, motioning to her bedroom window, which had a view of the driveway, “that my brother just got home. In case, you know, you wanna profess your undying love for him for something.”
Kyra pulled her magazine back up in front of her face to hide the grin that had formed there, and slapped her bare feet up on the desk, crossing ankles. “Eh, I was just messing with you about that. I could care less.” She knew she was just tempting Faith to push further into the subject of Carson, but the game was put on hold when a large boom shook the house. Faith, having just finished her nails, dropped the bottle of nail polish from her hand in shock. While only slightly more affecting than a resounding thunderclap, the clear outside sky led the girls to panic.
Faith, wide-eyed, instantly thought of her father’s lab. “Oh my god, I think that was my Dad’s lab, in the basement. Something must have exploded!” She leapt up from the bed, heading straight for her door. “I gotta see if he’s okay!” And then she was gone.
Kyra, slightly less panicked, slipped her feet off of the desk and into the pair of black fuzzy slippers she had brought over. Rolling her eyes at the interruption, she followed Faith out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
Faith stood at the doorway to the basement, calling down to her father, when Kyra caught up to her.
“Dad! Dad! You okay?” Faith shouted, her voice echoing down the stairs. Silence greeted her in response.
“Are you just going to yell down the stairs? Let’s go down and check it out.” Kyra said, annoyance in her voice as she began to push past her friend. Faith held an arm out to stop her.
“We’re not allowed down there. Dad said it was dangerous.” She said, but Kyra only ducked her arm and started down the stairs, stopping to look back up at Faith.
“If your dad is hurt and needs our help, I think that sort of overrides safety precautions.” Kyra rolled her eyes for punctuation, continuing down the stairs. Faith stood at the doorway for a moment longer, biting her lip as she made a decision. She knew Kyra was right, and that they had to go check, but her father had always been so insistent of the danger…but she made up her mind, and rushed down the stairs after her friend.
When they reached the bottom, they were shocked. Other than a little smoke that was quickly fading away, there was nothing. They walked cautiously past the little living room, toward the workshop of the basement, but saw no one.
“Well…maybe it was a tire backfiring or something.” Faith said, walking around the gray cement floor, her arms spread in confusion. She was relieved to find that her father wasn’t on the floor, in a pool of his own blood or something.
“Well then what’s this?” Kyra bent over, picking up a burnt piece of metal, partially cylindrical in shape. “Still kind of warm.”
“My dad has never been very clean. Just throw that away, I see some garbage cans over there.” Faith pointed to a line of garbage cans, full of similar looking junk.
“Well,” Kyra said, walking over to the garbage can and dropping the scrap in, “Lets get out of here before he sees us down here. I’d hate for you to get in trouble.”
“That was so strange.” Faith said, her hands on her hips as she looked around the lab. “I could have swore that sound came from here.”
Looking over the various pieces of junk at the trashcans, Kyra wrinkled her nose in disgust as she said, “What does your father work on anyway?”
Faith sighed. “I don’t know. He would never tell me. Some kind of secret.” She began to walk toward the stairs, her bare feet slapping against the cement. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.”
Kyra left the trashcans and followed her friend up the stairs, looking back around the basement. “I don’t see what could be so dangerous down here.” She laughed as she walked through the doorway, back to the kitchen.
Meanwhile, immediately following the explosion of energy, Samuel's world went out of focus, his skin instantly growing almost unbearably hot. He felt as if he was hurtling through space, completely disoriented. Then, the ghost of the light flash still dancing across his blurry sight, he felt himself land onto his back, hard. His vision continued to swim, but now he could start to focus. His whole body aching, he quickly rolled to his feet, disorientation causing him to sway as if in a drunken stupor. It took a moment, but his vision fully returned, and the vertigo left him as abruptly as it came. It was then he saw what he feared the most.
His basement lab had become indescribably large. Quickly calculating in his head, he realized that the machine, running at max output, was capable of reducing matter to 1/10th of 1 percent of its original size. At six feet tall, that meant that he had become 0.07 of an inch tall. People were now mile-tall creatures nearly incapable of communicating. The reality of the moment almost paralyzed him with fear, until he heard the shouting from behind him.
Turning to look, shock settling in, he saw a very confused looking Eric running toward him from across the vast expanse of cement floor. Thankfully, the floor was polished, so no dips and grooves surrounded them, making movement much easier than otherwise. Eric, who kept himself in shape, was nonetheless winded by the time he reached the befuddled Samuel.
"Sam....what...the...the fuck...happened." Eric breathed in heavily as he stopped only a few strides away from his colleague, his voice shaky with fear and rage.
"We shrunk. The machine...it wasn't supposed to...Carson." Realization dawned on Samuel. Carson and his friends had been in the basement as well, and a quick spin revealed no giants in the basement. They had been caught in the explosion as well, and were now nearly imperceptibly miniscule, a world away on the other side of the basement.
Panic now set in, as Samuel began to take off in the direction of the garbage cans, now worried only with the safety of his son. He had only gotten a few step when Eric grabbed his arm, yanking him back, his grip tight.
"Where are you going? You have to fix this, Sam! Do you understand our predicament? You can't just go charging off! And we have to find Fred!"
"I have to find Carson! Don't you understand, my son is out there..." Samuel nodded his head toward the monolithic garbage cans that seemed a world away.
Eric let Sam's arm drop. "Let's just find Fred first, then we'll find your son. We have to stick together. Who knows how many dangers..."
Samuel shook his head. "Listen, every living organism in this basement has now been reduced in size. We won't have to worry about any bugs."
Eric raised an eyebrow. "And what about help? We're kind of in trouble here. No one knows we're down here, but even if they did, they would never find us."
Samuel calmed himself, and began to think clearly. "Lena just left for a three day trip, and Faith knows better than to come down here. We have time to group everyone up, and think of some way..."
The end of his sentence was cut off by the intense vibrations that sped through the air around them.
"Dad! Dad! You okay?" came the voice of Faith, a thunderous noise that filled the room from far in the distance. The words were hard to make out, but he was sure those were what was spilling from the top of the stairs. Samuel figured that she must have heard the explosion and had come to ensure that he was okay. He also knew that he had no way to respond to her, which might mean...
"Eric, we've got to find Fred." Samuel spoke quickly, his fear returning.
It was then he heard the cacophanus thud of feet pounding the wood stairs down to the basement. He stood in awe as a gigantic creature, Blond hair trailing down to a brightly colored top, shorts, and long pale legs ending in fuzzy slippers. It was Kyra, and she was coming down the stairs. Following behind her was the dark-haired form of his daughter, Faith, her bare feet forming their own ominous thuds. They reached the bottom of the stairs, and then began to slowly walk towards them. Samuel knew that right now, at such a great distance, they didn't seem like mile-tall human beings. But in moments, they might be standing right where he and Eric now stood, with no idea of the unfortunate victims trying to survive their mere presence.
"Run, Eric. RUN!" Samuel then began to take off toward the garbage cans, with Eric following quickly behind, as the vibrations that shot through the ground grew closer.