Claire realizes she must have drifted into a nap as she relaxed outside on the towel in her backyard. A faint honking sound coming from the ground in front of her wakes her. She lifts her head and rests her chin on her arms, looking down on what appears to be a little toy truck… but it looks as though there is something moving in the back of it. Bugs? Curious, Claire grips her sunglasses and removes them from her face. She continues to stare at the truck and its passengers but is still unable to discern just what the energetic little beings are.
Inside the truck, everyone watches and waves as the massive young woman continues lowering her head towards them. They stare up at her in awe, enraptured by her incredible beauty. They can feel her breath washing over them as the blue eyes scrutinize their movements.
A look of sheer confusion spreads across Claire’s face as she studies the 3 creatures in the bed of the truck that has somehow found its way into her backyard. She lifts her head and checks all around her for any sign of this being some sort of prank. She sees nothing suspicious and lowers her head again. The beings look like people… very tiny people. Claire brings her face in for an even closer look, stopping just inches away from the truck. “What are you little things? Am I really seeing this right now? You… you look like Amy from across the street. Mrs. Parker… is that you?!” asks Claire to one of the beings in the bed of the truck.
Everyone in the truck is thrilled, they have finally been discovered, and not misidentified as bugs but recognized as people. Michael puts his right arm out the window and repeatedly smacks at the outside of the truck’s door in an attempt to get Claire’s attention.
Claire sees movement within the truck and decides to get a closer look. She grips the tiny vehicle between the index fingers and thumbs of both hands, thumbs on the right side and fingers on the left. Raising it slowly, she peers inside.
The passengers are shaken by the small movement, everyone in the bed of the truck quickly sits down, afraid of falling out and onto the ground if they don’t, a fall that could prove hazardous to them now that they’re suspended in the air, held in place by the large fingers. Jim turns off his vehicle.
“Claire! Can you hear me?!” Michael yells up to the woman.
“Michael…” says Claire in a voice marked by shock/surprise, “Michael is that really you? What’s going on right now?”
“Claire, we need your help. Yes, yes it’s me, and you were right before too, that’s Amy in the back and these other people are my friends. Could you VERY CAREFULLY bring us inside so we can discuss the situation?”
Claire still looks incredibly confused. “Uhmmm… sure… yeah, yeah, okay.” Claire sets the truck back down onto the ground so she can pick it up again using only her right index finger and thumb. She lifts it into the air and places it in her left palm, keeping her fingers together, the back of the vehicle positioned towards her wrist.
As the young woman rises from the towel, the elevation of the truck in her hand continues to increase. The passengers are transported up and up along her perfect body. They pass her navel adorned with some sort of diamond-like piece of jewelry before coming to a halt between it and her breasts above them, pushing her shirt outwards and causing the orange Amon Amarth logo on the fabric of the small T-shirt to stretch a bit. Her breasts weren’t particularly large, but of course to the people inside Jim’s truck, they were quite massive.
Having reached her full height, Claire removes her bare feet from the towel and begins walking through the grass towards where she had deposited her flip flops behind her before she laid down on the lawn to relax. She reaches them and slips her feet into them, her soles smoothly sliding along the black foam. With her shoes now on, she begins walking towards the back door of her home. She looks down at the small truck in her left hand. “Don’t fall” she says to its occupants before looking back up. Reaching the house, she climbs the two stairs onto the deck. In another few steps she reaches the door, gripping its handle with her right hand she turns it and pulls it open.
From within the truck, the groups watches as what to them amounts to the monolithic gate to their salvation is opened, air whooshing around them from the action. Their giant transporter steps into her home, pulling the door shut behind her before carrying her cargo through the kitchen and into the living room.
Claire enters her living room and approaches the center. She lowers herself in front of the rectangular marble coffee table, planting her bare knees in the soft plum-colored carpet below. Slowly and with great care, she brings her left hand to the edge of the table and tilts it up slightly, forming an incline that faces downwards towards the table. The little truck rolls off her fingers and onto the surface, her guests have been delivered.
Amy, Isaac, and Scott look up as an index finger pushes down gently on the roof of the truck. They stare up at the large digit while Claire pushes the vehicle forward at an angle so as to put some distance between the people and the table’s edge.
Retracting her arm back to her side, Claire leans in and brings her face closer to the group of people on her table, staring down at them. “So, uh… what… how…” The look of confusion is still prominent on the young woman’s gorgeous face as she struggles to find the right words for her questions. She makes small movements with the sides of her mouth as she thinks. “Okay, so… what is happening? Why are you guys so small?”
Michael gets out of the truck and takes a few steps away from it. “Like I said before, we really need your help. You know me, I’m kind of a weird guy, I make inventions in my spare time. You know this, right?”
“Mmmm, yeah…”
Well, lately I’ve been working on a certain machine… something went wrong, I’m still not exactly sure what, but it shrunk us. All of us.
Amy climbs out of the bed of the truck and stands beside her husband.
“You guys really are real, aren’t you? WOW, can I… can I touch you?”
Claire begins moving her arm before she has even finished asking her question. Slowly, she brings her pinky finger towards the shrunken couple. Amy screams and pushes her arms out in front of her defensively, pressing both hands into the large deep black fingernail. Claire’s eyes widen with the sensation of feeling the pathetic touch of resistance at her fingertip.
Michael grabs his wife and pulls her away from the finger. “Claire, please, be careful. We really need your help here, you’re our only hope.”
Claire again returns her arm to her side. Sorry, sorry, okay… what do you need me to do, Michael?
“This is only half of our group, I need you to-”
“There’s more of you like this?!”
“Yes, yes, please let me finish.”
“Okay, sorry, continue.”
“There’s another man and four women, we had to leave them behind so we could journey over here in my friend Jim’s truck to try and get your attention. The others are waiting for you to rescue them, they’re on a rock at the right of the bottom of my porch. You need to listen to me because this is very important, okay? Are you listening?”
“Yeah, keep talking.”
“You cannot go through the front yard to get them. Something is wrong with the machine, if it sees you coming, it will shrink you too. I don’t think any of us want that to happen, now do we?”
“No, definitely not. So, what should I do then?
“My back door is unlocked. I need you to enter through there, but FIRST, before going back outside through the front door, I need you to get something from inside the house. The machine on the porch that shrunk us is very large, it‘s the first prototype. In a drawer upstairs in my office is the most recent model. It’s much more powerful and reliable, and it’s smaller than a television remote control. I need you to grab it and put it in your pocket, okay?”
“Okay. Will I need a key or anything to unlock the door to your office or the drawer that the device is in?"
“No, everything is unlocked. Okay… so after you’ve secured the device, you’ll need to go back downstairs and out through the front door to get onto the porch.”
“Are you sure the machine won’t be able to shrink me?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, you say that now but you didn’t think it was going to shrink you and everyone else either, did you?”
Everyone on the table laughs except Michael. “Look, all of its visual sensors are on the forward-facing hemisphere of the machine. It won’t be able to see you, and if it can’t see you, it can’t shrink you. Okay?”
“Fine, it better not shrink me.”
“It won’t. Alright. So when you get onto the porch you’ll be behind the machine. STAY BEHIND IT! Here’s what you’re going to have to do, so listen carefully. The machine is essentially a sphere with three legs to keep it standing. A tripod of sorts. Put your hand underneath the sphere and you’ll feel a gear-like knob. Turn this knob to the left until it and the piece it’s attached to falls free and just set it down on the porch. What you will have just done is removed the power source from the machine. It will then be safe to come out from behind it. Do you still follow?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, with the machine out of commission you will then be safe to walk on the front lawn. You need to be EXTREMELY careful. There are 5 people down there. They should still be on the rock to the right of the bottom stair where they were told to wait but PLEASE watch where you step in case they ventured off of and away from this rock for any reason. Find them, pick them up, and carefully carry them and the handheld device from my office back here to your living room. So that’s the plan, any questions?
“No Michael, I understand.”
“Okay Claire, please hurry. It’s dangerous out there at this size. Thanks for helping us.”
Claire rises to her full height and looks down at the people on the table. “You’re welcome. Okay, I’ll be back soon. Stay right there.” Claire giggles at her own joke, she knows the little people can’t leave the table without taking a long fall onto the carpet below.
The group on the table watches as she turns and walks away towards the back door in the kitchen. They hear the clacking sound of her flip flops slapping against her heels and soles as she walks, a sound they’ve spent a fair part of the day becoming quite familiar with. They can still see her far off in the distance as she pulls the door open, her long black hair blowing gently in the light breeze generated by the movement of the door. Soon the door is sealed shut with a slam and she disappears as she walks off behind it.