I waited outside the door.

Some shuffling noises echoed down the dark corridor. My heart thudding in my chest, I moved closer, as the sounds went from shuffling to feet scraping. No signal yet. Then a bang, like someone striking a wall.

“Summer!” I called under my breath. My steps began to speed up, down the dimly lit hall, turning a corner to an ajar door.  Someone was running over the floor, feet pounding. The door banged open and a bizarre sight emerged.

“Steve, get out of the way—!” Summer yelled. She never screamed when she was scared, she yelled.

She burst out of the darkness, completely naked, and pushed past me. Her legs stretched like elastic to take her further, faster. I’d never seen her run like that; she looked like some alien entity and in the dim light it looked freaky – and not helping was her lack of clothes. One second she was a speeding, stretching pale blur, the next second I was struck into by her fast moving Flexer body, like being body slammed by a huge basketball. I knocked into the wooden floor. The world went black and felt like it was still moving even after I’d stopped. She kept going.

I didn’t want to believe she said what she did. I wanted to believe she said ‘get out!’ and I had imagined the rest. Her voice must have echoed weirdly in the hallway, creating the illusion of extra speech.

She turned the corner and footsteps carried on over the floor, before the door to the corridor opened and then slammed shut again.

As I groaned and rolled over, a broad shadow descended over my body. I scrambled to get away, but a burly hand scrunched around each of my wrists and began dragging me into the darkness that Summer had just escaped from.

I was slung over a man’s back and carried into another, smaller room of the warehouse. A dirty fluorescent light strip buzzed on, the main light source apart from some dirty perfectly circular windows which glowed an eerie blue from the moonlight. There was broken glass around the floor, dirty used coffee cups, flecks of black dust and stubbed cigarettes, and a pile of Summer’s clothes. She must have stretched out of them.

I was dropped into a chair, my arms were wrenched behind me and tied with tape, and then my ankles were taped to the chair legs. My thoughts were going like a bullet train: I was worried for Summer; trying to work out why she’d bailed out of the exam like that. Performance anxiety? She’d never gotten it before. She must have seen something she hadn’t studied for. Would the board penalize her for aborting? She’d have to re-sit with another partner. Unless I deliberately failed, too, and we could re-sit together. That seemed like the thing to do – the only thing to do now. Except I was tied up.

The man appeared at my front. This guy wasn’t wearing a suit, but jeans and a hoodie, with the hood on, and underneath a mask, and weirdly, a backwards baseball cap underneath. The cap’s visor must have been cut off to fit.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not able to continue,” I announced. “My partner left the exam, so we have to reschedule.”

The man blinked slowly.

“Gonna to try something?” Then he bent in my face and roared: “Well, DO IT!”

I suppressed a flinch.

“Excuse me? Look, I just said that—”

A big-knuckled fist came flying out of nowhere and socked me hard in the face. My head snapped to the side and a blur of stars rushed past my eyes. The pain dug into my skull about a second later.

As the man slid a chair right up in front of me and dropped into it, a pair of pumps clacked across the floor.

When my vision sharpened again, a woman had appeared in the room behind the man, a woman I’d only seen on the TV news: a real life Stepford wife with a trim figure, flawless styled hair and dress, like some investment banker’s young wife at a luncheon.

It took a second to sink in.

She was a Reducer. Her name was Lucy DeLuca, and she had no place being here, in a supervised exam setting. The only place she should have been was behind bars in the high security Fangelburg Super Penitentiary.

I stared back at the broad-shouldered masked man, making the connection. The guy was also a Super, and Lucy’s henchman, Rodney the Reconstructor.

According to the archive of extensive case files I kept on my PC, Lucy and Rodney had been solo Supervillains until Rodney had a run in with Lucy’s husband, after a bar fight over gambling debt, Rodney had snapped and reconstructed him into a dollar bill and spent him. As revenge, Lucy had Rodney’s wife kidnapped, reduced, and put into a tiny world inside a glass bottle, blackmailing Rodney for visitation in exchange for being her henchman. She also implanted him with a special device to control his reconstruction ability. They were now on-off dating.

“Just listen, sweetie,” the prim woman held unblinking eye contact, “before you commit yourself to something you’ll regret.” She steepled her manicured hands in front of her face and her voice went down to a firm strain:

“If you have the Flexer deformity, like that girl, it’s time to drop the act.”

“What are you talking about?” I cried, “I’m not a Flexer! Let me go!”

Where was the test? Where were the crisis actors? Where was Summer? She must have recognized the villains. Rodney must have tried to subdue her and she stretched out of her clothes trying to escape. I’d never seen her do that before.

Lucy watched me for what seemed like a long time. Then murmured to her male henchman:

“Run the litmus test.”

Rodney jumped up and punched me in the stomach.

“No reflex,” he concluded, as I choked for breath.

The woman paced around my chair, heels clacking, but always keeping herself stationed safely behind Rodney’s bulk form.

“Then what do you do?” she sniffed down at me.

“Why would you want me? I’m just a Natural.”

Her look of puzzlement slowly turned into a smile that showed too many perfect teeth.

“Well, young man, I have a secret,” her voice simpered like I was a well-behaved child.

“I hate Supers. “Her mouth was smiling but her eyes were glassy and hard. ”They’ve watched all our traditional societal family values crumble and they won’t do anything about it. They stand back in the shadows, letting their powers grow dusty on the shelf. And ultimately, who pays the price? You Naturals pay for it, because the Super state has no interest in taking the reins from Natural leaders and trying to remake a better Natural world for them. If you want to know why your Natural society is such a disgusting, delinquent mess right now, you only have us to blame. Anyway,” she turned away, fussing over her hair. “You’re free to leave.”

I stared between her and Rodney, waiting to be untied.

She continued:

“Yes, there’s a very special way out of here. We have a little house for you down in my developing project neighbourhood, Locketopia. A little size-jigging and your new home could be anything from a condo to a castle. And best of all, no Supers. All your neighbors will be perfect, ordinary, law-abiding little Naturals. Your world has so many social problems but my development is crime-free. It’s just a slight scale adjustment, and it’ll feel l like home.”

“Where is it?” I said. All fear had left me since Summer had run out. The memory stung more than Rodney’s punches. 

She lifted her necklace, showing off the locket.

“Locketopia,” she explained.

I didn’t understand, at first.

“That’s too small.”

“Don’t be fooled by the current dimensions. It’s small to you now,” her voice rose and fell with mounting glee, “but wait ‘til you’re even smaller, then it’ll seem like a kingdom!”

Her pumps clopped closer and closer.

Unless she was totally deranged, she couldn’t really mean that the village was stored inside the locket itself. You’d have to be microscopic to live in a village that fit in the locket. Invisible to the naked eye, completely lost and forgotten to the normal size world.

You can’t shrink a person, I thought desperately. At least, you can’t shrink them all. You can reduce the body but the person inside stays the same. But my consciousness would be trapped in whichever micro hell my body occupied. My consciousness would be trapped somewhere tinier than a grain of sand. And the biggest insult; it would all belong to Lucy.

And who knew if the neighborhood inside the locket was truly perfect? It might have been a wrecked dystopia. There was no prove it wasn’t; no way for Lucy to know.

My voice came out in pure reaction:

“Fuck your tiny town! I’d rather die!”

Lucy gave a very thin-lipped smile.

“So be it. It’ll make us both better off, I suppose. Locketopia is an oasis from reality; there’s no room for problem-starters.”

Swishing around, she barked at Rodney:

“He’s a walking crime scene now. Make him a bug.”

One her polished pumps grinded over the floor in preparation.

The henchman grumbled:

“Enough bugs! Let me make him into a bubble and send him out into the park’s tot playpen.”

There was a good reason Lucy kept Rodney on a metaphorical chain. A Reconstructor was so much worse than a Reducer; not only could he change my size, he could transform me into whatever he wanted, person, animal, and inanimate object, and possibly worse of all, my new form would retain my consciousness.

This drew a darkly interested look from Lucy.

“I hate having to strangle plan A in the cradle, but that’s an awfully tempting plan B.”

“He’s not going to exist very long,” the man plunged on, bolstered by her compliment. “The kids are gonna try and snatch him. They might try and blow him around for a little while, but some kid’s gonna poke him and…pop.”

Lucy got to the point:

“And there’ll be no evidence, just a droplet on a child’s finger.”

The man suggested:

“Or tongue.”

Lucy’s explosive laughter rocked the air. She was definitely deranged, I decided.

The sound shook me as much as the thought of being popped. Would it hurt? Would I die or would my consciousness carry on as a speck of water? – and then what? Would I get absorbed into the skin of whoever popped me, or would I get swallowed? …And would I still be conscious in the stomach, maybe being turned into a digestive bubble forced through the intestinal tract? Just how long would my ordeal go on?

“Just let me go,” I strained, feeling utterly defeated, “I won’t tell anyone.”

Lucy’s face downturned over my head.

“Lying isn’t good for you, honey,” she barbed, having lost all patience and interest in me now that I had no further role in her vision. “It might even stunt your growth. Our little talk was fun. Now, Rodney’s going to get you fixed up. You’re going to feel very wet and fragile, then we’ll open up the window and let the draught do the rest. You’ll get sucked out into the grounds and we’ll take bets on the winner of ‘puncture the bubble’.”

Rodney stood over me, cracking his knuckles. I threw myself against the tape until my shoulders ached. Suddenly she stopped.

“It’s a shame,” she considered aloud. “I don’t want to hurt a Natural. I wish we could make the Flexer girl into a bubble instead.” 

She thrust a cell phone onto my lap.

“Call her up and invite her back in.”

I continued to strain against the tape. The phone slid off my leg and clattered onto the floor.

“You want to leave, yes?” Lucy grated. “Give us the Flexer, and you can. Call her.”

“She doesn’t have her phone,” I snapped. But she might, if she’d returned to the Academy van, where our phones were.

She spun away from me, pumps rapping as she passed over the wood floor.

“Rodney,” she commanded, “our guest needs to retire and have a little think. Pull up a house for him.”

The man pulled a cigarette out of his pants pocket and bent to place it on the ground. As he pinched it between his fingertips, the white stick expanded rapidly into a white block. Windows and a door appeared. When he stepped back it was a standing dollhouse on the floor. He extended one finger and gave the front door a poke, causing it to swing inward, revealing a miniature room inside.

Now Lucy was stepping over to me.

“You’re so confused,” she simpered. “Clear your head and get back to me when your priorities are straightened up. I’ll give you a couple of minutes.”

I stared at the ludicrously small house with a gradual dawning sense of realization.

“Don’t do this,” I cried, jerking myself against the chair.

She hesitated, but not in sympathy.

“I’m not as promiscuous with my power as Rodney,” she said. “He’s something of a hypnotist, too, you know, and I suppose I’m a magician. He’s going to put you into a deep sleep now, while I do a little magic trick.”

Lucy’s pumps traipsed back and forth, skirting me, while Rodney stepped around behind me.

Something smacked into the back of my head and all the lights went out.