Chapter Four: The Car Accident!
When Amber had started the eighth grade, she had taken an algebra class, instead of taking pre-algebra first. Because of this, she was unprepared for it, because she had been doing basic arithmetic in the seventh grade. She was doing well in most of her other classes, but she got an F on her first algebra quiz.
Her mother was a high school drop-out who was unfamiliar with anything above and beyond basic arithmetic, so she was unable to help her own daughter with her math homework. As a bartender barely getting by, Amber’s mother couldn’t afford a tutor. Now that I was there, that all changed.
It wasn’t difficult to communicate with Amber, because my voice was loud enough for a normally sized person to hear me, because Nixie had used her technology on me to make that possible. I used a chunk of pencil lead to explain algebra to Amber, which was tedious. It wasn't long before I had explained the fundamentals of pre-algebra to Amber so that she could understand, and I was also able to help her comprehend the concepts of whatever homework her algebra teacher had assigned on a particular day.
After tutoring her the night before a surprise pop-quiz, Amber got an A minus on a quiz that had 10 problems. She only missed one out of ten, and that was because of a clerical error, not because she didn't understand how to do the problems.
After a few weeks of this, Amber informed me that her teacher had started asking her how she had improved her math skills so drastically. He never would have guessed that Amber had a full time tutor living at home; or that her tutor was a sophomore at Bullet Bay University majoring in nuclear physics, and minoring in electrical engineering. He also never would have guessed that I had been reduced to six millimeters tall in a lab accident during a cold fusion experiment, and that I lived in a glass jar on a shelf in Amber's bedroom.
Amber's mother also noticed her improvement, and no explanation or alibi could quench her mother's curiosity. After being questioned unrelentingly by her mother about her improved grades, Amber finally decided to tell her mother the truth.
I was in the glass jar that Amber kept me in, relaxing in the small clay dwelling that Amber had sculpted for me out of clay. Amber picked up the jar, and informed me of her desicion to show me to her mother. Before I could protest, Amber carried the glass jar, with me inside, into the living room.
After being dumped out onto the coffee table and being introduced, Amber's mother was at first astonished, but after Amber explained my story, her mother remembered the newspaper articles and the television news broadcasts about Deuce Orion, the missing college student; at that point it all made sense to her.
One thing I did discern about Amber's mother was that she was concerned, and wanted to make sure that no harm would come to me. After explaining the fact that I was not extremely vulnerable to cold weather because of Nixie’s immortality device, but that I preferred warmth, the mother decided to immediately purchase a heat lamp that Amber could place above my jar at night, to keep me warm.
I was returned to my jar, and Amber and her mother piled into the car, to drive thirty miles into the main town to go to a well supplied pet store, to purchase a heat lamp. Once in the car, Amber kept my jar in her hand, but soon placed it in the cup holder above the ashtray below the dash board, so her hands would be free to look through her many C.D.'s, to figure out what she wanted to listen to.
The car got on the freeway, and we were on our way to the same college town where Bullet Bay University was located. We went back down over the Cuesta grade, in the opposite direction that we had come when I had accidentally hitched a ride in their car, when I had mistakenly thought that that they were heading South, instead of North.
Amber put the C.D. that she wanted to listen to into the C.D. player, but still resumed looking through her collection when the accident happened. From my vantage point, I could not see what caused it, but I assume that someone tried to change lanes in front of our car, and Amber's mother was cut off. Luckily, both Amber and her mother had seatbelts on, but the window on the passenger side where Amber was sitting was rolled down, so when the car went off of the side of the road and flipped, My jar was thrown from the car.
Amazingly, the car flipped over completely, but Amber and her mother were unhurt. The car was totalled, and my jar was thrown violently from the vehicle, and rolled down the hill and hit a boulder that was wedged half-submerged in the ground, shattering the glass jar I was in.
I was a little shook up, but when I stood up, I knew that this might be my only chance to escape from Amber and her mother. There was a possibility that Amber's mother would have decided to return me to my relatives, but I couldn't count on that. So, after looking back to make sure that the two of them were safe and unhurt, I started off on my own.
We were almost all of the way into town when the accident happened, so it wouldn't have been too far for a normally sized man to reach town, but I was six millimeters tall, so the distance for me was significantly magnified. It was early afternoon, and it was less than one more mile into town, so I expected to get there some time not long after nightfall.
During the first hour of my journey, Amber tried to locate me, and I was worried that she would capture me, so I walked West instead of directly South, to throw her off of my trail, and I was successful. At times I could see her in the distance, calling out my name, but I was so small that from that distance I was undetectable to the human eye, so I wasn't spotted.
As early afternoon became late afternoon, Amber's voice could be heard farther and farther away in the distance, until finally I couldn't hear her at all. I lost a lot of time on my detour, but if I had gone South, as Amber had assumed that I would, there would have been no way to elude her, and I would've surely been captured again.
After nightfall, I reached the top of a hill, and I could see the outskirts of town below. It was soon going to be the beginning of September. I had to make a camp to protect myself from predators.
That night, before I fell asleep in my hidden campsite, I pondered the events of the past month. The lab accident, getting captured by Amber, and my serendipitous escape. I wondered if I should continue on my quest to contact Jerrica, or if I should try to get in touch with the professor.
I had studied enough about nuclear physics in college to know that not enough was known about the elusive neutrino particle; that is why the professor's theory was so revolutionary. He had actually found a way to manipulate these particles, and remove them from the quarks and gluon particles that made up the protons and neutrons that are the components of the nuclei of all atoms.
I also knew that because so little was known about neutrinos, there was little if any hope at all of replacing the neutrinos that had been subtracted from my body. This is the reason I had first decided to contact Jerrica, because I didn't believe that the professor could do anything to help me, and I figured that if I had no choice but to accept my current situation, it would be better to establish contact with Jerrica, a girl who was in love with me, than the professor.
I knew I could trust the professor, and that if he was to find me, he would return me to my mother or any relative of my choice, but was that what I really wanted? sure, I would be safe, but my mother was so over-protective of me, she would probably make sure that I would remain single until I was 80 years old.
After seeing the way Amber and her mother had decided that my freedom was an option, not a right that was carved into granite, I now realized that even Jerrica could probably not be trusted, either. When human beings have unlimited power over other human beings, there is an instinctive human weakness to abuse that power, and I wasn't sure there were any normal-sized human beings on Earth that I could trust any more, even my own relatives.
Now that I was free, I wondered if my best option was to stay away from normal-sized people for the rest of my life. It would be a difficult existence, but it was probably the best plan. I decided to wait until morning to make my decision, so I went to sleep under the stars on that clear late August night, free for the first time in over a month. Time would only tell what fate had in store for me, Deuce Orion, the six millimeter man!
To Be Continued!
Giantess World
