It was a warm, late September Saturday morning around 11 AM, and Max was just waking up from a long, restless night's sleep. As of today, he'd officially been attending Ventus University for one full month—and so far, things weren't exactly going the way he'd always hoped.
After spending most of his senior spring fantasizing about heading off to college in the fall, his first taste of the "best four years of his life" had been average at best. He hadn't tried out for any teams or clubs, he hadn't made any friends aside from his roommate (who was stuck with him all year either way), and, worst of all, he hadn't been invited to a single party. While many of these problems likely stemmed from his innate shyness, social awkwardness, and fondness for staying holed up in his room, playing video games and watching anime whenever he wasn't in class, he had a feeling his choice of school wasn't doing him any favors.
Like most former women's colleges, Ventus's student body still skewed overwhelmingly female—and when Max had started the application process, that had sounded like a huge plus. With four girls to every boy in any class, he assumed he'd have a much better shot at getting a girlfriend and finally losing his virginity. The school's strong academic rankings, athletic performance, postgraduate job placement numbers and sunny Southern California campus didn't hurt, either. The only real downside was its infamously idiosyncratic House System, a network of powerful sororities that dominated all aspects of student life.
According to the school's website, at least 80% of female undergrads belonged to one of the major houses — Diana (the "Jock House"), Minevera (the "Nerd House"), Juno (the "Goth House"), Fortuna (the "Hot Girl House"), and Proserpina (the "Loser House") — and by the end of his orientation weekend, he could tell that the limits of the campus social scene ended pretty clearly beyond their doors. Barred from official membership in any of the houses as a male, his only way into the school's biggest and best parties seemed to be befriending as many affiliated girls as possible—and for a guy who still had trouble making anything more than small talk with members of the opposite sex, that was increasingly feeling like a pretty tall order.
As a result, his first month at school had mainly consisted of going to class, studying, gaming, sleeping, and waking up to do it all over again—which didn't represent a significant shift from the way he'd spent most of his teens. The only difference was that now he was constantly surrounded by reminders of everything he was missing. Every night, as the campus came alive with at least five separate parties, all he could do was sit in his room in the Unaffiliated Students Dorm and long for some kind of breakthrough. Yesterday, he'd finally gotten one.
When he'd returned from classes, he'd found his roommate, Zeke, eagerly waiting for him. While Zeke was every bit as much of a goofy, dorky gamer and anime aficionado as Max, he was also noticeably more good-looking and better at talking to girls. Perhaps owing to these qualities, the stocky, fluffy-haired Mexican-American nerd was blossoming into quite the campus social butterfly. He was already getting invited to parties at all the major Houses, and he never missed an opportunity to rub it in Max's face.
Last night, though, Zeke's message was very different. He was about to head out to yet another party, but this time, he'd gotten the go-ahead to bring Max. Faced with the prospect of entering an exciting new social situation with only his roommate of four weeks for company, Max then did what many introverted, anxious college-aged young men might do. Egged on by Zeke, he decided to pre-game—and by the time they finally left for the party, the far less experienced drinker of the two had more "liquid courage" than he knew what to do with.
Now, about fourteen hours later, his memory of the rest of the night was one big blur. If the pounding in his head and the queasy feeling in his stomach were any indication, it seemed like all he had to commemorate his first big college party was the mother of all hangovers. Then he opened his eyes, and everything got even weirder.
"What the…"
Right away, three things became frighteningly clear. First, he wasn't in his dorm room. Second, he was naked. Third, and most importantly, he had shrunk.
"Oh, fuck…"
Like any modern teenager, Max was no stranger to news stories about people getting dosed with drugs at college parties. Still, he'd never heard of anything like this. He was lying on a vast expanse of cheap brown plywood — seemingly the top of a giant coffee table — and based on the relative size of his immediate surroundings, including several pencils and a half-empty can of Red Bull, he couldn't have been more than three inches tall.The more he saw, the more questions flooded into his mind. How had this happened? Was there any cure? And where the heck was he?
Rubbing his eyes and taking another look around, the freshly-shrunken freshman immediately got several clues about that last part. To his right was a modest flatscreen TV hooked up to an aging Nintendo 64; to his left were two well-worn green couches covered in empty takeout containers and crumpled rolling papers, and behind him, mounted above another green couch, two huge posters of Bob Marley and Pulp Fiction loomed overhead like giant billboards. Putting all of this together, it didn't take a genius to figure out that he had woken up in his very own common room—in the residential building known to everyone else at Ventus as the Unaffiliated Students Dorm or "USD."
If the jocks in House Diana were the strongest students on campus, the nerds in Minerva were the smartest, the goths in Juno were the scariest, the e-girls in Fortuna were the hottest, and the losers in Proserpina were the grossest, the undergrads lumped into USD were the most down-to-earth—and as a result of being held at arm's length from the social scene of the major houses, they usually stayed that way. A mix of stoners, slackers, chillers and normies, the ones who stuck around for all four years tended to be steady as a rock, either through intense strength of character or a constant stream of weed and booze. In other words, in a school of intense extremes, they were simply, refreshingly average—from their academic performance to their social lives to their sex lives.
Realizing where he was, Max let out a big sigh of relief. While he wasn't sure if anyone in here had the intellectual horsepower to figure out a cure for whatever he'd woken up with, it was nice knowing that he wasn't far from his room—and that he wouldn't have to worry about running afoul of any overbearing jocks, horny nerds, kinky goths, bratty e-girls or fetid gooners on his way back there. All he had to do now was find a way off this table and get moving—although, as he peered over the edge, he could tell that would be easier said than done.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, before he could spend any more time trying to game the whole situation out, he heard the door opening on the other side of the room—and when he turned around, he had to resist the urge to groan.