It began with “The Big Sister” episode of the cartoon, Dexter’s Laboratory: Dexter uses a technologically advanced machine to create what appears to be a batch full of chocolate chip cookies. His older, less intelligent sister, Dee Dee attempts to eat one, but Dexter thwart her attempt. Later, he unwittingly gives one to her (she disguises herself in a rat costume.) When Dee Dee eats the cookie, she taunts Dexter briefly before feeling the effect of the cookie: her body grows to huge proportions and she proceeds to go about “toying” with the nearby city and its inhabitants. This, Steve recalls, was the first time he found himself “fascinated” by giants.

Since he was a toddler, he found himself oddly intrigued by stories involving giants and/or shrinking. The episode of Dexter’s Laboratory was merely one example. One of his favorite episodes of this occurred in the cartoon, Ed,Edd, and Eddy: the Kanker sisters, as told in a story by Ed, through consumption of radioactive mash potatoes, grow hundreds of feet tall and rampage across the neighborhood. These shows, as well as movies like the famous Honey, I Shrunk the Kids series, caused Steve’s fascination for giants, particularly female giants, to grow.

He began to search the internet for videos of females playing this role of a gigantic woman interacting with tiny, inferior people.  Though videos from sites like ShrinkUDown and Clips4Sale sites like The Loser Store and Miss Untamed “fed” into his fascination, deep down, Steve knew that he would never be that tiny man fleeing from the angry giantess who, believing that he was a bug, would attempt to turn him into red paste under her old, worn white socks. He believed that his “fascination” was never going to become a reality…until he stumbled onto “Reduction Blast” that night.

The front page of the website appeared to be ominous: the background was nothing but white and the only text was:



            Underneath the text was a small text box and two options: one for enter and one for leave. Steve was strongly tempted to leave the site immediately; however, he felt as if an enigmatic force pulled him to stay. He first clicked Enter; however, that caused no change on the page. He stared the text in a confused manner for what felt like hours before an idea popped into his mind. He recalled his days as a mischievous youngster who like to play pranks on adults involving computers. 

One of his favorites was merely changing the text of a document from Times New Roman or Ariel into Symbol. Figuring that it would do no harm to try, he copied and pasted the mysterious text into Word and changed the font to Calibri. When he did that, the text became much clearer. It read:

“Do you like new extraordinary experiences?”

Feeling accomplished that he solved the puzzle and intrigued as to what would happen next, Steve returned to the main page and typed “Yes”. After doing so and clicking enter, the page closed and his laptop restarted. As Steve sat wondering why this happened, he saw that he seemed to get a mysterious text from an unknown number. The text message read:

“Congratulations young explorer, you have won a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. Reply “SHRINK” or “Grow” and watch the magic begin.”

He sat there in his chair wondering… “Could this be real?” Steve sat in a deep trance for a minute before laughing at his own ignorance, “What am I thinking? Like this message will cause me to shrink or grow. The government hasn’t even created that technology yet.” He turned off his phone and went to bed.