Chapter 1

Date: June 23, 1997

Another year has passed for the Szalinski family, and progress has been made on multiple fronts. My dad Wayne has got himself back in the good graces of his employer Sterling Labs after his mishap last summer. You might remember it. It involved an experimental new kind of “targeted” growth ray and a certain young woman I hold close to my heart.

That would be Mandy, of course, my on-again/off-again girlfriend. I’m Nick Szalinski by the way, just to refresh your memory. She and I have been getting along quite well in the year since her little escapade in our hometown of Las Vegas. Mandy is back to her normal 5-foot-3 stature, of course, though she loves to remind me of her giantess days when she towered over 6-foot-nothing me.

Unlike freshman year, Mandy and I figured out the whole long-distance relationship thing during our sophomore year of college this past year. She and I may go to different schools, but that experience last summer brought us closer than ever before, and not just because I spent much of that night nestled amongst her enormous cleavage. Rarely would a day go by during the last school year that we wouldn’t call each other. We’ve also got into emailing each other, and she’s even convinced me to write her old-fashioned letters.

Anyway, where was I? you probably want to hear more about my dad’s latest technological innovations. As I mentioned, he continues to earn the forgiveness for all the misadventures he’s caused over the years, so it’s any wonder he still has a job, nonetheless his own laboratory at the Sterling Labs facility on the outskirts of Vegas.

Among the latest gadgets my dad has created are a portable growth ray to go along with the portable shrink ray he’d previously developed. No more traipsing back to the lab anytime someone needed to be re-enlarged like I had to go through a year ago. Now all it takes is a simple remote-control type of device to grow OR shrink an object on command, as he’d finally managed to find a way to combine the growth and shrink rays into one device for the first time.

Not that anyone in the public would be able to get their hands on this technology. Sterling Labs remains reluctant of course to let anyone but the military lay their hands on such a powerful gadget. They all remain under lock and key at my dad’s lab (as far as he knows). Being that we’re family, there are perks we Szalinskis get no one else does. I was about to discover the latest such perk.

During the last year, my dad also worked the bugs out of his targeted growth ray, a device that could target a specific area of an object’s anatomy and increase its size. He’d planned to use that to grow a chihuahua’s ears to comic size as part of a test. Instead, Mandy accidentally got in the way of the beam. It turned out that the ray didn’t just enlarge a specific area after all. But the ray works now, and my dad had plans for how to use it.

Mandy and I were lounging around again on a lazy Saturday afternoon when my dad barged into the living room.

“Do you want to come test out my targeted growth ray?” he asked us.

“That again? You know what happened last time,” I replied. “What’s gonna be different this time around?”

“This time I guarantee you it will work,” dad replied. “I’ve already tried it out on that chihuahua and other animals countless times. Now it’s ready to be tested on humans.”

“And your plan is what exactly?” Mandy asked.

“You remember how I told you last time about the cosmetic uses my ray could be used for?”

Mandy and I each raised an eyebrow.

“How would, uh, you like to try it out, Mandy?” my dad said nervously. “You know, to, uh… enlarge your breasts.”