Coming Up Short (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

Only half a solo cup of liquor in and Nerea was already regretting showing her face at this party. None of her friends followed through, and she was marooned in this filthy pigsty of human indignity. Her dark hair matted to her forehead in the balmy hovel of the run-down university house. She shuffled past sweating, dancing bodies in constant flux and obedience to the thrashing beats blasting through the speakers.

At four-foot-nine, negotiating through a crowd was never Nerea’s preferred mode of travel. Any given pair of elbows or swiveling rear ends could threaten to topple her over like a small child wandering amongst clowns on stilts. Pink light from a pair of strobes flashed over her eyes, momentarily blurring her vision; obviously, the party planners hadn’t considered the possibility of anyone under five feet having to pass through this room. She shielded her face, holding her sloshing cup of rum out in front of her body, and crashed almost headlong with the towering blonde amazon that was Angelica, the head cheerleader for the college football team.

“Oh my God!” the young woman shrieked. Nerea’s dark alcohol dripped down the cheerleader’s hourglass figure, sopping through her shimmering party dress and down to her toned, bare thighs. “I just bought this.”

“Shit! Um, sorry, Angelica,” Nerea gasped. She instinctively bowed her head in the face of athletic regality, the likes of whom had rejected her from the cheer team not three weeks before, and not without more than a little sneering pleasure.

“Watch where the hell you’re going, bitch!” Angelica spat. She splashed away as much of the excessive dripping liquid as she could from her flat stomach, but it was obviously a partial lost cause.

“Y-Yeah, yeah, I will. Seriously, I’m super sorry.”

“Un-fucking-believable. To think you were trying out for the varsity squad. You. You’re such a damn klutz you’d probably trip over your own pom-poms,” Angelica said. She sunk into a nearby armchair, snatching napkins from the side table, and began toweling herself. “Unreal.”

“Yeah,” Nerea agreed sadly.

Ducking to the kitchen, she returned with a rag and soap in hand. By now, several other of Angelica’s equally model-height cronies had surrounded her for support. Suddenly Nerea was noticeably dwarfed by everyone seated around Angelica’s adopted throne, all of them snarling down at the failed cheerleader from on high.

“What are you even doing at this party?” one of them laughed.

“You look even shortersurrounded by all these normalpeople. You honestly thought you were strong or tough enough to keep up with us? Cheerleading isn’t a joke,” another commented. “With you, it’d look like we let a toddler in to the big girls’ club.”

“I know,” Nerea sighed. It was much easier to surrender to their barbs than to resist, especially after she’d spilled on Angelica. She leaned in, offering the cloth to the blonde junior queen, only to have it slapped away. A set of probing fingers pressed Nerea directly in the neck, shoving her backward, nearly over a coffee table.

“Back off, slut,” Angelica huffed. “Touch me or even come near me again and I’ll mess you up, got it? I might have to bend down to have a good go at you, but I’ll manage.”

“Maybe you can just stepon her, Angie,” a redheaded cheerleader snickered.

“That’d be a hell of a lot easier,” the girl agreed. She slammed her stylish blood-velvet hued high-heel into the carpet. Even above the thumping bassline of the music, Nerea could hear the girl’s enormous foot stab its mark. A flinch was impossible to avoid.

Angelica snorted at the obvious wince of fear from the pathetic wannabe. She looked the miniature student up and down, over every inch of her sun-kissed tan skin and shoulder-length dark curls, then furrowed her lip in disgust.

“Get out of my sight, Nerea. If I see you again anywhere outside a classroom: a party, the practice field, tryouts next year, I’ll cut your short little bitch-ass up. Or just step on you, like she said. Clear?”

“C-Clear,” Nerea mumbled. She sniffled; her eyes welled up, thankfully concealed given the shifting shadows and flashing pink strobe. Though she’d grown used to some teasing throughout her adolescence given her below-average stature, it wasn’t easy having it all piled on at once. Not to mention the credible threat of physical violence from this entire gang of nearly six-foot-tall strong-armed goddesses.

Nerea retreated to the porch, tears already streaming her cheeks, and made her way toward the footpath for the lonely walk home. Amongst the whistling lower branches of the trees, all of which still hung well out of reach, she hadn’t felt quite so small in quite so many ways for a long while.

###

The pint-sized brunette awoke the next morning with an unusual sense of purpose. Whatever it was she was going to do today, it would be a confident step out of this rut where she’d become entrapped. Shortness didn’t have to be a setback for everything in life, after all.

She had a text waiting from her friend Marcus, something of a chemical engineering prodigy who spent just about every weekend in the university open laboratory trying to craft his way to a breakthrough prize or at least worldwide fame. He was a bit of a young crackpot, but also sweet enough to be a friend to Nerea on this emotionally unsteady morning.

Come to the lab, please, it read without unnecessary salutation.

Shrugging, Nerea supposed this at least fell in the parameters of safe locations where she wouldn’t be cat-clawed within an inch of her life by Angelica. Not that the fiery woman would have recovered from her hangover this early in the day, anyway. So, collecting her belongings, Nerea made the trek across the quiet campus to Marcus’s home away from home.

“Morning, sunshine!” he called out to her from his back corner workstation as she shuffled inside.

“It’s too early for you to be so happy,” she grumbled.

“Aw. Rough night?”

“You can say that.”

“I heard some shit almost went down at that one party last night, with you and the whole cheer squad. Not good odds there, I gotta tell you,” he said. Goggles fastened around his neck, he intently peered through the glass porthole of a specialized incubator he’d designed for his own experiments.

“You’re saying you don’t think I could take them?” Nerea joked.

“I’m saying you’re a little spitfire for one so short, but all together, they’d clobber you into next semester at least,” Marcus said. He popped his goggles off and rubbed his nose. “Don’t mind them. None of them are half as pretty as you.”

Nerea knew it was just the chiding teases of a friend, but she couldn’t help but blush. It was nice to be reminded sometimes, especially in the wake of social breakdown amidst the drunken animals.

“Shut up, nerd,” she laughed. “So why’d you drag me out of bed this early?”

“For this,” he marveled. The port to the device was unlatched. With a pair of delicately gripped tongs, Marcus removed a tiny mint-green pill the size of a lakebed pebble.

“What, a tic-tac?”

“Not a tic-tac, but good guess,” he snarked. “No, what this is, is no less than the next evolution of cellular regeneration for medical personnel and military operators alike. Pop just one of these, maybe some additional electromagnetic encouragement, and cells start to multiple themselves and heal. Not just those cells in direct contact, and not even exclusively organic matter. Conceivably, you could regrow damaged body parts hundreds of times over. Maybe thousands or more.”

“Huh.” Nerea cocked her head at the sight of the innocuous little pill. Her friend lowered it down into his gloved hand.

“Feels like the heat’s off now. Here, have a look,” he said. Extending his arm toward her, Marcus waited as Nerea pinched the orb between her thumb and index finger.

“Doesn’t look like much,” she said. She held his invention up to the level of her deep amber iris.

“Doesn’t, right? But trust me. Just one of those babies is all it takes, and there are almost limitless uses. Assuming it works, of course, which I have yet to test on a suitable subject. But think about it. It’s not just about healing wounds. Heck, we have a shot here at further evolving humanity, if that’s the route we take as a species. Strength, durability, probably size as well. Who knows, you pop one of those, maybe even someone like you would grow up to be six feet tall. Nifty, huh?”

“Yeah,” Nerea said with a frown. She nibbled the corner of her lip. Six feet didn’t sound bad at all. “Nifty.”

“Don’t actuallythink about it, obviously. There are way too many risks at this stage. Not even the rats have tasted this one.” Marcus’s phone buzzed in his pocket, catching his attention.

“Got it,” she lied.

“Hey, listen, I guess Avery needs a hand over in the other lab. He’s cooking up something real crazy that he’s probably too shy to show off until next month. I’ll be right back. You can go ahead and put that back in the incubator if you want. Carefully, yeah?”

“Sure,” Nerea said. She dutifully tucked the tiny green pill back inside the mechanism while Marcus was still in her line of sight. As soon as the door shut, she peered back in.

There were at least four dozen pills from Marcus’s secret recipe, all collected in the bowl within. Was he likely to miss one? Just a single miscalculation? As a man of science, Marcus was an innovator, but Nerea knew him to occasionally let excitement take over and skip the double check.

She smirked, palming a miniature chemical bead once again. Hearing the squeak of Marcus’s tennis shoes on the tile outside, she popped it over her teeth and swallowed the pill whole without hesitation. A broad smile allayed the thrill of her secret snack as Marcus, completely oblivious to the girl’s deception, returned and recommenced rambling about the future benefits of his creation.

Nerea rubbed her stomach idly. Gaining a whole foot? Heck, she’d take growth of just a few inches. Enough to put her on the same level with Angelica. Then they’d see who could threaten who.

###

After some expired food and a little too long at the gym, the girl was so spent at the end of the day, she simply collapsed atop the blankets, still in her bright-lilac top, thigh-hugging short jeans, and faded jet-black flip-flops. She felt as though her very pores were leeching an air of spine-tingling seismic resonance; her body and clothing hummed with the same heat and life. Sleep came all too easily. However, most of the night was spent in a state of fitful dreams.

Within those imaginary sleepscapes, Nerea pictured herself as a shrunken rodent of a human, sprinting away from the enormous stamping feet of her would-be cheerleading rivals. She could see Angelica’s blonde-haloed countenance, especially, twisted with pleasure at the idea of grinding Nerea’s tiny body into the rubber sole of her shoe.

Outside, in the waking world, reality had taken a sharper and ironically much more shocking turn. Sirens blared and students screamed in the commotion. No one was precisely clear of what was happening in the past-midnight darkness. All that was certain was that an object, of distinctly slumbering, feminine geometry, was enlarging by the second. A shattering of known physical law and, worse, a destructive force which had already crushed at least twenty residences and the hapless people inside.

Each time the girl rolled over in her sleep, another row of university houses was demolished beneath her shoulder. She’d grown rather impressively in just a few minutes, to at least a quarter of a mile tall. Her shapely leg extended down the block, swooshing past several buildings and reducing them to dust. That black flip-flop, seeded with timeless grit, was painted by human remains and tumbling spires of smoke as Nerea’s naked heel bulldozed through an entire university building in one blow.

A few minutes later, Nerea was a mile long, and only growing larger at a terrifyingly exponential rate. Her pert ass, taut in its denim covering, trounced unknowingly into the university square. A crater smashed into the very heart of the school, taking out several more buildings and sweeping entire houses into makeshift tornadoes. Those comparatively grain-sized people who hadn’t managed to escape the carnage within the first thirty seconds were flung helplessly about by Nerea’s casually brushing hands. Her fingers curled down, unconsciously scooping up great rifts of earth and flinging crowds of her screaming fellow classmates about. Cars and alleys wrecked like flecks of tin foil beneath the giantess’ worming toes.

She rolled over again, exposing her entire five-mile form to the town below. The university rubble remained beneath her tight rump, while her squat limbs stretched for new lands. Each of Nerea’s sloped bare feet, clasped gracefully in the thong of the flip-flops, crunched two separate town squares into soil-flat dust. Her toes spread wide, pouring out the crumpled shreds of ravaged civilization into the fleshy crevices between. As she reached ten, then twelve, then fifteen and twenty miles in jolting succession, Nerea’s body splayed ever-wider across the imposed bedding of the countryside.