Wrong Place, Wrong Time (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

Even as Mike stepped inside the testing chamber without first powering down the university’s state-of-the-art size alteration device, a voice in the back of his mind told him he was breaking every safety protocol in the book. But still he did it anyway, standing in front of the still-active apparatus’s business end while modifying the experiment, since he knew that following the rules would cost at least twenty minutes of precious time. He and his lab partner Jason were on the clock here, and they needed a breakthrough in their test runs within the hour, if they were going to get approval for continued use of the machine. It was already unprecedented for grad students to have open access to this kind of technology, and both twenty-seven-year-old academics were eager to make names for themselves. Jason grimaced from outside the chamber, seeming to acknowledge the risk, but didn’t speak up, as he was in just as much of a hurry to achieve their eureka moment.

So Mike tinkered away on the testing platform, with his back turned to the multi-million-dollar equipment, thinking only of the glory they would share if their theories proved correct. Such focus meant that the young scientist paid no mind to the flicker of the laboratory lights signaling a freak-chance power surge, nor to the groan of machinery in the testing chamber. He didn’t even notice Jason’s concerned throat-clearing. Though of course no amount of fascination could’ve kept Mike from at last realizing something had gone wrong when the size-changing machine roared to life unbidden, and fired a concentrated beam straight at the platform. Jason was already rushing to the chamber door, shouting at Mike to get clear, but it was too late. The energy stream penetrated its bewildered target in a blink, and then upon unluckily refracting off his body, angled away and struck the other lab partner too.

Even though their feet never left the ground, both highly-intelligent yet devil-may-care grad students felt as if they were hurtling out of a plane without a parachute. Shouting and flailing, they lurched with whiplashing speed toward the ground, each falling flat on their faces in a shell-shocked stupor. The tumble itself didn’t hurt any worse than an accidental trip over shoelaces, though the revelation both Mike and Jason made upon catching their breaths and looking up again came with its own kind of trauma. In an instant, they’d both been reduced to a paltry fraction of their former statures. The once-narrow quarters of the testing chamber floor had become like a vast alien-world plain they were marooned upon, with the once-easily accessible computer terminals and experimental platform now towering a mountainous distance above their heads. All the once-familiar equipment appeared gigantically epic in scope to the awed pair, neither of whom could even speak for the first minute as they stared around the space in astonishment, until the consequences of their poorly-gambled risk finally sunk in.

“Holy SHIT! W-What… how did that even… I swear, I didn’t TOUCH the-” Jason hysterically gasped, running toward his equally-puny friend.

“It wasn’t you! Something with… the power grid… maybe a storm… I don’t even know,” Mike dazily replied, his thoughts clearly elsewhere as he continued scrutinizing their colossal environment.

“Hey, Earth to Mike! LOOK at me, man! Look at what just HAPPENED to us!”

“Do you… realize what this means?”

“I realize it means we’re SCREWED if we can’t get someone to find us down here!”

“It means our hypothesis was correct.”

“You can’t be serious. How can you think about the experiment right now, when-”

“Because we’d be dead right now, if our calculations were off!” Mike exclaimed, somehow over the moon about this. He gleefully shook his unhappier friend by the shoulders. “Or at least I would be. Maybe you’d just be knocked out. Doesn’t matter. Think about! With the specifications we set? We should’ve just exploded when the beam hit us, but we DIDN’T! We shrunk… in perfect proportion… clothes and all! What do you think we are, three-quarters of an inch tall? No, it has to be less. More like half an inch, if that. The POINT is, we were RIGHT!”

Though he acknowledged this morbid observation was correct, Jason was shivering now in rapidly-rising panic. Put-off by his friend’s apparently cavalier attitude for their own safety, even in the face of what was technically a success, he slapped Mike’s cheek hard, which seemed to take the edge off the guy’s thrill.

“Shut up about the experiment already!” Jason cried. “Even IF we can get someone to see us down here, which won’t be easy when we’re THIS small, do you have any idea how much trouble we’re in here?”

“Yeah, I guess this isn’t ideal…” Mike uttered, trying to stay positive. “But, c’mon. Our math was right! It WORKED! Just… not the way we thought it would! Seriously, what’s the worst that could happen? What are they going to do, kick out the two guys who just made maybe the biggest single-experiment leap EVER with this machine?”

“No, that’s not the worst that could happen,” Jason bluntly replied. “They could just squish us to death, if they never find us.”

Mike wanted to laugh at what he interpreted as dark humor on his friend’s part, but was interrupted by what felt like a seismic shudder disturbing the ground beneath them, causing both half-inch-tall scientists to topple over again. It wasn’t an earthquake, however, but in fact the overlapping thunderous gaits of footsteps belonging to unthinkably humongous beings. Wild-eyed, with jaws hung, both shrinkers craned their necks back and stared out of the chamber in time to see none other than their not-quite-friendly peer Megan, followed by their graduate studies advisor Dr. Moore, marching into the laboratory. Mike and Jason would’ve known both these women anywhere, but it still took each of their brains an instant to register that it was the same perky blonde athletically-sculpted grad student and the same ingenious kindhearted MILF-esque brunette scholar, respectively, since they now appeared to stand roughly in the neighborhood of nine hundred feet tall. Intellectually, the shrunken scientists knew that nothing was different about Megan or Professor Moore themselves, of course. It was all perspective.

Nonetheless, as the two women made their way into the room with loping strides and ground-tremoring impacts from the soles of their shoes, each looming like living monuments so high above the boys that neither of them could even fully comprehend such titanic creatures existing, it was impossible for Jason and Mike not to feel like they were stranded in the presence of goddesses right now. And oblivious goddesses at that, since neither Megan nor Dr. Moore had any reason to search the floor and find the miraculously shrunken duo, but began kept their sightlines a comparative forty-story distance overhead to operate the lab workstation. Neither giantess had any idea what had just happened, or that there were two extremely vulnerable and easily crushable young men the size of insects grounded just inside the testing chamber. Suddenly Mike’s positivity vanished, recalling his friend’s entirely serious prediction of the worst that could indeed happen to them, and Jason himself practically fainted from fear.

Maybe they were in some trouble after all.