Have you ever waken up one day to discover that you were one inch tall?
…Look, it's not as silly of a question as it sounds, okay? I get that it would have been on Sunday, but it really isn't now.
To be honest, if you woke up one inch tall on Monday, you're probably one of the luckier ones. I mean, sure, you don't get to fly, but compared to burning or freezing yourself to death, or falling through the ground to the center of the earth, you're probably in pretty good shape.
I think I would have still preferred not to be one of the one percent that woke up changed, though.
I was a little scared at first when I found myself suffocating underneath the crushing weight of…
Wait. That wasn't crushing me. I could definitively feel a layer of thick material completely covering me, and I was sure it should have been able to completely smother me, but somehow I was… pushing it up just fine? And I wasn't actually suffocating, because it wasn't constricting me at all…
I walked for around half a minute, pushing up the material around me, and finally crawled out from under the… bedsheet.
It was a bedsheet.
And my room was huge.
Wait a minute, how could I see?
Okay, so maybe this shouldn't have been the most pressing question for me at the moment, but look, I was pretty sure I was around fifty times smaller than I had been, relative to my surroundings, and that meant the radius of my eyeball was fifty times smaller, which meant the light-collecting surface area of my retina should have been 2500 times smaller, which meant I should have been seeing far less light than I could have possibly used to see with, and I was still seeing, which was plainly impossible.
Oh, right, and I was one inch tall. Maybe that was cause for concern.
My scream, probably at least around fifty times quieter than it had been before, was heard by no one.
"Okay, what the hell, I'm one inch tall, and," I paused for a moment and checked something, "and I can't breathe through my nose when it's pinched shut so I'm not dreaming, I mean I was pretty sure I wasn't dreaming anyway, but there's no way this could possibly happen, what is life."
Now that the rant was done, I walked cautiously up to one side of my bed, where there was… what looked like a steep fall, anyway. The sun had only just started rising, and I couldn't see too well in the darkness, but that definitely seemed like the kind of fall that would kill me without a problem.
Maybe it wouldn't, though? The acceleration due to gravity would be the same regardless of my mass, right? So I should hit the ground with an equal force to if I just stepped off the bed at a normal height, I thought. And weren't smaller objects more resistant to the forces of falling anyway?
Though, theoretically, I didn't know the difference between whether the world around me had gotten bigger or I had gotten smaller, and it seemed, intuitively, like those two scenarios should have identical effects and be indistinguishable – but if the world around me had gotten bigger, then taking this same fall would absolutely kill me, there would be no difference between this and stepping off a giant building yesterday. So if the two cases were the same, shouldn't I be just as wary of jumping off the bed even if I have shrunk?
Well, the shrinking had proven that it definitely was not following the normal laws of physics, because I should not have been able to hold up that bedsheet (I thought), and I definitely should not have been able to see. So I would probably survive the fall anyway, wouldn't I?
I returned to the edge from the seating position I had taken to think, looked over…
…and decided I really wasn't confident enough in my grasp of magic-altered physics to take that risk. My dad would come in when I didn't come out in time for school, anyway, which would be in… about 50 minutes, at 5:50.
And so, I laid back on the gigantic bed, and began waiting.
It was about ten minutes into that wait that I heard the explosion from down the street, and saw the growing orange light even through my closed curtains.
Apparently, my parents heard it too, and rushed over to my room to check that I was safe.
"Zoe?" I heard my mom's frantic cry, as she flipped on the lightswitch with my dad walking into the room behind her. They seemed to grow even more worried as they glanced at the bed, seeing nothing obvious there, and then dashed over to it… only to see me, the Miraculous One Inch Tall Girl Who Somehow Survived Having All Her Internal Organs Shrunk To Probably 1/65th Of Their Previous Size Assuming That She Is Actually One Inch Tall Literally, And She Can Still See Regardless And hey, what does that all do to the surface area-volume ratio of my body and its cells, no seriously shouldn't that fuck everything up –
"Zoe?" asked my father in… a surprisingly restrained disbelief, given the situation. "What…"
They were dumbfounded, as, admittedly, they should have been. I started trying to explain something, which they probably heard as a squeak, until my mom lifted me very carefully in her palms to near each of their ears (and okay, this was not a very pleasant experience and I was very worried that I was soon about to fall and die, whatever conclusions I had come to on the subject of magic-altered physics beforehand, but I tried not to let that show).
Insightfully, I answered all their questions, speaking: "I dunno what the hell's going on either."
My dad stepped to the curtain that faced the direction of the explosion and pulled it open, finally giving us a look at what was happening outside.
The neighborhood was burning, a somehow just slightly otherworldly fire spreading rapidly from only a relatively short distance away.
Suddenly, my phone buzzed, as the phones in my parents' pockets gave off blaring alarm noises.
"EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION SYSTEM – WARNING
BEGINNING AT 4:53 AM, EST, A NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS HAVE SHOWN DANGEROUS CHANGES. IF SOMEONE NEARBY YOU HAS NOT WOKEN UP YET TODAY, YOU ARE ADVISED TO KEEP DISTANCE FROM THEM. EVACUATE ALL FLAMMABLE STRUCTURES OR BODIES OF WATER. THOSE IN THE NORTHEASTERN COUNTIES OF NEW YORK OR THE WESTERN COUNTIES OF VERMONT AND MASSACHUSSETTS, SEEK SHELTER AS FAR UNDERGROUND AS POSSIBLE IMMEDIATELY, AND ATTEMPT TO FIND SHIELDING FROM NUCLEAR RADIATION. THOSE IN SURROUNDING REGIONS, EVACUATE AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE AS GUIDED BY NEARBY EMERGENCY PERSONNEL.
IF SOMEONE WAKES UP GLOWING WITH MULTIPLE COLORS, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CATCH THEM AS THEY FALL. YOU WILL INSTANTLY DIE. IF SOMEONE WAKES UP WITH CHANGED SIZE, DO NOT PANIC. THE CONDITION DOES NOT APPEAR TO HAVE ASSOCIATED DANGERS OR HEALTH CONCERNS SO FAR.
STAY ALERT FOR UPDATES."
"We're in the northeastern counties of New York!" my mom exclaimed. "We need to get down to the basement. Zoe, are you okay being carried?"
I nodded, which was probably only barely visible, and held on as best as I could while we ran to our basement. It didn't really feel like "as far underground as possible," and we frankly had no protection against nuclear radiation (and where the hell did nuclear radiation come into things?), but it was the best we could manage.
We turned on the news on our basement's television, which was showing essentially chaos. The gist of the stories was this: Approximately one in one hundred people had changed at 4:53 AM this morning, with one of six possible outcomes. They could grow to twice their previous height, shrink to one inch tall, manifest uncontrollable fire powers that normally made explosions like the one before, manifest uncontrollable ice powers that tended to freeze a large radius around the person, and the entirety of any body of water the blast touched, start glowing rainbow and fall to the center of the Earth (also destroying entirely any living thing they came in contact with), or gain the ability to fly into the air briefly and then fall down slowly.
While these changes caused mass pandemonium and an immense number of deaths, perhaps the biggest problem was the giant – and I mean giant – turtle monster and red-clothed man fighting each other. They had appeared suddenly at 4:53 near northeastern New York, and were moving and destroying everything in their path at a ridiculous rate. The news outlets were speculating, based on the emergency message, that the government might be considering a nuclear option for resolving this threat.
What was especially disturbing about these two giants, however, was that their current location was very very close to our current location.
As we watched, a rumbling grew nearby, shaking the ground around us ever more in minor earthquakes – the footsteps of titans. Eventually, our shelter was almost threatening to collapse, as the monsters seemed to be directly above us.
In a voice so incredibly deep and incredibly loud that even with my 65 times smaller ears, they were still in pain from its sound, one figure boasted, "BWAHAHAHA! NOW THAT THAT MAGICAL WII CONSOLE HAS RELEASED ME FROM THE GAME, I CAN TAKE OVER THIS WHOLE WORLD, AND NOTHING WILL STAND IN MY WAY! NOT EVEN YOU!"
The other figure, with just as imposing of a voice, gave a brave response: "WA!"
And as I thought, Really? Am I going to die to a giant Mario and Bowser?, the massive plumber's jump crushed through the ground above me, killing my family and I instantly.
Mario and Bowser fought for another hour, carelessly destroying the ground below them.
The United States government delivered and detonated three nuclear explosives flown in to the moving targets by jet. They had no effect on the giant beings, only decimating the buildings and lives around them.
Three hours later, a team of armed officials busted into a house where an eight year old child was playing New Super Mario Brothers on a Wii that was just a little more enchanted than he had bargained for, heedless of the destruction around him.
When he repeatedly ignored the SWAT team's demand to stop playing and shut off the Wii, they forcefully tried to turn it off, which met with no success. One member shot it, also failing.
Eventually, someone shot the kid.
But the kid just laughed and took off his costume to reveal that he was actually… Kamek!
"Nyeah heh heh! I'll never break the link keeping King Bowser in this world!"
She was shot again, but only took off her true costume, showing that she was actually… Princess Peach!
The SWAT team didn't wait for what she had to say, simply shooting her again.
"I'm sorry," she taunted. "But your princess is in another castle!"
Peach took off her actual real costume this time, showing that she was actually… Toad, all along!
Toad made an unintelligible noise, and was shot again. He took off his definitely actually the real costume this time to find that he was actually… Bowser!
"BWAHAHAHHA! …Wait, this doesn't even make sense…"
The SWAT team was at this point more thoroughly confused than anything, muttering back and forth between themselves and asking over speakers what the hell they should be doing. In what seemed more of a routine check than anything, someone slowly shot Bowser, who took off his costume without ceremony to reveal that he was actually… me, the author of this story!
"Ahahaha, I have destroyed your entire fictional world for the sake of narrative tension! This is an impressive meta commentary or something!"
After I was shot, I took off what was definitely, for real, actually the last costume this time no bamboozle to reveal that I was actually… you, the person reading this story!
You said, "[INSERT YOUR QUOTE HERE]" and then you were promptly shot, taking off your costume to reveal… Nothing!
No really, there was just nothing below all those costumes.
Huh.
I guess that's symbolic or something.
A SWAT team member shot the air out of habit.
"Oh no!" I shouted as I woke up the next day. "Now I'm ten feet tall!"