All of a sudden, the chamber is so much bigger. Aladdin is little more than a bug on its floor.
Dawn streams through the vaults. The rooster hasn't crowed yet. Aladdin can't hear a noise outside. Time has slowed, for some reason.
Aladdin needs a way out. If he can contact Kharaqa about the Dark Crystal, maybe he can tell him how to resize himself back to normal... But that's a long shot. At this size, everything is so far away...
The door creaks open. Aladdin starts to hide...until he remembers how small he is.
She has green-polished toes. And she wears chains on her feet. In baby steps, she wanders around the Crystal. She's coming right towards Aladdin...
Like a titaness, she lumbers into view. She's a straight-haired ravenhead, and only wears a green bikini. Aladdin keeps expecting her footsteps to make quakes. They don't.
She's about to step on Aladdin. Aladdin dives out of the way just in time.
Her huge foot comes down near him. Its chains jingle as it does; they both do. Her foot doesn't stay down long enough. But then, being a street rat, Aladdin SHOULD be used to it by now.
Aladdin wonders if the Sultan knows she's down here. He wonders if Kharaqa wants her down here.
She admires the Dark Crystal. She stares at it. With her green-polished-nailed fingers, she caresses the glass case it's inside. Aladdin waves his arms, and tries to warn her...but to no reward.
The Crystal lights up, of course. Yazmin's eye contact is fixed. Aladdin sighs. It's about to happen again...
The moment passes. Yazmin blinks her long-lashed eyes. She's still normal-sized, and a titaness compared to Aladdin. He would be relieved...if her feet still didn't post a threat to him-physically and sexually.
She finds the scrolls under the Crystal. She reads from the one Aladdin did hours ago. Like Aladdin, she can't make much sense from the runes either. She voices what little sense she can make.
She groans. She grabs her stomach, and bends over. Once again, Aladdin tries to warn her. She's looking right at him...but again, she's more worried about herself than what's crawling around on the floor beneath her bare feet.
A shadow surrounds her. It contracts all around her. It takes her with it. Soon, she's only slightly shorter than Aladdin.
She looks around. She seems scared. She shouts for help. Naturally, no one comes.
Aladdin approaches her. Now she's more afraid. She tries to run...but there's no cover to take for what seems like leagues at this size. Aladdin implores her to relax.
The door swings open. Men are coming in.
With no time to argue, Aladdin sweeps Yazmin off her feet, and shuttles her outside via a rat hole in the wall. He's a street rat; he should know his way through rat holes if he doesn't.
The rat hole twists and turns. It seems this palace once had a bigger rat problem that the royal family would care to admit.
Aladdin's got her over his shoulder now. And Yazmin's VERY insecure...not in the least because she can now travel into a rathole as if it were a hallway.
"You're a street rat," she says. "You're kidnapping me!"
"Saving you, actually," Aladdin corrects her. "And in case you can't tell, I didn't ask to be shrunk any more loudly than you did...although I am confused, as to how you did the exact opposite of what I did and got the same result."
"What...are you talking about?!"
He puts her down, and takes a breather. He trusts her not to run away as he's explaining it to her.
"Before I got shrunk, I read the scroll BEFORE staring at the Crystal. You just did the exact opposite, and now here we both are."
"Wait... You were SPYING on me?!"
"I don't know what you think I'm capable of, but I can't really look away from something that's big enough to make me look like a bug!"
She slaps his face. "I AM NOT FAT!"
"Do you want to get back to normal or not?" He offers her his hand. "Do you trust me?!"
"What?!"
"DO YOU TRUST ME?!"
Slowly and insecurely, she takes his hand. "Yes."
"Good. Now follow me and don't do anything hasty." With her hand in his, he leads her on. "This is the first time this has ever happened to me, too."
"Oh sure," she says, smiling. "Just because I'm a princess who was raised her whole life in a palace must mean that I've never been the size of a bug crawling through my life through a rathole."
"I don't mean to judge. No offense, but it's not really that hard to deduce."
She smiles, as he drags her through the rathole. He may be a street rat...but he hardly seems as savage as she was raised by the palace guards to believe.
The rathole lets out. They crawl out. All around, the palace xeriscaping expands everywhere, like a forest. And there's nothing uniform about the arborculture...which, of course, is really shrub culture as it looks from a bug's eye view.
Or a view of a bug's eye, for that matter. A lost locust lands near them. Yazmin screams, and hugs Aladdin. To them, that locust is a titan, peering at them with eyes as big as moons.
"Be still," Aladdin whispers. "Maybe it can't tell us from the ground."
She does. And he does. Moments pass. The locust does nothing but stare.
And, it flies away. They usually travel in swarms; it probably misses its own.
Relieved, Yazmin kisses Aladdin. It's a very intimate experience for the both of them. He's in white briefs; she's in light green lingerie. Neither one of them is exactly a rag-clad leper.
She stops kissing him, and backs away, embarrassed. "Sorry; impulse."
"I would return it...if not for the priority of our situation. We've got to find the guy who brought that Crystal here, and find out if he can resize us back to normal."
"How do we find him?" She looks around. "Or better yet, how do we get to him? This palace is much bigger than it was, and we're not exactly long-legged...or winged."
The front paws of a titanic monster step into the clearing, where they're bickering. It's red, and has got whiskers, menacing eyes, and tufted ears.
"Oh crap," Yazmin swears. "He probably thinks we're mice."
Aladdin takes her hand again, and drags her away, running. She runs with them.
The caracal stares, and watches them run. They're smaller than he's used to, when it comes to prey; this may be a desert, but is he sure he can't do better?
Aladdin and Yazmin run through the palace xeriscaping, in a panic. Clearly, they need a better, if not a bigger, plan to get to Rayat bin Alnufus.