1 Hr Story Commission: KingDead and the Tiny Criminals

Doctor Omega and Coney looked at their ill-gotten reward and grinned at each other. They were finally going to escape prison! It took weeks of planning and an entire day’s worth of work to drag the growth ray back to their cell. There were close calls and near-deaths at every turn. But now they could receive their just reward: freedom from this shrunken prison.

The raccoon and rabbit were smaller than small. Infinitesimal even. Neither criminal was sure exactly how small they’d been made. After a certain point, you start to lose track of anything to easily measure yourself against. They did know their entire prison was beyond visibility to the naked eye. And even inside this tiny prison they’d been shrunk to an inch tall, at most.

What they did know was who put them there. KingDead. That masked, green-and-red clad, doofus superwolf would get his comeuppance soon! Not just for the indignity of being shrunk this small, but for daring to stand against this terrible twosome of villains. Muahahahaha!

When the two tinies were done with their evil laughter, they struggled with the growth ray’s trigger. The two of them simply didn’t have the weight combined to push the metallic trigger. They struggled and strained with all their might. It was slow going but they could see the spring holding the trigger taut ever so slightly coiling up. Hours passed until finally, miraculously, they made enough progress that a brilliant blue beam emerged from the barrel of the ray. The entire prison was soon bathed in a similarly eerie, blue glow. This growth ray would grow anything in contact with the target too. Finally, there would be no stopping their dastardly plans anymore. They just needed to let the prison grow large enough that they could escape safely into the world at normal size.

It might take a while though. The entire prison was pretty darn small.

---

KingDead felt an itch between his toes and clenched. Darn ants must be getting between his toes again or something. It was midday, and he was on patrol. There was no time for itchy distractions. The street shook slightly with each step the 50-foot-tall canine took through the downtown neighborhood. He had no reason to suspect anything was amiss today. How was he supposed to know that his tiny prisoners, kept safe between his fuzzy toes, had finally devised a clever plan to escape bondage? King put them behind bars months ago and no one was the wiser. ‘This is sure to give those serial shrinkers a taste of their own medicine’ he’d thought at the time.

Of course, he forgot they were even down there a few weeks back.

But the itching at his paws didn’t go away. In fact, it only seemed to grow in intensity. No matter how many times KD scratched it wouldn’t stop. He furrowed his eyebrows, clearly contemplating what to do. He needed to complete his rounds through the city. But an itch this strong made it difficult to pay attention.

“If I’m not careful, I could accidentally stomp something expensive,” he mused aloud, as his foot landed atop a Porsche with a sickening, metallic crunch.

A bright blue glow surrounded the wolf all at once as the itching reached a fever pitch. KingDead yelped as a familiar sensation of growth struck his entire body. Fur standing on end, the superwolf watched as he grew straight up into the high atmosphere. His body felt like it was on fire, and his musculature responded in kind to the power filling every inch of him. He went from amateur lifter to bodybuilding hunk within seconds.

The world shrank away so quickly that KD was left breathless for an instant. The growth felt more like a sudden burst of size rather than a slow and continuous rise through the clouds. Every building, car, farm, and cloud for miles in every direction were suddenly pushed aside by a set of wolf paws that could be measured more like atomic bombs than as an appendage holding aloft a colossal wolf.

KindDead huffed, creating hurricane force winds that tossed an airplane aside like a gnat. “Geez. What the heck was that about?” he asked himself aloud. “I mean, it didn’t feel bad. Pretty good actually. But where did that come from?” The superwolf flexed an arm experimentally, marveling when a bicep the size of a basketball appeared beneath the spandex supersuit. His tail wagged gently, brushing the tops of skyscrapers far below.

He hadn’t felt his own size changing powers activate, nor had he seen any telltale signs of a growth ray firing. One second he was patrolling the streets, and the next he’d become more Hulk than KingDead. His heartbeat alone was strong enough to be audible by anyone down at the surface of the planet. What could possibly have been strong enough to make him this huge? KD was lost deep in thought. So deep he hardly noticed the helicopters lost in his fur, or when a slight shift of his heel dug a gouge into what used to be a city.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

---

“Dammit KD, why do you have to grow that large? You are in so much trouble when you get down here.”

The raccoon practically punched at his phone’s screen with his thumbs. That dork wolf flattened his city on practically a weekly basis these days. Quinn was pretty patient, but enough was enough. Now KD wasn’t content with just stepping on his house, he had to do it to the entire city at once? Enough was enough.

“Awww. What’d I do this time?” KD replied a moment later. Quinn didn’t want to think about how the superwolf’s phone could easily demolish an entire county if it fell from his city smothering hand. He just glared up at the wolf far above the clouds, his head and hands hazy from sheer distance. King’s toes had landed on either side of Quinn’s house, surrounding his neighborhood with wolf pads too large to easily fathom. The landscape quaked and cracked with the simple act of KD clenching his toes into the earth.

The raccoon shuddered and typed the reply. “You know what you did. No Pete for an entire week.”

“Awwww.” KD typed back. Followed by a long succession of sad wolf stickers. Quinn could literally hear the superhero’s whining. It boomed through the atmosphere, deep and powerful. There was no where safe from a wolf that size. The tiny raccoon sighed and started texting a series of scientist friends, requesting a shrink beam on the apocalyptically large canine.

Down at the level of Quinn’s phone screen, two pathetically tiny screams cried out with each tap of the enormous raccoon’s thumbs. A small speck of dust had fallen off from between KingDead’s toes, floated down to the surface of the planet, and was now resting atop Quinn’s phone. “This is all your fault!” cried Doctor Omega, his striped tail tucked between his legs.

Coney’s white ears drooped as he looked up at what would surely be their doom. “What do you mean? I wanted to keep the growth ray running until we got safely back to normal height!”

“Yeah, and it was you that said it was a good idea to get the ray that grew anyone touching the prison. INCLUDING THAT SUPERDORK KINGDEAD. Now we’re going to get crushed!”

If the dust speck holding their prison didn’t get out of here soon, they were likely to be destroyed by Quinn’s texting. The dust spun across the screen, dancing back and forth until the thumb print loomed directly overhead. The sky turned black, eclipsing their view from all light aside from the ambient glow of Quinn’s illuminated touch screen. If only they’d let the growth ray run a little longer, perhaps they could’ve made it to large enough for even someone as tiny as Quinn to notice.

Omega and Coney screamed before it was cut off abruptly. They were lost in Quinn’s print, and at their size it could be quite a long time before either of them saw the light of day again. The sides of the fingerprint rose rivaled the height of the Grand Canyon. Maybe if they were lucky they could fix the ray to only grow the prison, while not growing Quinn. But that would take lots of work and they didn’t have much time. The pair looked at each other and sighed. Foiled once again by an oversized superwolf. How humiliating.