April Fools Apollo

Kit steepled his fingers together as he looked out the coffee shop’s window, the perfect picture of mischief. April Fool’s Day was practically designed for mad science. And Kit was just the mad scientist for the task of pranking unsuspecting victims. He more than willing to use pranks for the purposes of flustering and embarrassing friends.

First on his radar: Alkali. That shapeshifting little meerkat had gone for too long without receiving a bit of his own medicine. Just where did he get off causing so many size changing shenanigans and meerkat TFs anyway? The nerve of some scientists!

It certainly wasn’t like Kit -enjoyed- any of those shenanigans. This was purely payback.

The fox plucked a computer out of his backpack and booted it up. Kit wasn’t a hacker by trade, but when you dedicate your life to mad science you have to pick up a few tricks here and there. Across the street stood an enormous raccoon, dressed in what could only be described as a miracle of modern tailoring. Who knew where Apollo got his shirts and vests? Clothing 25 feet of raccoon had to be a nightmare, even if that raccoon was able to change his height at will. He never appeared smaller than 8 feet tall, but even so the space faring raccoon was beefy enough that accurate measurements would be… difficult to obtain. The clothes weren’t what Kit was interested in though; the fox was interested in the technology inside the clothes.

Taking control of the size changing technology inside Apollo’s suit would lead to one heck of an April Fool’s Day prank. Al wouldn’t know what hit him! Kit laughed maniacally inside the coffee shop, drawing more than a few concerned stares. But there was no stopping him now. He began to type furiously into a command prompt on the laptop. It took longer than Kit expected, but with a little time he’d gained complete access to Apollo’s suit technology. Jackpot. Now he just needed to turn up the growth… more… more…

---

An alarm went off in Apollo’s suit. It was an unassuming warning signal; a soft chime from the internal heads up display whispered in the space raccoon’s ear that something was wrong. He brushed away the notification with a flick of his wrist. Now wasn’t the time to be worrying about that. There were more important things to do, like teasing meerkats.

“I hear what you’re saying, but what’s wrong with carrying you in my pocket if we’re both going the same direction anyway?” Apollo said.

Down way below, closer to ground level, a meerkat shuffled his feet and stayed focused on Apollo’s face. It wasn’t easy from down at Apollo’s paws considering how much beefy raccoon got in the way of seeing the glowing red eyes. “It’s… flustering,” Alkali mumbled. “And it’s hard to make good arguments against you when you insist on staying 25 feet tall. Distracting.”

Apollo raised an eyebrow and he slowly expanded, clothes stretching across his body just slightly. “Pardon?” he said simply as he approached 30 feet tall. Workers on the third floor of office buildings nearby could stare the raccoon straight in the face now; Alkali was definitely not going to be the only one distracted now.

“S-Sorry, that’s not what I meant!” Al stammered. His long tail thrashed back and forth over the sidewalk, and his wrung his hands. Apollo did stop growing, but only once he’d fully reached 30 feet tall. And only once Al said it: “I’ll ride in your pocket on the trip back to my place for a movie.”

Apollo rumbled and dropped to one knee to get a closer look at Al. He put a finger beneath the meerkat’s chin and pulled his gaze gently upward. “Good. Not like you had a choice anyway.” Even bent over like this, the raccoon towered easily four times as tall as the meerkat; Al was barely taller than 3feet after all. The sidewalk pavement cracked under his paws, and the knee dented it straight through to the dirt below the concrete.

Alkali’s face turned bright red. He didn’t speak, aside from a quiet squeak. His knees felt weak. Al was barely able to stay on his feet except for the raccoon’s finger, nearly as large as his head, holding his chin up. This might actually end up being the best April Fool’s Day ever. It wasn’t a proper prank, but the fact that he got to spend a day with Apollo definitely made it worthwhile. Al was never a fan of April Fool’s thanks to the ease with which he could be fooled. Maybe a little time with an enormous space raccoon would put a lighter spin on a usually unpleasant day.

The beeping in Apollo’s suit became suddenly much more insistent, loudly pulling the raccoon’s attention away. Dangit, what could be that important anyway? With a flick of his eyes the notification appeared in front of his face floating in a midair holograph, written in a language that no one from Earth could’ve hoped to understand.

Apollo’s eyes widened. Security breach? How? The encryption around his suit’s hardware was leagues more complex than anything being used on this planet. Getting through that would take a genius level scientific knowledge or an especially talented-

The kick of growth to his system was nearly enough to leave Apollo winded. He went from 30 feet tall to 50 in the space of a single breath, and without being prepared for it to happen. The raccoon shook his head and caught his breath. He hadn’t even activated that growth on purpose. Someone was hacking into his space suit’s software to take control of its functions. Power like that really wasn’t meant to be under anyone’s control except his own; there were things on his suit that could be seriously dangerous in the wrong hands. But instead, the prankster had decided that the size controls were far more interesting. Apollo watched silently as safeguard after safeguard turned off around his growth technology. This hacker really wasn’t looking to cause damage; he wanted something much more specific, and bigger.

“Apollo? What’s going on? Are you okay?” Al asked. He’d never seen Apollo look surprised to change size like that before.

“Yeah, just hold on. It’s about to kick in,” Apollo said, taking a careful step up to his full height again.

“Kick in? I don’t know what you mean-” Alkali started, before he was bowled over by a set of raccoon toes.

The ground shook beneath his soft pawpads as he bowled over entire blocks of the bustling metropolis with constant growth. The suit held fast against him, thank goodness, but who knew how long that could be said. This was the first time he’d been completely out of control of his own growth. Based on the data flashing across Apollo’s eyes it didn’t look like the hacker had simply picked a size. No, instead he’d gone for something more creative. He’d disabled the off button on his suit’s size tech. In simple terms, he’d basically forced the ‘On’ lever to the point it was stuck. He’d be caught in a constant, slow growth spurt for… as long as the hacker wanted at this point.

Apollo was a little impressed. This prankster knew his stuff. He chuckled as he lifted a single foot up, out of the crater of this city’s remains. “Looks like we’re going up, speck,” the raccoon said, lowering his voice to cloud-disrupting levels rather than the hurricane force winds of his usual speaking voice. He set a foot back down atop the city, carefully grinding a single toe into the remains now. The top soil curled beneath the raccoon’s toes as he clenched them, creating a new mountain range on a once flat cityscape. Apollo quickly moved from city-stomping size up to state-smothering.

Al was busy tumbling from toe to toe, caught beneath enough raccoon paw to easily fill his entire state. He wasn’t sure if this was an elaborate April Fool’s Day prank, or just moving quickly from movie night into something closer to a continental tour. He sincerely hoped it would be the latter option. Maybe that was just from the fact that his whole body had been part of a game of state-sized footsie. The meerkat knew Apollo was up there, purposely doing this, teasing just to watch his meerkat squirm.

“Urf… you planning to slow down, or should I buckle in?” Al asked, once he was able to find a strand of fur to cling to. Even as he did, it expanded larger still, as wide as a multilane highway and easy for the meerkat to stand on.

“Nope. Isn’t me this time. Think a friend of yours is tryin’ to play a prank.”

“What? So, you can’t just stop?”

“Nope.”

Alkali gulped. That wasn’t good. The strand of fur he’d been standing on widened, shuddering, stretching. The meerkat looked way up, just barely able to catch sight of the grinning raccoon’s face and the piercing red eyes locked in on him. He shuddered. The way Apollo was able to keep track of his position that easily was a little unnerving sometimes.

For his part, Apollo was content to let the ‘prank’ play out this way. His meerkat was certainly enjoying it. The HUD in front of his face showed that whoever hacked the suit in the first place wasn’t sending any more commands. Looks like he wasn’t going to stop growing anytime soon. And as his paws stretched large enough to begin curling over curvature of the planet, he took a gentle step up and floated away into the inky black of space. Earth shuddered in ripples from the point of the raccoon’s lift off. Tsunami-sized waves of North American soil and soon after that the Atlantic Ocean pulsed away from Apollo. The whole planet shook, every inhabitant of Earth paying attention to see a handsome raccoon turn around in midair and fill the sky with his handsome mug.

Alkali watched in awe as the raccoon’s toes rose away from the planet. It was hard to make sense of what was happening down at the surface; Apollo’s paws had grown large enough that they broke away from the atmosphere a while ago. But he could see the debris of ruined cities and miles of countryside falling off the bottom of the titanic raccoon’s soles. In spite of that… the damage could definitely have been worse. The continent was still mostly intact, aside from the parts that found themselves directly underpaw. Apollo had plenty of practice being absurdly titanic, afterall. He knew exaaactly how much pressure a building… or state… or planet could take.

Speaking of planets… Earth rapidly started to fill Alkali’s vision as Apollo returned his paw to its surface. Apollo’s foot might have gotten much bigger, but Al was still the same size compared to Earth. It was an interesting sensation to see a marble sized planet approach that quickly, to feel himself break the atmosphere and see the weather patterns shift as air was replaced with raccoon toes. He squeaked as Apollo carefully wiped the meerkat off into the crater of raccoon paw that used to be Al’s state. The meerkat knew what was coming now. He looked up… way up… at the smiling face of a devious raccoon.

The planet dwindled into a speck of blue and green on a background of soft black flesh, stuck in a raccoon’s fingerprint. Apollo carefully brought that same finger to his lips, and planted an earthquaking kiss on the surface of the little dust speck. Fissures and cracks spiraled over the surface of Earth with the sheer intensity of raccoon affection.

“April Fool’s, squeaky,” Apollo rumbled. “Better get comfortable, because you’re stuck with me. Mine for the month.”

---

Kit only realized just how big a mistake he’d made when Apollo’s foot came back to earth, giving the city a shiatsu massage from between two colossal raccoon toes. And the growth had only been running for a few minutes, tops. The roof shuddered and electricity cut from the coffee shop as a sheer plane of pawsole eclipsed the entire sky and practically grew toward the fox faster than Apollo could step. The last thing the fox thought of before he was smothered into the toeprint of a space raccoon was worrying what would happen when his laptop was broken. He couldn’t turn off the growth without that. Maybe the raccoon had his own way of stopping it but who could say for sure?

“April Fools,” said the fox, just as the toe pressed down.