The experiment had been, by all accounts, an enormous success. Perhaps not enormous in the literal sense though.

Many long months of work with the micro sized tech had finally paid off. When Alkali first found the Mitan Scaler, it was quite the mysterious equipment. It was sheer luck the kangaroo had even come to own one of the tiny folks’ size changing tech. He never asked Quinn where it came from. That was a secret only the raccoon was allowed to know. He wasn’t about to pry either, not when it came to a chance to work with such delicate and rare stuff. The only thing Quinn made him promise was that once it was all done, the raccoon would get to be part of the testing. For better or for worse. And that day was today.

“Alright Quinn, it’s time to try out the new Scalers. Think I finally got a handle on the nanotech,” Alkali said, pulling the goggles off his face. In his hand was a set of two miniscule bracelets no larger than a hair’s width. They blinked red every few seconds to indicate they’d been powered up. Ever so gently, the kangaroo tilted his hand so they fell off and onto the lab bench. They were small even compared to the tiny kun sitting at the bench’s edge.

Poking at one of the blinking red doodads, the raccoon replied, “Took you long enough. Don’t see why your other size tech isn’t good enough to play with.”

“It’s not that. These are just more powerful. Way, way more powerful. From a sub-atomic sized universe to ours with a single use? Come on Quinn, I’m good but I’m not that good. But these Scalers are,” Alkali said. He was busy tapping away at a computer screen, and once he hit enter one of the bracelets popped into view for the roo. Just like that it had grown to the proper size for his arm.

Quinn whistled, then clapped. “Not that I’m unimpressed. Just that isn’t too much of a size change, going up to fit your arm. Can’t it do more than that?”

“Oh? Well put the other bracelet on. It should be your size now. And if I remember correctly, I owe you the first test.” Quinn looked down and sure enough, the red blinking accessory was now the perfect fit. “Nice. Doesn’t really fit my ensemble though. Can I get one in purple rather than red next time?”

The scientist merely stuck his tongue out at the micro. “Hah hah. Just hold on while I finish telling the program what to do to us. Won’t be able to mess with it much when we’re small after all.” A few seconds of further tapping and then Alkali put his own bracelet on. This was going to be a big moment. The first ever test of brand new equipment. Maybe he’d be able to make some for friends too, have them try out any of their own size related fun. But it depended on this first experiment working.

“So,” Alkali said, adjusting his hat deep in thought. “It’s going to shrink you first. Then it will shrink me. Then after a few minutes we should return to normal size. Nothing unusual. Just a first time Alpha test.”

“Are you sure you trust a computer to work this out, roo?” Quinn said, squinting his eyes to try and see just what the computer screen read. It wasn’t easy to look up that high from down on the lab bench. But the kangaroo simply shrugged. If Alkali wasn’t worried about it, maybe there was nothing for him to worry about either. Or, everything to worry about.

The kangaroo mashed on the enter key and the computer began compiling the code. It wouldn’t happen right away of course. Maybe a few seconds of thinking on the machine’s part. The roo picked up a clipboard and began writing notes down furiously. There wouldn’t be long before the pencil in his hand would be far too huge to be useful. In the meantime Quinn’s Mitan Scaler had begun to flash red more rapidly. The raccoon poked at it out of curiosity but it didn’t respond. And by the time he looked back up at Alkali, he’d already missed the change.

It wasn’t a huge difference. Just enough to be noticeable to a tiny raccoon; any small difference in the sizes of those titans surrounding him would be immediately apparent. The kangaroo loomed a bit more thoroughly than normal. What used to be a skyscraper sized roo to Quinn now looked more like Alkali was up in the clouds. He looked down at the table and the wood grain was clearly spaced further out too. No doubt about it. He’d shrunk. Maybe around half as tall. Hard to be certain though.

“Wait, that was it? I missed it!” Quinn said. “Only looked away for a second too.”

“That little bracelet is powerful. Looked practically instantaneous to me really,” Alkali replied, the bass from his voice rumbling the table deeper than the usual quaking. The kangaroo carefully picked up the procyon between two fingers. Much easier now that Quinn was close to a centimeter tall. Not that it hadn’t already been easy to deal with the Lego sized raccoon before. “Just hang on a second. I’ve gotta get somewhere safe for us. I’ll be shrinking soon too. Don’t wanna get lost.”

The simple act of hopping over to his lab’s couch felt like earthquakes to Quinn, shaking all over with each jolting jump. Alkali wasn’t one to pay much attention to how he moved when carrying tiny passengers unfortunately. All part of the deal when tiny. Gale force wind rushed through the roo’s paw and across Quinn’s body as Alkali unceremoniously flopped onto the couch.

“Not long now…” Alkali muttered, looking down at the bracelet on his arm. It was starting to flash red as well. Grinning, he smeared his finger out on the couch to set Quinn down. He could’ve been a little gentler with it. But he knew the raccoon was durable at that size and it was much easier than trying to carefully place him in a single spot.

Suddenly, without so much as a flash, the roo found himself lost on a field of brown. It was enough to give even the most seasoned of shrinkers whiplash. To one second be sitting on a couch, then the next transported to a vast plane of brown fabric was confusing to say the very least. At least he knew that the experiment must’ve been a success then. That made this brown fabric his couch. Miles and miles of couch.

Were it not for a slight problem, Alkali would be celebrating the culmination of his experiments. “Alkali? Where’d you go?” Quinn boomed.

Uh oh. The kangaroo looked up. Way, way up. This was a problem he hadn’t anticipated. Normally he wasn’t the one to find himself this small so he wasn’t quite sure what to do as he gawked at the mountain of raccoon looming above him. At the time of writing the program controlling all this, going 1000 times smaller than Quinn had sounded like a fun escape. Just a quick pop down to micro size.

But staring up at a centimeter of raccoon, when you were just barely past the size of most bacteria? It was intimidating. And a little hot if he were honest. The math worked out to just around 12 or so micrometers. A mind bogglingly small size for anyone to find themself at. Those paws surrounded him. They could easily smoosh him between toes, keep him lost for days there. Really, anywhere on Quinn would be like a forest inside that brown and black fur.

It took a few minutes, but finally Alkali was able to flag down Quinn. Nearly yelling himself hoarse afterward of course. Quinn was actually just about to start lording his size over the tiny macropod when he noticed something. The raccoon’s bracelet was flashing again.

With a tiny ‘Pop’ sound, the titanic raccoon found himself small once again. It wasn’t quite to the comparison Alkali had dealt with seconds before though. Quinn was standing just around waist height. He crossed his arms and tapped a paw in a ‘explain’ sort of look.

“Uhh, say Quinn. You know when you asked me if I trusted this computer program to work right?” Alkali asked.

Quinn put a hand to his temple, rubbing away the headache. “I remember. Do you still trust it?”

“Uhm. Not so much, no. Think it might still be running. Was supposed to only shrink us once but… ahh, you see what happened. It’s either still running, shrinking us every minute or so… or there’s a recursive part of the code doing it over and over.”

“Okay genius. And what’re you going to do about it before you find yourself back to small fry status?” Quinn asked, continuing to tap his paw atop the membrane of the bacteria he was standing on.

“Hopefully, we shouldn’t have to do anything,” Alkali replied with arms crossed. “It was set to only run for 10 minutes. So we’ll shrink and shrink and shrink and then pop back to normal at the end. Piece of cake. We just have to find somewhere safe to wait it out.”

Quinn looked around at their surroundings. Not much in the way of ‘safe haven’ when you could be measured in single digit microns. But there was one thing far above head that he thought might just work. “Look up. See that orange?” the raccoon asked. “You know, the impossibly large, orange wall approaching faster than we could ever comprehend? Get ready to jump on. We found our safe haven, like it or not.” The combination hurricane and falling meteor in the form of orange fur fell down to the couch and the pair of tinies found themselves lost instantly.

“Great. This is just fabulous. We’re stuck in someone’s tail or butt or something. What else could possibly go wrong!?” Alkali yelled. As if to reply, the roo’s Scaler flashed. Quinn’s paw easily dwarfed the kangaroo once more, this time with him caught on top of it. Maybe that was for the best though. Doing some quick math, if he was 1000 times smaller than Quinn now… 6 nanometers tall. Oof. He looked out at the background and saw that the orange had given way to buzzing, floating particles. It wasn’t immediately obvious but he could only think of one possibility for what they were. Atoms. Most atoms were smaller than a tenth of a nanometer. They’d still be visible now though.

“Come on computer… fix this problem already…” Alkali muttered.

“I dunno, I’m kinda enjoying getting to be the big guy compared to you for once,” Quinn chuckled, an idle movement of his paw sending the roo flying to his stomach.

“Not helping!”

---

Kit brushed his tail across the top of the couch before he took a seat. Strange that Alkali wasn’t here to meet him. The roo made the invitation to come around to see some brand new technology, something major the lab worked on for a while. By the sound of the phone call he was really excited to show it off. So why wasn’t he around right now?

Maybe the roo was just in the bathroom or something. No reason to stress. He’d show up eventually. The fox’s tail swished gently, unaware of his microscopic passengers. There wasn’t much to do while waiting. Kit had been in enough labs like this to instinctively know not to touch anything. Too many delicate, easily broken experiments. Equally as many to go wrong. Knowing Alkali, that’d mean either very large or very small problems.

One thing did catch the fox’s eye though; a black screen on the nearby computer with flashing white text. It looked like some sort of command line program was running. And at the very bottom was a small countdown timer. Huh. What could that be doing? With a more careful look Kit noticed it was just about to reach zero.

“That’s weird-” Kit started, but never got to finish. As soon as the timer reached zero his body trembled, then expanded. He barely had time to register the house crumbling around him before the neighborhood went next. Then the city was gone, and in just seconds everything had gone black. Kit looked around, more than just a little confused. It all happened too quickly to quite register exactly what was going on. Not much time to actually enjoy his head spinningly-fast growth.

What he did know for sure was that he wasn’t on Earth anymore. It felt more like he was gently floating. Clothes weren’t staying flat against his body anymore. Gravity didn’t seem to be working the same now that he’d gotten monstrously large. And right beneath his rump was a tiny ball. He struggled to turn around in the microgravity environment of space, but after the monumental struggle he managed to see… the Earth. Basketball sized at best.

“Is this the experiment Alkali had in mind? I mean, it’s not bad. Just would’ve preferred a bit of warning,” Kit whispered. With a blush and a worried look he carefully reached out to palm the tiny green and blue rock. Nothing he could do except try to keep his home safe for now. Until the kangaroo figured out a solution. Wherever he might be now that is. The moon approached the musing fox, his much greater mass drawing it into a new orbit. And in that swishing tail, a normal sized kangaroo and raccoon looked around at the orange fur.

“What happened? Why didn’t we go back to normal?” Quinn asked, kicking at a nearby strand of fur.

“No, we definitely went back to usual size. Just… oh boy. This is gonna take some fixing,” Alkali whimpered. The roo had no idea just how correct he was though. When the program started to return them back to normal it had dragged everyone along for the growth that was touching the subject. Going from nearly atomic sized all the way up on a normal sized fur had led to a planetary sized nightmare.

So far, only Quinn’s Mitan Scaler had reverted. Alkali’s still had to revert too. The three furs weren’t finished growing.