Best Laid Plans

The desire to laugh maniacally was almost overwhelming, and the only thing that kept him from indulging was the lack of being able to add lighting crackling in the background. Then again, such feelings were often experienced when doing things that could easily be considered 'mad science'. He had learned to control those urges. Well. Most of the time.

His jacket billowed out behind him as he dashed through the lab, leaping over the test platform in the middle of the room to the control panel against the far wall. Sometimes it was just too fun being a scientist. He got to experiment with all kinds of crazy, cool toys and chemicals. Stuff that most would consider sci-fi at best, and laughably unrealistic at worst. Today's experiment: A new, experimental size modification ray. It was supposed to work on the concept of pulling mass from subspace, rather than expanding it, thus making it much safer to use on organic life.

After inputting a few more calculations into the computer he turned to leap back over the test platform to where his notes were. He had intended to bring them over with him, but for whatever reason the experiment had the fox rather excited and hyperactive, and thus forgetful. The problem came, when his foot caught on one of the large electrical cords laying on the ground near the platform.

“OOF~!” he grunted loudly as he jerked forward, torso and chin smacking against the test platform. His neck and chest throbbed a bit in a dull, lightly bruised pain. That, however, was not what he needed to be worried about. He heard a faint buzzing sound coming from the cord he had tripped over, small sparks spiking out of where it connected to the large ray gun apparatus built into the far wall. “Oh f-” He started to curse, before a loud crackle of energy cut him off, a shower of sparks exploding from the device before it began firing.

A bright green burst of glowing energy exploded from the barrel of the large device, slamming down right onto Kit and sending uncomfortable tingles surging through every inch of his body. The device seemed to rapidly power down after the initial electrical surge died down, but even after the ray shut off that green glow persisted around his body. Whatever form of energy that it used to alter the size of things clung to him like some kind of ethereal goop.

At first nothing seemed to happen, and Kit was relieved. Slowly he pushed himself up to his feet, brushing off a bit of dust from the front of his blue jacket. The constant green glow tinting his vision was a bit worrying, but he didn't appear to be effected otherwise so panic had not been needed yet. Until he felt his stomach churn.

His paws reflexively flew to his belly, gripping at it as he felt a strange, nauseous feeling overtake him. His balance seemed to take a dive abruptly as he stumbled a half step to the side. His whole body felt like it was cramping up, not painfully so but as if it were being pushed at from all sides. The vulpine winced again as his stomach churned a second time, stronger than the last, and this time he noticed it.

He Shrank.

He was able to actually see the room around him slightly expand outwards in all directions. The strange compressing sensation he was feeling was getting stronger, as if the glowing green energy surrounding him were compacting him inwards, shrinking around him and forcing him to go along with it. Each second caused him to slip inwards more and more. Thankfully, his clothes were shrinking with him, but it was a small consolation as he dwindled down under the five foot mark. Then four. Three foot coming and going as he looked around the rapidly expanding lab around him. Bookshelves sitting against the wall he had previously been able to reach the top of with ease were now so tall he couldn't even reach up to the first shelf.

Two foot came and passed with no signs of slowing, and Kit was starting to get worried. He wasn't even the size of a child anymore, and still the lab and everything in it was swelling in all directions around him. He wouldn't be able to reach the doorknob anymore. Hell, he probably couldn't even crawl off the edge of the test platform without risking hurting himself now as he dwindled under the foot tall mark.

Nervousness rapidly filled his thoughts as he turned towards the edge of the platform, making a quick dash over towards it before the distance got too far for him. It was an odd sensation to have to spend several seconds running at full speed across a space that, 5 minutes ago, he could have just stepped over.

He was down to six inches by the time he reached the edge of the platform, standing beside a large toolbox that had been left out by whomever had been installing the power cables into the floor. It amazed him to think that the toolbox was now taller than he was. A wrench left laying out beside it rapidly expanded in front of him as he continued to dwindle still.

After nearly a minute since the effect had started, Kit could see the green glow beginning to fade off of him and the shrinking mercifully slowed to a stop. From his perspective there wasn't much else to be happy about, however, as he saw that the wrench sitting beside him was nearly as thick as he was tall. The orange fox couldn't be more than an inch tall at best.

Now the annoyance was starting to replace the worry. He thought to himself how stupid it was for someone to leave those cords out, mostly to let his ego cover up how he shouldn't have been jumping back and forth across the room. The last thing he wanted to do was admit that this was his fault.

A thought came to mind.

“Wait. What's wrong with me. I'm not in trouble.” He exclaimed aloud to the empty, massively scaled room. A wide, almost cocky grin spread over the fox's lips, whiskers bristling slightly as he casually started to stroll his way back towards the center of the platform.

Kit was no fool. He had read those tales online. He had thought of situations like this, and even been in one or two before. The last thing the vulpine was going to do was let himself become another of those 'shrunk by their own machine' stories that people posted. He had thought ahead. He had just let himself get a bit over excited in the middle of his shrinking and forgotten about the fail safe.

With that grin still spread across his smug, self satisfied muzzle, he proudly pranced his way back towards the middle of the test platform, arms crossing over his chest in anticipation. There was nothing to fear; being shrunken to such a miniscule size was no problem at all

Not when he had a fail safe.

He has been smart enough to program the computer with a program that, in the event of the machine going off without someone at the console to put in the approval command, 5 minutes later the device would go off again. This time, set on reverse. Any minute now the device would rev up again, and shoot him with a healthy dose of the opposite spectrum of radiation, and send the vulpine swelling back up to his normal size. And right on cue, he heard it.

A dull, booming rumble beginning to vibrate through the air, the volume and intensity seeming magnified hundreds of times with his diminished size. He swore he could actually feel the air vibrating around him as energy charged into the device, creating a building green glow at the end of the device.

“Come to papa!” Kit exclaimed aloud gleefully, arms raising up happily as the device let out a dull THOOM, and a burst of that same glowing green energy exploded forth, washing the test platform in the same energy. Thankfully, the platform was made of a radiation resistant material that the ray wouldn't effect, so being the only other thing in the middle of it, every ounce of that glowing green energy flooded towards Kit as if magnetically attracted too him. Soon, just like before his body from head to toe, clothes and all, was engulfed in that same glowing, pulsating aura of energy.

He felt that now familiar tingle flooding through his body. Somehow it felt both exactly the same, and completely different this time. He watched as the green aura began to pull and jerk outwards, as if being stretched outwards like taffy, and once again his body seemed to be tugged along for the ride. His arms lengthened and stretched, pulled forward and to the sides at the same time as they extended longer and thicker along with the rest of him. His broad, black furred footpaws stretched and swelled across the platform beneath him, claws making quiet scratching sounds as they glided across the floor with his toes pushing them farther and farther. His head rose up towards the air, soon reaching two inches, then four. Rapidly swelling up to a foot in height with no signs of slowing, it seemed he wouldn't have to wait even a fraction of the time it took him to shrink for him to be able to get back to normal.

He happily started to walk over towards the edge of the platform, casually hopping down off of it and making his way towards his clipboard. An amateur would have been trapped down there, an inch tall screaming for help till someone came and stepped on him. But not Kit. He was far too smart for that. Casually he began rustling through his papers as he expanded up near his original size, happily humming to himself as he read through test reports. It wasn't until he turned to head into the break room that he noticed a problem.

Said problem being when his forehead smacked firmly onto the seven foot frame of the door.

At first he simply grumbled, growling in annoyance under his breath as he reached up to rub a paw across his forehead, only to realize there was still a faint green glow surrounding him. And where moments ago the top of his forehead had smacked the door frame, now he was looking down at it.

“Crap crap crap” he muttered under his breath as he turned to make his way back over towards the computer. He could feel how each footstep thumped against the ground, causing small glass beakers on the wall to vibrate slightly from the rumbling. In the few seconds it took him to get over to the other side of the room, he already felt his ear tips brushing against the ten foot ceiling. It was picking up speed.

It was fine, totally fine. He kept telling himself that as he crouched down in front of the computer. All he had to do was put in the command to send another smaller shrink blast at him and it'd cancel out. His fingers lowered to begin typing and ended up pressing several buttons at once. Already crouching down, his shoulders were starting to press against the ceiling and his fingers had grown far too thick to be able to type anymore.

So much for his fail safe. Who the hell thinks to give their fail safe a fail safe? Out of reflex he tried to stand up as a paw raised to his head to rub it, only to smack the back of his head against the roof, leaving deep cracks spider webbing out across it. The impact startled him, his arms reflexively jerking up to grip the back of his head where he hit it, taking a step back and hearing a loud crunch as his broad and expanding paw landed right onto the edge of the test platform, bending the metal downwards into the shape of a 15 foot and growing fox's foot.

Worse still, the growth was still accelerating. Within seconds, even while hunching, his back was pressed tight against the ceiling while his tail knocked stuff over behind him as it fluffed out. He tried to duck down lower, a hand paw lowering to grab at something and help support him, only ending up gripping the edge of a bookshelf and making it collapse under the weight of his arm. Then an idea hit him: his phone.

His clothes were growing with him, so it stood to reason his phone would be as well! He tried to reach down into his pocket, back already tearing into the ceiling as it further cracked and crumbled around him. His elbow smacked against it, tearing a deep hole in the drywall. His fingers slipped into the pocket of his cargo pants, wrapping around the small piece of plastic and circuitry.

“Aha!” He yelled in triumph, arm raising up with his back as he abruptly stood up, raising the phone into the air as if in victory, and only after the fact realizing as he did so his head, shoulders and upper body ripped through the roof of the lab, sending debris crashing down into the lab below. All the while his paws continued to swell and expand inside of it, pushing furniture and equipment back against the wall of crushing it beneath the now 30 foot tall and growing vulpine.

Wincing a bit at all of the destruction he had suddenly caused, Kit gently began trying to lift his foot paws up one at a time out of the lab, carefully setting one down into the street nearby and the other into the flower bed in front of the building. The last thing he needed was to risk damaging the equipment any further before it could be used to return him to normal.

Already crowds had begun to gather around the growing vulpine, several of the neighbors rushing out of their homes to stare up at Kit as he rose higher and higher into the sky. Kit, however, was far too busy to notice the growing crowd or his growing self. He raised the phone up and quickly punched in one of the speed dials.

“Yea. Hey. Kuma, listen. No, no I can't come over right now. Just listen. I need you to come over, like, right now. No. Man. Listen. There was an accident in the lab. Get over here right now. No, it can't wait. If you don't get over here in the next 5 minutes you'll probably be able to see me out of your window. Fine, just hurry.” He growled out into the phone, his voice booming across the neighborhood as all the while he continued to expand.

By the time he finished his phone call and again noticed his surroundings, he realized he had grown a lot. His heel had smashed back into his lab and was crushing the front half of it, while his other paw had stretched out past the street and into the lawn across the road. He had to be a hundred foot tall now and was still growing. Quickly, he jerked his foot forward, pulling it away from the lab, hoping that he hadn't further damaged the machine. At this rate he wouldn't be able to wait until Kuma got here to reverse things before he got too big to avoid damaging things.

The fox turned on his heel, not even thinking about the raw, destructive power and weight his massive and still growing form held, and began to stomp his way down the street. Each impact smashed a deep, paw shaped crater into the cement and sent rumbling tremors through the ground. Car alarms began wailing as he approached. People began combinations of screaming and/or hiding when they heard and/or saw him approaching. And all the while he continued to grow.

“Gotta get somewhere more open, before I get too big,” he rumbled aloud to himself, too wrapped up in his own thoughts of what he should do to notice as his paws smashed down onto an SUV parked in the street. Broad, powerful padded toes slammed down onto the metallic box, crushing it into the ground as if it were made of aluminum foil.

“Ack! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” he exclaimed worriedly, taking a half step back away from the destroyed car, only to yelp in surprise as he heard a loud crunch from behind him. He turned to look behind and saw his heel had crashed right through the front of another house, demolishing half of it in an instant.This was getting out of hand, and fast. He couldn't even walk down the street anymore without destroying something, and he was only getting bigger faster.

Quickly the ever growing fox turned on his heels again, digging a rather deep hole in the lawn as he did so, and quickly bound off down the road again. He had to get out of the city limits. By now he had to be well past the 250 foot tall range. He was so big his foot could nearly cover an entire house, he could pick up an SUV like it were a can of red bull. Each thundering step took him closer to the edge of the city. Each booming footfall rumbled through the ground harder than the last. Each massive footstep stretched longer than the previous one, as he rose higher and higher into the sky. 300 foot came and went with staggering speed, and it wasn't seconds later that he was nearing 400 foot. This was getting totally out of control.

A loud crash echoed through the deserted building as a heavy log was shoved to the side, smashing down to the ground and taking a small section of the wall it was supporting with it. The bear grumbled quietly as he squeezed his way underneath another broken support beam, squirming his way into the middle of the partially destroyed lab.

“get to the lab, he says. It can't wait, he says” The bear grumbled under his breath as he made his way towards the far wall where the size device was. “If he had told me he was destroying half the town by walking I might have understood the urgency.” He had to shove a chunk of the ceiling away from the command console, coughing a bit when it stirred up a cloud of dust in front of him. Thankfully, it still seemed to have power.

Carefully he reached down to start typing away at the console, his larger paws and thicker fingers always making typing a difficult task for him. He tried reading through the last command that had been issued to the machine, the task made even slower with his sub-par computer skills.

“Aha! Alright, here it is” he muttered aloud to himself as he read through the last command's settings. The power surge seemed to have randomized a bunch of settings for the device such as intensity, duration and then a string of seemingly incoherent characters Kuma couldn't make out. “Ok, so all I have to do is reverse this?... erm... not sure how to do that with this last bit. Hopefully the first two will work.” he muttered. A few more lines were punched into the computer, and then a dull whirring of mechanisms began to vibrate through the room. Heavy, solid steel cogs began turning to slowly raise the device upwards towards the sky.

Even now that he was miles away, Kuma could clearly see his still rapidly growing titan of a friend off in the distance, feel the powerful thooming of his footsteps and hear the dull thunder of his voice as he seemed to be constantly apologizing for breaking things. At least he was an easy target at that size. With one last command, Kuma set the device to fire, hopefully shrinking Kit back down to size before he threatened the entire continent with his giant ass.

The dull, air vibrating rumble of the machine revving up filled the remains of the lab. Small bits of dust fell down from the small pieces of ceiling that hadn't collapsed. Small crackles of sparking electricity shot out of the sides of the machine.

Uh oh. That wasn't good.

The machine began to vibrate much more violently, dangerously. Kuma starting to take a step back from it as fear began to well up on his face. He had barely turned his back to the machine, ready to dash out of the lab, before a loud BOOM exploded through the lab as the device exploded. Debris flew in all directions as a massive multicolored explosive shockwave of energy burst from the core of the device, surrounded by the red hot, warped pieces of metal that had once been its housing.

Groaning and clutching his head, the usra slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, rubbing a sore spot on the back of his skull. “Ow...” he would murmur, that same paw reaching down from his head to rub his sore chin. Though when he did, he stopped his arm infront of his face, eyes going a bit wide. His arm was glowing green.

“Crap.”

This was bad. Really really bad. He was way, way too big. Each footstep send a literal earthquake cracking across the countryside. Massive crevices cracked in the earth from beneath his immense weight, and entire forests were demolished beneath his massive paws. He couldn't even keep track of how tall he was anymore, he had nothing left to compare too. All he knew was that he was pretty sure he was standing on-top of the Mariana trench, the deepest part of the ocean, and it wasn't even coming up a fraction of the way up his toe. Literally thousands of miles tall, the vulpine tried his best to keep himself as far away from land masses as he could. Granted, even in the ocean he could feel his incalculable weight literally crushing the crust of the earth beneath his soles.

The crust of the earth literally split apart when his toes made the slightest shift or flex atop it. He could feel thick gouts of molten hot magma rolling up around his toes, yet by now his skin and fur had become so impossibly thick it didn't feel any hotter than lukewarm water to him. The only thing he had to be thankful for, was that he seemed to have stopped growing.

If only being 'Only' 5,000 miles tall was a consoling thought.

He was starting to worry that something had happened to Kuma, he should have made it to the lab to fix this minutes ago. Yet he was still here, impossibly huge with his head literally sticking out of the atmosphere, waiting for someone down in the germ sized populace below to shrink him back down.

He didn't have to wait long to find out what had happened to Kuma, however. As a dark shadow began to fall across the northern hemisphere... all of it, Kit included. At first Kit thought maybe the sun was just setting, but then realized the sun was almost directly above him at this point... slowly he started to turn around, and his eyes went wide at what he saw.

Kuma. More specifically, Kuma's head. The titanic bear's head, which by itself was bigger than the entire planet earth. And what was worse still, Kit could still see a faint aura of green energy tinted around the edges of said head, as with each passing second it seemed to stretch further and further across the sky. And then he spoke, his voice thundering like the voice of god itself, filled with discomfort and irritation.

“Kit. What the hell did you do?”

All Kit could do was stare for what seemed like an eternity. Then, nervously, brow starting to bead up with sweat. His arms raised a bit, giving Kuma a nervous, apologetic Shrug.

“Eheheh... you know how it is man... best laid plans...”

The End.