An Eye for an Eye (?? cm)

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(Side - Mayu-nee: Mayumi Komiya)

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Mayumi Komiya was an observant woman. To call her a genius would not have been an understatement, but it wasn’t as accurate as she would have preferred. Her talent, she felt, was to notice and make connections and inferences in an instant. She was not perfect, seeing as she needed to rely on a high school senior like Takumi for circuitry help, but she was a fairly capable woman who could see the big picture and make observations before many others could.

That, sadly, was why her younger sister Makoto was now caught like a rat in a trap.

Mayumi had set her trap up properly in the short span of time since she had arrived home. It was clear when she stopped by the Compression Chamber that something was off. From the layout of the room, it had been used, and with Takumi out of sight, she immediately deduced that he had been compressed. She didn’t want to think her sister had been the culprit, but she was the only one who knew how to use the device. And after conversing with Makoto, it was clear the girl had intentionally and maliciously taken advantage of the boy’s trust in her.

She was right to take the Activation Key to the machine. As she stood in the doorway blocking Makoto’s only exit strategically, she honestly regretted the fact that her deductions were proven true.

When it came to one’s instincts, a person’s fight-or-flight response said a lot about what a person would do when cornered. ‘Fight’ was to resist the threat whereas ‘flight’ was to find a way to escape. In the case of Mayumi’s little sister, Makoto would have chosen flight; however, she was stuck in the guest room with no way out. Running away was not an option for Makoto, and for that very reason, the girl’s body stiffened. Instead of ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ her body ‘froze’.

To fill the silence, Mayumi made sure to let Makoto know she was disappointed in her sister.

“Really, Makoto, what do you have to say for yourself?” Mayumi’s disapproving voice pierced her sister’s ears like a hypodermic needle. Angrily, she snarled.  “I didn’t think you were this reckless of a girl!”

“Reck- Ababa- I-I wasn’t reckless!” Makoto couldn’t speak properly. Having been caught red-handed, she desperately searched her brain for a way to lie her way out, but she couldn’t think quickly enough. When she was stressed, Makoto never could think clearly. To Mayumi, this time was no different.

“I hope you’re aware that you used a barely tested prototype on your friend,” Mayumi took a step closer, forcing the nervous Makoto to take a step back instinctively. She did this once more, and then twice more, until Makoto was clearly away from the computer. Seeing her younger sister cower so easily told her Makoto was not thinking rationally. She was like an animal, as though she had lost her human nature in less than 24 hours. “Did you not even think about how, if anything went wrong, Takkun could’ve died?”

“D-Died? I… I… ” Mayumi was the only person who could throw logic into Makoto’s scattered mind as she panicked. Makoto realized she had no excuse for that. She had not considered Takumi’s safety at all. Everything had been going her way so, in her mind, she thought everything was just fine. Her lucky streak just kept happening to the point where she never even thought of failure. “H-He’s alright, isn’t he? He’s alive. It’s fine.”

“Fine? I don’t think being a fraction of his normal size can be considered fine!” The woman sighed as she looked at the monitor connected to the Compression Chamber. She pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head.  “I was hesitant to test Compression on people for a reason. I didn’t think it’d be successful at all.”

“T-Then that’s a good thing, right? I helped you, didn’t I?” Makoto grasped at straws to talk her way out of trouble; however, the words she chose did nothing to ease her sister’s disappointment.

“Is that what you really think?” Mayumi scratched the back of her head in frustration. Her sister was too frantic. “What else did you do besides deceiving him? Toy with him? Assault him? I don’t want to think about it, but looking at you right now, you would go further than that, wouldn’t you.”

“I-I just wanted to get back at him!” Makoto shouted. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

She didn’t deny it. Not only that, but she refused to own up to her own errors.

Mayumi groaned. Her young sister wouldn’t accept her mistake. An eighteen year old girl would normally have more common sense, wouldn’t she? “...Hey, Makoto, I asked you this question earlier to see how you were thinking. You said it, didn’t you: that perverts who do kidnappings should be locked up? Did you really think that just because you’re my sister that I wouldn’t report you to the authorities for compressing and abducting Takkun?”

What proof did Mayumi have to do that? In truth, she didn’t have any. What laws existed to handle Compression when she hadn’t even finished such technology yet? However, she was worried for Takumi’s sake. What did her sister do to him? She shuddered to think. Was her sister turning into a criminal? It seemed, in Makoto’s mind, she hadn’t done anything to Takumi at all. He was still perfectly fine. His body had been able to endure it after all. But Mayumi knew better than to just leave it at that. For Makoto’s sins, there had to be some sort of punishment.

“N-No. You can’t do that. I’m good. I’m not wrong,” Makoto backed up one more step. She slammed her foot onto the Compression Chamber’s platform, barely missing the shrunken Takumi by her right foot.

Makoto was lying to herself to try and convince her own mind that she was right. Mayumi knew that. There was no doubt in her mind that the 18 year old girl was in no state to think clearly. But even so, that didn’t give her a free pass to have done what she had done like some sort of insanity plea in court. Knowing that, Mayumi continued to provoke her. “I’m pretty sure any trauma Takkun has experienced should be enough to start a case. All he has to do is elaborate on what happened in the past day.” 

“T-This is all Taku’s fault anyways!” Makoto tried shifting the blame, continuing to step back from her sister. Mayumi winced seeing her nearly crush Takumi when her other foot got onto the Compression Chamber platform.  “He’s the pervert who didn’t understand anything. T-That’s right. This is all his fault! I wouldn’t have done any of this in the first place if it wasn’t for him! I’m not wrong. It’s because of Taku. He did this to himself!”

“His fault, huh?”

“I’m not wrong.” Makoto repeated. She wasn’t wrong. She couldn’t be. That was clearly what her face was saying, and her mouth echoed those feelings. “I’m not wrong. I’m not wrong.”

“Is that all you can say?” the older sister frowned. 

She couldn’t believe her sister had stooped so low. Wasn’t she normally so composed? Her realist of a younger sister who was always so quick to tell people off was so mentally out of her mind now that it didn’t seem to be the same girl. Was the Compression Chamber at fault? Or had her love for Takumi gone off the deep end? It could even have been a combination of both. Mayumi hesitated to think about the cause. What she knew she had to do now, however, was to figure out a solution. Makoto was a danger the way she was now. She had to figure a way for Makoto to be properly punished for her actions and understand how criminal she had been.

“I’m not wrong! I’m not wrong! I’m not wrong!” Makoto repeated like a broken record. She stomped her foot vigorously. Hearing the metal clang of Makoto stomping onto the chamber, Mayumi looked down in concern. She saw Takumi’s miniscule body being launched around by the footfalls of her younger sister’s feet. She knew the boy would definitely be able to survive getting crushed because of the principles of Compression she had researched, but even if the two of them had proven the machine worked on humans, it worried her to see him in such danger without Makoto even thinking about his safety...

…

………

…………….. It worked on humans. That was right.

Seeing Takumi’s predicament, Mayumi realized what she could do. She held up the key in her hand again and inserted it into the machine’s safety lock. Immediately afterwards, she approached her tantrum throwing little sister.

“Makoto...” the older woman frowned as she stood in front of Makoto. The muscles in her arm tensed.

“I’m no-”

Slap!

Before she could finish repeating the same sentence once again, Mayumi landed a heavy smack right onto the girl’s face. A deafening slap of palm meeting cheek echoed through the room. It was not a simple slap either. Mayumi had hit her younger sister so hard, the girl dropped to her knees, speechless. “...!!!”

Her wrist hurt from the intensity of the impact she had delivered, but Mayumi was not finished. While Makoto was stunned, she returned back to the operating monitor and keyboard for the chamber. “I didn’t want to do this, but even if we decide to take you to the police, I want you to start thinking properly again, Makoto. I think I have a solution for that. Something to make sure you actually reflect on your actions.”

An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. That was Hammurabi’s Code. 

“...??” Makoto was still speechless as she held her hurt face, but her expression told her she did not understand what Mayumi was referring to. Mayumi took advantage of that moment in time to update how she programmed the chamber and worked around one issue she had been meaning to deal with when using the prototype. 

“While there is a dome, it’s not actually that necessary to use. I’m going to speed up the process by bypassing the need to use that clunky thing,” her older sister wasted no time in informing her what her intentions were as she finished typing on her keyboard.  “Makoto, you do realize where you’re standing right now, don’t you?”

“...Where?” Makoto was regaining her senses enough to look down. It seemed she only now realized just where she was. From all of her backing away, she had gotten onto the Compression Chamber. Mayumi watched the sight of Makoto’s heart plummeting down into her stomach as her younger sister realized just what she had meant now. “Wait. Nee-san. Stop! I’ll be good. I promise! Wai-”

Instead of arguing her case, what Makoto should have done was to just step off, but she didn’t think of it in time. It was too late. Mayumi had already finished inputting all the necessary values. And as she had said, there was actually no need for the dome. Bypassing the slow closing of the dome, Mayumi engaged the Compression Chamber. Even though she had chastised her sister against using it on Takumi, Mayumi felt this was a necessary evil that had to be done. For Makoto to understand what she had done, she was going to have to experience the same trials as Takumi had.

Without the dome, a bright flash of light blinded the entire guest room. And with that, everything on top of the platform was compressed, shrinking her sinful sister down to a new scale.

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(Side - Neko: Makoto Komiya)

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No.

No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

“No way. No… This is impossible,” a frantic Makoto Komiya strained her neck as she looked up and turned left and right in complete disbelief at her surroundings. The ceiling… It was the sky. The steel platform… it was an expansive field… The guest room of her house… it was now as vast as a city.

A complete change of her surroundings had snapped Makoto out of her insanity, but because of that, in place of her mental stupor, her mind was now free to clearly panic in realization of what her sister had done to her. The same sister she had reached her hand out to earlier to beg her to stop before she hit that button was now far out of arm’s reach. Even though she was distant now, however, in Makoto’s eyes, Mayumi was still clearly in her view, or rather, only parts of her at a time.

Up. Up. And up. The further she craned her neck back, the more it hurt and the more the sinking feeling in her heart and stomach deepened. Was this despair that she felt? She could barely make the connection that the gargantuan tower she was looking up at was the same person she called her sister.

How small was she? 

“Well, it really does work on humans… you look perfectly healthy at 1:30 scale, Makoto,” Mayumi’s voice sounded down from the sky. It was not painful because she did not speak loudly, but it was all encompassing. Makoto felt that no matter where she was in the room, her sister’s voice would reach her.

30 times smaller. Her 152 cm had been compressed down to a just barely past 5 cm. While if she was put next to Takumi, she’d still be nearly twice his height, compared to Mayumi, she was no larger than a cockroach. A feeling of despair encroached on Makoto. All the control she felt she had over the situation had been torn away from her. Now, she was helpless in the center of the platform knowing she had no way to change back on her own.

Her heart dropped into her stomach when she realized she was covered in shadow. Looking up, she saw a peach colored ceiling eclipsing her view of her sister.

Stomp!

“Hyaaaaah!” Makoto screamed at the top of her lungs as she dropped to the floor in panic, seeing her sister’s foot descent. Her sister’s foot landed not on her, but mere centimeters to her left. The sheer impact knocked her off balance and sent her body rolling like a barrel to the side.

“Since you compressed Takkun and had fun with him this whole time, how about you experience what it’s like to be his size too, Makoto?” Mayumi told her, fully aware she was intimidating her. All of the bad karma Makoto had accumulated toying with Takumi had now been turned back against her. Now she was the small one facing off against a giant.

“N-No,” Makoto squeaked as she stood back up when Mayumi took her foot off the platform. She shouted up to the Heavens like she would to a higher power, only this higher power was her sister. “N-Nee-san! Y-You can’t just do this to me!”

But her voice didn’t properly reach her literally bigger sister. What carried up to Mayumi’s ears resulted in her needing to stifle her laughter. “... So that’s what it sounds like when someone talks while Compressed… Sorry, but it’s really hard to hear you, Makoto. Let me sit down.”

Sit down?

Whoooooosh!

“K-kyaah!”

Without any time to brace herself, Makoto was knocked off her feet and onto her butt. It was just the simple action of getting down onto the ground to Mayumi, but to Makoto, it was as though an entire mountain had moved. The burst of wind generated by the air Mayumi pushed away with her body was enough to force her to the ground.

“A-A-Ah...” when the shrunken girl opened her eyes and looked up again, she found herself unable to form any words. Unlike when she used her foot, this time, her sister wasn’t even doing anything intentionally, and she was already overpowering Makoto. Any confidence she once had was now replaced with despair as she looked at her older sister’s visage many times the size of her own body.

“There we go… Oh my, did I scare you, Makoto? I’m sorry. I suppose it must be a drastic change from what you’re used to,” her older sister spoke. Due to the close proximity of her face, her booming voice became thunderously deafening to Makoto, forcing the girl to have to cover her ears. This was not missed by the genius woman who quickly shifted to whispering. “A-Ah… I forgot to take into account the vulnerability of your senses.”

It wasn’t just her senses. It was the overwhelming force of everything that was normal sized to a compressed girl like Makoto. Her head struggled to process that she was up against her sister rather than some sort of kaiju-sized monster. Desperately, the girl swallowed her saliva and dared to ask again. She weakly picked herself up and shouted to her sister. “M-Mayu-nee! Change me back! Now!”

Upon hearing her question properly, Mayumi only frowned, much to Makoto’s dismay, and how she replied cut deep.

“Takkun probably asked you the same thing, didn’t he?”

“I… I...” Makoto looked away, not able to fake her expression while under duress. She couldn’t deny that. Not only was it the truth, but she felt intimidated by Mayumi’s mere presence even though she was speaking so calmly. Was this how Takumi felt when up against her?

“I won’t hurt you, Makoto, but you need to realize just what you’ve done to Takkun,” Mayumi told her. Makoto flinched as an arm the size of a building moved, and she nearly fell over again when a palm larger than her bed lowered down to the platform. “Hop on. You don’t really have much of a choice, do you?”

She didn’t. The realization of her helplessness was sobering to the 1/30th scale girl. She was hesitant to approach her sister’s palm. Seeing the thickness of her hand be almost knee high, she realized she couldn’t have been any more than 5 cm tall. As Makoto got onto her sister’s plush palm, she tripped and dropped down on all fours. She realized she fit on her sister’s hand with room to spare. She really was tiny now.

Mayumi tried to slowly and gently stand back up, raising her hand that held Makoto in the process. No matter how her older sister tried to keep her hand stable, the compressed girl was still vulnerable enough to take a tumble as the g-forces of being accelerated up pushed her down. She was at her sister’s mercy and aware she was being punished for her actions.

But that was the status of only one of the people compressed by the device. Though she had Makoto in her hand, Mayumi did not forget the original person who had been put through the ringer. After bringing her hand up to her stomach level, Mayumi ignored Makoto to look back down onto the Compression Chamber. The words she spoke next reminded Makoto of the boy she had tormented.

“Now, while you’re that small, let’s take Takkun along too, shall… we? Oh my…”

Oh my? Just what happened to the 1:48 scaled boy?