“I swear, this is going to blow up as soon as we post it”, Mia said excitedly, while insistingly shaking her friend’s shoulder, in a vain attempt to convince her of the importance of her idea.
Abby was all but enthusiastic at the idea of taking part in one of her friend’s TikToks. An idea she found rather embarrassing, especially for a girl her age. “Look, don’t you think this is way too silly? Teens do this kind of stuff”, she replied, in a rather dull tone. She had been dragged to Mia’s bedroom almost an hour prior, where her friend hoped they could film together some dumb challenge.
“Nonsense, everyone can participate! Come on, this is the trend of the moment!” Mia continued, eagerly grabbing her friend by the shoulders, and showing her some videos on the screen of her brand-new iPhone. The short clips featured couples of people dancing and making silly moves, when suddenly one of them was promptly hit by a low-quality filter effect that made them smaller than the other person. From there, all sort of stupid choreography happened.
The hashtag #shrinkingchallenge was highlighted in the description of every clip. And there were a ton of them.
Abby was even less convinced now. “Wow, what brilliant and clever content”, she remarked sarcastically, “I’m sure your excellent idea will stand out from this pile of cheap entertainment…”.
“Of course it will!” Mia promptly responded. “Because I got the real thing”. As she proudly announced that, she rummaged inside a drawer in the back of her room and took out a weird ray gun.
At that point, even Abby was astonished, her eyes widened with surprise. “Is that… real? A real --”
“A real shrink ray? Maybe…” Mia interrupted her playfully, playing mysterious. “I have certain connections here and there that maybe owned me a favor and got me one of these toys-- err… one of these highly sophisticated devices only to be used for scientific purposes”, she proudly declared.
“How does it even work…?” Abby muttered, bringing a hand closer to the device in curiosity. Mia immediately hid it behind her back. “Nuh-uh, you want to play with it, you big science nerd? You first must do this TikTok with me, or I’ll never let you touch it”.
Abby tried to snatch it from Mia, but being considerably shorter than her, her attempt failed miserably as Mia simply held the ray gun high above her head.
“Fine”, Abby sighed, “I’ll do your stupid dance thing, and then you’ll let me do my experiments with the ray”. Mia’s smile broadened: “I knew I could convince you! Okay, watch a few of these, learn the moves and get ready. Oh, and of course…” Mia added after a few seconds, “I am the star. So, you’re the one getting shrunk in the video”. Abby was about to protest, but Mia cut her short, annoyed: “And yes, shrinking people is completely safe and reversible, and the device comes with a long list of security instructions to avoid any incident. Don’t bother me with formalities, let’s just do this!”.
After just a few minutes, Mia had placed her phone on a tripod, ready to film, and Abby, despite herself, was rehearsing her moves.
“… And we’re ready to shoot!” Mia announced excitedly as she ran at the side of her friend, in front of the phone.
“Three… two… one... Go!”.
Abby frantically tried to mimic her friend’s moves while dancing on the silly music of the trend. And after a few seconds, Mia took out the ray gun and theatrically pointed it towards Abby, looking right on her eyes. She waited for the drop in the song and then…
“Fire!”
Abby felt weird, with a strange itch running across all her body. But she didn’t stop dancing. And when she turned around, she was barely at waist height of her friend.
She was really shrinking.
Trying not to panic, she continued to shakingly perform the moves. Until she turned again and noticed she was below Mia’s knee.
And just then, right at the end of the clip, Mia playfully kicked Abby’s reduced body out of the frame and easily sent her rolling at the center of her bedroom. She enjoyed the last seconds of stage all for herself and the phone stopped filming.
Mia ran to retrieve her phone and see the result. Abby was laying on the ground watching the ceiling. Her head was spinning, her breath was still short, as she looked around, noticing how her friend’s room seemed to grow larger and larger by the second.
“It’s… so amazing! Simply amazing! It all looks so natural, so rhythmic, so real!” Mia announced, as happy as she could ever be. She was walking back towards the other side of the room, but at this point, when Abby got up, she saw the gigantic figure of her friend absent-mindedly walking towards her, with eyes fixed on the screen of her phone, uploading the clip.
The diminishing Abby saw the massive, white, socked foot of her friend soaring in the air in her direction. She lost track of how small she had become, but that foot was bigger than her. Way bigger.
She looked at the dusty, greyish bottom descending towards her and quickly dodged the incoming impact by rolling to the side just in time. Mia’s massive soft foot landed right beside her, as she was talking to herself about how great her dance was.
Abby got up again, frustrated, and delivered the strongest kick she could muster at Mia’s socked toes, barely smaller than herself.
“Huh?” Mia muttered finally looking down. “Oh yeah, right, you’re still shrunken”. She kneeled down to get a better look at her diminutive friend. “Wait, are you still shrinking?”.
The itch and the spinning head had, in fact, never stopped for Abby. And she was starting to worry, noticing how her body was still becoming smaller. She turned to the giant face of her friend above. “Don’t just stand there and watch, do something! Didn’t you say the device had safety features?!” she shouted.
Mia looked at the ray gun in her hand. “Well, I said it had a lot of security instructions, not that I have actually read them… I didn’t think they would be that useful”. Abby heart sank, as a feeling of dread and blind anger surged from within her. “What do you mean you haven’t read them? YOU SHRUNK ME, and only now you’re telling me you didn’t know what you were doing? And you can’t even stop it?! Mia you stupid, idiotic bi--”
But her words became inaudible to Mia, as she continued to shrink on the cold tile of the bedroom. Abby kept shrinking, and she calculated she must have been smaller than a centimeter. The sky above her shifted, the mountain-sized socked toes disappeared beyond the horizon. She looked up to see the familiar face of her long-time friend, now as big as a planet, looming above her.
“ABBY? ANY BRIGHT IDEA ON HOW I CAN GROW YOU BACK TO NORMAL?”
The booming voice of the giantess exploded in the air, Abby covered her ears and screamed. The simple breath exhaled from Mia as she spoke was a true hurricane, blowing Abby away as if she were dust.
“Whoops”, Mia whispered, watching her minuscule friend fly away for a while before landing again on the floor. She had to squint her eyes now to make out the tiny moving dot that was the shrunken Abby. She followed her desperate movements for just a few seconds, before losing track of her. She had become invisible to the naked eye.
“Abby? Are you still there…?” Mia tentatively asked to the floor.
Of course, no answer.
“If only I could pick her up…” she muttered to herself. Mia used her fingertips to scoop up the surface of the tile. Then, she attentively looked at her skin, and under her nails. Nothing more than a few grains of dust.
“I wonder if at this stage there’s even a point in looking for…”
Her thoughts were interrupted by multiple vibrations from her phone. She picked it up and unlocked the screen: hundreds of likes in just a few minutes. Comments congratulating her performance, but mostly, the realism of the shrinking effect. Mia’s heart skipped a beat. She enthusiastically got up and walked away, scrolling through all the notifications with a proud smile on her face…