1976….

School was out, which for 8 year old Jacoby Kurk meant the Wahroonga Public School, surrounded by a nature reserve on one side, two streets, and a suburban house on the other side. Third class was out of the way, and he had the long summer holidays to enjoy: nine weeks in fact. Jacoby liked the school grounds and the forest like nature reserve more than his own backyard. So he took the short walk there from home on the first day of the holidays, and took his action figurines and their vehicles out of his backpack and set up a few toy adventure scenarios in the nature reserve, before beginning to realise that he was starting to grow out of any interest in them.

Then another tiny vehicle rolled into view all by itself. It was like an overly wide and overly long motor cycle, with a domed passenger compartment on the top. There was a small moving figurine in it, which seemed to be driving the toy.

As he looked on in surprise, the dome opened and then the cycle flew up to his head height and its occupant actually spoke:

“You must be my double on this earth.”

“Double?” said Jacoby.

“Take a closer look. We could be twins, except for our sizes. I know I talk like an adult, but that’s because the Glamorous Trio used their Eye Box to advance my language skills. They made it by combining technology from Brother Box and Mother Eye (two other devices). Now it does all sorts of things. It even invented the Trio’s custom sized version of this Slipper Cycle.”

While trying to absorb all that, Jacoby looked at the tiny boy closely and saw that his facial features were identical.

“It’s true. We are like twins,” he said.

“I’m also Jacoby Kurk, but from a parallel earth,” said the newcomer, “The Slipper Cycle is so named because it can roll along the ground, or fly through the air, or SLIP between dimensions to any of the four earths. It also fires Meagre beams, by the way. They’re like minor strength lasers, that just knock someone out for a while. But let me tell you about the earths, now that I’ve seen them all. There’s earth-T, from your perspective, which has tiny people like me. There’s earth-G, which has people who are so large that you’d seem like my size in comparison. There’s earth-B, which has people exactly twice the size of their counterparts on your earth (for those who have counterparts, and not all people are replicated on the other earths). Your earth-A has people your size, but some of them have the gts gene. It allows those boys and men to shrink, and to teleport and grow back to normal size, and allows girls and ladies to grow to giant size and back to normal size. Some people can even use the gts gene’s teleportational ability to cross between earths (in certain specific gateway areas) without the use of the Slipper Cycle.”

(Earths A, B & G have already been mentioned in previous chapters concerning Lewis Rickland’s inter-dimensional exploits, making earth-T the fourth earth.)