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Yasushi was a savant. A genius. A 20 year old university student at one of Japan's top universities. Perhaps unusually amongst people so gifted, he was also pretty normal. Not much of a compliment, but amongst his co-studies he certainly felt it to be an unusual point. Yasushi studied Applied Engineering with a few modules of Physics for Engineering thrown in here and there, and was expected to ace just about every assessment and test thrown his way. Something he did, without fail, year after year, until one day he stopped coming to the tests. He stopped coming to class in fact. He stopped being seen by anyone. This is the story of what happened to the "Great Mind of the Tokyo Youth".
Yasushi lived in a small apartment in a quiet part of Saitama north of Tokyo, and commuted each day along the Shonan-Shinjuku line. Sitting (or standing, as was so often the case) on that commuter line gave him a lot of time to think. Why had his mother left him and his three siblings when they were children? Why had their father left to work in Hokkaido leaving only a cash sum for emergencies and a regular bank transfer for expenses in his wake? It's true the four young children of the family had an easy life, but living without their parents unsettled them. Were they disappointed? Their mother had been a top researcher at a pharmaceutical company, and their father a corporate powerhouse. That must be it, thought Yasushi on the train one day. "We failed them".
He would see to that. He would bring their parents back, praising the unbridled genius of their children. He knew what had to be done.
One year later, Yasushi rode the commuter train back to Omiya station and began the slow walk to the apartment. Today was the big day. The results of his experimentation with matter transformation were neatly tabulated, the internal workings of the devices documents, and all of the relevant information cross referenced and triple-checked. Today he would submit his paper, kept secret until now, to the scientific community. Months of hard work, pulling all-nighters in the university labs and library, slowly drawing out a whole new field of advanced mechanism. The means by which to change the size of anything.
This, he thought, will change the world. My parents can't possibly fail to see this. It'll be all over the news. I'll bring the family back together.
"I'm home", he announced cheerfully, entering the apartment and kicking off his shoes. No response. "I guess they're not home yet..." he thought, referring to his three sisters. His older sister Rena was probably still at work at a nearby cafe. It was simple work, but brought in enough money while she looked for something more professional. His younger sisters Mika and Yui were probably still at their after-school clubs. He dropped his satchel in a corner of his small room, and headed for the workshop.
Now, workshop might be too generous a word. The room was originally a small wash area, with a sink, a small work area and some shelves and drawers. When they moved into the apartment, no-one found much use for the metre-and-a-bit square space, so Yasushi threw a simple lock on the door and converted it into a compact but capable workbench. Above the smooth aluminium counter hung a high-powered set of lights, and on the walls hung a variety of tools - micrometers, screwdrivers, files and the like. On the desk was a set of small vices and rails, similar to those used on optics workbenches, and two devices.
Both devices looked a mess - wiring and I/O ports hanging out at jaunty angles and arrangements of lenses held on one face by roughly machined screws and bolts. Both devices were connected by heavy duty cabling to a large set of capacitors, and onward to a jury-rigged plug connecting 4 wall outlets to a convertor. The devices took a lot of power in a short time, and experiments had to be spaced to allow recharging.
Yasushi smiled at his work - his masterpiece. One device that shrunk matter, and one that enlarged it. There was some fundamental rule that objects could not be enlarged, since the enlargement process was actually an un-doing of the shrinking process. Nevertheless, it was a work of art. He squeezed into the small chair and prodded at some of the connectors. One more test can't help, he thought to himself. One last play around before he changes the world. He flipped the switches on the power transformer, cutting the device from the mains and connecting the capacitors. A few switches later and the device showed a 'Ready' light.
He smiled. The chair slipped. He vanished.
"No." was his first thought upon waking. "This can't have happened."Yasushi looked up at the chair he had fallen from, now apparently hundred of metres tall. There was no way for him to climb it, and even if there were, the devices on the table would be impossible to use. A small loudspeaker quietly informed him that the capacitors were fully drained and needed to be reconnected. It was his own voice, mocking him from far above. "Keep it together", he thought. "I'll get help, and it'll be fine. I'll just end up publishing tomorrow, I suppose."
He walked across the floor of the workshop, and found he could easily fit under the door. Everything was so huge he felt a sense of vertigo simply looking at the apartment he'd inhabited for years. The floor in the hallway was smooth imitation-wood flooring, and at his size he could make out every fleck of dust and dirt that had been carried in here. As he marveled at the vastness of the space, there came a scraping at the door. As he watched, the door was flung open, and a young woman entered. Mika had returned home. "She can help me!", he thought out loud. The words had barely left his lips as Mika closed the door behind her and pushed her shoes off with one hand, stepping onto the cool plastic of the hallway floor, and Yasushi realised just how small he was. His sister lurched forward, seeming to move inhumanly fast as she walked down the corridor, stepping over her miniscule speck of a brother, and flopping down loudly somewhere in the living room.
"She almost killed me...", Yasushi thought, unable to forget the sight of his younger sister's colossal socked foot soaring over him, looking like it weighed more than the moon. "If she had..."He had to get help soon, before he was popped like a tiny ant by his unaware sisters. If he stood still, it was only a matter of time, and with this in mind, he set off at a jog toward the living room and it's titanic inhabitant. Perhaps ten minutes later he arrived by the sofa his sister was relaxing on, watching the TV contentedly. He watched as she wriggled her toes in her socks against the slight roughness of the tatami floor of the room. Yasushi eyed his sister's school bag leaning against the low table, and decided that would be the best way to get up onto the table and attract Mika's attention. He didn't know why, but he found himself tiptoeing past the giant pair of feet, as it they were sleeping beasts that would devour him. "What am I doing... It's not like they can hear me", he thought, just before his train of thought was interrupted by Mika's right foot rocketing into the sky, only to return a moment later minus the navy blue sock that had covered it. The left foot promptly jumped into the sky from it's position immediately next to the miniscule person, and gave him no chance to respond as it came crashing down upon him.
"I'm... not dead?" Yasushi thought with surprise as he stared at the ceiling between his sister's big and second toes. The heat emanating from them was oppressive, and the faint smell of his sister's long day of study surrounded him. Just as his thoughts began to come together, he saw his sister reach out, socks in hand, to place them on the table. As she lent forward, her foot rocked up onto her toes, and she unknowingly pressed the sticky, delicate flesh between her toes into the body of her tiny sibling. As she lay back, he found himself lifted aloft, stuck to the skin of her foot, able only to look around at the bits of sock lint that shared his predicament.
The world moved around him and his fuzzy-blue compatriots as his sister brought her feet up onto the sofa, holding her knees to her chest. He saw her face, undeniably beautiful, with big dark eyes framed by straight black hair, the smooth tone of her skin only broken by the soft pink of her lips. Was she looking at him? She was! He cried out, "MIKAAAAAAAA! I'M HERE!" as she looked on, uncaring. No, he realised, she's not looking at me. She's looking at her foot. As he cried out once more, hopelessly, something heavy crashed into him. Mika had slipped one delicate finger between her toes, apparently offended by the sock lint and other black specks that had accumulated there, making her feet look dirty. She idly rubbed at the space between her toes, rolling the stuff up and down, gathering together into a ball bound by her sweat. She left the ball there, pinched roughly between her toes as she repeated the process with the others, before returning. Combining all the lint and sweat into one little lump, the brought it up to her face, and seeing nothing of interest, flicked it away.
Yasushi had a terrible time - first he was pressed hard into the flesh of his sister's foot, but was not taken up with the rest of the lint. The ball rolled over him, but he was held fast to her skin. He thought he was okay, he'd made it, as her damned finger moved on to other places, but as she parted her second and third toes, he was popped out from his secure place, and felt dangerously exposed. His feeling was right, as a moment later he was balled up with a day's worth of sweat residue and fluff, and held before his sister's gorgeous eyes. Before he could summon the strength to move or shout, incredible acceleration winded him, and he lost consciousness.