The Mite-y Football Team

[shrinking, some midgetization and giant]

Chester’s Legacy

I was Chester’s roommate during our PhD programs. He wasn’t shy about his research with me, and although I thought it was a little kooky (and that Chester was more than a little kooky) it was all very sound. Chester was unstable but brilliant. He showed me all of his work and it was shocking but amazing.

That’s why they called me in to talk to detectives about what truly happened. All that the world knew for sure was that on October 21st, in the Granite State Goliaths’ locker room just after their victory over their U. Maine rivals, a purple fog was released. When it cleared, everyone in the locker room--125 players, 6 coaches, 10 team assistants and 2 reporters--seemed to vanish, leaving only their clothes behind.

Chester publicly claimed that no one was actually missing; that the team was all still there, actually, but now approximately a millimeter in size. He called it, “the great equalizer.” He said that these men’s massive statures gave them undeserved privilege and that it was time to, “swing the needle the other way.”

I went to the station to say that yes, it was possible for him to make full grown (perhaps overgrown?) men so small they were almost invisible to the eye. “We’re lucky he didn’t make them even smaller,” I told the dumbfounded detectives. “In the trials he made living things microscopic. At least with these guys, there’s a chance that we can still find some of them.”

Rescue Efforts

While Chester went to prison to await his sentencing, I was called in to spearhead the rescue efforts. Government physicists sat waiting to take notes about my proposals for recovering these lost men. “We’ll need heat sensors,” I said, “but their small bodies are barely going to register anything above room temperature. We can’t make the room colder or they’ll freeze to death, so it’s going to be a very slow search-and-recover effort.” I suggested a pully system that left us suspended by the ceiling, combing the floor with infrared goggles on, looking for little specks of warmth somehow surviving in what, to them, was an alien wilderness.

We theorized that the men in the shower were long gone, and our search efforts confirmed that. We estimated six men, lathering up their big bodies when the purple fog swept through. Suddenly a microfraction of their size, we assume they instantly washed down the drains. They probably had no idea what was happening. If any of them survived, they probably ended up so far down the plumbing that we had no hope of recovering.

“Let’s keep our rescue efforts reasonable,” I said, ignoring the idea that some of these massive athletes ended up miles away in pipes without even knowing what was going on. I hoped they drowned over starving to death; both possibilities were better than dealing with whatever vermin lived down there. The other scientists shuddered as I jotted that possibility on the whiteboard and I decided to move on.

“Wouldn’t some of them have been killed by their clothes?” one of the short-sighted police detectives asked. (They insisted on being there for all of our strategizing despite the fact that they only slowed things down.) “What about falling? When they shrunk, did they end up at the floor or where their heads were?”

I had to point out the fact that even if they were between, say, a spiked football cleat and the floor, their small size and near weightlessness would have protected them. “We can imagine that most, if not all, of them ended up lost in whatever clothes they were wearing. To them it probably felt like being on another planet despite the fact that the alien mountains they had to scale to escape was actually their own sweaty jockstrap.”

Some of the men may have been nude at the time of the shrinking. At their size, they would have lost enough perspective to continue to identify their surroundings as the locker room they were just in. We could imagine that the men were completely in the dark about their current situation. Even we rescuers would be so big as to be incomprehensible to the tiny little men. We had to assume that, in our efforts to collect them, they would resist out of confusion and fear. For their own good, we needed a system that could harmlessly snatch them up without harming their bodies.

I put together a small handheld device with a foam padded probe. The device used static electricity to attract and cling the miniscule football players to its end while the foam remained porous enough that it wouldn’t smother them if they ended up trapped face down.

Within two weeks of “the incident” our team had recovered 60 of the players. The others kept searching but I formed a smaller team to work on restoration.

Post-Rescue

“Can you imagine,” I thought one day as I looked at three of the men through my microscope. “When this all happened, the Maine Bears players were all walking around the away team locker room, defeated and dejected. They had no idea that the big, strong men who stomped them into the ground were suddenly smaller than lint.”

On my slide were three of the players. Using a syringe, I squeezed out a nutrient gel with a fragrant scent and a bright pink color. The starving little men rushed for the gel and ate desperately with their hands. It wasn’t nutritionally perfect but it would keep them alive. I could see that a week of trying to survive in the locker room had left their bodies withered and weary. It was hard to tell with specificity, but they seemed to maintain their large frames but their hard-earned mass and brawn had wasted away as they struggled to navigate their deflated uniforms and the cold locker room tiled floor.

My assistant, Barry, made a note as he checked the three tiny men feeding in the microscope. With his smart watch he quickly tapped out a text message.

I recognize one of those guys I think. Daryl Walker. Great big guy. I sat next to him on the bus once. He took up two seats.

(It was imperative to maintain absolute silence around the tiny men. A voice at regular volume was likely to burst their tiny eardrums.)

I made a note before I put the slide back in the storage unit. We were struggling to ID these guys, nearly impossible until we got them to a larger size. “Possibly Daryl Walker,” I noted before reinserting the slide into the miniature “dormitory” I had come up with for all of the “tinies.” The men lived on plastic slides but in the unit, they had a little room to walk around, constantly airflow, a place to dispose of waste and a gently shifting set of lights to keep them calm and soothed. The entire thing was smaller than a tackle box and housed all 75 of the men we had located.

It’s funny, Barry texted after I had put the slide containing “possibly Daryl” and the other two players away. I remember sitting next to him and thinking like he just smelled like pure testosterone. He smirked, then texted more. I don’t mean B.O. It was like… I could smell his body working to make him big and huge and strong. My little body was only 150 pounds but he was 325, still the same species as me but genetically a relative giant. And I could smell it. I wonder what he smells like now?

Recovery Effort 1

Communication with the “tinies” was impossible, but as we identified them, we were able to contact their families to cede their rights over to us so that we could legally attempt to restore them to full size without a liability issue.

“It’s not going to be simply reversing what was done to them,” I explained at the public hearing about the mssing football players. I tried to ignore the crying mothers and girlfriends and the furious fathers in the crowd. “Much of their mass was permanently dumped so I’ll have to rebuild them from scratch. These are living things so it’s going to take time, and there’s no guarantee full restoration is possible.”

Somehow, several of the families agreed allow us to try anything to restore the shrunken athletes.

Chet Earley’s family was first in line to sign the liability release forms. He was the team’s starting quarterback, and one of the first we were able to ID. I spent weeks running simulations, spent many sleepless nights tweaking equations and running more and more complex algorithms hoping to get out in front of any possible mistakes.

Day after day I stared at Chet’s charts, studied pictures of him as I did my best to create a machine that could make a 1 millimeter man 6’5” tall again. While most of the team were brutish oafs, this man, who would have seemed intimidatingly tall if he were full-sized, was remarkably beautiful. He had icy blue eyes, incredible cheekbones and an undeniably masculine jawline. He lacked the overwhelming bulk of some of his larger teammates but his body, from the pictures, seemed hard and sinewy. At first glance it was obvious that this stud was a next-level athlete.

When I thought I was ready to restore him, I inserted the slide carrying the miniscule quarterback into the resequencer and activated it, staring intently at the large cylinder his restored body would end up inside. Thick clouds of fog filled the device as my machine did its thing, synthesizing mass as the teeny-tiny man expanded out.

This man had been a helpless speck in my lab for weeks. It had been hard to remember that he was a human and not some little parasite. But if my calculations were correct, out of the cylinder would step a giant of a man. I’d be looking up at him, overwhelmed by his striking beauty (despite the fact that I’m sure the ordeal would have weathered him a bit).

Sadly, I had made a mistake somewhere. As the tube slid away, I saw Chet Early within but his proportions were all wrong. He stared around, confused, patting his body in disbelief as he realized he was much smaller than he should have been. I got the mass right, having enlarged him back to his 220 pounds, but his height was only a hair over 4’ tall.

The result was what looked like a bulky dwarf of a man. He waddled around on too-thick legs and marveled at his stumpy, musclebound body. When he spoke, he had the high-pitched voice of a munchkin. We had to sedate him to explain everything that had happened to him (only for his own safety of course; we weren’t actually worried that this little midget would injure us in any way).

He could hardly believe that after everything he had gone through, he would live the rest of his life constantly looking up at people. He’d have to move the seat in his car all the way up, ask for help getting things off tall shelves and being looked down on (quite literally) for being a short little beefy freak. People would forever assume he bulked up his muscles to compensate for his near-crippling lack of height when the truth was that he was the victim of two scientists: one who was too good at his job and one who wasn’t nearly good enough.

Recovery Effort 2

After what I’d done to Chet Early, I submitted my resignation from the project. I kept getting a flash in my head of two images: one of Chet, tall and strong and beautiful, and then one of him after what I’d done to him: short, stumpy, hindered by his unwieldy limbs and forever relying on others.

It was a message from Chet that changed my mind. “No matter what happened,” he began, “I can’t imagine what those other guys must be going through. When I was that small, life was insane. Every day was a struggle. We never felt comfort. I think my only saving grace was not knowing that the place I spent my first two weeks like that, struggling to survive, was my own sweaty jockstrap. Knowing how tiny I was would have driven me insane.”

“Even though life is different now,” the message continued, “it’s better than where I was. If you can help the others, I think you should. And I believe you may be the only one who can.”

I made my decision then to do what I could to help the rest of the microscopic football players. I cursed Chester twice, once for doing this to them and once for sharing his knowledge with me so that it would fall in my lap to save them.

Skip McEachern’s family was the next to volunteer their miniaturized athlete for a recovery effort. I took this attempt far more slowly and methodically, spending half my time theorizing new ways to approach the process and the other half combing through my prior attempt and searching for where it all went wrong.

Skip was a tight end. When he was full-sized he was 6’3” tall, more solidly built than Chet with broad shoulders and a husky muscular body. I imagined him as the kind of guy who had been the biggest his whole life, shooting up before his classmates, getting muscles before anyone else, dwarfing full grown men by the time he was 18.

It was two months of grueling effort working on Skip’s recovery. I had his family and the public begging for results to one side, with the scientific community urging me on from the other. When it was finally time, I still didn’t feel ready (would I ever?) but I submitted Skip to the device and held my breath.

When the cylinder opened up and the fog cleared, I heard a gasp from the other scientists on my team. Skip was there but he was enormous, well over 8 feet tall. Despite the shocking sight of the monstrous human I had created, I still congratulated myself for at least getting him proportional.

He stumbled forward and stood straight up, bumping his head on the ceiling. He swung his massive limbs wildly at the scientists approaching to sedate him, knocking them clear across the room with little effort. Fully nude, his big cock swung between his legs. I wondered if that was the length it had always been or if somehow, in enlarging him, I’d made it even more impressive.

Skip kept blinking and looking around with a dazed expression. It looked like he was having a hard time processing what was going on. “Guuhhh…” he moaned. “Duhh… Hurrr…” He looked like he was trying and failing to form words. Controlling his body seemed to be a massive effort as well. He seemed to focus hard before taking a step or grasping with his fingers.

After a few days of examination it was determined that Skip’s brain didn’t enlarge appropriately with his much more massive body. Just the effort of managing the bloodflow to his gigantic form was leaving his brain short on resources, and his brain, which was no longer proportionate to his gigantic frame, couldn’t manage the effort. For the rest of his life Skip would be a hulking giant without the ability to tie his shoes, or identify shapes, or even feed himself. He was little more than an animal in this state.

After I resigned from the program I heard that Skip was kept in a large caged in area where he was fed and washed like an elephant. A team of handlers would restrain his limbs while they hosed him down and dropped in oversized loafs of bread and massive burger patties. An old classmate forwarded me a video that had apparently gone viral, of Skip jerking his massive dick while he stared off into space, drooling. From what I’d heard, the cumshot that erupted him went over a hundred feet into the air, but I never watched the video.

One day while flipping through channels I happened upon ESPN just at the moment a sportscaster said, “Damn, they should do this to every athlete! Make ‘em huge and braindead. Imagine how great the game would be then!”

Aftermath

I was surprised to receive an invitation to the one-year memorial ceremony for those who didn’t survive that horrible incident. After I visited Chet and Skip’s families to offer my most sincere apologies (which were most graciously accepted, thankfully) I very vocally washed my hands of the affair. I don’t even know how they got my new address, let alone why they would invite me to the services remembering the lost athletes.

I was thankful they didn’t ask me to speak and sat silently as I watched the slideshow of all of the men who never made it out of that locker room. I imagined Chester in his maximum security mental institution. I wondered if he was satisfied with his work or if he had more work left to do.

I saw Chet pass by me. He seemed to have a little more confidence in his stumpy little physique. As he waddled past me on his incredibly thick legs, I heard him complaining about his flight in. “Planes are the worst,” he said in his high-pitched voice. “I can’t ever reach the overhead compartments and there’s no seat in the world good enough to fit this thing.” He patted his enormous backside and gave it a wiggle. It was wider than any of the full-sized men’s asses around.

Skip didn’t arrive but they showed a video of him in his cage, gnawing on a tree branch and using basic sign language. Maybe, I thought, in years he would be able to fully communicate. Maybe he would resume a normal life--or as normal a life as an 8 foot giant could have.

Near the end of the ceremony, a grey-haired gentleman with thick glasses took the stage. He was the scientist who headed the recovery program after I resigned, Dr. Enrich Magnus. He said some kind words to the families who lost loved ones but went into the groundbreaking research that had saved the lives of the rest.

Despite my efforts to avoid the topic, I had heard news that the other remaining athletes had been restored, but the media didn’t have much detail about them other than the fact that they were alive and working to resume normal lives.

At that point, the surviving athletes took the stage. My eyes went wide when I saw them: every one of them was only 3 feet tall. They were still powerfully built, many of them resuming the high-octane training that had built them into powerhouses before the incident (I’m sure with much smaller weights), and their bodies were the exact proportions they had once had. Each of them was just half their original height.

A small choir of schoolchildren took the stage to sing a song for the lost. I couldn’t help but notice these kids, who couldn’t have been older than 10 years old, towering over the formerly hulking football brutes. These men faced far more struggles than Chet did. The entire world was now twice its size to them. Imagine, a lifetime of looking down on the world, of being revered for your physical power, and being reduced to near insignificance at the blink of an eye.

At least at their 1 millimeter height they were unaware of how small they were. I scanned the crowd of shrunken men and spotted some of the rugged looking lineman. Once they had tipped the scales, probably breaking chairs under their powerful bulk, but now a steep flight of stairs would present a problem.

Imagine one of them running into an ex-girlfriend with their new boyfriend. They were now below crotch height for the man who replaced them. They would politely extend a tiny hand, staring up at a man they would have sneered at for being puny before--now the man’s hand swallows theirs and they realize that single hand could hoist them into the air and toss them around with ease. What does that do to one’s psyche, I wondered? I was certain someone was researching it. I was desperate to explore the results.

I wondered if Chester could see all of this from his padded cell. I wondered if he was pleased with himself. His whole goal was to take the power away from these men. Goal attained, Chester.