Warmup scene 9: Sero

“Well I don’t see why you need me here for this experiment, Alkali,” Sero said, arms crossed and huffing grumpily.

Alkali’s hand clapped the blue and white collie on his back. “Nonsense. Mad science loves company, you should know that!” the roo laughed. He led the canine through his laboratory, past half-finished experiments and bubbling concoctions. A large machine stood in the back, 10 feet tall and imposing. It looked like an enormous metal box with buttons covering nearly the entire front. They flashed in bright reds, blues, and greens and toward the bottom an LCD screen no larger than a smart phone took up prime real estate right in the middle. Sero furrowed his eyebrows, staring at the machine. That screen was the only actual place for interacting with the machine; the buttons and wires all seemed to be for show.

The collie pushed his hair aside, out of his eyes. “Very impressive. You’re just trying to show off with all those scientific looking things on the front aren’t you?”

“Oh. You noticed huh? Don’t pay attention to that. Just wanted to make it look cooler. You’re the only one who’d figure that out. Probably,” the kangaroo said. “This does have a use though. It’s a size transferring device. Takes mass from one thing and puts it in another. Sort of removes the whole issue of ‘unable to create or destroy mass’ problem with growth or shrinking.”

“Cool,” Sero said with a yawn, leaning against the side of the chrome box. “So why are you showing it to me?”

“It needs a beta test.”

“Oh, gotcha.”

“You get to be the beta tester.”

The collie’s usually floppy ears perked. “Wait, what?”

Before Sero could ask for any details though he found himself surrounded by a bright blue glow. The roo held in his hand a smoking ray gun pointed right at his chest. Without answering anything, Alkali began busily tapping away on the control screen of the machine. He had to use his pointer fingers only, typing awkwardly on a keyboard thanks to the tiny size of the screen. Sero put a hand on his chest half expecting a singe mark or some sort of growth to start. But nothing happened.

“Your machine is supposed to do more than turn me into a blue glow stick, right?” the collie laughed.

Alkali turned around and stuck his tongue out. “Just give me a second. That was just to set you up as the machine’s target point. This isn’t a growth ray, it’s a targeting gun.” The machine in front of him started to hiss and hum, while the lights’ blinking sped up. Sero backed away slowly, suddenly not as self-assured.

With a quick flash of light, Sero suddenly disappeared. Only his clothes were left behind in a pile on the floor. Alkali turned around triumphantly, ready to gloat to his friend. But no one was there to gloat to. That wasn’t right.  He turned back to futz with the screen again. It looked like he’d accidentally set it to siphon mass rather than send it into the collie. Oops.

Down in the pile of clothes, way down within the molecules of his jeans, a tiny collie floated amongst carbon atoms. He’d been caught up in the pull of a single nucleus, vibrating around it with the rest of the electrons. One second he’d been standing up in the roo’s laboratory, the next he found himself with all his mass drained. He grumbled lightly. Soon as Alkali fixed this he was going to give him a piece of his mind. And by a piece of his mind, he meant slapping that roo’s face back and forth. An electron bumped into the collie’s side, ricocheting him off against other atoms in a cascade until he finally came to a stop.

“Alkali, fix this already! I’m getting dizzy down here!” he squeaked impotently.

Luckily for him Alkali was in the process of doing just that. He flipped the polarity of mass travel back toward the collie and mashed on a big red button labeled ‘GO.’ The machine sprung to life yet again, but this time a strange smoky smell filled the room. The roo had to step backward as sparks jumped from cables on the sides of the enormous machine.

“Well, for a beta test this is about as bad as possible,” he muttered. But it did seem to be working. The small, blue collie appeared from out of the folds of his shirt, naked but still intact. He grew up to his former height and kicked his clothes out of the way to run after the kangaroo.

“What’s the big idea, shrinking me down like that? Why did you-” Sero started, but was cut off when he felt his head bump into something hard above. The blue canine leaned down to look up at what he could’ve hit and realized it was a hanging light fixture from the ceiling. A lamp that hung 10 feet up in the air. It seemed his growth was not yet finished, as the size transfer device continued to pump more mass toward its collie target. When Sero was shrunk down it simply stored his mass in electric energy inside a large battery. Something changed when Alkali switched the machine to grow though; it wasn’t just draining the battery back into the collie. More energy was being sent to him in the form of mass too. The electric outlet sparked and shuddered as power from the grid was siphoned into the canine.

The lights in the lab flickered slightly as the machine pulled more and more power, its humming reaching a feverish pitch. Sero was forced to sit down, his tail dragging across the ground and destroying hundreds of dollars of glassware and furniture. In spite of the chaos around him, he seemed to be quite pleased with the change.

Alkali wanted to get back to the machine to fix whatever was happening, but Sero had placed a growing foot on the front of the machine. He’d blocked any way to get there. The roo looked up to see a smirking collie face just before it grew straight through the ceiling. Yup. Just about as bad a beta test as was possible.