"Mr. Bauer, please, come right in." The bear smiled and stepped aside while opening the door for Will. Her bulk still filled most of the door frame, but the weasel was able to squirm his way in regardless. He did so, doing his best to ignore the way she wrinkled her nose at his passing. He was nervous. His musk was always strong when he was nervous.
Still, it didn't hurt to be as cordial as possible. "Thank you so much Mrs. Grimes. It's truly a pleasure to be in your wonderful home."
Mrs. Grimes snorted as she shut the door. "Not so much at the moment. Please excuse the mess. Ever since we found out Victor's diagnosis, things have been a little hectic." She shuffled forward past him, nearly pushing him against the wall. She looked tired, but she was doing her best not to show it.
"There's no need to apologize, Mrs. Grimes. I get the feeling that your home on a bad day is still so much cleaner than my apartment on its best." He looked at the living room before following her towards the back of the house. It was a cluttered place, a room that had obviously been lived in for quite some time, but it had been kept painstakingly clean. It smelled strongly of industrial cleaner, though Will could catch a whiff of the family that lived her underneath all that. He chuckled to himself. She had taken great care to tidy up before he arrived, despite what she said.
The big bear chuckled and looked down at him over her shoulder. "You're too kind," she purred. She lead him to the kitchen, which she filled almost entirely by herself. Will couldn't imagine what it must have been like for the whole family here. Though she was the smallest, she still towered over him at seven feet. Her son and husband were much bigger, bulkier. It must have been all they could do not to trip over each other all the time. "Please, call me Barbara."
She stuck out her hand and he took it. He didn't have to bend to kiss it, but he bowed after he did anyway. She chuckled and put her free hand to her muzzle, doing her best to look demure. Will smiled broadly. It was nice to know he still had it. "All right, Barbara," he said. "I don't want to take up much more of your time. I figured I'd just get to meet Victor for right now, talk for maybe fifteen minutes before heading home. We'll set up our interview schedule so it's not too much a strain on any of you, but I have to insist on at least three times a week."
Barbara nodded, then looked out the back door behind her. Will could just make out movement over her shoulder. "Oh, of course," she said, then smoothed her immense hands on her apron. "I don't think Victor's going to go back to college this semester until we can figure all of this out, so he'll have plenty of time."
Will smiled, rows of small sharp teeth suddenly visible. "You mean he's not going to get a job this summer?"
Barbara chuckled, but her face fell slightly. "I don't think there's a place that'll take him now."
Will winced inwardly. "You'd be surprised. Most guys are a shoe-in for construction work once they're diagnosed. Plenty of 'em are leading quite productive lives now that...well, now that we know this isn't going away. We're doing our best to make sure those first few instances don't set the reputation for everyone with the disease."
Barbara's smile returned, though it wasn't as bright as it was before. "I know, Mr. Bauer. I can't thank you enough for the work you're doing here. It means the world to me and Mikhail."
He smiled and nodded, setting down his briefcase and plucking out a notepad. "It's my job, ma'am. I'd hate to think that we'd shun certain people just when they needed us the most to make sense of what was happening to them. By the way, call me William."
The weasel walked out of the kitchen door to the Grimes' expansive back yard. Barbara had done quite a bit of work on it -- a line of fruit trees dominated the back fence, and there were small islands of herbs, rosebushes, grapevines and other flowers laid about, like mines of color and fragrance. Of course, that only caught the eye for a moment. What really grabbed your attention was the reason that Will was here in the first place -- the giant bear sitting against the big apple tree at the edge of the yard.
Victor had been diagnosed with chronic hyper-gigantia two weeks ago, and in that span of time he had doubled in size from eight feet (just under the tallest bear ever recorded) to nearly sixteen feet. He hadn't finished growing yet, of course, and the latest reports seemed to indicate that he would start growing in random, but potent spurts. No one knew just how tall he was going to get. Of the couple thousand hyper-gigantic cases that had sprung up in the past year, not one of them ever seemed to truly finish growing. Fenn Richards, the wolf who was the first recorded case, was nearing 600 feet tall at last report. According to the authorities up in Massachusetts, detaining him was getting to be impossible.
The bear in the backyard had nothing to do with that, of course, except for sharing the same condition. But Fenn's actions had put the fear of these "macros" -- that's what the media called them -- quite clearly in the public's mind. And once that first impression had set, it would be awfully hard to shake. That's why William's work was so important. He had to prove, scientifically and beyond the shadow of a doubt, that hyper-gigantia didn't cause dementia, aggression or any of the other mental traumas it had come to be associated with. While growing to the size of a skyscraper had to do crazy things to your psychology, it didn't necessarily make you a bloodthirsty monster. Or so he hoped.
William smiled as he approached the bear. Victor smiled back, and didn't bother getting up. Even sitting the young bear towered over the weasel, and standing would only make the size difference that much more pronounced.
"Good evening, Victor. I'm Dr. William Bauer." He smiled and offered his paw. "I'm here to ask you a few questions..."
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