Jake’s shout takes you by surprise, and you look up to see a glass bottle hurtling towards you. Your immediate instinct is of course to reach out to catch it; unfortunately, your right hand is currently engaged in protecting your modesty. Obviously you’ve all seen each other nude before in the showers, but knowing Eric and Jake as well as you do you know they are bound to draw the worst possible conclusion about what you’ve been up to on your own if they notice your arousal, and they certainly won’t pass up the opportunity to make fun of you for it. There is absolutely no way you are going to risk letting yourself—a proud and mighty giant god—be humiliated by your friends in front of the thousands of people inside the city (not to mention those elsewhere who may be following events via live news broadcasts), just because you’ve got an erection.
And so, with self-consciousness dictating your actions, you instead try to use your other hand to grab the bottle. Unfortunately, since you’ve just finished stuffing a small crowd of tiny people inside the pocket of your shorts it’s not exactly in an ideal position for catching a fast-moving object. The result is that you are a fraction of a second too late and only succeed in knocking the bottle with your fingertips, sending it spinning away instead of catching it firmly in your palm.
The tumbling bottle, which is of course large enough to dwarf most of the buildings in this tiny world, hurtles down into a region of high-quality housing and parklands near the outskirts of the city. The result is spectacular to say the least. The giant bottle doesn’t just shatter on impact; it explodes. Razor-sharp fragments of glass, many of which are larger than houses, fly outwards like shrapnel, while a foaming mass of sticky-sweet, ultra-carbonated liquid sprays across the landscape for miles around. From the force of the blast—and the smirk on Jake’s face—you guess that he must have given the bottle a good shake before he tossed it, hoping that it would drench you when you opened it. That plan didn’t quite work out, but he and Eric are clearly delighted at the disastrous effect it has instead had on the miniature city.
“Wow, did you see that?” Jake asks. “Pretty cool, huh? I found a couple of those old bottles in the garage. Don’t know how long they’ve been there.”
Well, that explains that. The things could have been sitting there for ages, slowly building up pressure inside. And of course Jake was only too happy to give yours that little extra boost.
“Sure, I’ve always wanted coke-coloured sneakers,” you remark pointedly. The landscape wasn’t the only thing that got drenched: your footwear has also been splattered and stained. You suppose you should count yourself lucky that your bare legs didn’t receive any cuts from the flying glass.
“Man, it was just a joke,” he shrugs indifferently. “Maybe you should try catching it next time? That’s what hands are for.” He looks pointedly at the one that is still in its unlikely position in front of your crotch.
Fortunately, the sudden distraction has allowed your erection to subside so you nonchalantly shift your posture to something more natural. “Maybe I would have done if you didn’t throw like a girl,” you retort.
He ignores this and walks past you to inspect the carnage more closely. He is carrying a similar, though already opened, bottle, and lazily takes a swig from it before admiring the sodden mess on the ground with a look of satisfaction. “Guess they were right, this stuff really is better when it comes in a glass bottle,” he comments sardonically.
You take a look for yourself at the havoc you’ve inadvertently wreaked. It’s actually pretty shocking. Pretty much everything in the immediate vicinity of the impact zone has simply been obliterated. Further out, the massive shards of glass have ripped through houses, schools and shops with stunning force. Trees and traffic have been crushed; at least one train that you can see has been derailed and sliced up like salami. You can’t even begin to imagine how terrifying and horrific things must have been for those caught on the ground.
You even notice a thin sliver of glass, about half the length of your finger, that has travelled some distance further. It has punched all the way through a tower block, leaving it transfixed, as if by a spear. You guess the building won’t survive long: the immense weight of the sliver is already causing the structure to deform and become unstable…
Meanwhile, Jake is pacing slowly backwards and forwards, taking great delight in the way the ground squelches and oozes under his soles. It only takes a slight twist of his sneaker to churn the once-pleasant neighbourhood into mud. The tiny landscape is so thoroughly waterlogged by the immense volume of liquid that much of the spilled cola is now trickling freely across the surface, following the natural contours of the landscape until it gradually begins to pool in great sparkling lakes, with a mist of fizzy droplets constantly leaping dozens of feet into the air.
Half-submerged in the middle of one of these pools you notice a crumpled object that looks exactly like a school bus, so you pluck it out, dripping, to examine it. It seems to be empty, but you can’t help but notice how most of the paintwork has already been etched away by the acids in the drink…
“See what you’ve caused?” Jake pontificates as he casually wanders closer to the city centre, obliviously reducing yet more buildings to powder underfoot and leaving damp sticky footprints wherever he steps. “Littering is bad, mmkay? Next time you don’t want your drink, think of the environment and just pour it safely down the drain.” He finally stops next to the river that winds its way through the centre of the metropolis. Holding his bottle at chest height, he slowly and deliberately tilts it until the contents start to trickle out through the top…
In the space of a few seconds thousands of gallons plunge the hundreds of meters down to the ground and crash into the river with a force greater than any waterfall. The resulting splashes rise higher than nearby buildings, and instantly carry off pedestrians and traffic caught exposed on the embankments. A mighty torrent quickly builds and starts to surge down the watercourse.
“Oh man, now they’re really in trouble,” whispers Eric.
Though probably fairly wide to the inhabitants of the city, the river is in no way able to handle the sudden influx of a vast quantity of extra fluid. The combination of the water pressure and the chemicals of Jake’s soft drink make short work of the concrete embankments. They quickly begin to crumble and even dissolve like a sandcastle in the face of the encroaching tide, allowing the swollen river to burst its banks and flood the surrounding city blocks. Meanwhile, the main surge continues downstream, sweeping aside everything in its path.
The three of you can only follow slowly and watch as the bridges positioned at intervals along the length of the river are overwhelmed one by one, collapsing and sending the gridlocked traffic trapped on them plunging down into the raging black depths of the contaminated river, along with the rest of the debris.
“Hey, look at that,” Jake points. You follow the direction of his finger and see a small boat, a passenger ferry by the look of it, struggling against the current further down, trying to escape, and right in the path of the approaching flood. You guess it must have been in the middle of a trip down the river when the three of you arrived and either it didn’t have time to reach its berth, or the captain decided he and his passengers might be safer staying in the middle of the river than amongst the potentially-collapsible skyscrapers of downtown. Sadly, he reckoned without an Act of Jake.
The fizzy tsunami rears above the helpless ship. It is about to sweep up the puny vessel and dash it to pieces when Jake’s hand reaches down from on high and scoops up the little boat, lifting it effortlessly above the foaming waters. He turns to you and Eric, with the tiny ferry cupped in the palm of his hand. For a moment you think he is simply going to close his hand around it and crush it into splinters, and that is clearly what Eric is expecting too. But instead Jake smirks at the two of you and holds up the bottle, which is by now just under a third full. As you watch he carefully inserts the ferry into the neck of the bottle. As luck would have it, it just fits inside. With one final push from his fingertip the little boat slides down the inside of the glass onto the surface of the effervescent liquid.
“How about that! A ‘ship in a bottle’. I’ve always wanted one of these!” he snickers.
You and Eric roll your eyes at him, but you have to admit, it’s a pretty funny sight. The ferry is filled with passengers and you can clearly see them screaming and waving through the glass. Holding his thumb over the opening, Jake slowly tilts the bottle first one way, then the other, sloshing the liquid about and making the tiny vessel bob up and down. You think you see some of the passengers being sick over the side, and wonder whether he is still planning to drink that stuff. Knowing Jake, he’ll probably play with the ferry for a while and then completely lose interest, leaving it stuck inside—or he’ll forget about the trapped ship altogether and simply throw the bottle away. But for now he slowly turns the bottle into an upright position, taking care not to swamp the ferry in the process, and lets it dangle by his side as he walks along with you and Eric. The mighty flood is left to continue its passage of destruction through the city and presumably then carry on downstream until it reaches the sea.
As you look back at the battered city you can’t help but wonder what might have happened to that little family you released. Whether they have been caught up in the floods along with thousands of others; whether you will ever see them again. Having had a conversation with them, heard their voices and seen their faces, you can’t quite think of them as anonymous little bugs any more. You try to remember exactly where you set them down, but of course you weren’t really paying attention at the time and don’t know the layout of the city well enough to recognise any landmarks. Maybe they were lucky and will get to deliver your message to the guys in charge; you’d certainly like to think so. You suppose you’ll find out eventually if they did.
A little disturbed at the turn your thoughts have taken, you try to distract yourself by turning to Eric and asking: “So, did you get all the food and stuff?”
“Sure, and then some.” Eric indicates a spot a short distance away where several boxes of pizza and some more drinks have been laid out on a blanket on the ground. Not only that, you can also see a couple of backpacks, what look suspiciously like rolled-up sleeping bags, and even some small tents ready to be set up.
Eric notices your look of surprise and explains: “While Jake was digging around in his garage he also found some old camping gear. And then I remembered we still had most of the stuff my brother used when he went on that survival course last year, so we decided it might be fun to make this a proper camping trip.”
“It makes sense, really,” adds Jake. “It’s the best of both worlds. We can pop back home whenever we want for a shower and a change of clothes, but then we’re out here by ourselves, exploring our own private world and all its secrets. We can be slobs who send for take-out whenever we need—or we can be real explorers who live off the land!” He winks at you.
“Oh yeah,” continues Eric, “My brother told me all about how to forage for stuff in the wilderness.”
Somehow you don’t think his brother’s loony survivalist cronies taught him about lands where everything and everyone is a tiny fraction of normal size, but you can certainly follow the way your friends’ minds are working right now…
“So it’s agreed then? We spend a few days here exploring and hunting, and see what happens?”
“Sure, why not,” you shrug. It’s not as though you have anything better to do anyway, and this is bound to turn out to be the trip of a lifetime!
“Okay, so what shall we do first?” asks Jake.
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