Detectives Erik Jameson and his partner Marcus Tanner sat in the back of the unmarked police van as it sped through the city streets. Marcus checked and rechecked his equipment, making sure that every buckle of his stab-vest was tightened, while Eric sat nonchalantly, his stab vest lying on the seat next to, regarding his partner with mild amusement.
"I've never seen anybody look so serious before one of these things. Have you ever raided a squat den before?"
"I've rounded up plenty of squatters before," Marcus replied seriously. "Those people are desperate and vicious, and they've always got shivs hidden somewhere. I'm not taking any chances, and neither should you."
"Not squatters, man. Squats. Did you miss the briefing or something?"
Shamefaced Marcus admitted that he had dozed through much of it, what with it being the last of six 14-hour-shifts. With somebody flooding the city with drugs, the TFPD had never been more in demand, which meant shifts had doubled and officers had to get their rest where they could find it.
Erik grinned widely from ear to ear. "Boy, are you in for a tree. Not every day you get to do your first squat raid. Okay, guess I'll go over the briefing again, so... Squat is a drug. The junkies that use Squat, we call them Squats, easy to get confused with squatters, I know, but there's a big distinction. Or, rather, a small distinction. Other names for Squat are Bonsai, PygmyUp, MiniMe, and a bunch of others."
The van was pulling into a rough part of town now, shuddering through the potholes on the crumbling roads. The buildings eeither side of the street began to show decay, graffiti and shattered windows. Hunting grounds for the TFPD.
"So, on it's own, Squat might not sound like much. What it does is it activates some gene somewhere, and it makes the user start shitting out their guts, basically. Morning, noon, and night, shit, shit, shit. It aint pretty. They don't eat much either. Anyway, all this shitting and not eating, they start to...?"
"...starve?" Marcus ventured, who looked aghast at the tale of shitting, wondering to himself if there was a limit to the type of filth these junkies could shove into their bodies.
"Wrong! They don't get thinner, instead they shrink! The activated Squat gene means that, as the body runs out of nutrition, it gets smaller to compensate. Everything shrinks - fat, muscle, even bone and brains! They grow in reverse, getting tinier and tinier, but their proportions stay the same. Eventually they become little miniature people."
Marcus was almost speechless, but it didn't help promotion prospects to look to surprised about new discoveries in the TFPD. Fellow officers started to look at you as if you're naive. "How small do they get? And what's the point?"
"There's really no lower limit. Most lose maybe a foot or two of height. With chronic usage, you might get abusers that are a foot high, or less. Who knows? This is fairly new on the market, the boys in the lab haven't exactly had time to study it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they just keep shrinking until they're just too small to put the handcuffs on. Maybe eventually they just float away on the wind, or get eaten by rats," he laughed.
"But why? Do they get some sort of high out of it?"
"No pun intended, right," Erik winked. "Nah, no high, at least not directly. The thing you have to understand is that there's very few Squat addicts in the world. None of the Squats take it because they want to. It's a simple question of weight rations. Y'see, if you make a man half the size, his weight is actually 1/8th of his original weight, on account of him being halved in three different dimensions. Half as high, half was wide, half the gut. And a person that is one 8th the mass requires only one 8th the food to eat, one 8th the water to drink, and one 8th the cocaine to get high."
"Ohh."
"That's why I said there aren't many Squat addicts. They take it because, to a serious Squat, a spliff can look like a goddamn tree. A baggy of cocaine is like a holdall stuffed with it. Most of these are serious addicts to other substances, and they take Squat because it allows them to afford their habits. They live like kings. Tiny, off-their-face kings."
Marcus looked down at his normal-sized handcuffs. "Wow, I was really not prepared for this mission. Next time I fall asleep in a brief, kick me. So what exactly can we expect?"
"Nothing too dangerous. It's not like these guys are going to be carrying around heavy weaponry - the worst you can expect is a cut from a dirty-blade and a trip to the doc for a tetanus shot. But there can be a lot of them. These Squat dens - typically they stick together for mutual safety, against other humans or even animals - so there can be upwards of a hundred squats living in a single house. It's kinda funny really when you see these places - most of them live in cardboard boxes, some even in doll houses, and they're like mansions to them. Most of the time they'll have at least one normal-sized person there to look after them, somebody who can actually go out, buy food and score them all drugs without worrying about getting trodden on. He should be the only one you need to worry about. The minute things kick off, the Squats are probably going to scatter, start throwing things, and its going to be manic. Just try to keep your wits about you. Keep your gun holstered, because you aint going to be able to hit these tiny fuckers anyway, and try not to run - if you tread on them, it's going to be a lot of paperwork."
Marcus was starting to wonder if a vacuum cleaner might have been a more suitable weapon than his sidearm, if his partner's description was to be believed. "Anything else I should know?"
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