A fine afternoon in Great Lakes City, especially for the Casagrande family. The large, hispanic family was enjoying the day, just relaxing without a care in the world. Hector and Rosa were out on their vacation, leaving Bobby to watch the Mercado. Carlos, on the other hand, was also out, only he was working his shift at the city university. As for the rest of the family, they were all just going about their day as if nothing bad was going to happen. Unfortunately, that was all going to change very soon.
Ronnie Anne was currently hanging out with her best friend, Sid, in the Chang's apartment while her mother was working at the city hospital for the day. That only left Carl, Carlitos, CJ, Carlota, and their mother, Frida, in their apartment. Carl was currently playing with his El Falcon de Fuego action figure in his room. Luckily for him, his grandmother, Rosa, wasn't there to ruin his fun for the time being. However, his fun was suddenly halted by a knock on the door.
The boy went to answer the door and saw his usual delivery woman, Mirta, at the door. "Hey, Carl. How's it going?" Mirta kindly asked, holding a small package in her hand.
"Hey, Mirta. Eh, I'm doing great. So what's the deal for today?" Carl said.
"Here you go, little buddy. Sign here, please." Mirta replied handing the package to Carl and then having him sign the forms for it. "Thanks, Carl. See ya around." The delivery woman then left and Carl became curious as to what was inside the box he had just been given.
"Hmm. I wonder what this is. Ooh! Maybe it's that new weapon for El Falcon that I wanted." He then looked around suspiciously hoping no one would see it and try to take it from him. Carl then ran back to his room and shut the door behind him. He was now alone with the box and couldn't wait to see what it had in store for him.
The 6-year old Casagrande hoped it would be a new toy to play with as he began ripping the tape off of it. Then he opened the box with an excited smile on his face, only for that smile to quickly turn into a face of pure confusion as he opened the top flaps of the box only to see that its content was definitely not what he was expecting.
"What the?" Carl looked and saw that what resided in the box appeared to be a strange-looking machine. He picked it up out of the box and put it on his bed. "This isn't the El Falcon Saber!" He said in disappointment. "What the heck is it?" The strange machine appeared to look like a green ray gun with a yellow streak on it from some science-fiction movie. It also had a small round knob on its right side, marked with an arced line around it with the letter S on the left end of it and a G on the right end.
Carl held the gun up and looked it over still confused as to what it could be. "What is this thing? Some kind of prop from an alien movie or something?" Carl questioned.
He noted the letters on the knob and wondered what they were supposed to mean. In order to discover what the machine was capable of, he began by turning the knob to the S setting and tried to see if it could do anything. As the boy looked at it with an unamused expression, he was greatly startled by what happened next.
Carl left the knob at S and then slowly pulled the gun's trigger. Then out of nowhere, a beam of blue light shot out of the gun's nozzle and fired directly at Carl's bed. Carl was very surprised by this as the light suddenly engulfed his bed, then, much to his shock, Carl's bed was nowhere to be seen once the light faded. "What the?! What was that?! Where did my bed go?!"
Carl became perplexed by the disappearance of his bed and looked around the room. He walked to where the bed once was, thinking the ray gun turned it invisible. But that wasn't the case as he soon looked down and saw what really happened to it.
"Is that my bed?" Carl got down onto the floor on his stomach and saw that his bed was reduced to the size of doll furniture. "No way!" He picked it up and realized that it was indeed his bed, covers and all.
"It is my bed. But it's so tiny now." He then looked back at the ray gun and it all became clear to him as he saw what the machine was.
"This thing is some kind of shrink ray! Wow!" Carl exclaimed excitedly. "But I can't sleep on a tiny bed. There's gotta be a way to fix this." He then looked at the shrink ray again hoping to find a way to reverse its effects. He then realized that there was also the G setting on the knob. "Hmm. I wonder."
Carl then turned the dial to G and aimed it at his diminished bed. He fired the gun again and in an instant, his bed was returned to its normal size. "It works! I get it now. S is for shrink and G is for grow." Carl was able to put together how the shrink ray worked and saw a lot of possibilities for it.
He chuckled maniacally to himself as a few wicked thoughts popped into his mind. "With this thing, I could finally show Carlota what it's like to be the little sibling. I could even get Ronnie Anne to finally let me have her ice pops and even her video games. It's perfect! Mwahahaha!"
The mischievous boy decided to have a little bit more fun with his new toy by shrinking and growing a few other things, starting with CJ's bed, his El Falcon action figure, which he grew to be taller than Bobby, and even one of his toy trains. However, he was startled as he saw his big brother, CJ, come in through the door. "Hey Carl, I-huh?" CJ grew stunned as he saw the giant El Falcon in their shared bedroom, along with the expanded toy train.
"What's going on here? What happened to our room?" CJ asked.
"I don't know." Carl answered nervously, hiding the shrink ray behind his back. CJ became curious as he saw that Carl was hiding something. "What's that, Carl?" CJ asked his little brother.
"Nothing." Carl said, slowly backing away from him. But CJ managed to grab him and pried the shrink ray out of Carl's hands as Carl tried to get it back from him.
"What's this thing, Carl?" CJ asked again.
"Nothing CJ! It's just my new toy gun. Give it back." Carl tried to grab it but CJ kept it from him with a determined look and held Carl back with his foot. "No way. I wanna know what this thing is, Carl! Talk!"
Carl tried to get it back from him, but finally gave in. "Okay." Carl dejectedly surrendered. "It's a shrink ray. I got it in the mail today. I don't know from who. All I know is, if you turn the dial on it to S, it shrinks things, and if you turn to G, it makes things grow. I was kind of playing with it a little." The young Casagrande admitted.
"Well then, we'd better fix it." CJ said as he undid all of the size-changing shenanigans that Carl had done. He really didn't like how he changed his El Falcon back to normal.
"Oh man. Did you have to change my El Falcon back to?" Carl said in annoyance.
"Yes. We'd better put this thing away before it does something bad." CJ said as he was about to take the shrink ray away from Carl. But the boy wasn't going to let him take it without a fight.
"No way! I need this thing! You can't just take it from me!" Carl said as he tried to grab it back from CJ, but he wouldn't let go of it either.
"It's dangerous. We need to get rid of it." CJ countered but Carl still disagreed with his big brother. The two boys fought for the ray gun, but unbeknownst to them, the dial was turned back to the shrink setting and out of nowhere, their fighting ceased as they saw that one of them pulled the trigger, firing the shrink ray beam directly at their glass window which reflected the beam right back in their direction.
They both screamed as the ray came back and hit them, knocking them out in the process. All of a sudden, CJ and Carl woke up to a loud crashing noise. They opened their eyes and saw that they were still in their room. But there was something very different about it. "What happened, CJ?"
"I don't know." CJ answered as they stood up and looked around. Everything seemed to tower over them. Their beds, the dressers, even all of Carl's toys. "Whoa, why is everything so big?"
"Uh, CJ." Carl nervously said as he gestured for CJ to turn around and they saw what made the crashing noise that woke them up. Even the shrink ray was bigger than they were and they realized what happened. "Oh no! CJ we shrunk! We're tiny!"
The boys screamed in panic as what Carl said was true. The shrink ray had reduced them both to what they could only assume was a few inches tall. "We're shrunk. What do we do?" Carl said in panic.
"Don't worry Carl. All we have to do is get big again. The shrink ray's right there. We just have to make ourselves grow back." CJ said hoping to calm Carl down.
What happens next?
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