This choice: Lauren tests her powers, and their limits, on May. • Go Back...Chapter #4Lauren tests her powers, and their limits, on May. by: RoyalJelly   Lauren looked at May, debating what she should do first. It'd be hard to see if she could make a change to the world unintentionally. Parsing that out would come at another time. First things first, she needed to see what limits there were on her power. In a contest between Lauren and Physics, the latter had traditionally won, but the tables seemed to be turning.
"Let's find out," muttered Lauren, eyes fixed hazily on the floor below. "The square-cube law seems like a good place to start."
"What?" asked May. She stood just within the doorway, staring at Lauren. "I--what's up?"
May had worked up the courage to step into the room and close the door behind her. Lauren looked over at her friend and picked a number that would be a good experiment.
"Hey, May, how tall are you? You're about 3.1 meters tall, last I heard." (Slightly over 10 feet)
Lauren could hear the cracking of joints and creaking of floorboards as May started to change. The formerly-small girl began to grow upwards and outwards, as though the universe was scaling her up in Photoshop. As she grew, May's head began to bend further forward to look at Lauren properly. Her head collided with the ceiling, producing a dull thunk, but she made no reaction.
"Well," said May, "I'm pretty close." May continued bending over further and further as she continued to take up more space in the room. The mess of vaguely-nerdy detritus on the floor moved itself out of the way of her ever-larger shoes. Behind Lauren, she could feel May's mattress growing as the universe attempted to retcon itself for its new, tallest human. May bent over at the shoulder as she began to kneel on the ground. Even at her kneeling position on the floor, her head would have towered over a standing Lauren. "Sometimes it's 3.11, sometimes it's 3.09, but it averages out to be about 3.1."
Lauren looked up at her new friend. Under normal circumstances, reaching such a height would have easily crippled a person. May, however, seemed to be the portrait of health, provided that health were pale, rail-thin, and heavily nearsighted. Lauren looked behind her. The new May appeared to sleep diagonally on a king-sized mattress. A small armchair sat near the corner of the bed, evidently as a leg-rest for a young woman who was still too tall for a king-sized bed. The chair at the computer desk was replaced with a small bean-bag cushion, and some hastily-built supports raised the desk to a height more convenient for May. Lauren looked back towards May. Never before had anyone looked so intimidating while being so uncomfortable in their surroundings. Time to fix that.
"I know you're embarrassed about your height. But hey, at least you got that advertising gig to pay for accommodations."
This time, the room changed. Wood and metal creaked as the ceiling rose to a height more comfortable for a 10-foot-tall woman. The room grew in all directions around them, scaling up in proportion to its inhabitant. The mattress extended further behind Lauren, and the armchair began to creep over to a corner, evidently to serve as a chair for tinier guests. A behemoth swivel chair that rose up to Lauren's waist stood in front of the now-well-constructed computer desk. Lauren craned her neck and saw a large keyboard and mouse on the desk, placed in front of a flatscreen TV that served as its monitor. On the opposite wall hung a poster. It featured May on a basketball court, effortlessly placing a basketball through a hoop while a dwarfed NBA player looked up at her in jealous confusion. On it was the slogan "Effort is overrated."
May had changed as well. Her pale face had flushed to a beet red. "I mean--I mean--"
Lauren nodded. Her question had been answered, and the shame that she may have felt about being shorter than her friend had been mitigated by May's sudden sputtering and hyperventilating. Life was good.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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