nano day 1

Once, upon the last few weeks of the hot, hot summer of 2007, the lives of four inconspicuous teenagers would change forever, in ways they had never, ever dreamed possible.

One of these four, a beanpole of a girl, laid in a bed on one side of a bedroom, boredly watching cartoons on a television at one end of the room through a sheet of ginger hair. She draped off the mattress listlessly, occasionally glancing over at a second bed, totally empty. Somebody else was supposed to be here. But she was gone, and had been for weeks. This girl, the one currently cosplaying as a tossed aside throw pillow, wondered where she had gone. She watched as the white-haired boy on the screen punched a ghost in the face, and wondered why these spirits had such a terrible afterlife that they would assail the living like this.

Another of the four, a black-haired young man, sat on the back porch of a modest, unremarkable house, brushing jet out of his hazel eyes. Another empty chair sat next to him, and he felt the hollowness of a missing person in his life just the same. He stared into the back woods behind his home, feeling the breeze against his face. He wished he could lift into the air on that breeze.

The third, a gangly boy in a striped t-shirt, didn’t have a home to speak of. He carried with him only a steel folding chair, which today he used to sit in front of an electronics store and watch a wrestling match. Oh, how he loved wrestling, and Mario. Especially the RPGs. He had always wondered what it would be like to live in that world, to live amongst the Toads and learn to jump like the eponymous plumber and maybe even experience paper physics.

The last, on the other hand, was very busy today.

With a heavy welding mask and power tools, this diminutive little imp was currently putting the finishing touches on the sleek, black casing of a fairly large device. When she set down the blowtorch, she picked up a remote, and aimed the point of the device at a nearby sock. The machine roared to life at the push of the button, and a fiery orange beam tore through the air at the article of footware. It struck, and in an instant, the sock wasn’t so much a sock for humans, as it was one that might fit onto a centipede.

“It… it works!” The girl exclaimed, throwing off the mask. “Oh… oh my god. Oh my god! I have to call them!! I have to call my si...” She paused and looked at a pile of books on a nearby table, beginning to gather dust. “….my friends. I have to call my friends...”

She rushed to the nearest phone, and dialed the first number that came to mind: the wiry girl who currently laid on her bed, watching cartoons. The answer was swift, and indeed, you could hear the action in the backdrop.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end of the line was low and soft.

“Zorana!!”

“… Hello, Jax.”

“I did it! I finished it!”

“Okay, sure, you finished the shrink ray. But there’s no way you made it work. Absolutely no way whatsoever. That Japanese girl, you know, the science nerd, when she heard about this she absolutely went off about how impossible it was.”

“Well… well that’s why I had to prove her wrong! And I did! It totally works! You gotta come over and see, Zorana! You gotta!”

“Alright, alright. I’ll start heading over.”

“Great! And if you see Zed on the way, grab him too. He’s gonna love this!”

“Will he, though? You can’t wrestle when you’re tiny.”

“Sure you can! You can wrestle like, ants and stuff. Please, will you get him? For your cousin?”

“Yeah, I’ll get him. I’ll be over in a little while.” The phone went back onto the receiver, and the girl named Zorana rose from her bed and shut off the television. She paused upon passing the second bed. A Nintendo DS was left on the pillow, and the box to a game entitled Ace Attorney: Justice For All sat on the table next to it. She shook her head, and kept walking. It hurt.

She drifted down the stairs and into a kitchen covered with potted herbs, with plenty of open window space, and began to forage through the fridge as an older-looking, bronze-skinned Indian woman watched her and fixed the flowers weaved into her salt-and-pepper braid.

“Doing alright, sweetheart..?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“She’ll turn up eventually, you know that.”

“But will she be alive? Will she be intact? Will she have spent this last few weeks deep in some awful rich man’s pedophile ring? I mean, look at that guy that runs that bed and breakfast on the other side of town. No one that jolly has nothing to hide. It’s a cover-up. Gotta be. He’s got her in a closet for blowjobs.”

“Nonsense. Don’t throw around heavy accusations like that. The man has done nothing. Wherever she is, she’s alive. We’ll find her.”

“...I miss her.”

“I know, sweetheart, I know. Now, you came down here in quite a hurry.”

“Jax says she finished that crazy shrink ray she’s been talking about since before the disappearances. She told me to go find Zed and come see it.”

“It would be quite a feat if it was true.”

“Yeah, but is it? That’s supposed to be a physical impossibility.”

“Nothing is impossible if you believe hard enough that it’s true. She’s quite the clever girl.”

“Yeah, but this? I figured she was looking at comedy. She’s funny, she should stick to it. This would require enough knowledge of quantum physics to be able to break natural laws, and I didn’t think she was that into science.”

“Mmmhm. Well, perhaps you should go see if it’s true. Be sure to let me know when you come home.”

“Yeah… I’ll probably stay out for a while. Is Dad still asleep?”

“A dead sleep, you could say.”

Can you let him know I’m out, if he wakes up before I get home? And… if I don’t come home tonight...”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’ll tear apart this city looking for you, just like we’re doing for her.”

“Thanks..”

“We love you.”

“Love you too, Mom...”

“Tell Jax I said hello.”

“I will.”

Zorana grabbed a backpack hanging by the door, and headed out. She always became acutely aware of her family about now. She was adopted, and she loved the ones who had taken her in a lot, but at the same time, she was grateful to know her blood family too. She never knew what happened to her birth parents, but it had been so long at this point that it no longer mattered, they would be as strangers to her.

As she headed down the road into town, her head in her thoughts, she nearly collided with the black-haired boy. “Oh!”

“Woah woah. Zorana?”

“Rhythm? Did you get the call from Jax too?”

“Yeah. Do you believe it?”

“Hell no, there’s no way she could have made a working shrink ray.”

“Right? It’d be like if that fluffy weirdo in the 90’s clothes actually did start flying when she jumped off the school roof on the last day last year.”

“Is she still in the hospital?”

“I heard she got out but her sister isn’t letting her leave the house.”

“Lucky her that her twin didn’t get abducted.”

“Tell me about it. Then again, they’re… weird. Have you ever seen them by themselves? Like, without the other one?”

“Can’t say I have, no.”

“Well, whatever. We should grab Zed. You think he’s in front of the electronics store again?”

“Watching wrestling reruns, yeah.”

“Has your mom tried to adopt him yet?”

“Tried, yeah. He doesn’t bite. It’s like he likes living in alleyways.”

“Or he doesn’t understand the invitation.”

“I mean… yeah. He tries, but his English...”

Sure enough, they found the boy in the striped shirt deeper in town, sitting on his trusty folding chair in front of a storefront. He was absolutely entranced by the television displays in the window, cheering in what sounded like Portuguese.

“Zed, buddy!” Rhythm exclaimed, to get his attention.

“Oh! Haldo, waldo! What brings to the TV store on today?”

“We got a call from Jax. She says she actually did it.”

“A shrink ray?”

“So she says, anyway.”

The boy, Zed, laughed a strange, meandering laugh. “I’ll buy that when I see with thine own eyes! She doesn’t listen to wiser physics guys.”

“That’s what we said… kinda.”

“Well, mine friends, take me the way to Jax’s humble abode. Maybe I TKO her Shrek figures, heeheehahaha...”

“Uh… yeah, sure. Let’s go.”

Jax was waiting out front for the trio when they arrived, clutching something in her left hand and holding a remote control in the other. She was bouncing in place excitedly, and that bouncing only intensified the closer her friends got to her.

“I did it! I did it I did it I did it!! Look! Look at what I made happen!” She opened her left hand, revealing the shrunken sock resting on her palm.

“You… ran a wool sock through the dryer?” Zorana asked.

“No no no, come inside!”

Zed huffed. “I swear if you’re lying, thou gets the chokeslam...”

“Zed.” Rhythm’s voice was firm. “That’s enough. Let’s see what this is about.”

Jax led them inside her quaint little house, and into her basement. On one wall, there was a shelf of Shrek paraphernalia that Zed glared at, but Zorana and Rhythm did their best to ignore. Front and center in front of them was the sleek black device, mounted on top of a heavy-looking pile of cinderblocks. Another sock had been set up on the table in front of it, presumably as a demonstration.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I present… the shrink ray!” Jax’s voice swelled with pride.

“… I have to admit it looks more polished than I thought it would.” Zorana shrugged a bit. “But no way that thing works.”

“It works, cousin, and I can prove it. This remote here controls the beam. With this knob I can control the size of objects under the ray, and with this button here...”

As Jax talked on about the specifics of the controls, Zed continued to glare at the wall of Shrek. He removed a small rock from one of his pants pockets while the other two were distracted, and wound up to throw it.

“… just… look, I’ll give a demonstration.”

Zed threw the rock as Jax it the button. The rock, of course, didn’t hit the shelf of Shrek merchandise. It hit the wall, and bounced back, striking the device hard enough to swivel it on its hinges away from the sock and toward the party.

And the ray fired a blazing orange.