Chapter 1: The Shrunken Jock in the Bathroom Stall
The bass from the party downstairs was a physical thing, a throbbing pulse that traveled up through the floorboards and vibrated in Jed Wagner’s molars. He leaned against the cracked tile wall of the second-floor bathroom, taking a moment of quiet. Well, quiet-ish. The shouts and laughter from below were muffled here, replaced by the dripping of a faucet and the hum of a faulty light fixture.
He’d been chugging punch all night. The stuff was sugary and potent, a frat house specialty. Now his head felt swimmy, his vision soft at the edges. Probably just dehydration. Football conditioning had him used to pushing through.
He pushed off the wall and moved to the sink, splashing tepid water on his face. The mirror was fogged, a blurred reflection of his own towering frame. Six-six, two-forty-six of solid muscle, and right now he felt about as stable as a newborn giraffe.
A wave of dizziness hit him, hard and sudden. The room tipped. He grabbed the edge of the porcelain sink, his knuckles white. “Whoa,” he muttered to his blurry reflection. “Spiked stronger than usual.”
It wasn’t a normal buzz. This was a descending feeling, a pulling sensation deep in his bones, as if his very center of gravity was dropping. The sink basin before him seemed to expand, rising like the rim of a great white bowl. The grout lines between the tiles, previously thin gray dashes, widened into vast, canyon-like grooves.
He looked down at his own hands, still gripping the sink. They were shrinking. Not like in a movie, not a smooth visual effect, but in a series of sickening, micro-lurches. His wedding-band-sized college ring suddenly pooled loose on his finger, then slipped over his knuckle with a heavy clink onto the porcelain, landing with a sound louder than any ring should make.
Panic, cold and clean, sliced through the fog. He tried to let go, to step back, but his perspective was betraying him. The floor, once a step away, now seemed a terraced cliff. He stumbled backwards, not in a controlled step but in a clumsy, sprawling fall.
The fall took forever. And no time at all.
He landed on the hard, cold tile with a jolt that rattled his teeth. The world had re-scaled itself. The bathroom was no longer a room. It was a cathedral. The ceiling was a distant, water-stained sky. The legs of the toilet rose like thick, white ceramic columns. The drain in the floor was a dark, metallic well he could have fallen into.
And his clothes. His letterman’s jacket, his t-shirt, his jeans—they were a mountain range of fabric collapsing around him, a smelling, sweat-dampened landscape of denim hills and cotton valleys. He fought his way out from under the sleeve of his jacket, gasping.
The door, a monolithic slab of painted wood at the far end of this new universe, creaked open. A sliver of light from the hall cut across the vast tile plain. A pair of scuffed sneakers entered, followed by skinny jeans.
Jed tried to shout. “Hey! Down here!” What came out was a thin, reedy squeak, utterly drowned by the muffled thunder of the party below.
The shoes walked with familiar, hesitant steps. They stopped near the mountain of his clothes. A hand, impossibly large, with long, careful fingers, reached down and picked up his discarded t-shirt. The hand held it for a moment, then gently folded it with a heartbreaking tenderness.
Then the figure crouched. The world tilted again as a face came into view, lowering from the heights. It was Felix Thorne from his Chemistry 201 class. Wiry, sharp-featured Felix, whose eyes were now the size of dinner plates, brimming with a terrible, anxious wonder.
“Jed?” Felix’s voice wasn’t a voice. It was a cavernous rumble, a seismic event that vibrated in Jed’s chest. He had to crane his neck to see all of him.
Felix’s expression was a war zone. There was awe, a sliver of triumph, but crashing over it was a tsunami of pure, unadulterated horror. He reached out, his index finger extending slowly, a fleshy skyscraper aimed right at Jed.
Jed scrambled backwards over the gritty tile, his body moving with a strange, light agility. “Felix? What did you do? What the hell is this?”
The giant finger paused. The rumbling voice came again, softer now, thick with a regret that seemed to shake the very air. “It was supposed to be a compliment. I just… I wanted you to see me. For once, I wanted to be the big one.”
The words hung in the damp, antiseptic air. Jed stared up at the colossal, agonized face of his shy classmate, standing naked and six inches tall in a puddle of his own colossal clothes, and understood, with a cold, clarifying dread, that this was not an accident.
Felix’s massive eyes darted toward the bathroom door. The party thumped on, oblivious. Down here, in the shadow of the sink, a new and terrifying silence had begun.
Jed’s breath came in ragged gasps, his chest heaving like a fish’s as he tried to process the absurdity of his situation. Felix loomed over him, a towering, naked god of his own making, his massive, trembling hands still clutching the t-shirt like a lifeline. The scent of Felix’s sweat, mixed with the stale cologne of the frat house, filled Jed’s nostrils—overpowering, intoxicating.
Felix’s voice was a low, distorted whisper. “Jed… I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I just… I wanted you to *feel* it. But Felix will make jed love him. And he’ll do it in the only way he knows how.
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The bathroom was a cavern, the air thick with the scent of Felix’s sweat and the musk of his own fear. Jed’s heart pounded so hard he could feel it in his throat, his pulse a rapid, desperate rhythm against his ribs. Felix’s massive, trembling hands were still clutching the t-shirt, his fingers—each one the size of Jed’s forearm—twisting the fabric into knots.
Felix’s voice was a deep,