"Ow! You're so big!"
Merritt's ego didn't need any more boosts. Just being seen with a young woman as beautiful as Etta was a huge certification of status for any guy.
Merritt had gotten ahold of Etta the next day. They agreed to meet at a certain slightly upscale restaurant. Dinner was wonderful. The food was good and even more than in the club the previous night they just seemed to click. They shared laughter and even seemed to be kindred spirits, Christian but somewhat cynical. There was electricity between them. Merritt could see other diners sneaking glances at beautiful Etta, a slender blond, five foot eight with green eyes. He didn't feel jealous. He felt so sure of his connection to her right away.
And, after dinner they went back to her place. The second the door was closed they practically tore each other's clothes off. She was even more amazing in the nude, her slender hourglass shape even more alluring with all her perfect fair skin on display. Merritt had never felt more virile. With his chronivac upgraded body, he had amazing endurance. And, while he hadn't done anything to directly change his penis, one of the side effects of his various upgrades was a lengthening of his already very impressive organ.
Etta was certainly impressed. "Ow, you're so big!" she'd gasped as they'd started.
But she got used to it. She got used to him, just as he got used to and loved everything about her. They had hours of ecstasy together. Merritt left in the early morning and went back to his apartment with a spring in his step.
He might have been distracted from anything else but instead he felt energized. He couldn't wait to be contacted by the old man again. He went to that same local restaurant where he'd seen him before for lunch that day. He didn't see him.
So, Merritt's focus turned back to preparing for . . . for something, for whatever the old man would have him do to flush out the corrupt bastards at the NSA.
He decided that he needed to perfect his use of multiple different forms, multiple different identities. He couldn't just be good at them. He had to be flawlessly expert in all of them, miniaturized, fly, bird, dog, woman, boy and others.
He had made himself 1 centimeter tall and had handled it well. He decided to challenge himself a little further. He went to a specialty shop and bought mountain climbing ropes and a hook. He stripped off all his clothes and set up the laptop on the hardwood floor with a ruler upright against a chair beside it. He went, laboriously, through all the menus and set the chronivac to make himself smaller still this time, just 1/4 inch tall.
At last, after going through many menus, he pressed the START button. The usual prompt, ARE YOU SURE? came up. He pressed START again. He felt the usual electric wave go through him.
In a few seconds he was a foot shorter, then two feet shorter, then he could just see over the arm of the adjacent chair. Then, in a few more seconds, the top of his head was even with the top of the ruler. Then he was nine inches tall . . still rapidly shrinking till he was looking up at the one inch mark on the ruler, finally stopping changing when he was 1/4 inch tall. His climber's rope and hook, had shrunk proportionately with him and were still wrapped around his waist.
He looked around at the room around him with a smirk, despite everything towering over him. He ran for the door, it taking him a minute even with his fantastic running ability. It was fun. There was a certain delightful freedom in running around bare ass naked. He crawled on all fours under his own door with room to spare and out into the hallway.
There, he saw Ms. Kiritsy, the cougar who would have given anything to jump his buns. While he ran beside the baseboard unnoticed, she sashayed on by, like a super skyscraper moving along at 40 miles per hour. Merritt sprinted along at the edge of the hallway trying to decide on a task.
The banana bread! That's what he'd go after. Mrs. Calloway's banana bread. He'd been in her apartment once and she had a freshly baked loaf of it on her kitchen counter. It was fantastic. She had some ingredient in it that he'd never tasted in a banana bread. It was so good. She said she always had some and always kept it there. That would be his goal, to get some of Mrs. Calloway's banana bread and bring it back to his apartment. She wouldn't even miss the size piece of it that he'd break off in his temporarily tiny condition.
He ran and dove under her door as Ms. Kiritsy was turning in his direction. If she ever knew how close she'd been to seeing him naked . . .
Mrs. Calloway's apartment was unoccupied. There was no one home. Merritt sprinted his tiny bare ass right through the middle of her living room, across the nice hardwood floor to the thick rug on one side of it. This was like running through a forest for Merritt The shag of the rug was nearly an inch high, four times his height. It slowed Merritt down so that when he finally got through to the vinyl tile of the kitchen area, he was winded.
He caught his breath and then gave himself an encouraging pat on his spectacular albeit tiny ass. "Let's get climbing," he exhorted himself.
He whipped the hook in a circle making a high pitched whir before finally hurling it upward and getting it to catch on a lower cupboard door handle. He climbed up and reeled in his rope. From the meager landing made by the top of the handle he whipped the hook in a circle beside him again then launched it at the handle of a cupboard just below the counter. He had to leap out to the side and endure several pendulum swings back and forth before climbing up onto that handle. He was winded and took a minute before leaning out away from the cabinets and throwing the hook over the top.
He gave a tug to test how secure it was then climbed up onto the counter. From there, he jogged over to a corner of it where there was a banana bread on a plate that looked to be 25 feet high and 200 feet long. He jumped and climbed up onto the plate and grabbed a hunk of banana bread the size of a grapefruit to him but that which Mrs. Calloway would never notice was gone.
He retraced his path back down from the counter somewhat more unsteadily but still, when he got down to the kitchen he felt completely confident of his abilities as a miniaturized agent. He jogged his naked self through the forest of a rug at the edge of the living room and that's where he first heard the sound.
The things always sounded so unimpressive to him as a 6 foot tall man. Now, a quarter inch tall, an ibot Roomba bearing down on him was a like a low office building on wheels sucking things in with near hurricane power. And now it was bearing down on him. Track star Merrit ran as fast as he could toward the apartment. He lungs started burning and he could feel the lactic acid in his legs.
The Roomba was coming straight at him and gaining on him every second. He ran what must have been the equivalent of a 45 second 400 meters sprinting for the door but the vertical face at the front of the thing kept getting closer and closer. The vacuum suction of the damn thing sounded like a nearby jet engine to Merritt as he strained to get his tiny ass to the door before the Roomba got there.
He was just a couple of running strides short of it when it caught up to him. There were arms sweeping back and forth underneath it and one swung and gave him a tremendous spank across his bare ass sending him flying to the wood floor in the process.
"Owww!"
He tried to get to his feet right away but before he could get up and resume running, the damn thing advanced over him and a hug wheel, like a 20 foot thick log studded with brooms, swept him backward. There he ran into another 20 foot thick log studded with brooms that swept him forward and up and now the deafening vacuum suction had a hold of him. Merritt desperately tried to grab onto something, anything, but found himself pulled into the air, hurtling helplessly upward and drawn into a massive dust storage bin that seemed to be 150 feet wide and 40 feet high. He squinted trying to keep the dust that was everywhere out of his eyes.
He made his way, unsteadily, to one side of it trying to stay out of the way of incoming debris. He couldn't figure out how to get out of there. Between the suction and the second rotating wheel it didn't seem to be possible. So, he waited with the super loud vacuum in his ears the whole time and more dust and debris coming in every second.
Merritt waited 15 minutes for the damn thing to shut off. When, finally, it did, he climbed down to the carpet below where the thing had parked itself. He had a brown coating of dust over every square millimeter of himself. He got out of Mrs. Calloway's apartment and back to his own. This trial had been only partly successful.