Brad had traveled far along the corridor using his little fly wings before he met Russ emerging from the bathroom after his shower.
"Finally!" Brad thought and buzzed and flew toward Russ, ignoring for the moment how monumental his big black neighbor now appeared to him. "All you have to..."
Russ walked with his usual confident stride, oblivious to a faint buzz of wings in his way as a tiny insect finally realized it was in the path of the moving mountain of muscle and skin.
Brad screamed silently and dove wildly at a vertical pitch along the front of Russ's enormous torso. Huge muscled thighs moved beneath a pair of boxers as Brad continued his controlled plunge, zipping between Russ's legs and somehow managing not to collide with the man.
He hovered a moment, to ease back from the panicked encounter, and watched Russ through his new, strange eyes as the giant continued toward the kitchen.
"My message!" Brad thought with excitement, powering his wings to move his body faster. In the race back to the kitchen, Russ still won, but Brad's faint whine of wings wasn't far behind.
The transformed scientist hovered and waited. Beneath him on the tabletop, the wide white plate gleamed with its painstakingly produced plea: HELP. ITS ME BRAD. NOT A BUG.
The letters had lost some cohesion and looked feathery around the edges, but the words still appeared legible.
Indeed, Russ stopped abruptly, surprised, and read them aloud in a curious voice.
Brad buzzed closer.
The giant man laughed.
Not the response Brad had hoped for.
Once he got the laughter under control, Russ looked around the table.
"Trust me, neighbor. After speaking with your hubby, I am not going to mistake a tiny little hunk for a bug," Russ said in a loud, amused tone. "Come on out. Show yourself and I can get you back to Mark."
No! No! No!
Russ thought the message was a plea not to mistake a shrunken Brad for a bug.
He buzzed toward the man's face. "I'm a fly!" Brad buzzed in his only means of communication. "You have to...ahhhh!"
Russ smacked at the fly. "Shoo! Go away!"
Russ did two things after shooing off the pest.
He took up his phone and called Mark. After some preliminaries, he chuckled. "The little fucker left me a message," he explained. "I've not found him yet. I thought you might want to help me search."
Brad flew down and took a stand among the salsa letters, determined to force the issue.
His resolve wavered as Russ grabbed a yellow cleaning sponge. Russ couldn't help himself. A "clean-as-you-go" sort, he couldn't stand to leave things untidy for even a short amount of time. The sponge soaked up all of Brad's labor in two quick swipes that also forced the insect to take flight again.
"Russ!" Brad buzzed desperately, hovering near the monumental face. "It's me!"
At that moment, the fly's husband barged through the back door, not pausing to knock.
"Found him yet?" Mark asked as he strode across the room toward Russ.
"Not yet," Russ said and swatted the irritating fly with the back of his hand. "How do you think we should search for him?"
Neither man noticed...