Chapter 9 - Zapped!

First, there is the pulse in your head. Like a deep, thundering rumble.
Then, there is a blackness of vision.
You try to move your hands. You feel a smooth surface underneath you. It's cold.
You remember the energy beam, gasp and open your eyes.

You see your friends slowly reviving, as confused as you are. You are sitting up on a vast, endless surface. Like an endless plain, perfectly smooth, but... wait. There are huge black and white sectors on this surface. They alternate in a regular pattern.

You look up, and see a distant sky, all white. Enormous towering objects are in the distance. Where the heck are you?!?

You turn around.

"Holy crapperoni!", Al shouts once she realizes their situation. "Are we dreaming?" She punches Logan as hard in the arm as she can. "Did you wake up?"

Ahh, I hate Alice in Wonderland. Logan says as he sits up.

"That's kinda rude," Al says. "We barely know Alice. And this doesn't really look like a wonderland to me either."

"I am Alice... and trust me, this isn't the first wonderland joke I've heard. Still.... this is.... weird. Really really weird."

He looks at the oversize Swiss army knife. "I had that in my hand. Must have dropped it when..."

He tries to recall. "What the heck was that light from the floor? Did you all see that?"

I'm not sure, but it came from the floor. So maybe whatever made it is in the basement. Logan says as he stands up and looks around at the room.

"But we can't go to the basement like this! The stairs down would be like.... a million miles deep." Alice says a bit worried. This is weird stuff and she is not used to weird stuff at all. She seems quite worried.

"Good thought!", Al agrees. "Let's head to the basement."

She digs through her pockets and frowns. "Darn, I wish I had dropped a quarter. Can you imagine how much a quarter would be worth if it's bigger than us?"

"Uhm... still fifty cents, as always?" Alice says a bit vaguely. "What you wanted to have dropped is a candy bar!"

"Oh my gosh!", Al shouts, her eyes widening. "You're right! We could be eating a single candybar for weeks! You're a fricking genius."

"OK... the basement seems a better idea than trying to get back out. Those dogs were scary enough when we were normal height!"

He turns to look at the loooong room. He remembers seeing two doors left and two doors right. But from this point of view, he can only see the closest two. They tower like immense monoliths, or skyscrapers.

"How are we supposed to get through a door, at this size... and which door leads to the basement?..." he says bitterly, beginning to grasp in what trouble they really are.

We need to walk over to any of the doors and see if we can slide under it or through a crack. That's the easy part. The hard part is going to be getting there. Logan says as he looks at the closest set of doors. Resigned to his fate, L9gan starts walking towards the closest door.

Logan starts walking to the East door. He realizes that each tile of the floor is like 10 yards to him. The grooves between the tiles are like gutter ditches - not very deep but still needing hopping over them to avoid tripping.

It takes him a while, but eventually he reaches the base of the door.



He looks at the gap under the door. It is pretty narrow, and clogged with big clumps of dust that have gathered there. Maybe if he cleared the dust and lied down flat on the ground he could just about squeeze through. Maybe...

Looking at the doorframe, what looks like smooth painted wood at normal size actually offers foot and hand holds for someone as small as they are. The doorframe shoots up vertically to dizzying heights, but one could in theory climb up and try to reach the handle, or the keyhole.

"You know guys," Al suddenly says, glancing around nervously. "If we're this small, I really hope there aren't any rats in this house. Or spiders! Shoot maybe the basement is a bad idea."

The others can see Logan in the distance, minuscule at the base of the titanic door, pondering and looking up.

Al follows him over, using her board for speed. "How are we going to open that?", she asks. "It's way too big and heavy."