Deviant Downsizing (Chapter 19) (Patreon)

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            Only one month had elapsed, but it somehow felt like half a lifetime since Mason’s prolonged power-locked entrapment as a few-inch-tall loser gave way to his full-control breakthrough – and the revelation that he was apparently an even mightier deviant than either he or his mother could’ve ever predicted. Not only could he easily alter his own size up or down in the blink of an eye now, but he could do the same with inanimate objects and other living creatures alike, though naturally they’d only tested this trend on Lori. After a few more days of making certain his regrowth wasn’t just a fluke, Mason was gladly able to return to school and his normal vaguely-human day-to-day existence. Aside from some awkward excuses needed to explain his lengthy absence, he no longer had to worry about putting the two of them at risk thanks to his conspicuous shrink-related vanishment.

Or, by extension, his older sister Eloise either, who’d been attending her junior year of college on a scholarship abroad in England, and might’ve been forced to go into hiding without anyone there to protect her. Because, despite definitely being a powerless human by every standard metric, since she was already twenty-one years old with no prior hint of inheriting their mother’s super genes, she would’ve faced scrutiny and even possible capture, if her family’s abilities had publicly come to light. And Mason could never have forgiven himself if his annoyingly nonfunctional size-change mutation had ruined both his parent and sibling’s lives as well as his own. Just to prevent Eloise from worrying, he and Lori had made a point of keeping his extended regrowth struggles a secret from her, and only revealed the happy ending of this near-catastrophe to her via secret-coded text once they were certain that everything was under control.

Now free to go on existing as normal, without anyone being the wiser to his extremely powerful potential – much like Lori, the literal living firestorm who spent her days teaching schoolkids – Mason was ready to put all those hardships in the past where they belonged. And aside from some occasional taboo longing he felt for another hedonistic thrill while shrunken down at his slumbering mother’s filthy feet, a habit he’d soundly forced himself to quit cold-turkey, it seemed entirely possible that their little family had already gone through the worst surprises that deviant life had to offer.

But of course that optimism couldn’t last. Overnight, international headlines blew up over a deviant resistance movement taking a stand in France. Their numbers were few, compared to their human oppressors, but according to the wildfire rumors, their ranks included deviants who could wipe out whole military battalions alone without breaking a sweat. Eloise’s university seemed far away from the conflict, at least from the start, yet within a few weeks, that unchecked chaos had spread into Spain and Germany, then crossed over the English Channel, with no sign of stopping. Just like that, the semester was cut emergently short, and the students were sent back home to their points of origin all around the globe, before this vengeful deviant revolt could crash onto the college’s doorstep. Mason, with his mother, had watched all this happening through the TV and social media in a state of loyalty-torn trauma. Though deep down his allegiances laid with his fellow deviants who only wished a better life for themselves, he also couldn’t abide the deadly measures some of them had employed to get what they demanded, and above all, he just wanted his big sister to come home safe. Mason only felt true relief when Eloise had physically set foot back inside their house, following a fraught journey across continents.

Despite her gladness to return and be with her family again, though, especially after all the grief her parent and once-shrunken brother had gone through during her time away, there was something noticeably (and understandably) off about her. The ordinarily-warm and chipper Eloise was instead left distant and saddened for days afterward upon her homecoming. Not only due to the abrupt curtailing of her classes, but even more so from the obviously profound empathy she felt for the many peaceful deviants in Europe who’d gotten caught up in what was quickly devolving to interspecies warfare. Lori did her best to comfort her daughter, promising that she had witnessed such unfortunate calamities unfolding between humans and deviants many years before, and that this one too would pass. But still nothing seemed to console her. Mason, meanwhile, couldn’t think of anything helpful to say, let alone a practical way to banish her gloom, and so he quietly gave his sister her space, just wishing something could be done – for her and for the many suffering deviants out there. He’d always known that the ferociously kind-hearted Eloise cared greatly for all living things, but with special affinity toward the superhuman phylum to which her mother (and now little sibling) belonged, even if she herself was just a regular person. Or so they all fairly presumed, given the girl’s age far surpassing the usual threshold when someone’s powers would normally manifest, if ever. Though as it would turn out, Eloise shared more in common with her extraordinary family than anyone could’ve guessed.

The proof of this phenomenon showed itself one evening with much the same randomness as Mason’s own recent accidental super-heritage coming to fruition – albeit lacking the relative subtlety of his original shrinkage down to an inch tall, which was easy to hide and required no cleanup after. Having been home for two weeks now, Eloise spent most of her waking hours in a morose blur, doom-scrolling the news from Europe and barely speaking to her family. Tonight, as they all soberly gathered around the table for dinner, she’d hardly touched her food, instead preferring to further depress herself by reading up on the deviant-human clash and sighing with pity.

“I wish you could give yourself a break from everything, hon,” Lori said at last, laying a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. A subliminal heat-flare announced itself when her hair, no longer hidden beneath the wig, mottled from blue to orange. “I know. It’s… terrible. All of it. Every single thing we hear only makes it worse. And I’m sick from thinking about it, too. But, I just hate to see you this way. Hurting this much. If there was anything I could do for you, to help you, to make it easier somehow, you know I would. I’m sure the same goes for Mason.”

“Yeah, El,” her brother meekly offered, and meant it, even while he understood already that there wasn’t anything they could realistically do to ease the girl’s heartache. Unless they could literally end the fighting and offer instant shelter to the many victims. Mason and his mother were powerful, yes, but not the kind of powerful that could stop an impending war. “We’ve always got your back.”

“I know you do. Thank you. B-Both of you. I’m… really sorry, for the way I’ve been acting, ever since I came home,” Eloise declared in the longest string of words she’d consecutively spoken for days. She offered a mournful smile to her brother and mom. “I wish things were different. I wish I could DO something about all this. And I feel even worse, thinking about how these are all people exactly like you two, suffering just because of the way they were born, and still you’re being so much braver about it than me. I don’t know if I’m just not strong enough to deal with it, or what, but-”

Both Lori and Mason were preparing to interject and promise Eloise that her empathetic melancholy over the deviant population – now facing some of its harshest worldwide persecution yet – was in no way a sign of weakness. But before either of them could get a word out, the girl was interrupted by something much more dramatic than familial reassurance. Letting out a startled gasp, Eloise began to grow, so quickly and with such destructive propulsion that none of them could even tell what had even happened until it was already over, like a tornado had materialized and ripped straight through the room. The dinner table buckled and split as she filled the space; chairs clattered aside and food spattered over the walls. The closest door cracked then flew off its hinges when Eloise’s arm instinctively struck out in a bid for balance. Lori was thrown into the corner just by the momentum of her daughter’s rapid expansion, while Mason was pushed clear out of the room as though tackled by a linebacker, but instead squashed into his big sister’s bare suddenly-enormous sole while it launched forth to accommodate the length of her legs.