Introduction: Shrunk! Shrunken First Semester chapter 1 by maximally

Max woke up with his face mashed against something cold, hard, and strangely textured. His head throbbed, his muscles ached, and his stomach felt like it was trying to eat itself. The lingering taste of stale beer and something thicker, sweeter, and vaguely chemical clung to his dry mouth. When he tried to open his eyes, the pain around his temples only got worse—so he kept them shut a moment longer and just breathed. Whatever he'd done last night, it couldn't have been good.

The longer he lay there, though, the more something nagged at him. The surface under his cheek was cold and rough, less like a floor or a mattress and more like he'd passed out face-down on a sheet of sandpaper the size of a parking lot. The air felt wrong, too—drifting over his skin in a way that told him he was a lot more exposed than he should have been.

Max forced his eyes open.

"What the…"

As his eyes adjusted to the light, three things hit him all at once. First, he wasn't in his dorm room. Second, he was completely naked. Third, and most critically, he was tiny. Like, action-figure tiny.

"Oh, fuck…"

He was lying on top of a coffee table—except it didn't feel like a coffee table anymore. It felt like a field. Up close, the polished wood wasn't smooth at all; every line of grain stood out like a furrow, and the surface stretched away from him farther than his blurry eyes could follow. A little ways off, a couple of pencils lay toppled across the wood like fallen trees. Past them, a half-empty can of Red Bull loomed up taller than he was now, close enough that the flat, sugary smell of it rolled over him and turned his stomach. The math wasn't hard. He couldn't have been more than a few inches tall.

"This can't be happening…"

And yet here he was—wide awake and shivering, cold air prickling every inch of his bare skin. His heart slammed against his ribs hard enough to hurt, and the whole room seemed to tilt and sway around him. He pressed his palms flat against the cold wood, just to have something solid to hold onto, and tried to make himself think.

Like any modern teenager, Max had seen plenty of news stories about people getting dosed at college parties—kids waking up somewhere they didn't recognize, missing hours of their lives. But getting roofied was one thing. Waking up the size of a chess piece was something else entirely. There wasn't a drug on earth that did this. Not that he knew of, at least.

He had no idea how long he'd been out, or where he was. Right now, the only thing he knew for sure was the date: Saturday, September 30th.

With nothing else to go on, he started working backward—through the night, through the weeks before it—reaching for the last thing that still made sense.

One month into his first semester, things weren’t exactly going the way he'd pictured. He was barely passing his classes, hadn't tried out for any teams or clubs, and hadn't made a single real friend—unless you counted his roommate, Zeke, who was stuck with him either way. Worst of all, he hadn't been invited to a single party. Not until last night. Sure, maybe some of that was on him; whenever he wasn't in class, he was holed up in his room, gaming and binge-watching anime. The night before the party, he'd stayed up until four in the morning throwing himself at the same boss fight over and over—which was about as eventful as his calendar ever got. Still, he couldn't help thinking his choice of school hadn't helped.

Like a lot of former women's colleges, Ventus University still ran four girls to every boy in any given class—something Max had considered a major win when he applied. With odds like that, he'd figured, even he might finally land a girlfriend. The strong rankings, the athletics, the job placement numbers, and the sunny Southern California campus hadn't hurt either. The only real catch was the school's infamous House System: a network of powerful sororities that dominated every part of student life.

At least eighty percent of the female undergrads belonged to one of the major houses—Diana (the "Jock House"), Minerva (the "Nerd House"), Juno (the "Goth House"), Fortuna (the "Hot Girl House"), and Proserpina (the "Loser House"). The whole social scene revolved around the first four, especially Diana and Fortuna. As a guy, Max was banned from all of them, which left him exactly one shot at any kind of social life: befriend as many house girls as possible. For someone who still got tongue-tied around any woman who wasn't a blood relative, that was a tall order. So most weekends, while the campus lit up with four or five wild parties at once, he just sat in his room in the Unaffiliated Students Dorm and waited for some kind of breakthrough.

Last night, he'd finally gotten one.

It had come through Zeke. Yesterday afternoon, Max had come back from class to find him waiting—stocky, fluffy-haired, just as much of a dorky gamer and anime addict as Max was, except annoyingly good-looking and actually able to talk to girls. That combination had already made Zeke a campus social butterfly, racking up invites at all the big houses and never missing a chance to bring it up. This time, though, his message was different: he was heading to another party, and he'd gotten the okay to bring Max along.

Faced with walking into a brand-new social situation with no backup but his roommate, Max had done what a lot of anxious, introverted college guys might do. Egged on by Zeke, he'd pre-gamed—and, being the far less experienced drinker of the two, he'd ended up with way more liquid courage than he knew what to do with.

And then… nothing. Fourteen hours later, that was all he had to show for his first college party: the hangover from hell, and a complete blank where the rest of the night should have been.

Which left him right back where he'd started. Naked, freezing, a few inches tall, with no memory of how it had happened and no idea what to do next.

The questions came faster than he could keep up with. Had someone done this to him? Was there any way to undo it? And where the heck was he, anyway?