Lotte's Room Shrunken First Semester: Students for Tinies chapter 2 by maximally

The second journey was shorter. A door opened. Cooler air hit the top of her shirt. Fingers plunged in, fished him out, and held him up dripping with her sweat, the ruined tissue hanging off one shoulder like a bad toga.

 

They'd entered another dorm room, but this one was nothing like Sydney's pastel shrine. The walls were lined with shelves, each crammed with rulebooks, dice sets, and meticulously painted miniatures. A massive terrarium dominated half the room, built over a battle table whose old terrain boards were stacked neatly underneath. Its glass walls enclosed a sprawling miniature village, with cobblestone streets, little furnished buildings, and a park fountain that actually trickled water.

 

Then there was the room's current occupant: Lotte Carlsen. She was taller than Sydney, with tan skin, thick-framed glasses, and a wild tangle of brown hair that looked like it hadn't seen a brush in days. Her wrinkled button-up shirt hung over a distinctly bottom-heavy figure, its sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms dusted with model paint. Her green eyes sparkled with enthusiasm as Sydney held Max out for inspection, and her breath washed over him in a warm, slightly stale wave.

 

"Fascinating," Lotte murmured, adjusting her glasses as she examined him like a specimen under a microscope. "Minimal bruising, no visible fractures, stable respiration."

 

"And he's adorable," Sydney added, giving him a squeeze. "Look at his widdle face!"

 

"Sorry—where are my manners?" Lotte blinked, as if the manners had been hiding behind the glasses. "Max, right? I'm Lotte. Head of the Students for Tinies initiative."

 

"Hi." He clutched the increasingly inadequate tissue around himself. "Can you help me call my roommate?"

 

"In a minute. Are you dizzy?"

 

"Yeah. And hungry. And—"

 

"He passed everything," Sydney put in brightly.

 

Lotte looked at her. "What did you do?"

 

"The usual."

 

"Syd."

 

"What? He's fine. Look at him."

 

Max looked between them, waiting to find out which part of the answer was supposed to involve him.

 

"I'm not fine."

 

Lotte's attention returned to him. "All right. Tell me what hurts."

 

It was the first question anybody had asked that Max actually wanted to answer. He did his best, stumbling through his hangover, the events since waking up, and the fact that Sydney's idea of checking on him hadn't made any of those things better. Lotte listened without interrupting until Sydney tried to explain her methods; then she held up one hand and asked Max to finish.

 

She couldn't tell him whether anything was seriously wrong just by looking. She did, however, bring fresh water, a few small pieces of plain cracker, and a clean square of soft cloth from a drawer beside the terrarium. When Sydney finally relinquished him, Lotte supported his feet instead of leaving him suspended, and Max found himself absurdly grateful for the distinction.

 

"The fact that he's still talking isn't an assessment," she told Sydney. "We don't know what happened to him last night."

 

"I know what a tiny looks like."

 

"That doesn't tell you what this one can tolerate."

 

Sydney rolled her eyes, but Max noticed she hadn't been asked to leave. Lotte was willing to correct her, apparently, but whatever had happened before he arrived hadn't stopped the two of them from remaining in the same rescue club.

 

For the moment, though, there was water within reach, food he could actually lift, and something clean to wrap around himself. He let the shredded tissue fall. The cloth was still too big, still not clothes, and still the first thing all morning that had been given to him instead of dropped on him. Max ate while Lotte slid the terrarium's mesh lid completely back and lowered him onto a patch of artificial grass beside the park.

 

"This—" she gestured grandly at the terrarium, pride rushing back in the moment she had an exhibit to point at, "—is Tinytown. Our Tiny Rescue Center!"

 

Max took a tentative step forward. For the first time since shrinking, the nearest bench was a bench instead of a distant piece of architecture, and the door of the building beyond it looked like something he might actually be able to open. Several of the larger structures had interchangeable fronts, and a tray beneath the table held spare furniture in different sizes. Lotte had selected the little chair beside him before putting him down, a detail he wouldn't have noticed if he'd still been able to take sitting down for granted.

 

 

"The big structures on the north side are dormitories," she explained. "The round one in the middle is a dining hall, and those two are the rec center and library. Functional plumbing and electricity. The pumps and heating run off an external supply, obviously, but the smaller fixtures have their own batteries."

 

Max stopped at a tiny fire hydrant, running his hand along its smooth surface.

 

"The pipes connect to a filtration system I rigged from old lab equipment. The park benches are printed to scale, and the dining hall has a working clock tower. Oh! And the library has actual microprinted books. I used a laser etcher to—"

 

"Is that a Warhammer ruin?"

 

Lotte stopped. "Where?"

 

"Behind the library. The bit with the broken arch."

 

"Oh! Yes. I had to rebuild most of the doorway, but the stonework was too good to throw out." She leaned closer, green eyes suddenly interested in something beyond his current dimensions. "You play?"

 

"Not Warhammer. I always wanted to try D&D, though. Never really had a group."

 

"Seriously? I run a campaign on Thursdays. Well, most Thursdays. Scheduling is—" She gave a frustrated little laugh. "You'd think four people who live in the same house could manage an evening."

 

Max laughed too, before remembering that he was standing in her terrarium. He'd spent a month surrounded by people with apparently endless access to parties and friendships, while the closest he'd come to finding a gaming group was reading a club's recruitment post and deciding he'd probably missed the deadline. Now somebody was discussing a campaign with him as though his interest might be enough to qualify him for an invitation.

 

"Is the town part of it?"

 

"Not this part. I keep the residents separate from the game terrain." Lotte hesitated. "Usually. But I could show you the map sometime."

 

"I'd like that."

 

It came out more readily than he'd intended. For a few seconds, the room had begun to look like a place where he might have wanted to spend time even before becoming three inches tall.

 

Pbbbbbt

 

The stink hit before he finished the thought. Max looked up and found Sydney leaning butt-first over the open rim of the terrarium, pajama shorts straining as she planted her hips against the glass and made sure every molecule reached the park. The humid, sour cloud dropped straight into the streets. He gagged, waving at air that had nowhere to go.

 

"Syd, move back," Lotte said.

 

"I'm not breaking your town."

 

"That's not the point."

 

Sydney leaned away with an exaggerated sigh, then immediately ruined the gesture by peering down into the enclosure, cleavage nearly spilling out of the Hello Kitty top.

 

"Besides, he's fine. Right, widdle guy?"

 

Max's eyes were still watering. "She heard me ask her to stop."

 

Lotte glanced toward Sydney. "I know."

 

He waited, but that seemed to be the end of the explanation. Lotte watched until Sydney had actually taken a half-step back, then turned toward the park again.

 

"Sorry about my associate. She gets carried away."

 

Max adjusted the cloth around his shoulders. Thirty seconds ago he had been picturing himself on a Thursday night with a character sheet. Now he was checking how the library was attached to its base, because a roof only helped if it stayed put when somebody decided she wanted to pick him up again.

 

"Where are the other guys?" he asked.

 

Lotte blinked. "The other—"

 

"The ones who live here."

 

Her enthusiasm faded. Before she could answer, the door opened and a towering Japanese girl ducked into the room, long blue hair slipping over the shoulders of an oversized turtleneck.

 

"S-sorry I'm late!"

 

Akane stopped beside the terrarium, brown eyes widening behind her fogged-up wireframe glasses. At six feet three, she made both of the other girls look smaller, although that distinction was of fairly limited comfort to Max. She was dressed as though the September weather had personally offended her, and the effort of hurrying over hadn't helped. Sweat glistened at her hairline. The turtleneck clung.

 

"Oh my gosh. Is that him?"

 

"Max," he said.

 

"Max." She repeated it carefully. "Hi. I'm Akane."

 

"Easy," Sydney put in. "He's mine."

 

Akane's face fell. "O-oh. Sorry."

 

"That hasn't been settled," Lotte said.

 

"Whatever happened to finders keepers?"

 

"We got rid of that last semester. After the birthday cake incident."

 

Max had several questions about that sentence, none of which sounded as important as the one he'd already asked. He waited until Lotte looked down again.

 

"Are there any other guys here?"

 

"Not at the moment," she admitted.

 

"What happened to them?"

 

Lotte rested a hand on the edge of the table. "Some left. Some were handed over to the administration. We lost contact with people we shouldn't have lost contact with."

 

"And the ones Sydney had?"

 

"We're not doing this," Sydney said.

 

"Syd—"

 

"He's asking about every single guy we've ever met!"

 

"I'm asking if they're okay."

 

For once, nobody answered immediately. Lotte looked toward the empty dormitories. Akane clasped her hands together so tightly that Max could see her knuckles whitening. She had come in flushed and hopeful, and the question seemed to have knocked the hope sideways without giving her a script for what came next.

 

"I can't promise you that," Lotte said at last.

 

There was plenty of room in Tinytown. Max had initially taken that as a good thing.

 

Akane leaned on the glass without thinking about it, still staring at the empty streets, and a soft, almost ladylike poot escaped her as she shifted her weight. The sour, nervous stink drifted down into the park. She clapped both hands over her mouth the instant Max coughed.

 

"O-oh! S-sorry! I-I didn't mean to—"

 

"Akane." Lotte was already moving, not toward Max, but along the rim of the table. "The lid is open. The filtration only works if the enclosure is closed. You're dumping that straight into the streets."

 

"I know. I'm sorry. I just—he's really small, and I didn't—"

 

Lotte fanned the air away from the park and toward the rest of the room, then checked the fountain as if a change in pressure might have knocked the water off its cycle. The gesture helped the miniature plumbing more than it helped Max. A leftover ribbon of Akane's nervous funk still sat over the grass, and Lotte's first concern was visibly whether her system had been compromised.

 

"Don't lean on the glass," she added, more quietly. "I don't want another cracked pane. Or another argument about who was supposed to be watching him."

 

Sydney snorted. "You mean watching your town."

 

"I mean both." Lotte did not look as if she had sorted out the difference. She glanced at Max, seemed to remember he was the reason the lid was open in the first place, and stopped short of sliding it shut on him. "He's in an environment I can actually manage. That only works if the two of you stop treating it like a couch."

 

Max dropped to a knee beside the fire hydrant, lungs still burning. If he asked Sydney again she would giggle and change the subject. If he asked Akane she would look stricken and wait for someone else. Lotte at least had a phone on the table and a habit of answering questions she would rather not have been asked.

 

"Then I want to call my roommate," he said, when he could speak. He said it to Lotte.

 

Sydney made an impatient noise, but this time Max kept his attention on Lotte.

 

"He brought me to the party. He might be looking for me. And even if he isn't, he should know where I am."

 

"You don't want to involve the administration before we understand what happened," Lotte began.

 

"He's not the administration. He's Zeke."

 

"We have to be careful about who finds out about the club."

 

Max looked around at the village, then back up at her. "Can I talk to somebody without telling them about the club?"

 

Akane spoke before Lotte could answer. "We could just tell him Max needs to talk."

 

"If we start spreading this around—" Sydney began.

 

"He lives with him," Akane said, surprising herself enough that the rest of the sentence came out in a rush. "He's going to notice!"

 

Lotte took out her phone. She called the number Max gave her, holding the speaker above the terrarium while he stood underneath it with both hands clenched in the cloth. The ringing was loud enough to fill the entire little park. It continued until Zeke's voicemail answered, at which point Max discovered that he had no idea how to explain any of this in a recording.

 

"It's Max," he said. "I'm at Minerva. I need you to call this number. Please."

 

Lotte ended the call and began typing. Max asked what she was writing, then asked her to remove the part about him being safe. She looked embarrassed, but she did it. The text she finally showed him said that Max was at Minerva, needed help, and was waiting for a call.

 

"I won't put it on silent," she promised.

 

Max nodded. It wasn't what he'd wanted, exactly—his own phone, his own room, and a version of Zeke who could explain the last fourteen hours would have been considerably better—but it was the first thing he'd asked for that had produced something outside these girls' conversation.

 

There was still no reply when Lotte set the phone on the table. Max kept glancing toward it anyway. For all he knew, Zeke was sleeping off the same party, blissfully unaware that his roommate was currently using a washcloth for a blanket while three members of the Nerd House discussed where to keep him.

 

 

The call hadn't settled the argument about who would look after him. If anything, it had given the girls enough time to rearrange themselves around the table and return to the subject with renewed energy.

 

"What he needs is structure," Lotte insisted. "A place where he can adjust without somebody moving him every five minutes."

 

"You mean your place," Sydney said.

 

"Yes, Syd. The place with the working facilities. The one you keep calling a hamster cage when you want the Wi-Fi password."

 

Akane glanced at Max, then at the other two. "Syd got the last two. And Lotte, you had the one before that. Isn't it… shouldn't I get a turn?"

 

Max looked up at her. She seemed to notice how that had sounded a second after saying it, but noticing didn't appear to tell her what to do next. Her face turned red, and she began explaining that she only meant she could help too.

 

"Oh my god, we're going in circles again." Sydney threw up her hands. The motion made her chest jiggle violently, a seismic event from three inches down. "How about this? Let's all say what we'd do with him. Then he can see who's the best fit." She grinned. "I'll go first!"

 

For a moment, Max thought she'd finally asked what he wanted. Then she started describing her own plans, and it became pretty obvious she had not.

 

She struck a pose at the rim of the terrarium, one hand on her hip, the other cupping her breasts through the strained Hello Kitty top. She lifted them and let them fall with a soft, heavy jiggle that filled his entire field of vision.

 

"If you choose me, you'd get to spend the whole day right here." Another bounce. "You'd be my super-secret, super-cute boob buddy. No more getting bored in lectures. And at night—" she leaned in, grin widening, "—you can sleep in my panties. I usually get, like, super sweaty down there when I sleep. So it'll be like your own little personal sauna." She winked. "Bottom line, you'll never be lonely. Or clean."

 

Max pulled the cloth tighter. Given what had happened when she'd carried him between two rooms, he had trouble imagining that arrangement improving after she got used to it.

 

"That isn't what care means," Lotte said.

 

"Okay, then tell him your thing."

 

Lotte cleared her throat. "A controlled environment. Proper routines. Enough independence to function without putting himself in danger."

 

"Who decides how much is enough?" Max asked.

 

"Well, somebody has to assess—" She stopped, apparently realizing that she'd answered the question. "It's a process."

 

She went on to explain that she'd borrowed material from Professor Chandra, the campus psychiatrist, concerning adjustment after shrinking. Some of it described what the authors called Size-Affirmative Role Reinforcement, which Lotte presented as a way of reducing distress by helping shrunken men accept their changed circumstances. There were schedules. There were exercises. There was a considerable amount of language about gratitude. The more she explained, the harder Max found it to tell where learning to manage a smaller body ended and learning not to argue with its caretaker began.

 

"It involves daily exercises," Lotte said, a faint blush creeping into her cheeks, "where you'd… ah… worship my feet after I've come back from class. Or practice gratitude affirmations while nestled in my… well, while I'm sitting on you. The data shows it helps tinies embrace their new place in the ecosystem and reduces stress-related… um… malfunctions."

 

Sydney snorted. "You wanna turn him into a lab rat with a foot fetish."

 

"It's science, Syd."

 

"Does it make them feel better," Max asked, "or just stop asking to leave?"

 

Lotte's face went pinker. "Those aren't necessarily the same thing."

 

"That's what I'm asking."

 

She looked down at the table for a moment, then pushed her glasses up as if that might produce a better citation. "I'd have to check which outcomes that particular paper measured."

 

It was the most Lotte possible way to lose an argument: admit nothing, promise homework, and still look like she expected him to sit quietly while she found the page. Max had spent four weeks wishing a girl would take him seriously. This was not the version he had pictured.

 

"My turn," Akane said softly.

 

She described little meals, a pillow of his own, evenings watching anime, and a relationship in which she would finally have someone to look after. Her voice grew steadier as she talked. Unlike Sydney, she sounded genuinely interested in whether Max might enjoy any of those things, although she kept sliding from things they could do together into things she'd always wanted a boyfriend to do.

 

"What do you like watching?" she asked.

 

"Uh. My Hero Academia. Attack on Titan."

 

"I like those too! See? We could—"

 

"I'm not saying yes."

 

Akane stopped. "Oh. No. I know."

 

It was the sort of conversation Max would have spent the rest of the day thinking about if it had happened yesterday. She was pretty, she liked the same shows, and she was looking at him as though what he said actually mattered. Unfortunately, yesterday he wouldn't have needed her permission to walk out of the room if the conversation went badly.

 

"Remember Jake?" Sydney asked.

 

Akane's hopeful expression vanished. "That was different."

 

"You said you'd be careful then too."

 

"I know." Akane looked back at Max. "I know I did."

 

Whatever had happened to Jake, she clearly wasn't going to explain it in front of Sydney. Max found himself looking toward the phone again. It hadn't lit up.

 

"Well?" Sydney planted her hands on her hips. "Who sounds the most fun?"

 

Max pulled the cloth more tightly around himself. His first choice had been getting off the table. Then it had been finding somebody who understood the problem. Now he was standing in an entire miniature town built by somebody who understood plenty about his circumstances and still seemed prepared to make most of his decisions for him.

 

"I want to go back to normal," he said. "I want to be my size again."

 

Lotte's expression softened. "Sydney, did you explain—"

 

"I told him!"

 

"You told me there wasn't a cure you'd seen," Max said. "Does that mean nobody can do it, or you don't know anybody who can?"

 

Sydney opened her mouth, then looked at Lotte instead.