| Genre: television | |
| Chapter 1 | |
| More disclaimer: This work is my own. Do not repost this story beyond the limits of the Fair Use standards of Copyright Law (quotes, examples, 'you gotta read this' excerpts, the usual). A Trek fan for about 40 years, and a fan of Lilliput since the day I heard of it, I imagine a crossover universe where the little people of Swift's tale are part of the Federation. And how that'd affect the series. | |
| A transporter accident reduces the bridge crew to 1/12th scale. "Welcome to my world," the Lilliputian officer says. Later, a transporter accident causes her to become 12 times her normal size. "Man, you people have tiny, tiny rooms. Was the bridge always this claustrophobic?" The bad guys underestimate the Lilliputian due to her size, but she escapes and manages to release the crew, allowing them to recapture the ship. | |
| The bad guys overlook the Lilliputian in the away party, but she tracks them back, infiltrates the fortress, and releases the away team, who then overcome the bad guys. The same crew member who kicked ass against professional mercenaries twice is helpless when she gets lost in a cargo bay and has to wait for someone to notice she's missing, find her, and rescue her. The director says it was to show her vulnerabilities. | |
| Once every three episodes, station display failures prevent her from using her specially programmed interface, forcing her to jump back and forth on a giant display to do her job. Usually, she is within arm's reach of another officer who doesn't appear to be doing much of anything on his station. She is crucial in a first-contact with a race of beings so small that they don't even recognize the humans as a life form, but were about to open up the warp core for technobabble reasons. She talks them out of it. | |
| She is also crucial in a first-contact with a race of giant beings, who are going to exterminate the crew as vermin, but come to understand from her example that there is a wide spectrum in sentient beings in the universe and come to adopt the Federation's basic fondness for the Vulcan philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC). As a sub-plot, the engineer will keep trying for an entire season to perfect a robotic or hologramic 'contact suit' that allows the Lilliputian to travel among and interact "normally" with her human and human-sized shipmates. | |
| No one on the production crew notices how terribly sizeist this is, or how offensive it is to anyone that isn't human 'normal.' After the fans finally point out how this is poking IDIC one right in the eye, they quietly drop the subplot, and no one ever mentions it again, even in episodes where the character could be expected to use such a suit to resolve the plot nearly instantly. | |
| The episode where the Counselor makes a big deal about how the thoughts and emotions of Lilliputians are 'just the same' to her as anyone else's seems to contradict the episode where telepathic aliens notice the Lilliputian only because her brain waves are at a drastically different amplitude, allowing them to communicate with her and thus saving the day. Convention fans spend a great deal of time justifying the two episodes as if they were real, not just written by two different writers during two different seasons. | |
| The Trip to Risa episode shows how the casual actions of others can effectively discriminate against the Lilliputian, used as a metaphor to show how wrong discrimination is, no matter who is victimized by it, and how it's possible to thoughtlessly discriminate. Fans in general hate this episode for being excessively preachy, even for Trek, although they learn to stop saying so after it wins many accolades from minority groups. | |
| The Empowerment Episode: Fans have noticed that her battle plan usually consists of escaping notice until she can release a 'biggie' to fight the monsters and save the day. Rankling under the internet title of 'the human lock pick,' she demands an episode where she actually faces and defeats opponents. Critics draw many unfortunate comparisons between this episode and the Batman/Green Hornet crossover, where Robin kicked Bruce Lee's ass. | |
| Her opposite from the Mirror Universe wears a tighter, more revealing uniform, and there are implications that she is sexually active with other members of the crew. Afterwards, Real Universe crewmen, and the fans, look at the Lilliputian in a new light, mostly by muttering 'how?' to each other over and over again. Diagrams exploring the mechanics appear on the internet. | |
| A transporter accident combines her with another crewman, imposing her form on his mass, creating 1701 of her, providing some 1700 evil twins, all of whom maintain that they are the 'real' one. The Packleds overwhelm the ship, but the Lilliputian convinces them that a transporter accident has made them all giants, and she can save them if they just step back on the transporter pads. She beams them to holding cells, then releases the crew. | |
| The away team is accused of practicing witchcraft and are placed on trial. The Lilliputian allows herself to be seen, claims to be the corrupt judge's familiar, and Starfleet personnel escape in the confusion of the ensuing riot. Time travel places her on the first Enterprise, where she enlists the aid of the captain's dog, Porthos, to ride to the rescue of the original crew. After Porthos apparently reprograms the airlock to blast the aliens into space, Archer brags about how smart his doggy is. T'Pol thinks she sees a tiny human go by on doggy-back but refuses to comment. If anyone is going to behave as 'the delusional one,' it is not going to be the only Vulcan on board. | |
| The Lilliputian is possessed by the unshriven soul of an alien sorcerer. The crew gets suspicious when she keeps "forgetting" that she is not five foot tall. A tribble infestation on a research facility leads to the Lilliputian wrestling her way through a mass of the fuzzy, cute, purring things in order to save the ship. Exposure to a depressed telepath heightens the tension by driving her to constantly reevaluate her decision to join Starfleet and most of her career choices made since. This episode is referred to by fandom as 'the Tickle Me Emo' episode. | |
| A planet with an atmosphere high in helium has the away team talking like Lilliputians, but her own voice is not detectable without reprogramming a tricorder. An episode makes reference to her Kobiashi Maru test, where the fake explosions were big enough to blast her across the bridge, and she graduated with a cast on her leg. While heartbreakingly cute, no one explains why Starfleet technology was insufficient to fix a broken bone in time for the ceremony. | |
| The Doctor has to make many unusual adjustments to the surgical table to save the Lilliputian's life after trauma, discussing abilities and limitations with the Engineer and two people of the Sciences staff. It is never explained why no one thought to address these problems for the first three seasons after she reported aboard, waiting for a life-threatening situation instead. | |
| Harry Mudd's grandson is dealing in Starfleet Action Figures to Ferengi markets. The Lilliputian recognizes one as the Chancellor's nephew and risks all to rescue the stasis-kept Lilliputians from slavery. An evil Lilliputian inflicts a devastating biochemical attack upon the Enterprise, reducing the crew to mindless minions, except for the Lilliputian. She interrupts his plans of interstellar domination and tosses him in the brig, sneeringly referring to him as a 'The Brain' wannabe. The Captain congratulates her, while the XO suggests calling her Pinky from now on. | |
| Fans point out that Pinky was the minion, not the opponent, and start a campaign to name her Snowball. A time-travel portal opens, and the descendants of several crew members appear. The Lilliputian's great-great-granddaughter stands 6 feet tall and says, "The Doctor found a cure for the Lilliputian condition! All our race has been restored!" Since most of 'their' race considers themselves as restored as they want to be, she suspiciously monitors the behavior of the visitors and detects and ultimately foils the Ferengi plot. | |
| The Lilliputian's mother visits, wanting to see how her girl lives. At the same time, a Romulan diplomatic mission is hosted on the Enterprise. Yet another Romulan race is revealed as tiny Lilliputian-sized Vulcanoids attempt to kidnap the Lilliputian, but they get her mom instead. The daughter defeats the kidnappers, foils their insidious plot to destabilize the diplomatic mission, and actual progress is made towards peace. Mom leaves, more proud than scared. | |
| Q decides that the Lilliputian needs to have a new perspective, and she wakes on a colony planet, the size of a Brobdingragian. While her new size helps in the resolution of a threat to the colony, it also affects her relationships with fellow officers. "C'mere, shorty," pretty well sums up her new attitude and altitude. | |
| The Lilliputian crash lands on a planet with a civilization of tiny life forms. They worship her as a goddess. She's torn between leaving them to their beliefs (as mandated by the Prime Directive) and attempting to correct any changes made to their culture by her interaction (also as mandated by the Prime Directive). A scientist among the Tinies adapts her DNA to theirs, advancing the entire race along to the next stage of evolution. They transform to energy in a blinding light, just before an away team beams down, and the CO steps on the empty city. | |
| The Holodeck episode features a program that goes berserk and threatens all life on board, as usual. It turns out the Blefuscan software company that developed the program (Micromicrosoft, of course) has a subroutine that puts little tunnels through the backdrops, allowing the Lilliputian to crawl around inside Data's fantasy to solve the puzzle, finish the program, and save all life on board. | |
| There must be a 'Terrans on Trial' episode: Aliens monitoring old Earth TV programs feel it is unlikely that there is only one sentient life form on Earth as depicted in the programs. They show up, ready to kick ass in the name of the unsung species, and the presence of the Lilliputian saves the day. Fandom responds by saying: Yeah, I loved the fourth movie... And a false deity episode... | |
| The ship passes a new frontier into a previously unexplored region of space. A woman claiming to be the goddess Neith appears on the bridge. Everyone says 'Neith who?' Data explains that Neith was the Atlantis name for the Greek goddess Athena (according to Plato). She claims that the Lilliputians were created by her priests in Atlantis, in an attempt to save the population when the island sank. She winks back and forth between Lilliputian size and human size, offering to restore all the tiny people. "Why does everyone think I wanna be 'restored'?" Rejecting the offer and the claim of divinity, she ends up discovering that Neith is an alien trickster out to incur a huge debt from the biggified and assumedly grateful Lilliputians. | |
| Pissed off at the rejection, Neith says that now she 'wouldn't fix you little pygmies if you begged!' 'Put that in writing!' the other yells, poking the bitch one right in the eye. The CO ends the episode with the usual: 'Place wouldn't be the same if you weren't you,' speech. 'Damn straight,' she replies. | |
| The old patron episode: She turns out to have had a Brobdingragian mentor at the Academy. This is brought to light when the Enterprise operates in tandem with a giant-crewed vessel captained by the mentor, probably with an incredibly original name like the USS Goliath. The plot will certify that the mentor has a chance to make his 'so proud' speech about the her protege's performance. | |
| The historical figure episode: The crew meets J. Swift, finds out that he's a time-traveling alien who tried to ease Lilliput's introduction to the rest of humanity by offering a fictional story that was declared 'amazingly prescient' after the ReDiscovery. | |
| The time-travel-to-the-year-of-the-show's-production episode: A temporal technobabble takes the Lilliputian to the 21st century. She discovers that a test of a new weapons system threatens the magically hidden islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Without revealing her existence or Lilliput's location, she must convince the scientist in charge of the test to select a new location. | |
| The technology-out-of-control episode: The ship's artificial gravity goes nutsy fagin. As the crew are pinned to the decks, they lie there discussing the long-term effects of above-normal gravity, the difficulties of operating the ship by raspy voice commands, why the incredibly over-redundant system usually functions well after every other ship component has failed (power, inertial dampeners, lighting, life support, doors, replicators... everything but the cameras and the mood-lighting) yet remains vulnerable to casualties like this one, and the human-like muscle/skeletal arrangements of Lilliputians, which makes the race horribly over-muscled for their mass, allowing the tiny officer to be the only person aboard capable of addressing the malfunction. | |
| The best-pick-for-the-mission episode: A team of scientists from the Daystrom Institute have been firing unmanned probes into a space anomaly, losing them immediately on crossing the event horizon. The nature of the anomaly puts a limit on the size of the probes, but they feel that the Lilliputian would make a dandy pilot for the next one (number 23, they eventually admit). As the tiny officer obviously loves a challenge, or she wouldn't be here, she feels good about the plan, but everyone else on the bridge crew tries to protect her from the danger. She calls them all sizists and sneaks out on the probe by herself. Her mission is successful, but the CO is still miffed about her insubordination. He gives her the same punishment he gave the last officer, polishing the ship's bell with a toothbrush. She rolls up her sleeves, shoulders the brush, and marches off... with a smile. | |
| The Babysitter episode: LT "Dolly" must deal with hostile aliens while keeping a class of young children safe. Back on Earth, size discrimination has affected human/Brobdingrag/Lilliput interaction. The bridge officers try to find a way around prejudice, bias, and misconceptions without letting politics affect their relationships. The Engineer lets loose with the 'elf' word after seeing a new report. Shocked by the ethnic epithet, the Lilliputian returns to Maldonado to rethink her place in Starfleet. Engineer follows her home, apologizes in the town square. His humility, and her forgiveness, go a long way to at least calming the participants, if not solving the issues. | |
| In a follow-up to the riots, the Engineer meets the Lilliputian on the holodeck. Careful programming allows him to join her at her normal size, spending a typical day on the ship, to try to get to understand her better. | |
| To their surprise, he is still six inches tall when the holodeck simulation ends. Now he really has to walk a mile in her tiny, tiny shoes. He pretty much adopts "You're enjoying this, aren't you?" as a mantra. She just giggles. |