Genre: originals

Chapter 1

Disclaimer: This work is mine. The characters are mine. Gulliver's Travels and Thomas Dolby's song belong to their respective studios and estates. The author is making no profit from this fanfic.

"I dunno, Ray. A variety show?" Angel's agent continued to text away on his phone. As always, she marveled at his ability to carry on three conversations at once, usually involving at least four of his clients. "It's perfect," he assured her, not looking up, or in her case, down from his phone. "Trust me."

"I do, Ray," she replied. "But after all the trouble we went to, to position me as a serious action figure, to sing, dance, and frolic on stage..."

"First off," he pointed out, "it increases your exposure. That's always a good thing. Second, it opens doors for future projects. You can always choose to turn down an offer to do a musical comedy, but right now, you're not even being offered anything like that. Third," he said after a breath, "it's a favor for a favor. You go on Aleeta the Amazing's Variety Hour, she gets a guest shot on Force of Fury, and the two Lilliputians in LA with their own TV shows leverage each other up."

"I suppose," she sighed. She slid from the seat in the limo to jog over to the minifridge.

Marcus Thompson was Aleeta's comedy guest. The lights came on, and he was standing in a typical mad scientist lab. Mists rose and fell, colored liquids flowed through pipes, and Bunsen burners flamed. The human started singing "Blinded Me with Science" and danced from counter to counter. On the far right, Aleeta was dressed as a lab assistant, watching bubbling beakers and taking notes on a clipboard. He hovered over her shoulder and sang about her tender eyes. She kicked at a laser that was heating a test tube, and it swung to flash in his eyes. "She blinded me with science!" he screamed, staggering backwards. On stage left, Angel was dressed in a handkerchief, locked in a cage. She stretched a pole made from tape and paper clips towards a test tube of noxious fluids. As Marcus got close, she managed to hook it and tip it over. He sang "I can smell the chemicals" as the acid burned through the sleeve on his arm. The acid transferred to his face when he wiped his sweating brow. "Blinded me with science!" he screamed once more, staggering away. Back behind Aleeta's station, he sang of her eyes. She stepped to a human-scale remote control and hit the arm. A robot crawled out from under the table, heavy blades whirring around as it aimed for the human's feet. "I can hear machinery!" he sang, just before the blades chopped off the front of his shoe, throwing pieces into his face. Hands over his eyes, he limped away, singing: "Blinding me with science - science!"

Angel had broken out of her cage and danced seductively on the counter. Forgetting his hurts and pains, he moved towards her, hands out and grabby. She spun to cut a wire with a dissecting knife, and the model of Jupiter fell out of the artificial solar system in the overhead. "The spheres are in commotion," he sang, just as the Red Spot blackened his eye. He crashed around the room for a long while, the physical comedy that Thompson was famous for. Angel and Aleeta ran across the power strip along the wall to the middle table, taking cover in the small bookshelf. When he finally managed to get back in control, the room was pretty well destroyed. Cross-eyed, he looked at the two women in the shelf. The monitor switched to show two camera views, centered on each woman, overlapped and blurry. "Good heavens, Miss Saka- Stacka- Macka- Makisoto," he slurred, "you're beautiful." Taking a step back, he saw that all the tables had been swept clear. "I - I don't believe it! There she goes again! She's tidied up, and I can't find anything!" Following the outburst, he tipped over backwards and lay unconscious on the floor as the two women sang the refrain. Rather than the curtain dropping, though, another human scientist stepped into the room. The stately Shakespearean actor Nicolas Farmer looked around the room and at the two tiny women cowering at center stage. "Well," he said, drawing the word out to about ten syllables, "let us get the place cleaned up, chop-chop!"

A couple of human lab assistants swept into the room, clearing debris and the limp body of the blinded scientist. Lilliputian women, both in lab coats and rags, also swarmed through the area, helping restore order. After a while, the lab was cleaned up, whole new banks of piping and bubbling fluids were moved in on dollies, and the senior Mad was left to what looked like setting up an experiment of some sort. One of Aleeta's human magic assistants, Dorothy, walked in dressed as the French Maid that turns up in so many skits on the show. The males (and a few females) in the audience hooted and hollered as she sashayed in. She told the Mad that there was someone to see him. "Gott in Himmel!" he swore. "Yet again, the power of my superhuman intellect is frustrated in the act of creation by the hampering of little minds."

"Hey!" Aleeta shouted from the table. "My apologies, darling, of course I meant no slur upon your intellect by virtue of the size of your brain."

"Well, alright then."

Maid sashayed out, more hooting and hollering. In came the other assistant, Carol, dressed as a government functionary. "Sir," she said, "I am from the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, here to audit your laboratory."

"Oh, shit," he said. "No, sir, OSHA!" she corrected. "Well, this is not a government facility, so you have no authority here."

"But you have received government funding."

"No, I have not." Angel waved to him from the balance scale she stood on; he leaned down. She whispered in his ear. "You are kidding me!" he blurted. Turns to the auditor. "Because I extorted money from the US Government to NOT shrink the population of Terre Haute to the size of a tiny time capsule, you are counting that as receipt of government funds?"

"It was tax money, sir."

"Blast. Well, what is it going to take to get you out of my hair, today?"

She opened her briefcase to examine her files. "Well, with respect to your employees..."

"I have no employees!" he shouted. "These women are experiments!"

"Sir, I personally don't care if you hired them or kidnapped them. We're part of the Department of Labor, not the Justice Department. But if you count them as uncompensated employees, you have to deal with OSHA regulations. If you count them as test subjects, you'll have to deal with PETA." (Everyone on stage shudders at the thought.)

"Very well, I suppose..." He looked down at Aleeta in her lab coat. "What if I create an online unaccredited university and make them all grad students in my shrinking woman research?"

The Lilliputian women all booed and hissed, throwing things at him and stamping their feet. "Please, sir," said Carol, "there's no need to get THAT hostile."

Carol lifted the form to get back to the script. "Sir, are your employees always able to reach you?"

"Well," he shrugged, "they can if I am at the table they are on."

"I mean, sir, are they always able to communicate with you. Can you hear them?"

"No. Lord, if I wanted to be able to hear them, I would not have shrunk them. Believe me, women test subjects should be underfoot, not overheard. All day long they are going... Put me back. You monster. You are never getting away with this."

"Sir, I - " Carol couldn't interrupt his roll. Aleeta and Angel sat down and got comfortable as the rant continued. "People know I am here. You have no right. You are evil. God will punish you. You are going to a fiery hell."

"Sir?" Carol tried to interrupt.

"My friend, Gregor, he thought Shrinking Women experiments were clichéd. What does he do? He makes women telepathic. In his sleep, he hears their complaints. 'SIR!' " She shouted and stamped a foot. The little women woke up, and the Mad spun around. "What?"

"The women! If they cannot reach you, how can they communicate if there is a problem?"

"If I see the problem, I fix the problem. I do not need them to tell me."

"But sir, what if the problem is something small, that affects them, which you can't see?" Between the two humans, Aleeta waved signal flags as semaphore. Angel whipped out an Aldis lamp and flashed light. The Mad just stared at the OSHA rep. "If the problem is too tiny for me to notice, why would I go to extra effort to find out there are problems that are not problems? I do not understand?"

"Mr. Mad Scientist, you must make some sort of communication available to your women test subjects." Behind her, two women on the left workbench rolled two soup cans across the table. One was held in place while they dropped the other to the floor. String connected the two. The lowered can hung seven inches off of the floor. Another woman stepped from beneath the workbench, stuck her head in the can, and shouted, "Hellooooooooooooo?"

On the table, the women held the can and aimed their ears into it. They looked at each other and shook their heads. One walked to the edge and shouted: "Can't hear you!" to her comrade on the floor. She pulled out two signal flags and replied. "Gotcha!" said the table-top woman. "I will come up with something," the Mad assured the inspector.

"Very well, sir. Now, on the subject of communication, what sounds do you make while walking across the laboratory?"

"Oh, well, you must understand that my people eat a lot of cabbage..." Every tiny woman in sight pinched her nose shut and waved a hand in front of her face. "No, sir! Warning sounds!"

"Hey, if it is two hours after lunch and I am telling you to run out of the room..."

"Collision sounds, sir! Warning tones, that one may know if you're coming, where you're headed, if you intend to reverse, that sort of thing."

"Thursday!" he said, glad to have an actual answer. "What?"

"Dorothy waxes the floor on Thursday. My shoes always squeak on the floor on Thursday, part of Friday."

"Sir, how do you transfer your subjects?" Carol continued. "Transfer?" He looked around, confused. "Well, I have sold a blonde to an MIT frat...."

"No, sir, physical movement around the facility. Are there restraints?"

"I use a butterfly net when they escape. And I taped Experiment #7 to a cutting board..."

"Safety restraints! Do you ever lift them?"

He flexed his fingers in apparent glee. "Oh, yes, I am always lifting them up and carrying them around the places."

"Do you have a seat belt afforded them whenever you lift them between the tables or around the laboratory?"

"He surely does not safety belt them!" Aleeta shouted. "He just uses his thumb," Angel added, "like a great pork butt of an anchor."

"You were not complaining," the Mad told her, "when that great butt was the only thing between you and a four-foot drop!"

"I was complaining at the top of my lungs, jackass!"

"Oh, yeah..." He turned away from the Lilliputians with a dismissive gesture. "Very well. Only with the small pet carrier will I transport the shrunken women in the future."

"Is the small pet carrier fitted with approved airbags?"

He sagged, visibly, like a game animal taking a bullet. "Very well. I will seek a supplier of teeny, itsy airbags."

"Thank you." She consulted the file. "Speaking of safety devices, do you ever move heavy items around the lab?"

A large black Labrador ran across the stage, with a tiny woman riding his back like a mahout upon an elephant. The dog towed a very massive piece of machinery behind him on a little wagon. Carol held her hand to her forehead and counted to ten. "Speaking of safety devices, do you ever move heavy items around the LABORATORY?"

"Oh, yes. I take the machinery to where it is needed."

"And do you ever lift unsecured weights over the areas where shrunken women are collocated?"

"Straight damned he this action does!" Aleeta shouted, while the Mad mumbled 'collocated' in confusion. "And are hard hats afforded the test subject during these transfers?"

"What? If it is that I am moving the shrink ray around, and the chainfall breaks, a gram of plastic on their head is going to be useless except for identifying which end was their head!!"

"Nevertheless, sir, it is the position of OSHA that many cranial impact events of less than goo-crushing lethality could be averted with proper safety gear."

"Are you writing this down?" he asked Aleeta. She was writing on the clipboard, nodded. Beside her, Angel was counting heads. "That's twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two hard hats, size point zero zero zero zero zero zero one," she said. "Where am I going to find these devices," Mad grumbled. "I'm sure I don't know, sir," Carol replied. "But it is the position of OSHA to establish safety rules, not to provide safety equipment."

Aleeta was writing a shopping list on her clipboard. She handed the sheets up to the Mad, who reviewed them and groaned. He groaned more loudly each page. By page 20, everyone on stage was holding their ears. "That reminds me," Carol interrupted, "what about hearing protection?"

"What, to prevent the spread of aural diseases?"

"To protect hearing."

"This is why I stopped shrinking them to eighteen inches tall. All the time with the whining. You monster. I can pay you. You are never working in this town again. This is not what is meant by a 'small part.' I will fire my agent. No, no, six inches is much better. I can hardly never hear them."

Carol sighed the sigh of the long-suffering. "Sir, at their size, much smaller sounds will have a proportionately greater impact on their eardrums."

"Oh, come on," Mad replied. "They are getting hearing loss from a simple noise?" He leaned over and tapped a fingernail on the table. A close-up on the two girls showed them staggering around as the world shook. A closer zoom on Angel's face as she spoke. "Knock it OFF, you son of a-"

The view instantly changed to human scale, across the stage from Angel and Aleeta. She finished her sentence as a high-pitched squeal. The Mad stopped. The squeal went on and on and on. Finally, she stopped. The view restored to one close to the two humans, with the two Lilliputians between them. "It is she that you are forgiving," Aleeta offered. "Her first Mad the Navy in was..." The humans shrugged. Carol started again: "Well, sir, I believe that concludes our audit at this time. I need to research railing standards with my colleagues back at the Department. The rule is that every runway shall be guarded by a standard railing on all open sides 4 feet or more above floor or ground level."

Behind her, three tiny women on the table carried out a tape measure. Two held it at the edge of the table while one grabbed the tab and leaped over the side. She got it to the floor and stepped on it.

Above her, the other two read the result. The look at each other and shake their heads. "But under the circumstances..." Carol goes on, "I think that standard needs to be revisited."

"Visit, schmisit," Mad replies, "I proceed on the plan that your decision will be the worst one for me and my banking accounting."

"That's probably for the best," she agrees. She puts files and papers into her briefcase, packing to leave. Dorothy enters, leading Marcus Thompson back in. He is now dressed as a government stooge, the epitome of bureaucrat in a cheap suit. "Mr. Mad Scientist," he says with nasal authority, "I am from the Internal Revenue Service, with questions about your return."

"Oy gevalt," the Mad mumbles. "There's a lot of interest down at the Service, wondering exactly how you'll explain the rather high number of dependents you claim."

"Oh," Carol says, "that's easy. It may seem high for a single-scientist dwelling, but he has many women shrunk down."

"Many?" the IRS man asks. "Does he have five million shrunken women on the premises?"

"FIVE MILLION?" everyone shouts in alarm. Sheepishly, the Mad shuffles over to a filing cabinet and pulls out a snowglobe. He puts it on the table and everyone crowds around it. The view shifts to two women having a picnic in a city park. The park is full of women playing with dogs, playing games, walking or sunning themselves. As the women set out dishes, a large shadow covers the park. They look up and see the colossal face of Aleeta filling the entire sky. They scream. Back in the laboratory, everyone looks up towards the Mad, who shrugs. Except for the Labor department woman, who squints into the dome and says: "I don't see too many hard hats down there."

And the curtain falls.

A Lilliputian cameraman follows Aleeta and Angel out the back of the Mad Scientist set. Aleeta's dressing room is a large trunk mounted on very smooth wheels. They cross the drawbridge into it and an aide sweeps it to the next set. Inside, Aleeta hugs her guest. "Oh, such fun we are having."

"Yeah, it's a blast. Way more fun than I expected." Aleeta steers her towards a changing booth. "You will find coveralls inside. You will put them on, okay?"

"Um, okay." As they separate and change, their voices carry across the curtains to the camera. "Hey, Aleeta, what's this for? I thought that was my last set?"

"Last of the set is not finished, dear."

"Huh? What else is there?"

"The dance number remains."

"We did the dance, Aleeta. At the start of the skit. We didn't rehearse any other ones."

"Worry not, you should."

Angel steps out in a bright yellow set of coveralls, holding a black hardhat, wearing black boots. The coveralls are more tight-fitting than you'd typically see on a worker. Aleeta finally shows up, dressed the same. In the background, a disco-era beat starts to play. "What the hell is that?"

Aleeta waves away the question and directs her guest to a corner where wires dangle. "You are ready for special effects?"

Angel looks dubious but connects the cables to her boots and wrists. Then the roof is whisked away, and the cables yank her into the air. A masculine hand dips to collect Aleeta. On the dance floor, Aleeta's human male dancers are assembled in mock-safety worker costumes showing lots of skin. The female portion of the audience hoots and hollers. Safety cones dot the dance floor. To the side, the house band starts to speak. "S-s-s-s A-a-a-a F-f-f-f E-e-e-e T-t-t-t Y-y-y-y, Safety, dance!"

Aleeta assumes a position next to Angel, who dangles from a marionette's cross. The hand running it pokes through a hole in the curtains. Angel takes in the scene and wails. "I don't dance!"

The singer speaks again: "We can dance if we want to. We can leave your friends behind." The puppeteer causes Angel to dance in approximate step with Aleeta, who leads the male troupe from her place on the shelf. The unwillingness is a put-on, obviously. Angel only complains during brief pauses. During the dance sequences, she does a fair imitation of Aleeta's performance, much more precise than the string arrangement would support. She turns her dancer/complainer status back and forth as if throwing a switch. "Cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance, well they're no friends of mine."

"Puppeteers," Angel points out, "are no friends of mine."

"I say, we can go where we want to. A place where they will never find. And we can act like we come from out of this world. Leave the real one far behind. And we can dance."

Aleeta is swept up by the Chippendales wannabes, passed from hand to hand, then returned to the shelf for just long enough to hear Angel's complaint. "I swear, Aleeta, when you come on my show, I'll get even."

"We can go when we want to. The night is young and so am I. And we can dress real neat from our hats to our feet. And surprise 'em with the victory cry."

"I'm gonna make you do all your own stunts! I don't even do all my own stunts!"

"Say, we can act if we want to. If we don't, nobody will. And you can act real rude and totally removed. And I can act like an imbecile."

"Imbecile? Speaking of my agent..."

"I say, we can dance, we can dance. Everything's under control. We can dance, we can dance. We're doing it pole to pole. We can dance, we can dance. Everybody look at your hands. We can dance, we can dance. Everybody taking the cha-a-a-ance."

And at the big finish, everyone rushes to the black and yellow safety rail at the edge of the stage. Aleeta is posed on the top of a safety cone, centered in the light and camera. They bow while the audience applauds. Over the shoulder of one 'safety inspector,' we see Angel shaking her cables. "Hellllllllllllloooooooooooooo?"