Mason - (Postponed Chapter - Part 1)

EDIT: the client and i have decided this chapter would fit better in the future of the story, so it's being taken off the public release table atm (this was previously chapter 5) but will stay up for patrons

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One of Mason’s favorite ways to spend time, especially with other people, was playing video games. It was one of the only things they could do where someone’s size wouldn’t put them at an advantage or disadvantage; as long as you could operate a controller, you were on even ground with everyone else. Also, video games were a great way to pass the time when they were high.

Getting high wasn’t as even-grounded though. Mason and Skye had done a lot of experimenting a few years ago to try and find the perfect way for him to smoke, but all the innovation in their relentless teenage minds was no match for the fuckery of physics.

Technically Mason could roll his own blunts, but lighting them was such a chore. The two of them had spent an entire afternoon once testing out a dozen ideas, but they’d never been fully successful a single time. There wasn’t any way for Mason to create a flame that was as proportional to his size as much as a normal person’s, and trying to light a blunt for a 3-inch tall person using a regular lighter or match pretty much meant that the blunt would burn up the second it was close enough. Even though the tip of a joint could still be ignited by quickly holding it against something hot, neither Skye nor Mason felt comfortable with how close the shrunken boy had to get to something of such a dangerous temperature (for him) just in the name of getting high. Plus if Skye had to be the one to relight them, he’d just have to keep passing them back and forth to her so often that they’d both get frustrated. Pretty much the only reliable method for Mason was holding cigarettes against his mini-stove, but the log cabin had to stay where it was for all of its power and water and gas connections to stay hooked up. So unless Mason was in his house, which he wasn’t if he was hanging out with others, then lighting up was just infeasible.

There were also edibles, but they were way too much of a gamble to be reliable for him. Even if Skye was as confident as she could be that the cannabis was evenly distributed, whether the guy at the dispensary had said it was “totally solid” or whether Skye had cooked it herself, Mason was way more sensitive to THC concentration fluctuating depending on where he took a bite. Either he wouldn’t get high at all, or he’d get so insanely blitzed out of his mind that he’d get panic attacks and it’d take her months just to convince him to try again.

Of course, all of the teenagers’ frustration with trying to get Mason to successfully have a good time might just end up rectifying itself in two years when Mason turned 21. There were some specialty products that a select couple of dispensaries carried that—allegedly—worked a lot more reliably on people Mason’s size. But because they were only good for shrunken people, only shrunken people could buy them. While Skye was lucky enough to just have Mikayla buy whatever it was she wanted, just as underage smokers and drinkers had operated for decades, Mikayla (or anyone else for that matter) couldn’t buy any products intended for shrunken people. She wasn’t shrunken, so it was obvious that the products were for someone else, and therefore nobody would sell to her since they couldn’t verify the age of whoever it was she had to be buying it for. It was like a reverse loophole; while everyone else in the world had been easily skirting minimum-age requirements for decades, Mason was put in a position where he was forced to actually obey the law. Equal treatment, and yet unfair at the same time.

So for the past few years, his and Skye’s solution had been so simple and crude that it was almost funny: she’d take a drag from the blunt, turn to him and lean in real close, and then slowly blow it all in his face. It made everyone else laugh whenever they saw it in action, but realistically what else could they do?

One day, Skye had gotten home from school and discovered Mason on the couch playing his Switch. “Welcome hoooooome,” he called out to her without taking his eyes off the TV.

“Ooooooh, you’re playing Mario Kart?” she commented as she slipped off her shoes and came into the living room. “I feel like we haven’t played that in a while.” She turned to him with a bounce in her step. “Also… voila!” She reached into her backpack and pulled out a plastic bag with a few grams of weed, smiling widely. He glanced quickly at what she had, but shrugged with a sigh, seeming disinterested.

“Not really in the mood to have you blow me today,” he joked.

Her face contorted, but more into a look of bewilderment than disgust, since she told her fair share of dirty jokes too. “That one doesn’t even work, cuz technically I blow on you. Or like, at you.”

Mason’s voice took on a mocking tone, “Eh, your joke isn’t linguistically accurate so actually it’s not very funny,” he teased, to which she rolled her eyes. “Also since you’re on the subject, Mikayla said her friend at work made edibles for everyone, but I guess they have macadamias in them so she couldn’t have any and said you could take it.”

“MmmmMMMMmm,” she hummed, floating her way over to the kitchen and spotting the paper plate with a single brownie in the middle. As she picked it up to admire how good it looked, Mason paused his game and turned to look at her, holding back a smile on his face. Skye didn’t even bother asking how strong it was, and opened her mouth to stick the entire square in with a single bite. It wasn’t a particularly big brownie, so she only bothered chewing it a few times to break it up before swallowing it all down. From the moment she put it in her mouth to the moment she gulped it down had been barely two seconds.

“Oh my God, shit,” Mason laughed, scratching his forehead nervously. “I didn’t think you’d actually swallow it, I figured you would’ve chewed it for awhile.”

She turned to him with a confused look on her face, “What do you—” And then it hit her, a burning sensation on her tongue that increased in severity with every passing second. A few days ago, Mason had discreetly ordered some ghost pepper cooking powder, and then while everyone was out of the house today, he’d carefully cooked a single brownie that looked massive to him, but would be average size to anyone normal. Using a shovel to stir the ingredients together and then pushing it into the toaster oven to cook; the whole process had literally taken the entire day. Nobody had tried pranking each other in a while, but Mason had definitely gone above and beyond anything he’d pulled in years.

Her eyes reddened and teared up as the burning began to feel like little knives stabbing all around her mouth, and she whimpered as she rushed over to the fridge to grab a carton of milk. Skye didn’t even bother grabbing a cup and opted to just chug the whole fat drink straight from the container, swishing it around before spitting it out in the sink.

Mason was laughing maniacally as he saw how badly Skye reacted to the material, knowing he’d probably have to suffer the consequences as soon as she recovered. But his laughing stopped as soon as he saw her projectile vomit into the sink. “Oh… shit.”

“What the hell, Mason!?” she screamed in between throwing up, crying as she tried to wash away the pain with the milk. She rushed to grab some ice cubes from the freezer under the refrigerator, hoping that the cold might counteract the violent amounts of heat she was feeling in her mouth, but then another round of puking came out of her before she could make it back to the sink.

Mason wondered if he might’ve mixed in too much of the powder. There weren’t any specific enough recipes online for using ghost peppers, so he’d had to adapt his plan from a recipe for habanero brownies. But now that he was thinking about it, he realized that the amount of habaneros that the instructions called for shouldn’t have been applied to a pepper that was five times worse. “Fuck…” he muttered under his breath.

He’d gone too far.