Humanity has vanished, I'm in a smalltown apartment, and my iPhone is big enough for me to use as a small mattress. I think I'll go insane now, please.
Perkins never was that big of a town. The houses were old enough to run on gas, a fortunate few having second floors as they rose over expansive bare backyards. A tight cluster of municipal buildings, convenience stores, and the occasional tightly cramped sales place huddled around a broken concrete main street almost as old as the bricks in their walls. From there, the roads split and spread quickly, attaching themselves to the offshoot highway nearby as soon as they could. Large plains of tall grass remained untouched, the occasional farm visible in the distance.
It wasn't a bad place, persay. It was modern enough that it had internet and all that, and it was quite relaxed... aside from the occasional pressure to do something outside, in the Oklahoma heat. Tornado warnings would come and go, but the terrifying windstorms usually touched down far away from the inhabited homes. And the apartment I had recently moved into with my grandmother was just large enough for the two of us.
Well... now. Now it was too large for the one of me.
What follows is a rough compilation of my journals in that time, alongside a few notes explaining the situation at the time. Feel free to mock my past self, I know I certainly do!
The following is a combination of original journals from my first day as what I now know is a Breezie, recorded via iPhone voice-to-chat reminders, and supplimentary materials detailing what I didn't write down between journal entries. The journals themselves will be in blue. Due to the recording, some words are translated incorrectly; these words will be marked in red with a grammatical translation following every section.
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Well today has been confusing. I wake up on my pillow. The floor is very far away. Also I don't hear anyone. On the upside I can flying* now! Took me a while to minister**. Especially with the ceiling fan but now I can get around. I should go find something to eat.
*fly *master
In my original journals, I didn't see a reason to explain that I had awoken naked on my pillow and had a very brief panic attack when I realized I had shrunk. Oddly enough, finding out that I had a dragonflyesqe wings and a pair of antenna did calm me down somewhat, as it convinced me that I had merely been transformed into an insectile species; for some reason I found this far more acceptable than just being shrunk. The tail and hooves threw me for a bit of a loop, as I recall, but not enough to restart my initial panic. I spent some time afterwards jumping on my bed, trying to figure out how my wings worked; I was not going to just jump off the edge at my size. Eventually a small gust from the ceiling fan did get me over to my desk, where I keep my laptop and iPhone.
After entering the journal--apparently Breezie hooves are small enough to count as fingers for a touchscreen--I aimed myself for the door. Thankfully, I had gotten up late last night to take a bathroom break, so the door was still open a crack and I could easily squeeze through. While I did glide down the hall toward the kitchen, I was only just able to make it to the dining room table before I had to take a breather. After that, though, it was only a short flight to the kitchen counter, where I kept my cheap poptart knockoffs. I did topple over one of the boxes and I did manage to rip open the metal wrapper around a pair, but... well, I could only scarf down a quarter of one of the things.
So I got my breakfast and managed to slip into the bathroom. It took some effort to turn on the light switch but I did it. Turns out that my reflection in some strange sort of gangly tell me* bug thing. I also buzzed up against precious his** door. I couldn't hear anything. I hope she isn't dead.
*pony **Precious's
Precious was the name I called my grandmother. At the time, there was a mutually beneficial situation going on; I would help her around the apartment because, well, she was old and infirm, and she would use her social security check to keep the bills paid. Of course, I was earning just enough money from commissions to buy my own groceries, and I did intend to build up enough of an income to eventually be self sustaining. Still, being transformed into a microhorsebug was definitely going to put a damper on that plan, in more ways than I even realized at that point.
I went back to my room after that, putting down another journal, and turned on my laptop. It wasn't all that hard, even if my hooves were now just a touch smaller than the keys themselves. But when I opened up my browser like I usually do, there was... quite a bit of delay on the various tabs I had Chrome set to open automatically. At first, I just thought the laptop was having yet another technical problem, but after a half hour of refreshing I found that, well, nothing was coming up right. Up until that time, a large portion of my life had been online, so I understandably freaked out a bit. Yes, I know, it was rather immature, but...
Well, I have an issue with face-to-face speech. Always communicated better with written words, and even talking was easier over the internet.
I'm not going to go into detail about my freakout, because nothing long term happened because of it. Aside from me realizing that it wasn't just me in this weird situation, probably. Once I was done, though, I buzzed up to my bedroom blinds and squeezed my head through; even then, I didn't really pay that much attention to what went on outside to see anything different. Oh, and I decided to check on my grandmother in person... which really meant I spent a good ten minutes trying to push down on the door handle and another twenty realizing I couldn't fit through the crack at the bottom of the door.
Okay so I can't open doors anymore. Is there another Whitney down to* this appointment**? Oh yeah! I am at*** small enough to fit in that happens then****
*way around **apartment ***This "at" shouldn't even be here, how did it get here?! ****air vents now!
As you can plainly see, my small size was somewhat warping my voice, and my poor iPhone had to work overtime to get anything out of it. Of course, I wasn't too concerned with that at the time--finding the familiar to be difficult to traverse usually gets attention more readily--but I should have remembered that later when... well, that'll come up when it does. Nevertheless, my plan at the time was to get through the airducts to check on my grandmother. This... would take some doing.
Finding a screwdriver was easy. Flying up to a nearby grate with it... yeah, that was tiring. Then I had to get the point into the slant of the screw driver while still hovering there--a lot more difficult then anyone thinks--and then, when I tried to rotate it the screwdriver fell out of my grasp and onto the distant floor. I'm not going to lie, I grumbled a lot while I went to retrieve it. Mostly in made up words and half syllables, because I don't actually swear that often but my mind meanders a lot.
The second time, though, I kept a hold of the screwdriver with all four of my hooves--rear to rotate, top to press in. Fortunately there were only two screws in the grate, and I was able to dodge with it fell to the ground. I stabbed through the air filter with the screwdriver and poked my head through... and then realized how dark it was. I'm pretty sure it was frustration that made me curl my antennae--and pure chance that I managed to trigger their natural bioluminescence. So that was how I discovered that they could glow.
After that, I pushed through the filter and put my hooves down on the dark dirty metal of the air vent. I'll admit I felt a little trepidation walking through that tunnel, dragging the screwdriver after me, the only light source my own two face bulbs, but I've always been spatially aware of my environment--I can navigate an area much better without a map than with one, I use landmarks to mentally locate myself, that sort of thing. It wasn't long before I was over the grate leading to my grandmother's bed room--- which, unfortunately, was not directly over he bed, so I couldn't tell if she was there.
But then, that's why I had brought the screw driver. I raised it up and swung it down hard, wailing away at the filter and the grate below me with as much strength as I could muster, focusing on the weak points where metal bent and met metal. It took some time, but eventually I had broken through and managed to buzz down.
And she wasn't there. In fact, having seen the Dark Crystal I could tell that the sheets had... collapsed, for a better word, around where she would have been sleeping.
Yeah, that... stunned me, not going to lie. My whole ordeal with the screwdiver and the air vents had tired me out quite a bit, so I didn't really freak out, but... I sat on that bed for a while.
Eventually I found myself licking my lips in thirst. So I buzzed to the attached bathroom, grunting with effort as I turned on the sink faucet, and tugged at that... thingy, that makes the sink plug descend. After the sink was decently full, I pushed the faucet back shut and buzzed low, carefully bringing my head down and licking up a few gulps of water. I didn't even care that I was drinking like a cat, I just... I was mentally exhausted. Once I had had my fill, I opened the stopper--still water breeds mosquitoes, and at my size I really didn't want them around--and buzzed back up to the air vents, making my way back the way I had came.
After that, I basically... well, I'm not going to describe what I did, but I figured out how to relieve myself while hovering just under the lip of the toilet bowl in the bathroom. I mean, the thing was the size of a swimming pool now! Luckily enough I was still strong enough to push the handle down....
And then, well, I headed to my room, completely drained mentally and utterly exhausted physically. I checked the clock and discovered that it had taken me two and a half hours to travel the vents. At the time, I didn't care. I just... settled down on my pillow for a nap.
A lot of what happened next is not going to make sense if you don't understand exactly what I was thinking at the time. First of all, I assumed that my grandmother--and by extension all of humanity--had also been turned into microhorsebugs somehow. Furthermore, I thought that my grandmother's now much tinier form had been smothered in her sleep by the sheets of her bed; I hadn't really poked under because, well, I didn't know if I could survive in there for long...
...and, well, I didn't want to find a tiny me-sized corpse. Especially not one that had been family at some time.
As I continued thinking, though, I realized that if all of humanity had become, well, microhorsebugs overnight, a lot of them would have went out like she did--which meant that the delicate network supporting civilization would have lost a lot of its support, in addition to everyone now living in homes for giants. Factor in the freakout aspect leading a good one out of a hundred to kill themselves accidentally, and then accidents like pets eating their former masters and... Let's just say I've seen The Borrowers. And that old Honey I Shrank The Kids movie. Although to be fair, I wasn't quite that small.
The point was, for the moment I was effectively alone. Maybe if I could get outside the apartment, like through the air ducts possibly, I could locate others and we could do... whatever it was we needed to survive. But that would require me getting outside, and I didn't know exactly where the exit air duct was located, or if it was covered by a fan of some sort.
I let my eyes drift over to my bedroom door; more specifically, I gazed contemplatively at its handle. The door itself was open, but I knew I wouldn't have been able to head out if it was closed; the door handle I could push down, but I wouldn't have been able to pull it. And the doors leading outside--
My antennae perked.
The front door opened inward. But the porch door opened outward. If I could just get the handle to stay turned, I might be able to ram into it and push it wide!
Of course, that required the effort of one more microhorsebug than was functionally present in the apartment. The door handles weren't knobs, thank goodness, but they were smooth with no hook on the end, making it difficult to attach a weight to them--
Tape. My tiny hoof hit my face. Of course! I could tape weight to the handle tip until it drooped, then I could... hmm. I brought my tiny blue hooves in front of my face. There wasn't a lot of contact space there, I needed a way to spread it out if I was going to ram the door. Some sort of wide surface, easy for me to pick up but sturdy enough that I could charge with it--
The poptart boxes, of course! They were a bit bulky, true, but if I just grabbed one and made sure it was full, I could push against the door. And they could be dropped as doorstoppers! After the door was open. Which required tape. Lots of scotch tape, I didn't want to get my wings anywhere near duct tape.
I glanced back at my shimmering wings as they revved up again. It was odd, I could count something like... three? Four of them? Three and a half. Insects only had two, maximum, but then again I demonstrated some decidedly non-insect traits. Like the flexible ears. Or the long green mane. Or the incredibly large eyes with ludicrously large eyelashes...
Now that I was focused on the eyelashes, I realized that I was actually feeling something from them. It was... well, very strange to experience. Like somebody tugging at the scruff of a new beard, only around my cheekbones and not... painful? I tilted my head to try to get a glimpse at them out of my peripheral vision--and the sensation changed.
It took me a few seconds of tilting before I hit on what was going on. My ludicrously large eyelashes were reacting to the wind kicked up by the ceiling fan. Or... rather, they were telling me which way the wind was blowing, I just needed time to interpret it.
That... actually, as a tiny flying creature, that made a lot of sense. True, eyelashes as whiskers was something that seemed a little bizarre to me, but humans had fingernails which served next to no purpose, and that wasn't counting all the weird and wacky traits animals had evolved in nature.
The musings on my eyelashes fueled a more general curiosity, and I turned to look at the new appendages sprouting from my back. The frontmost and largest set was almost bifurcated, and twitching the muscles I had only recently discovered did make them feel as though they were... different fingertips on my back, if that makes sense. I'd already figured out the how of my flying, but that was trial and error; the why was something I hadn't looked into.
Well... I could figure that all out later. With a shake of my head I buzzed out the door, whispering through the air as I searched for the roll of scotch tape--ah, there! Hiding behind various objects on the desk in the computer room. So many useful items would float around the apartment, being used here and there...
...well, back when there were people to float them around.
No time to focus on the past. I hovered down, grabbing the roll of tape and flying it to the handle of the porch door. There was a little space between the roll and the... cutty blade thing on the end of most plastic tape rollers, so it was easy to hang it on the handle for the moment. As soon as I was sure it would stay, I flew over to the silverware drawer and... well, have you ever braced against a waill whil traing to shove something heavy across a room?
The next, oh, half hour consisted of me picking up a fork, or a spoon, or a knife, and flying it over to the handle where I would carefully attach it in two or three wraparounds of tape. Wash, rinse, repeat. After a few trips, the handle looked like it had grown some sort of exotic metal sea anemone on it, but I didn't stop until I'd emptied out half the silverware drawer.
I remember looking at my amalgamated door handle weight and nodding in pride. Of course, I didn't push the handle down right then--I suspected that when I did, the weight would start to slip off. No, I set up the poptart battering ram on the coffee table nearby first. Then I buzzed up to the handle, giving it a critical eye.
Of course it did, otherwise I wouldn't be here writing about it. I mean, yeah, I kind of had to ram three times, then I had to drop the poptart box, and then I shoved it forward just as the door was swinging back closed and managed to jam it in the space between the door and the frame so I'd have a tiny crack to fly out...
But that, I think, counts as flawless.
Once I was outside, my first order of business was... to actually figure out what my first order of business was. After all, I wasn't exactly strapped for noms anymore, now that I was smaller than a rat. Well, assuming that my metabolism was somewhat similar to what it had been and wasn't hyper-processing like... actually, as a flying creature, I would in theory need more calories to body mass, and that's not factoring in the energy needed to keep the brain running since I was still sapient--
I shook my head. Alright, food was a bigger priority than I had thought. But there was a grocery store just down the road... which would be quite some distance in the beating sun.
There's an old list I stumbled on once, before this all happened. It's called the survivor's rule of three. Granted, it was tailored toward humans, but at this point I decided to operate under a 'similar until proven different' schema. So, I went through a mental review.
Three seconds without blood flow? Well, even if I got cut, there would still be blood flowing through my body. Still, best to try to avoid it, getting infected at this size would be bad.
Three minutes without air? Simple enough, I didn't have a bathing suit that fit me anyway. Also, probably smaller lungs, so probably not as long.
Three hours without warmth? Oklahoma in the middle of summer had a lot of that! I supposed I could stay indoors to avoid heat stroke... oh, yeah, the AC would give out eventually. Probably a good idea to look that up at some point.
Three days without water? That would be the first big problem, but there was a grocery store down the road after all. I could figure it out from there. It might take some effort to unscrew a water bottle, but they were designed to be unscrewed, so I wasn't... too worried.
Three weeks without food? Grocery store. Assuming the food kept long enough anyway. And that I could still eat it... well, I was able to eat that poptart knockoff, so that wasn't a problem.
And then, the big one. Three months without companionship. Three months alone. Three months, three months without seeing another face. The list had emphasized this one; humans that tried to make it past that usually just grew so depressed that they would lie down and die without complaint.
Now, I hadn't been that social offline, and in fact most of my interactions up until that point were either digital, necessary, or... well, not forced, but definitely somewhat awkward. Now, though... now there was a chance that the internet would fail. And more than that, there was the chance that all the people I had known had been suffocated by their sheets when they became ponyflies. Everything else, I had at the least a good idea how to handle. This last thing, though...
I made up my mind then and there. I would search the apartments for other survivors, and failing that.... I would think of something. I was good at that, thinking of things.
About twenty or thirty smashed window panes later, I had come to the conclusion that I was the only one to have avoided sheet suffocation. That not only sucked personally, as save for the various ex-pet dogs I encountered I was alone, but I did recall seeing and hearing children about. Including a few that still traveled primarily via stroller. Or baby carrier.
...Yes, I did spend a few hours perched on a roof, staring into nothing. You have to remember the assumptions I was operating under. I thought they were all dead! I was technically wrong, thank God, but I wouldn't learn that for... let me think... okay, it was less than a year, in hindsight, but the point still stands. Those early days were a lot more horrifying than anything you youngsters have to deal with.
Yes, I did just call you youngsters, you young whippersnappers, because back in my day we had to fly for a mile just to get to the grocery store and we did it under burning hot sunlight knowing full well we could be a morsel for any animal that caught sight of us and we didn't have all this fancy-shmancy solar tech, nooooo, we were running without AC and we absolutely hated it but we did it without complaining!
Aaaaaanywho, I could go into detail about my little angst coma, but honestly? There's not much to tell. I had to work through a lot, don't get me wrong, but... well... it's one of those things that would drag down the story. I mean, I've already spent three chapters on my first day alone. And you didn't pick up this book to read about my early day angst, oh no, you wanted to know how I went from pathetic to powerful. It's right there, in the title. So, let me summarize what happened next.
I got my head on straight, filled with determination to survive and at least ensure that I myself would not become a lost footnote in this new world. So I flew home, set up my grandmother's computer to download all of Wikipedia--great source of info back in the day, and it's not like she would use it--and immediately set about planning the rest of the week.
And then I basically did nothing productive for the rest of the day. Well, okay, I prepped for some of the things that would happen in the morning, but nothing really dramatic happened. The next day, though... and the day after that, and the day after that...
