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Maurice had just managed to get comfortable on his velvet pillow, water dish next to him and a platter of treats before him, when the capybara stuck its nose into his tent.
It was the end of a long day of circus performances—scampering along slacklines, jumping across platforms, swinging from the trapeze, even leaping through flaming hoops—and he had been looking forward to relaxing. He was the star performer of Madame Madeline’s Marvelous Rat Circus, and as such had the privilege of getting his own little tent to himself whenever he wanted to have a little peace and quiet. The other circus rats knew better than to bother him.
This capybara was not a fellow circus rat, and was accordingly much less polite about his space. It was also the smallest capybara Maurice had ever laid eyes on or heard of—not that he’d laid eyes on too many capybaras, but from everything he’d heard even the babies were bigger than a full-grown rat. His uninvited visitor, on the other hand, looked hardly bigger than him, and it didn’t seem like a baby.
“What do you want?” he asked, rather grumpily.
“Oh!” said the capybara. “I’m sorry for disturbing you! But I asked around, and everyone I spoke to said that if I wanted serious help, the one to go to was Maurice at the rat circus.”
At this Maurice sat up a little bit straighter and proudly puffed out his chest. “That’s me,” he said. “What do you need?” He liked his relaxation, of course, but he had a reputation to maintain, too! And part of how he’d garnered that reputation was that he would at least hear out anyone in need, should they come to him.
“There’s a mad scientist on the fairgrounds,” the capybara explained. “He’s made some sort of shrinkifying machine, and he’s been terrorizing the animals with it! I was still big enough that I could at least get around after being so terribly shrunk, so I was the one who was sent for help.”
“A mad scientist!” said Maurice, ears perking up in alarm as he considered the problem. He could ask his troupe to come help, of course, but he didn’t like to put them in danger unnecessarily; he decided it would be best to at least check it out by himself before possibly dragging them in. “Do you know where this shrinkifying machine is?”
“Yes,” said the capybara. “I can show you, if you want? I think the mad scientist has gone off for the night, so it should be safer.”
“Very well,” said Maurice, and he finally got up, giving his treat platter a long, mournful look, before taking a small green sword from the collection in the corner of his tent and placing it between his teeth so he could more easily scamper after the capybara. He added, somewhat indistinctly, “Let us depart.”
The capybara led him across the fairgrounds in the lengthening evening shadows. Her name, she told him, was Mika, and she was part of an exotic creature exhibition travelling with the fair. Most of them so far had managed to evade the shrinkifying machine’s effects, but Mika and several others had been struck; of them, only Mika had been brave enough to venture out into the fairgrounds to look for help.
Eventually they reached the mad scientist’s tent. It reeked of steel and machine oil, setting Maurice’s nose twitching.
“Here,” said Mika, approaching a large blocky shape shrouded in a dark cloth. She gripped the cloth between her teeth and tugged sharply. It fell away, revealing something that looked vaguely like a souped-up, crystal-and-mercury machine gun, but there were no bullets that Maurice could see and no chamber for them either. “The narrow end produces a white beam that makes anything hit by it become much smaller when it’s activated.”
Maurice took the sword in his front paw and stood on his hind legs, peering at the machine before him. “Do you know how it’s activated?” he asked.
“There’s a set of buttons at the top,” she said.
“I see,” said Maurice, still examining the machine. He, unlike most creatures he knew, could read a little bit of human writing. It didn’t matter most of the time—it wasn’t like a rat needed to read in the circus—but sometimes it came in handy, and the machine had SIZE-CHANGER written on it, not SHRINKIFYER. “Do you know if the mad scientist left plans lying around?”
“There’s a desk in the back,” said Mika, and Maurice followed her over to it.
After several minutes spent sifting through papers, he found what looked like schematics for the shrinkifying machine, and set to parsing them as best as he could.
Most of the notes were useless to him; they used vocabulary that Madeline never did, or were scrawled in the funny connected shapes he’d never quite figured out how to interpret. He could read enough to discover how to trigger the machine, though, and he also found, several pages in, that there was a switch deep in the machine’s innards that would make it embiggen creatures it hit rather than shrink them.
Scampering back to the machine, he quickly discovered that it wouldn’t be that simple; there were paths inside, but all of them were far too small for him to access, and he didn’t think he’d be small enough even if he let himself be hit by the shrinkifyer first.
He explained all this to Mika, and the two of them left the tent to get some fresh air. Maurice paced back and forth in the red light of the sunset, muttering to himself; Mika waited patiently, not interrupting.
What did eventually interrupt him was a tiny, squeaking voice from below.
“If you’re trying to get in somewhere small,” said the field mouse, “perhaps I could help?”
Maurice stared down. The mouse stared up, patiently awaiting his response.
“You’re still too big as you are now,” he said slowly. “But if you’d be willing to be shrunk by a mysterious machine… that just might work.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the mouse, which was a very reasonable question. Maurice turned to Mika.
“Not at all,” said Mika. “It felt very strange, but it didn’t hurt.”
“Then I’ll do it,” said the mouse. “Oh, and you can call me Buttercup.”
Maurice and Mika introduced themselves in turn; Buttercup, being a local mouse, didn’t know about Maurice and his reputation, it turned out. She had simply heard their mutterings and discussions and had grown curious.
They positioned Buttercup carefully in front of the shrinkifyer and then Maurice and Mika both climbed up to the top; neither was big enough to operate the machine alone, but together they could manage it. They turned it on, activated it, and hit Buttercup with a white beam of light.
“Oh!” said Buttercup in an even tinier, squeakier voice. “That was strange.” She was now so small that it took Maurice a moment to pick her out, even on the cleared flooring of the mad scientist’s tent.
She was small enough, Maurice thought, that this might actually work.
He scampered down and let her cling to his fur to carry her back up to the machine; it was too big and slippery for her to climb alone in her current tiny state.
“I just need to switch the wires in there?” she asked.
Maurice nodded. “Be careful,” he said.
“Of course!” Then Buttercup leapt off his shoulder and scuttled down into the inner workings of the shrinkifyer.
“Well, well, well,” said an unfortunately familiar and highly unwelcome voice from below. “If the rat hasn’t run away from the circus.”
Maurice sighed. The Captain was a bitter old tomcat, hoarfrost dusting his muzzle, but he was still quick enough and heavy enough that he might be able to shake the shrinkifyer and disrupt Buttercup’s work.
“You know I never run away, Captain,” he retorted. “Would a runaway return home again?”
The Captain’s lip curled. “All I see is a rat for me to catch,” he said, preparing a lunge towards the shrinkifyer.
“Guard Buttercup,” Maurice murmured to Mika; then he put his sword in his mouth, darted down the machine, and leapt over the Captain’s head to land between him and the door, away from Buttercup and her work. He took the sword in his paw and brandished it at the Captain. “Catch me if you can,” he said, and then he turned and scampered away.
What followed was a harrowing, five-minute chase across the mad scientist’s workshop. Maurice dodged the Captain’s claws and teeth, as he had uncountable times before; he struck the cat a few times with his sword, but of course the blade wasn’t sharp enough to do real damage. It did make the Captain recoil, though, and that was good enough for him.
Eventually, he heard Buttercup’s squeaking voice echoing through the shop. “All done!” she called. “I’m out.”
“Mika!” Maurice shouted. “Switch with me!”
Mika bounded down from the top of the machine and interposed herself between Maurice and the Captain. Maurice dropped his sword and raced up to the top of the size-changer where Buttercup waited.
Luckily, even in her extra-tiny size, Buttercup could still manage to press the lightest button, and Maurice, if he stretched his tail out, could get the rest.
“Mika, into position!” he called, and Mika bounded into the space in front of the size-changer.
Together, he and Buttercup activated the machine. A rainbow array of lights engulfed Mika, and suddenly she was much larger than she had been before—enough bigger that she clearly outweighed the Captain several times over.
She turned to him and said mildly, “Shall we continue?”
The Captain growled, but he wasn’t a fool; he knew when he was beaten. Rather than try to fight Mika at her real size, he turned and slunk away. For a moment, all three of them were still and silent.
Maurice turned to Buttercup. “Shall we restore you as well, then?”
“Oh! Yes, please.”
Mika was now big enough that it was a bit awkward for her to climb on top of the machine, but she still managed it. Together, they activated it again, and the rainbow light put Buttercup back to her regular size of slightly-less-tiny.
After that, it was easy. Mika went to collect all the creatures that had been hit by the shrinkifyer, and brought them to the tent so Maurice and Buttercup could hit them with the embiggifyer. There had been about a dozen affected, all told, and the most time-consuming part of fixing them was waiting for Mika to bring them.
Once all the shrinkified creatures had been restored and had gone back to their usual tents and dens, Mika turned to him and Buttercup.
“Thank you,” she said, inclining her head.
“Oh, it was nothing!” Buttercup squeaked. “This was an excellent little adventure.”
“You’re quite welcome,” said Maurice, giving her his most sophisticated look. “Do come by again if you run into more trouble.”
Mika nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.
Then Buttercup ran off back to her den in the meadow and Mika offered Maurice a ride back to Madeline’s tent, which he gladly accepted—it had been a lot of running around after a long day of performing, and he was tired.
Once he arrived back, he replaced his sword with his collection. Then he reclined on his pillow, gleefully ate the treats from his platter, and recounted his adventure to his troupe in grand detail before curling up to go to sleep for the night.
The next morning, he woke to find that there was a herd of surprised, pony-sized capybaras running through the fairgrounds, the humans scrambling out of their way and a mad scientist shouting somewhere about how he didn’t understand, this wasn’t what he’d set up his machine to do, what could have possibly happened here?
But that’s another story for another time.