Munmun(36)

What if this family of six joined munmuns with me, Prayer, and a hundredtwelve other littles, huntwenty of us in total, we’d all be middlescale, onemillion per person.

Perfect fit for middleroads, middledoors, middlecars, and middlephones, the nice comfy middlelife. Sicktypercent downscale for six, sure, but thousandpercent upscale for hunfourteen, that’s every single person in the old Yewess Coastguard station.

Warner, ungratefull jerk, can you not be chill, just let the riches be nice to you.

Or what if the family joins tentimes as many people, a thousandhundredninetyfour littlepoors, everybody’s halfscale, an incredible life improvement for a crazy number of people, ten coastguard stations of littlepoors finally getting to live life.

Warner, turn that freaking mindcalculator off.

Go the other way, the family joins with fewer people, add just six littlepoors to your family of giants, the family only shrinks a little bit to doublescale, tenmillion per human, you’re still enormous, plus you made six littlefish lives amazing, doublescale now.

Enough enough enough, I learned prettyquick to stop making calculations. Because that’s ungratefull thinking and I was super gratefull. Twohunthousand munmuns is a fortune for me and Prayer, super generous, lifechanger.

I spent one night as a littlepoor in Hue Family Palace. Prayer was still living in the storeroom at Paddy Quickstand, not scaled down yet. Hue promised we’d get her in the morning.

Mom Dawn fretted that the house hadn’t hosted littles ever, she hoped I’d be comfortable, ofcourse let her know if I needed anything. Dinner was blendedup soup and bread.

“Any scale person can eat soup,” announced Dawn with nervous hope. “You know what they say! ‘Water’s water at any scale!’ And water’s a liquid. Just like soup!”

“Mom, be a littlebit chill,” said Kitty.

“Am I not being chill?” cried Dawn.

Kitty made me a little pillowbed in a special halfscale bathroom, carefully smoothed the sheets with her long fingers.

“I make these kind of flowery operahouses in Dreamworld and sing music in them bytheway,” added Kitty sort of shy, “actually that’s my whole schoolproject, I think dreammusic can basically be therapy, I’m curious to see the impact on other people with hard lives.”

I nodded a That’s Intresting nod, hopefully not the nod of Yeah I Already Know That.

Why didn’t I want her to know I had seen the house before, I can’t really tell you, guess I just needed a secret to protect from giants.

Anyway that first night out of jail I couldn’t get all the way to Dreamworld, kept dozing off and then startling awake to the deep robothum of the middlerich house, darkblue bathroom light, gentle aircurrents, faroff smells of buttery wildflowers breathed by machines.

In the morning Hue, Dawn, and Kitty drove me to the bank in their threelane limo. Dawn held me over the glassbottom so I could watch as we straddled and swallowed the middlecars below.

“It’s so exciting that you’ve never been in one of these before,” Dawn told me.

“They’re fun allright,” boomed Hue, as copcars and ambulances drifted behind and underneath.

We left the car in bigparking and as we wandered around the bank to the littledoors, dronecams and reporters hustled after us, snapping pics, cooing reports.

Hue lowered me to the door and we beamed at the cameras.

“See you in there, Warner,” Hue winked, the glassy bankdoors hummed open, I crept inside.

So when you grow up littlepoor, talking to other littlepoor kids about munmun and scale and banks, you hear theories about bankers. Bankers are robots, bankers are ghosts. Don’t hide in the tellerroom at night because bankers will eat you. Bankers can’t make their own blood so they suck it from a dozen littlepoors a day. Bankers don’t have peens or jeens, instead when you become a banker they chop off your peen or fill your jeen with cement, et set set setera.

So I was tensing, bracing for weird behaviors, attacks, shadiness.

But they were all very nice and normal, mild and polite. Big smiles, soft hands. The only weird thing about them was the middlescale thing, which, okay, the middlescale thing is super weird.

The middlescale thing was this. When you become a banker, they freeze your scale account forever at a million munmuns, even when you retire or quit or get fired. Basically it’s a guarantee of No Funny Business for all bankers. Meaning, you can’t use your job or bank knowledge to make yourself huge.

So all bankers are middlescale forever and so down there in the halls and rooms inside a bank, every single person is middlescale, and it feels crazy to look at. Like being in Dreamworld except you’re not real, everyone else is but not you, you’re no longer a human and instead just a piece of someone else’s dreamfluff.

Because banks need all kinds of different size rooms to manage all kinds of different transformations, all levels of Scale Up and Scale Down, most of the bank is underground, and the smaller you are, the deeper you go. So a littlevator like a jar in a tube dropped me deep into the earth.

Hue stayed somewhere shallower. We vidded each other before my Scale Up and he explained, he’s meeting Paddy at Paddy’s local bankbranch, they’ll sort out Prayer’s munmuns so she doesn’t have to scale all the way down to little and then scale back up again.

“Dawn will drive you home, I’ll bring Prayer home with me after work tonight, and we’ll all see each other at familydinner,” said Hue. “Enjoy your new scale, Warner. We’re all expecting great things from you.”