bakerstreet | The Size-Shifting Meme

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The Size-Shifting Meme

The Size-Shifting Meme

This meme is for playing out everything where one party is a different size than the other. All configurations are welcome!

Shrinking and growing are popular themes in movies, comics, tv shows, and even in classic stories such as Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels, and ancient mythologies. The large and the strong are usually treated with respect, while the small and the weak are not; height and physical strength are tied in to power dynamics. So when a character changes size, it changes their outlook on the world, and it more often than not changes other's outlook on them.

How they view themselves and how others view them, and the resulting actions and reactions are dependent on several factors. What kind of person were they before, and whether or not their personality will differ significantly with a loss or addition of power. Was the change intentional or not? If so, what were their motives? Can the change be reversed? Do they or others even want it to be reversed?

How to Play
•Comment with your character and your preferences, and be sure to include information about your character's original height, and what height they’ve transformed to.
•Comment to others.
•Use the RNG to determine prompts or just go with the flow.

Cause Prompts
1.) Science Experiment (Shrink / Growth Ray, Medicinal Side Effect, Nuclear / Cosmic Radiation, Evolutionary / Genetic Mutation)
2.) Magic of a Higher Power
3.) Inter-Stellar, Inter-Dimensional Differences
4.) Altered Reality

Size Prompts
1.) Microscopic ( Less than 1mm )
2.) Bug ( 1mm to 1” )
3.) Action Figure ( 1” to 1’ )
4.) Doll ( 1’ to 3’ )
5.) Kid ( 3’ to 4’ )
6.) Short ( 4’ to 5’5” )
7.) Tall ( 6’5” to 8’ )
8.) Giant ( 8’ to 20’ )
9.) King Kong ( 20’ to 100’ )
10.) Mr. Stay Puft ( 100’ to 400’ )
11.) Godzilla ( 400’ to 500’ )
12.) Titan ( 500’ to 3000’ )
13.) God ( 3000’ to 1 mile )
14.) Celestial ( Larger than 1 mile )

Prompts
1.) Growth Spurt: All of your friends and/or significant other seem to be getting taller, bigger, and stronger but you’ve somehow missed out and remain the same. Or on the contrary, perhaps you went on a trip and return home/to school/to work to find you’ve outgrown everyone else.
2.) Born This Way: This isn’t a new thing for you, you’ve always been smaller or bigger, it’s everyone else you encounter who needs to get used to it.
3.) Villainous Plot: A villain has shrunk you for some nefarious reason. Perhaps you’re a damsel in distress waiting for a hero to save you, or perhaps you’re the hero and found yourself brought down to size by the villain, or you could just be an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or on the contrary, you’re the villain and you’ve found a way to make yourself into a powerful giant, or perhaps you’ve found a way to shrink your heroic nemesis. Either way, you’re large and in charge at last.
4.) Ongoing: You’ve not only shrunk/grown, you’re still shrinking/growing. Just how small/tall will you get?
5.) Everyday Life: How does your smaller/larger size impact your day-to-day life? Are you having to shop for clothes in the kids’ section? Can you fit inside your house? How about work and school? Is the media hounding you? Are scientists wanting to run tests on you?
6.) Friends and Family: How are those closest to you handling your new size, and how are you handling being around them now?
7.) Romance: Is your significant other still in love with you? Or if you don’t have a special someone, will you be able to find someone who can see past your size and love you for you?
8.) Fantastic Voyage: You (and probably others) intentionally shrank down to take an internal tour of the human body and find some mysterious ailment inside a world leader before it’s too late to save them.
9.) Kaiju War: You were intentionally grown to fight the giant monsters that are plaguing your world.
10.) Secret Agent Man: A new form of espionage, spies like you shrink down to access areas regular sized people are locked out of and get information undetected.
11.) It's A Living: Being so tall and strong, you've found yourself the center of a lot of job offers; construction, military, advertising, entertainment industry, firefighter, police officer are just a few.
10.) Unforeseen Side-Effects: Perhaps the shrinking process left you with super strength. Or the growth process had a detrimental effect on your mental capabilities and now you’re a cannibalistic giant. Either way, more than a sudden change in size has happened to you.
11.) Unaware: Suddenly finding yourself smaller can be daunting, but without anyone knowing you’re down here can be downright dangerous. Or on the contrary, perhaps you are the one that’s unaware of a smaller person or people in your midst.
12.) Downsizing: Shrinking is simply the newest trend. Whether you want to live like a tiny billionaire, or your goal is to reduce your ecological footprint (and your real one too).
13.) Wild Card

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ hey, sup? ]

[ also

pixiesized, but this particular canonpoint might be a better option for this meme. your pick. ]

[Open to just about any prompt, big or small.]

[ Either role ]

[ either role ]

[ y/n? we can assume things like logan having known steve when he was tiny and them meeting... 80ish years later and suddenly steve's his height (or taller than him) ]

[ Sure, I play Logan based on his comic book height of 5'3" anyway so as Cap, he'd definitely be taller than Logan. ]

[ that's... so cute... tiny lo is my favourite

though now i'd like to ask if you wanted to do this 616 or cinematic 'verse? a mesh of both? i'm cool with anything -- it's just that in the former logan's got an avengers backstory, so i wasn't sure if you wanted that dynamic to come into play as well! ]

[ Cinematic for sure, but I can roll with whatever. That said, I think this should definitely be their first face-to-face encounter since Steve's transformation. ]

[ There's a lot that Steve's missed. It was Peggy's death that had him looking up old friends and old names -- most of them gone, most of them given a bouquet and Steve's best wishes as he stood alone by a gravestone. But there's not much he can do in his downtime, so this works, and he goes all across America touching base with memories he hasn't really allowed himself to sit down and think about since coming out of the ice. Brooklyn was nice to see again, different as it was, and Steve lingers in the state of New York longer than he thought because everyone he knew stayed there.

It's while he's in Westchester, sitting alone in a cafe fresh from a morning grave visit, that he sees him out of the corner of his eye -- and feels his stomach lurch, because there's no way a man from Steve's younger days could look exactly the same decades later. A man who helped him when he got himself in a bar fight with three others -- a man who had taught him a few stances, a few moves for the littler guys of the world who had to fight bigger guys all the time, and then eventually became a friend.

He ends up fumbling to his feet, just barely remembering to leave a twenty on the table, before he's running out to meet him.

Logan.

It occurs to him then that after he'd signed up for war he'd never seen Logan again.

Admittedly, Steve stalks him for a bit. He follows him as he enters a bodega and buys some cigars (God, he always had one of those on him, didn't he?), furiously trying to hide himself behind the closest magazine he could find (Good Housekeeping), and follows him out of the store. And... man, Steve is usually better at sneaking around, but he keeps trying to catch glimpses of Logan's face, and something stupid and silly flutters up in his chest every single time.

He's not surprised when rounding a corner has Logan looking at him, probably aware that Steve had been following him this whole time. And he's not frightened in the least; if anything, he finds himself speechless and stupid and smiling just a bit, because as many questions as he might have, here's a piece from his past who looks as if they haven't changed a bit. ]

Do you [ he lifts his hands up at chest level, palms shown, showing Logan he means no harm ] remember me?

Edited 2018-03-09 07:49 (UTC)

[ Steve was completely right of course; no ordinary human could have still looked the exact same well after seventy years had gone by. Logan was no ordinary human though. Mutants like Logan were unknown of back then, and for the most part they still were. After his brief encounter with Steve back in the late 1930s, Logan himself had participated in World War II, fighting for Canada against the Axis powers. Following that, he also participated in the Korean and Vietnam Wars for Uncle Sam, and then the Weapon Plus program discovered him.

He’d lost his memories, lost loved ones, found a place where he could possibly belong with Professor Charles Xavier’s secret group of gifted youngsters – the X-Men. The X-Men, under Charles’ guidance worked out their various issues and forged a very unique family. Together with Charles, the most gifted telepath on the planet, Logan was recovering the memories he thought had been lost to him forever. He was exceptionally old even by the time he’d first met Steve – having previously fought in America’s Civil War.

Logan had just stopped into the store for cigars and some beer. He may have lost his memories, but his overall personality and his vices as well remained the same. He walked around the store, looing for his brand of beer when his heightened sense of smell picked up on Steve. The scent was like, a memory of a dream; familiar, but he couldn’t pinpoint why. He glanced around, seeing the other man with his face buried in… a Good Housekeeping magazine. The scent was the first red flag, and anyone being that interested in Good Housekeeping magazine was the second. He was being followed. He decided to play the game and made his purchases before leaving the store.

He rounded a corner, sat his beer down, turned around, and sure enough came face to face with Steve. ]

Look bub, I don’t take kindly to being followed. [He certainly doesn’t look happy either. Seeing Steve’s reaction though, throws him off. There wasn’t any sign of fear, anger, or maliciousness from the other man.

But as he’s sizing Steve up, and he hears the question posed to him, Logan is caught off guard. He recognized him. His body relaxes, and he looks more surprised and confused than anything else. ]

…Rogers?

[ Steve wasn't sure he'd ever been so happy to hear his name before. In lieu of giving a proper nod, however, all he did was bring his hands back down slowly and say: ] Logan. Hi.

[ And God, it felt good to say it to a living person and not a grave marker. As many questions as Steve had (how was Logan alive? Why did he look the same? What had he been doing all this time?), he decided those could wait, and instead ducked his head to look down at the other man, his hands pushing into the pockets of his hoodie because he feared the first thing he might do would be to hug him.

Judging from the confusion on Logan's face, maybe it was better to keep that to himself first. ]

You look -- jeez, you look exactly the same.

[ Except Steve had never had to look down at him before, had he? And even then, the difference between them had never been this big. Steve essentially had a foot over. ]

But you know, "bub", [ tone verging towards teasing, Steve offered Logan a smile ] I always told you you could call me Steve.

And that's the same now, too.

[ Steve was clearly unaware of the memory loss. ]

[ Despite the loss of the his memories, Logan didn’t live in some isolated bubble, he knew of Captain America, both from his time in World War II and with the Avengers. However, mostly due to lack of interest, he never put two and two together; that the scrawny kid from Brooklyn he’d had to help out one time, was the same as the alien and Nazi fighting superhero. Everyone knew Steve Rogers, and knew that he went through the super soldier program. But the kid he knew and this guy were physically completely different. This was indeed the same Steve he’d protected all those years ago though. ]

Well… looks like you finally grew up. [ A smirk. Logan was short, but built and a very capable fighter. Steve had been willing to fight, but completely unable to and roughly the same height as he was. Now, he was having to look up at him. ]

Put on a little weight too. [ Logan couldn’t help himself anymore, and surprisingly he was the one who initiated a hug, clapping the other man on the back. Most of the people from his life before the X-Men who he could remember, were dead – the two men had that in common. But here was someone from his past, before the experiments and the claws, who was not only alive, but alive and well. ]

It’s good to see you.

[ The hug was surprising -- easy to lean into, but not any less of a shock, but Steve was biting back some form of a laugh in favour of wrapping his own arms around Logan's body. Despite the ounce of self-control necessary to keep from lifting him (he had to bend so much; Steve had never noticed how little Logan was, not with how preoccupied he'd been with the man's strength), it was nice to receive some point of positive contact.

Even nicer that it came from a man whose methods Steve still used to this day. Taller he might be, but the things he'd been fighting these days were even bigger. ]

You surprised? [ It was the first thing Steve asked as he pulled back, the corners of his eyes crinkling with mirth. There was a moment's worth of hesitation as his arms let Logan go -- an illogical sense of what if he isn't real -- but Steve didn't linger, instead leaning against the wall and trying for a proud smirk.

He probably looked sheepish, though. Seeing Logan now was a little bit like meeting one of his heroes in the flesh, only with a dash more sentimentality. ]

I mean, it's not like I built the muscle up myself, but [ he laughed, shaking his head from side to side ] I think I use it pretty well.

But I wouldn't say I'm at your level yet purely because I don't want you kicking my ass and proving me wrong.

That the scrawny kid I trained in Brooklyn turned into a damn Avenger? Captain. [ He teased him with his title. Logan was finding it difficult to not smile now. ] Yeah, surprised don’t quite cut it.

Well, you managed to beat up Nazis, robots, and aliens. Gave that dickhead Stark a few good hits too I hear. [Logan wasn’t a fan of the arrogant billionaire.

The mutant can’t hold back a chuckle about him kicking Steve’s ass.] Damn straight.

Steve, I gotta ask, how’d you even find me? [Logan and the X-Men in general made an effort to not be discovered after all.]

I'll be honest -- I wasn't looking for you specifically.

[ It was still so jarring having to look down, but the smile on Logan's face looked exactly the same as Steve remembered. That, if anything else, was a comfort in the world he no longer understood. ]

I've just been around the state, catching up with what I missed. [ He paused, then admitted: ] One of my friends was buried here.

I was having coffee, and... well, it's hard to miss that pointy hair of yours.

[ Steve grinned. ]

[A grunt.] Yeah, most of the good ones, they're gone. [In loss, Steve would be hard-pressed to find a more kindred spirit than the scrappy Canadian.

He allows the solemn moment to pass though as Steve comments on his hair, he runs a hand through it with a smirk.]

Well, you might not have been looking for me, but you found me. [He grabbed one of his beers and handed it over to Steve.]

[ Though he takes the beer, he can't stop himself from laughing, even if it's quiet. ] Right here on the street corner, huh? [ He considers popping it open, but decides to just hold it for now. ]

Look, uh -- do you have someplace to stay? I have... [ Steve gestures behind him in some general way. ] Well, I got a room somewhere, and.

I mean, if you have the time, I'd love to catch up.

[ His heart shouldn't be beating as quickly as it is, but he figures meeting an old hero is as good a reason for that as any.

Steve manages a crooked smile. ] Or you could just give me your number. I've been getting really good at cellphones.