Earth-349:
The Atom
by Anton
Psychopoulos, Ph.D.
Disclaimer
#1 This story is set on a
hypothetical parallel world within the pre-Crisis DC Universe, based on a
story in Superman #349, but is not limited by that story or any
other.
Disclaimer
#2 Some characters appearing
in this story are based on copyrighted characters owned by DC Comics, Inc.,
Marvel Comics and others. Their
use here is not intended to infringe or disparage those
copyrights.
Disclaimer
#3 This story is not recommended
for persons under 18 or the easily offended.
The last time Martha Palmer had awakened naked, on a cold floor, with
no idea where she was or how she'd gotten there, had been several years earlier,
well before she had become the Atom.
The experience had not improved with age.
Resisting the urge to stretch her stiff and aching limbs, Martha opened
her eyes to cautious slits, blinking repeatedly to make them focus, trying
not to give away to any watcher that she was
conscious. A sudden draft, tickling
between her legs, confirmed Martha's suspicion that she had already given
away plenty to any watcher
.
Her eyes focussed reluctantly on some pattern of vertical
lines.
Wallpaper? Fence
pickets? Oh, God, jail
bars?
No. These bars were metal,
but gold-colored. And the floor under her wasn't concrete, but more
metal.
Martha rolled her eyes slowly upward, trying to get a glimpse of the
ceiling. There didn't seem to
be any. The bars just continued
up and up, curving overhead to form a rounded framework from which hung .
. .
A swing.
"Son of a bitch!"
She sat up suddenly. In
spite of her shock and outrage, her mind noted the way her body moved, the
floating, "weightless" feeling of being reduced to a size where inertia doesn't
work quite the way it does on the human scale.
Her scream brought an enormous shape moving towards the cage from
the misty distance.
"How nice. my little birdie is awake," thundered the immense black
and yellow mass. It leaned closer,
and Martha made out an immense masked face.
"Welcome to your new home, little
birdie. You are now the property
of . . . Yellowjacket."
Martha looked up at the black cowl, brow furrowed, head
cocked.
"Henry?"
Yellowjacket recoiled from the cage, hands to his cowl as though checking
that it was in place.
The Atom jumped to her
feet, shaking her sliver-sized index finger at the immense
figure. Yes, she was about six
inches tall, a common size for the Atom to
assume. At ant size, she'd have
had difficulty in standing on two feet.
"Henry Pym, you son of a bitch!
Stealing my research wasn't enough, you had to kidnap me and steal
my costume?"
Pym cringed behind his mask, actually seeming to grow
smaller. A
little.
"That's not fair, Martha.
We were both building on Dane's research --"
"You didn't even know what a micropion was until I pointed them out
on Darrell's CERN printouts! If
it weren't for me, you'd still be fiddling around with hallucinogenic
gases."
Henry's hand lashed out, flashing past the cage like an express
train. Knives lanced through
the Atom's feet. She fell to
the floor, and the electric current stabbed at every place her flesh touched
metal.
Fighting panic, Martha got to her feet, dancing in agony, and lunged
for the wood-and-plastic swing.
Seated precariously on the swing, the Atom caught her breath, forcing
herself to become calm. She saw Henry's black-gloved finger pressing a button
on a golden column she guessed was the cage's
stand. He grinned at her, releasing
the button.
"That was your first lesson, little
birdie. Yellowjacket did not
go to the trouble of catching his little pet in order to hear her screech
at him like a crow. Your function
in this house is to sit on your little perch and sing
sweetly."
Martha started to get down from the swing, but Henry's finger flicked
towards the button.
"Stay on your perch, birdie.
I like seeing you there.
"Swing, birdie."
Like a child at a playground, the Atom began pumping her bare legs
back and forth, driving the swing into a small
oscillation.
"Faster, birdie."
Higher and higher went the swing, until Martha saw the floor and the
cage roof on each pass, her brown hair flying into her face, her breasts
slapping against her chest.
"Sing for me, birdie."
"Henry," Martha gasped, breathless, the swing slowing, "Henry, that's
enough. You've got to stop
now."
She saw the black glove coming but could do nothing to brace for the
impact. The metal cage screamed
as the Atom was flung against its walls, crashing back and forth as the world
lurched around her.
"Stop calling me that!" Yellowjacket screamed, shaking the cage in
both hands so Martha rattled inside it.
"Henry Pym is dead! I
fed him to a spider! Ant Man
is dead, too! I squashed him
under my shiny new black PVC boot!
Giant Man is dead! I, uh, I shot him!"
The Atom had just enough presence of mind left not to say You left
out Goliath, schizo boy.
"Now, who am I?"
"Yellowjacket. You're
Yellowjacket."
"Good. And what are
you?"
"I'm your little birdie."
"You are learning fast. Not
bad for a little bird-brain."
He dropped the cage, letting it swing freely.
"Back on your perch, birdie."
Favoring her bruised left leg and her aching right wrist, Martha climbed
back onto the swing.
"Sing for me, birdie."
Trembling with fear and humiliation, Martha was unable to think of
any song but "Workin' on the Railroad", but that seemed to please Henry just
fine. When she was done, she
continued with "Barbara Allen" and was halfway through "Lord Randall" when
Henry suddenly interrupted.
"Would you like some clothes to wear, birdie?"
Martha was surprised by his sudden question and his softened tone
of voice, but quickly chirped "Oh, yes, please, Yellowjacket,
sir!"
Taking the Atom's servile twittering at face value, Henry opened the
cage (nearly knocking Martha from her perch as he fumbled with the
latch). He'd spent enough time
interacting with relatively gigantic people that he knew better than to reach
into the cage and try to grab her; he held out his hand, palm up. slightly
cupped, and allowed her to climb onto his
fingers. Holding her near his
body, he carried her to a department-store sized desk and set her down on
its worktop. He flicked on a
reading lamp and seated himself, smiling down at her.
On the desktop, Martha could now see the wall of Henry's
study. Numerous degrees and
awards hung in neat uniform frames.
Uniform frames indeed: pride of place went to the red and blue outfit
of the Atom, pinned to a sheet of white cardboard like a
butterfly. Martha winced; that
was no way to treat a suit woven from irreplacable fibers of spatially distorted
dwarf star matter. She wondered
if the pins had damaged the wafer-thin control circuits in her
gloves.
Henry pulled open a drawer in the
desk. It made the desktop under
Martha's feet shake as though a subway train were pulling
in. He laid a shoebox on the green paper blotter and lifted
from it a poisonous-green nightgown.
Martha saw at once that it was a piece of doll clothing, made from
some light, thin fabric, but to Martha, at doll size, it was as coarse and
stiff as burlap. Gritting her
teeth, Martha pulled it on, trying to ignore the scraping of the cheap
petroleum-based fibers, cooing as she smoothed it over her
limbs.
The Atom turned for her captor, trying not to stumble over the too-long
hem (it was a very short nightgown, but made for a doll nearly twice Martha's
size).
"Oh, Yellowjacket, it's lovely!"
"Heh. And you look lovely
in it."
Henry shifted in his chair, recrossing his
legs. The Atom hoped he wouldn't
be able to see her tiny smirk.
Henry pulled a tiny plastic envelope from the box, opened it and shook
out the contents onto the desktop.
Martha untangled them and found a black garter belt and a pair of
stockings.
"These aren't doll stuff, they're reduced."
"Something that dumb bitch Janet left behind."
Martha looked up warily as she pulled on the
stockings.
"You aren't, uh, seeing Jan anymore?"
"No. Stupid
cunt. I gave her
everything. I gave her shrinking
powers. I gave her a
costume. I was going to give
her wings. Even I didn't
have wings."
"Er, really?"
The stockings were laddered, but they probably looked all right from
Henry's perspective. Martha stretched a leg out experimentally, lifting the
stiff curtain of the nightgown to show off her minute
thigh.
"Lovely transparent wasp's wings that would sprout from her back whenever
she shrank down. She would have loved them if she'd tried
them. Dumb bitch said I was
crazy."
Gee, the Atom thought, he wanted to make her into some kind
of half-animal freak, he makes me into a caged pet, who would think a guy
like that was crazy?
Henry stroked Martha's extended leg with the tip of his index
finger.
"How about you, my little pet?
Would you like some pretty wings,
birdie? Some nice birdie wings
with yellow feathers?"
Martha reached back between her shoulder blades as though she were
imagining wings growing there.
"Oh, Yellowjacket . . . my goodness!"
Henry squirmed in his seat.
"Dance for me, birdie," he suddenly demanded.
Martha began swaying from side to side, then peeled slowly out of
the nightgown. Pressing its
rough fabric against the front of her body, she teased him with it through
a few steps, then tossed it aside and began stroking her body as she skipped
and pirouetted across the blotter.
The Atom stopped, facing her captor, and began squeezing and pulling
at her breasts.
"Yellowjacket," she rasped, "won't you let me . . . touch
you?"
Henry swallowed hard.
"I won't shrink down," he warned her.
"Oh, no, I like you all . . . big," she cooed.
Casting aside caution, Henry Pym unbuckled his tights and pulled them
down, then reached out a hand to convey Martha to his
crotch.
The heat and the heavy smell made
Martha want to make a very unromantic face, but she leaned against Henry's
penis as though it were a column in a Greek temple, tracing over a vein with
her fingertips.
"You're so big," she stage-whispered, hoping she wasn't laying it
on too thick. She glanced up,
and saw that Henry was mesmerized by her performance.
Martha leaned forward and licked at the irregular, salty
surface. She looked up at Henry
pleadingly.
"If you'd just come down a little, so I could get this lovely monster
into my mouth . . . ."
She whined the word "mouth" as though she were a child begging for
a taste of a favorite treat.
Henry glared down at her suspiciously, but Martha threw her arms around
his cock and hugged it, rubbing her tiny mound against the shaft in one of
the strangest dry-humps in history.
He shuddered and plucked her from his lap, no longer taking care not
to hurt her, and twisted a knob at his belt.
He climbed onto the desk as he shrank, stopping while he was still
well over a foot tall.
"You won't try anything," he insisted, "not when I'm still twice your
size and eight times your weight."
Martha stepped cautiously forward, her eyes exactly at his crotch
level, and nuzzled his member cautiously.
"I don't want to try anything, sir," she insisted in a
good-little-girl voice, "except that wonderful
cock."
She fitted the act to the deed and her lips to his
glans. It wasn't all that good
a fit, since relative to her his penis was a foot long and as big around
as a soda can. She was barely
able to get the monster's head in her mouth, and while Henry enjoyed the
sight of her struggling with his penis, he knew he needed to be smaller to
enjoy her fully.
Stepping back, he twisted the same control knob and reduced himself
to nine inches. He still towered
over Martha, but now she could fit his penis into her mouth, and
did.
It was still the biggest penis she'd ever had in her mouth, and in
spite of herself the Atom had to admit she was enjoying
it. If only Henry weren't such
a screwed-up creep, they could have had a very good relationship as superheroic
colleagues. But then, they could
have had that as graduate students, too, but Henry had been messed up even
then.
She pushed up his yellow shirt, stroking his chest with her tiny hands,
trying to give him pleasure with the touch o fher skin against
his. He took the hint and pulled
the shirt off over his head. The
black cowl came with it.
Martha tugged Henry's pants down to his
knees. He didn't
object. She pulled at his boot
top, and he lifted his foot to help her undress him.
When Henry was naked, his costume piled on the desktop, Martha cupped
her hand by her mouth, as though to whisper something to
him. He bent down from his nine
inches of height to her six, until his ear was level with her
mouth.
He didn't expect her to be able to lift her foot that high, or for
it to connect with his chin with so much power.
"Eight years of ballet," Martha snarled as she lunged for his Yellowjacket
costume.
Henry staggered towards the Atom, trying to get the belt away from
her before she could enlarge herself.
He wasn't expecting her to suddenly wrap it around his neck and twist
the shrinking knob.
Between the blow to the jaw and the shock of involuntary reduction,
Henry barely perceived Martha tying his hands with his own tights, then climbing
the wall to knock down the frame holding her
costume. The next thing he perceived
clearly was Martha, in the red and blue of the Atom, knocking his desk telephone
off the hook and painfully dialling a long series of digits with a pencil
held in her arms. And then she
grabbed him and things were very confusing again.
Henry had a concussion, that had to be
it. Otherwise, why would he
still have the feeling that he was at reduced size when all the people around
him were normal sized, or only a little above average?
He shook his head, trying to make sense out of the babel of voices
around him. They were speaking
some soft, fluid language he didn't recognize, though it sounded vaguely
Asian. Their clothes were strange,
too, sort-of Asian, sort-of European 18th Century, but really like nothing
he'd ever seen before. The
occasional American T-shirt or baseball cap only heightened the oddness of
the rest of their dress.
Martha was there, too, but her clothing was too weird to credit: she
seemed to be wearing her Atom costume, but it always vanished when she was
at full size. And she seemed
to be taller than he was, which wasn't right.
Thinking of clothing made him notice that he was still naked
himself. Somebody handed him
what he thought was a towel, and when he just stared at it, somebody else
took it and wrapped it around his waist, tying it into a
loincloth.
They were in a huge chamber like an airplane hangar, near a large
object that might have been a shed erected within the huge
room. Henry stared at it for
nearly a minute before identifying it as a speaker phone, as seen from a
very small size.
She'd reduced the two of them to electron size and carried him along
a telephone connection. Darrell had theorized such a thing, but Henry'd had no
idea the Atom could actually do it.
So apparently he really was small, less than six inches in
height. But then these people
. . . ?
He could make out occasional loanwords in their speech: "telephona",
"criminalu". And they seemed
to be calling Martha "Nardac Martaa" and "Quinbuta Flestrin", but the rest
of their speech was just so much jabber to
him. But they seemed to be taking
him into custody, respectfully listening to Martha, who was speaking to them
in their language.
Finally, Martha turned to Henry and spoke to him in
English.
"As a Nardac, I'm entitled to give two people per year a summary sentence
of up to thirteen moons. I'm
only sentencing you to six, and I think you'll find it rewarding work, if
not exactly cutting edge."
She gestured at the people around them.
"They want you for their rural electrification program; they don't
have nearly enough qualified engineers.
"Personally, I envy you.
This is a beautiful country and the people make good
neighbors. My duties as Martha
Palmer and as the Atom prevent me from spending as much time here as I'd
like.
"I'll be back in a couple of moons to check on
you. You should be settled in
by then, probably fluent in the
language. In the meantime,
co-operate with the Lawfuls and try to enjoy your stay in
Lilliput."