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."