"Thanks for coming over, Dr. Rose, Mr. Stalvert." I widely swept a hand inside. "Please come in."
The woman standing at the front door of my condo gave a perfunctory smile, cordial but brief. I gave her a quick up and down as she passed me, breezing in through the front door and looking around. She was in her late forties to early fifties, maybe; about ten years younger than Dad had been when he passed a month back. Her red curls - peppered with grey-white streaks - were tied back into a short ponytail, and she was wearing a simple green-colored jacket and blouse with matching pants.
She had a good figure, too, especially for a woman of her age; apple-size breasts, a trim waist... her hands and neck belied her years, though. Dr. Rose was, of course, taller than me at about five feet and eight inches - roughly the same height as the man following her in, though he didn't walk straight-backed and proud, as she did. He was boring-looking; middle-aged, with receding hair and a flat expression, and was wearing a black pinstriped suit with a similarly unimaginative blue tie. He had a leather case in his hand. That would be John Stalvert, her attorney. Why couldn't I get away from those?
I myself was wearing a tight pair of jeans and a heavy, black woolen sweater - along with a pair of walking shoes and a hairband. My chestnut hair was swept back and tied into a short ponytail, freshly brushed and not quite as scraggly as usual. Of course, for those who didn't already know, I'm a lifelong shrimp - barely five feet tall, scrawny and small-breasted... but I'm cute as a button, or so the boring and sex-hungry men I used to sleep with would tell me.
In the spare bedroom, adjoining to the kitchen where I was inviting in these dreaded guests, was my lovely little Summer - the girl I'd used the machine on two weeks ago. I'd used its sort-of limitless power to make some adjustments to things about her body, the way she thought... and, of course, to make her about eight inches tall. In the same room was the machine itself - where I had set it up - and the primary emitter was aimed straight through the wall at the dining table. All according to plan!
It had taken me almost four days to get it into working order after we packed it up and got it out of my Dad's old place... and, fortunately, there had been no serious mistakes in the process. I had been expecting at least some, given how often I decided to take little sex breaks with Summer and lose my place in the re-assembly process. I'd been exploring all kinds of interesting possibilities with my miniature toy lover ever since I used the machine to shrink her.
She was so incredibly fucking sexy at her new size - and the twists I'd put into her psyche made her love it, and she came just as hard during our games as I did. In the past twenty-four hours alone, she'd been lovingly inserted almost completely inside my pussy, twice, then carried around in my purse for half a day around town, and then been coated up to her neck in chocolate syrup and sprinkles - which I then slowly licked off her as she squealed with delight.
To her credit, she was adapting to her new existence well - I was still trying to figure out a good way to work around her fear of heights, and the vulnerability of her new size to cold and a few other things I hadn't though of before we'd jointly 'decided' she was better off permanently reduced to pocket-size... but there was no rush. I just had to turn up the thermostat in the meantime; more excuse to walk around naked.
Not right at that moment though. Houseguests. I had the thermostat back at seventy. Summer was safely bundled up in the machine room.
Anyway, earlier in the week, once I was sure I had the machine set up correctly, I'd targeted a willing Summer for a few test runs, trying small changes like altering her hair color and making her only able to speak French for a little while.
Once I was satisfied and had reverted all the test changes to Summer, we'd begun using it surreptitiously on a few of the neighbors too - but I'd shied away from seriously altering them. Just a few little things, mostly already reversed.
It would be too difficult to get out of if something went wrong, especially if I burned too much charge on the accumulator in the process - and I couldn't count on the bulky, power-hungry, overheating-prone machine to bail me out of any trouble I got myself into. Not yet. I needed to know more about the underlying theory, and the limitations of the technology.
"Thank you, Rachel, for meeting with me like this." The red-headed woman straightened her jacket. "I'd hoped from the start that you and I could come to some understanding. I'm sure Michael wouldn't want us fighting over his estate." She glanced around. "Weren't you going to have your own lawyer here?"
"She's not able to sit down with us today -" I lied just a little - she could, but she'd probably raise some eyebrows, being my eight-inch-tall lesbian slave - "but I'm going to put her on speakerphone." I waved my cell phone in one hand. Summer's old cell phone was propped up next to her spot at the machine's controls; I'd broken it open and done a few hacks I found online to modify her tiny spoken voice to sound, over the phone, almost like she had before I reduced her.
Stalvert chimed in, Mr. Helpful. "Our office is available too - there's no need to use your personal residence. The firm doesn't charge either party to use it to meet." He said it in a monotone, nasal pencil-pusher's voice; polite but distant. I'd seen his name on the top of half a dozen letters in the past week - all notices that Dr. Rose, my father's former colleague, was suing to have all of Dad's research released to her, on the grounds that, as she'd collaborated with him remotely off and on, that she had more claim to it than I did.
It was true that my place wasn't much. I had a dingy two-bedroom condo in Brooklyn, complete with creaking laminate floors and heavy steel radiators in every room. I was on the fourth floor of a ten-story building, the avenue it was upon half-forgotten even by those living there, and my roommate had moved out earlier in the year - annoying at the time, but now leaving me a convenient place to house the machine.
Hairline cracks and a few spots of concrete were visible along parts of the white walls, the dozen-layered aging paint on the window frames was peeling, the multi-colored shag carpet was probably older than I was, and my décor and furniture were cheap at best; it was all a bunch of mismatched stuff I'd snagged over the years.
Sure, I'd told Summer I could use the machine to get rich, which wasn't a lie exactly - just, you know, later, when I was sure I wouldn't get caught. Summer hadn't complained about the little fib once she was down to size and happily enthralled. Hadn't complained anything else at all, for that matter.
The stained coffee table, the cheap faux-leather arm chair I plopped down in, and the frayed plaid love seat the other two used at it would serve as our meeting place. Summer was loaded, and while she was happily making sure she wasn't actually listed as a missing person, I didn't want to touch her money now - there might be someone keeping an eye on her accounts.
I waved a hand. "Here is fine. I do owe it to you, Dr. Rose, for being there for him. I know Dad was a bit of a crackpot..." I gestured widely. "... but I think you and I are the only ones who were really talking to him at all in the past ten years or so, right?"
"That... sounds about right." She gave a thin, but maybe knowing, smile; hiding something? I felt a little spot of worry cross my thoughts.
"Um - I'd like to get started, if you don't mind." Stalvert opened his bag, glancing at us both. "Could you dial in your attorney now, Ms. Cartwright?"
I nodded, and pressed some buttons on my phone. I set it on the table. Summer's voice piped out from it. "Hello?"
"Hi, Summer. This is our one o'clock, remember?"
"Of course. Hello, everyone, I'm Summer Whates; I serve the Mi- I mean, I represent... Rachel... Cartwright." Summer was still kind of capable of mimicking her old self when necessary, but I could tell she had to force my actual name out instead of 'Mistress'. I suppressed a sigh. I'd changed her too much for her to pretend at being the old Summer, or even a decent lawyer. Summer tried to continue. "You're Dr. Jennifer Rose and John... Stalvert, right?"
Dr. Rose nodded... as though Summer could see that. "Ah, yes. Getting started, then - hopefully we can be finished in an hour here. Ms. Cartwright, you've received our letters, correct?"
I frowned. "The ones claiming Dad's notes and stuff?"
"In a nutshell, yes." Stalvert nodded, gesturing to Dr. Rose to please let him take the lead. She didn't look thrilled with it, but went along. "We're here to try and work something out. Dr. Rose does have a valid claim to the work, I can assure you. Now, please understand, my client doesn't even want to take any physical property or monies from you. She only wants copies - not even the originals - of your father's notes and research, and rights to review and analyze any and all devices of his construction, including any blueprints or plans. I can show you the..."
For the following ten minutes, I sort of zoned out as I pretended to listen. Summer occasionally chimed in with some question or other, doing a marginal job of making the whole interaction seem legitimate... and agonizingly slow, if intentionally so on our part. Unfortunately, one - among many - of the machine's limitations was its calibration period when it was acquiring a new target. It had to get a super-accurate picture of what it was working with before it worked its magic - as in, molecule by molecule accurate.
Worse, the amount of time it needed seemed to be random - I hadn't tried dozens of targets yet, but it had already varied from two minutes to fifteen. I couldn't even tell what the bottleneck was or if I was doing something wrong. It also only had barely enough memory to have one calibrated target at a time, and I didn't trust myself to move Dad's software into an upgraded computer without blowing it. There had been some headway in making sense of his sloppy, un-documented code recently, but I had a long way to go.
In Summer's case, I'd been able to get her data loaded when she first came to visit me to try and claim Dad's estate due to all the debts he ran up - I bought time by hemming and hawing, and demanding detailed explanations of every single document she put in front of me. The next day, she came back and I zapped her unconscious and got to work... and now she was my tiny, devoted lover, always ready to service me.
My eyes caught Dr. Rose's briefly, and she glared at me briefly before suddenly seeming to remember to shine a bright, fake smile. I thought to myself for a moment as I listened to her lawyer. I'd looked up Stalvert's firm online - they weren't cheap. Dr. Rose must have been breaking the bank to have kept him on this so long.
