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sylverbullett · 6 months

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Quinn and Jaz - Ch 1

(Quinn and Jaz is the working title, and once I settle on a better one I'll reupload this :3)

word count: ~2.1k

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Quinn sometimes wondered if she was cursed.

Not with a big, life-altering curse; she didn’t believe she was important enough for one of those. She wondered if someone, somewhere, decided she was worth fucking with, and decided, every day, to do little things to make her life just that much harder. Right now, she was wondering if this mystery-being decided to make her bus late.

Pacing a circle into the snow at the bus stop, a flash of ice bit at Quinn’s heel. Looking down, she saw a pathetic old winter boot, ripped at the seam and gulping in muddy ice slush.

“Because the bus being late just wasn’t fun enough, huh?” she griped, trying and failing to shake the ice from her boot. She hated this. Hated these long, exhausting days of classes and overtime shifts, which would have been bearable, if the damn bus was even half as efficient as she was.

A long, forced sigh shot into the air in a dramatic cloud. Instead of standing around for 20 minutes in the cold for a slimy bus, she could walk for 15 minutes back to her apartment. It would suck, but at least she could choose the suckiness she had to deal with. Briskly trudging her way through the slush and muck on the cracked sidewalks home, chunky snowflakes began drifting through the air around her. Quinn wanted to cry, but refused to permit herself the catharsis. She’d been through so much worse; and heavy college textbooks, a long shift at Shelly’s, a late bus, a broken shoe and walking in the snow was nothing compared to that.

This isn’t for forever, Quinn’s calming mantra surfaced in her mind. It’s not even for the next 20 minutes. Get home and you can take a steaming hot shower and have some soup.

Slowing to a stop at a crosswalk, Quinn nearly tripped on a wet heap of something piled right next to the crosswalk button. What the hell? After mashing the button a few times, she used her good boot to shove some of the snow away. A pile of soaking wet clothes, some sneakers and an expensive-looking bag stared back glumly at her.

Who would strip in this weather? Crouching down to balance sitting on her ankles, she unzipped the bag and rummaged through it. Tugging out a heavy metal clip wallet, tapped out the cards to see that this bag -and presumably outfit- belonged to…

“...Jasper Ross” she breathed absent-mindedly. Why does that sound familiar? Quinn was hardly a socialite, and she only knew the names of the people she had to deal with for projects and such. There was a sudden stirring from the pile of clothes. With a yelp reminiscent of a scared chihuahua, Quinn splashed clumsily from her half-perch-half-crouch into a slush of muddy ice. Oh God, a rat?? Not even caring that her backside was now soaking wet, Quinn tried and failed to push herself away from the nest of laundry, her old worn boots refusing to grip the ice. Then, she heard the most peculiar noise that gave her pause- an almost unhearable, muffled shout came from within the pile of clothes. “What the fuck?! Where am I?”

Quinn’s eyes grew wide as she saw a… a… tiny guy. There was a tiny guy, emerging from the pile in front of her. Frozen in place, Quinn couldn’t tear her eyes away, she needed to download every bit of information about this new phenomena in front of her.

He looked proportionate, and fit. Even, golden-brown skin with a mop of dark brown hair. He seemed to be assessing his surroundings, hands exploring the fabric around him. He could have been muttering something, too, but Quinn wasn’t close enough to hear. Miniscule eyes finally swiveled towards Quinn, and for a moment Quinn thought he looked quite a lot like an action figure with how still he went. His face slowly traced from her boots to finally meet her bewildered gaze.

A long silence yawned between the two- Quinn had no idea how to approach this situation. Usually she’d blame her awkward personality, but she figured most people would be struggling for words right about now. Thankfully, she didn’t need to worry about what to say.

“Oh hell no,” the man said with an exasperated groan. He began to rub his eyes vigorously. Quinn blinked. “Excuse me?” “Hey, lady, um, I think my vision is fucked. You look absolutely massive,” the man stated plainly. He righted himself and offered another comment, “And not in, like, a fat way. It’s like, a sky-scraper, ‘massive’ way. You think you could call an ambulance for me? That bitch from last night probably drugged me.” She ignored anything that could have been implied. Quinn’s throat had gone dry from the cold, but she managed to force out a response.

“Your vision has nothing to do with it. You’re, like, a borrower, dude,” Quinn half laughed. She had no clue how to react to this. The laughter built into a chuckle, then a full-blown fit. “W-what the fuck!” She managed to say between laughs of disbelief. She slapped her gloved hands firmly clasped over her mouth, failing to quell her convulsive laughter. She felt a heat begin to rise in her face, and darted her eyes along the street, head on a swivel. Thank god there’s no people around. “Lady, you’re a total psycho,” the diminutive man offered, going back to scrubbing his eyes.

A lazy snowflake slowly drifted down and planted atop the man’s head. Quinn steadied her breathing, watching him reach up and break a bit of the snowflake off in a crystal shard and then melt in his doll-sized hand.

“Hm.” He started shivering then, enough for Quinn to notice. In fact, her own jeans had been soaking in ice-water since she slipped, and it was becoming very clear she needed to take control of the situation before things got worse.

Drawing in a deep breath and loosing a cloud of fog into the chilled air, Quinn composed herself as well as she could manage. Chill out, he’s just…some guy. A very, very small guy, but still, she thought. She closed her eyes and breathed, then looked back to the doll-sized man. “Are you Jasper Ross?” she asked, holding up his wallet and sliding out his ID for him to see.

“First of all, looking through other peoples’ things is pretty invasive- but yes, that’s me. Secondly,” he pointed at her, “no one calls me ‘Jasper’. Ew. It’s Jaz.” He ran his hands over the folded cloth in front of him to dry his hands, and started rubbing his arms sharply. “Seriously, it’s too fucking cold out.”

Quinn started feeling a bit bad for Jasper- or, Jaz, despite him being all sorts of rude. He was the size of a hamster, of course the cold would be biting at him hard. “Do you have any place I could take you to-”

“No,” Jaz shot, slumping into a grumble. “No I don’t.”

“For real?” Quinn furrowed her brow. “I would offer to take you to, like, the police, but I don’t think you’d like it there, either.”

“So you’re abducting me?”

“I’ll take you to the police station if you want.”

Jaz thought for a moment. “Yeah, I’d rather not be a lab rat. Do you have a place?”

“Wuh- me?” Quinn sat back again, but this time in shock at how forward he was being. A gust of icy wind made her shudder, and the cold concrete was making her legs go numb. “I-I mean, I do have a place, but-”

“Perfect, take me there.”

“I’m not ready for, uh, company-”

“Lady, I’m about to freeze to death, that doesn’t matter.”

Quinn pursed her lips, holding her breath. He does look like he’s in the early stages of popsicle… And, realistically, what’s the worst that can happen? Pinching the crease between her brows and sighing, she shifted and replaced the wallet in the bookbag. “Fine. Just let me plan out how to carry everything, alright?”

“Roger that, Goliath,” Jaz shot back, gathering fabric to cloak himself, making him look even smaller than before. “What is your name, anyway, lady?”

Quinn was unamused by Jaz’s nickname. “What a skill, you guessed it right on the very first try. People usually say I look more like a Gulliver, though.” She finished packing up Jaz’s bag and swung it over her vacant shoulder. How should I tackle the clothes?

“I think you look like a perfect Goliath. Same stature, and all,” Jaz quipped.

“Quinn. Is my, uh, name,” she offered lamely, rolling her eyes. “So. I assume you’re naked. And you’re standing in the middle of the clothes. I dunno what to do, champ.”

“You can’t just grab everything all at once?”

She gave a huff, “All of that shit is like 20 pounds, it’s soaked. Maybe I can shove it in your bag? I don’t want to ruin anything-”

“Just do that, then, I can get a new bag.��

Quinn’s eyes went wide at how wasteful of a thought that was, even if he could have been joking. She was slightly angry on behalf of the bag. “Whatever, it’s your shit. You want to go in the bag too?”

“You literally just said it’s freezing and soaked.”

“Well then I guess you’re walking,” Quinn huffed, growing tired of his less-than-pleasant attitude.

“Can’t you just…” Jaz trailed off, eyeing her gloved hands. He lingered there, and… gulped? Quinn couldn’t really tell. “What if you let me have your glove?”

“You’re naked.”

“And freezing.”

Quinn looked down at her left hand for a long, disgusted moment. The gloves were the only things she had that were actually high quality- a gift from her younger brother. Her eyes scrunched tight at the thought of them being treated the same way this guy treated his bag. She summoned her courage, “You have to be clean. If you get them dirty you own me new ones.”

“God, is that not obvious? Anyway hurry it up, this isn’t funny anymore. It’s getting actually painful to be this cold.”

Quinn was surprised by how quickly he offered to pay for the gloves, and would have been suspicious he was lying if not for how disinterested he seemed by it. She pushed a finger under the cuff of her left glove, got it halfway up her hand, then pinched and tugged the glove off from her middle finger. She quickly went to lay it down next to Jaz, but stuttered when she saw how her hands truly dwarfed him.

Quinn had never felt big, compared to anything before. Even though she was taller than average, her nature was to minimize herself; withdraw until no one could tell she took up any space at all. So much of her life was dedicated to remaining unseen, that she might have convinced herself that she didn’t even exist.

Maybe that was why she grew queasy at seeing the truly baffling difference in size between them, why she felt more than ever that she had to shrink smaller than this finger-sized man before her. She basically lost sight of him behind her hand, as if there wasn’t a tiny person in the heap of clothing at all.

She ripped her hands back from the glove as if it had burned her, “Whatever, don’t worry about the glove. Just get in and yell when you’re good to go.” She slouched and waited for him to call out, shrugging his bag back to the ground and unzipping it. She heard a muffled Okay let’s get a move on, and she pinched the opening of the glove to hover it above the clothes, then used her free hand to quickly and clumsily shove the sopping outfit into his really nice bag.

She was able to ignore that queasy feeling with Jaz out of sight, thankfully. She tried to be as careful as she could standing up, figuring the best way to keep her gloves clean was to give Jaz a steady ride so he wouldn’t blow chunks, and she slipped the glove gingerly into one of her winter coat’s inner pockets. Still, the thought of Jaz spilling his guts didn’t stop her from basically jogging home- the promise of soup had never been so desirable.

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This drawing is from like, 2020 and is definitely more of a concept image than 100% accurate X] I'll have to redraw it! I've actually been sitting on this story for so long, and I've gone back and forth about whether or not I wanted to do a comic or not, I just decided "fuck it write the damn thing and go from there" so here we are! :3

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