Ditty for the month of May for Nia! Technically! This month's entry was given to Beleth, a mutual friend. You might remember them from Work Requirements. They laid out a scenario where the blink-and-you-miss-it presence of a particularly infectious cognitohazard gets into the head of someone and slowly shrinks them into a small, dainty, identical mouse creature. Original design goes to Bel, I just added the obnoxious French accent and police procedural start to this.

In spite of everything, I think this is a general rating? That fits, though. Bel and I work best on asexual projects.

Oh, before I finish this intro - did you hear about this thing? I saw something a day ago, I think it was a mouze...

---

THAT THING YOU SAW

--A Ditty for Nia/Beleth--


“Step over here please.”

Raz nodded obliquely. Red and blue siren lights flashed in the apartment parking lot. He wasn’t in trouble - thank god for that - but a lingering sense of displacement kept him on-guard.

Pest control didn’t respond to emergency calls after eight PM. So instead of pest control, Raz called the police, because for all intents and purposes, without any shadow of a doubt, this man was definitely sure that there was… something out in the commons.

Some. Thing. Hiding in the leaves.

He followed the officer with curly hair to an overhang between apartment units. The night was quiet, warm. Dim reflections glinted off dim cars in the gloom. A recent rain made everything damp, the air a little muggy.

The officer took time to radio in this as a domestic disturbance. She read out code numbers Raz didn’t understand, while Raz tried to read her name tag. He didn’t make any progress.

“Okay,” she said suddenly, putting her hand-walkie away. “So. You’re the resident of 224, right?”

Raz went stiff, until he realized this wasn’t a criminal deposition. He rubbed the back of his head. “That’s me.”

“Can I have your name for the record?”

“Razputin Guiterrez.” Raz tried to make his heritage sound as least mixed as possible. It wasn’t a convincing American neutral accent he just pulled off, but it was enough to avoid mispronunciation. “Thanks for coming out here, miss uhh.”

The officer looked up from her pad. “Danica Jefferson,” she said politely, and scratched a note down.

“Right. Hey Danica. Sup?” Raz cringed at himself. Idiot.

“Not much,” said Danica, expression unreadable. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Likewise, with her uniform, tactical vest and belt all navy blue with accents of silvery GUN, it was hard to tell her body language without the chest light on. Not a good place to be. “Slow night. Can you tell me what you saw out there?”

Raz sighed. His shoulders slumped a little. “That’s the thing, I uh. I don’t know. Some kinda vermin, I think.”

Danica raised an eyebrow. “Vermin. Like what, a raccoon? Dog? Lynx?”

“I dunno. I didn’t get a good look at it.” This was only partly true. Raz caught a glimpse at ‘it’ long enough to form opinions about it.

“How big, you think?”

Raz tapped his chin, trying to recall the size of it…

//// ֆʍǟʟʟ > ȶɨռʏ > աɦɨȶɛ > ɮʟʊʀ > ʄօօȶ ȶǟʟʟ? \\\\

His eyes widened. Now he remembered. “Oh! It was about a foot tall. Like, like this big.”

Raz crouched to show his point, leveling his hand at what he felt was a reasonable approximation. Danica watched him attentively. “Seems a little big for a vermin.”

Raz shook his head no. “No, I think it was definitely-” His thoughts stopped for a second. “Small.”

After a pause, Danica nodded. “Small,” she said automatically.

“Small,” Raz agreed, then stopped, narrowing his eyes. That was weird.

He stood back up, shuffling in ill-fitting shoes and messing with hoodie sleeves drooping over his hands. Danica fussed with their belt, pulling up her pants. They were missing about twelve inches each, and looked a smidge sillier in their sagging clothes.

The sentiment wasn’t lost on Raz, picking at his collar in absentminded body angst.

“Okay,” said Danica, pulling her tie tighter under the collar. “So you saw a small vermin out in the complex about one foot high?”

Raz nodded. “That’s right, small.” He didn’t understand why he was compelled to repeat the word ‘small,’ but it wasn’t like he minded it. Neither did the cop, who seemed just fine with it.

“Small,” she noted brisky, “And could you tell me anything about their…” She stopped to compute something. “Tiny appearance?”

As far as ‘visitors’ went around the complex, small mammals were notoriously difficult to see at night. It wouldn’t be an easy question to answer, and Raz was aware of that, but the pressing need to tell somebody that there was a wild animal outside seemed important enough to risk looking stupid. What if they had rabies? Lyme disease? Tails? Bit somebody by accident?

Did he just think ‘tails?’ Tails were cute, but that’s beside the point. Raz set his jaw. He tried his best to be diplomatic. “Well, I didn’t see it that well. It’s dark out, and it wasn’t under the street lights, so the most I could say is it had-

//// ʀօʊռɖ > ɮɨɢ > ʄʊʀʀʏ > ʍօʊֆɛ ɛǟʀֆ? \\\\

Raz leaned against the wall, lightheaded. “Big… mouse ears?”

Danica wrote this down. As she did, her ringlets parted. Soft earlobes were pushing them out of the way. “Not small?”

Raz shook his head. Two white circles unfurled where his ears should be. “Not small, no, these were big. They were like, round, and fuzzy- no, furry, and they were sticking out like those DirectTV dishes, you know? The big ones?”

“I’m aware,” said Danica, and then for posterity, she said: “Big.” Her satellite dish ears grew as fast as Raz’s did, prickling with silvery hair. They rode higher and higher on their scalps until… Pop.

They winced at the same time. Raz grasped at the radial symmetry of his fresh ears, completely at a loss as to what caused that tinnitus ring just now. It was clearing up quickly, though, so that was good.

He noticed Danica had started swaying her hips. He couldn’t help looking at her funny. “Hey, um.”

Her ears pointed to attention. “What’s the matter?”

Raz almost didn’t want to say. “Are you uh, feeling small? A-alright, I meant alright.”

She blinked. “Oh.” Then stopped. The swaying started up again seconds later. It didn’t seem optional. “I’m just vibing. Good beat.”

It seemed like a breach in decorum for a cop to ‘vibe’ to anything, much less something only she could hear, but before Raz thought to call her out on her weird behavior, he noticed something about his hips. They were swaying too.

He peered over his shoulder, following the unconscious movements. His hips minced gently from one side to the other, like Danica’s. Almost exactly like Danica’s. There was a rhythm to it, one he could count. One, two, three-and-a-four, two, two, three-and-a-four. Three-ta-two, three, four. Four-ta-two, three, four. He didn’t know where it was coming from - whether something was making the beat on the other side of the parking lot or if it was tapping away in the back of his head - but somehow, Raz could hear the beat. It was almost like tuning into a secret broadcast only he knew about…

Their sleeves drooped further. Danica’s tie came undone. Raz’s shorts sagged to one side, while his hoodie slid down to the other side. Another twelve inches slipped away.

They didn’t quite pass as people anymore. Not normally sized people. The term 'munchkin' seemed far more apt. Shrunken humanoids pretending to be fully sized adults. The wide, white, fur-filled circles on top of their heads did not help matters in the slightest, giving their shadows a distinctly inhuman shape.

“Sorry,” Danica grunted, fidgeting in a uniform she was sure fit in this morning. Now, it felt more than a little embarrassing to keep wearing them, like a dog wearing a human’s christmas sweater. It was just not right. “Must’ve worn my big friend’s uniform by mistake. Say, are you itchy-small?”

Raz flapped his droopy sleeves, unable to get his hands out without holding them up. Come to think of it, he did feel an itch, though it wasn’t physical in the immediate sense, more… psychosomatic. “Yeah…” he replied. “A little, but. I need to keep telling you about this creature.”

That phrase should have been ‘I need to file the rest of this report,’ but it came out more insistent on accident. He needed to tell her. Which wasn’t wrong, per se, but some part of him thought that might’ve been too much of a stretch for a wild animal sighting. Wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it, though?

Danica tried to clear her mind and focus again. She breathed. “Right, sorry.”

She waddled in her floppy cop boots, clutching both ends of her uniform. “I can’t reach my big notes, so we’ll have to keep this going through smalltalk.”

Raz’s ears perked up, hearing the magic word. “Right, smalltalk. I like smalltalk.”

Danica smiled sheepishly. Her front teeth poked past the lip. “Smalltalk. Me too. Small…”

Raz returned the smile with one of his own. An exact copy poked past his lips too. “So um. Right. The small creature. I need to tell you about it. Well, I think I saw it by the big tree over there.”

As if taken up by an urge, Danica inquired. “How big?”

“Very big,” Raz clarified, missing the seamless growth of his whiskers.

Danica gasped softly. “Ohhh. That’s big… what did you notice about the creature-small?”

There was an undercurrent of appreciation developing between them. An unspoken understanding about the importance of size, of how much scale and difference mattered. It came to the two so naturally that it shoved most other concerns to the side, and was almost as potent of a conversational topic as the creature was quickly becoming.

“Well,” Raz said, using some conversational filler to piece together details in his head. “I know I saw something else big on them too, it’s uhhh…”

//// ʟǟʀɢɛ > ɛʏɛֆ > ɖɛʟɨƈǟȶɛ > ɦǟɨʀ > քɛʀʄɛƈȶ > ֆʏʍʍɛȶʀʏ? \\\\

He snapped his fingers - or tried to. His hoodie got in the way. “Large, big eyes!”

~FuuuWOOMPFH~

Raz blinked, trying to remember what else. “A-and they had really delicate hair-” ~Ruffle ruffle~ “Not, like, fur, but it had a lot of small fur, small, but it also had this long princess hair.” ~Extra thick ruffle.~ “And I… I couldn’t shake the big feeling like they were perfectly uh. Symmetrical??? Is that the right word?”

Raz looked to Danica for confirmation that he wasn’t completely out of his mind. The officer’s perfectly symmetrical, oval shaped eyes stared inquisitively at him.

He brushed long locks of straight hair back, turning his head and snout to one side. “I think that’s the big word, anyway…”

“Huh? Oh, I was just small-looking at you. Many sorries!”

“A-ah…” Raz blushed. “Many sorries.”

Where there had once been two reasonably identifiable humans(?) having a conversation a second ago, there were now, after a few carefully chosen words, completely identical mouse snouts. It happened abruptly, without warning, a blink and you miss it blip in reality. They were distinctly different people with admitted mouse accents one moment, and then the next, Raz and Danica were unknowingly admiring the near perfect symmetry that had been carved into one another’s faces.

It was like staring into a mirror. The two looked almost exactly the same.

The devil for this sort of thing was in the details, of course, details the two started to take in without thinking. Their snouts stuck out a quarter of a foot from their cheek bones. Their eyes rounded into rodent-shaped pools of black. Their noses were pink, their whiskers long, and their hair even longer. Their hairdos blunted just above their eyebrows and it tumbled over their thin shoulders in long currents, painted silky white, and it didn’t stop until hung next to where their ankles should have been.

There were concessions made near the crown for their ears, of course, but everywhere else, it felt like wearing a coat you never knew you owned until just this moment, when you could feel it curling around your arms and tickling the small of your back…

Which made the notion of wearing anything even more distasteful, to be frank? Why weren’t they decent?

“Psst, allo?”

Raz blinked. “Allo?” he repeated.

“That’s small French for ‘hello.’ You look really small today.”

That seemed extremely non-sequitur. Especially French - that was odd. Odd for the time it took to worm into his cognition, anyway. He shuffled, blushing a little, shrinking a little, swaying on the spot as though he’d never stopped. “You too. Small small.”

Danica giggled into her uniform’s sleeve. She shrank a little too, out of courtesy, or perhaps a mutual appreciation of smallness, and swayed in time with him.

Thirty-six inches gone. At this rate, they were only twelve inches off from being creatures themselves. Not that that seemed like a terrible idea right now…

An accent crept into Raz’s voice as he spoke up. “Allo, ah, can I azk you ah big question?”

The same accent came back at him, measured and careful. “It iz alright? What iz your big question?”

Raz swallowed. His voice lost a little maleness. “Dahneeka,” he lilted a little too phonetically for his own good. “Why do we ‘ave big clothes?”

That was the million dollar question. Dahneeka’s mouth worked, tinged with a worry that she’d buried for most of this conversation but now wanted to be rid of post-haste. “I was about to azk you zhat myself, Rahzuhputin. Why are we dressed like zhis?”

She waggled her hands for emphasis, ruffling her uniform until one of them popped out of the collar. Daneeka gasped. It was furry up to the wrist, before it turned pink and delicately small for a rodent person. She gawked at this new discovery, her rodent hand, turning it over in surprise and then abruptly started to giggle.

Rahzuh didn’t know what she was laughing at. He tilted his head, puzzled. “Zhat is your small ‘and, no? It iz just your ‘and?”

“It iz,” Dahneeka laughed. Then, blithely, she repeated it. “It iz it iz!”

Rahzuh laughed in turn. “You zeem a little big repeat, no?”

Like clockwork, his mouth worked without him. “You zeem a little big repeat, no? You zeem a little big repeat, no?”

He glanced down at his snout.

“Juzt like you,” said Dahneeka with the sweetest grin on her snout. “Juzt like you~ Juzt like you~!”

“Come on, let’s get out of zhese,” Rahzuh said. “Come on, let’s get out of zhese. Come on, let’s get out of zhese.”

There was a logic to this behavior, somehow. Rahzuh could figure it out, even if it was a bit vague.

Once to introduce it. Twice to set a pattern. Thrice to make it permanent.

His little heart thumped. He liked how that worked. Once, twice, thrice. Once, twice, thrice…


The pattern had a good beat to it. After the first, oh, three times he repeated something, Rahzuh found the groove, and rode it for so long he forgot what he was so hung up about, why it felt strange at all to repeat himself. It was natural. And he wasn’t in a hurry, right? It didn’t matter if he or his mouse friend were so keen on repeating themselves, as long as they were enjoying doing it.

They disrobed. It was a more complicated process than either of them thought, having to pick and peel things like bras, boxers, belts, and the odd tie off, and fish things of apparent importance out of their pockets like keys, wallets and horribly oversized smartphones. Not that it mattered - their driver’s licenses didn’t look like them anyway, and the possessions the two kept in their (shudder) human clothes didn’t exactly elicit any strong emotions, except ‘ooh, zhis is big’ and ‘i can’t use zhis, my hands are too small.’

With every article taken off, an inch was erased. One inch, two inches, three, four. They didn’t notice. Razhuh and Daneeka, unaware of how far they’d fallen in stature, kept going in an earnest attempt to get comfortable, and kept shrinking as a result, until finally, they stood naked on the stoop, a fifth of what they used to be.

“Aahhh!” sighed Rahzuh happily. “Zhat is so much better!”

He spun on his petite little peets. “Aahh, zhat is so much better!” he belted, loving how his voice sang back to him. “Aahh! Zhat is so much better!”

Daneeka admired him, though she was almost puzzled. She felt down her conspicuously flat chest to the beat in her head. “Rahzuh? Razhuh? Razhuh?”

“Allo? Allo? Allo?”

She turned to him. Her hair fluttered around her like a curtain in the window. With a motion, she pointed to the flat plain running from overly wide hips to overly narrow shoulders. “I zhink zhere must be zomezhing missing big??? I zhink zhere must be zomezhing missing big??? I zhink zhere must be zomezhing missing big???”

Rahzuh inspected her up and down. He swayed pensively.

Neither of them noticed how featureless their crotches were. In fact, neither of them saw so much as hide nor hair of naughty bits when they pulled themselves out of their cavernous clothes, or really any gender to speak of. The gendered parts of their bodies were gone. It was all one generalized, vaguely feminine curve, top to bottom.

“I zhink we are missing…” he started to say, but then the same thought occurred to Dahneeka.

“Zynchronization?” she guessed.

“... wait. ‘Ow did-”

“I do zhat? Oh, I just gave it a-”

“Big zhink?” Rahzuh suggested.

Dahneeka wriggled happily. She could really feel her connection starting to blossom here.

They spent the next minute repeating the exchange twice. In that time, Rahzuh remembered the creature had a tail, and so they had tails too. Long, striped tails, plugged into increasingly fat-assed hips.

By now, the neighbors were well aware of a whispering outside that had been going on for a while now. They didn’t quite hear Raz and Danica when they were being discrete, but ever since the conversation started progressing to decidedly less human topics, everyone could hear incessant, high-pitched chattering going back and forth.

Razhuh couldn’t help it, and neither could Daneeka. As shortstack mice, they had enormous conversations in tiny voices, and didn’t want to stop.

There were so many big things to talk about, after all.

“Allo! Allo allo!”

“Allo? Allo allo? Heeheehee…”

“Zay… we don’t like ‘uman big zhinks, right? Zay… we don’t like ‘uman big zhinks, right? Zay… we don’t like ‘uman big zhinks, right?”

Razhuh took this under consideration. “Right? Right? Right?”

Daneeka held her excitement in and settled herself before continuing. “What if we are juzt… Mouze? What if we are juzt… Mouze? What if we are juzt… Mouze?”

Razhuh’s eyes lit up. “You mean zhe name? You mean zhe name? You mean zhe name?”

His swaying increased several fold. Daneekah followed his infectious energy. “Yeah!” she chirped. “Yeah! Yeah! We can both be Mouze and not worry about a ‘uman name! We can both be Mouze and not worry about a ‘uman name! We can both be Mouze and not worry about a ‘uman name!”

The prospect of throwing away his human name and going with a proper noun was so enticing, it seemed perfunctory, a matter of course for them. They definitely looked like mice. They definitely didn’t look distinct, or descript in any way. The biggest difference between them was probably the exact lengths of their tails, the precise part in their hairs, but other than that, they were functional to most humans. Why worry about being picked out of a crowd?

Especially when being discerning suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Identities were old hat. Individuality made functionally irrelevant. Why would anyone care? Why would they care? It was fun being a mouse, and fun knowing that you were just as much mouse as the next mouse over. If anything, it bred solidarity. This mouse is a mouse, and so is that mouse, so there. It just made sense.

Razhuh bumped hips with Daneeka, more sure of this decision than he’d ever been for anything else. “Well? Well? Well? I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready.”

“Me too,” Daneeka shimmied, bouncing him back. “Me too. Me too.

“Ready? Ready? Ready?”

They huddled together in a hug.

“We are Mouze! We are Mouze! We are Mouze!”

The last step of the mental contagion clicked into place. Their names fit like a glove. The mice forgot who they were supposed to be, and what had brought them here in the first place. It didn’t matter enough to them to try to remember it clearly.

The one thing that mattered now was a simple statement of being. They had turned into mice. Mouze. A pair of diminutive shortstack creatures who spoke weird and who bonded with a partner for life, and who spread the contagion known as ‘Mouze’ to anyone who had the misfortune of seeing them in the corner of their eye.

For some, the process was quick. See a Mouze, speak like a French chipmunk minutes later. For others, like Raz, who just barely saw the Mouze currently loitering in the community laundry room, the process required him to jog his memory a bit.

Luckily for him, he had Danica. And now, they had each other.

The lights came on. Their prey instincts kicked in. The Mouze launched into each other’s arms and held each other. The tenant in 116 had a broom in his hands and a confused look on his stubbly face.

His jaw came loose as he parsed what exactly he was looking at. “What in the fuck…?”

The Mouze ran off, long hair rippling behind them in twin trails. They left an image in the man’s eyes for but a flicker of time, but even that irrevocably spelt his doom.

In twenty minutes, he will start falling out of his slippers. His neighbors will see him start to shrink, and then they will start muttering about big and small things, and then they will spread the contagion to their neighbors, and those neighbors will spread it further and further, jumping between apartment blocks and spreading the demure nature of talkative mice to everyone in the complex, regardless of their feelings about it.

Even hearing the name Mouze has consequences after all.

The night will soon fill with pleasantly surprised squeaks. New bonds will be made. Identical mice will play.

Come morning, when the second patrol arrives searching for Deputy Jefferson, there won’t be a single human left within a two mile radius. What will be there instead, hiding among the trees, the foundations, camping out in cars and sitting on balconies, is a colony of prim, pretty, peculiar-looking mice.



How to Speak Like a Mouze

Mouze (n) - mou-zuh. A Mouze is a subspecies of anthropomorphic thought-contagion. Their origins are unclear. Their method of propagation is simple - upon hearing the name or seeing them, any part of them, for more than a microsecond, you will begin to obsess over the Mouze. Referring to ‘it’ as a mouse, or even as a small, white creature will spread the contagion to someone else. Depending on your level of contact, this process will accelerate, until you have started shrinking, growing mouse parts, speaking in an inexplicable french accent, and eventually cultivating a very small, nonbinary body. Substrains have mutations such as shorter hair, more apparent princess-like behavior, slightly different species, slightly different accents (mostly european), but all have a similar process of infection and eventual disruption of human cognition.

If you would like to sound like a Mouze, or have already accepted your fate, follow these easy steps.

1. Begin using the word ‘small’ more frequently. Encourage the people around you to do the same.

2. Incorporate ‘big’ and ‘small’ into your regular vocabulary. Use them to increase or diminish the importance of a subject’s size. Fixate on size for greatest effect.

3. Gradually adopt an accent. In the case of a Common Mouze, use French.

•
Turn ‘Th’ sounds into ‘zh’ sounds.
• Do not pronounce h’s.
• Stretch out your ‘er’ endings. Ex. super becomes ‘soo-pair’
• Flourish your ‘s’ sounds into ‘z’ sounds.
• Use your nose to pronounce ‘an,’ ‘ain,’ ‘on,’ and ‘un’ sounds.



4. When you are comfortable with your level of language proficiency, repeat everything you say three times. Also, remove your clothes if possible. Speaking like a Mouze while wearing any sort of clothes is very silly.

5. Exalt the virtues of being nullified, small and pretty to anyone who is not a Mouze; and finally

6. If you have a friend, pair with them for life and renounce your human name. You are a Mouze, and you are better off finishing each other’s sentences and frolicking in nature than you are living a life as a boring human.

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