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Being tiny sucked. Momo thought.
She had to rely on her friends and family for everything. Water, transportation, dignity. And sure, she still had her powers, but they weren’t nearly as strong, her range being so limited. And normal people couldn't even see her… though that was probably for the best. But the whole situation made her feel frustratingly useless, like she had lost all control over her life.
And then Granny announced she was going on a trip.
Which meant she couldn’t stay with Vamola, something about a language barrier and how leaving her alone with an alien might not be the best idea. So, things were about to suck even more.
Her friends were eager to help but kept awkwardly mentioning how caring for a tiny, mostly invisible friend might be difficult with their parents around. It was starting to feel like she was about to get punted into the "figure it out yourself" void, until Okarun quietly said it wouldn’t be a problem for him, and that he would be happy to have her over at his place.
And not in the “I guess I can help way”. No, in the “I’d be happy to have you stay” over way. Which was different. Better.
And, suddenly, things weren’t looking so bad.
Okarun always spoke softly to her, adjusting his voice so it didn’t feel like a sonic boom to her tiny ears. He worried, sure, but no more than usual, no treating her like some fragile little thing. When he moved her around or lifted her up, he did it so naturally it felt the same as him helping her off his back after a battle. He still called her a genius, still looked to her for help, even though she was currently a bit useless.
And, okay… his hair was stupidly soft. And fluffy. And it smelled really nice—like his shampoo…
But that was beside the point.
She couldn’t help but grin as the decision was made, Okarun leaning down with that stupid soft look of his, holding out a careful hand for her to climb on to. (Not pick her up like some people.) He brought her up to his shoulder, letting her perch there so she could still see the world, whisper in his ear… and, okay, maybe play with the loose curls of his hair. Just a little.
Before long, he was saying goodbye to the others and setting off on his bike, reminding her to be careful, but in the exact same tone he always used when she climbed onto the back of the bike at normal size.
She relished the time they were getting. just the two of them. Sure, the reason for it sucked, but they hadn’t had much alone time lately. And now? She had him all to herself.
As he lifted his bike onto the train, one of the wheels accidentally nudged a tired-looking businessman, who shot him a scathing glare and muttered something under his breath.
Okarun, being the absolute angel that he was, only mumbled an apology and ducked his head, tucking himself into the bike area.
She leaned in closer to his ear.
“You should beat that guy’s ass,” she whispered.
His eyes flicked toward her from behind his glasses. She knew she saw them crinkle in amusement before he smoothed his expression into one of perfect, practiced boredom.
“No. Bad,” he said plainly.
Well. She had the whole weekend to wear him down.
Once they were inside his apartment (a small place he had repeatedly apologized for, despite her finding it the most fascinating thing in the world right now) she promptly migrated to the top of his head. They were in private now, which meant he could talk normally without looking like a lunatic muttering to thin air. She didn’t need to be right next to his face to hear him anymore.
And maybe it was a little cold, and being surrounded by his hair was warmer.
But only for warmth. No other reason.
He asked what she wanted to do, and they settled on watching movies, something that required zero effort from her, letting her almost pretend she was just wrapped up in a fluffy blanket instead of, you know… being tiny and nestled in her crush’s hair.
Everything was going fine. Until Okarun got caught off guard by a jumpscare.
In an action movie.
(Not even a scary one!)
He practically jumped out of his skin, which meant she had to grab fistfuls of his hair unless she wanted to go flying.
As she did, his arms shot straight up like he was being held at gunpoint.
They both froze.
For several long, tense seconds, she slowly loosened her grip. His arms slowly lowered.
“Oh no,” he said, a bit faintly.
“Oh yes,” she replied, with a hint of playful malice.
She could control him by yanking on his hair!
In no time at all, they were in front of a mirror. If she focused on his aura juuuust a little bit, she could sort of see which parts of his hair connected to which muscles. She could totally control him like a mech or something. Or like…
“This is just like Raccacoonie!” she crowed, making his arms flail around.
“Do you mean Ratatouille?” he asked with faint amusement, letting himself be manipulated like a very patient, very resigned doll.
“No! Like the raccoon that makes the guy cook,” she insisted, pulling on a chunk of hair to make his arms cross in a dramatic "no" motion and forcing his head to shake.
“No, the movie is about a rat controlling someone to cook,” he said, smiling. “You are being a rat right now, Miss Ayase.”
What! Nobody called her a rat and got away with it!
With careful, deliberate tugs, she made him strike the most embarrassing pose she could think of.
A dab.
She watched in satisfaction as his face turned a deep, burning red in the mirror.
“Let’s cook something!” she said excitedly. “Like in the movie!”
“Like that rat movie?” he confirmed cheekily.
“Like the rat movie,” she agreed, rolling her eyes.
“I guess we could,” he said, turning toward the kitchen. “I don’t really have any specific plans for dinner for the two of us.”
And she adored that he said it like that, plans for the two of them, even though she would be full even after only a grain of rice from whatever he had.
“Do you know how to cook, Miss Ayase?” he asked as made his way over to the fridge.
“Of course I can cook!” she said, puffing put her chest, even though he couldn’t see. “You do know my Granny, after all.”
That was a lie. Granny had given up on her years ago and outright banned her from the kitchen. He didn’t need to know that.
“Ah, that’s reassuring,” Okarun said gratefully, completely unaware of the deception. “I only know the basics myself.”
“Hehe,” she chuckled, making herself comfortable in his hair. “Just let Chef Momo guide you.”
Okarun pretty much let her take the lead on cooking, which was very kind of him, she had to admit. This was really cheering her up.
She decided on a simple curry. He had a box mix, some vegetables, and some chicken lying around. How hard could it be?
As time went on, however, he started looking more and more skeptical. Which was very rude of him.
“Miss Ayase… you’ve made this before, right?” he asked as she made him clumsily chopped some carrots and dump them into the pot. The varying sizes would make the final dish more interesting, right?
“Of course!” she said cheerily.
Now, even when Granny used a pre-mix, she always added a little something extra. Momo rifled through his cupboards, ignoring his squawk of dismay as she searched for the perfect ingredient.
Chili flakes.
Excellent.
She liked her curry spicy, so after some finessing, she got him to pop the lid off the jar and dump half of it into the pot.
Okarun let out another distressed squawk. Heh. He must be a baby when it came to spice.
What else…? Oh! She had heard that adding chocolate and apples to curry made it taste better! She had definitely read that online at some point. Or maybe it was in a video game…
Minutes later, after adding a handful of other "enhancements," Okarun was staring at the pot with thinly veiled distrust, looking like he had mentally checked out.
Screw him! She was a great cook!
But, man, this was taking ages. The package said to cook it for 40 minutes on medium heat. So logically, if they cranked it up to high, it should be done in 20, right?
She carefully moved his arms down, turning the burner knob to high.
That seemed to be the final straw. She could feel him straining against her inputs.
“Miss Ayase!” he said, trying to wrest back control. “I’m starting to believe you lied to me.”
“I did not!” she lied back, yanking on his hair again. This resulted in him awkwardly flailing around on the spot, arms jerking like a malfunctioning marionette. “We’re almost done!”
They both froze as the smoke alarm blared.
Black smoke curled from the pot.
“Shit!” they yelled in unison.
After some minor panicking, some frantic flailing as the smoke detector screamed at them, and her hurling the smoldering pot into his bathtub with her powers… everything was good again!
Crisis averted. No problem at all.
She preened. “C’mon. Say it.”
“I’m not calling you a genius, Miss Ayase,” Okarun said flatly. And wow. He actually sounded genuinely pissed. She wasn’t used to that being directed at her. “You set my kitchen on fire.”
She scoffed. So dramatic. That didn’t count as setting the kitchen on fire.
She should know.
There was a reason she was banned from the kitchen at home.
“The kitchen wasn’t on fire, Okarun,” she said, adopting her most patient, teacher-explaining-to-a-child voice.
“There were flames, Miss Aya—”
She leapt back onto his head, yanking his hair just right to force his hands up and clap over his own mouth, effectively cutting him off.
“The point is—you’re welcome, Okarun,” she said smugly. “Now go order some takeout. Granny left us money for that anyway.”
She let his hands drop and watched as indignation flashed across his face.
“Then why were you making me cook?!”
Even after the… cooking incident, messing around with Okarun like this was easily the most fun she’d had since being cursed.
For his part, Okarun just gave her a small, resigned smile and waved her off, telling her to enjoy herself—as long as she didn’t make him do anything embarrassing again.
She chose to interpret that as implicit permission to be nosy.
So, naturally, she piloted him around his apartment, dramatically flinging open every door, drawer, and container in sight.
Look, she had been desperately low on entertainment since becoming tiny. She was gonna take what she could get, okay?
Having already rifled through everything in the living area (his biggest crime: an excessive number of cringe sci-fi movies stacked under his TV), they moved on to his bedroom.
It was… so boring.
Just a standard teenage boy’s room. Bed, desk, closet… spiced up only by a few alien posters tacked onto the walls.
Boo.
Determined to find something more interesting, she made him clumsily pull open his wardrobe.
Her eyes immediately lit up.
“Okarun! You’ve been holding out on me!” she crowed, grinning.
Among the expected lineup of plain hoodies and casual wear, she spotted something much more interesting—cute graphic T-shirts from older anime, some clothes that actually had color, and a pair of dark jeans she had never seen him wear.
Okarun shifted uncomfortably. “A lot of this is older stuff, Miss Ayase,” he muttered, and she swore she could feel his head getting warmer beneath her.
“Nah! What’s that?” she demanded, making him point toward the dark jeans. “You’d look so good in those with your big hoodies.”
“You think?” he asked, hesitant.
“I know!” she declared confidently, making him dramatically cross his arms.
In the mirror attached to the wardrobe door, she caught the exact moment the blush spread across his face.
“I’ll… think about it,” he mumbled.
She smirked. Victory.
There wasn’t much else in the wardrobe that caught her interest (seriously, why did he own so many boring shirts and cardigans for a teenage boy?), so she made him close it, peering around the room for her next target.
Her eyes landed on his desk, where a few notebooks were spread out haphazardly.
Now they were getting somewhere.
“Oh!” she cried out in excitement. “What’s that over there?”
“Miss Ayase,” Okarun said warily, his voice laced with concern. “Careful how hard you’re pulling—”
Before she could even process his warning, her world was suddenly consumed by white as his hair flared up around her. Cool strands flickered to and fro, brushing against her like wisps of mist. It was like being caught in a sudden gust of snow.
At the same time, her perch lurched violently as he hunched forward with a groan.
“—Momo-chan,” he finished, voice strained.
She blinked, slowly peeking through the fluffy mass of hair that now cocooned her.
“…Whoa,” she murmured, awed. Did she just… accidentally trigger his transformation?
Grinning mischievously, she gave another firm tug on the now much wispier hair clutched in her grasp.
His hair shortened and turned black as he straightened up (slightly).
“Holy shit!” she giggled. “An on-off switch!”
Without hesitation, she began yanking furiously on the lock of hair, watching in delight as his hair flickered between forms like a glitched-out game character.
“Miss Ayas—omo-chan…— Please sto—p, yo, this is ma—king me feel reall—weird, yo—”
She finally paused, giggling, leaving him stuck in his transformed state. His hair was even fluffier like this, pleasantly cool in the humid air as it flickered around her.
He slumped forward, letting out a long, exasperated sigh.
“What a drag.”
She laughed. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, only kind of meaning it. “I can stop if you want.”
“Nah,” he drawled lazily. “I’m just glad you’re having fun, Momo-chan. You’ve been so down lately.”
Ugh! He just said sweet things like that out of nowhere! Completely unprovoked! Sometimes while transformed… sometimes when not transformed…
Unacceptable.
Flustered, she yanked on a few random locks of hair, making him punch himself in the arm.
“Ow,” he said flatly.
“C’mon!” she shouted, yanking on his hair. “I wanna go fast! Mush!”
Okarun sighed as he started walking across his bedroom.
Not nearly fast enough.
She scowled. He was in his Turbo form! He was supposed to go fast fast!
Digging into his aura, she searched for the right strands to tug—there had to be something in there that could access his actual speed.
There!
A cluster of energy thrummed beneath her fingers, pulsing with the same eerie, restless hum as Turbo Granny’s spiritual power. That had to be the one.
Okarun must have sensed her intent because he suddenly stiffened, his voice taking on an edge of real concern.
“Momo-chan, are you su—”
She pulled the lock of hair.
And suddenly—
Oh.
She was weightless. For a split second, she hung suspended in midair, still clutching a tuft of white hair in her tiny hands.
Then gravity kicked in.
She let out a startled yelp, flailing wildly, only managing to summon a (to her) massive psychic hand just in time to break her fall. She landed with a soft oomph.
Safe!
She blinked, disoriented, before glancing down at the tuft of white hair still clenched in her tiny hands.
…Sorry, Okarun…
Wait.
Where was Okarun?
She looked up—then froze.
There was… a comically Okarun-shaped hole in the wall.
And in the wall beyond that.
Her stomach dropped.
“Oh—fu—”
It took her a while to reach him.
Everything was so much further away when you were tiny, okay? She had to awkwardly swing from object to object using her powers just to make any decent progress. It was like doing an obstacle course designed specifically to piss her off.
She finally reached the first hole.
It was perfectly Okarun-shaped—limbs splayed out, even the outline of his ethereal hair and collar, like the imprint of a bird that had smacked into a window at high speed. Judging by outline, he must have hit it stomach-first.
Sorry again, Okarun.
She swung through, only to be met with an even worse sight.
Two whole walls. He had gone straight through into his bathroom, wrecked that too, and then kept going straight through to the other side.
She landed on the edge of the bathtub, grimacing at the sheer amount of destruction.
Settling dust coated every surface. Broken tiles were scattered everywhere. His bathroom counter was cracked down the middle.
There might be a reason he tended not to go all out indoors, huh.
Finally, clearing the debris, she caught sight of him.
Or, well… half of him.
He was lodged halfway through the wall near his front door, his upper body completely embedded in plaster and drywall. His legs stuck out at an awkward angle, his bare feet scrabbling uselessly against the wall.
She Stared.
And she kept staring.
It was… kind of mesmerizing. Like watching one of those inflatable tube men outside a car dealership
“You, uh… okay there, Okarun?” she finally called out.
The frantic flailing paused.
“Momo-chan?” came his muffled reply, barely audible through layers of drywall and regret.
Then, another desperate burst of struggling. His legs kicked wildly, heels smacking against the wall with pathetic little thump-thump-thumps. His feet scrabbled, his knees jerked, and then—
Defeat.
With an exhausted sigh, he went completely limp, legs swaying slightly.
“…I think I’m stuck,” he whined.
She had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.
“Do… do you need some help?”
He struggled for another, much shorter amount of time, before once again falling limp once more.
“…yeah,” he mumbled, barely above a whisper. He sounded so defeated.
She cracked her knuckles, grinning as she summoned her powers. It was a bit trickier at this size, but she could still make them huge, as long as she didn’t need to reach too far.
Bracing herself, she wrapped her psychic hands around his midsection, gripping as close to the wall as she could.
And yanked.
Okarun let out an immediate squawk of protest, legs flying wildly again, but she ignored him and kept pulling.
He was still transformed, which meant he was fine. She had seen him jump off a cliff and walk it off in this form. He wasn’t made of glass. He wasn’t going to break.
But seriously.
He was really stuck.
She tried twisting and turning him every which way, but he was wedged in there.
She vaguely remembered a time when a deer had gotten its head stuck in the fence at the edge of Granny’s property. Granny had to carefully twist it just the right way to get it loose, all while it panicked and flailed.
Kind of like Okarun right now.
Finally, with one final, determined yank (and a deeply pained whine from him) one of his shoulders popped free. His newly liberated hand immediately slapped against the wall, fingers digging in as he braced himself and shoved until his other shoulder squeezed through.
Exhausted, Momo released her psychic grip, slumping slightly.
They say if something can get its shoulders through a gap, the rest will follow, right?
…Or wait. Was that just for cats?
Whatever. Hard part’s done, she figured. He had both hands and feet pressed against the wall now. He could push himself out the rest of the way. No problem.
She waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Okarun wiggled a little. Twitched. Shifted half an inch. Then… nothing.
His hands slowly slid down the wall in surrender.
And then, with an almost comically slow deflation, he went limp again.
Dangling.
By his neck.
She squinted.
That could not be comfy.
She didn’t get it though. She’d gotten his shoulders through—how the hell could his head still be stuck?
Suspicious, she used her powers to climb up his slumped form.
“Momo-chan?” came his muffled voice from the other side of the wall. “Is that you? Or like… a bug or something?”
She ignored him, gripping his hoodie for stability before leaping toward the letterbox slot on his front door. Using her powers, she pried it open just a crack and poked her tiny head out into the hallway.
And immediately had to suppress the overwhelming urge to scream.
This goddamn dumbass.
He still had his mask on.
Of course he couldn’t back up. He still had his goddamn mask on, blocking him like a cork in a bottle.
She turned to glare at him through the letterbox.
He startled at the sight of her head suddenly poking out of his own front door, his whole body jerking as he immediately started struggling again. His head twisted side to side in place, trying to free itself.
She watched, unimpressed.
He grunted, strained, wriggled, huffed—his distress growing more and more dramatic as he flailed… all while keeping panicked eye contact with her.
Then, as expected, he gave up again.
And went limp.
“…Momo-chan,” he whined pitifully.
“Okarun,” she said flatly. “Turn off your damn mask.”
He blinked.
And the mask expanded outwards, dissolved into wisping energy that curled upwards into the air like smoke.
Instantly, his head popped free, and he fell backwards through the hole.
She pulled herself out of the letterbox to get a better look, watching as he lay there, dazed, staring blankly at the ceiling.
Then, slowly, he sat up.
“You’re a genius, Momo-chan,” he said reverently, scrambling up to offer her a careful hand to hop down onto. He lifted her up to his (very dusty…) shoulder, his movements gentle.
“…I’m really not,” she said, holding back a laugh.
Now freed, he took a long, suffering second to survey the wreckage.
The huge gaping hole in the wall.
The destroyed bathroom.
The smaller hole leading to the public hallway.
His eye twitched.
“…My walls,” he whispered, staring at the damage with dead eyes.
She patted his head. “You really need to be more careful indoors, Okarun.”
He made a strangled sound.