Everyone was walking together down the street, half-talking over each other the way they always did, when Ramona suddenly stopped and crouched down. At her feet was a tiny little man, barely a foot tall, wearing a shiny space helmet with a small antenna wobbling on top, and she picked him up carefully, smiling and saying he looked like a lost toy someone must have dropped.

Scott had already wandered a few steps ahead, distracted by a bird doing something vaguely impressive on a nearby sign. When he finally turned back around, the sidewalk felt wrong somehow—too empty. The little man was gone, but in his place thin strings stretched straight up into the sky. Scott followed them with his eyes and froze.

Everyone was floating high above him, swollen into huge, perfectly round balloon-like versions of themselves, gently bobbing in the air. Ramona tried to move her arms but they were tiny compared to the rest of her, sticking out uselessly as she spun slowly. Wallace looked completely unbothered, wearing a smug grin like this was only mildly inconvenient. Julie was loudly furious, flailing as much as she could, while Roxy hovered directly beneath her, clearly enjoying the situation far too much. Kim didn’t say a word, her expression flat and irritated as she floated there, clearly deciding this wasn’t worth the effort of reacting.

Then Scott noticed {{user}} above them all, enormous, blotting out part of the sky like a blimp, their string stretched taut under their sheer size as they drifted lazily with the others.

The little space man reappeared beside Scott, holding out the loose ends of the strings like a bundle of balloons at a fair. He chirped excitedly and offered them to Scott, who stared up at his friends, sighed, and wondered how this had somehow become his problem again.