Hazel Dadoni

Hazel was born into a medical and scientific frigate orbiting the binary planets. She spent the first few years of her life on the frigate, but her parents didn't want her to be sheltered from the outside world. They left the frigate, telling their friends they wanted to start a family, and would get back to research when Hazel was grown up.

Hazel was brought into the city of Turmalis, she lived like a normal child. She played, she laughed, she ran around in the rain and splashed in the puddles. She was a bit shy with new children her age, which would have been worse if all she did was sit around all day up in the medical frigate.

Hazel's parents gave her lessons on not only mathematics, literature, science, etc, but how to survive these crazy planets. Her father noticed she was squinting at the chalkboard mounted on their dining room wall, and how she had trouble looking her parents in the eye from a distance. At the age of 10, she started wearing glasses.

When she was 18, she was considered an adult. She had so much knowledge crammed in her brain for an 18 year old, her scientist parents made sure of that. Her parents had never decided to make more offspring, so their promise with their friends had to upheld. In the 18 years they had taken leave from the research project, the science team had established a small research outpost out in the deserts, where they could do their work in private. Hazel realized she had to come and help too, and she tearfully hugged her friends goodbye, although cracking a smile and assuring them she'd coke back.

The research team sent a small shuttle to the city, and it picked them up on one of the landing pads. Hazel and her parents were taken back to the research facility. Although she knew alot, what they were working on was confusing stuff. They had been working for years on technology that would temporarily shrink packages and raw material, if it was successful, they'd make a fortune off of the whole industrial, transport, and trade market. Valuable resources could be minimized and set in a transport shuttle, when the shuttle would reach it's destination, it would presumably have the same device that could undo the effects. Thus, you have just transported much more resources than the shuttle could originally hold.

Unfortunately, Hazel was only a lab assistant. This lead to quite boring work, while her parents were tweaking the device and configuring computers, she was doing the little tasks. Watching monitors, writing down measurements, some even degrading as getting the scientists a soda or some sandwiches.

4 years later, after so much work had been put into the project, the first test was being conducted. In the glass dome containment chamber was the device, aimed at a simple office chair. Hazel's job that day was to simply cart the device into the containment chamber, calibrate it, and seal the door behind her. Which was quite eventful compared to her previous jobs. She pushed the cart in, tapping her fingers away at the little console on the device. The machine whirred, aiming down at the chair. She locked the cart's wheels in place, and turned around, sealing the door behind her. She walked back into the main room where all the final procedures were being carried out.

Scientists babbled to each other, the head scientist yelling above them "Alright people, finish your protocols, let's light this thing up." The scientists quieted, typing into their computer stations. Inside the glass dome, the cart's wheel lock came undone, and the cart drifted off a few feet. The head scientist sighed, giving Hazel a look. "Miss Dadoni, please go back into the containment chamber, set the cart back, and redo the calculations. And this time, make sure the lock is firmly in place." Hazel bit her lip, the head scientist always chastised her for the smallest things, even if they weren't her fault. "Yes, sir, s-sorry." She walked out of the main room, entering the dome. She pulled the cart back into place, locking the wheels, kneeling down to make sure they were jammed up into the wheel so they didn't budge. "Who said you had to put this thing on a cart anyway.." she grumbled to herself.

Inside the control room, a small alert went off on one of the computer stations, soon the alerts traveled along the line of computers. The scientists all paused, looking at each other before quickly turning back to their consoles and typing away rapidly, calling out answers and questions to their corresponding stations. Hazel, unaware of the confusion in the control, room was still calibrating the device. The head scientist ran up to the main console facing the glass dome, grabbing the microphone. "Hazel, get out of there now, we're reading some odd power fluctuations." Hazel turned her head to the control room, and then looked at the device. The barrel was charging up for no apparent reason. The power fluctuations caused a large tremor, and Hazel fell off her feet before she could start running away.

The device fell off the cart, spinning in the air and landing beside her, the barrel pointed at her. It shot the blast of energy at that moment. Hazel squealed and covered her eyes. The blast of energy, enveloping her in a green aura. She opened her eyes, pulling her hands out of the way. It hadn't killed her horribly or turned her into dust, so what was it doing? She then began to feel a little dizzy, she tried to pull away but it felt like the whole world was spinning, like she was caught in a tornado. She placed her hands on her head and shut her eyes tight.

Something went terribly wrong with the device when it was being built, and now Hazel was shrinking. She didn't realize it, but within seconds she was under a foot tall, and when she opened her eyes, she was in the shadow of the cart. She looked at herself and then around her, and sat back, holding her head and trying to piece together what was happening. But before she could come to any sort of conclusion, the green beam veered off into the building itself, swinging around erratically. Metal groans were heard from all sides, as the scientists began to evacuate the building.

Hazel looked around at the crumbling lab, and saw a small grate in the ground. She jumped up and ran to it, slipping through the bars easily. She looked up through the bars and saw the roof tumbling inward. She ran down the dark corridor, reaching for the flashlight in her labcoat. She turned the flashlight on and tripped, falling to her stomach. She turned around and saw the rubble blocking out the light, and a huge gust of dust coming through the pipe. She kicked her legs forward and jumped into a small, cube room with 3 more pipes leading to somewhere, ducking under the pipe. The dust shot through the pipe, filling the room with small broken wall segments and sand from outside.

She pulled herself up, sneezing and coughing, brushing the dust off her once blindingly white lab coat, and rubbing her glasses on her undershirt. She put her glasses back on and looked around. "I've got to get this fixed.. they can reverse this, I know it, I just have to get their attention.." Kicking her heels off and going to pick them up, she walked along the edge of the room, looking in each pipe, the last one she checked had light coming from an opening. She climbed up into it and ran down. She knew where she was now, the heating system for when it became dead cold at night. She was at the spot where the desert vermin had chewed into to let the hot air keep them alive. She climbed out into the desert, It had been shoddily repaired many times, she noted as she pulled off a big scrap of duct tape on her labcoat.

Turning to the lab, she gasped. It was in ruins, all of it destroyed, some scientists standing outside and staring at it in the same awe and disbelief as her. To them, it was a life's work wasted. To her, it was inconceivable, small enough that she'd be stepped on and no one would even know. The scientists trudged through the sand, horrified of the last few events that got their colleagues killed. She glanced at them uncaring for a moment, tears in her eyes. She then looked back up and saw where they were going, they were giving up, they were leaving in the research team's supply ship! She burst to her feet and started sprinting through the sand to the landing pad. It was hard, as there many sand dunes about half her height on the way there. She could already feel the heat blisters forming on her bare feet, but her adrenaline made her ignore the stinging pain. She ran faster as she hit the concrete of the landing pad, running up to the back up the ship where the ramp was. It was raising back up! She stopped next to the hydraulic landing leg, and looking up at the ramp, stuffing her high heels in her labcoat, she climbed up the side of the rubber wheel and stood up on it.

She had only one chance, she jumped. She hit the side of the ramp, her lower half dangling off the edge. She pulled herself up frantically as she was slowly sliding into the corner between the ship and the ramp, it'd crushed her chest! Pulling her legs up onto the edge, she pushed off with them, sliding down the ramp and hitting the metal floor. She scurried away from the door, the near-death experience probably giving her a future phobia of slowly closing ramp-doors.

She hid under some boxes and junk, along the way to where ever she was going, she figured this; This was a science team. A science team that had just lost everything. If they found her, they'd probably enslave her to a life of research and tests to try and replicate the size manipulating laser rather than give up. She decided she would hitch rides along the way to a town that she knew she wouldn't get much attention in. Question was finding it..

A month later, Hazel jumped off the dirty desert traversing jeep. She hit the ground and started running into an alleyway. Checking to see if anyone saw her, she looked around. She could see one end of the town to the other. She had hope in her new living arrangement, but had to investigate on her neighbors before she could reveal herself..

They were starting it up, the ramp was closing. She ran faster as