Inktober 2026 - 3 - Miniature

“Watcha doin’?” she asked playfully as she entered the room.

Coming up behind him, she wrapped her arms around his chest and kissed the side of his neck. He laughed softly, and gently grabbed one of her wrists to keep her against him a little while longer before answering, enjoying the embrace.

“I’m making a model for the presentation to the new partners next week. They were so impressed by our installations when they visited that they asked us whether we would be open to designing a compound for them. And of course, we were…”

“A lab? Again?” she guessed.

“Yes. Ours is first and foremost a science-based endeavour, after all. Besides, I had rather we build laboratories than barracks.”

“Anything fancy on the docket?”

Letting go of him, she walked around the table he was sitting at and working on, and considered what he had already constructed. His models were usually pretty advanced, and this one was no exception. Bits and pieces of paper, plastic, metal, cardboard, and plywood, as well as glue sticks, and tweezers of various shapes and sizes surrounded the tiny structure. Although he was far from finished, the result was already quite impressive in the details it did have in some areas.

“Nothing we don’t already use ourselves, actually, but they came with a twist because there are tricky specifications to follow.”

“Like what?”

“We’ve had to make adjustments to the machinery to fit their requested dimensions. Some minor, some major. It’s been a lot of work by engineering.”

“How different can their dimensions be?”

She had heard of people placing their kitchen cabinets higher or lower on the wall depending on their family’s average height, or mounting their desks in accordance with their dominant hand, but that was anecdotal at best. And it did not require an engineer. What dimensions could their new partners request that advanced computations would have to be involved?

He smiled and nodded, pretty sure about knowing the origin of her confusing.

“I take it you did not read the brief from the last meeting that you missed,” he taunted her.

“You know full well I get all my info from my mission orders. I’m a field operator; nothing from those meetings ever has anything to do with me.”

She scoffed as she spoke, and rolled her eyes, which only made him smile wider.

“In that case, let me be the first to tell you that our latest contacts are from a place called Lilliput.”

She froze. And blinked.

“What? Lilliput? As in… Gulliver’s travels, Lilliput?”

“Yes and no. We named the planet in English like that after the island in the story, due to the reduced size of its indigenous humanoids population, but it is definitely in outer space, not in the Indian Ocean.”

“So… those guys are like… 15 to 20 centimetres tall,” she concluded after some quick mental arithmetic.

“Pretty much, yeah. I guess I forgot to mention that this model happens to be to scale.”