Jessica had always been a tomboy. While other girls were playing with dolls, she was playing baseball with her brother and his friends. Skateboarding, BMX riding and other physical sports were more to her liking too. Even as a young teen, when her body began to fill out to match her pretty face, she was still more comfortable in blue jeans and a ball cap than a dress.
One day, she was riding her BMX bike on a wooded trail, she came upon a quarry. She thought it was abandoned so she left the trail and began riding through the quarry, jumping hills and stirring up the dust doing spinouts. It was a hot summer day, and her sweat caused the dust coating her to emulsify and stick to her. As she rode, she came upon some rusted out steel drums and garbage bags that had deteriorated from prolonged UV exposure and were broken up, their contents spread by frequent heavy rains. Still thinking nothing of it, she rode for a few more hours, occasionally taking a slip in the soft ground, unknowingly exposing her to more of the toxic chemicals contaminating the area. As she was leaving, she found a pond, so she stripped down and took a dip in the pool to wash the dirt and dust off of her she went home.
A week later, while getting dressed, she noticed her shoes felt a little loose and the hem of her jeans was too long. Her parents had left the markings on the mudroom wall with the ages and heights of she and her brother while they were growing up and she stood next to the mark of her peek growth....and found she was an inch shorter !!! She didn't say anything to anyone about it, but after another week, she checked again and found she was now TWO inches shorter!!!
Jessica finally told her parents, who scoffed at her at first, thinking it was just her imagination, but when she showed them her height compared to the growth chart, they took her to a doctor. A series of tests and x-rays revealed nothing to explain her reduction in height, but over the next month, she lost four more inches. She was taken to more doctors, endocrinologists, hematologists, osteopaths, neurologists and pediatricians, but none of them could diagnose the condition. Finally, she was interviewed by a criminal pathologist, who backtracked her activities starting from when she first noticed the change. When she got to the day she was riding in the abandoned quarry, the doctor sent a team of investigators to the quarry to gather land and water samples. They found the site was contaminated with a large variety of chemical, radiological and biological wastes. A DNA testing found her chromosomes had been changed by the mixture of contaminates and he believed that was what was causing her "shrinking". Her case was assigned to a special unit at the CDC who began working on the problem, but they couldn't figure out how to stop or reverse her condition. , They had taken animals to the site and replicated the contamination and the animals who were exposed also began to miniaturize. Over the next year, she continued to shrink, approximately an inch a week. Her once five-foot eight-inch body was now a mere 5 inches tall.
Then a phone call to her parents advised them they had found a solution to her condition. Exposure to a specific type of radiation had stopped the shrinking process in the test animals, though it didn't reverse it. At least, she wouldn't shrink down to nothing, so a charter plane took her to the CDC lab where she was treated with the new procedure. And it worked. Over the next month, her miniaturizing stopped, but didn't reverse. She remained at her current five-inch height. She was sent home with her parents while the scientists continued to experiment on the miniature animals to try to find a cure to restore her normal height.
Meanwhile, Jessica sank into a depression. Not so much because she was so tiny and forced to wear doll clothes and live in a dollhouse, but she couldn't participate in any of her formerly favorite activities. Her brother tried to help, constructing a seat similar to the seats on roller coasters, so she could ride on the handlebars of his bike, but it still wasn't the same. Most of the time she was relegated to standing on the curb and watching enviously her brother and his friends tearing up the street on their boards or bikes. One of her brother's friends then introduced her to a new craze that had started on the west coast.....finger skateboarding. While just a silly novelty to normal sized humans, the boards were nearly the perfect scale for her. Additionally, one manufacturer of the skateboards made one that was so delicately detailed, it performed exactly like a full-size skateboard. Soon Jessica was ripping up the kitchen table on one of tiny skateboards.
She discovered at her size and body mass, she could perform extreme stunts way beyond the possibilities of regular skateboards. Her brother and his friends built a 1/12 scale skateboard park for her, complete with ramps, jumps, rails, stairs and even a 360 degree loop. As she pushed herself further and further, she took a lot of spills, but she learned that the reduced effect of gravity greatly reduced the chance of injuries. It seemed that her skeleton, while the size of a small bird's bones, were very strong and a fall that would break the bones of her brother, merely left her bruised.
Her acrobatic feats, along with the novelty of her size, began to make her famous. Several television specials were filmed about her, and she appeared in Sports Illustrated and Teen Magazine. She even received visits from several world class skateboard competitors and a toy company began to manufacture a line of finger skateboards, a Jessica action figure and even a highly detailed BMX bike which she endorsed and starred in many television commercials. When the royalties began rolling in, her parents started becoming very wealthy.
Skateboarding remained her first love, and she continued to push her limits with new and more difficult feats. Her mother happened to be watching her with her brother and one of his friends when she took a particularly hard spill. Her mother rushed over to her and scooped her up in her hands. As she looked at all the bruises and scrapes on her doll sized daughter, a very concerned look came over her face. Jessica began to worry that her mother was going to freak out and ban her from her only self-esteem building activity, but to her surprise she only said, "We have to get you a helmet."
