The quarry business is one that not many people think about. Everyone seems to know that granite, marble, limestone and other slabs of rock have to come from somewhere, and it takes work to pull them out of the ground, but when is the last time you thought about the people who worked on that heavy slab of rock you use for your counter top? Well, Robert Pond thought about it nearly every day, as his job was to make sure the rocks they pulled out of the ground met the standards of his company. That's right, he was the Quality Assurance Manager for a big mining company.
One might think that there wasn't really much he had to do, but his department was rather large, and he was the supervisor for over a hundred employees. He was even called on every now and then to make a final decision on where a certain product would be sent. You see, the advantage of mining rocks for construction is that even if the slab you pulled out of the ground isn't suitable for building materials or counter tops, you can still make gravel out of it. Robert thought of himself as being quite the expert on rocks and their structural integrity and he liked rocks so much he even kept a collection of geodes at home.
As would be expected of one of the managers in the QA department, he often was called on to travel to different workplaces and quarries and even some factories and warehouses to make final calls on products flagged as questionable by his employees. He was on his way to evaluate a batch at a certain middle America warehouse when things started taking a decidedly weird turn. As he parked his car at a gas pump to start refueling, his arm seemed to move further back than it normally did, making it harder to set the e-brake.
Confused, he brought both his arms up to compare them and saw that his right arm was, in fact, several inches longer than his left. This of course was a source of great alarm for Robert, and he stumbled out of his truck and turned around to look at himself in his reflection on his window. Nothing else seemed out of place, and he pulled himself back together to continue his drive. Literally, as it turned out, since he soon discovered his arm was back to normal. Convinced he was mistaken earlier and that nothing was wrong, he refilled his gas tank and continued on his way.
When he arrived at the warehouse, he did his inspections, and everything went as it normally did, though he did need to recalibrate one of the measuring tools used in the verification process. That night as he relaxed in his hotel room before bed, he reached for the remote and picked it up without even thinking about it, and as he set it back down, he noticed how far he had actually reached. His arm had stretched to nearly double its normal length, and he startled himself off the other side of his bed, falling onto his face. And as he pushed himself upright again, he realized that his arm was actually no different than it normally was.
The next morning he got back into his truck to head to his next scheduled inspection, and once again reached further than he should have been able to. And once more, upon inspecting himself, nothing was amiss. Thinking he should really take more breaks, he continued his trip. This time he was heading to a quarry to take a look at some marble that was questionably sturdy, and he was looking forward to seeing some interesting patterns in the product.
Robert was used to dealing with other people's stress levels impacting their work quality – it was one of the most common reasons he was called in to make a final call after all – so he didn't really think much of his little hallucinations. He was an old hat in this industry, and had even dealt with a mine or two that were haunted, so this set of weird happenings didn't really throw him off his stride all that much.
When he was inspecting the marble at the mine, he subconsciously reached for a device that should have been out of his reach to help him make a decision, and picked it up and continued using it. He wouldn't have even noticed that anything unusual happened if his fellow employees hadn't started shouting like they saw a ghost. Looking up from his work, he noticed the size his arm had grown to, and nearly dropped the device.
This was the first time this had happened around anyone else, and judging by their reactions, he was in fact, not hallucinating, but rather what he was seeing was real. Now it was time for him to really freak out, and he turned to the nearest guy, pointing to his own arm with his normal one and asked, “You see this too? It's actually happening?”
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The other employees who were there with him nodded quick affirmatives before backing off even further, one particularly superstitious of them even did his Christian “cross himself thing” to ward of evil spirits. This was not withing Robert's expectations, and now he knew he had to do something about it, rather than just taking a short vacation after he was done here.
But just like before, while his attention was on his surroundings rather than himself, his arm reverted to normal, which caused a whole new round of curses and exclamations from his coworkers. Afraid of what he would see, he looked at the arm they were pointing at yet again, and saw it had reverted to normal. After sending off one of them to report the weird happenings to HR, Robert finished his work inspecting the marble. And at the end of the day, he was told to take some personal time to sort out himself away from easily startled mine workers, who had a tendency to be a bit superstitious.
And having seen enough tv shows about superheroes back in the day, Robert decided to start his training montage. Having returned home, he spent some time trying to get a handle on his situation. About a week after he started, however, he received a very lucrative retirement offer from the main office of his company that would let him retire right now and even have a better monthly income than he had originally planned on for when he retired in another ten years according to his current plans.
Seeing no reason to say no and every reason to say yes, and even agreeing with HR's reasoning – as stated before, mine workers were a superstitious bunch – Robert accepted the retirement offer. Having more time to focus, Bob spent even more time on getting a handle on things. Did this end his awkward surprises? No, not really, especially since the next morning he woke up with all four limbs stretched all over his bedroom and his wife shouting in protest as he accidentally pushed her off the bed an hour before her alarm was set to go off.
After getting quite the earful of a lecture from the old lady, he was banished to the backyard to “sort himself out for a while” until he was called back into the house by a much less grumpy version of his wife, who had finished getting a breakfast ready for each other after sleeping for a bit longer. This time something new happened. Well, nearly everything that happened since he had been retired was new, but this one in particular was breaking new ground as, when he took a deep sniff to appreciate the scent of the breakfast waiting for him, his nose grew three times its normal size. Over the sound of his wife's hysterical laughter – he did have to admit he looked rather ridiculous – he focused hard and managed to get his nose back under control.
While he did manage to get Grace(his wife) to stop laughing finally, he did not manage to get her to stop calling him Pinocchio at random times until nearly a week later. And that was not the only unfortunate growth he managed, either. In fact, the next day he was trying to put his shoe on when his foot randomly grew to the size of a large dog, which weirdly neither ripped nor stretched his sock.
His clothes seemed to stretch with him whenever they should have gotten in the way, making it look almost like a kid who had gotten a copy of Photoshop for the first time was playing with the transform tool. The fabric even looked zoomed in on, though the opposite was clearly true – it had become much larger instead. This was yet another thing his wife found rather hilarious, and Grace would often poke at his clothes when they got all over-sized like that.
While he was grateful his wife found it funny instead of disturbing, Bob often found himself embarrassed as a result. Later he was trying to trim the trees in his backyard, and instead of stretching his arms and legs as he was trying to, he stretched only his torso, making him simultaneously look dwarfish and ridiculously tall. In the process of trying to fix his bizarre transformation, Bob shrunk his torso to normal and then shrunk his legs, then grew his arms, with his legs still short. He then managed to get his body back to normal size, only to have his legs be over-sized and his arms shrink. Finally he stretched his whole body at once and managed to grow to the size he wanted and start pruning his trees, trying really hard not to notice his wife cackling on their back porch and trying not to fall over from laughing too hard.
A few days after that embarrassment, Bob was shopping with his wife at the grocery store, and after reaching a good dozen feet down the aisle to grab the item she asked for, had a hard time shrinking his arm back to normal, and was unable to figure it out until they were nearly back to his truck. He was quite glad that he didn't have to drive home with an arm nearly the size of his truck bed, but it was still rather awkward navigating the checkout aisle with an over-sized arm and watching everyone check him out.
The whole way home Grace teased him mercilessly, and cackled about the way different people reacted to his over-sized arm just held over his head trying not to run into anyone or anything. As they were trying to unload the groceries into the house he caught something that fell on his foot... and then proceeded to nearly kick a hole into the wall on the other side of the room before he brought his foot back.
It took a few months after that fateful day at the marble quarry, but he finally got control of his abilities, and even started to have some finesse in using them. And as he started rescuing overly adventurous kittens from tree branches and occasionally fixed the time on clock towers, his wife tried to get him to wear a bright pink onesie with “Stretch Armstrong” written on the front that she bought as a joke off the internet. His particular entry on our list might have been full of awkwardness and scenes straight out of a horror movie, but at least nobody got hurt in the process.