Opportunity: Nia Shrinks
Story:
“Yes, I believe that will be sufficient” Melia said on her video call with the queen of Agnus. “With those schematics your engineers have drawn up, our half of the project should be finished on schedule.”
“Oh schedule. Good.” Nia replied. “Now all that we have left to do is…” Nia trailed off, thinking about how much work was still left to do on both ends of the project.
“Um, Nia.” Melia’s voice came across the call again. “I believe you have a visitor.”
“Huh?” Nia turned around, only to find Mythra, charging a glowing green spell from her core crystal.
“Oh bloody hell!” Nia exclaimed as a burst of green light shone out from the aegis core, striking Nia dead in the chest. Almost immediately, she felt her body compress, growing smaller and smaller.
Once Nia was shrunken to a ridiculously small size, Mythra stopped her magic. “Yes!” Mythra pumped her fist in victory. “Might want to think twice next time you think you can take me, Nia.” Apparently satisfied, Mythra turned on her heel and walked back out the door, likely to brag about her success.
Climbing up onto the table to be in view of the camera, Nia addressed her fellow queen, growing red in the face. “Um, one moment Melia. I’ve got to go catch Mythra so she can grow me back to size. I’ll be back in a moment, hopefully in less of a… small stature.”
“Not to worry my friend.” Melia had a look of familiarity in her eyes, as if she had experienced the same thing herself. “Go. We can finish our meeting later.” As Nia jumped off the table, Melia resisted the urge to laugh. Apparently size shenanigans she herself had been through weren’t exclusive to the Bionis after all.
Notes:
This project started out a lot more ambitious. At first I wanted to have Melia pick up a discord call with Nia and then have the entire animation take place exclusively through the lens of a webcam mounted on their computer where a webcam would normally be mounted. But as I was working, I realized that it would take a massive amount more work to make Melia’s section as well, and it would be really difficult to fit everything in frame if I had to work from a single camera that was locked in place. In the end I decided to scrap the idea, and just focus on one side.
Speaking of the other side, Melia was actually planned to shrink as well. This was intended to be a sequel to both “Mythra’s Shrinking Swordfight” and “Monado Shrink II”. In Melia’s side, Shulk was supposed to walk in with the Monado, trip on the floor, and have the Monado accidentally activate the shrinking art, shrinking Melia. I still think it’s a cool sequence and I might end up doing it sometime in the future.
I know it’s hard to see, but I want to say how awesome Nia’s clamber animation is. It looks so cool how she picks herself up on the table. I really wanted to focus on it more, but unfortunately I think it would have broken the flow of the animation to do so. Having it be hard to see adds to the idea of how small Nia is, that it’s hard to even see what she’s doing.
Mythra’s animation looks okay. I like how she peeks in the door, and how she sidesteps into frame. Everything after that is a bit meh though. Her laser beam shot isn’t the greatest, and her fist pump looks pretty rough. One idea I had was to have her do some sort of super exaggerated pop off instead, but I realized it would have been too much work to animate for something relegated to the background.
I briefly considered adding sound to this animation, but after looking at the hundreds of unlabeled voice clips from Nia alone (yes, I think just her spoiler voice clips total a few hundred) I realized it was far more effort than it was worth. Maybe some other time.