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  For Annie and Sam, The two best friends I’ve ever seen

  CHAPTER 1

  NEW AND IMPROVED

  Lin chewed, swallowed, then opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. Specks and crumbs from Fruity Stars cereal covered it like glitter.

  “Five minutes and eleven seconds. I’m not sure it’s a world record, but I’m impressed,” I said to Lin as I checked my stopwatch.

  “I bet it is a world record. How do we find out?” Lin asked as she dusted cereal crumbs off the front of her shirt. “Should we call the Fruity Stars cereal company? I bet they’d know.”

  “We’ll write down the time and call them later. Right now, we need to turn that box into a new lab for the Microterium. Remember?” I said. I held out my hand for Lin to pass me the box.

  “Of course I remember. I just think that setting a world record for fastest time ever for eating a whole box of cereal, without milk even, is something pretty special,” Lin said. She handed me the box.

  “Absolutely. And I promise we’ll look into it. But for now, it’s construction time,” I said as I placed the box on the kitchen table. “Marker.”

  Lin dug through my backpack and found a blue marker. She handed it to me. “My lips are all chappy and my cheeks are sore on the insides of my mouth.”

  I measured the center of the box and drew a square where I would be cutting a hole for the front door to the new Fruity Stars Lab. “Hazards of the job, I guess,” I said. “Scissors.”

  Lin pulled a pair of scissors from the caddy on the table and handed them to me, handles first. Not only is Lin an excellent cereal muncher, she is the best lab assistant I’ve ever met. I used the scissors to cut a perfectly straight door hole, then I bent it open, creasing a hinge in the cardboard so it would open and shut.

  “Will you please hand me that masking tape?” I said to Lin.

  “Thure…” Lin said. I looked at her to see her tongue was lolling out of her mouth. “My thongue ith sthwollen up. Ith thath mormal?”

  I laughed—I couldn’t help it—which made Lin a little angry. “I’m theriouth, Danny. It’th puffing up like a balloon,” Lin said. Lin pinched her tongue and held it out as far as she could, trying to see it over her nose.

  I reached for the tape myself. “I’m sure you’ll be fine. Your tongue just did a big workout session. It probably needs a rest. Maybe have a glass of milk or something,” I said.

  “Thath’th a good ithea,” Lin said. It made me laugh again and I kind of put the tape on crooked, but it was fine. Hearing Lin talk with her tongue hanging out of her mouth was totally worth a crooked piece of tape.

  I could hear Lin digging through the fridge as I added a few more details to the Fruity Stars cereal box. I cut two windows in the top of the box to let in some light. Then I pinched the top of the roof into a triangle, like Professor Penrod had done with the first cereal box. The original held up fine for a while, but after Lin and I introduced a few rowdy Microsaurs to the Microterium, the box was pretty much destroyed.

  “The milk helpths, but I think thith thrawberry thoda will be even better,” Lin said. She leaned around the fridge door and showed me a half-empty bottle of red, sugary soda.

  “Thure thing. Thelp thourthelf,” I said.

  “Ha-ha, very thunny, Danny,” Lin said. She unscrewed the cap and drank right from the bottle.

  Just then, my phone started to buzz and beep. Looking around, I dug under papers until I found it buried beneath the plans I’d drawn earlier for the new lab. A notification had popped up, and I swiped the screen to check it out.

  “Looks like we have exactly four hours and fifty-three minutes until Professor Penrod returns,” I said.

  “That’s tons of time,” Lin said. She put the bottle back in the fridge. “And hey, look. I’m cured! Strawberry soda to the rescue!”

  I had a feeling Lin had waited her whole life to shout that. “Tons of time for what?” I asked.

  “To go to the zoo,” Lin said.

  “The zoo?” I asked. “Don’t you mean the Microterium?”

  “Sure, but the zoo, too. Remember? It’s the last day of Junior Zookeeper’s Class. And it’s only the most important day. We’re talking about FOOD, and I want to show my Microbites to Annie and Sam. I bet they will want to buy my recipe to feed to their animals. Hey. Maybe even other humans, too. They are pretty good,” Lin said.

  “I have to agree, I’m kind of addicted to them. Especially when you add raisins,” I said.

  “I always add raisins,” Lin said. “Everyone knows triceratops love raisins.”

  “Well, how about this? We stop by the Microterium first. We remove what’s left of the old Fruity Stars Lab and replace it with this masterpiece,” I said as I showed the completed cereal box lab to Lin.

  “Awesome. The Fruity Stars Lab, Part Two: The Reckoning,” Lin said, and I tilted my head.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing. It was a scary movie I saw once. I don’t even know what it means, but it sounds good,” Lin said.

  “We’ll keep working on it,” I said. “Besides, we need to check on Pizza and Cornelia. Last night was their first night alone in the Microterium.” Since they hatched, they’ve been staying with one of us in the mint case at night. “It was a big night for them, and I wanna make sure they are okay.”

  “For sure. I’ll grab them some snacks, too,” Lin said.

  I started stuffing things in my backpack as Lin grabbed her Microbites and some pepperoni slices, and chunked up some corn-dog parts for the Microsaurs. Once my pack was all stuffed and Lin’s pockets were crammed with plastic bags full of snacks, I checked Professor Penrod’s progress on my phone one more time.

  “Four hours, forty-four minutes, and forty-four seconds,” I said.

  “No way! That’s gotta be lucky, right?” Lin said.

  “I don’t really think numbers are lucky,” I said.

  “Well, they can be. And that many fours all strung together has got to be lucky,” Lin said as she snapped the strap of her skateboard helmet under her chin. “It’s gonna be a good day, Danny.”

  “The best,” I said as we tied the box containing the Fruity Stars Lab 2.0 onto Lin’s skateboard using a bungee cord we found in my garage. Then we push-pulled it as fast as we could toward the greatest place on earth—Professor Penrod’s supersecret, hidden-away, tiny-dinosaur-filled Microterium.

  CHAPTER 2

  SLIDING INTO PLACE

  If you take a map of our town and use a ruler to draw a straight line from my house to the zoo, your pencil would go right through the Microterium.

  Despite her added package, Lin made it to Penrod’s first, squeezing through the iron gate that surrounded the house. I chased after her, the tall grass of the backyard tickling my legs as I ran toward the old barn that contained the professor’s lab.

  “
This shouldn’t take long,” I said to Lin as she threw the door open.

  Blinking, we paused to let our eyes adjust. The professor’s barn-lab was dark inside. Come to think of it, it was more of a collector’s room than an actual laboratory, which were usually bright so you don’t miss any of the science. Dinosaur bones, old books, and chemistry supplies were scattered about, and photos of Professor Penrod’s adventures were tucked all around in tiny frames he made himself. But the real magic of the barn-lab was hidden behind a picture of his childhood dog. If you didn’t know the secret, you’d never guess that with one simple twist, the whole wall lowers into the floor, revealing the Microterium.

  “That never gets old,” I said as I laid my eyes on the Microterium. Large glass windows in the roof of the barn let in plenty of sunlight, and Professor Penrod had designed the place so perfectly it looked like the world’s greatest science fair diorama.

  “Totally,” Lin said, then she took three big steps into the Microterium itself, heading toward the destroyed Fruity Stars Lab.

  “Be careful,” I warned, even though I knew that was a silly thing to say. Sure, Lin was the type of girl who would jump off a two-story building onto an old slippery slide while riding a skateboard and juggling three wild kittens, but she was also the type of person who could tiptoe around in a dense garden of leaves and grass without harming a single flea. Or, in our case, a single Microsaur.

  “So, this place is a pretty big mess inside, too,” Lin said as she stood up holding what was left of the old lab in her hands. “It looks like everything is scattered around and all messed up. There are teeny-tiny books everywhere.”

  “Oh boy. I had a feeling that would happen,” I said. Being the tiny descendants of ancient dinosaurs that once ruled the planet didn’t really prepare the Microsaurs for being neat and tidy. Holding the new Fruity Stars cereal box, I took three careful steps toward Lin to inspect the mess. “You’re right. It looks like your bedroom.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Lin said, and we both laughed. We both knew her bedroom was a natural disaster.

  I carefully placed the new cereal box right where the old box had been. I didn’t want to accidentally smash any of Professor Penrod’s equipment. Especially the Expand-O-Matic! The machine the professor had invented to unshrink you after a visit into the Microterium seemed sturdy and big when you were the size of a Microsaur, but now that Lin and I were normal-sized it looked super fragile.

  “So, now what? Do you have tweezers or something that we can use to put all the stuff back in the new lab?” Lin asked. “Or are we gonna shrink down and do it? And, I don’t know, maybe play with the Microsaurs for a few minutes while we’re at it?”

  I looked at Lin and gave her a crooked smile. “Uh, yeah, we’re going to shrink down. Of course.”

  “Yes! I knew it!” Lin nearly flew back to the barn, leaving me alone in the Microterium. “Shrinking is my favorite part,” she said. “Well, riding Zip-Zap is my actual favorite, but you have to be little to do that, so yeah. It’s all my favorite, I guess.”

  “Well, I think I have something new that will be your favorite part,” I said.

  “Really, what is it? Are we going to ride Pizza and Cornelia?” Lin asked.

  “Nope,” I said. I pulled off my backpack and set it on the floor.

  “Are we going to go swimming with Honk-Honk again? That was pretty amazing,” Lin said.

  “It was amazing, but I’m not so sure I want to wear soggy clothes to the zoo. Besides, this is even better,” I said as I removed something new from my backpack.

  “Are we going to fly with Twiggy again? Get chased by Bruno? What, tell me!” Lin said.

  “We’re going to try out my new invention, the Slide-A-Riffic.” I showed my new contraption to Lin.

  It was simple in concept—basically just sliding down a string—but I’d had to really think about how to make it work. The basket that would hold Lin and me was made from an old chewable vitamins bottle that I’d carved down to be just the right size. I’d looped two used guitar strings through a system of gears and pulleys I had connected to the vitamin bottle with my Plastic Interlocking Building Blocks, PIBBs for short, a new interlocking block system my dad and I were inventing. And finally, I wrapped the strings around two old toothbrushes I wasn’t using anymore, then hammered the toothbrushes deep into the soil to hold things in place. All in all, I was darned proud of the new invention, and I couldn’t wait to try it out.

  “What does it do?” Lin asked.

  “Well, you know how it only takes three steps to get to the Fruity Stars Lab when we’re big?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Lin said, her eyes getting wide.

  “And it takes like an hour to climb over the hills and mountains when we are tiny-sized, right?” I said.

  “Yeah. Even if we get rides from the Microsaurs it takes a long time. Go on. I’m listening,” Lin said.

  “Well, now that I have this pulley system down by the Fruity Stars Lab, all I have to do is hook this transit retaining arm to the big metal step in the barn, and…” I said before Lin broke in.

  “And then we climb in the little white tub thingy and zip on these metal strings all the way down to the lab in like half a second,” Lin said. Her eyes were so wide I thought she might pop.

  “Well, if my calculations are correct, it’ll be more like thirty seconds, but still, it’ll be fast and easy,” I said.

  “Oh my GOSH! Hook it up, Danny. Let’s give it a try. You put your new Slide-A-Riffic in place, and we’ll meet on the metal step! GO!” Lin said.

  I double-checked to make sure everything was set up nice and secure, then looked up to see that Lin was already standing on the metal step that worked like an on switch, sending the shrinking potion through a series of tubes and out the spray nozzle above. I jumped onto the metal step, joining Lin, and our combined weight was enough to start the process. In no time at all we were the size of ants, running toward the new Slide-A-Riffic.

  I climbed in first, then gave Lin a hand to pull her inside the basket with me.

  “It smells like vitamins,” Lin said, taking a big sniff. “I like that a lot!”

  “It’s a feature,” I said with a smile. Then, putting on my best announcer voice, I said, “Welcome, Slide-A-Riffic riders of all ages. Please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Hold tight and enjoy your ride. Ready?”

  Lin nodded, and I wrapped my hands around a blue plastic lever and gave it a yank to release the Slide-A-Riffic.

  Lin raised her hands over her head and started to shout as the slide began to roll.

  I think she was expecting a faster ride, because we hadn’t moved hardly at all before she lowered her hands and turned back to me with a quizzical look on her face. “Is this as fast as it’s going to go?” she asked.

  I shrugged, totally happy with the speed we were moving. There was a nice breeze, and the view was amazing as we soared along high in the air.

  “Okay. It’s slow, but it’s still awesome,” Lin said.

  “This is my idea of riding in style,” I said, but as we slid farther away from the step, the little plastic pulley wheels started rolling faster and faster. With every inch of the guitar string that we traveled, the Slide-A-Riffic picked up speed, which was totally not what I had planned. “Um, Lin. I think I forgot something,” I admitted.

  “What?” Lin said. She was hanging out over the front of the basket, her arms stretched out as if she were trying to take flight.

  “Brakes!” I shouted as the Slide-A-Riffic began zooming toward the ground.

  “Yeeeeeee-haaaaah!” Lin shouted at the very tip-top of her adventure-seeking voice.

  As we zoomed over the hill, the Slide-A-Riffic basket swayed as it brushed against the tops of the trees. We picked up more momentum and we barely slowed down as we burst through branches, knocking leaves and twigs in every direction. We popped out of the little grove of trees, and I braced for impact.

  The bottom of
the Slide-A-Riffic crashed into the soft earth of the Microterium, leaving behind a dark scar of mud beneath the grass. We bounced back up, and for a quiet moment I heard nothing but the air rushing by again. Then we slammed to the ground again. Lin and I were both thrown from the basket, and we rolled over and over until we tumbled to a stop.

  “That was…” I started, then Lin took over.

  “The most amazing Slide-A-Riffic ride in the history of the world!” Lin jumped up.

  “Also … the first. And probably the last,” I said. My hand went to the back of my head. I found a lump as big as a robin’s egg, and my rear end felt like I had landed on a rock the size of a grapefruit.

  I checked. I had.

  “Are you kidding me? We’re going to do it again right now,” Lin said. “This time you ride in front. It is a much better view up front.”

  “Uh, the answer you’re looking for is somewhere between ‘no thanks’ and ‘never again as long as I live,’” I said. “Besides, we have a lot to do today. We’ll try it again as soon as I can figure out a braking system. What was I thinking?”

  “All right, but I get to control the brakes,” Lin said.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen, either,” I said as I stood up and dusted off my pants.

  CHAPTER 3

  OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW

  The sun was shining down on the brightly colored cereal box as Lin pointed to the new lab. “It looks pretty good. Professor Penrod will be surprised.”

  The new Fruity Stars Lab cereal box didn’t just look good, it looked great. It was nice to see it without any holes in it—except the ones that were supposed to be there, of course.

  “Let’s go check it out,” I said.