Episode 17: The 1/8 Project
(featuring The 1/8 Humans)
Ultra Q's version of :"Land of the Giants".
Intrigued by a sign annoucing "The 1/8 Project's third open applications", Edogawa, Yuriko decides to check out this "1/8 Project". She learns it a plan to reduce over crowding in over populated cities by shrinking people to 1/8 normal size so they and their district take up far less space. She declines to take part in this scheme but there are so many people interested that she gets swept up with them and finds herself, against her wishs, shrunken to 1/8 her normal size. In this new society people do not have names they are numbers. P103924 is welcomed by the "Welfare Committe" but then two normal sized men appear to arresst her for "trasspassing" as she did not go through the proper channels and endered this new society without a passport. She protestests that she never wanted to enter it at all. But they say "the law is the law" and they put her inside a case to carry her off to jail. She is put in a normal sized cell with a man who is too big for the current shrinking machine, he's there waiting for a new machine to shrink him. He wants to be shrunk because at his normal size he can never get enough to eat and figures if he's smaller it will be easier to feed him all he wants. He agree to help her escape in exchange for her promise to bring him a bick steak dinner. He ties his suspenders to the case to lower it out the cell window. But her case falls into a stream and as it floats away Yuriko is endanger of drowning as water seeps in. Some boys take the case out of the water but before they can open it a couple of nuns who read the "DIstrict S13 Committee" label on the case take it from the boys planning to return it to "District S13" but Yuriko hears the nuns talking to the taxi driver and beg them to take her to "Hoshikawa Airport" (where Manjome, Jun and Togawa, Ippei work). The nuns leave the case in their office but the men are not there. And worse than that. she finds a photo of herself, drapped in black. Her friends think she is dead! When he friends arrive she hides behind her photo. Ippei finds the case but neither her nor Jun realize that "DIstrict S13 Committee" refers to the "1/8 Project". Ippei ties a bunch of helium balloons to the hande of the case. He talks to the photo not realizing Yurkio is behind it. Jun wants him to throw the photo away so he will stop thinking about Yurkio. He doen't or he'd have found her. After Jun receives a phone call, he and Ippei leave on a job. Yurkio with some difficulty makes a phone call after they are gone to her boss, but he doesn't believe it is her and says "I don't have time to talk to ghosts" before hanging up. Picking up a pencil, which is almost as big as she is, she scribbles off a goodbye not on a giant peace of paper. In the next scene the case it flying around outisde. How Yurkiko got it outdoors and why the helieum beloves made it fload outdoors, with her extra weight inside the audience is not show.
Later, traffice in a conjested city known as "DIstrict S13" is brought to a hault by the appearance of two "giants", Jun and Ippei. So "The 1/8 Project" is a failure after all, too many tiny people in the same place. They walk around the city, scaring its 1/8 sized inhabitants caling "Yuriko-chan!' Fortunantly for Jun and Ippei this minature city didn't get around for building a minature military. They find her but she won't go with them because she thinks all her friends abandoned her. She runs away and is knocked down by the crowed of people fleeing the giants. Later, Jun and Ippei go to visit Yuriko who is in the hospital after falling down a flight of stairs. When she awakens and sees them she is so happy the chosse to be shrunk too. While she is looking out the window and still going on about everything being small but the same, Jun sends Ippei to get the doctor. Its obvious they think she's gone crazy. So the entire episode was a dream.
‹THE END›
