“OK! Let’s have you do a few more tricks, maybe just get as much air as you can, maybe some grabs, whatever you’re feeling!” the director of the photo shoot said.
Lank smiled and dropped into the halfpipe. “No problem!” The kobold didn’t necessarily have the height you might expect from a celebrity, standing just four feet tall, but as a skateboarder, his low center of gravity worked in his favor.
He’d developed a bit of a grassroots following, and his popularity just kept growing. Now, he was finally going to be on a major magazine cover — definitely a high point in his career so far. They’d picked a great background for it, too, setting up a temporary skatepark on Santa Monica Pier.
Lank played up a cocky, easygoing character for the cameras, but internally, he was completely focused. He wanted this shoot to be perfect. It probably wouldn’t be a big deal if he messed up a trick, but he wasn’t taking any of his recent success for granted. And the pier was crowded today — he didn’t want to let any of his fans down!
The kobold built up speed on the halfpipe, leveraging the physics of the board, the ramp and his body until he finally had enough to launch himself high into the air over the rim of the halfpipe. Grab the board… one rotation… two rotations… land it cleanly… 720, easy. No sweat.
Lank heard the camera shutters click and the crowd erupt into cheers. The hard part was done. But he couldn’t help himself — he completed a few more passes on the halfpipe before doing one more trick, reaching behind him in midair to execute a nosegrab (the board, not his actual snout).
It was a slightly simpler trick, but still looked cool, and still got a big reaction from the crowd. Lank went to put his feet back on the board as it was about to make contact with the halfpipe and… missed. His back foot slipped off the board and he wiped out, hard, sending his board flying as he slid down the curved slope of the pipe.
“And that’s why you wear a helmet, kids!” he said, trying to laugh it off. (His lesson was undercut, perhaps, by his inability to find a helmet that fit over the huge horn on his head.)
Lank went to pick up his board and hop back on it, but as he did, he realized it seemed… smaller. He could barely fit both paws onto the board if he stood with his feet together. And moments later, he couldn’t even do that!
He fell off the board again, but this time everyone knew it wasn’t a mistake — the kobold was growing, and quickly at that. His four feet of height became forty in an instant, and his upward surge didn’t stop until it was over four hundred!
Lank froze in place, struggling to comprehend what had happened. He wasn’t shrinking back to normal, and his mind raced through the implications, anxiety building. He surveyed his environment, kneeling to get a closer look. His heart began to race and adrenaline coursed through him. He had to answer to his fans and to the cameras below as a giant… and in that moment, he realized that calling himself a giant felt good. Fear gave way to excitement, and he smirked. He intended to embrace his new self.
By that point, Lank’s enormous paw had utterly flattened the skatepark, making it impossible for him to do any more tricks even if he were able to at this size. But the wheels in his head were still spinning. “Wait, I can make this work!” he shouted and sprang into action.
Plenty of vehicles around Santa Monica Pier had been brought in for the shoot, and Lank quickly tracked down the ones that would work for his idea — cars or trucks with trailer hitches or roof racks. “Gonna borrow these for now!” he bellowed with exuberance. Then he grabbed a nearby billboard and set to work putting it all together.
The kobold had always wanted to be on a billboard, and now he was going to be… just in a different way than he’d dreamed. The billboard would be his skateboard, and the vehicles below would be the wheels. Once he was satisfied with his work, he began bounding down the beach and through the streets of Santa Monica, keeping his eagerness in check just enough to make sure he didn’t crush any people or vehicles under his heavy paws.
The sight of the city around and below him was exhilarating. He could see larger buildings when he looked inland, but the tallest one nearby didn’t even reach his shoulder. Even the speed at which he moved made him feel like a kaiju — footsteps took much longer to fall from over a hundred times higher than before. I’m like Lankzilla!, he thought. Nah, that would get me sued. Um, Titan? King Kobold. Gargantua. Kobold Kolossus. Gargantua the Kobold Kolossus. That’s a start. I’ll workshop it later with the PR people!
The director shrugged her shoulders and hopped into a car. “Follow that kobold!” she shouted. Fortunately, they had a drone that could fly ahead and get shots of the colossal coverboy once he reached his destination. And that didn’t take long: Lank finally slowed down as he reached the canyons just north of the city.
The kobold was filled with a mixture of excitement and nervousness he hadn’t felt since he’d first started learning how to skate. Would it work? He carefully balanced the billboard on the edge of the deepest canyon and dropped in.
He was wobbly at first — the rough terrain would make for a bumpy ride on even the most ideal of boards — to say nothing of the makeshift billboard he was wrangling. But the reptile soon got the hang of things, and as a crowd of fans began to gather on the edge of the canyon, he started doing the same sorts of tricks he was doing out on the pier. The extra time he had for every motion from his sheer scale offset the time it took to move his own enormity. It was as if he were skating in bullet time!
The kobold grinned and struck a midair pose. The cheering crowd kept growing, soon far exceeding the number of people who had watched him on the beach. Hundreds of camera flashes lit up the southern California sky as the giant performed trick after trick against the backdrop of a setting sun, his confident expression barely masking his sense of wonder and pride each time he looked down at his fans.
Lank had figured this would be his opportunity to strike it big. He just never expected to strike it this big.
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