May 2006.

One Friday afternoon, Stefan made another of his tests. He would always use the shrinking tablet first, and then make use of the growth tablet if he’d gotten it to work. If the shrinking tablet failed, he’d not be game to try the growth tablet for fear of becoming too conspicuously large with no way to immediately reverse it until more experimentation had been done. For all his months of testing, neither had ever worked.

Once again, Stefan waited for the laboratory room to empty and then took the shrinking tablet. Once again it seemed as though nothing would result of all his hard work. He gave a sigh of disappointment, and began to pack up his books, and tightened the strap on his backpack, while it was still resting on the laboratory table.

Then to his surprise, he found himself beginning to shrink...

Stefan continued to shrink slowly. He looked across at the laboratory table top, which was now just a few inches above his eye level. He instinctively remembered that his growth tablet had been packed away in a small container in his backpack, which was on the table. He reached up blindly, feeling about with his hands for the backpack.

However, he was still shrinking, and found that the backpack was out of his reach.

Now he was only the height of the laboratory stool.

Stefan continued dwindling in size. He was looking around the undersides of the laboratory table, wondering if he had any way of climbing the legs to the table top and tugging at the zip of his backpack, to get it open and retrieve the growth chemical.

What an over anxious amateur he had been. He had not even considered the ramifications of the possibility of the shrinking tablet working, if the growth tablet did not. He wanted desperately to climb to the table and give himself the piece of mind of restoring his size, since he had no idea whether or not such restoration would be possible.

At last his seemingly endless reduction came to an end. Stefan’s size stabilized at a height of 1 ¾ inches and a width of less than an inch. The distant table top might have been the height of a skyscraper building away from him now. Even if he could climb up onto the stool, which looked unlikely, he would not be able to reach the table top from there. The distance would still be too great for a boy who was less than two inches tall.

Suddenly Mrs Robertson opened the door and entered the room. He darted behind a table leg, but his clear line of sight towards her entry made it most likely that she had been able to see him too, if she had been looking slightly downward with her peripheral vision. If his science teacher learned of his experiments, she might not let him retain the patents to them. With her current size advantage, she could easily take over his work and claim the credit for it, not that he had ever planned to reveal his inventions to anyone but his closest female friends.