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All of this had happened during a school holiday period. Colleen was a science and English teacher at the school in the village, and had used her advanced knowledge of science to build the reducing machine.

School went back, and Colleen, whose last name was Balfour, decided to confide in her best friend Frances Woodfield, who was a mathematics and cooking teacher at the school. They went to a far part of a playground and sat on a seat near the bushes, and Colleen told Frances everything that had happened.

One of her year 7 students named Henry was already playing hide and seek, and had chosen the very bushes near their seat to hide in. He heard the entire conversation and could hardly believe his ears.

“You actually ate him!” said Frances, “It’s amazing, and your secret’s safe with me.”

“That’s taken as read,” said Colleen, and raised a strawberry to her opening mouth.

Henry watched as her tongue extended far out of her mouth, saw her lower the strawberry onto it and draw it into her mouth. It was the most exciting thing he had ever seen, when combined with the revelation that she had done the same thing to a shrunken person.

After school that day, he secretly followed her home from school at a distance, to learn where Miss Balfour lived, and presumably, learn the location of her machine.

 

Months later, when the next school holiday period started, he bought a bottle of hair dye, and changed the colour of his hair, and fashioned a simple lock pick from a piece of wire, having seen a fictional character on television do something similar once.

When nightfall came, he made his way to Colleen’s house and lay down on the lawn outside in the dark, until he awoke in the middle of the night, certain that she had now fallen asleep. He quietly went to work on one of her door locks, and was able to gain entry to the house. There was a full moon that night. So he could do everything he needed in the house, relying only on the moonlight shining through the windows. There was no need to turn a light on. He looked in 2 rooms, before he found her machine. After experimenting with the buttons for a few minutes, he was able to operate it reliably. He took some string from his pocket and tied pieces to the on and off switches, and then held them both and pulled the on switch. It reduced him, but reduced the string as well, so that he was lifted off the ground and up to the switches, by the time he was sufficiently reduced. So he simply turned the off switch manually. Then he pulled the string off, climbed back down to the carpet, and hid the string under the couch.

"She's never been able to catch a leprechaun before, and had to settle for eating her shrunken boyfriend. If she catches me too easily, she might guess what I've done," he thought, "I want to make her believe that I am a Leprechaun. Since I'm tired now anyway, I can fall asleep on the carpet in the lounge room. Then when she arrives, she will think that I am a sleeping Leprechaun, and believe that it was her first opportunity to catch one."

He lay down on the soft thick carpet, and dozed off into a deep sleep.

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