Murray tried to make sense of it, and remembered the Dimension Shift of the other village. Had his attempts to time travel somehow caused the destination time and place school to Dimension Shift into the giant land and enlarge?

He then realised that this was the least credible explanation, because there had been no such incidents recorded in Kayla’s journal, which covered a period before the start of the other village’s Dimension Shift. If time travelling caused Dimension Shift, then it would have happened back in the days when all of those students had disappeared.

The only other logical explanation was that time travelling seemed to cause a person to reduce dramatically in size.

Murray had reached the correct conclusion, but did not know that it only happened to people who time travelled through the period of time which had been affected by the Ring of Reversal’s interaction with residual radiation from Colleen Balfour’s use of her shrinking devices. As far as Murray knew, he had just discovered the reason for the disappearances of Sandra Corlani’s other Time Class students. Perhaps they had come across the legendary leprechauns of the meadow and become honorary citizens amongst them, being unable to restore their sizes and return to their own times either. Some of the leprechauns had the power to turn invisible, while others were as unable to perform such a feat as Murray himself.

Murray thought about attempting to reverse the process part of the way. If he could send his consciousness forward in time only thirteen years instead of fifteen, then he would not be in the widow’s oven, but be able to go with Trudi’s original suggestion to inhabit his body at the time of their bushwalk towards the portal to giant land and talk her out of it.

He tried to do it, but apparently the journey was a one way trip. There was no way to mentally go forward in time, and hence no way to be back in a full sized body. Murray was now tiny sized for the rest of his life.

He still had one strong hope to hold out for though. He was in love with Trudi Northumberland, knew her address, and had seven available years of her being single, with which to explore the possibility of her allowing herself to be romanced by a shrunken fan.

The most immediate pressing problem was how to get to her house. He was stuck in a schoolyard watching girls talking after school under a tree. He couldn’t do anything without asking somebody for help. He walked over to the girls and explained that he was one of their fellow students, shrunken as a side effect of an experiment he’d been doing for homework for his science class. He asked if one of the girls would be willing to take him home on her own way home from school. The girl agreed to help and asked for his address.

And he gave her the address that Trudi had told him about, while the he and Trudi had been trapped in the giant widow’s oven and planning his preventative escape through time.