As a teenager, Percy helped the local church people to set up a small Saturday evening restaurant at the church, using its coffee room under the different name of Bite Delight. For some months the restaurant was a successful venue for Christian musicians to entertain diners; and provided a chance for guest speakers to preach the word of God to an audience who might be unlikely to attend the Sunday church services. The serenity of this atmosphere was soon disrupted by a gang of teenage vandals, who did everything they could to destroy the work of the church. On some occasions they would deliberately pretend to accidentally knock cups or plates off the tables, causing them to shatter on the floor. They would find numerous other ways of vandalising church property, and also chose to walk into the restaurant smoking marijuana at their leisure. Percy was terribly frightened of them; and the church people made frequent telephone calls to the local police station.

Too often it was the same story: The police would arrive long after the vandals had left, and nobody knew their names. Percy even saw them during the daytime on a Saturday afternoon, when to his disgust, they followed him around tearing down the restaurant advertisement posters for Bite Delight, that he had been sticking up around the local area with the permission of the local council. He had to watch his efforts being ripped to shreds and thrown into garbage bins, merely to appease the paltry machinations of the simple skulls that rested upon their excessively powerful shoulders. He eventually gave it away, and decided to seek the permission of shop assistants, to stick his posters up inside the shop windows. That had defeated the vandals, for the moment.

There was one delightful night when they failed to put in an appearance. It seemed that they had found other pastures to pervert on this one Saturday night of reprieve, after so many awful experiences. Percy, who usually stayed indoors in the restaurant in order to avoid being bullied by the vandals, decided to talk to the people who were congregating under the moonlight in the gardens of the church. If the vandals returned that night, to keep up their weekly record of destructive achievements, he could always head for the door, as soon as he saw them coming; but for the moment he would be happy. As he approached a group of teenage boys and girls, he saw one more reason to perhaps be happier: a beautiful girl, whose incredible full shapely lips and greater height all unwittingly played up to the giantess vore fantasy which had grown much stronger in his mind with the onset of adolescence. She had a  haughty confident look, which made her far more arousing than any of the other ladies who had been in his hopes and dreams in the past. The irony was that it would also most likely make her unwilling to match their friendliness and interest in him.

The girl was very pretty, and almost as tall as Jenny would probably have grown to be by that stage in his teenage life.

Ingrid Castlecove's haughty dignified penetrating beauty had an arousing glamour, which made him instantly wish that she was already in love with him and willing and able to shrink and eat him. He attempted to meet the impression she gave him with an artificially confident dignity of his own, as they exchanged their full names. (Days later, he would use the surname to find the only Castlecove of Wahroonga in the telephone book).

He reached to stroke her hair uninvited, hoping to convey a sense of bravery, but this fell to pieces, when he could think of no appropriate words with which to accompany the gesture.

"You're a little short to be attempting something so bold, aren't you?" she said with a carefree attempt to tease him.

"I like big tall girls," he said with a truth that nearly contradicted the falsity of his feigned show of confidence.

Her greater height (already six feet) would make her the most amazing giantess of all, if he was reduced to tiny size. She was already taller than him.

"I like sweets," she said, contemptuously dipping her hand into his open pocket, which she had noticed to be full of lollies.

"Have some," he offered, wondering if it had the slightest chance of impressing her.

"I intend to," she said, removing a huge handful that almost entirely exhausted his supplies. Ingrid used her free hand to put one of them into her mouth, and then transferred the rest of them to her own pocket.

The sight of her mouth receiving the lolly drove him wild, and the last thing he could do was tell her why, lest he be surely laughed out of her life.

It had been easy for girls to do things like that to him in those days. The teenage Percy had to let her take his lollies with a ninety-nine per cent certainty that it would not make the slightest improvement on his chances of attracting her.

"I don't suppose those sweets would be worth a sweet kiss," he suggested.

"They might be worth it, but you aren't," she mocked.

She took out another of his lollies, and kissed it.

"There!" she said, and ate the lolly.

What little remained of his forced confidence was blown to bits, as she saw him burst into tears. She seemed to enjoy this and smiled cruelly at him before laughing in a way that made her seem as beautiful as she was unkind. She would have flattered herself with the thought that he had run into the church, because he could not face up to any more of her taunting. The truth was that his tearful eyes had seen the approach of the vandals.

*          *          *          *

Later that evening in Percy's teenage years, the church people closed the restaurant and went to Wahroonga's all night service station to buy some cold drinks for themselves. Percy enjoyed his drink and then walked home. As he passed the church, he saw that the vandals were smoking cigarettes in the church gardens, and allowing their cigarette lighters to burn the leaves a little before putting out their miniature fires with the church hose.

"I hear you made a pass at my girlfriend tonight," said the tallest of them, blocking Percy's path. He was an inch taller than Ingrid had been.

"Who is your girlfriend?" asked Percy.

"She pointed you out to us when you took off, just as we arrived," said the boy, "She is Ingrid Castlecove."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I did not know that she had a boyfriend. I guess you're very lucky that she likes you," said Percy.

"And you would be lucky not to get pounded, if you didn't come to this restaurant ever again."

"I work here with the church," said Percy, "and the police won't like what you have done to our leaves."

"I've had enough of you!" said the boy, jarring Percy's shoulder with a sharp hook punch. Percy tried to parry the next one, but the boy knocked his arm away.

"Don't fight back," said the bully.

He could only have thanked the Lord for the courage to say what he mouthed next, as well as the fact that it worked.

"Just one more of those, and I'll walk next door into the rectory, and get you all thrown off this property by an angry woken minister at a late time in the night," said Percy.

The next punch partly winded him.

"Alright," he choked, as he walked towards the rectory.

They actually let him go.

He reached the minister's veranda and pretended to press the bell, to see if they would leave the area.

"The next time we see you on the street you're dead," said the boy, and the group walked away from the church.

"If you plan to assault me again, you had better make sure that you kill me," called Percy, amazed that he had not already awoken the minister, "Otherwise I'll be reporting you and whatever you do to me, to the local police!"

He waited for them to go, and then stole home himself. He had no intention of waking the minister. For to do so would inevitably lead to his grandparents learning of the incident. As well as suffering a lot of worry and concern for his safety, they might well tell him not to risk it, by never going to the restaurant again.

The following morning, he secretly made a telephone call to Hornsby Police Station, who were unable to act on the matter without knowing the names of Percy's assailants. For nearly a year after that, he had occasional nightmares about that gang, and he was always nervous at the restaurant as well as at any time when he walked the streets at night. That in itself was bad enough, but he had been hurt twice already, before the assault took place; firstly by the way that Ingrid had scorned him, and secondly when he discovered that this beautiful girl was attached to the ringleader of the vandals whom he had already feared for quite some time. He might even have welcomed the physical pain of the showdown, had it been instrumental in his having an impact on Ingrid Castlecove's feelings, but he had had the worst of all worlds that night. A year later, he had been wearing his finest suit for an early evening walk to the station, and happened to see Ingrid walking through Wahroonga Park with another girl, both wearing the uniforms of a school he knew well. They were probably in his year, but at a girls’ school instead of his boys school.

"You look well-dressed tonight Percy!" Ingrid called.

He didn't know whether the compliment was an attempt to make up, an invitation to talk, or a passing act of politeness. He did not know whether Ingrid was still in love with his unknown assailant or not, and he did not have whatever it took to walk over and find out. His planned train trip for that evening had no particular destination, but his legs just could not diverge into the park. The only thing he did know was that he had recently observed (from a safe distance) some teenagers being arrested for under age consumption of alcohol on a public railway station. He was too far away to see who they were. Maybe Ingrid's partner had found his way into the care of the law. Percy did not know, and some awful fear that the worst could happen to him all over again, prevented him from walking into that park to find out. There he was, lonely.

Something about the entire nonesuch Ingrid affair stood out from the other girls he wished he could have been shrunken and eaten by. He had to tell her of his fantasy, even though he knew she’d tease him all the more. Yet she had seemed friendly this time, without any of the mocking that had been there the previous year. As a matter of fact, she had actually complimented him, initiating discussion in a positive way. He couldn’t expect anyone, least of all someone who teased his apparently ordinairy courtship attempts, to care about his fantasy in the least, but he just knew that he wanted more than anything else in the world, more than ever before in his life, to invent a means of shrinking himself.

He thought back to all that he had learned from James Hamilton. Since then he had added much more high school science knowledge of electronics. There had to be a way. He borrowed every science book he could find from the libraries, both at school and at the local library. He took out all of his electronic kits, tools, equipment and so on, which largely came from birthday and Christmas presents going back several years.

He knew that he had to solve another problem too. Reducing himself was one thing, but how could a shrunken Percy hope to get to the only place where he would be sure to find Ingrid: her school?