Allie was hiking through the woods, her backpack weighing heavily on her shoulders. She's been trying to be more "outdoorsy" for a while, but it's definitely been a struggle, given the fact that she isn't in very good shape. That's not to say she's overweight, she has a fairly average build. She just can't run up a hill without needing to catch her breath once she reaches the top.
After getting to the summit of one of said hills, she lets her backpack fall to the ground, the contents within it bouncing around on contact. She then sits down on it, taking a deep breath and wiping the sweat from her brow.
"Hah...hah…why am I doing this again?" she asks herself, wondering why she's putting herself through this instead of staying home and watching Netflix. However, she reminds herself that it's "good for her," as her mother would say, and she takes a swig of water from her bottle, building up the motivation to continue.
Suddenly, she feels a rumble in her stomach, and she realizes that she's hungry for a snack. She gets off her backpack and opens it up, rummaging through it to find something to eat. Unfortunately, she can't seem to find anything, and she hits the ground in frustration.
"Damn it! I knew I forgot something!" she says, angry at herself for forgetting to bring something so important. Her stomach rumbles again, and she becomes desperate for food. She searches her surroundings, scanning the flora and sparse fauna surrounding her, and she notices two mushrooms at the base of a tall tree.
They look red, with random white spots dotting the toadstool's surface, and Allie, not wanting to eat something poisonous or anything, looks it up on her phone. She finds something that looks almost exactly like it, scrolls quickly through the page without looking at any details, and finds the word "edible" amongst all of the others she chose to ignore.
Confident she won't poison herself, she scrambles over to the pair of mushrooms. She finds herself choosing between the two of them, which is strange to her, considering they're probably both the same. Randomly, she chooses the left, breaks off a piece, and pops it in her mouth.
It has a bit of a savory taste to it, and she likes it very much. However, she waits before eating any more just in case she made a mistake while looking it up, and she lets the mushroom piece soften in her mouth so she can savor it before swallowing. She tilts her head back and gulps, moving the piece to the back of her throat and down her esophagus. It quickly makes its way down to her stomach, and at the moment it makes contact with her acids, it begins to glow faintly.
On the outside, Allie is sitting down on the grass, waiting a minute or two for any side effects to kick in. After that time passes, nothing seems to have happened, so she reaches for the mushroom for another piece. Before she can touch it, her perspective shifts, and she is now looking at the ground, until a large canopy casts a shadow over her and lands right on top of her.
Startled by this, she initially panics, but realizing it's just cloth, she tries to find her way out from under it, but while crawling on the ground, she notices that she is suddenly naked, which makes her instinctively cover herself up, until she realizes that no one is looking, so she lowers her arms and continues crawling, wondering why she is naked and under this large cloth...a cloth that has the same color as the shirt she was wearing…
Eventually, she finds an opening, and she pops out of it, basking in the sunlight coming down on her. Once her vision adjusts to the outside again, she gasps in surprise as she notices that everything seems to be a lot farther away...and bigger. The reality of the situation sinks in, she has shrunken down to about an inch tall.
She looks around erratically, wondering what could have caused it. Nothing seems to stand out to her, save the mushroom she just ate a piece of, and then it clicks with her. She realizes that the mushroom must have made her shrink, like that old movie she watched when she was a kid. If her memory was correct, then the other mushroom must make a person grow, or the other side of the mushroom at least. It was stupid to follow the logic of a movie rather than science, but given that she had no other ideas and her phone dwarfed her by quite a bit at this point, she figured she had no other option.
She makes her way over to the base of the mushroom, dodging imperfections in the dirt and scurrying insects that are much scarier at this size. She eventually reaches her goal, taking a deep sigh of relief...until she realizes she has to climb it to get to the edible part of the mushroom. Annoyed, she grabs onto the stalk with her hands and feet, and climbs up to the top, only falling once or twice. She doesn't want to stay small for another second, so she starts tearing off pieces by the handful and eating them as fast as possible, not waiting to see if it works or not. Then, out of nowhere, her perspective changes again, but not to the normal one she was expecting.
She is surrounded by what looks like moss, and she's still naked, which annoys her slightly. She scans her surroundings again, and notices what looks like bugs flying by her arm. She bends down to get a closer look, and gasps upon realizing that the "bugs" are actually birds. She grasps at one of the pieces of moss, wanting to confirm her suspicions, and she pulls out a tree, which is now the size of a toothpick to her. Her heart sinks, and she looks back to where she thinks she was before, trying to find the mushrooms again.
However, she seemed to have crushed them in the process of growing, along with her supplies and her phone, leaving her completely alone out in the woods. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, thinking about what to do next.
"Well," she says, standing up to her full height. "Guess I'll look for a town where someone can help me. Hope no one shoots at me or anything." She takes her first step, committing to one direction as she walks off in search of civilization.