Not A Toy 113

A deep exhale escaped the woman.

It was one of relief, and quiet victory, but tinged with a distant apprehension. The redhead tried to bury that far away feeling, letting herself enjoy the moment. Today had been a lot. Hoping that her actions at work would go unnoticed, which had been a fool's hope in truth. To having to retrieve her niece from the after-school center, only to leave behind her prize invention, dashing back to discover that two women had run afoul of its capabilities. To making the decision to shrink said women even further, to lying about its malfunctioning. As well, hearing from Nathalie that questions at work were already being asked, only for her friend to throw off the scent - at least for a moment.

To the here and now, experiencing firsthand the functionality of her device. Sophie's 'shrink ray' as some folk at work called it, to her chagrin. It was far more than that!

Still, in this moment - it really was just a shrink ray. Sophie had scaled herself down purely to experience it. What else would you call it in that context?

The woman felt fine. The initial surge had brought on a light vertigo, and her perception was slightly altered - her sense of how far away things were relative to her own size and stature was still calibrating, as it were.

Sophie the scientist began to take form in her mind, and she was suddenly more curious about her environment and how she 'fit' into it.

In the dark, she padded over to the lamp that rested by the couch. Sophie was used to being taller than it, and her hand slowly reached to switch it on, light erupted into the room, casting into clarity the larger space and the smaller woman.

Her hand had had to reach further than expected, and even the force required to turn on the light was a fraction more than expected. Sophie had been curious about how her device affected strength overall...

Her eyes wandered from the now-taller lamp and came to rest on a stool that sat idle. With a slight skip in her step, Sophie took hold of the item and hefted it off the ground.

A sound of shock and laughter pressed past her lips, despite her attempts to muffle any vocalization. There was no real danger of noise attracting undue attention, but shrinking herself as she had in this context, she felt akin to a girl trying to sneak around the house without waking up her parents.

It was much heavier than expected. The woman needed to utilize almost all of her body to get it across the room. It wasn't offensively weightier, but if this was a different situation, it could almost be a 'two-shrunken-Sophies-lift' - if she was feeling a bit lazy in the moment.

The dwindled scientist, in her more than roomy nightshirt, finally set it down with a delighted grunt. She circled the piece of furniture. The altered sense of scale already adjusting things in her mind, Sophie almost giggled at the thought that she had once been much taller than the stool, as opposed to it being around half her size.

Then, as she regarded it, she realized something else.

...She just had to, right?