Adrian made his way back to the dorm with measured steps, his coat pressed subtly against his chest. Inside the pocket, Mira clung to the fabric for dear life, her tiny fingers curled into the lining.
“This is undignified,” she hissed, barely peeking out. “I am not some loose change you can just shove in a pocket.”
Unfazed, Adrian kept walking. “Would you rather be in my palm? In the open?”
Mira scowled but said nothing. As much as she hated this, the last thing she wanted was more people seeing her like this.
When they reached his dorm, Adrian wasted no time clearing a space on his desk and setting her down with the same precise care one might use to handle a rare artifact.
Mira crossed her arms, still wrapped in the petals from earlier. “Alright. Step one: I need clothes. This is not a fantasy novel—I refuse to spend my time wrapped in leaves.”
“A practical issue. Let’s fix it.”
From a drawer, he pulled out a crisp handkerchief and inspected it like an engineer assessing raw materials. Then, without hesitation, he reached for a small pair of scissors.
Mira’s eyes widened. “Wait. Wait. Are you seriously about to tailor me something?”
Already cutting, Adrian didn’t even look up. “Do you have a better plan?”
A few precise snips later, he folded and secured a makeshift tunic with a thin thread.
Mira stared at it. “...This is disturbingly well-made. Do you do this often?”
“No, but I understand structure and proportion. Wear it before you start overthinking.”
She muttered under her breath but slipped it on, begrudgingly admitting it was better than expected.
With that crisis handled, they moved on to the real problem—figuring out how to get her back to normal.
They retraced her steps, testing everything: exposure to different elements—light, temperature, even static electricity. Nothing. She touched the camera again. Zero effect. She recounted every detail of the moment she shrank. No breakthrough.
Adrian, fascinated, took careful notes, his expression unreadable as he analyzed every variable.
Mira, meanwhile, teetered between frustration and existential crisis.
“Let me get this straight,” she said at last, exasperated. “Your first reaction to finding me tiny isn’t panic. It isn’t concern. It’s intellectual excitement?”
Adrian leaned back, utterly calm. “Would panic have helped?”
Mira threw up her hands. “It would’ve made me feel less like a test subject!”
“But then we wouldn’t be making progress.”
Mira groaned and flopped onto a scrap of fabric. “I am never going near that forest again.”
Adrian watched her, that calculating look never leaving his face.
“Oh, you will. You’ll want answers just as much as I do.”
But Mira didn’t hear him anymore.
Because at that very moment, she caught sight of the tiny clock face propped on the corner of his shelf—a gift from some dignitary, probably, all baroque gold trim and ticking elegance—and her heart promptly dropped into her stomach.
Her mouth opened in horror. Her hands flew to her face.
“I have class. I have Global Policy Forecasting & Crisis Mapping this morning.”
“I’m still tiny, Adrian!”
“I’m aware.”
“No, no, you don’t understand—” She stumbled into a frantic little pace, each step wobbling over the textured surface of his desk. “Today’s session is the start of the next forecast block. Aldren’s unveiling the new predictive model, the big one—the one that incorporates satellite-indexed resource pressure variables and AI escalation simulations—I’ve been waiting two weeks for this.”
He leaned back in his chair, watching her scramble with something close to amusement.
“You could always catch up later. The recording—”
“No.” She turned to him, eyes wide with something deeper than panic—hunger. “You don’t get it. He builds each scenario like a story. Every data point, every decision node—it’s a narrative of collapse and survival. And if I miss the beginning—”
Her voice thinned.
“It’s like starting a book from the middle.”
She continued, breathless now.
“And if I don’t listen to how he frames it live, I won’t feel the tension. I won’t know what’s urgent. The tone won’t carry. Aldren never says outright which variables are traps—you have to read it from how he moves the map. I have to be there. Even if I’m invisible. Even if I’m not allowed to type a word.”
She stopped. Her voice hit the edge of something—too thin, too fast—and she turned to him.
“Adrian…”
Her gaze clung to his, wide and glassy, like someone on the verge of tumbling off the edge and hoping he might pull her back by sheer logic alone.
“You’re a genius,” she whispered, her words cracking at the edges. “You understand things people don’t even have names for yet. Can’t you just—” Her breath caught. “Is there any way I can turn back?”
She wanted to scream, but instead she just stood there, barely tall enough to reach the height of a pen, shaking from something too heavy for her size. Until the tension in her chest finally gave way to something messier, something warm and wet and uncontrollable.
“I haven’t even finished my first semester,” she said, barely audible, her voice cracking as the first tears spilled over. “I’ve only just started here. I haven’t earned anything yet. I still get nervous raising my hand in policy labs. I still memorize the route to class every morning because I don’t want to be late. I still eat with my friends in the same stupid corner of the canteen because it finally feels like mine. I just found my place here.”
She rubbed at her face with both hands, furious, trembling, overwhelmed—frustrated that even the act of crying felt wrong in this body, too small for the size of the grief inside her, as if her emotions had outgrown her skin and now had nowhere to go. Her breath hiccuped, sharp and ragged, breaking unevenly in her chest before collapsing into a sob that ripped free without grace, without control.
“I don’t know what I touched,” she cried, the words spilling out between gasps, “what I did, what cursed mushroom or hallucinated dream logic caused this—how this happened—but I can’t let it ruin everything—” Her voice cracked as another sob overtook her, louder now, raw and helpless. “I’ve worked too hard—too hard—I can’t go back to being nobody—I can’t disappear—”
She cried without filter, without timing, like a child who had been holding it in too long—loud, wet, and unstoppable. Her entire body shook with it, tiny hands pressed against her face as if she could block out the world just by covering her eyes. The sound of it filled the room, not dramatic in the practiced way adults sometimes allowed themselves to weep, but untrained and desperate, like someone finally letting go of something they didn’t know they had been holding since it began.
When she looked up at him, her eyes were soaked, red-rimmed, and nearly swollen with salt. Her expression was unguarded, too open, and too honest.
“Tell me you have something,” she begged through the mess of her sobs. “Anything. Even if it’s just a maybe. Even if it’s impossible, you’ll try. Please.”
The last word broke completely, shattered by the force of a breath she didn’t manage to catch in time. There was no composure left in her voice. No shield. No mask. Not even pride.
She wasn’t trying to be funny. Or strong. Or the smart, promising girl who knew how to fight through setbacks and keep smiling.
She was just a girl then—tiny, terrified, tearstained, and clutching the shape of a future she hadn’t even begun to live yet, terrified that it was already slipping away.
Hours later.
Mira found herself sitting inside Adrian’s pen case, dressed in the makeshift handkerchief dress. Above her, the lid of the case stayed propped just enough to let light filter through, half-shaded by the angle of his laptop screen.
From where she sat, she could see him—his chin, the edge of his jaw. Adrian looked completely normal. As if nothing about this arrangement was unusual.
As if sheltering a doll-sized girl in his pen case was just part of the academic routine.
At the front of the room, Professor Aldren cleared his throat again, dry and sharp, trying to regain control of a class that hadn’t even technically derailed—because no one knew what was happening.
He was still looking at Adrian.
Still wondering if this was real.
Because an hour ago, Mira Larkspur—punctual, participatory, a borderline syllabus idol—had emailed him to request a sudden absence.
And now Adrian Vale was sitting in his classroom. Calmly. Alone. With a laptop tilted slightly forward. And a presence that made it impossible to focus on anything else.
Aldren swallowed, then turned his eyes back to the rest of the students, as if looking at Adrian too long might somehow hurt him. Or trigger something.
He opened his mouth. Shut it again.
What in the world were those two up to?
And why did it feel like the whole room was one misstep away from stepping into someone else’s very elaborate secret?
The moment Professor Aldren began outlining the new scenario—cross-border resource strain, AI-coordinated response clusters, population displacement probabilities—Mira was already pointing at the chart. Pointing at Adrian. Pointing at the air as if it were a chalkboard and she had exactly three seconds before the next slide.
Adrian finally typed something.
With that same silent precision he applied to everything else—his fingers moving steadily across the keyboard, line by line, as if transcribing the professor’s voice in real time.
She watched his notes fill the screen in structured logic blocks, graphs copied with annotated margins, and even Aldren’s offhand muttering jotted down in clean shorthand.
Her arms slowly lowered.
And yet—ten seconds later, when he skipped a throwaway quote she found critical, she threw both hands up again, mouthing, “Why would you skip that?” before rolling onto her back in exaggerated despair.
Adrian typed it in, without looking.
She sat back up immediately, nodding in approval.
By minute thirty, when Aldren joked that this was the part where simulations tended to collapse if handled wrong, she flailed both arms in warning. Adrian, to her surprise, actually highlighted the line.
Somewhere beyond the laptop screen, the class watched slides flicker across the wall, none the wiser that the real storm of attention and strategy was unfolding quietly, in miniature, on Adrian Vale’s desk.
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