❧

“Where are we going?” Mira asks, peering up from the fold of his scarf that is now her passenger seat, strapped carefully to the dashboard with a bit of washi tape and far too much nonchalant elegance on Adrian’s part.

“Class time is over,” he says. “Now we need to figure out what’s happening to you.”

“Then why are we in your car?”

“To my lab,” Adrian replies, simple and steady.

Her stomach sinks a little—not because the car bumps, but because of the word he chooses. Lab.

“I thought you had a private lab on campus?”

“It’s unsafe,” he says, voice as smooth as the car’s suspension. “And too slow for advanced testing.”

Her heart hitches.

A tiny warning bell rings somewhere in her ribs. “Wait… are you—are you planning to run tests on me?”

“Do we have any other way to figure this out?” he says.

Mira stares at him in horror, frozen for a heartbeat, then tries to stand—only for the car to hit the slightest curve in the road. She immediately loses balance and tumbles backward into the fold of the scarf, landing flat on her back like a startled breadcrumb.

“You’re not,” she finally says, voice trembling, “you’re not going to do surgery on me in your shady lab, right?”

Adrian exhales. Slowly. Sharply. His jaw tenses just enough to betray his restraint.

“Mira,” he says. “My lab is not shady. It’s legally registered, with business licensing, oversight board certifications, and full digital compliance.”

“There are things I can’t tell you,” he continues, evenly, “but I don’t do shady research.”

Which is exactly what someone who does shady research would say.

She doesn't say that out loud.

She just pulls the scarf tighter around herself, eyes fix on the windshield, as the car speeds toward who-knows-where, with who-knows-what kind of machines waiting—and prays none of them come with scalpels.

❧

Mira doesn’t know how long the drive lasts. Time slips strangely when you’re two inches tall and spiralling. It feels both endless and compressed—an echo chamber of silent overthinking and muffled city sounds becoming a kind of white noise beneath her rising dread.

Several voices greeting Adrian, polite but formal, almost mechanical. Then the faint hydraulic hiss of an auto-lock disengaging— several in rapid succession. Doors opening. Then closing again, sealing with a soft, final sound like the inside of a vault.

By the time the light reaches her eyes, she’s sitting on a smooth metal surface—cool and seamless, like surgical steel—laid gently at the center of a lab desk the size of a banquet table. 

Everything gleams with artificial precision. The room is sealed on all sides, every panel seamless and unmarked, with soft white lighting embedded into the ceiling like a web of concentric rings. Holographic interfaces ripple across glass monitors suspended in midair, flickering as Adrian moves past. Behind him, a towering bio-dome unit glows faint blue, enclosing rows of culture columns that pulse faintly—each one reading vitals, folding strands of virtual DNA in real time.

Mira turns slowly, eyes wide.

She’s not in a lab.

She’s in a fortress.

And she is very, very small.

“What do we do here?” Mira finally breaks the silence, her voice small—though, to be fair, everything about her is small now.

Adrian doesn’t answer right away. He steps to one of the counters and pulls something from the inner pocket of his coat: a sealed glass vial, no longer than his finger. Inside, suspended in a nutrient gel, floats a delicate blue mushroom—its cap faintly pulsing with bioluminescence, as if breathing.

The glow reflects on the steel walls around them. Mira’s eyes widen.

“This… this one,” she whispers, inching closer on the desk, palms flat against the cold metal. “I saw it. In the forest.”

Adrian doesn’t even look at her as he sets the vial onto the table beside her with careful precision.

“How many times,” he says calmly, “do I need to remind you not to get close to unknown fungi?”

Mira blinks. “Wait—are you criticizing me right now?”

He finally turns to face her. “There’s a high possibility you came into contact with a biogenic fungal strain that triggers physiological regression. In plain terms: you touched it, and now you’re two inches tall.”

Her entire expression unravels into pure disbelief. “You’re not serious.”

Mira points at herself, nearly trembling. “You think I shrank because I touched a mushroom? What is this—fairy folklore meets academic misconduct?! Tell me something realistic!”

Adrian folds his arms, perfectly composed.

“How is your current tiny size realistic, by the way?”

He puts on the face shield. Clicks a sterile pack open with one hand. The fine needle glints under the clinical light, impossibly thin, but not small enough to comfort her.

“Wait—” Mira steps back instinctively, her bare heel skidding slightly against the metal desk. “Wait, stop that. Adrian. What are you doing?”

She scrambles back farther, eyes darting for cover—there is none to hide behind. She’s alone on the cold, immaculate surface of his research desk, every escape route too open, too bright, too clean.

So she does the only thing she can: shuts her eyes tight, hands covering her face as if the simple act of not seeing might somehow make her disappear.

She waits.

A beat.

Then another.

Still nothing.

Carefully, hesitantly, she opens one eye through her fingers.

Adrian is still there, mask on, silent.

But the needle isn’t pointed at her.

It’s in his hand—angled into his own arm, drawing a slow, measured vial of blood. The dark crimson pools into the chamber without a word, steady and precise.

He just finishes the withdrawal, seals the tube, and moves calmly to the centrifuge without ever breaking rhythm. Like this is routine. Like he never intended to touch her at all.

“Let’s see if the fungus reacts to my cells first,” he says calmly.

He approaches the specimen unit—where the preserved fungus floats, faintly pulsing in its nutrient gel. With practiced precision, he activates a containment sleeve: a sealed, negative-pressure box with fine-motor robotic arms controlled through a haptic glove interface. His own hands never touch the sample.

Inside the chamber, one robotic arm extracts a micro-biopsy—just a threadlike sliver of the fungal tissue, thinner than a strand of hair. It's immediately suspended in buffer solution and isolated in a micro-capsule.

Adrian injects a small sample of his own blood into the capsule through a side port using an automated precision injector. The capsule is then sealed and transferred into the bio-reactive interaction chamber—a high-sensitivity, rapid-response diagnostic unit designed for cellular interaction analysis. Not a clinical tool, but something he likely built or customized himself.

Mira hasn’t moved. She’s still at the far end of the desk, watching him like he’s just disarmed a landmine and is now casually dissecting it for fun.

He finally speaks—without turning, but his voice softer now, meant for her.

“I took a small part of the fungus,” he says, “just a fragment. I’m mixing it with my blood to see if it reacts the way it did to you.”

She doesn’t answer. He keeps going.

“If it triggers cell changes, attacks the blood, or releases any toxins, the machine will catch it immediately. If it does nothing, we know it’s not a universal effect—it might only respond to certain conditions. Or certain people.”

She swallows, still tense. Her fingers press into the smooth metal desk.

“So you’re… testing if I’m the one it wanted.”

Adrian watches the screen, one hand adjusting the sensitivity of the spectrometer, the other still gloved, resting beside the containment chamber. The first data line appears—normal. The second—unchanged.

He speaks without turning.

“The reaction was almost immediate in your case,” he says. “Within minutes of contact, you began shrinking. That suggests the fungal agent works through rapid biochemical interaction.”

Mira, still perched tensely on the far edge of the desk, frowns. “Meaning…?”

He continues, calm and methodical. “Possibly through transdermal absorption—through your skin. Or it could’ve triggered something deeper, something tied to your nervous system. Neurochemical activation is linked to your biology. Your genetics.”

She opens her mouth, but he’s not done.

“And,” he says, glancing over the data again, “if we’re being honest, we can’t rule out a magical-biological hybrid mechanism. Something that doesn’t follow strict scientific laws. If that library under Meridian is connected—and if your memory of it was real—then this fungus may be partially bound to a system of logic we don’t fully understand.”

Adrian finally looks over his shoulder.

“But I’m not exposing myself the same way you did,” he adds. “I’m not touching it. I’ve isolated a microscopic fragment, and introduced it into a sealed blood sample. That changes the timeline.”

“How long until we know?” she asks, barely breathing.

“Fifteen to thirty minutes,” he says. “If the fungus reacts to my cells, the system will pick it up. But so far—” he turns back to the monitor, tapping one screen, where a quiet green line pulses steady and flat—“nothing.”

“Besides, there’s another angle I want to explore. Something in your genes might be amplifying your sensitivity to external stimuli—emotional shifts, even small doses of substances like caffeine or alcohol. It’s not normal for someone your size or weight to react so intensely to wine sauce or tea.” He added.

Mira blinked. “You’re saying I’m… what? Genetically overdramatic?”

“Genetically responsive,” he corrected. 

“I’d like to run a basic DNA sequence,” he continued. “I need your blood. If your body is responding with full-scale physical change, something at the genetic level is allowing that. I want to know what.”

Mira freezes.

“You need what?” she says, too lightly, as if saying it with a joke would make it less real.

“Just a drop,” Adrian replies, as though that changes anything.

Mira goes utterly still.

Her face, already pale, seems to drain a shade lighter, and her breath hitches as if the very word blood summoned a childhood ghost she’d rather not meet. Even without saying a word, it’s written all over her—etched into the corners of her mouth, trembling slightly, in the way her shoulders rise too fast, and her eyes widen with slow, dawning dread.

She looks at him like he’s just transformed—not into a boy she almost kissed the night before—but the villain of some twisted Thumbelina fable, a dark sorcerer disguised in a white lab coat, ready to pluck the wingless fairy from her path and pin her between glass slides before her journey even begins.

Adrian simply reaches into the kit beside him and lifts something between two fingers: a needle. Tiny, gleaming, precise—built for micro-samples from the smallest organisms. To her, it might as well be a sword.

“It’s scaled,” he says gently, like someone coaxing a wild creature toward the edge of a trap. “One second. Close your eyes and count. I’ll be done before you finish.”

Her lip quivers.

She doesn’t move.

“You said just a drop?” she whispers, as if confirming the contract of her impending doom.

He nods.

“And one second?”

Another nod.

She gulps, every inch of her body still shaking like a leaf caught in wind. “You better not lie.”

Then, bracing herself, she squeezes her eyes shut, turning her face away as if expecting a thunderclap.

Adrian’s voice comes gently, almost too gently, just above the sound of the sterilized vial clicking open.

“After this, we’ll get you something warm to eat,” he says. “And proper clothes. And if you want… we can start building a flower house. It suits your size.”

Her eyes snap open, glaring. “Adrian, what are you—?”

But she doesn’t finish.

Because it’s already done.

He’s sealing the vial with calm precision, not even looking smug about it.

“You didn’t scream,” he remarks quietly, as if that’s worth celebrating.

“You’re going to tell me exactly what you’re testing for.” Her voice cut through the air, sharper now, brittle with the need for control.

Adrian nods once, as if he expects nothing less. “I will check for connective tissue markers. There are rare profiles that link tissue elasticity to sudden somatic changes. It’s a long shot—but if we’re talking transformation, we can’t ignore morphology thresholds.”

He hesitates, then adds, “And I’ll need to run a deeper sequence alignment—comparing your genome to high-resolution human reference panels. The incident with the fungi altered you at a level we don’t fully understand. There may be structural anomalies—mutations, duplications, or non-coding regions acting in unpredictable ways. If something changed you, even epigenetically, there’s a chance we’ll see the shadow of it.”

“Okay. So this is real science. Not just fairy logic…If we test now… how long until we get a result?”

“With standard university-grade equipment?” he says, tone clinical. “At least a day, maybe two. That’s why we are here. This is a fourth-gen nanopore sequencer. It runs real-time sequencing as DNA passes through a charged membrane. With the right libraries preloaded—and mine are—I can run a basic profile in under two hours.” 

“The raw genomic map will take longer to analyze, but structural flags, duplication anomalies, or even protein-coding irregularities.” He adds, “I’ll see the first clues in thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes to see if I’m genetically cursed?”

“Genetically unusual.”