Ella stands in the mouth of the alley, staring up at the massive faces passing by far overhead, she feels a cold, sharp pain in her mouth. She immediately probes with her tongue and discovers a small, hard object pressing up against her gums. Raising her hand, she spits out the object onto her palm. It appears to be a small piece of cobblestone that got picked up in her lick-it-up session, and which thankfully shrunk with her. Visions of the shard bursting her shrinking head flit across Ella's mind, and she tosses the slimy fragment to the ground with a look of deep aversion before wiping her spit-covered palm on her blue skirt. Looking up, she finds herself face-to-foot with the man from before.
Ella stares at the man's old, battered leather boot for a moment, startled. She takes a hurried step back as the boot moves into the air, but it is slow and ponderous, and moves only a very short distance before being set down slowly once more. Looking up and taking a few more steps back, she sees his head returning from a glance over his shoulder turn downwards, his eyes methodically scanning the ground below him. They alight upon Ella almost immediately, widening.
"There you are!" he cries, carefully getting on his knees for a better look, "For a moment there I thought those thugs might have squashed you!" Ella takes a few more steps back as the man's enormous bulk crashed down in front of her, his overly-loud voice ringing in her ears. He falls silent for a moment as he settles down, still staring directly at her. For her part, she gets an opportunity to study the man in front of her. His dark green pants were stained and battered with use, with a number of ragged, uneven patches and repairs, clearly done by the man himself. His equally battered brown shirt is covered by a leather vest of inferior quality, which is festooned with an enormous number of pockets, most of them bulging. His face is youthful, covered with some scraggly facial hair which has merged with his overlong, dark brown matt. His blue eyes are covered by a beat-up, extremely dirty pair of glasses. For a moment, neither does anything as each sizes, literally, the other up. Ella can see his eyes travel up and down her diminutive form, taking in her blue skirt and white blouse, both acquiring a level of grime from her sudden closeness to the ground.
Finally, after what seems like an eternity, the traveler shifts his weight, setting a building sized pack down on the ground net to him. It is crammed to bursting with items, all of which set up a fearful din as the objects inside clatter against one another, sounding like a bull in a glassmaker's shop. Ella can see glass bottles full of plants, animals and strange liquids, as well as some notebooks almost bursting out of the side pockets of the pack, and she shivers as her eyes catch a glimpse of a large net set upon a long pole.
Movement in the corner of her eye draws her attention back to the traveler. He has withdrawn a thin notebook from one of his innumerable pockets and he gently flips it open to a blank page with a pencil in hand. Now he starts to bend down, very slowly, while edging towards Ella with tiny movements.
What's he doing?, Ella wonders to herself as he seems to move towards her in slow motion. Suddenly, as he begins to move his pencil rapidly in his notebook, it clicks in her head. He's acting as if I'm a small, wild animal, edging forward carefully and not making sudden movements or sounds!, she thinks indignantly. Even worse, she is reacting like a skittish animal as well, stepping away from him, an instinctive reaction to such an enormous mass on the move. This thought galvanizes her into action. She stops backing away, puts her hands on her hips and starts yelling up into his startled face:
"Hey you! What have you done to me?" He stares at her, mouth agape and pencil slack. Then his eyes widen and he starts writing furiously:
"Subject appears to maintain mental faculties!" He whispers in time to his writing. His words were clearly meant for himself, clearly a habit he had formed. However, they are quite distinct to Ella, and if anything make her even madder:
"Hey, I'm not some specimen for you to examine, I'm a person who you've shrunk you dolt! Stop that scribbling and change me back this instant." He looks at her, quite bemused by the tirade coming out from this girl who doesn't even each his waist, even when kneeling. He continues to watch as her yelling reaches its peak:
"This is outrageous, illegal, immoral and unacceptable; the watch will clap you in irons for doing this to me!" He now is writing and drawing almost reflexively as he stares, his efforts almost on autopilot on this point. Finally, she seems to become short of breath. She stands there, gasping and glaring, and it’s at this point that he decides to interject:
"Well, if you felt that way about becoming a subject, why did you lick up that potion in the first place?" He asks her, in what he hopes is a low, reasonable tone of voice. He had noticed her flinch when he spoke before, clearly too loudly for her newly reduced eardrums. To his satisfaction, he sees that his voice was at a comfortable volume, but to his dismay the words themselves are not received well:
"You never told me that this would happen, you misinformed me and that is a felony!" Her anger continues unabated by his smug, patronizing words, given in a tone of voice suitable once more for small animals. His face grimaces and he shakes his head regretfully:
"Well, actually, it's not, at least, not for the last seventeen years." He informs her.
"It should be!" She shoots back, momentarily sidetracked. Her passion and energy quite astonishes the traveler, who once again tries for a reasonable set of words:
"Maybe so," he hedges, "but you didn't have to lick up the potion- thanks for that, by the way." He says in an aside with real gratitude. She answers at once, without thinking:
"Of course I did, you made m-" her words halt abruptly as she realizes what she has just said. He looks at her curiously, head cocked and eyes narrowed in puzzlement:
"What-" The dreaded question is interrupted, however, as another shadow suddenly looms up behind the man. He sees the tiny girl's eyes widen, and that's all the warning he has before a hand claps down on his back.
"Gotten an early start, have you?" Asks a chuckling man dressed in merchant's clothing, Mr. Hember. Both of them immediately realize that the merchant has not seen Ella, that instead he thinks that the traveler is drunk and puking his guts out in the alley. The traveler, thinking quickly, immediately bends forward, almost directly over Ella, mouth open. She gets an unpleasant view into his mouth, a gaping fleshy hole n the air above her as he makes dry retching noises. A couple of droplets of saliva hit Ella, and she is buffeted by his warm, surprisingly pleasant-smelling breath. At the same time, he reaches with his concealed hand into a pocket, pulls out a small skin and starts spilling it onto the ground under his mouth, close to Ella.
Ella takes evasive action, hot-footing it to the right and landing sprawled on her front, aching and even dirtier but at least, she thinks with a shiver of apprehension, not soaked in alcohol. The smell of the drink pervades the air heavily, as the skin had contained some strong spirit or another. Mr. Hember, still grinning, shakes his head sagely:
"Some people can't hold their drink." Peering down at the traveler again, he waits for the last of the spirits to be spilled before saying: "Listen brother, I sympathize with you but you're going to drive away the customers if you stay here much longer. Could you..." He is cut off by the travelers waved hand and apparently weary nod. Satisfied, he eyes the traveler one more time before moving off.
Once Mr. Hember is gone, the man straightens up again and looks down. He takes in the small puddle of strong spirit regretfully, than looks over at the girl. She is still sprawled, in the motions of pushing herself up. He finds the scene amusing, and hasn't composed his face enough by the time Ella straightens up.
The annoyed girl catches the amused look before it is wiped away into a studiously blank and professional expression. She glowers, but for once he isn't looking at her. Turning his head, he sees that he is getting curios looks from shopowners and shoppers. Looking back around and down, he says, more to himself than to her:
"This is too much attention..." Returning his gaze to the miniature female in front of him, he decides on a course of action. He...
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