The next few days passed by rather uneventfully, at least by the standards Steve had come to expect. Now that Melissa had grown him all the way up to 3 inches tall, he could at least pretend like he lived something of a normal life. His dollhouse afforded him this luxury -- at his current size, the house, and all the furnishings inside, were the absolute perfect size for him. He could finally do all the "chores" that Melissa had assigned to him. Even though he periodically shook his head and grumbled about having to do them, these "chores" gave him something meaningful to do, something goal-oriented, and in the end they contributed to his growing sense of normalcy. It seemed absurd, to call his life "normal," when he lived in a dollhouse perched on top of Melissa's desk, but sometimes when he was inside with the curtains drawn, lounging on the little sofa or easy chair that Melissa had specifically ordered with the doll house, he actually could believe that this whole shrunken-man debacle had all been a dream, and that he was relaxing in his own normal-sized house.
Of course, he couldn't keep up this semblance for long. Inevitably, he would hear what sounded like rustling thunder...or perhaps he would hear the deep, long, rumbling sound infusing the air around him, shaking everything in his house...or even, more dramatically, he would hear a loud, shattering crack outside that would nearly startle him out of his skin. As the days went by, Steve would come to know the "rustling thunder" as Melissa rustling her papers as she combed through them, doing her research; the deep, long rumblings were Melissa's absentminded hums that came out sometimes as she worked; and the shattering cracks happened whenever she got particularly excited, started writing rapidly with one of her pencils, and then dropped the pencil to the desk abruptly when she was done writing, in a dramatic kind of "gusto" movement that had been the result of a habit Melissa had formed in elementary school, when she was rushing to be the first in the class to finish her multiplication quizzes.
This particular day, about a week or so after growing "back" to 3 inches, Steve was in the middle of sweeping his "kitchen" floor with a little broom that Melissa had specifically ordered for him. He was almost done with his chores, and was looking forward to relaxing on his sofa. But Melissa had been extra-animated all morning, humming to herself more often, scribbling quickly with her pencil and letting it clatter down on the desk triumphantly after she finished her latest...well...whatever it was she was writing. Steve had been feeling the vibrations of her scribbles through the floor for a few hours now, and to go along with the periodic clashes when she dropped her pencil down, he had heard her muttering to herself...something about "alkaline shield" and "GI tract" and "porous membranes" and god knows what else. Whatever she had been doing, Melissa was certainly getting excited.
Steve could only try and pretend to bask in a "normal life" for so long, and not just because Melissa's noises were distracting. The truth was that even if she had been totally silent, or working in another room, Steve would not have been content to exist apart from her. He had grown close to Melissa, closer than he would have been comfortable admitting. Ever since he had become quite small, the raw sexual attraction to her had changed dramatically, but it had not gone away. As goofy and klutzy and bookish as Melissa was, Steve couldn't avoid the obvious reality: he was terribly drawn to her, and the longer he existed alongside her gigantic body, the more aroused he became by the sheer size of her...especially those glorious 8-story breasts of hers. And she was wearing all that tight clothing now -- he knew she was doing it on purpose, just to tease him...and it was working.
Still, though, sometimes the noise could get to be too much, and this particular morning, she had tossed her pencil down one too many times. Steve had just finished yelping out from the vibrating clatter that went through the floor, which had scattered the little pile of dust he had been sweeping up. The next moment, he had dropped the broom and stormed out of his "front door," beholding the sight of the immense Melissa sitting upright in her chair, her shoulders thrust back proudly, as she grinned down at a long formula she had just written down.
"Magnesium hydroxide outer liquid shell," she was muttering to herself happily, chewing on her thumb as she rolled her head back and forth, "Stabilized by a flash-hardened film of sodium stearate...hmmmm...yessss, yes it could work..."
Steve had intended on immediately raising his voice at her, but upon opening his front door, he had been struck by the sight of Melissa sitting there in her chair, with that confident, deliberative posture showing off the huge, fleshy orbs of her massive breasts, which looked especially good today, squished into a stylish white blouse top that was half-unbuttoned. Behind her, the late-morning sun had climbed high in the sky through the window, lighting her entire person up in a warm yellow glow, as the sunlight threw glittering spangles of light through her hair. Her huge figure was poised above him, its immense bulk gently rising and falling with each breath she took. For a few seconds, Steve was stunned, unable to say anything.
"Hmm that solution kinda tingles," Melissa murmured to herself, still apparently unaware that Steve had come out of his house onto her desk. She reached for a small beaker of fluid that Steve hadn't noticed before; it was next to a haphazardly-stacked tower of papers, and as Melissa picked it up, Steve found his eye drawn to the contents inside. It was a brilliant cerulean blue liquid, a rich color he was not used to seeing in liquid form, and as Melissa picked up the beaker, the fluid splashed up against the glass walls, shimmering in the sunlight. Steve watched as she raised the beaker to her lips and drank the contents all the way down...by her comment before, Steve was led to understand that she was finishing off what she had started drinking before he came out.
As she drank, Melissa glanced down and noticed that Steve was standing in front of his house, watching her. Her lips immediately turned up at the corners in a warm smile, and her eyes brightened. She looked delighted to see him, but this delight may have distracted her, because the next moment she had seized up, her eyes going wide. Steve saw her abdomen tense, and the veins in her neck briefly popped out; her throat had stopped swallowing. Melissa brought her hand up to her mouth, inhaled a determined breath through her nostrils, and swallowed one last time, immediately after breaking out in a coughing fit.
"AAAAUUUCCCKKKK!! AAAUUUCCKK!! CCCUUUUAAGGHH!!!"
Her coughs weren't especially loud from the perspective of a normal-sized person, but to Steve's ears they sounded like an earth-splitting cataclysm. Even though he had grown all the way up to three inches, he was still at the mercy of so many "normal" aspects of the world. He quickly covered his ears to shield them from the sound until a few seconds later, when her coughing had died down.
"CUAGH! Heh, sorry about that," Melissa chuckled when she had collected herself. "You just made me lose focus!"
"Made you lose focus on...drinking?" Steve asked, raising an eyebrow. "You really need to focus that hard on it?"
"Well excuuuuse me," Melissa sighed, rolling her eyes playfully, "I'm not the best multi-tasker!"
"Obviously not," Steve observed.
"Especially," she added, setting the empty beaker down next to him as she propped her chin up on her forearm, looming over him as her eyes glinted cheerfully, "When I catch my three-inch resident action figure spying on me."
Steve ignored her little jab and stared up at the beaker, which was just over twice his height. Its glass walls were stained with the remnants of the cerulean liquid, and now that he was looking at it closer, he could see that it really was sparkling in the sunlight. A faint hint of burnt caramel reached his nostrils...it actually smelled pretty good. He had completely forgotten that he was going to tell Melissa off for tossing her pencil around. The intrigue of the blue liquid was getting to him.
"So, uhm...what was that you just drank?" he asked casually, leaning against the beaker as he watched the blue streaks glide down the glass walls.
"Mmmm, wouldn't you like to know!" Melissa intoned, her eyes going wide as she continued sitting there with her chin propped up on her hand. Steve looked up at her. He wanted to be annoyed that she was screwing around with him, but he was actually far too interested to play their usual game of back-and-forth gibes.
"I would, actually," he replied simply. Melissa was generally too careful with her experiments to haphazardly ingest experimental concoctions, so the fact that she had drunk the entire contents down implied to Steve that she was very confident about whatever the solution's mechanism was. He already had a hunch that it had something to do with him; the wry way she was staring down at him, with that smile and that sparkle in her eyes, made that hunch even stronger.
"Well aaaaaall right," Melissa sighed, rolling her eyes again as she sat up straighter, pushing her shoulders back, so that her giant breasts jutted out conspicuously onto the desk. "But before I tell you, you have to tell me what's different about my outfit today."
Steve had expected something like this.
