Hannah spent the first night scrabbling at the glass walls of her enclosure to no avail.  All she managed to do was exhaust herself and burn energy.  Realizing that she had to bide her time for tonight, she took a few scraps of what had remained of her dress and used them as a sheet to sleep with.  

The next morning, she awoke to Mandy clattering around trying to grab food for everybody.  For Hannah, as a subject with Food Category 3, she received a small helping of what she could only assume was some sort of meat substance.  Pork maybe?  Either way, it was wrapped in shredded lettuce.  It wasn’t actually that bad all things considered.  

Ralph came in a bit later to do inspections on the state of the specimens.  Starting with the newest subjects first, Hannah became the first inspectee.  The first step was weighing each subject.  Looking down at her weight at only a little less than a fifth of a gram, the reality of her situation really set in on just how small she truly was.  And she was only going to feel smaller.

The next step was checking the bodies for any bruises or scarring.  Ralph was having the time of his life with it.  What should have taken a few minutes at most dragged on almost half an hour, or at least it felt that way to Hannah.  Ralph’s prying fingers groped at her smaller, perky breasts, feeling them up and down.  She was lifted into the air as Ralph forced her butt cheeks apart to peek at her itsy-bitsy anus.  And the whole time he whistled and jeered, making comments about how fuckable she would be if she was the size of a real person.  Mandy had enough of her boyfriend ogling something she viewed as beneath her.

“Good lord, Ralph.  Quit fucking around with it and get on with it!”

“Ooo, somebody’s a little jealous.”

Mandy’s face turned bright red.  She stomped her foot, then began screaming and stammering.

“N-no!  It’s just… You’re going to stress out the subject, and we won’t get any good data!”

“The little bug doesn’t seem to mind.  Look!  Nice and syrupy.  You love getting touched by the big strong scientist, don’t you?”

To punctuate his statement, he lifted the finger that had been forced against her pussy lips and lifted them to the light, revealing the slight shimmer of the fluids he forced out of her.  Hannah began to cry.  How could she look her husband Jacob in the face after being raped and forced to cum by just a single finger.  Ralph took a perverse glee in seeing this, but Mandy was still fuming.  So he switched up his tactics.  He reached over to Subject 102, a spritely, athletic hunk of a man.

 “Here, why don’t you give it a try.  You can’t deny that this one’s quite the looker.  You can play with it however you like.  I’m sure you’ll see how fun it is, having a miniature to play out your fantasies with.”

Ralph walked over and placed 102 in Mandy’s palm.  No sooner had it entered Mandy’s hand than her grip coiled around its entire body.  Blood spilled liberally between the cracks in her fingers.  When she no longer felt its breath inside her fist, she dropped it on the ground.  For extra emphasis, she gave the corpse a quick stomp.  And with that, a man that could lift Hannah over his head five times over was crushed and destroyed by an ornery nerd girl.  Hannah screamed.

Ralph realized this wasn’t going to go his way and tried to hurry through the rest of the inspections.  All was going fine until they finally reached the end and only Subjects 53, 54, and 56 remained.  As 56 stepped onto the scale, he stumbled off the front and fell, suddenly going faint.  Mandy picked it up to see if it was alright.  But as she lifted it to her eyes, she saw its body shimmer, then fade, then finally disappear altogether.

“Oh my god.  Ralph!”

“What happened?  What’s going on?”

“I think the shifter just… shifted again!”

“What?!?!  They can do that?!?”

“Look!”

Ralph looked over and saw Mandy’s empty hand.  He was about to ask if she was sure she didn’t just drop it when Subject 53 passed out the same way its comrade did.  Ralph quickly pried the camera off its stand to record what was happening.  Sure enough, it was like a miracle.  The tiny buglike creature simply disapparated from this plane of existence, like it had never been there at all.  Nothing like this had ever been recorded.  This was the breakthrough of the century!  If they could figure out how this was possible, it would open so many scientific possibilities.

Mandy wasted no time.  She moved Subject 54 over to the dissection table and began making cuts.  She needed to see what had changed to cause the shifters to re-shift.  As 54’s body began to shimmer, her cuts became more and more hectic, carving him like a roast duck trying to figure out what was making it tick.  Finally, 54 stopped shimmering.  It didn’t go anywhere, instead lying in a pool of its own blood.

Mandy beat her fist on the table, but Ralph walked over to hug her.  She was a bit shocked and brushed her hair from in front of her face behind her ear.  She then embraced Ralph back.

“That was amazing!  Did you just see…”

“I know!  I know!”

“Now your senior project…”

“Fuck that!  I could get a Nobel prize for this!  I mean, just think about everything I could do if I could figure out how this works!”

Mandy was beside herself.  She had never been this happy in her entire life.  She kissed Ralph on the lips and they shared a passionate moment together.  They both made plans for the next day to monitor Subject 59s behavior.  They had already caught the moment of a shift on film, the first video of its kind.  If they could just finish it with a discovery on the mechanics behind the shift, they would be set for life off the money they could rake in.

Ralph had to leave a bit early, so he gave Mandy a kiss goodbye and made for the door.  As he left, he gave Hannah a wink.

“I’ll see both of you cuties tomorrow.”

Mandy’s face darkened.  She waited until Ralph footsteps were far in the distance and stomped over to Hannah’s container.  With a forceful grab, she hauled Hannah out of her glass prison and onto the dissection table.

“Why can’t I just have one nice moment without you fucking shits ruining it for me?”

“I…”

“SHUT YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH, YOU HOMEWRECKING CUNT!”

Mandy already couldn’t stand the squeaky, high-pitched mumblings of shifters.  It was always so annoying.  You could only barely hear what they had to say even in the best circumstances.  And Mandy wasn’t willing to humor this slut’s moaning and excuses.

“You think you can just waltz in here and steal my man just because you have a pretty body for a pest?  Fuck you!  Let’s see if Ralph still paws all over you after I’m done with you.”

Mandy’s scalpel pressed directly into the side of Hannah’s face.  She cut and slashed at the shifter like she was possessed by a B-movie killer.  Hannah became weak.  She went from extreme pain to no longer being able to feel her body at all.  As she closed her eyes, she knew it was the last time they would ever open…

… which is why it was such a shock when she woke up again with a horrifying headache.  As she got to her feet, she saw her own reflection in the glass.  Her entire face and body had been grafted and stitched together.  She screamed and fell over as she processed what she saw.

“Hey, you made it!”

The voice belonged to none other than Ralph, beaming ear to ear.

“Mandy really did a number on you, huh?  It’s a good thing I left my lab coat here by accident, or you would be toast!  But don’t worry.  Now that you’re awake, you’re coming with me.”

Ralph picked her up gently.  Hannah flinched from the familiar probing grasp.

“Wh-where are we going?”

“Well, we can’t stay here, or Mandy will show up and really mess you up.  So I’m taking you home.  Hey, don’t make that face!  It’ll be fun.  We can get up to all sorts of fun when we get home.  Besides, it’s not like you have a choice.  You basically own me your life.  So you can’t really complain when I use it how I see fit.”

Hannah’s squirming was starting to turn Ralph on.  It took every bit of self control not to start playing with his new toy right now.  But Mandy had also left her lab coat, so he decided to hastily make his way back home.  Tossing Hannah into his book bag, he quickly made his way back home.  In such a rush was he to get someplace alone with his new doll that he only zipped his bag up part way.

Hannah saw the opening and started climbing pencils and pens to get to the top where she could escape.  Even one false step, and she could plummet to her doom or be smashed like a grape between two books  But she finally jumped to the opening of the bag and out to safety.

She looked around at her new location, and she seemed to be stuck in an elevator.  She watched Ralph step off on the second floor, leaving her trapped on the floor with several behemoth people, all as big if not bigger than Ralph.  She couldn’t stay here.  If she did, she’d get stepped on.  Or worse, Ralph could find her.

On the third floor, the gap between where the elevator began and the floor ended was far too massive.  She was about to lose hope as the crowd moved above her, when she heard a friendly voice call out to her.