“That’s a nice thing to say to a lady.”

He put his arm around her and snuggled his cheek against hers.

Then they kissed eachother and snuggled again, and he fell asleep in her arms.

He awoke at least two hours later and saw that he was surrounded by pavlova and strawberries, on a huge dining table, or at least relatively huge, because he’d been shrunken somehow, and was not able to see the seat he was facing, because there were four candlesticks positioned in front of his plate. Each candlestick had a page of writing attached to it with sticky tape. It was Colleen’s handwriting, and on the same paper that had been used for the rest of the manuscript. It was all true somehow, and she had reduced him and put up the new chapter for him to read, presumably before she came back to give him the ‘actual eating’ scene that he had chosen as his favourite in his appraisal of the novel.

He recalled her reference to ‘valuable insights’ and realised that she had given him the book, disguised as a work of fiction, in order to have him help to determine the way he would make his own contribution. Rather than read the entire four pages, he speed scanned them, jumping through and skipping the bits that told of what he already clearly remembered, like his meeting her at the dance the night before and coming over to read the manuscript. She must have written those, while he’d been reading those 60 pages that afternoon. Now he jumped ahead to see what she really had in mind for the ending, although he guessed that she would be eating him from the pavlova soon enough.

He heard a shower start running upstairs, and guessed that he had the duration of her shower and changing to go, before she came down and enacted his final part in the story.

“Don’t worry. We’re going to get you out of here,” said a voice.

“Who was that?” he asked, and then remembered the invisible leprechauns in the story, “Are the leprechauns she wrote about real too?”

“Yes, but I’m glad she didn’t shrink anyone else before the food colouring wore off, or we couldn’t have come in to rescue you. This time we pulled the wires out of both her alarm circuits and her video camera circuits first. She won’t see or know anything, even when she finishes her shower and gets back to her room. But we do have to get you out of here fast. She can’t see us, but you’re a very visible target, and she may still have some of that food colouring to spray about in the hopes of catching us. With her great size advantage, she’ll be on you in no time, if we’re still in the house when she gets back down here,” said a second leprechaun, “Climb out of that and get to the rope and hook we used to get up here.”

The leprechauns led her back to the tunnels and a deeper cavern, where they had been living ever since Colleen had dug up their kingdom and eaten most of their population. They welcomed Kenneth as a refugee to their kingdom and held a meeting to decide what to do about Colleen.