Years further back in time, Kenneth found himself in a forest. The only one he recalled ever having been to back in year 8 was the one halfway or so between the meadow and the village, and yet he must have forgotten his way. He’d just have to keep walking until he got to either the village or the lower hill. If it was the lower hill, he’d turn around and walk back to the village.

When he finally came to a clearing and looked out, he saw that he was not in the forest, but in the public gardens in the village. It had seemed like a forest, because he had not returned to the size he had been as a year 8 student, but remained shrunken.

He recalled what the princess had said, about the Ring’s effects on a human user being unknown. It had not removed his memory of the intervening years, as she had feared it might, but had in fact not removed the reduction of his size either. Yet one thing was missing. By the time he’d awoken in the pavlova, he’d developed a five o’clock shadow, since he had not shaved since early on the Saturday morning, as part of his preparations for going to read Colleen’s manuscript.

Now he had no stubble at all. It was simply not growing at all. So he had been reversed back to the age of a year 8 high school student. Everything had been reversed, as a result of his amateur use of the Ring of Reversal as a human, everything except his memory and his size.

He couldn’t go to the university and court Colleen Balfour now. Nor could he return to school at that size. The only thing that he could do would be to hide out in the public garden and depend on the kindness of any ladies or girls he saw coming into the gardens alone, and maybe even find one who would love him as a tiny boy.

As it turned out, many a secretary from the village would at some point come to eat her lunch in the gardens. He would reveal himself and ask for food, and then, before they had to return to their afternoon’s work in the village, he would ask for a kiss. With the legends of leprechauns well known, he was always mistaken for one, and every secretary was happy to give him a kiss. However, none showed any interest in further romantic involvement.

On one particularly cloudy day, there were no secretaries coming to the public gardens to eat their lunches. He made do with berries from the gardens, as he had been used to doing on weekends anyway, and sat amongst the flowers, looking out at the gardens, wondering if it would rain. He had used a small hollow log for shelter on rainy occasions, and had made a bed of leaves and petals to sleep on every night, keeping it concealed in the log.