Early 1996…

During his lunch hour, a man who was almost 26 years old, and who worked in the city of Sydney, sat down in an outside mall, just beside an amphitheatre to relax in the sunshine, which filtered between the leaves of a partially shady small tree. He noticed an older woman sitting on the low knee high wall out the front of a large building. He looked at her for a while, and then saw her make gestures with her eyes and hand, indicating that she would like him to come over and sit beside her. He quickly obliged, and introduced himself.

“I’m Martin,” he said.

“I’m Dr Ann O’Malley, although my doctorate’s in science, not medicine.”

The front centimetre of her tongue slipped between her lips and licked them, and then disappeared back into her mouth. It was something, which caught Martin’s attention, and looked strangely inviting. He would have liked to have touched it, and wondered what the whole of her tongue would look like.

After they had been talking for a few minutes, during which she had frequently repeated the tongue gesture, he saw her laugh, which gave him a clear view of her entire tongue inside her mouth.

“My husband died a few months ago,” she said, “And I’ve recently turned 56. You look like a very young man yourself.”

“I’m almost 26,” he said.

“That’s a very appealing age for something I have in mind,” said Ann, eyeing him closely in a way that he found exciting and intriguing, “I have a formula, which is capable of reducing you dramatically in size. It could in fact make you so small, that I would be able to eat you by swallowing you alive. That’s why I beckoned you over here, young man. It’s something I’d very much like to do. I know you’ve got to get back to work, and you’ll need time to think about my request. Could I have your home telephone number and contact you some time to see how you feel about it?”

She put her tongue out much further and licked the side of her mouth. It made her request very interesting to consider. He gave her his number and asked him to call him in the evening after another two weeks and two days had passed.

When she called, he told her that he had used the first two days to make up his mind and then given notice at work, and left at the end of the last two weeks of the time he had given her to wait before calling him.

“I’m going to do it,” he said.

“That’s wonderful!” said Ann, “I’d like to get to know you at your normal size, before I shrink you. Would you like to go out dancing with me?”

He loved the idea, and for the first time in his life, he was able to take a lady in his arms and enjoy holding her closely and touching her cheek against his own. She asked him all about his life story, and learned much of his background. As the evening drew late, she pressed her lips to his cheek and kissed him slowly, then the other cheek, and then eventually the lips.

Finally, Ann invited him to her home, and gave him the shrinking formula. It reduced him to tiny size.

“This is a reconstructed version of a formula. The previous version could also impart a different super power to the user each time he shrank, and the ability to return to normal size later. Your version has simply reduced your size permanently. Now that you’ve accepted the shrinking formula, I can tell you that the previous version was something called the Super Schoolboy Formula. In 1965, I used it to turn an ordinairy teenager into the super hero who resurfaced last year after being frozen in suspended animation for three decades. His name is Captain Miniature.”