The short-haired brunette in a lab coat waved. "Hi again! I'm Jordan."
The pony-tailed brunette in a tank top, open blouse, and a skirt gave a polite nod. "I am Flora."
"...and today," Jordan said, "we are doing science."
"Again."
"Again," she repeated.
"Despite my stern warning against you doing so."
Jordan arched an eyebrow. "Why are -you- getting upset? The last time we did science you exploded me by filling me with an Olympic pool's worth of water."
"...and the time before that," Flora replied, "-you- filled -me- with helium and let me float off for most of the day."
"I didn't -let- you, it was an accident! What -you- did was deliberate."
"Though you seemed to be enjoying yourself towards the end."
Jordan blushed. "That's- that's not important!" She cleared her throat. "Anyway, I wasn't about to do more science, but we got a grant."
"From whom?"
"I dunno, Smash? Smush? Some company beginning with an 'S.' I was in a hurry to cash the check so I didn't really look." From the pocket of the lab coat she produced a device that, for all the world, looked like a cheap children's toy ray gun. "But they sent this along with it."
Flora eyed the device dubiously. "...and that is...?"
"It's a shrink ray," she said, adjusting the dial on the side.
She nodded, letting out a note of disapproval. "We're catering to the perverts now, are we?"
Jordan looked over at her. "How often is that joke going to be made?"
"Until it stops being funny, I would imagine."
"Wouldn't it have to start being funny for that to happen?"
They grinned and pointed at each other for a second before returning to normal. "But seriously," Flora said, "if this is going where I think it is, one of us is going to have to be the subject."
"You want to zap me?"
"No, I'll be your guinea pig." She gestured to Jordan, then herself. "Three to two. It's only fair. Plus you're the one in the lab coat."
Jordan nodded, taking a step back and aiming the gun at Flora. "Ready?"
"Ready."
The beam that emanated from the tip of the shrink ray and struck Flora looked so positively artificial that it had to have been a deliberate design decision on the part of the makers. Flora assumed it had some effect, however, as there was an electric tingling across her skin as her shoes suddenly felt a size too large, and her formerly eye-to-eye stance with Flora had become eye-to-nose. "Are we simply going to ignore that rapid growth and shrinking, as portrayed, require matter to be created and destroyed, respectively?"
"Yes." Pocketing the shrink ray, she pulled out several index cards. "You could say that a growth ray provided energy that was converted to matter, but if you did that, to double the height of the average woman, you'd be using enough energy to power the United States for a hundred and fifty years."
As her clothing grew larger on her, Flora was forced to hold the collar on her tank top up with one hand to keep herself covered. Her skirt began to slip off her smaller hips, and her other hand went to its hem to hold it in place. "Bit of a waste, I'd say."
"Yeah." She threw a card away. "Besides, the human body doesn't scale too good. A lot of the world's tallest recorded people needed crutches or leg braces to walk due to the weight being placed on their legs."
"Their bones had trouble supporting their body," she said, stepping out of her shoes and pushing them aside. Flora's hips, meanwhile, had trouble keeping her panties up; as they slid free she held her legs together, catching it with her knees. Realizing that she had no way to get them back up and keep them up, however, she let them drop.
"For -really- tall people they'd have problems all over. Their lungs wouldn't be able to get enough oxygen, their hearts wouldn't be able to pump blood through their body, and their muscles wouldn't be able to move everything. That's because-"
"The square-cube law." Her blouse slipped off one of her shoulders, looking more like an ill-fitting lab coat with overlong bunched-up sleeves on Flora's shrunken frame. She let her skirt drop - her tank top was starting to reach far enough down anyway - and shook one arm free of the sleeve, then switched hands on her top and pulled out the other, letting it fall away. "Their organs would increase by the square of the scaling factor, but the mass would increase by the cube of it. It's also why their bodies would be composed of more normal-sized cells compared to the average person, rather than a similar number of giant ones: Their cells would be subject to the same law."
"Exactly." Jordan tossed two cards over her shoulder. "Also, for the really, -really- tall people, they'd be so large that the signals from their nerves would take seconds to reach their brains. It would be like trying to play an online game with terrible lag."
"Fascinating, but I daresay that it's not really relevant to us." She looked down at herself; the bottom of her tank top was starting to bunch up on the ground, and she pushed the straps off her shoulders, leaving her nude. "By which I mean me."
"Well, smaller bodies have trouble maintaining body heat, and since people usually get lighter as they get smaller, it's safe to assume that they're losing matter and not just becoming more dense. So at this point you're losing brain cells."
"Are you saying that shrinking is making me less intelligent?"
"I dunno." She tossed the last card in her hands away. "Do you feel dumber?"
Flora looked up, and up, at Jordan. Proportionally she was still the same, but in terms of height she came up to just below Jordan's knees. She didn't seem to be getting any smaller, thankfully. "I volunteered for this, so I must be." She shivered before rubbing her arms.
"If you're cold I can find you some old Barbie doll clothes if you want."
"Thanks, but no, I think we're done here. You can return me to normal now."
Jordan averted her eyes guiltily for a second. "No I can't."
"I'm sorry?"
"It was a shrink ray, not a shrink-and-grow ray."
Flora folded her arms across her chest and glared at her. Despite being less than a foot tall and completely naked in the center a small pile of her own clothes she still managed at least a modicum of intimidation. "I'm stuck like this."
"No! No! I wouldn't have done this if it were permanent! It wears off!"
"Does it."
"Yeah!" She gestured, rubbing the back of her neck. "In a... few hours."
"HOURS." It was a surprising amount of volume from a small body. "I had -plans-, Jordan. Plans that didn't involve me being tiny for 'a few hours.'"
Jordan thought for a moment. "Okay, so..." She approached Flora before leaning over and gently picking her up, holding her under the arms and around the waist with one hand. "Oh wow, you're really light. "
As Flora's legs dangled, she clung to Jordan's fingers for dear life. She knew she was safe in her hand, but despite that she didn't want to take any chances. "Being small will do that to you. How do you propose we remedy this problem?"
She crossed the room, stopping beside a large air tank. Uncoiling the hose with her free hand, she gave the valve on the nozzle a quick tap and was rewarded with a burst of air.
"Oh."
Jordan held up Flora, fingers and thumb beneath her arms, before pressing the nozzle to her navel with surprising precision and holding down the trigger.
Flora went wide-eyed as a blast of air entered her, the force so powerful and the volume so great that she felt that she would burst then and there. Her body was shoved outward in all directions so quickly it may as well had been instantaneous to her, becoming a volleyball-sized sphere balanced in Jordan's free hand. Dazed, she moved one arm to try and test her elasticity, realization eventually dawning on her that she had mobility in her arms and, indeed, her head and limbs were completely untouched, dangling off the sides of her body.
Jordan quirked an eyebrow. "Well, that's new. Maybe I can..."
She gave Flora another long drought of air, pressing the trigger more gently. Her forearms and thighs went stiff, sticking straight out, before swelling with air. Their growth made them longer as well as rounder, the air concentrating in the upper arms and legs, thickening them to a more proportionate width before the thickness spread downward, stretching them out like a party balloon, until they stopped at her elbows and knees.
Jordan squeezed down on the trigger, trying to speed up Flora's inflation and accidentally giving her another full blast, her body rapidly blimping a few more inches before she turned it off. Pulling the nozzle free, she tapped it a few times to test the spring before placing it against Flora's navel and easing another slow stream of air into her. It continued along her forearms and lower legs, stretching them longer and thicker before pausing again at her ankles and wrists. Flora flexed her hands and wiggled her feet just before they swelled up, all at once, into nub-covered balloons. A second later her digits followed suit, becoming fat sausages for fingers and round balls for toes.
She continued to fill her, waiting for the growth to continue. Flora was certainly taller than she was before Jordan started pumping gas into her, and definitely rounder. She wasn't heavier, though, and despite her size that was the one saving grace that let her hold her one-handed. "You're almost done, Flora."
Flora went cross-eyed. "Jordan, I feel a little strange." Her lips suddenly grew plump and her cheeks fat, and she was aware of a hissing noise somehow coming from -between- her ears just before her oval-shaped face took on a more rounded, puffy look. It doubled, then tripled in scale, growing before finally becoming more proportional to her limbs, albeit much more spherical than it was before.
Jordan removed the hose, effortlessly setting Flora down. She was back to roughly her normal height, if not her normal proportions: Physically, she resembled no less than a flesh-toned exercise ball with swollen limbs and a head full of air. "See? Normal size."
Flora slowly patted her belly with half-bent fingers, not really sure of what she was feeling as she swayed unsteadily on rounded feet. "Thank you?" she slowly asked.
"You're welcome. How does it feel?"
She thought for several seconds. "Kind of good, but..." She lazily gestured with one hand towards her head. "...my head feels all disconnected."
"Like it's full of air?"
"Yeah."
"It is."
"Oh." Flora meandered away, moving in a slow, bobbing gait. "I'm going to lie down for a bit."
Jordan nodded. "Good plan. Just don't walk in front of-"
Flora glided back past her, slowly spinning in midair. "Wooooooaaaaaaah."
"...the fan."