Mira loses track of time, though the drive ends almost as soon as it begins. Before she can spiral further, the car stops. The engine cuts out, followed by the sensation of being lifted as Adrian steps into the cool night air.

  By the time the light reaches her eyes, she’s sitting on a smooth metal surface—cool and seamless, like surgical steel—laid gently at the center of a lab desk the size of a banquet table.

  The room is sealed on all sides, every panel seamless and unmarked, with soft white lighting embedded into the ceiling like a web of concentric rings. Holographic interfaces ripple across glass monitors suspended in midair, flickering as Adrian moves past. Behind him, a towering bio-dome unit glows faint blue, enclosing rows of culture columns that pulse faintly—each one reading vitals, folding strands of virtual DNA in real time.

  Mira turns slowly, eyes wide.

  She’s not in a lab.

  She’s in a fortress.

  “What do we do here?” Mira finally breaks the silence, her voice small—though, to be fair, everything about her is small now.

  He puts on the face shield. Clicks a sterile pack open with one hand. The fine needle glints under the clinical light, impossibly thin, but not small enough to comfort her.

  “Wait—” Mira steps back instinctively, her bare heel skidding slightly against the metal desk. “Wait, stop that. Adrian. What are you doing?”

  She scrambles back farther, eyes darting for cover—there is none to hide behind. She’s alone on the cold, immaculate surface of his research desk, every escape route too open, too bright, too clean.

  So she does the only thing she can: shuts her eyes tight, hands covering her face as if the simple act of not seeing might somehow make her disappear.

  She waits.

  A beat.

  Then another.

  Still nothing.

  Carefully, hesitantly, she opens one eye through her fingers.

  Adrian is still there, mask on, silent.

  But the needle isn’t pointed at her.

  It’s in his hand—angled into his own arm, drawing a slow, measured vial of blood. The dark crimson pools into the chamber without a word.

  He just finishes the withdrawal, seals the tube, and moves calmly to the centrifuge without ever breaking rhythm. Like this is routine. Like he never intended to touch her at all.

  “Let’s see if the fungus reacts to my cells first,” he says calmly.

  He approaches the specimen unit—where the preserved fungus floats, faintly pulsing in its nutrient gel. With practiced precision, he activates a containment sleeve: a sealed, negative-pressure box with fine-motor robotic arms controlled through a haptic glove interface. His own hands never touch the sample.

  Inside the chamber, one robotic arm extracts a micro-biopsy—just a threadlike sliver of the fungal tissue, thinner than a strand of hair. It's immediately suspended in buffer solution and isolated in a micro-capsule.

  Adrian injects a small sample of his own blood into the capsule through a side port using an automated precision injector. The capsule is then sealed and transferred into the bio-reactive interaction chamber—a high-sensitivity, rapid-response diagnostic unit designed for cellular interaction analysis. Something he likely built or customized himself.

  Mira hasn’t moved. She’s still at the far end of the desk, watching him like he’s just disarmed a landmine and is now casually dissecting it for fun.

  He finally speaks—without turning, voice softer now, meant for her.

  “I took a small part of the fungus,” he says, “just a fragment. I’m mixing it with my blood to see if it reacts the way it did to you.”

  She doesn’t answer. He keeps going.

  “If it triggers cell changes, attacks the blood, or releases any toxins, the machine will catch it immediately. If it does nothing, we know it’s not a universal effect—it might only respond to certain conditions. Or certain people.”

  She swallows, still tense. Her fingers press into the smooth metal desk.

  “So you’re… testing if I’m the one it wanted.”

  Adrian watches the screen, one hand adjusting the sensitivity of the spectrometer, the other still gloved, resting beside the containment chamber. The first data line appears—normal. The second—unchanged.

  He speaks without turning.

  “The reaction was almost immediate in your case,” he says. “Within minutes of contact, you began shrinking. That suggests the fungal agent works through rapid biochemical interaction.”

  Mira, still perched tensely on the far edge of the desk, frowns. “Meaning…?”

  He continues, calm and methodical. “Possibly through transdermal absorption—through your skin. Or it could’ve triggered something deeper, tied to your nervous system. Neurochemical activation is linked to your biology. Your genetics.”

  She opens her mouth, but he’s not done.

  “And,” he says, glancing over the data again, “if we’re being honest, we can’t rule out a magical-biological hybrid mechanism. Something that doesn’t follow strict scientific laws.”

  Adrian finally looks over his shoulder.

  “But I’m not exposing myself the same way you did,” he adds. “I’m not touching it. I’ve isolated a microscopic fragment, and introduced it into a sealed blood sample. That changes the timeline.”

  “How long until we know?” she asks, barely breathing.

  “Fifteen to thirty minutes,” he says. “If the fungus reacts to my cells, the system will pick it up. But so far—” he turns back to the monitor, tapping one screen, where a green line pulses steady and flat—“nothing.”

  “Besides, there’s another angle I want to explore. Something in your genes might be amplifying your sensitivity to external stimuli—emotional shifts, even small doses of substances like caffeine or alcohol. It’s not normal for someone your size or weight to react so intensely to wine sauce or tea.” He added.

  Mira blinked. “You’re saying I’m… what? Genetically overdramatic?”

  “Genetically responsive,” he corrected.

  “I’d like to run a basic DNA sequence,” he continued. “I need your blood. If your body is responding with full-scale physical change, something at the genetic level is allowing that. I want to know what.”

  Mira freezes.

  “You need what?” she says, too lightly, as if saying it with a joke would make it less real.

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  “Just a drop,” Adrian replies, as though that changes anything.

  Mira goes utterly still.

  Her face, already pale, seems to drain a shade lighter, and her breath hitches as if the very word blood summoned a childhood ghost she’d rather not meet. Even without saying a word, it’s written all over her—etched into the corners of her mouth, trembling slightly, in the way her shoulders rise too fast, and her eyes widen with slow, dawning dread.

  She looks at him like he’s just transformed—not into a boy who almost confessed to her the day before—but the villain of some twisted Thumbelina fable, a dark sorcerer disguised in a white lab coat, ready to pluck the wingless fairy from her path and pin her between glass slides before her journey even begins.

  Adrian simply reaches into the kit beside him and lifts something between two fingers: a needle. Tiny, gleaming, precise—built for micro-samples from the smallest organisms. To her, it might as well be a sword.

  “It’s scaled,” he says gently, like someone coaxing a wild creature toward the edge of a trap. “One second. Close your eyes and count. I’ll be done before you finish.”

  Her lip quivers.

  She doesn’t move.

  “You said just a drop?” she whispers, as if confirming the contract of her impending doom.

  He nods.

  “And one second?”

  Another nod.

  She gulps, every inch of her body still shaking like a leaf caught in the wind. “You better not lie.”

  Then, bracing herself, she squeezes her eyes shut, turning her face away as if expecting a thunderclap.

  Adrian’s voice comes gently, almost too gently, just above the sound of the sterilized vial clicking open.

  “After this, we’ll get you something warm to eat,” he says. “And proper clothes. And if you want… we can start building a flower house. It suits your size.”

  Her eyes snap open, glaring. “Adrian, what are you—?”

  But she doesn’t finish.

  Because it’s already done.

  He’s sealing the vial with calm precision, not even looking smug about it.

  “You didn’t scream,” he remarks quietly, as if that’s worth celebrating.

  “You’re going to tell me exactly what you’re testing for.” Her voice cut through the air, sharper now, brittle with the need for control.

  Adrian nods once, as if he expects nothing less. “I will check for connective tissue markers. There are rare profiles that link tissue elasticity to sudden somatic changes. It’s a long shot—but if we’re talking transformation, we can’t ignore morphology thresholds.”

  He hesitates, then adds, “And I’ll need to run a deeper sequence alignment—comparing your genome to high-resolution human reference panels. The incident with the fungi altered you at a level we don’t fully understand. There may be structural anomalies—mutations, duplications, or non-coding regions acting in unpredictable ways. If something changed you, even epigenetically, there’s a chance we’ll see the shadow of it.”

  “Okay. So this is real science. Not just fairy logic…If we test now… how long until we get a result?”

  “With standard university-grade equipment?” he says, tone clinical. “At least a day, maybe two. That’s why we are here. This is a fourth-gen nanopore sequencer. It runs real-time sequencing as DNA passes through a charged membrane. With the right libraries preloaded—and mine are—I can run a basic profile in under two to three hours.”

  “The raw genomic map will take longer to analyze, but structural flags, duplication anomalies, or even protein-coding irregularities.” He adds, “I’ll see the first clues in thirty minutes.”

  “Thirty minutes to see if I’m genetically cursed?”

  “Genetically unusual.”

  ?

  Thirty minutes.

  It sounds short. Manageable. A harmless wait.

  But inside Adrian’s sealed lab—white walls too clean, machines too cold, air too still—it feels like a lifetime stretched thin.

  Mira shifts on the edge of the lab desk, her knees pulled up to her chest, bare feet pressed against the smooth steel surface. The lights overhead don’t flicker, and the machines don’t beep dramatically, but everything hums in that low, clinical murmur that makes her feel less like a person and more like a variable.

  Adrian is checking readings, adjusting the analysis stream, and annotating data like this is all perfectly ordinary—like it doesn’t involve someone shrinking down to fairy-size and handing over a strand of hair to confirm whether her DNA is secretly written in an ancient language of transformation spells.

  She watches him from her perch, arms wrapped around her knees.

  The lab coat doesn’t help. The gloves. The full concentration. The reflection of numbers and diagrams in his glasses.

  He looks like the exact kind of shady underground scientist people whisper about in medical thrillers.

  All serious angles and cold focus, with just enough mystery to make it worse.

  He hasn’t spoken since the countdown started.

  And the silence presses on her more than the walls do.

  “The DNA scan shows no major abnormalities in protein-coding regions. But there are structural anomalies in the non-coding sequences—regions that don’t show up in standard human reference panels. Some of them are stable, but others look like they’ve recently changed.” He finally speaks, calmly, precisely. “It’s not definitive, but it suggests an alteration. Or an activation. Possibly triggered by the bloom.”

  Mira says nothing, so he continues, more cautiously now.

  “I’d need to monitor how those sequences shift over time. Track what activates them, how they correspond with your episodes. If we observe enough cycles, we might—”

  She crosses her arms slowly. “You want to keep testing me.”

  “I want to understand what’s happening.”

  Mira’s jaw tightens.

  “No.”

  She stares at the far wall, voice low but firm. “I’m not your project.”

  “You’re not,” he says simply.

  Mira takes a breath and steps back. “But that’s how it feels. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be rewired, or cursed, or whatever this is. And I definitely didn’t ask to be studied like a case file.”

  She tries to keep her voice steady, but the tremor pushes through anyway.

  “I know you want to help. I know this is what you do. But when you talk like that—about tracking me, testing me, mapping my genes—I can’t think straight. I can’t breathe. I feel like you’re putting me under glass and waiting to see what happens when I crack.”

  Adrian doesn’t interrupt.

  She turns slightly away, one hand pressing over her mouth for a moment before dropping.

  “I’m not ready for that,” she finishes quietly. “Not now. Not like this.”

  A long silence stretches between them. The air shifts. Then Adrian steps back from the desk, and his tone shifts with him—lighter, more neutral.

  “Then we work with what we know.”

  She looks up, cautious.

  “And what we know here,” he says, “is nothing.”

  He steps closer to the console, not looking at her as he speaks.

  “The fungus only affects you—not me. And more importantly—we have no idea how to turn you back.”

  Mira stiffens, arms still folded.

  Adrian’s fingers rest lightly on the edge of the terminal. “There’s no existing research. No experimental precedent. Nothing in bioalchemy, neuromodulation, or even fringe gene therapy explains this kind of somatic shift. So…”

  He finally looks at her.

  “…let’s say the only information we can count on right now—is the fairy records.”

  Mira looks up at him, blinking hard. “Wait—wait. The most brilliant scientist in the world is seriously talking about fairy records now?” Her voice pitches somewhere between disbelief and panic. “You’re not… teasing me, right?”

  Adrian says nothing.

  “Adrian—did you…have you ever read a fairy tale in your life?”

  He turns to her, completely unfazed. “What makes you think I’ve never read fairy tales?”

  She opens her mouth. Then closes it. Then lifts a hand, gesturing wildly. “What makes me think—Adrian. What makes me think you ever read fairy tales—that’s the correct question.”

  “There’s an ancient archive,” he says. “Under the Meridian wing. A sealed floor. The entire collection is catalogued as ‘Folklore and Non-Scientific Traditions.’ with old books. Bound in bark, fungus-cured leather, pressed petals. All filed under a forgotten system. "

  “You said you wandered in,” Adrian continues. “You weren’t sure how you got there. You thought it was a dream. But when you woke up, you were already back in your dorm. No memory of walking out.

  “Your condition now and that incident might be connected. And until we confirm otherwise—” he reaches for a vial, already slipping on gloves, “—we have to figure out what this fungus is, how it interacts with your system, and why it affects ”

  She stares at him as if he’s grown a second head. “You’re saying…” Her voice drops into a half-whisper, half-laugh. “You’ve spent two years in Vermillion Crown—attending elite lectures, heading research projects, building synthetic brain models—and secretly reading the fairy tale archives in the basement?”

  “More or less,” he doesn’t deny it.

  Mira’s mouth stays open.

  Of all the shocks today—the sudden shrinking, the mushroom, the sterile lab, the looming possibility of never returning to her normal size— might be the one that finally breaks her.

  Adrian Vale, prodigy of the generation and walking enigma of logic and poise, said he stayed at the most prestigious university in the world to read fairy tales.

  She doesn’t even know what stunts her more anymore—the fact that she’s two inches tall… or the fact that Adrian Vale might have voluntarily read books with hand-painted dragons and curses and dancing flower spirits.

  This life is insane. This must be a fever dream.

  She finally covers her face with both hands, then peeks out at him.

  “Adrian,” she says, voice small and sincere, “tell me this is just in my dream.”