Shelly coughed as the smoke cleared after the door of the exit chamber opened. The foggy condensed moisture was an unexpected side effect of the process.
I really need to work on that, thought Shelly, as she exited the chamber.
Then she remembered what had happened. She began to look over her body, patting it to make sure it was all there and still normal. With a sigh, she saw that she was entirely the same. Her device was a success! She had successfully transported a living organism! She began to dance around with glee.
Suddenly, the little white mouse scampered out of the exit chamber. Shelly angrily tried to stomp on it, losing one of her high heeled shoes in the process.
"You little bastard! You almost got me killed!" said Shelly. She stumbled unevenly, and pulled her other shoe off and threw it across the room at the mouse as it scampered into a hole in the wall. "You deserve that, and much worse. You certainly don't deserve to be the first animal to teleport, you little coward!"
Shelly made a mental note to remove the mouse from her experiment log. It didn't deserve to be remembered in the history books. She sat down at her desk and began to make notes in her lab notebook, occasionally scanning the computer logs to see exactly what it had done to make this attempt a success. It was arduous work, and Shelly worked all through the night.
Shelly was so focused on the work, that she failed to notice the small changes in her body. Her nails clicked loudly as she tapped them thoughtfully on her desk. The noise gradually became louder as her nail sharpened into claws and her palms were thickened by soft pink pads. Because her shoes were off, she didn't notice as her feet stretched into long thin paws, her big toe receding into a dew claw. She absentmindedly scratched her chest and legs as soft white fur gradually sprouted across her body, a few thin fibers at first that slowly grew into a thick fur coat. She was annoyed when her pencil fell from behind her ear, as it grew larger and more round. But she still did notice anything was wrong. Even the pinching feeling in her lower back that developed as a thin pink segmented tail slowly poked out of her spine did nothing more than annoy her as she tried to concentrate on her work.
But it was the tail that finally alerted her to the problem. As Shelly's body continued to slowly shrink, she found herself constantly moving forward in her chair to maintain the same position so she could work on her notebook. Her last movement had shifted her growing tail beneath her, and she sat down on it with a yelp.
"Ah!" she screamed in pain, and her body pinched her tail. She jumped off the chair to see what she had sat on. She turned and saw a large mouse tail swinging behind her. "What the hell is this?"
Still thinking she had sat on something and that it was just stuck to her butt, she gave it a had tug trying to remove it. She yelped again, as the tail remained painfully attached.
"What is this thing? It looks just like ...." Shelly paled as she realized what it was - a mouse tail! She looked at her hands and feet with fear. Her heart began to race rapidly. She felt the fur covering her skin. She felt her huge rounded ears.
Not my face, please God, not my face, thought Shelly.
She reached up and touched her face. It was covered in fur, but felt the same. She opened her mouth and felt her teeth. Her incisors were very long. She could almost feel them stretching beneath her fingers. Her nose twitched, and when she reached to touch it she felt long thin whiskers extending though her fingers.
Dear God, I have to stop this somehow, thought Shelly.
She looked back at the computer on her desk. Her chair now seemed much taller. She was less than three feet tall! Her clothes hung loosely on her body, and were beginning to bunch up around her. The chair seemed to rise above her as she began to shrink more rapidly, her changes accelerated by her racing heart and fear. She struggled to climb into the chair when she her jaw was suddenly racked by a tremendous pain. She closed her eyes and bent down to the ground as her jaw stretched into a long snout. Finally, the pain ended. Her transformation was over. She looked around and saw that she was swimming in her clothes. She struggled to find her way out and wriggle free of her clothes.
Outside of her clothes and nude, she assessed the extent of her changes. She was just 12 inches tall. She was covered in white fur from head to toe, and she had the head of a mouse. Her hands and feet looked liked paws, but she found that they still had the manual dexterity of human hands. Thankfully, she could still write and hold objects, but they would have to be very small. Although her body was very small and covered in fur, it still had a human shape. She had kept her hourglass figure, and her breasts were still in the right place, although covered by fur. In short, she looked like a tiny hybrid of human and mouse - an anthro-morphic mouse!
Shelly looked up at her computer. She had to figure out a way to get up there and try to reverse this! Suddenly, the doorknob to her lab rattled. Someone was trying to get in. She looked at the clock and saw that it was morning. It was probably time for the janitor to clean her lab. She couldn't let him see her like this! If he didn't kill her, she would be the laughingstock of the Institute if anyone found out. They were already looking for an excuse to take her project away. She would probably just end up in someone else's lab as their own personal lab rat. She scurried around the lab, looking for some place to hide.
"Hey! Over here!"
Shelly ran towards the voice, and was surprised to find another hybrid exactly like her. She was confused at first, then quickly realized that this was the mouse that had ridden with her during her teleportation trip. It must have been changed by the process, too.
"Quick, you can hide in here with me. That evil scientist must have changed you, too. We have to hide before that horrible woman comes back, " said the white mouse.
Shelly looked at the mouse in shock. It didn't recognize her as a former human, and she decided that was probably a good thing. She had tried to kill it, after all. Shelly briefly considered her options. She could pretend to be a mouse and hide with her new companion. But if it ever found out the truth, things could go bad quickly. Then again, if she revealed herself, maybe she could threaten and bully the mouse into helping her. But why did she need a mouse's help anyway? The mouse could talk, so she probably could, too. She could just tell her visitor what happened, and they would probably help her. Hopefully, they wouldn't kill her on sight or turn her over to the other scientists for experimentation.
The mouse looked at Shelly, awaiting her decision.