Todd wandered the zoo with impunity. With the janitor’s set of master keys, he could go wherever he wanted and see whatever he wanted to see. He decided to collect some more subjects. For science, of course!
With the zero age safeguard still activated, he entered the macaw aviary and resolved to collect some birds. Freezing time again, he reduced both a male and female of the colourful tropical parrots and collected their eggs.
The zoo was so dead, the staff were slacking off. They didn’t even notice Todd wandering around unsupervised. Eventually, he grew more bold. He approached the “plains” exhibit and approached the mating pair of moose. With a giggle, he started both the male and female on their way to unbirth and hopped the fence.
By the time he reached them, the two big hooved critters had been halved from standing taller than a man to the size of deer. The bull’s antlers had shrunk away and both were looking leaner and younger as they continued to shrink. The two animals staggered slightly in unbalanced loss of control as they became newborns, and finally both went still and began to lose their fur as they reverted to embryonic development. Unlike the reptiles and the birds, however, the mammals developed a slimy placental casing around their forms that hid the changing forms away as they shrank and shrank in the mid afternoon grass. Losing size fast, Todd gasped as the two animals each reduced to a single dot of a fertilized egg, from which a slimy umbilical cord dangled from each. Todd checked the remote and noted that without a connection to a womb both would die quickly.
Todd solved this by creating a orb-like coating with the remote to act as a makeshift womb. He smiled in amazement as the two tiny umbilical connections anchored, throbbing, to the “wall” of the containers he had created.
Need to be careful with the mammals, he realized, and gently put the two moose in his bag for safe keeping.
In this way, Todd traveled the zoo collecting subjects, freezing time, and reducing them to easily carried embryos.
Soon he had rhinoceros, flamingos, apes, hippos, , zebras, lions, tigers, giraffes, a few more reptiles, and even penguins, lovingly shrunk to the start of their existence and stashed away for further “study.”
A job very well done, he excitedly headed back to the dorms to “play” with his new friends. Hopefully they would all be as much fun as Gretta.