Dave noticed two things on the way to the department store.
Firstly, everything he was wearing was starting to feel less and less like the right size for him. The sleeves of his coat began to edge down across his wrists and towards his knuckles. His shoes felt loose and he began to feel his socks bunching around his ankles.
Secondly, while he was used to being tall, a full head higher than a man of average height he was now mostly at eye level with the majority of men he was passing, and having to look up towards at least a few.
By the time he reached he destination things had progressed further. He was having difficulty now in keeping his feet in his shoes and his arms had disappeared entirely inside the sleeves of a coat that now hung loosely way down his lower body. He now seemed to be eye level with women only, and shorter than quite a few of them too. All men seemed effortlessly taller and bigger than him. Some looked like giants, his head barely reaching to their chests. Others had a head or so on him, and was it just his imagination or did he catch a few even looking down and smirking as they checked out what seemed to be his now far from average and increasingly diminutive height and size.
Bizarrely, Dave found it more exciting than he could possibly have imagined. He was grateful for the loose folds of his now giant clothing as it hid his increasingly erect cock.
But how small was he? There was one way to find out.
He headed towards a clothing store that he knew had clothes for both men and boys. Near the entrance to the boys section was a growth chart with an illustration of a large giraffe. Dave knew that he should really take his shoes off but standing by it he drew a hand across his head onto the scale: 5'2"
5'2": WTF, that was wild! He noticed the chart had helpfully put next to this height (about half way up the giraffe's neck) a label saying "Age 13 years"
Dave thought back. He hadn't been 5'2" when he was 13, he had been 5'7" (well on the way to the 6'2 and a bit" he would reach as a fully grown man). He hadn't been 5'2 since he was 11!
The initial tingle had lasted for about a minute and he reckoned he had gotten smaller over about another 15 minutes after that. His size, such as it was, had not changed for more than an hour now and so he assumed that this was the maximum effect his first experiment with the gun would produce.
There was just so much less of him than there was before. At well over six foot, Dave had been slim and muscular, but without question still a big guy in the eyes of the world. He had the same build now, only reduced in size in proportion to his height and he looked and felt little in every sense. He gulped as he reckoned that applied to other parts of his anatomy as well. He wondered too for a moment what the device had done with the mass of him that was no longer there. The device looked as if it would easily restore what had been lost, but what if he was trapped at this new size for ever, destined to live the rest of his life with a height and build somewhere below that of his twelve year old niece? Again, he felt himself stiffen and longed suddenly to compare himself up close with another guy.
To the department store assistant Dave appeared nothing too much out of the ordinary, There were short guys, there were very short guys, and this was one of the latter. How could he know that at the beginning of this morning Dave would have towered above him by a good six inches and that he would be the one looking up and the one noticing how much the other outranked him in breadth and build. As it was, the situation was reversed.
The assistant took in Dave's light build: he would be at best an extra small in the men's sizes, if he didn't mind a loose-ish fit or even a boy's size, poor guy if he wanted something more close fitting. He decided not to mention the latter until he had a chance to better gauge how that might go down: some small guys could be very touchy.
Mostly, though, Dave was just another customer and while Dave was freaking out as he was handed an extra small jacket to try on by a young man of barely average height, who now stood half a foot higher than him (with large masculine hands and feet, compared to his own now seemingly child like ones) the assistant himself was tactful and polite. In fact, even this tiny garment seemed embarrassingly roomy on Dave. His now raging hard on twitched again.