You look up with your biggest set of eyes. She looks very different than Marisa. She's younger, with red chides and bright green eyes. She's got a freckly face like Marisa, but not nearly as dense as the other witch's face is. She is wearing a pair of overalls and a plain white tank top and is carrying a little bag of gardening tools. She looks friendly, but so very big! Looking up at her with your biggest body is very disorienting and seeing her reflection in the window with smaller eyes is even worse. Still, the girl doesn't seem to mind your presence there. As a matter of fact, she has eyes only for you. She can't be older than thirteen, and her expression is not unlike a child eager to try something for the first time. "Well look at you, little Berry," she says, smiling down at you. "Marisa said a spell had gone wrong. I can see that she was right. Now… you don't have any idea what your magical abilities might be, would you? Marisa is sure that you still have some, and I agree.
She pulled on a pair of thin gardening gloves. "You don't mind if I take a look at you, do you…" She pauses for a moment. "What's your name, Berry?"
"I'm not a berry," you say, though you don't say it with much enthusiasm "I’m David." You fold your arms across your chest, though you don't feel self-conscious about being "naked" so much as about being entirely in the power of this small, feeble child. She does look friendly, though. There's something about her that puts you at ease. At least until she moves closer, towering over you.
“David. Well David, you're a common strawberry plant. Subtropical and temperate, semiannual. Very popular, very sweet. By the looks of you, you're probably gonna fruit all year round, if there was anything in here to pollinate you. You don't feel... magical, at all?" At a shake of one of your heads (a proud accomplishment), she reaches in with a pair of small clippers and trims off one of your leaves. It hurts sharply, but the pain fades almost at once. You still glare at her. That hurt, and she didn't even ask! The girl puts the leaf in her mouth, working it around for a moment and entirely ignoring your displeasure. "I don't taste any magic. It's probably in the fruit." She frowns, spitting the leaf on the ground. "Okay David, I’m going to have to trim you. You’re too dense, and you won’t grow well this way. I promised Marisa I'd have you a foot high in three months. This means we’re both going to make sacrifices." She seems almost too eager as she takes a little pot of dirt out of the tool bag, along with a small shovel. The more tools she removes the more fearful you begin to be. What exactly is she going to do? "Don't worry: I’ve been gardening my whole life. I know what I'm doing."
What comes next is the most horrible sensation you've ever felt since walking into this shop. The witch removes many of your branches, which grow in an unruly leafy mess all through the plant. She thins you out, each snip feeling slightly more painful than the last. That is not the worst of it, though. Each pain feels like getting a chunk of hair ripped out... by then she takes her little shovel, digging around the small, teenage you. She barely has time to protest... all three of you are screaming... and she slices through the roots, removing her main stem. You feel a jerk at your insides, and for a second it feels like you can't breathe. The pain is so intense that for a minute you blackout entirely. When your senses return, you’re looking through the eyes of the child at the horrible scene. Your biggest, oldest body has been cut away completely and is lying dead on the ground like trash. The pot next to you has the teenage version of you in it, a single terrified-looking stem whimpering and crying. You’ve been cut back to a single young sapling with short red hair, a sapling with a few small branches coming out of your sides and further down your stem, but no more. There is less soil now, so your toes vanish into the ground, which gives the illusion that you are bigger than you are. Your toes are white instead of green though, and you know they used to be a part of the roots. Strangely, you don’t feel pain anymore. As a matter of fact, you feel strength flowing into you from below. You're only one small, young stem now, with almost all the roots of the whole plant. There's something different about the soil too, as though you can see little sparkles of light every now and again. Something has been mixed into the soil, and it tastes so good you almost can’t feel the soreness in almost every part of your body where parts were trimmed.
"There!" The girl seems satisfied, and she leaves a moment, muttering something about getting a trash bag for all the mess she's made. This leaves you with a few moments to look into the eyes of your older copy, the girl looking so scared you can’t help but pity her. Somehow both of you know she is going to leave and you are staying - you wonder briefly how you might feel it you were being taken away to live with this crazy plant-witch. You reach out, leaning with all your might, and take her hand for a moment. No words are spoken, but strength is passed all the same. You are too weak to speak from all the cutting, but your eyes speak message enough. "Good luck," they say. “I won't forget you." You're too young to have offered advice if you could. Everything seems so much more complicated than it was, everything harder for your little brain to wrap its way around. You hope removing two of your stems didn't take away two-thirds of your intelligence.
The witch comes back to clean up all the David trimmings, sweeping them into a trash bag and muttering to you as she works. "I've used my special fertilizer. It should keep you growing much faster than normal. I'll have to come in to trim you every week or so, but otherwise you should be a foot and a half in three months. Big enough to use a register." She grins, tossing the trimmings into the trash and picking up the other pot. Your grip with the other David is broken, and you can see her crying silently. "Cya, David. I’ll be hack to check on you next week." And she’s gone, leaving you alone in the shop again.
The next person you see is...