"Hmmm," mused the witch in thought, "I've already got my new guard dog, so what else might I need? Oh! I know! A new familiar would be nice. Something small and easy to carry around and feed, like ... a manageable little mouse!"
"What are you talkin' about, ya crazy old lady? And what did you do to Damon?"
John felt strange already, but he didn't want to say anything, and he wouldn't know what to say if he did. It was like an electric tingle flooded down his body from head to toe, and then his cheeks tickled, and then even his ears felt odd somehow. Something loosened up right on the top of his butt and started wiggling inside of his underwear. He felt his ears jerk hard and start to twitch beside him, while a bunch of little pinpricks on his face made him scrunch his nose and wrinkle his lips. The witch seemed to notice his sudden unease.
"Now I must admit that you're change isn't going to be the most comfortable, since it's going to be rather drastic," she said to him, watching his growing ears perk up to hear her. "But I think you'll manage just fine," she reassured him.
"Manage what?" he asked dumbly. He reached up to scratch at his cheeks, and he was surprised to find some new hairs sticking out from his face up there. Not stubble like when he hadn't shaved in a while. More like long, sturdy cords branching out from his face as far as he could reach with his arms. A tickle took root in his face again, and the oversized hairs swished from his touch, whisking over his fumbling hands like--well, like whiskers!
John finally noticed that he was shorter than the witch when he found himself tilting his head up to look at her. She'd been just a little bit shorter than him when she'd come in, and from the looks of the room, she hadn't exactly grown very much as far as he could tell. She was still eye level with the lampshade that used to be almost John's height. The slightly awkward bagginess in his clothes also revealed that the change in size was probably his, not hers.
"Why am I ... suddenly losing weight or something?" he asked, tightening his belt in a hurry. Something in his pants flopped over and bent itself against the seat of his loosely fitting boxers, rubbing against the fabric in a way he shouldn't have been able to feel.
"Oh, you're losing a lot more than weight, little mousey," she taunted, barely managing to distract him from the feel of his ears, nose and jaw swelling even as his face kept sprouting more whiskers.
"That's the second time you've called me a mouse!" he said, tilting his head up higher and tighten his belt again, because he was still shrinking. "As soon as I can get my bearings here," he threatened, "I'ma have have to come over there and teach you not to mess with me OR my gang!" He pounded his fist in his hands. "And ya mighta managed to get Damon into the slammer, but Chris and me still knows where you live, so I wouldn't sleep to soundly until he's out if I were you."
The witch laughed at the threats coming from the whiskered snout of a man whose height now barely came up her hips, who couldn't stop fiddling with his own whiskers because they felt strange to him, and who couldn't stop messing with his clothes because they were now multiple sizes too big for him. Hilariously, her cackling only set him off further: "Why I oughta come over there and slap that smile right off your wrinkly old face, hag," he shot back. "Just wait til Chris comes back, he'll teach you a thing or too! Just cause you got Damon don't mean you can, you can--ow! What the ... ?"
Even the continuing loosening of John's boxers was no longer enough to keep the thing over his butt from bunching up painfully inside them. He finally had to just let his pants loosen some more, then reach down into the back of them to adjust whatever it might be. His hand made contact with his own skin, and wrapped itself around something thick and round like some sort of hose. Confused, he worked his hand along the unfamiliar length of flesh, managed to get a decent grip around it, lowered his baggy pants a bit, and maneuvered the strange appendage out of them. It was long enough to wrap the thing around his waist a bit, so he could hold the end of it in front of him and get a decent look at it. It was exactly the color of his own skin, and he finally just let his pants fall down so he could get his other hand around it. He could feel and see that it was growing longer.
"What is this?" he said, reaching up to scratch his head, then widening his eyes at how much his ears had grown.
"If you didn't want to be called a mouse," the witch giggled, "then maybe you shouldn't have grown those big round ears, my pet! And yes, I know the tail is long, but you'll have plenty of time to get used to it when we get back to my place. After all, I'm never changing you back."
"Wait, WHAT?!" John wanted to say that she couldn't possibly couldn't be causing this, or what he was holding in his left hand couldn't be a tail, and that he was going to cut her down to size as soon as he stopped shrinking, but it slowly started to make sense to him that she really MIGHT be turning him into a mouse, that she really could leave him this way if she wanted to, and that there might not actually be anything he could do about it. He hugged his tail tighter around him and flattened his ears. "No," he pleaded, "there's gotta be some mistake, I mean SQUEEEEEK!! SQUEE-SQUEE-SQUEEEEEEEEK!!!"
John quickly covered his mouth, noticing just how far his snout stuck out in front of him. He couldn't talk now? He tried but only squeaked again. His long tail thrashed behind him. He held his arms out front and notice black fur growing from the arms, but not his hands. He'd shrunk so much now that he no longer even came up to the witches knees, and the collar of his shirt was getting to be wider than he was, so the shirt eventually fell off too. He scampered up out of the pile of garments and paced around in circles looking at his new body--jet black fur basically everywhere except his hands and feet and tail--and dropped to all fours to go faster, scampering around frantically and squeaking. The witch came down and picked him up, holding him and petting his long black fur. "There now," she said, "I'll put you right here in my purse, and we'll go back to my place, and you can be my new familiar like I promised. It will be so much better than being a thief! Or at least, I think so anyway.