There was nothing Melanie could do about the big, furry black tail that was coming straight for her. Just as she attempted to brace for impact, the tail hit the side of the jar and sent it flying, with Melanie tumbling around helplessly inside. For a long, desperate moment, both the human and mouse parts of Melanie told her she was about to die, as the distant ground came closer and closer. But as the glass crashed against the floor and shattered into little pieces all around her, she bounced off the linoleum tiling and came to a rough stop just outside the field of debris, sore and thoroughly traumatized but physically unharmed. She had been saved by the laws of physics - her body was now so tiny that it just couldn't hit the ground with enough force to kill her.
But Melanie had no time to think about this stroke of good fortune, or the very bad luck that surrounded it on either side. Rolling over from the spot where she had landed, she looked up into the sarcastic eyes and smirking mouth of a vicious predator that was looming over her. The slightest flinch of a paw in her direction erased all rational human thought from Melanie's mind, replacing it with sheer terror. If she had needed to, she would have gnawed her own leg off without even stopping to think about it. She had to get away from here, as fast as possible, by any means necessary.
And so, before she even recognized what she was doing, Melanie took off on all fours and scurried away at top speed. She didn't have a moment to spare to look behind herself, and she didn't need to. She could feel the cat's presence behind her, the heat of its breath at her back. She had to keep running.
The situation seemed hopeless - she knew the cat was gaining on her. But right in front of Melanie's eyes was her salvation, the destination she just now consciously realized she was running towards. Where the floor met the wall, there was a small hole, its edges roughly carved into a corner of the baseboard. She might never have noticed it as a human, staring down from several feet up. But now this hole, just big enough for her to squeeze through, was her only chance at getting to safety.
Just as Melanie leaped into the hole, she felt a flash of pain at her back. A giant paw followed her through the opening, but she dashed to the right and managed to get out of its very limited reach inside the wall. She collapsed to the ground in exhaustion, the adrenaline still coursing through every inch of her body. Now that she finally had a chance to collect her thoughts again and try to contemplate her next move, those words stopped her in her tracks. Every inch? She shuddered to remember that her entire body was now only about three inches long, maybe four or five if you counted her tail.
Her tail. That was impossible to ignore. Not the fact that she had one at all, which was disturbing enough, but the throbbing pain that flowed through it now as the adrenaline began to wore off. The sensation was entirely alien to her, a sharp feeling coming from a part of her body that she shouldn't even have. Now that there was no immediate danger, she took a moment to look backward. In the dim light of the crevice inside the wall, which her eyes were rapidly adjusting to, she could see that the long, skinny, fleshy appendage sticking out of her behind had a crooked, angular bend near its tip. The cat must have slashed at it just as she escaped from its grasp, she realized, and broken it.
Melanie wanted to cry. Her impossible, unbelievable situation just kept getting worse. Why was all of this happening to her? What had she done to deserve this? A part of her hoped that this was all just a dream or something, but at the same time she knew it had to be real. Even her worst nightmares were meandering and unfocused, and the moment she could think about their events with any seriousness they seemed ridiculous. This, on the other hand, was the most vivid, maybe even the most real, experience she had ever had in her life. Her senses were heightened now, and her body felt different in ways that her subconscious couldn't possibly have imagined.
She was trying to think about what she could possibly do now when she heard the cat's snide, menacing voice again from the other side of the wall. "Hmph. Well, that was disappointing. I was hoping my new plaything would last at least a little bit longer than that. I've really got to remind Mistress Beth to patch up that hole. They can't hide in there forever."
At first, Melanie thought the cat was taunting her, but the tone of its voice was too soft for that, seemingly muttering to itself. She soon realized that she could only hear the voice, reverberating through the drywall, because her hearing was so much more acute now. She could hear the cat padding away along the floorboards outside her sanctuary, and then, beneath that, a cacophony of noise that she never could have noticed before - water rushing through distant pipes, the creaking and settling of an old building, and somewhere not too far away, the sound of something skittering around.
Training her attention to the last of those noises, she realized she could smell something coming from that direction, too. It was a scent that Melanie didn't quite recognize, although the idea of yet another unfamiliar sensation was hardly surprising to her at this point. If her newly enhanced hearing was merely stronger and louder than before, the sense of smell that came through her elongated nose was like stepping into another dimension, like seeing a rainbow of entirely new colors. It would be incredibly useful, she figured, if she had the slightest idea what she was detecting with it. Instead, it was an assault on her still-reeling mind, one that she was no longer preoccupied enough with more immediate dangers to block out.
But as she tentatively crawled toward the source of the noise, Melanie had a pretty good idea of what she was about to find. The soft sound of scratching that must be coming from a creature not much bigger than her reduced self, the scent that she now realized was not unlike the one that her own body was giving off, the fact that the cat seemed to mention that she wasn't alone in here. She turned a dark corner inside the wall and immediately laid eyes on what she was looking for. A group of mice was huddled there, all looking at her curiously. For a split second, Melanie thought of them as "giant mice", before the sad realization hit her again that she was the one whose size had been dramatically altered.
Were these just normal mice, or had they been human once like her? Melanie shuddered to think that she might be trapped here, living like a wild animal, indefinitely. Could they possibly help her out of this predicament, or was she just as screwed as before? There was only one way to find out. Melanie stammered an uncertain greeting to the other mice. "Uh, hello?"