The next thing that caught Isabella's eye, lying along the side of the boardwalk, was an ordinary-looking dollhouse. Surrounded by such strange and supernatural sights, it stood out exactly because of how normal it appeared to be. But she knew by now that looks could be deceiving. Her curiosity got the better of her, and she took a few tentative steps toward the miniature house. Nothing happened. Nobody jumped out at her. She got a little closer. Staring intently at the dollhouse, the only thing Isabella noticed was that it seemed to be a bit bigger.
Wait. Bigger?
Isabella looked up from the dollhouse and toward the people walking by. To her amazement, they all seemed unusually tall, by at least a foot. But the only way that would make sense was if...
Before she could finish that thought, she saw something strange with one of the people walking by. As he passed the dollhouse, he seemed to shrink by several inches, then immediately grew back to full size as he walked away. And all of it without noticing a thing.
That seemed to answer Isabella's question: the dollhouse could make people shrink as they came close to it. But she was still curious. Surely this had to be connected to a Fruit user somehow, but she didn't see anyone close by. Knowing that she could safely return, she took another cautious step toward the dollhouse, and sure enough, the world grew a little bit more around her. It was like being a little kid again, needing to look up at just about anyone. She guessed she was maybe about three feet tall now.
Every step Isabella took toward the dollhouse, it seemed to get further away. It was almost like the house was taunting her, playing a game of keep-away. And that only made her want to approach closer. Another step, and her head was barely above the house's roof line. Another, and she couldn't see over it anymore. Another, and the second-story windows were right at her eye level. The dollhouse in front of her was quickly starting to look like a regular old house.
It took only a few more steps before Isabella was standing at the front door of the dollhouse, exactly the right size to go inside it like it was any other house. Her first thought was to just try opening the door, but that seemed... impolite. Then she noticed a doorbell at the side. Feeling a little silly, she gave it a press, and then waited.
To her surprise, the door soon swung open. She was met by a woman who looked like a normal size to her – which meant that she was actually only a few inches tall. Isabella was expecting an awkward encounter, but the woman's eyes immediately lit up with recognition, as if she knew the girl somehow. "Oh, come in, come in!", she said before Isabella could get a word out to try to explain herself. "You're just in time! We're gonna get going in a couple minutes."
As she was ushered inside the house, Isabella was about to ask what that meant. But she got distracted when she caught sight of the stranger's elbow, which was actually a big, clunky plastic joint. Only now did it occur to her that she had just met a giant living doll - well, a normal-sized living doll, she had just been shrunk to match.
The doll led her into a large, ornately-furnished living room, where several other dolls were sitting around and talking to one another. Isabella was watching them with curiosity, her eye caught by the bright red wallpaper that surrounded the room on all sides, when a towel was suddenly thrust in her face. "Here," said the doll who brought her inside. "To wipe off whatever that stuff is you got covered in."
Isabella was tempted to politely protest, to say "I think you're mistaking me for someone else." But she didn't want to argue with this woman, and she wanted to see where this was going. If anything happened, she could just walk out of here and promptly be restored to full size. So she went along with it and started rubbing the towel on her arm, covering her flexible vinyl skin. But as soon as she did, she felt something unexpectedly solid underneath, even firmer than her body had been when she was a normal human. She pulled the towel away and found that where her translucent pooltoy form had been, there was now dull plastic underneath. That part of her arm looked just like the dolls she was encountering, except for the darker shade of her medium-brown skin.
Well, Isabella thought to herself, it was inevitable that she was going to end up with some sort of change, and this one seemed like fun. She rubbed the towel over more parts of her body, and saw the same effect. She even particularly enjoyed the feeling of her new joints flexing, bits of hard plastic sliding and rubbing against each other to allow her to move a "muscle". Soon enough, she had finished the job, and had successfully changed herself from one inanimate form to another.
In the meantime, Isabella could see from the corner of her eye that the doll who had welcomed her in was now preoccupied with something. "Eighteen, nineteen, twenty..." she muttered under her breath, pointing a finger at each of the various other dolls scattered throughout the house and counting them off. "Twenty-one," she finished, gesturing to the newly changed Isabella. "Okay, everyone's here. We can get going now," the doll said loudly, a hand cupped against her mouth, directing her voice to something upstairs.
A moment later, there was a great rumbling sound, and the whole house shook to its very foundations. Only after Isabella collapsed to the floor did she notice that all the other dolls seemed completely unperturbed by this violent earthquake, which still wasn't letting up. "What's going on?!" she shouted, hoping to be heard over the noise.
"What, you don't remember?", said the other doll, still standing there confidently as if nothing was happening. "You were part of the group that came down here with us, weren't you? Oh, maybe you lost your memories when you got changed. I've heard that can happen." She took a deep breath, the kind that signifies you're about to launch into a prepared explanation, and tapped on the wall beside her with a fist. "Okay, so, Joey here discovered the Dollhouse Fruit. It turned him into, well, a miniature house with optional arms and legs. Some of us in the neighborhood realized that it would be a pretty convenient way to travel, not to mention cheap, if we let him turn us into his dolls and ride around inside of his head. That's how we got this free beach vacation, but it's time to start heading home. Cleveland, here we come!"
Cleveland? Oh, no, this was not good. Isabella needed to get back to her own friends, and her own home, and her own crazy magical scheme to travel at a bargain price. She had to get out of here, even while the "ride" was in motion. She ran to the doorway she had come in by and tried to pull it open, only to find the door locked. Her next thought was to just unlock the door, since she was on the inside, but there wasn't any sort of mechanism that would do it. The door had a mind of its own, which made sense in a house that was apparently sentient, Isabella thought.
Searching for some way out of there before Joey got too far, Isabella made a break for the stairs. There had to be a window that would open or something! Only now did she notice the pink rug running down the length of the staircase, with a rounded part at the end. Trying not to think about the fact that she was climbing on what must be a person's tongue, she ran up the steps a few at a time.
On the second floor, she was met with a hallway full of nondescript doors. Pressing her luck, Isabella flung one of them open, only to be greeted with what looked like a giant brain - a normal-sized brain, she reminded herself - occupying most of the room. Knowing this was not the way to go, she shut the door immediately, and then noticed the placard that she should have seen the first time: "PRIVATE - Joey's Room".
There has to be a way out of here, Isabella thought. She tried again with another door, and this time found what seemed to be a fairly normal looking guest bedroom. And on the opposite side of the room was a window that was letting sunlight in! Yes! She ran to the window, only to be struck by a serious sense of vertigo. Although she was currently at eye level with the crowd of giants that lined the boardwalk, her vantage point seemed to be at least 100 feet up in the air, and it was made all the more dizzying by the way the whole house continued to rock quickly back and forth. If this was her escape, it was going to be a long way down.
Isabella gulped and tried to steel her nerves. It was either this or get taken hundreds of miles away to be stranded in an unfamiliar city. She heaved open the window, which thankfully opened without a complaint. And before she could even think twice about it, the shaking house tossed her involuntarily through the opening.
Isabella was flailing through the air for just a moment, and then she hit the ground, hard. She wished she hadn't been transformed from a light and airy pooltoy to a hunk of solid plastic. She turned to see the living dollhouse, which now had huge stalks for arms and legs that hadn't been there before, walking briskly away. At least the changes will wear off once I get far enough away from it, Isabella thought. But the man-house moved fast and soon had disappeared into the crowd, and she was still lying on the ground as a tiny little doll.
She waited a little longer before picking herself up off the ground and moving to dust herself off. Then she realized that in her right arm, the one she had landed on, she could still feel the surface of the boardwalk against her skin. She looked down to find the arm lying at her feet, and an empty socket where her shoulder should have been. Sighing, she reached down and grabbed the arm, which was surprisingly heavy, then lifted it into place where she could snap it back into its joint. Click. Good as new. At least that was positive - she was a lot easier to fix now, and no longer had to worry about the possibility of getting popped.
What wasn't so positive, though, was her minuscule new size. The people walking by all seemed enormous - except for one man, who looked just like the dolls she had seen earlier. He was running past, frantically, in the direction of the quickly disappearing dollhouse. There was no way his inch-long legs were ever going to catch up with it. Isabella shook her head. It was going to be tough to get by in the world at this scale - and that was assuming she could find her friends again and get them to help her, which would be a challenge all on its own.