"Come on," Mary muttered as her fingers delicately searched through the tiny vials. "There's got to be something to reverse this." She pulled open a few drawers in the box and squinted at the small labels. After looking through over a hundred animal vials, she finally found two that had words written on their labels: "Shrink" and "Growth."
Mary was in such a hurry to get back to her normal size that she didn't pay attention to how much of the shrink vial she used. After swallowing the liquid, she corked it and put it back in the box, where it magically refilled itself. She wasn't sure how fast it would take effect, but considering the immediate effects of the female human vial, she braced herself for a rapid descent.
After a few minutes of sitting in her living room, she didn't feel any different. "Well, the cow vial took all day," she reasoned. "I guess I'll just have to be patient."
After a few more minutes, she realized how hungry she was. She hadn't actually eaten a meal in a day and a half. She crawled on her hands and knees across the living room and through the mercifully large archway that connected it to the kitchen. This room was a little more cramped, but she didn't have much of a problem. Her major complaint was the freezing tile on her bare skin. She grabbed an entire loaf of bread and took some meat and lettuce out of the refrigerator.
"How much does a twelve-foot woman need to eat?" she asked herself. She made three sandwiches to start with, and she was halfway through the second when she noticed the room was a little larger. "Finally," she sighed. She scarfed down the second sandwich and proceeded with the third. Her appetite was satisfied for now, fortunately. She had worried in the back of her mind if the contents of her stomach would be shrinking with her, and was cautious about eating any more.
She crawled back out of the kitchen and picked up the vial box again. It did seem a little larger in her hand than a little while ago, but if she was indeed shrinking, it was proceeding very slowly. Just then, Mary came up with a way to keep herself occupied while she waited for the house to fit her again.
She rummaged around her nearby desk until she found a standard 12-inch ruler. It was strange to see one so tiny. She stretched out her hand and tried to measure the distance from her fingertips to her wrist, but the ruler was short by one or two inches. Then she grabbed a stack of paper and some tape. She took a bare section of the living room wall and taped the paper to it, making a column that went all the way to the ceiling. Then she took a pencil from the desk and measured up the wall, marking each foot. Her ceiling stopped at eight feet, so she knew she wouldn't be able to use the scale for a while yet, but she continued. Now she went back and marked every third inch up the wall for better precision.
Satisfied, she returned her materials and looked at the clock. It was just past noon. She wanted to get a few things done out of the house, especially getting more food since she hadn't gone grocery shopping in quite a while. She didn't want to have to live off of sandwiches for the next couple days. She tried standing as best she could next to the scale, and guessed that she was in the neighborhood of ten feet. It beat twelve, but it wasn't her usual five-eleven, either. Still, there was nothing she could do but wait it out.