Lee sighed in relief. Then he heard a noise and turned just in time to see Charlie, still sobbing, hastily opening the now-unlocked door to leave. "Charlie, wait!" Charlie paused. "We can't leave things like this. I'm too freakish to live anything resembling a normal life, and you - well, you shouldn't have to live like that.
Charlie sniffed, then asked "So what are you gonna do?"
Lee looked at the contraption, separated from them by a glass wall. "We have to manipulate the contraption directly. And though we couldn't get to it before, I bet at my size I can break through that wall. Stand back."
Lee walked to the far side of the room, near Charlie, then charged forward at the glass. He jumped and twisted so his massive shoulder took the first impact, and crashed bodily through the glass, landing on his back.
Charlie hurried over to him, carefully stepping through the new hole in the glass wall. "Are you okay?"
Lee picked himself up, brushing some fine shards of glass off of himself, and was pleased to see that he wasn't too badly lacerated. "Yeah, I think so. That was a rush."
"Now, let's see what we can do about this little problem," he said as he approached the machine. "I'm too big and you're too small, so the obvious solution would be transferring some of my. . . water to you."
"Yes, please, that sounds good," Charlie simpered.
"Alright. It looks like the easiest way to transfer it will be with this." Lee grabbed the green fish tank and snapped the wire connecting it to the scales. He carefully lowered it down to the green tank below it, and scooped some liquid into it. There was no change as he did so, which made sense because he had grown as soon as anything entered the tank.
He hefted the tank up a little and eyed its contents. It wasn't quite right, so he dumped it back and dipped again. After a few tries, he had what he judged an appropriate amount. It would bring him back to gargantuan-but-still-human levels, and it would make Charlie only a little smaller than him. He hesitated to let Charlie come out ahead of where he had started, but decided that he deserved a second chance. Besides, he mused, if Charlie ever gets out of line I can beat him into place.
He looked over at Charlie, who was starting at the tank, pointedly not commented on the large amount it held. He took a deep breath, and began to carry the tank over to Charlie's red tank.
But as soon as the fish tank moved from over the green tank, Lee's knees buckled. . .