FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

What kind of perverted school still makes girls wear skirts? I tugged at the hem of my grey skirt again, but just like before it stubbornly refused to cover anything below my kneecaps. I'd stopped wearing girly clothes like this the minute I graduated from high school. No matter how normal everyone insisted that they were, I always felt half naked in them. After all, my panties were completely on display to the entire world...provided I was looked at from the correct angle.

Frowning, I gave my skirt one more pointless tug, then looked at myself in the mirror again. If I'd been the shy type I would have blushed. Instead, I just scowled, which on my new face only managed to make me look cuter. The uniform fit me perfectly, as if it had been designed for me rather than someone else. At least it wasn't made up of bright, flashy colors...black sweater, black socks, black shoes, grey skirt, white collared undershirt. I would have probably aborted the mission a long time ago if I'd had to wear some kind of ridiculous Japanese fantasy costume.

The worst part--the worst_part--were the thin wire glasses that were already sinking down my nose again. I pushed them up in annoyance. I hadn't had to wear glasses in _ages. I'd spent my first paycheck on that laser eye surgery for a reason, dammit! But apparently the device had undone the optional changes to my body as well. I'd had to pull these out of case covered in dust in the bottom of the third box I'd dug through.

I heard the slight creak of the hinges behind me, spinning around to see Agent Conway poking his head through the door. "Something wrong? You've been in here a while, Mendoza."

I glared at him, stepping away from the mirror. "Haven't you ever heard of knocking, Conway? I could have been in the middle of changing!"

"But we've been partners since...." He blinked, then blushed. "Ah, yes, I see what you mean. New body, new situation, right?"

"Something like that." I sighed, plopping down on a nearby chair. Ugh, all the little annoyances were even worse than the main embarrassment. God, my feet didn't even reach the floor in this chair. I kicked them weakly. "This is the stupidest thing I've ever had to do."

"Oh, come on, now." Agent Conway closed the door behind him and settled down in a nearby chair. "We both know that it's the best way to catch the Bulldog. You said so yourself."

"Don't remind me," I grumbled, rolling my eyes.

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The crunch of the wood beneath my boot as I kicked the door in said it all. Termites. This was a house that hadn't been taken care of in a long time. But I knew that she was hiding in here somewhere.

"Spread out!" I called back to my team. The other two pairs of agents nodded their assent and took off down different hallways.

Agent Conway stepped up next to me, eyeing the room with his pistol raised. I preferred less explosive weapons myself, but it was nice to have someone watching my back with one of those. "I don't wanna say it, Mendoza...."

"Just say it, there's no need to qualify."

"It looks like it's been deserted for a long time," he continued. "The place is falling apart. Do you think that our intel is bad."

"Look at the floor." I gestured to the clean-swept floorboards. "No dust. Someone's been moving back and forth in here recently. Plus I can feel that she's here."

"You can...feel it," Conway responded blankly.

"I'm in charge here, Conway. I'm allowed to have gut feelings." I pulled out my flashlight and began carefully moving down the hallway in front of us, eyes darting around for potential clues...and potential traps.

Agent Conway followed closely behind me, turning his head back to watch our six as he ran a hand through his blonde flop of hair. "Gonna be weird to have this case finished up. How long has it been now, two years?"

"Three." The hallway seemed to be empty all the way down, but I continued to walk carefully, my boots creaking on the old wood beneath me. I'd been to enough crime scenes to know what the Bulldog was capable of.

"You never did make a bet on what she looks like, did you?" Conway chuckled to himself, using his own flashlight to check the spots I'd already been over.

"Who cares? Gambling is a waste of time. Besides, it's not like I'm scoping her out to marry her." Reaching the end of the hallway, I glanced up at the wide staircase up ahead. The mansion had looked to be two stories from the outside, but we'd have to check for any attics or basements as well. She could be holed up in here anywhere. At least the place was surrounded, so it was only a matter of time.

I noticed a distinct lack of partner standing behind me. I flipped around, worried, but Conway was just kneeling next to the wall. "What are you doing?"

Reaching his hand out, he traced the almost invisible sliver of a hidden doorway. "Well, I'm willing to gamble everything I've got that her lair is behind here."

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Conway suddenly stood up, walking behind my chair. "Your hair."

"Excuse me?" I twisted my neck up to look at him, frowning again.

"You still have your old hairstyle."

"Well, what's wrong with that?"

"I don't think little girls typically wear their hair straight back like that."

"Pretty sure that little girls do whatever they want. Anyway, how would you know?"

Conway grinned. "Three little sisters. No brothers. My mom made me help them get ready for school. Otherwise we would have been late every day. Anyways, if you want to blend in, it'd probably be best to try something else."

"What would you suggest, Mr. Hair Expert?" I grumbled. Somehow I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

He reached over to the counter by the mirror and grabbed a brush and some pins. "Pigtails!"

I sighed. "Fine, whatever. I'm already this far in, might as well go full doll at this point. Do your worst."

Conway stepped behind me and began brushing my chestnut hair into two clumps. His hands were surprisingly gentle as he worked. I was so used to seeing them grip firearms tensely that I wouldn't have imagined it.

"You know, looking the part is only half the battle," he commented.

"I'm not going to act like a doll-obsessed third grader, Conway. I can just be the kind of student who's, what do they call it now...?"

"Precocious?" he suggested.

"Sure, that."

"Fine, but you need to be careful. We don't know how long it will take to find her in this place."

I sighed, closing my eyes. This just made me extra aware of how my stupid glasses had slipped down my nose again, so I pushed them up with a huff. "Let's go over the layout one more time."

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The map that had been nailed into the wall was simplistic, a top-down view into the building with simple straight-lines denoting the walls between rooms and hallways. At the top, in bold letters, was typed "Greenfield Preparatory Elementary School for Young Ladies."

I ran my hands along the surface, but there didn't seem to be anything unusual about the diagram. What are you playing at, Bulldog? I wondered to myself. It was impossible based on previous evidence to decide whether this was a clue or a red herring; the Bulldog tended to use both.

We'd found the map at the bottom of the narrow staircase behind the secret door. I turned my body sideways, squishing myself in the narrow space off to the right. Conway had already gone through and declared the place clear. The Bulldog wasn't down here.

I was just about to tell my partner to head back up and search elsewhere when I popped out of the passage and into the secret room. My eyes widened as my flashlight darted back and forth in the crowded space. Large banks of computers lined all four walls, and various tables and counters had been shoved in between, covered with an absolute mess of technical and vaguely scientific materials. There was barely enough room to stand, let alone walk around.

Conway was inching his way towards one of the walls. He reached out, and with an electric sizzle a bank of lightbulbs in the ceiling above lit up. I switched off my flashlight. "Any signs of her?"

"You mean besides the amateur mad scientist décor? Hard for me to tell, it's not really my field."

"Head back outside and bring some technical specialists down here. We need to determine what she was trying to do."

"I'll try to find some thin ones." After I shot a glare at him, he raised his hands. "Sorry, sorry, just a joke. You sort of have to squeeze your gut to move around in here."

"Guess that will affect our bio on the Bulldog's body type, at least." I looked over the room again as Conway squished back to the staircase. As far as I had seen, the Bulldog used her ill-gotten funds to run experiments...but this was at a much higher level than we'd ever found before. If we were lucky, we could figure out where she was hiding from the data we collected here.

My eyes halted for a moment, noticing something that seemed out of place. Sliding between two tables, I reached out and picked up a bundle of dark fabric. Once unfolded, it seemed to be...a school uniform? One sized for a very young girl. What in the world?

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I kept my head down, looking at my shiny black shoes as I trudged up the path, surrounded by little girls on every side. Even after a day, I was still baffled by how much bigger everything around me seemed now. I would have been looking down at the tops of these girls heads before. Now I was seeing eye-to-eye with them...and even looking up to some of them.

I shuddered, gripping the pink straps of my backpack (Conway had insisted that My Little Pony was all the rage these days, despite my protestations). I felt weak, small, frail, and vulnerable. All the muscles and instincts I had developed as an investigative agent were gone, replaced by a tiny body that could be easily tossed around by any adult in the vicinity. My partner had secreted a small pistol in my pack for my safety, and even though I usually didn't use guns, it was a small comfort that I could at least protect myself that way if it came to it.

Taking a deep breath, I raised my eyes again as the crowd began to mount the stairs in front of the main entrance. I couldn't roll around in my own pity right now. The Bulldog was likely trying to wait out the heat here. I needed to be on the lookout and see if I could find her before she ditched this disguise and moved to another one.

Not that I even know what to look for anyway. We had no reliable data on what the Bulldog actually looked like. Everything was hearsay and riddled with incorrectly remembered features and purposely false plants. I wouldn't be able to look for a particular student by features or body type.

Most of the other girls around me were chatting with each other, ignoring me. Not that that bothered me much. I was undercover, so the less I got noticed the better. As we walked into the massive dome of the front hall of Greenfield, I started my practiced walk towards my new homeroom class. I'd studied the layout of the school thoroughly beforehand, so I was able to walk as if I'd been here before. I glanced around surreptitiously as I passed by lockers and doors, trying to notice if anything was out of order.

I was about to slip into the room and try and find a desk in the back when a voice behind me called out. "Young lady!"

My heart jumped, but I did my best not to react guiltily. Even if I had lost my physical prowess, that didn't mean that all my training was compromised. I turned around slowly, looking up to see a young woman wearing the light yellow dress that distinguished a teacher. She had her hair pulled back into a bun, and her smile was somehow both kind and strict. "Yes?"

"Yes, Miss," the woman corrected.

I quickly swallowed my sarcastic reply. "Yes, Miss?"

"A young lady needs to look presentable. Your sock."

I glanced down, noticing for the first time that my left sock had bunched down around my ankle. Feeling silly, I leaned down and gripped the black fabric, pulling it up to my knee again. "Sorry, Miss...." I mumbled.

"That's quite all right. Just be more careful in the future." Her smile softened a bit. "You must be Sandra."

"Yes, Miss." The fake name that the agency had signed me up for this school with. They'd assured me that they'd take care of all the paperwork. I just had to show up and act the part of a little girl. Not sure who got the more boring job there.

The woman nodded her head. "It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Miss Williams, your home-room teacher. May I show you around a bit?"

God, I'm already hating this, I thought. But I did my best to put on an innocent, excited smile. "I would like that very much, Miss! Thank you!"

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"Agent Jackson is about to give us good news," I said to Agent Conway, quietly.

"How can you tell something like that?"

"Look at the way he's walking towards us. Researchers always walk in a certain way when they're about to share a successful discovery with someone."

"Don't know how you can tell that when the only way he can walk is a slow shuffle."

Doing his best to squeeze around the other researchers, Agent Jackson extricated himself from the mess and stepped up to us. "Agents! Thank you for your patience. I think we've finally managed to figure out what's going on here!"

"Told you," I smirked.

"Told me what?" Agent Jackson asked, blinking.

"Nothing, nothing. You were telling us what you had discovered?"

"Ah yes!" The man adjusted his thick-lensed glasses. I was so glad I didn't have to wear those anymore. "We think that most of the detritus left behind is just extra material. But whoever was here had a purpose."

He pointed back to one of the corners of the room. A few of the special agents seemed to be slowly building something. Or rather...I peered closer. They were carefully taking pieces from the floor, examining them closely, then attempting to fit them onto the partially made structure. "The Bulldog built something?"

"Indeed. That's our best guess, at least." Agent Jackson reached into his pocket, pulling out a crumpled up piece of paper with very light pencil markings on it. "It's likely that the owner of this bunker took apart their creation after its purpose had been fulfilled. Right now we're trying to reconstruct it from the clues we can find."

"You say it's a device. What kind of device?" Agent Conway asked.

"Hard to say at the moment. We're hoping to get a better idea of its purpose once the deconstructed pieces are fit back together. It does seem to be some kind of capsule, however.

A capsule...what would the Bulldog be using some high-tech capsule for? A few episodes of old science fiction shows played in the back of my head, making me think of matter teleporters and invisibility shields. But as far as I knew, those technologies were a long way off for even the most advanced innovators in the field, let alone a criminal specializing in electronic banking fraud. "How long will it take before you've finished rebuilding it?"

"Hard to say, Agent Mendoza. We'll probably have something solid to go off of by tomorrow morning. Most of these agents work on the night shift anyway."

I nodded my head. It was frustrating, but getting angry only made the process take even longer. I'd learned that early on. "All right, we're counting on you. Let us know what you find."

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"...and so you add these two numbers together, just like this...."

I sat in my desk, my feet swinging above the floor as I watched the second hand making its slow cycle around the clock. I wasn't the only girl in the room looking bored out of my mind...but I doubted that this was because those other girls had already taken advanced calculus and didn't need five different examples to learn how to multiply two different numbers together. After all this is over, I might have a new proposal for torturing information out of suspects, I mused.

Blessedly, the soft chiming sounded from the intercoms, signaling that it was time for recess to begin. Miss Williams set her chalk down. "It is now your break period. You may _quietly_rise from your seats and exit the room row by row. Sandra, please remain behind for a moment."

I watched from my seat as the girls attempted to obey their teachers orders, their bodies trembling with excitement. This was one of those schools that was trying to preserve the "olden days" that elderly people liked to remember incorrectly. As far as I was concerned, it was a losing battle. The only reason that these girls were acting like proper "ladies" was because their parents still had a modicum of control over them. Once they got outside, I imagined it would be a round of cell phones and giggling whenever the teachers had their backs turned.

I stood up as the rest of the girls exited and walked up to Miss Williams desk, slightly curious as to why I'd been kept back. Not that I was anxious to try and act like an 8-year-old on the swings or something. Miss Williams set her teaching materials down and smiled to me. "Since this is your first day, you're what we call an 'Early Bird.' The school likes to keep introduce you to each other so that you can make friends together."

I nodded my head, trying to look demure and nervous at the thought of other girls. In reality, my brain was lighting up with excitement. The Bulldog had only disappeared a few days ago. If she came here, she would be one of these 'Early Birds,' and I'd have a much smaller pool of suspects. I quickly followed Miss Williams down the hallway, pumping my legs a bit so I could keep up with her.

"Now you don't have to be nervous, Sandra. All of these girls are new here, just like you. I'm sure they'll want to be your friend." Miss Williams opened another door, and I stepped forward, stopping under the frame to glance at the people inside. There seemed to be four other girls sitting at desks in the very back of the room. "Now now, in you go." I felt a light pat on my rear end, pushing me into the room. I automatically turned back and glared at Miss Williams, but luckily she was already closing the door and didn't see me.

The other girls turned towards me as I approached, and I did a quick scan of their features. Two of the girls appeared to be the wrong age. One was shorter than me, with white-blonde curly hair and big eyes. The other was about a head taller with dark skin and rather large ears. The other two girls seemed to be around the right age, eight years old. One had long red hair, and the other had brown hair and a tan face covered in freckles. This last girl was the first to smile and speak to me. "Hi! My name's Melody, what's yours?"

"U-Um...S-Sandra," I replied, momentarily distracted from my analysis.

"Hi Sandra, I'm Becky, and this is Sara and Leslie," the red-headed girl said. "We were gonna go out and skip ropes, do you wanna come?"

Skip ropes? What is this, the 1950s? Still, as childish as playing together at recess was, I couldn't just refuse. It was likely that one of these girls was the Bulldog in disguise. If I did anything out of character before I figured out who she was, it would blow my cover. I had to act the part and observe closely until I'd found who I was looking for.

Sighing internally, I smiled as sweetly as I could. "Yay, I love jump rope! Let's go!"

************************************************************************

I gently patted my partner's back as he tried to cough out the coffee he'd inhaled. "I know you said that you'd come to an unusual conclusion, but...seriously, come again?"

Agent Jackson tapped the front of his clipboard. He looked about as happy to be saying the words as we were receiving them. "This is the consensus of the majority of the team. The design is different and far more complex than anything we've ever encountered, but its purpose is quite clear from the context clues. This device was...or rather, it purported to be...a capsule that can change a person's age."

Agent Conway sputtered out the last of the liquid, taking a breath and glaring at Agent Jackson. "You do realize how ridiculous you're sounding right now, right? That's the kind of idea from a science fiction movie, not a crime scene investigation."

"I never said that the device actually words, Agent Conway," the researcher replied, adjusting his glasses a bit. "I'm just as incredulous as you are about the viability of this technology. I'm just reporting what the builder thought she was going to be able to do."

I looked across the room, where a space had been cleared and a structure had been built up. It looked like a grey metal coffin tipped on its end, barely large enough to fit a person inside with all the circuitry and bolts jammed on the interior edges. "How is it activated?" I asked, still staring at the machine.

Agent Jackson stepped over to one of the repurposed tables and picked up a vial filled with small, deep blue crystals. "The machine starts doing...whatever it's doing when the switch is flipped. Once that's done, a carefully portioned amount of Copper Sulfate is introduced to the subject. This somehow induces some kind of reaction that causes the subject to reduce in age by a certain number of years."

"How do you know how much to use?" I continued to stare at the machine, my heart thumping.

"We found a detailed proportion chart. It's one of the things we used to figure out what the device is for."

Agent Conway took another sip of his now half-filled coffee mug. "I just don't get it. Even assuming that this machine did work, what would be the point? Why would the Bulldog use her resources to design and build it."

"It's a getaway vehicle," I mumbled under my breath.

"Um...." Agent Jackson started flipping through the pages of his clipboard, looking concerned. "We didn't find any evidence of locomotion on the device...."

I shook my head. "Not that kind of getaway. Haven't you noticed? What's the one part of this room that hasn't fitted in with everything else? What's the extra piece of the puzzle?"

Agent Conway glanced around the room, and I could see the synapses in his brain firing through his eyes. After a few moments, they widened. "The map of the school...the school uniform...."

"The Bulldog knew that we were closing in on her. So she came up with a way to disappear completely from our radar. We were looking for an adult female of a certain repute...not a little girl from a preparatory school."

"But that would mean assuming that the device worked!" Agent Conway protested.

"Despite considerable effort to design and build the machine, the Bulldog then took even more effort to take it apart," I pointed out. "Why would she do that if the machine was a failure. And why, despite all the work we've done to track and pin her in this building, have we not been able to find her?"

Agent Jackson was ready to cut in when my partner fell silent. "It's not a medical or a biological possibility. And even if we assume that it was a success, what are we supposed to do about it?"

"The Bulldog tried to cover her tracks, but she still know where she was planning to lay low. She'll be watching for us to approach. If we try to raid the school, she'll probably be ready to escape. What we need is a way to sneak in after her and identify her before she figures out what's happening...." Sighing softly, I drank the rest of my coffee and set the mug down. "Get that machine running. I want to be in it by tonight."

Both of the men stared at me as if I'd just proposed...well, something as crazy as what I'd just proposed. I decided to pre-empt their protests. "I'm in charge of this mission, and it's my decision. This is the best way to catch the Bulldog. I'm getting in that capsule, and I'm...ugh...gonna be a kid again."

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My heart raced, and I tensed up my muscles, watching the spinning line with a flick of my eyes. In a moment I sprang forward, landing on my feet and then quickly pushing up again. The double dutch jump ropes passed beneath me with a rhythmic clicking sound.

Melody and Leslie were holding the ropes, and they starting chanting some sort of rhyming count. I wasn't paying attention to the words, just to keeping my feet above the ropes. I could feel my pigtails flapping in the breeze as they started counting. Ten...twenty....

Suddenly a chiming sound rang out from the building behind us. I turned my head to look, my momentary distraction causing one of the ropes to catch on my foot. All the other girls groaned in disappointment, then started chatting with each other, folding up the jump ropes and heading back towards the school building.

I started walking back with them, Melody on my right and Becky on my left, smiling from ear to ear. It had taken me a few tries to get the hang of it, but jump roping was really, really fun! Sara had said that they were planning on asking for chalk to make hopscotch squares for the next recess, and....

I blinked, suddenly slowing down and letting the other girls pass me. Damn, what am I doing? I thought with disgust. I was supposed to be analyzing the other new girls to figure out which one of them was the Bulldog in disguise...how'd I ended up playing around like a silly little girl? There weren't residual mental effects...were there?

I tossed that thought out of my mind. I had to focus on the task at hand...and the fact that I _was_able to focus (now) was evidence enough to me that I was fine...just fine. Anyway, I swung my mind back to the last half hour or so, thinking through things as the crowd flowed around me.

Which one of the girls was the Bulldog? Based on the uniform that had been left behind (and that I was currently wearing), plus the residuals on the machine, we knew she had been aiming for the third grade, about eight years old. That narrowed the suspects down to either Melody or Becky. Both of them had seemed pretty normal while they were playing. Becky had an above-average vocabulary when she talked. Melody frowned much more than the other kids. Either one of those could be a sign, or they could both just be me reading too much into things.

From my years of chasing after her, I knew that the Bulldog was, more than anything else, cunning. If she had planned this thoroughly to disappear from the law, she would have made sure that she couldn't be smelled out easily. It wouldn't be enough to just observe and report...I'd need a trigger to draw her out.

An idea was forming in the back of my mind, and I carefully dislodged myself from the current of the crowd, doing my best to sneak away without notice. I'd triple-memorized the layout of this school in my preparation, so I knew just where I needed to go to get the materials I needed. I could cut through some of the extra-curricular classrooms to get there. I slid open the nearest door and stepped inside.

For a few seconds, I wiggled around in the darkness, searching for a light switch. Eventually I managed to turn on a few banks of dim lights, illuminating the well-ordered counters, cabinets, and workstations. A junior chemistry lab.

I snuck down one of the pathways between the counters, glancing at the windows. Hopefully no one noticed me sneaking off, or the lights going on in the supposedly empty lab room. If I could just get some preparations made...but the sound of the door closing behind me made me act instinctually, rolling behind a counter and pressing my back to it. I could hear a familiar voice calling from the other side of the room.

"Seems like you followed my last gambit, agent."

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It was time. I'd been focusing my attention on a combination of heroic bravado and dedicated mission preparation, trying to stave off the feeling that was coursing through my blood right now. I knew it. Despite how many people I'd had to convince, the paperwork I'd had to sign, and all the assurances I had given...I knew that this was a fundamentally stupid idea.

But I had been chasing the Bulldog for three years now. I had started miles away from her trail, and every inch closer had to be clawed forward with my bare hands. For the very first time I was within reach of her...only for her to slip between my fingers, shrunken too small to grasp. I was willing to do anything if it meant finally sinking my fingers into her...even if it meant doing something reckless like this.

Agent Jackson stepped up next to me, reaching forward and opening the door of the machine. "We've powered it up and set things up as best we could. However, it's still incredibly dangerous to run an experiment when we don't--"

"We've already had this conversation, Jackson. Just tell me what to do."

The man sighed softly, seemingly resigned. "Just fit yourself in there. It's a tight squeeze for a human, but we think you can do it. We'll close the door and activate the procedure. Once that's done, we'll introduce the dosage, and the change is supposed to begin after that.

I nodded my head, keeping my mouth shut to prevent myself from coming up with another excuse not to do this. Taking two steps forward, I pulled myself into the tight space, carefully weaving my body between all the extra pieces that were sticking out. Giving me one last worried glance, Agent Jackson shut the door, sealing me inside.

It was actually quite bright in here, as if to keep the person inside happy. There was even a full-length mirror set into the inside of the door. I looked at myself, not really having much else to do. A tall Latina woman with long brown hair and brown eyes stared back at me. She was dressed in her usual garb, a dark blue business suit, sharp as ever. I looked down at my torso, with its acceptable size of curves that I'd proudly grown back in my younger years. It occurred to me that I'd be saying goodbye to those for a while.

I could barely hear what was going on outside, but they seemed to be readying something. I tensed my body, prepared for whatever this capsule was going to do. The metal around me trembled a bit as a whirring sound began. After a few seconds of wait, a thin white mist sprayed down from the ceiling, quickly filling the capsule. Aside for a slight cough as I breathed it in, it didn't seem to do anything...it wasn't even especially cold. Within ten seconds, it had dissipated.

Agent Jackson peered through the small window, and I gave him a thumbs up...well, I tried to in the cramped space anyway. He nodded, and I could hear a soft clinking sound. The very specific dose of copper sulfate was being slipped into the machine now. I yelped softly as something cool touched my feet...and I looked down to see the small crystals littered around my toes. Well, that's decidedly unscientific, I thought to myself as I felt my skin, starting at my feet and soon over my entire body, tingling.

I brought my eyes up, staring at myself as the changes started to take hold. I watched my eye-level slowly start to slide down the mirror as my height diminished. The fabric of my suit was rubbing against my tingling skin, the sleeves growing past my hands. I could physically watch my bosom flattening and my hips pulling back.

The strangest sensations were those on my head. A soft tightening in my throat told me that my voice was heightening ever-so-slightly. My eyes could see the skin of my face shifting out of their corners, the cheeks becoming fuller and rounder, a crop of freckles sliding across my buttoning nose.

I was estimating about an age of thirteen when my vision really went blurry. I blinked once or twice, but the image in the mirror didn't clear up. I could still feel myself shrinking down. With an embarrassing ruffle, the waist of my pants finally slipped off my tiny hips and feel to the floor. My hands immediately went down to cover myself, but found that the hem of my jacket was long enough now to preserve my modesty.

I could feel the tingles fading away, and I felt a dizzy jolt as the world stopped growing around me, similar to the moment that an elevator stops on a floor. Dazed and confused, I stumbled back against the wall of the machine, finding the space inside a lot roomier than I remembered.

The door was pulled open, and the blurry face of who I thought was Agent Conway stared down at me. "Mendoza, it...it worked! Are you all right?"

Blearily, my little body fainted into his arms.

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I cautiously peeked my head around the side of the counter, noting the position of my adversary before darting back. Despite recognizing the voice, I was still shocked to see Miss Williams standing there, a satisfied grin on her face.

"I thought it was you," she said loudly to the room, "but the sneaking off really made me sure. My subordinates thought that you wouldn't pull through on your end of the deal, but everything seems to have gone off without a hitch."

I reached back to pull down my backpack, planning to access the secretly stashed gun...only to remember that I'd left it in a cubby in my home room. I began checking all the corners I could see, looking for a weapon. "What deal?"

"The deal you didn't know you made when you trespassed on my laboratory. I knew you wouldn't stop looking for me, so I figured I'd use my newest invention to give myself a bargaining chip. A few well-placed clues and you all thought I had used it to shrink myself down to a little girl...when all I did was de-age myself into a young, healthy teacher, a brand new addition to the Greenfield family."

There! A cabinet filled with various beakers, vials, and chemicals. Using my shortened height as an advantage, I slipped down the counter and around to the other side, checking to make sure Miss Williams wasn't looking. I only had one shot at this, so I had to make it count. Crouching down and jumping with all the strength my little legs could muster, I vaulted to the top of the counter, pulled the cabinet open, and reached inside.

I felt a sudden arm wrapped around my torso. Miss Williams had closed the distance and was trying to pull me away. I desperately grabbed the side of the cabinet, but I could already feel my fingers slipping. I couldn't beat her in a contest of strength, not like this!

The woman grunted as she continued to tug on my waist. "Enough! Now that I have an agent under my control, they'll have to do whatever I want...provided they want to see you back alive! Now let! Go!"

My fingers felt like they were on fire. With an anguishedscream, I let go of the cabinet, grabbing whatever I could get my fingers around. As Miss Williams pulled me down to the counter, I flung the object with all of my strength and rolled out of the away.

There was a pitiful tinkle and a puffing noise. I turned around, seeing the remains of a small "Little Miss Chemistry" kit falling to the ground. Miss William's shirt and lower face was covered in a mixture of powders from the different sections of the kit, but her face was turning the deep crimson color of rage. "Why, you little bitch...!"

I braced myself as her hand came flying towards me, then stopped. I opened my eyes to see Miss William trembling and...beginning to shrink? "No...no!" she screamed, trying to push the chemicals off of her face. I watched her head sink below the counter, her screams becoming more and more girlish by the second.

I picked myself up, crawling down the counter, carefully looking out for any extra powder left behind. I gingerly reached out and pulled the chemistry kit towards me, checking the different labels for the now empty compartments. And there, right in the back, was a little hole with the words "Copper Sulfate."

I glanced down at the Bulldog, who was lost in a pile of her old clothes, wiggling and trying to get out. I dropped down next to her, checking the pockets of her old jacket. With any luck...yes! I pulled out a thin cell phone, activating the emergency call feature.

"Get me Agent Conway," I said into the phone. "I've got the Bulldog captured."

************************************************************************

I smiled with satisfaction as the policemen carried the Bulldog away in handcuffs. "Do you think that they always carry a pair that small?" Agent Conway wondered aloud.

"I doubt it. It's not every day that you get to arrest a toddler mastermind." I set the coffee mug I'd been given aside. For some reason, it was a lot more bitter than I remembered it. "Do you think we'll have enough evidence?"

"Between the demonstration of that machine in front of multiple scientific witnesses and your own testimony, I'm sure it won't be too difficult to put her away." Agent Conway smiled down at me. "You know, this machine could change the face of espionage as we know it. You might just be a little innovator!" He casually ruffled my hair.

For the first time, I blushed, pouting and slapping his hair away. "Stop it! I'm still your superior, after all!"

"If you say so." He grinned, gesturing to the door. "I suppose you'll be anxious to get back to the machine so we can turn you back?"

I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it again. Despite the embarrassment and the uniform and the humiliation...all I could think about was hopping over those jump ropes for that half hour of recess. I hadn't felt that happy and carefree in a long time.

I grinned up at my partner. "You know what? I think I'm good for a little while."