Captain Miniature and the Red Moll Conundrum

Looking Back at Closure

Dr Ann O'Malley, inventor of Captain Miniature's Super Schoolboy Formula, tells her shrunken 1996 friend Martin of her teenage adventures in the 1950s, to give him as much of her background as possible, before she eventually eats him.

7 year old Quentin was playing alone in the bush reserve behind his prep school during lunch break. Louise, now teaching at Quentin's prep school, rather than the high school where she'd met Milo, came into the bush reserve too, and offered him a drink. He accepted it, then fell asleep, and awoke several hours later.

He found himself in a school classroom at about nine o'clock in the evening. He was on the carpet on the floor, looking up at the lit room wondering how he could be at school at night time.

Then he noticed something else. The roof seemed a long way away. In fact, everything seemed a lot larger in proportion to his own size than it should have been.

"I've been shrunk to tiny size!" he exclaimed, "I'm only about an inch tall!"

"Quentin, you're awake," came a voice behind him.

He turned to see that seated on the carpet behind him, towering like a huge tall giantess was Louise his second class teacher.

"Louise! What happened to me?"

"I managed to put you to sleep in the bushes with a drugged drink and make you a lot smaller with a device I invented. I'll put you on my desk now."

Her white slender fingers enclosed him as she stood up and placed him gently on her desk beside other items that were usually there anyway. She sat down comfortably in her chair and smiled down at him.

"So why do you want me to be so small?" he asked.

"Well it's nice to see you so small, Quentin. Now my boyfriend Phil will be working late tonight. So he won't be coming over to have supper with me. I thought that I could enjoy a special treat for supper (here at the school) myself. You always looked rather tasty, being the youngest boy in my class. However, I could never have managed to fit you into my mouth. So I had to dramatically reduce your size first. Now that all of this has been arranged, I wanted to ask you if you would make a nice tasty supper for me tonight."

"Do you want to eat me up for your supper, Louise?" he asked, looking up at her pretty smiling lips in amazement.

"That's correct," she said calmly, "Nobody else would know about it except you and me, Quentin. It would be our own private secret."

"I guess it would be quite a wonderful adventure for me, Louise. Yes, I'd be happy for you to eat me for your supper."

"Thank you. I'm very grateful. I'd like to put you outside and play hide-&-seek and catch you first."

She went out, turned the outside lights on, and put Quentin in a soft flowerbed in the garden.

"I'll go inside and wait a few minutes, before I come and look for you," she said.

There was something about the school gardens and being a teacher that made her even more happy to be doing this, than she had been when she'd set her old would-be boyfriends up in the garden at her house in the hills.

He got up and ran through the school garden in the moonlight.

Soon Louise came around the building and walked along the pathway looking down into the garden in search of him. Although she did not see him when she walked past, she stopped at the end of the path, effectively cutting off his escape from the end of the garden. Louise squatted down and began searching through the garden, parting the plants with her hands and looking closely for him.