"Anyway, even if we could communicate, what would they do to us?" asked Barbara. "We're freaks. They'd put us in a glass case and examine us through a microscope."

That was exactly what had happened.

As if it wasn't bad enough to have been shrunken on arrival, Ian and Barbara had been separated from the Doctor and Susan. After discovering the dead body in the bushes, they'd carelessly chosen a briefcase as a hiding spot from a stray cat. Somebody had taken the briefcase indoors and left it on a lab bench, leaving the two teachers stranded. They'd been so distracted by an alarmingly large sample of dead insects and sticky seeds that they'd failed to notice a big person entering the lab.

A scientist.

They didn't have a chance.

In mere moments, they'd been plucked up, first one then the other, between a huge thumb and forefinger and placed upon an even larger palm. Enormous eyes examined them through a magnifying lens, the image slightly distorted by the glass. The scientist even held a ruler to them, although they couldn't stand to their full heights- every little hand movement threw them off balance. And then they were once again lifted by those fingers. Barbara shrieked and Ian tried to push them away, but it was like trying to move a building. After a few terrifying seconds, they found themselves deposited in a glass beaker.

Clinging tightly to each other, they slid around a bit as the big person turned the beaker this way and that. Finally, the sickening motion stopped as the beaker was set down. The face that dominated their field of vision pulled away as the scientist went to the other side of the table and began pulling samples out of a box- more dead insects, and a few rodents as well.

Ian and Barbara slowly got to their feet, legs still trembling from the sudden shock. "What do we do now?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said, looking around. "We're trapped."

The sides of the beaker towered over them. It was much too high for them to climb, even if one stood on the other's shoulders. Across from them, the scientist was engrossed in the insect specimens, but kept glancing up at the beaker. Barbara refused to look back. "The Doctor and Susan are still out there," she said. "Surely they'll think of something."

Ian wasn't so certain. They were working on a completely different scale now. At an inch high it could take weeks or more for their friends to find them, if they could even find them at all. In their current state, they were little more than scientific curiosities. They'd be examined and poked at and prodded in this laboratory. A depressing fate. But he could see that Barbara still had a glimmer of hope in her eyes. He put an arm around her shoulders.

"Of course they will."

-
Dr Liz Shaw knew it was going to be another one of 'those' days when she returned to UNIT after collecting new samples of DN6's effects and found tiny people running around on the lab bench...