Trading Post

Nope, it’s right here with us. 😊 Our precious trophy 🏆 

No in bed I am either in just a diaper or totally naked.  

mine is always the same just my diapers

Despite the mess in her diaper I was cuddled up with Madison and listen to a read, she couldn't wait to be in the play with Madison it was the only reason she auditioned being a tadpole she probably be a lost boy or in this case Lost Girl but honestly wanted to be Wendy Darling. after a bit of time Alice's eyes started to close her eyes. Madison was also started to feel a little bit tired the mixture of her warm footed pajamas, the soft diaper and the soft cloth diaper she wore on the outside started to effect her too, very soon Alice and Madison fell asleep, two sleepy little care bear cubs, sleepily cuddling each other even sucking their thumbs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ When Emily looked into Camilla's eyes she started to feel more relaxed, but it had been a long day and doing this had taken a lot out of her she has essentially given her up her entire adult life and right now the soft diaper she wore with her new pajamas made the little one sleepy, "Mommy c-can we do this later I wanna go night night now pwease."

For everyone not a subscriber to Personalias's subscribestar, you are missing out.  Once or twice a year authors from the community write a short story.  This year's theme was "Back to School".  The contest is now over, but here is my entry.  As an additional restriction, contest entries were limited to about 6000 words.   Squandered Resources An ABDL story by Operational Systems   She had intended to slam the door shut, but for the past hour her life had been coming apart, and so even this trivial task caused the apartment door to bounce forward again with opposite force, before settling in a half state, open to the world beyond.  Her short red hair crowned a face that had recently aged from cute to sexy, and bangs bounced before eyes that carried a mix of frustration and fear.  The woman would have been crying but now was not the time.  There would be time for that later.  By the clock on the microwave in her kitchenette, she had eighteen hours and twenty-two minutes until her entire life was over. A shame, as life had just started to get good when Margot turned twenty-one last week. “Ready for summer?” came a dim response from the open room adjacent to Margot’s theatricality.  The shared apartment, only a couple blocks from campus, was a luxury compared to the dorms she used in the first two years.  Margot was technically splitting the costs with her roommate, Imogen, but it was more of a three-way arrangement with her Imogen dad covering the rent, electricity, and utilities.  Margot brought her parents’ Netflix and HBO- an equivalent exchange for rent as far as Imogen was concerned. “I’m dead.  I’m going to get kicked out of school, and …” Margot paused, “I don’t know …” she concluded, “I’ll have to get a job at the Udder Barn because I’m a complete fucking failure.”  A shaking small hand swept bangs and wrinkles off her forehead. That prompted Imogen to pick herself up off the coach, “You’re not usually one to be stressed out.  You still worried about … um?”  Her long dark hair floated naturally into place from her prior horizontal position. “The cosmology final is tomorrow.  I don’t know a damn thing about space.”  Not yet tear time, but the tonal shift of the whine from the redhead suggested she was close. “Margot, you’re the smartest person I know, maybe the smartest person on the whole campus.  Relax.” “I can’t relax!  I have eighteen hours to memorize three hundred pages of astrophysics…” “You aced the midterm.”  Imogen was getting up; Margot had no place to panic.  Twice this year Margot had bailed out Imogen with a few … touchups … to her essays that had blown the teachers out of the water.  She stared at the distraught girl; she had never seen her out of place.  Margot slowly walked back to the door, closing it, and started to pace back and forth in the kitchen.  She opened and closed her palms, took a large breath, and then finally spoke her concern. “Doctor Short got fired.”  Pulling the truth from Margot was going to be like pulling teeth. “OK?”  Imogen tested, crossing arms. “He was sleeping with a student.” Imogen tilted her head, raising an eyebrow. “Doctor Draper is going to be doing the final and it’s now going to an in-class verbal one” “Since you weren’t sleeping with Doctor Short, I think…”  Imogen tried her best to connect points A, B, and C into a logical framework. “No god, fuck.  That’d be easier.”   Margot shook her head, “I’m just doomed.  OK I can’t go into details.”  The cracks were starting to become visible. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.  You’re smart.  Here’s an easy one, how many planets are there?” Margot’s eyes widened and her breathing intensified.  “Twelve?  Fuck I don’t know.  I never even opened the book.  I am so fucked.” Imogen navigated forward, “How did you ace the midterm?” “I used AI.” The room was quiet.  Even the air conditioner clicked off.  Imogen’s breath tightened.  “You’ve been…”  her voice lowered and out croaked a whisper, “That’s cheating.  That’s illegal!  How did you even?  For how long?” Margot had gone too far, might as well explain it to the one person who would understand, “Since I was fourteen.” “Holy shit!”  Imogen swore, barely able to keep her voice at room tolerance as her eyes tracked the downtrodden woman in a thin flowery blouse.  This explained everything. Margot immediately tried to close the barn doors, in her frustration over her impending doom she had admitted in casual conversation she had been doping, “No one knows, Imogen.  Don’t you tell any…” “It’s fine, I won’t.  How?  I thought they were all…”  An ancient art, magic from the before time, known only by tales told by oldsters who lament a lost past, like elves pining for the undying lands.  A buried technology; the concrete used to build the monuments of old, lost forever. “My older brother volunteered in Nigeria.  In the back streets of Lagos, you can sometimes find old stuff.  Hard drives, server parts, like from Facebook and Microsoft before the purge.  It’s old.  It can’t do anything, but it can write an essay.  It smashes take home tests on any subject.  Don’t tell anyone.” “No… wow.”  Imogen watched Margot, the other girl was still a wreck.  Despite the red head’s distraught look, to Imogen she had also transitioned in the space of two minutes from her nerdy insular roommate she would ask to help with her homework, into the coolest criminal. There were few status games that could be played by a person in her position and age, not many that wouldn’t result in her getting cut off from daddy’s fund.  To reject the Jihad, and to court all the danger that represents, and do it for something as minor like cheating at school … Margot was right; when they discovered she was a fraud, she would be lucky if she was only kicked out of school. Having said it, Margot passed the initial shock that had hit her system.  Now the coldness of the deadline loomed.  Studying was a simple equation; she was trying to jam 45 hours of content into half a day.  There was not enough time.  If she had started a week ago, she might have corrected by devoting every waking hour to studying.  Instead, the last moment for saving herself was in her past, and now all she could do was wait.  The failure had happened long ago, like a distant star going nova, and it would take time for it to be illuminated here on Earth. “I can’t drop.  Maybe I can say a family thing came up?  No, because they’d…” Margot’s thoughts were faster than her mouth, “Drugs.  I need drugs.  Brain steroids.  I’ll study for seventeen hours straight.”  Her eyes darted around the apartment, “Did I even bother to buy the textbook?” Margot continued to lie to herself, “I can speed read enough to bull shit my way through.  As long as there is no math I can do it.  Is there any math in cosmology?”  Her eyes desperately bounced back to Imogen.  “Ask me something that might be on the test!” Imogen tried a guess, “If the Millennial Falcon does the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, how long is that in minutes?” Margot collapsed onto her knees, arms unmoored, now was the time to cry. “There, might be a solution.”  Imogen offered as a life-raft, “I’m not supposed to mention it.”  It seemed cruel to start like that, after Margot just admitted to breaking the law to cheat at homework.  Margot looked up at her face, desperate for anything. “You know how rich people have their own Netflix?” Margot gave no response. “For like Yachts and private planes.  Anyway, there’s this … neuralink,” Imogen’s hands came up to her head like she was holding a virtual reality visor, “but for… rich stay-at-home moms.  You can get anything on there.  For a price.” Margot understood the words, but the concept didn’t make sense.  “Pay for what?”  She had $12 left on her student lunch card, which alongside some uncashed savings bonds in a shoebox back home, amounted to the sum of her net worth.  She could not afford Netflix for rich people, let alone ‘Neuralink, but for the rich’. “It’s an exchange, like, say you want to go to Mexico, you go on there and buy Spanish, and it puts it in your brain, and then you trade it back when you’re done.” Margot’s crying turned into a laugh, “That’s impossible, and if it were possible would be horrifying, and the fact it’s used by bored wine-mommies to help them write their first novel, is the kind of disgusting outcome I’d expect for our capitalistic world.  You could use this to like, train surgeons or flying planes or …” “It’s banned” Imogen stopped her, with an arm reaching towards the other girl’s shoulder, comforting but demanding, “like your-own ‘young lady’s illustrated primer’, but my ex-boyfriend got his hands on one, his roommate should still have it.  What are you prepared to give up today, to master cosmology one oh-one?” The dorm-room oozed a smell that overpowered the heavy chemical cleaner coming from the other darkened rooms on the floor.  Melvin was the last one here, as though he was meant to be left behind and forgotten over the summer.  The slightest knock on the door was enough to push it forward, where it stopped against a set of soiled clothing. “Mel, you in here?”  Imogen spoke, turning to her disgusted companion Margot who was carefully covering her nose.  “He spends about twenty-three hours a day on his computer, he should be here.” A light came on inside, and a blur of a man rushed forward through the hall, picking up the rumple of clothes, which opened the door fully to the girls.  He was ugly short, by about four inches, and had a body that never saw the inside of a gym or the kitchen.  His blue undershorts could be boxers or pajamas, serving only as the minimum of covering if someone were to glance his way, and his hair was unkempt and airdried from the last time he was in the showers – maybe yesterday.  The glasses were massive, cork bottle huge that somehow hid his face and dragged his nose down with weight.   “Gals?  Oh sorry?  Is that you Imogen?  I haven’t heard from Hung since…” Melvin appeared oblivious to the surroundings or his own appearance.  It was the final days of the school year, nothing he did here mattered anymore. Imogen smiled and then shrunk her shoulders in, “Melvin, this is Margot, and we need a favor.”  Margot took that as a sign to drop her fingers covering her nose.  He reached out with a greasy hand and then withdrew it, wiping whatever residue back on his shirt. His arrogance and ego carried him through what should have been the most awkward moment of his college career – he was half naked and two women far outside his league were in his dorm room. “Um… I guess?  I can try to help with anything.”  His voice pitched up a bit, he wanted to be agreeable. “Do you still have the neuralink machine?  The one your roommate had?  He wanted me to download the Karma sutra?” Melvin practically jumped up two inches, “Yes, are you still up for …” he said the next words with such confidence it felt italicized, “professionalizing your sex life.  Maybe a threesome?” Margot felt a bit of her stomach burn the bottom of her throat, not enough to vomit but enough to hurt and hit her nose.  It did not improve the room smell. “No, Margot needs help on a test.” Melvin started walking to the center of the dorm room, there was a double bed, one meticulous clean, the other well-worn with clothes and crumpled blanket and discarded soda containers.  In a darkened corner was computer that would make the setup in the Nebuchadnezzar seem like an etch-a-sketch. With the practiced movement, his thin body spun into a waiting chair, and his hands danced across keyboards and mice, and soon he was booting up programs and windows and browsers across multiple bright monitors.  His typing moved with a speed far faster than the girls could even track, and each keypress was a loud snap that echoed through the room.  Finally, as though a pianist finishing a song, he slammed a central red button on the keyboard with gusto.  Then he reached under his desk, nearly crawled into an unseen dark space, and came up with what looked like an old-style VR helmet.  Thick wires long were entangled and attached to an unseen monster that powered the machines.  He carefully handed the device to Margot, untangling wires and knots as he passed along the headset. Just holding it felt wrong, like touching a dead body, and not just the level of grime and dirt that had built up on it while absconded under Melvin’s desk.  In Melvin’s hands, it was a pornography device, a way to download sexual experiences of the most perverted and disgusting, but in Margot’s?  She brought the visor to her eyes, and it mirrored a display that had been on Melvin’s left most monitor.  She pulled a strap that covered her head and hair, locking it into place.  The artifact secured itself in a vacuum cup to her eyes, and mostly covered her ears, as though attuning itself to the head slot. “What are we looking for today?”  Melvin asked, an empty dialogue box brought up on a monitor, it held a cursor blinking for instructions. “Cosmology,” Margot whispered out. “Make-up?”  Melvin laughed, a bit of snort coming into his nose, Imogen slapped his shoulder hard. “Ast-ro-physics dummy.  And not the one with the zodiac, the one math one.”  Imogen chastised him.  She knew Melvin knew better; he just had poor opinions of the intelligence of others. Astronomy, Melvin typed.  The virtual packets bounced around the globe in a pattern that would be almost undetectable, near the maximum amount of entropy, before settling on a small server on the other side of the planet, which read a list, and then repeated the obstruse trek before arriving back home.  Forty-Five seconds to get a simple text file.  It was like a short list of resumes, school courses, former jobs, from which university and what grade of understanding. Melvin scrolled through the list; he was an expert on finding good deals. “What are those numbers?”  Margot asked, “Dollars?  That listing says eighteen thousand, I can’t afford that!” “Crypto,” Melvin answered.  “Proprietary brain bucks.” “Melvin, how am I going to be able to afford any of this?”  Margot complained from under her guise. “Follow the law of equivalent exchange.”  Melvin started.  Margot flipped up the VR helmet and Imogen leaned in. “It’s not really about the money, though you can cash out if you want.  The price is an estimate of neuroplasticity required.  If you want to take calculous knowledge, you need to give up something of equal worth, because the calc needs some place to go.  If we shove a language into your brain, you won’t know how to access the neurons correctly.  You’ll constantly feel like you’re searching for a word, the answer on the tip of your tongue.” Imogen was delighted at how simple it was, “Easy!  Just trade something you won’t use anymore.  One class for another.” Margot panicked.  There was nothing she could think of.  Every class she took she had either cheated in, or it was something she couldn’t live without.  After an inventory of her own brain, she found something she could discard, “I had four years of Spanish in high school, is that worth, anything?” “Put the helm back on, I’ll do a quick scan,” Melvin flipped tabs on the browser, and Margot reset the machine even as fans on the device ramped up loudly.  Margot’s hair felt warm, but the warmth continued into her skull.  There it traveled into blood and her head and finally her spirit. The warmth zipped through ancient archives, and briefly neurons flashed - a week in Mexico three years ago, memories of her friends, of a handsome teacher who she kept coming back to in some fantasies.  She felt the pull of an unrequited teen romance, and it triggered an ache of nostalgia, and only to be followed by a marathon flood of rules of grammar and studying.  Four years, zipped, burned, marked, categorized. “That’s worth about a thousand, and to be honest, the emotional texture is a lot of that.” “A thousand!  No, I had straight A’s.  Real ones!” Melvin looked at the diagnostics from the scan, “The last time you spoke a word was two years ago.  I’m sure if you tried, you could relearn it in a couple days, get back to good enough conversational, but nothing you learned was that special and the neurons are, flabby, they’re out of shape.”  Melvin realized too late he had just called a girl’s brain fat. Margot’s eyes began to water, the frustration of the coming doom, combined with the idea that everything she knew, everything in her brain was not worth more than a few grand.  It was one thing to suspect no one cared what she thought, it was another be shown no one would spare a penny for them. Imogen tried to salvage the situation, “Melvin, there’s got to be something.  Maybe something temporary, like driving?  Cooking?  Sewing?” Melvin understood the world of equivalent exchange quite well.  Common easy skills, those easily relearned, were not worth very much.  There were entire black markets around the globe where men and women slaved away to master some technique over the course of a day, only to trade it in for a few bucks at night.  One needed rare coinage and one needed to sell when demand was high – like on the day before test day. Except, Melvin was also a pervert.  He knew of a solution. “There is something,” He began.  Finally, his hours of self-pleasure had amounted to something useful, valuable, even heroic. The typing grew loud as the maestro percussively and slowly typed each letter, going slow enough for Margot to watch as he entered the cursed words into the search engine. “Potty” “Training” “Girl,” that last word was a helpful suggestion from auto complete. The browser filled with requests, some with offers to buy now at tens of thousands of whatever demonic currency fueled the exchange. Imogen understood, “We could do this.  Just sell and buy it back tomorrow after class.  Wine mommies are desperate to teach their kids to go potty.  They’ll pay top dollar!” Melvin darted his eyes back and forth, “Yes.  Bored moms.”  He tried to keep his knees together. “I’m doing it.”  Margot decided, “It’s just for a day.  Diapers for a day.  I want that astronomy major on sale we saw, the one from Polytechnic.” The numbers were too big.  She could buy astronomy, and then tomorrow trade it back.  She might not even need to go to the bathroom in the next 16 hours!  It was more than that.  Some part of her wanted to know what it felt like to know something, to be the nerd she pretended to be. Imogen moved to offer alternative, but Margot stopped her, “It’s just one day.” Click. Clack. Each button brought up prompts, sometimes in multitudes of languages stopping their progress.  The dark spells they were casting here were forbidden.  It would result in permanent injury and harm.  A reminder that this was all just for entertainment, to seek help if one digs too far. Melvin pushed past it all.  Margot breaths turned shallow, watching along under the cursed headset, as he used data from trackers to command prompts to bots to start a download.  To anyone outside the dorm room, it looked like Margot had just sold a NFT, uploaded a story to a text archive, and changed cloud storage providers.  Nothing weird.  Nothing perverted.  Certainly nothing illegal in the land where this young lady’s mind was about to get fragged. Imogen and Melvin watched a moving cursor bar, accelerated by the unlimited capacity of campus internet speeds.  Inside the headset, and more so, inside Margot’s head was something different.  These were the old memories.  Not her oldest, but old enough she couldn’t contextually place her age or life in them.  In her memory her underpants had been pulled to the floor, dangling over unsocked feet.  It had been the first real triumph, followed by a shout to mommy.  A shout to daddy.  She made a dance in front of a pink bowel as the adults scampered to the small room.  From that point forward, the memory was a promise to them and herself she had kept with nearly perfect accuracy. And just as she reviewed it, it was gone, neuron by neuron, out of her head.  The daily refresher exercise had made the act as easy as breathing.  She could control her bladder even in her sleep.  Under the vacuumed headset her eyes burned with a flash of bright light.  Such was her mastery of the skill that she was barely aware of what it felt like when it was now gone. The vomit was back in the throat again.  Burning her esophagus a bit before she shook her head clear. “Holllllllllllly shit she did it.”  Melvin started. “Look at that!”  Imogen pointed at the screens, shaking Margot’s loose body that still was protected from the world by a machine.  Where previously there had been a big fat zero, now there was a short font explaining Margot was the proud owner of $20,185 brain bucks… having lost a bit of her initial $21,000 to transaction fees, liquidity makers, and delays. Margot slowly pulled her head up and looked at the money.  Had they been dollars they would have been more in her account than she had ever made in her life.  A quote from a forgotten book she had read had dislodged itself in that empty space of her brain, as though excited from the transaction, “You’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the good s produced and all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.” There was a small buzzing down below, like the start of a build up from masturbation.  Trading her brain, her knowledge, something she had worked for, for pure money, had an erotic edge, more than her last boyfriend had ever done.  Margot gently touched the front of her pants; fingers in preparation to extend her stimulated bliss, as though unaware she was in the presence of others. “What’s it feel like?”  Imogen tried to ask Margot, hoping to stop her friend. For Margot, it was a growing horniness, her body was no longer entirely in her control, but there was a buzz from getting so many memories ripped out.  Her brain was trying new connections, trying to route around this new damage, and making new paths around the voids.  It felt good. Too good. If it were up to Margot, she would keep stripping her brain apart until she had nothing left. Gritting her teeth, Margot was ready, “I’m fine.  Now give me my astronomy.  I want nothing but the best.  I want a Polytech degree.” “I think I saw someone who dropped out a couple semesters early you can save a bit of money if we shop around,” Melvin offered. “I want the best!”  That came out as too almost a whine from Margot, she shifted to a quick rational, “I can’t do worse than the midterm or there will be questions.” If bimbofying herself felt this good, surely mastering some new technique or skill would feel ecstatic, soul-bending, incomparable in experience.  That electric buzz was there and she needed the push.  Melvin bought the dark knowledge, and the three watched as her account went from tens of thousands of coins back to a few hundred.  All explanations, all lessons, come with some suffering.  That part of the exchange was not lost.  The machine whirled up its fans, and the edge of the headset seemed to dig in deeper into her skull.  Electrical fields and magnets began molding her neurons into specific shapes, forcing dendrites and axons into strange positions.  To Margot it was a stabbing pain, not in one place, but a lair of pain across her head.  She pushed against it, as if pushing could remove the pain.  The whole body pushed.  Top to bottom, every part of her scrunched tight, breath shortening, every muscle tensing, as her heartrate doubled for a second. Then there was a smell, something smoke adjacent.  She felt intense relief as the pain was gone.  Margot gave a large gasp for air.  The pleasure from before shifted into contentment. Margot lifted the headset. “Did it work?  Tell us something cool about astronomy, something only a real space nerd would know,” Imogen begged, this would be the first sign this whole thing was not just a parlor trick. Margot opened her mouth to speak and then closed it.  She searched her brain, unsure of where to start.  It all seemed so simple, but it all seemed so mysterious and wonderful.  “What’s the crisis in cosmology?”  Melvin asked. “Crisis!”  Imogen’s eyes lit up, this was not just a dismal science but one prone to scandal. Margot tiled her head and then it was just there, it felt like lifting a thumb, and underneath, a thousand hours of math and physics and studying.  “The, expected Hubble constant using models built from the big bang forward, produces a value outside the error bars for the Hubble constant we get when we derive it strictly from direct observation.” Imogen mocked it, “That’s it?   That’s the crisis on infinite worlds?” Margot stared at her hand, as though the answer would come from it.  It had come from somewhere within, but she was still confused, as nerves were sending new sensory data to her brain.  She looked down at herself.  She shifted slightly in the seat. A recent arrival in her panties flattened into a squish, her posterior became covered in something wet or muddy that hadn’t been there when she sat down.  She reached towards her butt with a hand and lifted herself up to check. Imogen smelled it first, “Margot, did you?” She stood up and grabbed Margot’s arm, helping her up, stopping Margot from reaching into her panties.  Quickly, she dragged themselves to the dorm’s door.  Melvin had just enough time to see the growing wet dark stain around the back of Margot’s shorts, as the two girls exited to the dorm’s main hallway. Melvin’s hand hovered over the small stain in the chair that matched the one on Margot’s shorts.  With a bell laugh he spoke to himself, “I guess I’m never washing this chair then.”   “It’s happened!  You traded!”  Imogen flabbergasted, repeating the same thing on a loop, pushing a confused Margot into their apartment bathroom.  She pushed down the redhaired roommate on the waiting toilet. “Sit.” Margot sat down with her wet pants, “What’s going on?” “Get your pants off.” “Why?”  Margot asked, confused. Imogen knelt and started pulling at the girl’s soiled shorts, Margot’s blankly watched embracing the novelty.  She left the shorts at Margot’s ankles, an inch of space holding soiled garments from the floor.  She directed Margot’s attention to the damp and darkened panties. “It all has to come off.”  Imogen’s tone was stern, familiar, but comforting.  Neurons in Margot’s brain reached out for an event in her distant past and found nothing.  Deja-Vu.  Long ago she had heard these words in the same tone. Margot looked at herself.  She was hovering her butt over a waterfilled bowl with only her soaked previously white and now gray panties covering her private spots from a roommate who had never seen her this close before.   She carefully pulled at the panties’ elastic, and despite a small bit of stickiness on her fingers, was able to bring her panties through her legs and to her ankles.  The smell that came up as she moved the panties was exotic, unknown, but also not pleasant. “Stay there, I’m going to figure this out.” Margot tried standing up but Imogen gently pushed her back to the seat, “Margot, you’re not potty trained.” “Who cares?”  Margot answered.  Her roommate was acting weird.  She still had some coins to spend, right?  More knowledge to download.  “Why’d we leave, I could have bought some cooking skills with the remaining balance.” “Just stay there, and if you feel anything just go in the toilet.”  Imogen tried.  Imogen bundled her roommate’s soiled clothes and made her way out of the bathroom.  She briefly panicked through the kitchenette, grabbing paper towels and a set of oven gloves, before making her way through the apartment’s main hall.  She opened a side cupboard, grabbing a beach towel and then ran back to Margot.  The girl had since brought up her legs, to better sit folded up on the toilet. “OK, just, wear this.  I’ll go to the store and get some diapers, and it’ll just be for one day and we’ll get this fixed.”  The words rushed out of Imogen’s mouth in a single breath, lingering slightly on diapers and emphasizing just. “Wait, Imogen, I want to show you something.” Imogen just stopped with the towel stretched at the end of her hand; Margot reached behind her and pushed a small silver handle. Slussssssssh-huh-usssssssss. Margot’s face shown with pride over her knowledge, a discovery made all on her own.   Margot’s entry into the apartment was not as pronounced or dramatic as yesterday, but it still came to Imogen’s attention.  Margot’s hair had been laid down as far as it would go, and she wore a flowery long billowy blouse that hid the top of her gray sweatpants – as though she had given up on preparing to go out halfway down here body.  “How was the test?” “Easy, I’m not even sure what I was worried about.  Doctor Draper went around the class and asked a couple questions.  She asked me to give the three things we can know about a blackhole.”  Margot paused, “I reminded her we can also find temperature and pressure from mass, spin, and charge.  Then she asked me what the equation for temperature of a black hole was, and when I asked if she wanted me to derive it…  Anyway, A Plus.” Imogen gave a squeak like a mouse caught in a corner, clapping her hands and then rushing over to Margot.  Her hand went out to the girl’s gray sweatpants, and stopped an inch away, “And the protection?  No leaks?” Margot just smiled and her eyes closed.  Imogen could practically feel the heat coming from the sweatpants, the front bulge expanding in the crotch as she watched. Imogen reached further and grabbed Margot’s fingers, guiding her to the couch, “Let’s get you changed and then we’ll get your potty training back.” Margot carefully sat down on the changing pad, and Imogen’s fingers carefully pulled at the sweatpants.  Her gentle hand touched the enriched garment; its protective cloth expanded into a smooth round bulge. “That’s OK, I’ll help you change.”  Margot said nothing as tapes ripped off, exposing delicate feminine features to the cool apartment air. Imogen lifted Margot’s legs, sliding the replacement garment under her posterior.  There was a small buzzing, a stirring of pleasure as the vulnerable red head shivered and let out a small breath in response.  Gently Imogen returned the girl’s legs down and brought the other half of the diaper up and through the crotch, flaps around the hips.  She smoothed tapes in place, and then her fingertips lingered on the fresh front. “Perfect, just perfect.”  Imogen spoke to herself.  Margot awkwardly smiled, satisfied, and then gently pushed herself back to standing, bringing up her sweatpants, hiding her new undergarment as she tightened the strings and let her blouse fall over the gray slacks. The two returned to Melvin’s, and since he was expecting the girls, the dorm had improved marginally.  The floor clothes had been balled up and piled into a corner, and the stink of the room covered over with excess amounts of Lysol spray.  The ruined chair had been excessively wiped down, leaving no trace of yesterday’s accident. “I’m going to miss it.”  Margot hesitated before placing the headset over her hair and locked herself in the virtual world. “The diapers?”  Melvin asked, his voice shaking on the word. Margot took a large breath, remembering the hit from last time, “I’m ready, just take the astronomy and make the trade.”  This first part was going to feel good. Melvin repeated the dance across the darkness of the web, finally coming to the forbidden market.  He typed a few commands and Margot felt inky tendrils descend into her newfound mastery of the cosmos, dancing lights exploring and teasing every neuron in ways not even Doctor Draper could have guessed. Mevin shook heavily and moved quickly, dancing across new websites, and trying various combinations of words and terms.   The girls were waiting patiently for him to perform the reversal, but instead he warned, “There is a small problem.” Margot tipped up her helm and glared at the screen.  On one monitor was a graph, it showed a line bar moving up and then sinking rapidly.  She recognized the brain currency on one side and dates on the other axis. “The current best spot-price for your astronomy is about ten-k.  I can try the message boards but that could take days to for a response, and the price isn’t going to improve much.” Margot coughed up a bit of spittle and blinked.  “It was over twenty yesterday!” Melvin tried to explain, “Yesterday was finals.  Now, that astronomy degree in your brain is just bar trivia.  Useless knowledge.” Margot turned her head to Imogen, and then back to the screen.  “How much is potty training?  Maybe if it’s cheap enough, I can just sell something else I don’t need.” Melvin dragged a graph from another monitor, the prices showing a different inversion, peaking at $30,000 brainbucks. “Don’t worry Margot, we can just wait a bit we can switch it back.”  Imogen suggested, but Melvin was faster.  He expanded the timeline on the graphs.  The next time the next time prices might bounce back would be December. Margot slumped in her chair, letting the helmet fall from her grasp to the dorm floor.  It clinked, and as she straightened herself up everyone heard the crinkling of her diaper. Melvin offered the only solution, “You could try relearning it.  How hard could potty training be to learn?”   Imogen removed the rubber glove with a quick snap, balling the discarded protection into the soiled pull-up.  It did not take many changes for the old babysitting skills to come right back.  Like riding a bike.  Imogen glanced at the still empty pink bowel still near her feet, decorated with rainbows and pictures of Minnie Mouse intended to encourage the vessel’s use. “You’re getting better,” the lie came easily from Imogen. “I forgot to take the pants off.  The easiest part!”  Margot was on the verge of tears.  Now would be a good time for crying. “Oh baby,” Imogen reassured her, a hand coming down softly on Margot’s back, “let’s go to the potty chart, I’ll still count that as a star.” The light tears that had clouded Margot’s face stabilized, “Really?  This felt more like a brown dwarf.”  Her hands reached down and rubbed the new thick purple replacement to her previously spoiled pull-up.  With a waddle she made her way to her bedroom door adorned with the hand-made poster.  The stickers of stars, planets, and moons, announced a month of accidents and few successes. Imogen continued, “By the end of summer you’ll be able to stay in pull-ups full time” It had cost Imogen a large chunk of her bank account to buy all those puts and call options.  For one day she controlled the price of human knowledge.  As she watched her padded roommate place the sticker on her chart, Imogen decided it was worth every penny.