Without Merit: What Happened at the Lake House? (2/4) 6/10/22

[direking]

On 8/2/2021 at 2:17 PM, Mugi said:

Hehehe seems like Adam has just gotten the good ending. ?
The Pikachu footed pajama is it like a footed pajamas or a kigurumi? I have wanted to get one of those pikachu kigurumis myself ?

It's more of a footie, something that shows off a poofy bottom.

On 8/3/2021 at 9:58 PM, forever21months said:

If this is the end of this story, I want you to know that this was an absolute treat. I checked the site every day to see if it was updated. Up there with some of my favorite epics on this site. Well done!

Not the end, but we're getting close, only a few chapters left. There's 100% a 'The End' at the end. Thanks for the kind words.

On 8/4/2021 at 9:00 AM, D503 said:

Bravo! *standing ovation*

Bravo. The dream sequence was just perfect. Love your work DireKing, this will go down as an absolute banger.

(I do wonder how many other boys have gotten sucked in: there are thousands of Dianes and Adams, only one of you, but there are dozens of me)

Thanks for the kind words and comments! Diane is hinting at the fact that the Entity is in multiple bodies, for the formless Entity, a name is a foreign concept. Those from the other side of the 'door' have an issue with names.

As far as other victims, I plan on writing a one-shot in the same universe that takes place in 1988. That is after I'm done with Adam's story.

[direking]

Thanks for reading, we're rounding the final twists and turns at end of the race, and I hope you guys had fun with this zany story about a sleepover, alien body snatchers, and diapers.

There are 30 chapters and an Epilogue. I hoped to be finished by August 1st, but that didn't happen, I'm taking my time when it comes to wrapping up 'Without Merit'. I'm aiming for Chapter 28 next week, and I plan on releasing Chapter 29, 30, and Epilogue at the same time on a later date.

This is mostly a 'setup' chapter, preparing for a final showdown at the lake house.

27

Light and dark worked differently now that he was fully under its spell, the world lacked color, meaning, purpose. It was him and his mommies, and his delightful diaper.
 
Marisa was right, it didn’t hurt, because it didn’t feel like anything at all. This was the good life. A worry free existence that came with the sacrifice of his soul, his reason for being, and his daily illusion of free will.
 
They were back at the lake house, in the pink room, his room. However, he would’ve preferred the walls to be more of a robin's egg blue, maybe with yellowish dandelion accents, and he needed his Pokémon posters to be on the walls.
 
“Adam, wake up. Come on, come on — wake up. It’s not too late.”
 
Who was this black haired girl? Is she a mommy, too? Through the grayish haze she certainly looked like one.
 
Adam managed to fully open his eyes but that was a bad idea. All he saw was color, oversaturated, way too bright, a blinding kaleidoscope of rainbow. He hated it. He also hated how this mommy kept jostling him around, he wanted to go back to his nap. Maybe not feel alive for a few more hours, maybe a few more days.
 
But this mommy, she didn’t want him to take a nap. Why? He was so sleepy from going shopping, the oldest mommy told him that he was so good, that they had such a big day.
 
The blonde mommy wanted him to take a nap, she whispered how tonight was going to be a big night, too. Adam had no idea what she wanted, but she certainly wanted it.
 
The pretty mommy with honey-colored hair, the one who saved him from his old life, the one who pushed the pain away, she didn’t say anything at all to him. Did he do something wrong?
 
Now, back to this little mommy, she was having a frowny face day. She looked scared, confused, and kept pulling him around and snapping her fingers in his ears. Maybe this little mommy needed a mommy of her own, he had three, he was willing to share, maybe give her the older, cranky mommy, or the blonde one who kept kissing his neck and rubbing his diaper. No, he kind of liked that mommy for some reason. However, the honey haired mommy belonged to him.
 
“Adam, you’re strong, you can break free of this, I know you can do it.”
 
Katie yanked the pacifier out from his mouth.
 
“Wha—“
 
His mouth felt raw, loose like jelly, slick and wet with saliva. Katie had a pacifier between her fingers, held away like it still had cooties on it, a long string of drool dripped from the bulb.
 
“Earth to Adam, anyone home?” Katie frantically waved a hand in front of his face, trying to get any semblance of attention. “Come on, I need you to snap out of it because we’re running out of time.”
 
“Ti-me?” Adam stuttered, still dumbfounded by actual existence.
 
“Alright, can’t say I didn’t warn you,” Katie sighed.
 
She took a hand and slid it against his cheek before bringing it back with a vengeance.
 
Slap!
 
“Owie!” Adam cried out and held his cheek while kicking his legs. AKA Toddler death throes.
 
He didn’t like this mommy at all, she was now the mean mommy. Write it down, M-E-A-N, that’s how she was going down in history.
 
Katie brought the back of her hand against his other cheek. Adam saw stars, brightly colored and mesmerizing, his vision blurred from the pain, but his mind was one slap closer to normal. His thoughts became clearer, especially after she started shaking him. His brain rattling about his skull was quite the wake up call.
 
Smack.
 
Mean mommy wasn’t even a real mommy, she was a Katie. A girl who stayed at home to come up with a plan. A plan to do what?
 
Smack.
 
Ouch. The world sprang back into color, connections reformed between his senses and brain, and the personality that made him Adam awoke from a long nap. Katie pulled another hand back, she looked focused and concerned, and a lot better rested than she did that morning. She must have taken a little nap herself.
 
Another hand came his way, and he softly grabbed it from the air.
 
“Stop! Stop! I’m awake, just stop hitting me!” Adam whined.
 
“Finally! You were starting to scare me.”
 
Katie shifted back on her haunches, leaving Adam sitting on the pink bed. Her entire posture changed, from rigid to relaxed, the crease in her brow disappeared, and most importantly, she stopped slapping him.
 
Adam rubbed his cheek and glowered.
 
“Did you even think about using a mirror before beating me up? You know, like we talked about.”
 
“It must have slipped my mind,” Katie answered, it looked like she found the whole slapping thing mildly entertaining. “You’ve been totally out of it ever since you got home over an hour ago. The way you just sat and drooling on yourself, I thought you were gone for good.”
 
“I guess I’m back now.” Adam smacked his lips together a couple of times. “Why does my mouth taste like bananas?”
 
“We chopped some up, and I fed you with a spoon.”
 
“Was there a bib involved?” Adam felt around the back of his neck for a lingering sensation of velcro.
 
“What do you think, Adam?” Katie snapped. “You were nothing but a baby zombie when they pulled you out of the car. And this paci? I almost needed the freaking jaws of life to get it out of your mouth.”
 
“Well, you see how you do when you’re abandoned like I was in a baby store,” Adam pouted.
 
Katie protested, “I’m just saying —“
 
Adam held up his hands. “Look, do you have a plan or what? I freaking lost to this thing out there. This wasn’t like before, I was totally gone, and it felt like dying. Are you going to help me or just get out of my way?”
 
“You talk mighty tough for a guy with Elmo on his ass,” Katie fired back.
 
“What?” Adam looked down and saw he was wearing a Pamper. There was a lovely smiling Elmo on his crotch, but he’d have to take her word for the one on his bottom. He looked back up at her with a confused look on his face, then hastily covered up his diaper with frantic hands.
 
“What happened to my shorts?”
 
Katie just laughed.
 
“There’s nothing funny about any of this,” Adam complained. “I hate being someone else’s joke.”
 
“Adam, if you could only see the way you look when you’re angry in a diaper, it’s hilarious.”
 
Adam pointed a finger at her.
 
“That sounds like something the Entity would say, I’m not so sure about you anymore.”
 
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Katie asked. “Are you questioning my allegiance or something?”
 
“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” huffed Adam.
 
“Fine, fine. I totally understand why you’re paranoid, but this should make you trust me.”
 
Katie fished around her jean pocket and pulled out a small make-up mirror, similar to one his mom carried in her purse. It made him wonder if his mom was still his mom, or was she already something else. He shuddered. Things were serious now, much more so than this morning. His rapid descent into babyhood was similar to a playground slide, steeper at the bottom and almost impossible to climb back up again.
 
She shifted closer to him on the pink bed, and held the mirror open and facing the both of them. It was like they were taking a selfie. The reflection would tell them everything, Adam looked at the mirror and into Katie’s normal looking eyes. There wasn’t a hint of red anywhere, he breathed a sigh of relief. It was stupid to think that she’d change teams, but that business with Charity scared him into paranoid territory. The cheerleader jumped ship in a matter of seconds.
 
The mirror slowly rotated onto Adam.
 
His eyes glowed blue, but this time, it wasn’t going away. The effects of this thing were becoming permanent, did that mean he was still under control? Adam wished there was a guidebook for all of this: ‘Your Entity and you’. Despite the rough day, the thought made him grin, so did the ridiculous nature of the entire weekend. He had to assume the strange things that happened were more real than the normal things that happened.
 
In the real world there was a well-orchestrated charade meant to humiliate him, this supernatural side dish only wanted to reveal a vast town wide conspiracy. He still wanted to fight back, so he wasn’t totally under It’s control. However, to do that, he needed a plan; but that’s why Katie was here, because she had a good plan.
 
“So, what do we do next?” Adam asked.
 
Katie looked trepidatious again; why was she so concerned? She was the one chilling all morning coming up with a plan, he was the one suffering behind enemy lines.
 
“Alright, I came up with somewhat of a plan, but you may not like it.”
 
Adam already didn’t like it.
 
“Okay, give it to me.”
 
Adam sat down on the crumpled oversized unicorn he rode the night before. His thicker diaper buoyed him a bit before he could finally get comfortable and settle.
 
Katie used her hands to talk when she was excited. However, she wasn’t frantically snapping her fingers like this morning during her brainstorm. This time her hands were flattened and knife-like, like she was about to karate chop the air with her rhetoric.
 
“I figured the best way to pull the others out of their trance is to expose them all at the same time. I believe that they’re like a virus, and contagious, and they will reinfect one another if they’re given any chance. I don’t want to play ‘whack-a-mole’ with this unseen force that we’re against.”
 
Adam nodded. This was good stuff, he had tried the ‘divide and conquer’ technique at Webber’s to disastrous results. He would need to tell Katie all about what happened there, after she told him their new strategy.
 
“So I thought, what’s the best way to capture all of their madness at the same time?”
 
Katie waited a moment to let it sink in, her ‘karate hands’ finally came to a stop.
 
“A picture, or photograph, like your weird dream girl told you. However, I don’t think I can convince the ‘It’ to stand in front of the mirror and look at themselves, especially all at the same time. Even one by one would make ‘It’ suspicious of us — if it isn’t already.”
 
“Oh, it’s onto us,” Adam muttered, “and ‘It’ doesn’t care if we know or not.”
 
The Entity was in the bragging stage of the game, spiking the football, running up the score and rubbing their faces in it. It knew it was winning, so did Adam, but he didn’t want to ruin her good mood with the truth. Still, he had to tell her what happened at the store.
 
“You’re going to have to tell me more,” Katie said.
 
Adam took the time to explain Diane, which could have taken all day, because that bitch was crazy. He told her the important stuff, so it wouldn’t throw off whatever she cooked up. He may have left out the parts about the pair of wet diapers and the changing table handjob. Katie didn’t need to know ALL the details.
 
“I figured this would eventually come into the equation,” Katie surmised. “I’m not surprised by what happened, we should’ve figured that something this strange couldn’t be kept to the confines of the lake house.”

“But how far does it go?” Adam looked grim.

“That doesn’t matter, at least not to us. The most beautiful part of this plan is how quick we can turn the tables.”

“Hear me out. I spent a lot of time thinking about your dream, I think it’s the most important part of your, let’s say, ‘experience’. Are you following me?”
 
Adam nodded, he was mostly distracted by her active hands, but he was hearing bits and pieces.
 
“This guru-girl told you two very important things. The first is that ‘it didn’t matter for her’, which means that this has happened before. The second wasn’t so direct, but I picked it up after kicking it around in my head a bit. The reason she called pictures ‘photographs’ and she hummed weird songs that you didn’t recognize — she’s from a different time, Adam.”
 
“And?” Adam didn’t want to be rude, but if this was the best she could do, he was in deep doo-doo.
 
“Don’t you get it? That girl was from a time where photographs and mirrors were the only way to see yourself for who you really are.”
 
“Yeah, I picked that up myself,” Adam snapped, he was getting mildly impatient. “Just explain how this is supposed to help me?”
 
Katie grinned a wicked grin, pulled her smartphone free from her pocket and held it up for Adam to see. Oh! This girl was smart.
 
“The Entity has never dealt with one of these before,” Katie proclaimed with a smile. “Tell me, what’s better than a picture that says ‘a thousand words’? A video which shows a thousand pictures. We are going to nuke them with so much revelation, in so little time, that It won’t be able to fight back.”
 
“This might just work,” Adam muttered as he stood up from the bed. He started excitedly pacing the pink room, Pamper rustling with every step, but that did little to hamper his improving mood. He stopped and turned back to Katie, who was already awaiting his questions with a twinkle in her eye.
 
“What if the revelation makes things worse?” Adam asked.
 
“How can it get much worse for you, Adam?” Katie confidently answered. “You’re hanging on your last rung, you can’t get much lower than you are now. Like dying, remember? We are going to strike fast and strike hard, that’s our only chance to undo this thing.”
 
“And if this doesn’t work, what happens then?”
 
The room got quiet real fast as the conversation was sucked from the air between them, creating a space where they could cringe together without a single word. They didn’t want to think about it not working, Adam couldn’t bear the thought, he’d lost already, and he had no idea how he was able to break free from It’s final grasp.
 
Katie stood up and hugged him, held him tightly in her arms.
 
“It’s going to work, Adam. Something just tells me that this is going to work. You’ve got to have faith in yourself, you are stronger than you think. I have no idea how you’ve pulled through this weekend, but I need you to do one final thing, then you can be free.”
 
Still, it sounded easy enough. A simple plan to follow like a path away from diaper dependency and mind control, an actual path to freedom.
 
“Alright, I’m game,” Adam conceded. “What do I need to do?”
 
Katie took a painful swallow, so Adam did the same.
 
“Now, this is the part you might not like as much.” Katie let the anticipation reach its peak before telling him the rest. “The only way we can be sure that they’re glowing is by putting a baby in the room. You’re going to have to pretend that you’re that baby, and go into complete baby mode.”
 
Complete baby mode. Adam didn’t like the sound of that at all, the plan started losing its shine real quick. He unconsciously ran a pair of fingers across the Pamper at his waist, he didn’t know how much more like a baby he could become; thanks to the Entity, he’d picked up nasty habits like sucking his thumb, wetting his pants, and actually doing the poopy dance.
 
Adam asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
 
“You’re going to have to act like the cutest baby in the world to draw them all out. If you play your part, the Entity won’t be able to contain itself, it will come for you, but first we have to complete the look.”
 
“Complete the look?” Adam trailed off.
 
Katie motioned towards the Pikachu footie pajamas, an adult sized footie with snaps at the crotch for quicker diaper changes. This was undoubtedly worse than the sailor suit he’d worn for that play, easily the most embarrassing thing he’d ever been asked to wear.
 
“I don’t think I need to tell you how I feel about this.” Adam began to feel ill, and he hoped his face showed it. “There are too many variables, too many things that could go wrong. You know martial arts, can’t you just kick them or something?”
 
“It’s not just about you, Adam. Even if we were able to break out and escape, we’d be leaving our friends under It’s control. I know you think they deserve it, but the right thing to do is give them a chance to get away. If this doesn’t work, I’ll kick them — Charity first.”
 
Adam pointed to a small purple box gently laying upon the footie pajamas. Tiny and sinister, like a little clown with a butcher knife.
 
“What’s that?”
 
“That’s a laxative,” Katie answered, “it’s like a diuretic but for your, you know —“
 
She pointed to her butt.
 
“Oh, jeez!” Adam groaned.
 
When Katie mentioned ‘complete baby mode’, she meant everything she said. Adam began to feel trepidation himself; it was one thing to mess yourself because the Entity tricked you into doing it. Something all together different to do it to yourself, like homicide vs suicide. Oh jeez, that was awfully morbid.
 
“Just to be clear, I’m going to be um.. pooping myself on purpose?”
 
“You’re correct,” clarified Katie. “Would you like to see my eyes again?”
 
“No, no. I trust you.”
 
Adam barely trusted her, but he was out of allies. Her plan had faults but it was better than anything he could come up with on his own. There was a baby bottle filled with milk next to the laxative, it was most likely something to help him stomach the medicine. That’s what he had to do, stomach the medicine. ‘Going with the flow’ meant executing the best plan to the fullest, and if that meant dirtying a diaper, that’s what he would have to do. They were on a time limit, he’d have to go undercover and hope for the best. Katie had his back.
 
“Let me help you get dressed, Adam.”
 
He went into the footsie feet first, then he laid on his back as Katie sealed his crotch with the snaps, one at a time. He felt snug as a bug as she zipped him into the suit. Flipped over the hood so it looked like he had little yellow ears. Life was pain.
 
“They’re not going to be able to hide their true nature from you, Adam.” Katie struggled to stifle a smile, covering her mouth with her hand as if this was as serious as a funeral.
 
Adam wished it was his funeral. The oversized footie was uncomfortably hot, and how would he put it? Mortifying. Still, if this was what it would take to win, he’d gladly do it. That resolve bubbled up again. The last dagger hidden in his boot was a small bottle of purple stuff, it had recommended dosage measurements on the side of the box, but those could be ignored in emergency situations like this. He twisted off the cap, and held it up for Katie to see.
 
“Bottoms up.” And Adam chugged down the laxative without a care for its oncoming consequence.
 
Of course, it tasted nasty. Adam quickly picked up the bottle of milk and put the plastic nipple between his lips and began to suck. The muscle memory was similar to a pacifier, a familiar movement like riding a bike.
 
Katie grinned.
 
“What?” Adam pulled the bottle free from his mouth.
 
“It’s nothing,” Katie placated.
 
“It’s obviously something, you wouldn’t be all sheepish if it was nothing.”
 
“I just like seeing a plan come together, I know I’m weird.”
 
“It’s got to be something more than that,” Adam prodded.
 
“Alright, fine. When we first picked you up in the SUV, I thought you were the biggest wussy weakling in the world. But now, I can’t imagine how tough this weekend was, but you’re so brave that you keep on kicking.”
 
Adam smirked.
 
“So you’re saying that I’m changing, to avoid needing changing.”
 
“I wouldn’t say that much, especially after you just downed a whole sample-sized bottle of laxative.” Katie bit her lip to keep in a laugh, then let it out anyways. “You’re going to need changing before it’s all said and done.”
 
Adam and Katie shared a moment of gallows humor, laughing together too hard, until their ribs ached and both fell back onto the mattress. When it’s all over the best you can do is laugh at how it ends.
 
“Why are you laughing, Katie? I’m not the one having to change this diaper.” Adam crossed his arms, and glared at her, a move he’d picked up from the girls this weekend.
 
“I’m not dealing with this disaster,” Katie corrected him. “I’m the one holding the camera, but rumor has it, that Marisa is on diaper duty.”
 
Oh, jeez. Adam laughed along with her, it was pretty funny loading a diaper for ‘perfection personified’ Marisa. She’s going to need a lot of wipes for the first diaper that she’d have to change.

He gave Katie a sly grin.
 
“Then, let’s go out with a bang, but hopefully not a blow out.”

[Pierry Louys]

Great chapter really loving this story 

[Zylo1893]

Love this

 

[direking]

Thanks for reading! Sorry about the long wait, the cause was a good mix of IRL and writers block.

28
 
Step one: Act like a baby
 
Adam was a man on a mission, to get in touch with his childish side. His very childish side. He stood in the doorway with the pink room behind him, and took a moment for himself.
 
Showtime.
 
Three women made up the audience for his most important performance of his life. Marisa, Charity, and Mrs. Hartmann formed a close-knit circle around the low-rise coffee table between the couches. The living room was back to the way it was before Queen Charity had him move everything around, which felt like a lifetime ago.
 
On the surface, the scene appeared simple and innocuous. His targets lounged on the sofas, deeply engrossed in an easygoing afternoon chat. Each had a drink, or one close enough at hand. He watched them put together a jigsaw puzzle as they compared plans for prom. The teens could barely contain their excitement for the big dance, and Mrs. Hartmann lived vicariously through memories of her own senior year. Their posture was so cozy, relaxed, almost impossible to tell that they were under Its control, under Its influence.
 
The hot mom loudly gave advice to the enraptured teens.
 
“Try to remember that a diet is only for a few weeks, while pictures last a lifetime. Which means you need to start now if you don’t want to look chunky in your dress.”
 
“Mom, we aren’t fat, we’re not going to diet.”
 
“Are you sure about that?” Mrs. Hartmann allowed herself a pause to punctuate the mood. “I mean, what am I saying? Of course you’re perfectly fine. Just try to do a better job of managing your carbs.”
 
The trio awkwardly returned to their puzzle without another word on the matter.
 
Adam reminded himself that he was there to do more than just eavesdrop. He was a man on a mission. His very childish side. The goal was to trigger their inner maternal instinct by pretending to be a cute baby. Or to expose a hidden alien parasite, there was little difference these days.
 
Because they weren’t actually mommies.
 
They were something else besides the helpers, fixers, and kissers of boo-boos, the sweetness and kindness that made up a mom, they were a bastardization of the role. It was the way the Entity viewed mothers. Its sick, twisted way of misunderstanding their human 'baggage'.
 
He hesitated as he watched them, unsure what to do next, or how to actually begin the charade.
 
It didn’t exactly start as he had planned. Adam had expected the walls to come down as soon as he walked in looking like a baby Pikachu. He imagined overwhelmed cuteness receptors and blown up baby radars, but they barely seemed to care.
 
No, seriously.
 
The costume had long floppy ears, black tiger stripes on the sides, and a zigzaggy tail that protruded from his butt. Fighting the Entity was the only reason he’d ever be seen in something like this, not to mention willingly wearing the Sesame Street themed, Elmo-covered Pampers Babydry underneath. Well, he would need the diaper as this plan fell further into motion, as the laxative took hold.
 
Adam would have to rile up the casual crowd, their agreed upon plan was to get them all ‘glowy’. He needed to do that before the ticking time bomb went off in his belly.
 
He toddled across the room, trying to be careful not to crinkle, and got a closer look at the coffee table from behind the closest couch.
 
That’s when his eyes went wide.
 
The deranged puzzle was a colossal mess. Pieces from different scenes were forced together into an amalgamation of madness, where floral prints were crammed into candy bars, bits and pieces of a painted lighthouse could be seen among the debris of deserts and mountain landscapes.
 
Adam was pretty sure what sat on the coffee table was nothing like what was pictured on the multiple boxes carelessly stacked a few feet away from the action.
 
Still, the women casually pieced them together like their creation made any sense as they carried on like nothing was wrong.
 
Well, that's that. They weren't right in the head, and Adam knew he had to pull them free. This was now beyond just his toilet training, it gave him purpose, he had to steal their attention. Somehow, someway.
 
“Think like a baby, think like a baby,” Adam softly mouthed to himself. “Be one with the baby.”
 
Adam fell onto the wood floor and braced himself on all fours. Babies crawled, that’s how they got around. He wiggled his way within viewing distance, his tail behind him like a dorsal fin. His diaper crinkled as he shook his ass in the air, still no one cared. He did what he thought was a 'twerk', bringing attention to his puffy bottom, he even gave his Pamper a little smack through the footsie.
 
He expected a laugh, or a smile, he would’ve settled for anything, but he got nothing in return.
 
Adam added his thumb to his mouth and suckled on it like a pacifier. Man, he wished he had one of those right now. The lip smacking noise he made caused Charity to raise her eyes from the table for a second. But just as quickly, she went back to the nonsensical puzzle before adding her thoughts to the debate on the pros and cons of a ‘party bus’ vs. a limousine.
 
“It’s really all about the driver, whether or not they’re going to allow an open bar, or get all uppity about being underage.”
 
Marisa and Mrs. Hartmann nodded in agreement.
 
He'd have to go further.
 
He thought about that yoga class he took with his mom, and the ridiculous looking 'happy baby pose'. Adam leaned back onto his bottom, grabbed both of his footie covered feet and spread them apart as far as his legs and arms would allow. His lower half shook as he maintained form, dumbly grinning at the women while they paid him no mind. He needed their attention, he needed that sunlight, and he was going to pull it out of them whether they wanted to give it or not.
 
From the oak table across the room, Katie followed his every move. Already filming with her smartphone turned sideways for better resolution, for more of a widescreen perspective. He thought he saw her give him a thumbs up out of the corner of his eye, but he wasn't focused on the camera work. He had dirty work to do, with little time to get it done.
 
“Just look at him in his footies,” Mrs. Hartmann beamed, finally recognizing his hard work.
 
The hot mom put down her wine glass and snapped her hands together like she was summoning a Yorkie. Adam didn’t like that he was given the dog treatment, but he crawled over to her and ended up in her lap as an oversized toddler.
 
Great, he got what the attention that he wanted, now what could he do next? This was not working. This plan was just about the dumbest thing he’d done since getting into the red SUV just a pair of days ago.
 
Katie didn’t seem so super-smart anymore.
 
Adam jostled into a position to look over the shoulder of the hot mom, only to find the honor student documenting this disaster one digital picture at a time. He had half a mind to rage quit and just give up, it's far more embarrassing to flail in the wind than to just 'lose'. Until he reminded himself of the stakes.
 
“Why is he in your lap, mom?” Marisa asked when she finally pulled her attention away from the coffee table.
 
Yes. Yes. Finally, a reaction to his infantile behavior. Adam would welcome the attention, he needed them to play off one another, and let the competition begin between them. He wanted to be their prize, he would play into their jealousy, and tickle their emotions for once. He gave Marisa a wicked grin and curled up tighter in the arms of the hot mom.
 
“He’s just being a sweetie,” Mrs. Hartmann answered as she patted his head.
 
“I don’t know, it’s kind of weird,” commented Marisa as she scrunched her face.
 
His friend was right. It was too weird. He let Mrs. H fawn on him a little longer, taking it a step further by nuzzling up against her breast, and plopping his thumb back into his mouth. The hot mom pulled him away from her, cooed in his face, and his cheeks burned from the embarrassment. She spun him around and half-heartedly bounced him on her knees, which made his volatile belly jiggle. Unfortunately, he was still second fiddle to the blasted puzzle and nonchalant conversation, this time about hair and makeup.
 
Where was the obsessive Entity right now?
 
This was heading nowhere fast, Adam rolled off her lap. Mrs. Hartmann didn’t even put up a fight, not even stopping mid-sentence.
 
“I’ve found it best to have my nails done at a different location than my hair and makeup,” she explained to the girls. “It’s better to spread out the competency, focus on what they do best.”
 
“The same could be said about our dates,” Charity added. “One to pay for dinner, another to dance, maybe a third for a post dance get together.”
 
The three women laughed.
 
Adam scurried over to the table where Katie stood with her phone held sideways, he had to assume she was still taking video. Of what? Nothing had happened yet.
 
“Why isn’t this working?” Adam whispered.
 
She shrugged her shoulders and put aside the phone.
 
“I don’t know, maybe you’re not being cute enough. Try to act more like a baby, get into character and give them what they want.”
 
“What did you say?” Adam turned his head and took a step back.
 
‘Get into character and give them what they want’.
 
The evil Marisa from the ‘mind splinter’ nightmare had used that phrase as encouragement to crap himself on the dream stage. Almost down to the freaking word. The warning klaxons kicked off again, hot red strobe lights caused a layer of cold sweat to congeal beneath the fabric of his warm footie. Adam was alarmed, not panicked, but he felt a slight stoppage in his chest. 
 
It had to just be a coincidence, Katie was on his side, this was her plan and it was going to work.
 
Or was she on his side?
 
Adam spun around on the honor student, still unable to pull the accusation from his mouth.
 
She frowned at him.
 
“What’s wrong, Adam? You’re looking at me like I sprouted a pair of antennas from my forehead.”
 
Katie could be trusted, he had already confirmed her ‘eye status’, but — but this was her plan, he needed to mess to free himself from this diaper tyranny once and for all. That’s a terrible plan! Why didn’t he realize this before chugging down a bottle of laxative?
 
The honor student returned to her phone and gave him another one of her judgmental looks. This one said, ‘We’ve already been over this, diaper boy.’
 
“Adam, are you going to tell me what’s bothering you, or are you going to stare at me until I have to read your mind? Use your words.”
 
“Use your words, ba-by.”
 
It echoed in his mind, reverberated like an empty spinning hallway in his head.
 
She’d said that to him before — when she mocked him in the bathroom the previous morning, tapping his nose with a diaper that smelt so much like baby powder. It was just yesterday when she cornered him, she was the first one to tape him into a diaper.
 
How could she be on his side?
 
She was acting weird before the weird even started; diapering him before the appearance of all the red eyes, before the mind controlled body snatchers started popping up like gophers from the ground.
 
“Adam, I promise that we’re on the same team,” Katie reiterated as she patted his shoulder, her finger tips lightly touching the footie, it felt mostly assuring.
 
“I know, it’s just — I’m having a hard time figuring everything out,” Adam complained.
 
“There’s nothing to figure out, I saved you from It's control, what more do I need to do to prove my ‘allegiance’ to you? I swear that my eyes aren’t ‘glowy’, stop being paranoid and start acting more like a baby.”
 
Katie lowered her dark eyes before adding with a hushed tone, “Do I have to remind you that we’re running out of time?”
 
He tried to shake off his rapidly mounting paranoia to focus on the task at hand, unsuccessfully. Katie was right, something inside of him wanted to believe her every word.
 
Adam licked his lips, it still all tasted like bananas, milk, and laxative.
 
He asked, "Well, what more can I do?"
 
"You can try having them feed you," she answered.
 
The honor student pointed at a baby bottle full of milk sitting idly on the table.
 
"All you have to do is lay down in their lap and suck on a bottle until the medicine works its magic, even a baby can handle that."
 
"I'm not a baby," Adam argued, "I'm just acting like one."
 
"Not good enough, though.” Katie critiqued his performance like a seasoned drama vet. “Adam, you're not grabbing their attention, and I can't guarantee a second chance. You don't have the luxury of feeling embarrassed. 'Complete baby mode’, do you remember that?"
 
Katie grabbed the baby bottle from the table, and the milk sloshed around as she forcibly shoved into his hand.
 
Adam reluctantly nodded, and gripped the baby bottle slightly tighter.
 
She was right. He knew she was right. But this plan felt so wrong, so risky and desperate.
 
Was it smart to trust her?
 
At this point, he didn’t have much of a choice, that laxative would kick in at any moment. If he didn’t pull the Entities out of their shell before then, this video idea would be ‘dead on arrival’. He needed it to work, he needed to trust Katie.
 
Step two: Act More Like a Baby
 
Time to demand more of their attention, if cute wasn't going to cut it, petulant would. Adam stormed into the space between the women and took another look at the ugly puzzles. He raised a footie-covered foot into the air, and gave the coffee table a firm kick, sending the puzzle pieces absolutely everywhere. The girls screamed and stood from the couches. Mrs. Hartmann looked ready to kill him, and Adam wasn’t sure that the more aggressive approach wasn't the right way to go from the start.
 
He clenched his fists at his waist, scrunched his face, then whined with the whiniest of voices.
 
“But I want to play with my toys!”
 
Adam reverted to the way the Entity would expect him to behave. He was desperate and defiant, a preschooler in open rebellion, slamming the bottle of milk into his mouth. Suck, suck. All three mommies just stared at him like he was the crazy one.
 
They glared at the puzzle pieces that littered the floor, then back at him, then back to the puzzle on the floor. How was this even a competition? There was no way they were more interested in tiny cardboard cutouts, he was cute as a button, dammit!
 
“That’s it, he needs a red behind!” A mildly flustered Mrs. Hartmann prepped herself to give a spanking by clearing her lap and putting aside her wine glass. She had her hands wrapped around his sleeves before Adam could move away.
 
He cried out, “Oh —!”
 
The baby bottle fell to the floor as Adam wailed and went over her knee, he kicked his legs in the air as she applied her own style of retaliatory justice with an open hand.
 
He braced himself for the worst, but as the first spank fell onto his Pamper padded bottom, he became thankful for the extra layers of thick protection.
 
Thud! Thud! Thud!
 
Mrs. Hartmann gritted her teeth. "You naughty little thing!"
 
She quickly rained down a few more strikes, but it didn't hurt, bulky baby diapers had their good sides after all. He laid upon her lap until her arm tired, which wasn’t very long, because the hot mom quickly caught onto the futility of punishing him before pulling him off her lap. 
 
"Mom, chill out." Marisa groaned. "I'm sure he didn't mean to knock over the puzzles."
 
Charity gathered herself and twirled a strand of hair between her fingers.
 
"Adam does have a point, he's bored, and now I'm bored. Let's give him his toys, then we head out to the lake, and leave Mr. Attitude Problem with his babysitter. Katie, you're on kiddo duty."
 
No, it still wasn’t working. Adam was decidedly more panicked than before, if they escaped to the lake, it was over. No, he wouldn't let them.
 
Maybe Katie was right, maybe he needed to mess his diaper to get them to believe in his babyhood, maybe it was a last-ditch effort necessary to keep them engaged. Adam struggled with getting his hooks in them by himself.
 
Charity was already preparing to leave, dumping the few baby toys they had purchased from Webber's free from a plastic shopping bag. The baby blue elephant rattle shook to the floor, followed by a jangling orange tiger themed tambourine, there were a number of pacifiers that fell to the rug with soft landings.
 
Immediately, Adam grabbed the rattle, jerking back and forth with unprecedented intensity. Shakka-shakka. He wanted to be loud enough to wake the demons from their sleep. It felt ridiculous to play with a rattle like a baby, but he had a part to play. The tiger tambourine was in his other hand, he bounced it against his thigh, sounding out a jangling hippie beat. Jingle-jingle. Adam would use his baby wiles like a weapon, wield it with a rattle in one hand, a tambourine in another. The yellow pacifier he added between his lips did little to cover his smile as they finally turned his way. Complete baby mode initiated.
 
"You know, maybe we should stay here after all.” The blonde cheerleader watched him rattle and shake like a baby. “Even you have to admit that he's pretty freaking cute, Mars."
 
“Alright, Adam, we will pay attention to you.” Marisa reluctantly lifted him from the rug.
 
He hung there on her hip, his legs wrapped around her waist. Adam limply played with his toys as he suckled his paci. How the hell was she strong enough to carry him around so easily? This had to be Entity stuff. 
 
Marisa rocked him from her hip. It was awkward, unnatural, not at all what he expected. Their bodies were too similar in size. It just felt so wrong to him, he could only pretend so much, take this so far, and he was struggling to maintain dignity even if he planned on messing himself in front of a captivated audience.
 
He felt the first song from the medicine when wrestled his way back into the floor. A foreboding melody that quietly played from inside his belly. It made him stop in his tracks. Time to take things further.
 
His bottle laid lifeless on the floor, he picked it up and nursed as the women stared at him.
 
One by one, he watched them melt, a soft look of understanding smoothed their features; he made their eyes twinkle, the sides of their mouths turned upwards and outwards without them noticing. Adam smiled around the baby bottle and kept downing the milk. Maybe it would settle his stomach, maybe it would only give it more ammunition. The effect of the milk was less of a concern than the effect of his bottle feeding had on his audience.
 
Mrs. Hartmann gushed, “Just look how precious he is with that bottle!”
 
“Yeah, mom.” Marisa pulled herself away from his babyish spectacle.
 
“Marisa, you should appreciate a cute baby while you can,” Lindsey lectured her daughter as she sat herself taller on the sofa. “They will be up on their feet and out of diapers before you know it.”
 
“Except ours will never be out of diapers,” Charity said as stroked his hair before giving him a big wet kiss on the cheek. “He will be just like this forever and ever, won’t you baby? Just a little kiddo to feed, cuddle, and change until we get tired of him.”
 
“Nothing is forever. Not beauty, not babies.”
 
A wistful Mrs. Hartmann gave a toast to her own melancholy, raised the wine glass to her lips and downed the rest in one gulp, then looked around to make sure no one was watching as she filled another.
 
Track two from his stomach was a gurgling number, overly loud and extended for over six seconds, and Charity was standing close enough to hear the tune.
 
“Uh, I think he’s brewing something up for you, Marisa.” Charity laughed then wisely moved away.
 
Marisa quickly responded, “He’d better not.”
 
She eased back onto the couch, trying to distract herself with a magazine, but the frown on her face meant that her inner Entity wasn’t too enthusiastic about being a mommy anymore.
 
The ebb and flow of their moods was enough to give a baby whiplash. Their mercurial nature partly made sense, they were being manipulated by strings that they couldn’t see or feel, and they probably weren’t even aware of the manipulation at all. Or they were just being modern art.
 
“What? You didn’t think that he’d ever poop himself?" Charity addressed her BFF. "You’re the only one here that hasn’t changed him.”
 
“Yeah, but you guys only changed the wet ones, I don’t have a clue what I’d do with a yucky, smelly one. Just eww.”
 
Adam quietly chuckled as he finished his bottle. Revenge was a diaper best served dirty. Katie told him that the best part of revenge was the timing, there wasn’t a better time to get back at the hostess with the mostess, the one always in charge, the one who led a conspiratorial pact to embarrass him, and he could finally bring about the downfall of the Entity. A lot was riding on this diaper.
 
“Marisa, you’re going to have to get over your fear of changing him,” advised Mrs. Hartmann.
 
“I’m not afraid of changing him, who said I was afraid of changing him? I know how to handle my responsibilities, mom. I don’t need any more unsolicited how-tos or second guessing from the likes of you.”
 
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Mrs. Hartmann nonchalantly circled the wine in the glass.
 
“You had a live-in nanny to take care of me when I was a baby!”
 
Mrs. Hartmann failed to be moved by her daughter’s emotional outburst.
 
“We hired a nanny because when you were a baby I was busy making movies, travelling internationally for photo shoots, and paying the bills, but I still made time to change your dirty diapers. It's not an issue of it being gross, it's an issue of avoiding responsibility, not having the maturity to do what you need to as a mommy.”
 
“Mom! Just ugggh.” Marisa stormed off to the kitchen.
 
Adam needed her back. All of them needed to be in the living room for this to work. He began to panic, his internal timer told him to hurry, his pessimistic feelings said it was too late. The clock had already struck midnight days ago, and he was already halfway into a pumpkin. He quieted the doubt as best he could, he’d have to work on the panic next.
 
Charity delivered another peck to his cheek, but her hand trailed down his back to his diaper. She gave it a squeeze, checking its contents through the onesie. Adam just let her, real babies didn’t care if they were checked.
 
“Don’t worry, kiddo. I’m not intimidated by a poopy Pamper, especially from a cutie like you.”
 
His belly gurgled again, track three was a low, rumbling number with an overpowering bassline that straight up kicked him in the gut. Adam doubled over, there wasn't much more time left.
 
His only real care was for Marisa, that she was so far away in the kitchen, and he had to bring her back into the living room for this plan to work. How did babies get their mommies to do what they wanted? They cried. They bawled for their mommy to come back.
 
Adam reached for Marisa in the other room, both hands clasping at the empty air, as if she was just out of reach even though she was twenty yards away. He thought about adding tears, but that seemed like overkill. This wasn’t worth crying over. Yet.
 
“Ma-ma, Mari-sa!"
 
Mrs. Hartmann covered her face with her hand, a happy blushing smile snuck out from behind the wineglass.
 
Charity didn’t look too happy with his antics. The disappointed cheerleader flopped down onto the closest couch. If Adam were to have the cheerleader’s attention, he'd captivate her with jealousy. The same way she used the pizza boy against him. He remembered the sound of her endless laughter giggle by giggle.
 
"What do you need, Adam?" Marisa complained from the kitchen.
 
Mrs. Hartmann answered for him.
 
"He needs you, honey! Just look at him, hold him, tell him that you care about him. Is that too hard?"
 
“Shut up, mom!”
 
The teenage actress cupped her forehead with her hand, leaning over the counter, despondent.
 
The fortified wall that surrounded Marisa, the stonework that kept him out of her heart, was starting to crack and crumble. Adam knew her well enough to see it. At least he thought he did, there was so much that he didn't know about Marisa, as revealed by her 'corrupted' self in a tiny changing room at Webber's.
 
It mattered little. He had to keep pressing her 'mommy button' until she either responded, or else. He didn't have time to create a second plan.
 
"Ma-ma, Mari-sa!"
 
Adam sounded his call again, this time more desperate, more pleading. The intensity of the next stomach cramp gave his voice a wailing, vibrato sound. Oh, jeez. It felt like there was a monster in his middle, one that wanted to claw its way out, but Adam kept it together as best he could.
 
“Mom, I don’t know where to begin to make him happy.”
 
“You can start by giving him a hug,” replied Mrs. Hartmann.
 
Reluctantly, Marisa worked her way around the granite kitchen counter and into the living room. She opened up her arms to Adam, kind of like she did in the baby store, right before he got knocked out.
 
The entire room was focused on their moment. Katie with the camera, Mrs. Hartmann with a wine glass, and Charity squatted on the couch, her face twisted in a jealous scowl. Marisa slowly closed in on Adam, both ready to embrace one another in some sick play-acting masquerade of an actual mommy and baby.
 
It all moved so slow. No, it moved too slow because he felt his belly rumble, and that monster was about to take over. The bubbling pressure was now too strong to ignore, and it would soon be beyond his control. He somehow held it all inside as she wrapped her arms around him, lifted him in the air with her superhuman strength and lovingly squeezed him, a little too hard.
 
Adam gasped, “Marisa, you’re squeezing too tight!“
 
She didn't hear him, or she didn't care. She clung tighter and tighter, too busy doting and squashing his belly against her chest.
 
That’s when the debut album from his stomach decided to play the rest of its songs at once. All before he could even say ‘Oh, jeez’.
 
His butt made every sound it could, every wet, nasty noise as it all exited him and into his diaper. He sputtered and fluttered, his mind blanked as his eyes rolled to the back of his head. The sensation of uncontrollable release was a complicated mix of ecstasy and agony. Delight and defecation. Adam began twitching in her arms, most noticeably his legs tightened and wildly swung in the air, his toes curled, his twisting feet unable to reach the wood floor. Adam clung to Marisa with an unnatural grip, biceps and triceps seizing and pulling at his make believe mommy as the stomach cramps took over.
 
He grunted in Marisa’s horrified face, several embarrassing times.
 
The filling of his diaper went on forever, every time he thought he was done, it would send another hot volley. As promised, the thicker baby diaper made for ‘poo-poos’ cradled the mess as it ballooned behind him. Blow out or not, this was happening. Adam sacrificed the epicenter of control as soon as he downed that laxative, he'd have to appreciate the wild ride until his bottom said he was done.
 
This time, Marisa became the unsure statue, desperately wanting to recoil, but her hands just lifelessly clutched onto him despite her brain screaming for her to let go. The teenager was beyond disgusted, launched out of that stratosphere by a rapidly pooping rocket. The eighteen year old baby in her arms was way too big to hold, and he was wildly moaning and uncontrollably messing himself, which was way too much for her ego. Neither one she could handle.
 
Whatever Hallmark moment between them was over.
 
“You.little.stinker!” Marisa screamed.
 
"O.M.G."

The blonde cheerleader was right on cue with an insult, fully appreciating the humiliating defeat of her best friend and sometimes rival.
 
For good measure, he loudly moaned as his bottom let out a final, swampy death rattle.
 
Marisa finally regained control of her own bodily functions, summarily releasing him to the floor without a care for being delicate. Adam stumbled, he tried to stay on his footie covered feet, he teetered and tottered then landed on his messy bottom. It went 'splat'. Horrified, Adam felt his mess slam against his butt, covering his backside with the contents of his shame. He quickly rose to his feet, but the damage was already done.
 
“Phew! That’s quite a diaper he’s got there,” Mrs. Hartmann exclaimed, her perfect nose between pinched fingers.
 
“Do I need to check him?” Charity asked with a grin.
 
“No, I think we all know what he did in that diaper. Marisa, get the diaper bag from the table, we’d better get to work before some of it escapes down his legs and ruins the new onesie.”
 
“I’m not getting the diaper bag,” Marisa pouted.
 
Uh. What’s this? Adam looked deep into Marisa, paying close attention to her angry green eyes, and she wasn’t freaking Entity-rattled at all. This plan had already crashed and burned! He looked over at Katie still filming this disaster when she should be getting her kicking leg ready for plan B.
 
Adam went to take a sloshing step and felt everything wrong with a terribly dirty diaper. The Pamper stuck to him like his mess was a thin adhesive, even as the bottom hung low between his legs. He had a new appreciation for its thickness and absorbency now, as he straddled the empty air with no idea on what to do next.
 
Neither did Marisa.
 
"I'm not doing it! It's freaking gross!"
 
Mrs. Hartmann cajoled, "Ah! I knew you wouldn't be able to handle him."
 
Charity grabbed her BFF by the forearm, maybe to console her friend, or give surprisingly deep Taoist advice; but Marisa jerked her arm free, and was about to storm back into the kitchen.
 
This wasn't how this was supposed to happen, Adam began to panic. His breathing became fast and shallow, the air rushing in and out of his mouth, he didn't use his nose because he didn’t want to smell himself. Adam looked again to Katie for assistance, but it wasn't coming. The room felt hot, swarmier than his newly destroyed diaper.
 
The cheerleader placated her friend. "I'm here to help, Mars."
 
"Oh, shut the fuck up, Charity,” Marisa exploded.
 
Now they were all arguing between themselves, their insults bounced back and forth in profanity filled tennis match. Mrs. Hartmann was in Marisa's face, but her daughter refused to back down, smacking away a finger her mom jammed into her chest.
 
“Marisa, apologize to Charity, she’s a good friend.”
 
“I’m not doing anything you two tell me anymore, I’m sick of both of you guys and your baby crap. If you like him so much, then you should change him!”
 
“That’s not what we agreed to at the store,” Charity argued.
 
The cheerleader tried to fit herself between the feuding mom and daughter pair. The sudden movement and fight instantly reminded him of the disastrous end of their truth or dare game. No one could win in truth or dare, they just played until they felt that they hurt each other enough to quit, but there was no quit, no end, no victory; just like this stupid, stinking plan.
 
Katie just stood filming. Something wasn’t right, he couldn’t put his finger on what was bothering him, he found himself internally searching even if it was an odd time for deep-thinking, poopy pants and all.
 
However, an empty mind came with his empty belly, a clear head full of thoughts simultaneous with the cleansing release into a full diaper. An emptying of anxiety from an outright explosion. A quiet, numbing reaction to a chaotic reality. This time, Adam became a nexus of calmness surrounded by calamity.
 
With a vacated mind and open eyes, Adam looked at what remained of the puzzle on the floor, and he was surprised to see some puzzle pieces actually put together correctly. A small image of a bee, about the size of 8-10 pieces, sat innocently on the rug. Completely separate from all the madness around it, just a yellow bee in a blue flower, without a care in the world. Buzz-buzz.
 
His active imagination powered through the melee in front of him, and brought him to the previous evening. He remembered the dark room, the orange glow of the fireplace. His subconscious time-travelled to the night before, when shouted words echoed around the empty room. A tornado of voices spun around him, gathering all thoughts and rearranging them like that broken puzzle.
 
The weird weekend rolled through his mind, not in the form of an existential sepia tone daydream, this time his memory became 4k HD with every pixel in brilliant color. Adam speedily played through the entire 72 hours previous, running it backwards and forwards like a conspiracy theorist in control of an ancient VHS tape, looking for the most benign devil in the tiniest of details, until a singular clear picture could be formed.
 
Just like that bee.
 
All the pieces had to eventually come together.
 
“Use your words bay-bee.”
 
Bay-bee.
 
Bee-ware.
 
Beware the dollhouse, Adam.
 
That's what he saw in the car on the way to the lake house, so early in the adventure yet it still didn't resonate with him. He even doubted he saw it at the time, the billboard magically switched into an ad for Bonzo’s Costume Shop. It was just too weird, but weird became mighty subjective as the weekend only got worse for him.
 
His mind went back there. Back into the SUV sitting next to Charity on Friday afternoon.
 
How strange?
 
He could have sworn that sign had his name on it, he even checked twice like Santa. There had to be an explanation, or was this like deja vu or something, where there wasn’t any explanation. He needed to dwell on it, figure it out, and —
 
Katie closed her book in a huff, and it pulled him away from the mystery. She said something to Charity and then asked for Lindsey to turn down the music. Adam felt like he could hear the air after spending over an hour listening to pounding rhythm after pounding rhythm.
 
He could tell that Katie was upset just from the sound of her voice.
 
It was a mystery. Adam knew he should have dwelled on it longer, but that car was just so overwhelming for him, the car seat, the loud music, the crotch rubbing, the everything. It was Katie slamming her book shut that brought it completely out of his thoughts, almost as if she somehow knew about the message. Or that was all plain garbage because he was looking for puzzle pieces that fit together. Which didn't make her one of the bad guys.
 
Funny how he was thinking about that as he shifted his weight eliciting a comforting crinkle from his diaper.
 
Still, the honor student was firmly in his sights, and the subject of an internal investigation, with her humanity solely in question.
 
"Use your words bay-bee."
 
What did he know about the Entity? Not much until he heard from the toddler girl in the neon dream, but he learned even more from Diane.
 
“Alright, here’s what you need to know. Out beyond the door we are one, formless and free, more of an idea than a thing. In here we are many, just trying to coexist as best we can. We’ve been in your world for awhile, and we have the tendency to manipulate ones around us in special ways. Unbeknownst to your kind, of course.”

He recalled Marisa being a bitch and pressing an attack on Katie during their stupid truth or dare ‘game’.

“Is there another Katie playing truth or dare?” The actress pretended to look around the room wide-eyed and confused. “There isn’t a hidden side of you I should worry about, right?”
 
Katie spiraled from uncomfortable to downright nervous. Trepidation wasn’t a good word afterall, panic better described the way she shuffled on her couch cushion. The spotlight wasn’t her comfort zone, a sick part of him loved to see Katie squirm. Adam should have felt bad, but she deserved to be on the other end of intimidation for once.

“You’re always so full of yourself, Katie,” Marisa snapped. “Little Miss Perfect with perfect grades, even if they come at the expense of your precious integrity. I don’t know how, but I caught her making a teacher change her grades, she isn’t as high and mighty as she’d like everyone to think.” 
 
The room was dark now, the present completely disappearing around him. The sleeping fireplace became alive with an unearthly orange glow. He was now standing between the other three girls, they were all arguing, and he was demanding to know the truth.
 
Katie had just said something about the weekend being 'all about Adam', since he was Adam he deserved to know everything, right? Katie thought he deserved something else, something that sounded like heaven that turned into hell.
 
“Well, maybe it’s time that you treat Adam the way he deserves.” Katie shot a quick glance at the honey haired girl. “Treat him, Marisa.”
 
The actress took a step back, then turned towards Adam. The fire reflected in her eyes, Adam just watched and waited for what would come next.
 
But it wasn't the fire reflecting in her eyes, it was something else red and glowing, like she just received an order from a certain Entity.
 
Charity gave the pair of them a mischievous look, then a killer smile.
 
In the memory, Adam could see that her eyes were glowing, too. Of course, he couldn't see it when it happened the night before, but it came to him as clear as the quiet water on the lake. The room began to spin, twisting, turning and pulling his heart free from his stomach.
 
“ Marisa, I dare you to take Adam upstairs and play a lovely game of seven minutes in heaven while I get a little girl time with my teammate here.”
 
“What is seven minutes in heaven?" Adam looked to Marisa for answers.
 
They locked eyes in the dark. She grinned.
 
"Follow me and find out."
 
That wasn't the only time he'd seen someone react to her words; even if it seemed off the cuff, a remark not worth the notice, there needed to be attention to detail in everything. He found it harder and harder to remain calm, he put his thumb in his mouth, the same hand that clutched the yellow pacifier that matched his Pikachu onesie.
 
His messy diaper reminded him of when he stood next to Mrs. Hartmann the first time she gave him that awkward hug, the one where the ‘thought counted’. A second time where he saw a quick reaction in agreement to words from the honor student. They were discussing his apparent diaper shortage.
 
“That’s all we have,” Katie muttered as she shrugged her shoulders, “unless you guys are planning to go shopping again.”
 
Mrs. Hartmann straightened up and lifted her chin in a regal way, not too much unlike Queen Charity.
 
“That’s it! Girls get ready, we are going to need to make a shopping trip to get proper supplies. We're heading into town in fifteen minutes."
 
A question quickly formed in his mind: was Katie the one that came up with the idea to take him shopping?
 
No. Freaking. Way.
 
The entire weekend shot in front of him, things he didn't notice or see, think about, or understand. The Entity had literally given him a different pair of eyes, now he could see so clearly when he was blind the entire time. A countering thought just stuck around; how she helped him, brainstormed, how she was almost taken by the Entity herself. She'd even said the exact same words that Marisa had said in the upstairs bathroom.

"Stay cute. Stay small. Stay mine."
 
"Adam, you're so much better than normal. You're not like anyone else I've spent time with, that's why I feel so guilty. You're sweet and kind, loving and loyal, they don't make enough people like you anymore. You're super special, and you make me want to shelter you from all of this place.”
 
Katie continued to rock him back and forth on her lap. Adam began to welcome her tight grip, her soothing voice, and her soft embrace.
 
“I'm strong and I can protect you, I'm a black belt. I know that you don't understand how good I can be for you, but I'm here for you. I see you as you, Adam. You just need to stay cute. Stay small. Stay mine."
 
"Get the FUCK off of me!"
 
Katie furiously rubbed her face with her hands — Oh, Jeez! This was just like with Marisa in the upstairs bathroom, or with her mom outside the house, now the Entity was coming for Katie.
  
"What's going with me? I feel so weird." Katie seemed to shake away the Entity without much of a fight.
 
Adam guessed, “This isn't the first time you felt this way, is it?" 
 
"No, it's not. How did you know?"
 
"As I said before, Try me."
 
It was hard to swallow, just like her response to his story, but she still believed him when he told her everything. Katie became a lone refuge when the whole house turned against him. Piece by piece, an altogether different picture started forming about his friend, his confidant. He wanted to hate himself for not noticing before, how easily she could manipulate him into believing she was on his side. By themselves, the lonely jagged pieces didn’t make any sense; but in hindsight, neither were the things she said, or her answers to pertinent questions. That's why he needed the clarity of 4k to understand the entire movie. The benign devil, the evil details.
 
Before the truth or dare game, the pizza delivery, before the weekend went all haywire, Adam had three conversations with the three girls.
 
During their talk, Katie blamed ‘not feeling like herself’ for forcing him into a diaper in the upstairs bathroom. The more he thought about it, the more that whole conversation felt out of sorts. Like she knew about the 'body snatching' in the first place.
 
Nervousness, or trepidation, that's a good word.
 
Katie appeared extremely trepidatious. The way she looked made Adam want to ask her what was wrong; at the same time, he didn’t exactly want to pry. She was a tough cookie, and he didn't dare trigger another visit from Miss Katie.
 
"Adam, I just want to say I'm sorry for cornering you upstairs. I — I wasn’t feeling like myself, and I don’t — don’t know what happened." Katie struggled to force out the words, so Adam helped her.
 
"I know. It was just a prank that went too far. I'm sorry about calling you a 'stupid bitch', I guess a morning filled with G2W checklists would do that to you."
 
The icy honor student seemed to melt a little, but she still looked so nervous and uncharacteristically unsure.
 
Still, that memory meant nothing, just him being paranoid. Or trepidatious. One strike wasn’t bad, but there was more than that, a number that was impossible to see or count, the many times he'd been betrayed by teenagers, or aliens, or alien infested teenagers. He realized that Marisa was right. There were two sides of the honor student; and he’d met both of them, Katie and Miss Katie. One was a sham personality, a face, a counterfeit mask, the other was I/what exactly?
 
Still, his memories kept pouring in, reliving the not so distant past.
 
He spun around and found himself in a memory from being in the pink room with Katie. It was still early in the morning, and the room still smelled like his dirty diaper. It didn't matter how many windows that she opened, the stench was going to 'linger'. They were trying to figure out the Entity, trying to make sense of all the madness.
 
Adam scratched his head, this was far too much for him to handle.
 
“There’s got to be something more to this, it can’t just be about me acting like a baby.”
 
“You acting like a baby probably doesn’t help,” Katie added as she packed up the diaper bag and placed it on the edge of the bed. “What else could it possibly be?”
 
Adam continued, “This theory leaves out the ‘whole controlling people’ thing, which we don’t even know how it’s done.”
 
“Do you have proof of this controlling thing?”
 
“No, but it brings up other questions.”
 
“Like what?” Katie adjusted her shirt before easing onto the bed.
 
"How come you can control it and the other girls can't?"
 
"I dunno, maybe because I meditate," Katie admitted.
 
That was such a bullshit answer. Adam felt a crescendo of feeling, bursting sickness in his chest, as his stomach drooped just like his diaper. He would have hyper-ventilated but he was beyond panic, terror had a way to constrict the chest like the nylon strap of a changing table. Also, the heavy breathing would involve taking in more of the smell of his messy diaper. Adam closed his eyes and wished to be far away.
 
Suddenly, he was in front of a mirror in a drug store diaper in the upstairs bathroom. It was a rerun, he'd seen this one before. He tinkled into the diaper while staring into the mirror, the blue eyes synonymous with the Entity glowing in the mirror.
 
His make believe consciousness floated through the closed bathroom door and onto the upstairs landing. Katie pressed herself against the wall staring at the phone in her hands, just over her shoulder he could see the picture she just took of him, the 'insurance policy', and in that picture he had glowing blue eyes.
 
Adam shuddered from her wicked smile.
 
Alright, that was make believe, it wasn't a real memory. He didn't get to float through doors and walls and spy on people. Still, the thought stuck with him, what he carried free from his imagination was a singular understanding, he was sure to have glowing blue eyes in the picture. And how had she not looked at it after taking it?
 
An emerging wall of sound hammered against his head. A white noise, like a lonely droning radio, a TV screen full of static, annoying feedback from a microphone in the wrong hands. It was a gathering of dull thrumming notes, rapidly ascending in volume and intensity. Just why?
 
The buzzing noise surrounded his thoughts like a dark cloud, a buzzing just like right after he escaped from Marisa, he stumbled by the guest room door with barely any strength left.
 
Adam re-lived that moment.
 
He stormed through her bedroom and onto the landing, the living room sat empty, the fire still burned in the fireplace. Nothing out here indicated that anything went horribly wrong. Adam ran his hands through his hair. Why did everything have to be so confusing?
 
Neither Charity or Katie were downstairs, the only place they could be was inside the guest room.
 
He crawled past the door to the guest room which was now closed. Adam could hear a buzzing sound like an electric beehive sat a few feet away. He also heard hushed voices. It sounded like someone was inside, if he could stand and knock he could cry for help. However, even he knew that was impossible. There was still that strange buzzing sound; it was odd, different, but less important than getting away.
 
There was something wrong with that noise from the first time he heard it, the first time he remembered 'feeling' the Entity, but Katie didn't care about that at all when they discussed it the following morning.
 
Adam asked, “Could it be from that strange noise I heard in the guest room?”
 
Katie shot him a glare.
 
“No. I doubt that had anything to do with anything. Let’s get back on track ..."
 
What was on track? That was something important to consider, but Katie already knew the source of that buzzing noise; Adam now understood that. If she was on his side, why would Katie hold information back from him? He quickly told her everything that she wanted to know.
 
He spoke about the sickly feeling when the Entity took control, how Marisa went crazy until she saw herself in the mirror, and he told her everything she wanted to hear about his crazy neon dream with that strange little girl. Then it all came together, the last puzzle piece.
 
Adam asked, “Fine, I listened to you, now what do you want from me?”
 
“I need you to tell me where she is hiding,” Diane pleaded with surprising intensity and weakness. “I know she’s been sending you messages, even showing up in person.”
 
“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about,” Adam insisted.
 
“Our baby! Our sweet little girl, the one who is in the Cube. Some of us think that she’s been taken by your scientists, but I know she is out there all alone. If you tell me where to find her, I might have it in my heart to go easy on you.”
 
Even Katie wanted to learn the truth, but during that crazy brainstorming session, she wasn't looking to help him, she was looking for something else. Someone else. The girl from his dream. The one that looked like Princess Tinkles.
 
"You’re not telling me everything,” Katie said, rushing from one word to the next, trying to solve this problem as swiftly as possible. “I need to know more about the girl from your dream. Did she tell you her name, or where she was from, or how to find her?”
 
“Is there a way you can contact that girl? Try to bring her here so I can talk with her, maybe we can figure out more if she speaks to the both of us.”
 
Adam exhaled. “She didn’t exactly leave me a number.”
 
But her eyes? He'd been so stupid to forget what Diane told him, that they stop glowing 'after a few months', and that they aren't scared of their reflection after awhile, either. The mirror moment they shared in the pink room just minutes ago meant nothing. Which meant that Katie was something else before the weekend even began.
 
Diane’s disembodied voice echoed through again. Also, strange statements from corrupted Marisa and Charity.
 
“Oh, sweetie, you’ve been food all weekend. I’ve been nibbling on you since you toddled through those doors.”
 
“Katie won’t protect you, Adam,” Marisa assured him. “You shouldn’t have trusted her, but we will get to your mom. She’d love to have you back in diapers, almost as much as we do. Just think of your nursery filled with Pokémon plushies, toys, and blankies.”
 
"Even when you know it's wrong, that you know that it hurts, you're willing to sacrifice your well being for someone who doesn't have any of your best interests in mind; especially if it's from a girl as pretty as Marisa, as easy as Charity, or whatever Katie is, that one is an actual tough nut to crack, but she'll crack, they always do.”
 
“Alright, you’ve been played with, and not just by me."
 
Then why all the freaking trouble? Why the false face, the fakery, telling him about the conspiratorial pact? So it would be a distraction from the real main event, Charity and Marisa never were the impetus of any action against him. It was all her doing, most likely her plan, to pick out the two meanest girls that could socially engineer him into becoming 'food'. Katie masterfully pretended to be on his side, a self-serving buffer between him and the bullies, but Adam now knew better.
 
She even made him poop his diaper!
 
But, no, she actually didn't. He did it to himself, he downed the laxative in a single gulp, and he put on a show for Katie. And the Entity inside caught it all on camera. She was probably feasting on him at that very moment. Of the three teenage girls, Katie ended up being the master manipulator.
 
Diane explained it best with her own words.
 
“Adam, there’s no fun making you do anything. You’re playthings, not puppets. When you regress like a baby on your own, without our direct intervention, it just makes it so much sweeter. You have no idea what it does to us, the difference between you acting on your own and us making you do it.”
 
Diane hungrily kicked her lips and made a lewd moaning noise.
 
“Humans are wind-up toys, down to the last one. We may nip and tuck, pull a string, alter your behavior, but only a little bit. It’s all about when the toy begins to walk on its own, and we watch the sparks fly through the efforts of our creation.”
 
All of the white noise came to a deafening peak, an apex overpowering the arguing living room, louder than his ever present, uneasy heart, and applying all of its pressure to the sides of his head. Culminating until it became absolute silence. He thought about her infectious smile from just moments ago.
 
“I just like seeing a plan come together, I know I’m weird.”
 
It all made too much sense.
 
Suddenly, Adam became frightfully cold. Not the pin-prick cold from the Entity, a different kind of cold. The kind of cold that freezes you in terror. The kind of cold that only exists in nightmares you had when you were too little to know the difference between awake and asleep. The kind of cold that you feel as your closet door slowly slides open, and the worst thing from your active imagination creeps into your room. You’re so cold that you’re frozen, unable to move, mouth unable to scream.
 
Adam remained focused on Katie, his mouth trembled as he said the words.
 
“It’s you." His lips twitched as he fought not to cry. "It’s been you the entire time, you’re one of them.”
 
The Asian girl remained separate from the scene. An out of touch watcher, observer from another room, another space. The phone she used to film him covered her eyes like a tiny black bar. Just like in censorship, or the way the media hides a witnesses’ true identity, the obscurity always covers what you wanted to see in the first place. However, he knew her eyes would be regular, very much unlike Katie herself.
 
She greedily licked her lips before bringing her free hand up into the air. Adam was able to make out an evil expression from what he could see of her lower face, her chiseled jaw set, her cruel lips curling, she was Miss Katie after all. Next, she snapped her fingers, and the three arguing women suddenly snapped his way, faces keen and malevolent, their bright eyes glowing a sickening red.
 
He didn’t need a mirror to see that anymore.

[Pierry Louys]

Great chapter

[D503]

Katie! Wow, very nice twist. You sure broke through your writer's block.

Oh man, now she's got some incredible blackmail material. Who knows what happens - they don't seem happy!

[Mugi]

Oh man this is crazy, what a twist.
Now he has no one to support him? How will it all end, maybe they will let him sit in the messy pampers for a longer time ?

[D503]

Can't wait for the next chapter!

[direking]

Sorry, I was trying to avoid making this post. I'm still working on the final two chapters and epilogue, it's just slower going than I anticipated. I didn't want to bump my story without adding to it, but looks like I did that anyways. I don't want to appear as rude, or ignoring my story, because I'm not.

I hope it's finished soon, and we'll have the conclusion to Without Merit.

Thanks!

[direking]

Hey guys, it's been awhile. Sorry about that. I was planning on releasing the rest of the story all in one piece; but since the ending is giving me problems, I decided to buy a little more time, and separate chapters differently, which leads to today. Thanks for your patience. You guys make it fun to write, and I appreciate it.

As always, thanks for reading.

29

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s a law of physics.
 
All at once, the energy generated by his attention-grabbing efforts, his 'complete baby mode', turned against him. Equally countered by the enthralled women now in ‘complete mommy mode’, as evidenced by the shining eyes, flushed cheeks, and freaking darling smiles.
 
They aww’ed and coo’ed, gushed and giggled, taking delight in the way he squirmed as their voices rose a collective octave.
 
Mrs. Hartmann was the first, and loudest.
 
“Now, there’s our little bundle of joy!”
 
“Yeah, a bundle full of poop,” Charity joked.
 
“He’s still super cute,” Marisa clarified, “even if he is stinky.”
 
They were transformed, alright. Turned into something between mommy and monster, and they were on him in an instant, invading his personal space and preparing to pounce.
 
However, Marisa's quick change of perspective shouldn't have come as a surprise. Moments before, she wanted nothing to do with him, but now she thought he was ‘super cute’. The image of Adam in a footie with pooped pants became somewhat of a Rorschach's test, where her addled mind registered 'cute baby' rather than 'ewww disgusting'.
 
The Entity had that effect. Adam knew it was there, but he doubted that a casual observer could work past the baby talk, see behind their false faces, or recognize the malice in the way they held their hands. Their fingers were fully outstretched, whether they were ready to coddle him or throttle him, it was anyone's best guess.
 
"I just love the way he looks in his baby clothes, don't you?" Mrs Hartmann said to the two girls. "You're going to appreciate those little snappies when you change him, Marisa."
 
"I can't wait," Marisa happily replied.
 
Well, what else should he have expected? He pranced, primped and preened in his Pamper, riling them up. However, this wasn’t all on him. Katie added fuel to this fire, circling the scene, pushing and pulling their mood swings as the moon controls the tides. Her betrayal was still fresh on his mind as he did that statue thing again; his feet firmly rooted into the floor, unable to move away. Even if could, where would he go?
 
Marisa instructed him. “Adam, we need you to stay still while we clean you up."
 
"You don't need to- "
 
Adam couldn't finish, because there was nothing to say anymore. No way to properly convey his thoughts, or defend his actions. He messed a diaper in front of them.
 
So he stood still as he was told, and not just because he wanted to play the part of a good baby. There was something primal in the way he felt after pooping. A vulnerable sentiment carried over from the early days of cavemen. One that made him just want to hide away, to curl up into a ball and disappear into the nether, and become void and formless like the Entity before coming through the door.  
 
“You’re just the most precious little pooper we know,” Mrs. Hartmann interrupted his inner nihilistic fantasy with more crazy baby talk. "He's such a little shnoopkins, with a poopsie-woopsie, and I just can't get enough of those bouncy baby bumpies.”
 
Great, the MILF was making up words now.
 
Unfortunately, Charity wasn't faring much better. The blonde cheerleader was heavily panting and pulling at her shirt, especially the areas around her breasts. Somehow, she was terribly turned on by the spectacle of him in a messed diaper.
 
The new star of the show, Marisa, just beamed like a lighthouse in the dark, practically emitting in measurable wattage. She had that ‘spotlight look’ about her, like it triggered an innate sense of being alive. Her very own form of artificial sunlight, radiating in the warm afternoon rays that filtered through the large windows. She shimmered as she slid so uncomfortably close to him, so close he could almost taste her strawberry shampoo. So close that she could smell him, but he doubted that his essence was just as fruity.
 
She leaned and lowered herself until she was his height, hands on her knees, a wicked smile stretched across her face. A few strands of her hair fell free over her green eyes, she took a curly lock and slid it behind her ear.
 
Every tension-ratcheting second of intimate silence made it unbearable to be in front of her. Adam felt so ashamed of what he had done. He wished he was an extinct caveman, hidden under hundreds of sedimentary layers of stone, down with the dead dinosaur bones.
 
Marisa finally broke the ice. “It looks like we’ve caught ourselves a poopy Pikachu.”
 
The Entity would destroy his love of Pokémon as it destroyed him. His hobby, and his personality built upon it, was now collateral damage.
 
“This little guy can’t go play with his Pokémon friends if he’s got a messy bottom,” Marisa cooed.
 
“Can he?” Then she repeated with a darker tone, “Can he?”
 
Adam found himself nodding in agreement.
 
A natural defense. He had fully entered toddler territory, where the fear becomes larger than the mistake, and the complying body just wishes for it to end. His inner Entity was nowhere to be found. Adam had expected old ‘blue eyes’ to take over his body at any moment. However, the icy feeling never came, it was like it finally relinquished control over him.
 
“He's our little stinker!" Mrs. Hartmann continued to gush like a fountain. "And that's a fully loaded diaper, which means we've got work to do."
 
Charity picked up the blue baby elephant rattle and the tiger-striped tambourine, and re-evaluated her role in this charade.
 
“I’ll distract him with his wittle toys, while Mars does the dirty work.”
 
They each positioned themselves in preparation for whatever came next.
 
Mrs. Hartmann shifted herself to his left, and Charity slowly moved around behind him, while Marisa remained right smack in the middle. That slow ratcheting tension was reaching its peak, it became excruciating to turn the wrench any longer, because it was all about to burst.
 
It was coming, that final fight. That bubbling resolve proved to be stronger than the desire to be a complying toddler. It woke him from a standing sleep. Adam replaced the thumb in his mouth with the yellow pacifier, he wanted both hands available to fend them off, and he doubted any last second sassy quip was going to change anything.

Every tiny sound was painstakingly loud, including his own heart, beating as fast as a trapped rabbit.
 
“You know." Marisa drummed a finger against her chin. "I think I know just what you need.”
 
He needed to get out of there, but Katie was his only plan B, and she was behind this entire nightmare. Now that he messed himself into a corner, he had nowhere else to turn. The perfect execution of a perfect trap. Adam began to softly cry. It wasn’t fair.
 
“Oh, don’t get so upset,” Marisa mocked him with a fresh dose of exaggerated pouty lips. “Let’s get you into a nice, fresh Pamper, and you’ll be back to ‘playing with your toys’.”
 
Pure animal instinct took over — Fight or flight. Adam feigned a step to his right, then bolted left, but it wasn’t nearly enough. They had him.
 
In seconds, Charity somehow pinned his arms behind his back, and Mrs. Hartmann lifted him by his ankles before his feet could hit the floor. At first, he was able to kick free, but that was a temporary condition. He bounced around like a drunk bunny, sodden diaper sagged and bobbed as he fought against the empowered grip of the blonde cheerleader behind him.
 
“Quit squirming, kiddo.” Charity grunted into his ear. “You need to be changed and you know it.”
 
Adam put up a good fight, he twisted in their grip, his feet peddled the empty air in a final, futile temper tantrum. Mrs. Hartmann regained her firm grip on his ankles, this time with hands too strong to break. That’s when his legs became a pair of pistons, pressing against the older woman, which was just as useless as the kicking.
 
He cussed through his pacifier, arched his back, and put all he had into this last fit.
 
Then all at once, the fight left him.
 
It took everything he had to breathe, he was forced to soak it all in as the tears began to stream down his scarlet cheeks. Despite all of his fury, he was in their hands. Adam had a better chance to make a stand against a moving vehicle, or an oncoming tide. It was no use, he was going to end up hurting himself, working himself into a frenzy wasn't going to slow or stop this diaper change. A diaper change he needed.
 
“Looks like he tuckered himself out, they always do,” Mrs. Hartman observed gleefully as she began to playfully swing him from side to side as Charity followed suit.
 
The cheerleader added, “Maybe after he’s changed he can take a little nap, a crap then a nap.”
 
“Yeah, he’s literally pooped out,” Marisa chuckled.
 
They all laughed at his attempt to fight back, thinking it was the world's biggest baby joke. And Adam hated being a joke.
 
Still, it was useless to resist, to stand up anymore. A calmness came with yet another re-understanding: the Entity was far more clever, smarter and stronger; it was going to win the entire time, and he had to respect that, especially now that he was suspended in the air like London Bridge.
 
This weekend wasn't worth trying to figure out. The teenage girls, unrequited love, psycho aliens, red eyes and blue eyes, weird dreams, overly aggressive retailers, last second massive betrayals. Nothing he learned meant anything, it was only about survival.
 
He should've taken the deal offered by Diane. The colorless world wasn't an injustice, it was an act of mercy. Now, they all saw him as a baby. He would never be free from this nightmare, nothing would push away the bad dream. 'Acceptance' revealed itself again in plain old Times New Roman.
 
The gang remained in place for a bit, gently swinging Adam to and fro, while he contemplated his meager existence.
 
Katie joined them from the kitchen, and he could tell that she enjoyed the show. This was what she really wanted to catch on camera. Probably to get an extra chance to savor his delicious helplessness at a later time, like his pain made for good leftovers.
 
However, she didn’t just pop in empty handed. She brought along a fully packed butterfly diaper bag, bulging with supplies, with a crisp white line of fresh Pampers poking free from a side pouch. Katie smoothly slid the strap off and into Marisa’s hands where it belonged while filming the entire thing.
 
Marisa adjusted the bag over her shoulder until it looked natural on her; she then booped his nose.
 
"Now let's get you out of that stinky diaper."
 
The pink changing mat was pulled free from the butterfly diaper bag, unfolded and upon the floor next to the nice rug. Adam could only watch as he was lowered onto the changing mat, his back firmly against the padding, his mushy bottom pressed firmly against his skin. A revolting feeling only made worse by the fact that he did it to himself.
 
It didn’t appear that they’d go easy on him even in unconditional surrender.
 
Charity yanked his arms over his head, then spread them out as she rested her knees over his elbows. It wasn’t cruel or painful, but he wasn't moving anywhere with his arms pinned that way. Adam violently shook his head from side to side, but he was trapped between the cheerleader’s wonderous thighs, catching an eyeful of her dress code violating short shorts.
 
Mrs. Hartmann removed herself for Marisa to get into prime changing position and gave her daughter an understanding 'nod'. The honey-haired girl pried his knees apart, and dropped down between his open legs. She softly placed the diaper bag next to her, then ran her fingers up and down his footie covered thighs. A gentle tickling, scratching sensation. Then she jestly clawed at his baby belly elicited a babyish sound from mouth, almost like a laugh. Almost. 
 
Adam didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he giggled, releasing all of the ratcheting pressure built up in his chest.
 
Marisa began to slowly undress him. Starting with gradually and delicately pulling down the zipper over his chest, inch by precious inch, until it was all the way down to his waist. Just above where the Pamper poked free from the costume, the only thing between her and his used diaper was a long line of snaps along his inner thighs.
 
She smiled as she lifted his shirt, revealing his stomach, spreading her palms across his chest, slowly sliding his shirt up more and more until she revealed his belly button.
 
A cheeky grin returned.
 
Marisa quickly brought her mouth to his belly before blowing an unbelievably loud raspberry against his bare tummy.
 
Adam squirmed, then giggled again.
 
She raised her head with an even bigger smile on her face. How could she be so happy to be close to his dirty diaper? He couldn't believe how much the Entity changed her most basic instincts. However, there was little time to dwell on it because she was back to blowing on his stomach again.
 
During his darkest hour, Adam would have liked to think he didn't giggle like a real baby, but that's not what happened. Her soft fluttering lips on his ticklish skin, and his infantile response, had a disarming effect for the entire group.
 
“I just love their sweet little laughs,” Mrs. Hartmann commented.
 
He could barely make out Mrs. Hartmann beyond Marisa, but he could feel with a sixth sense that she was enjoying herself. 
 
Charity didn't say anything, but she was hardly quiet. Her heavy breathing was hard to ignore now, especially as she slowly adjusted her crotch over his face, dry humping the air, and occasionally lowering herself onto his nose on the upswing or backswing of her pelvis.
 
The others didn’t matter, it was all about Marisa between his legs. She was fun and playful, tickling and jostling his belly from side to side from a grip on his skinny hips. Marisa’s calming presence filled the room with metaphorical sunlight.
 
His world revolved around her now.
 
Just basking in her orbit melted the shame from the accident, pulled apart all of the misconstrued wires that made up his inner feelings, as she masterfully took all of his unease into her soft hands, her kind heart, and gave him the empty feeling of a baby lost in the embrace of a caring mommy. But mommy had work to do when it came to his dirty tushie.
 
"It’s best to have all of your supplies ready before you open his diaper," Mrs. Hartmann coached her daughter. "He's already proven to be a squirmy little guy, be ready for anything before you undo those tapes."
 
"Thanks for the help, mom."
 
Oh, Jeez. Marisa sounded so sincere, but it wasn't acting. Adam made the mistake of ignoring the aspect of the Entity that made it so potent to the human condition: the totality of agreement shared between those infected. They were all of the same kind with the same vision and the same ambition. In a sick way, maybe alien takeover was an actual path to world peace, albeit a heavily diapered world peace.
 
"Also, remember to use the butt paste, didn't you say that he had a little rash on his bottom?"
 
Katie didn't answer. At least she didn't outloud.
 
"That's right," Mrs. Hartmann replied to the silence. Telepathy confirmed.
 
The supplies came out of the diaper bag, an already opened container of Huggies wet wipes, a new paste that came in a tube, and their recurring companions, baby oil and baby powder. All carefully placed and prepared in a row. Marisa had her sights on the quiet canister of baby powder, she popped it open, and sniffed the can. Most likely to the same effect as before in the upstairs bathroom, she even licked her lips.
 
Maybe baby powder did make her horny.
 
Her mom asked, “Marisa, are you going to change him or what?”
 
“I just love the smell of baby powder,” responded Marisa.
 
Adam didn't know how many snaps there were, he didn't take the time to count them when Katie put him into the Pikachu footie. It had to have an even number of snaps, since he had two legs, and they ran down his inner thighs. So he kept his legs spread like a good baby. He also found that the diaper naturally forced his legs apart, or was it a natural disposition to avoid the mess against his bottom. Charity did her own leg spreading, and Adam could now see a glimmer of black and white striped panties peeking out from under her shorts.
 
Marisa wiggled her fingers before approaching the snaps of the footsie, starting with ones closer to his knees before moving to the center where his crotch lay. Pop then a pull, pop then a pull. The air chilled him. He’d managed to lather himself up with a lot of sweat during all of the chaos.
 
Also, Adam could feel the calming balm of inevitability, it made his hairs stand up, and was equally cooling as his freshly bared skin.
 
She simultaneously freed both legs from their snaps, slowly, assuredly, making sure that his diaper held up before advancing. Until her fingers were neared his heavily diapered crotch. Marisa nimbly opened the last snap, exposing his dirty diaper for the first time, but she barely flinched from it. She did stop and think, however. Unsure of where to go next.
 
Mrs. Hartmann chirped from behind her daughter.
 
“Marissa, it might help to tuck that onesie behind his back while you change him. Our little Adam may get ants in his pants again, and I don’t want to ruin his only outfit.”
 
“Good idea, mom.”
 
Adam helped her guide his feet free from the footie, he didn’t know why he was suddenly so docile and helpful. Probably because he wanted out of the diaper, but there was also a part of him that just wanted to comply.
 
Just like the day before when they cuddled, Marisa was acting so kind and caring. Way back when the world he lived in made some sort of sense. That world was dead now, and it didn’t even get bagpipes at its funeral. The new world was something awful, but he could cling to the way Marisa treated him like he was the important person in the room. He couldn’t get enough of that freaking sunlight, and how she shared it with an insignificant wallflower like himself.
 
When it came time, he lifted his back to help her roll the bottom half of the footie to safer ground behind him, further away from his messy butt.
 
This fully exposed him to her in a way he would have never predicted before this weekend. It made sense Marisa would be the final dagger. Hers would be the one that cut the deepest, one that would strike his heart. Adam was stupid enough to believe that they could have possibly been together as boyfriend and girlfriend. In that way he was still a child, still thinking that the improbable was possible. Now, he knew better than to believe.
 
“Uh oh, it looks like Elmo fell in the mud,” Marisa joked as she poked near the waistline of his diaper, one of the few parts still pristine.
 
It crinkled around her finger.
 
“That’s okay,” she added as she started pulling out wipes. “We’ll have you nice and clean in no time.”
 
Adam swallowed. Fully mesmerized and paralyzed from head to toe.
 
Rip-rip. Marisa finally opened her present, and Adam prepared for the worst. He felt the oncoming dread as her hands approached the tapes of his diaper.
 
“No need to feel so bad, kiddo. You’re just a baby, pooping yourself is what you do.”
 
Charity must have sensed his anxiety, because she started shaking the rattle over his face, like right next to his ear, and she let out a string of baby talk rivaling the nonsense noise that usually came from Mrs. Hartmann, babbling out gibberish to the tune of the tiger tambourine.
 
“Oh sweetie baby with a messy-wessy diaper. You don’t need to be scared kiddo-widdo. Mommy Marisa will shiny your heiney, and you’ll be back to precious and smelling so sweet sweet. I can’t wait to play with our fresh baby-waby.”
 
Mrs. Hartmann continued to guide Marisa through each step of the change, freely giving advice as soon as the tapes were ripped free from his diaper.
 
“For big messes like this one, you might want to use the cleaner parts of the diaper to wipe away whatever you can, just cup and softly scrape before digging into the wipes."
 
Marisa gave an affirmative nod then proceeded to peel down the front of the diaper, the plastic disposable brushed across his penis, which felt weird. Marisa wiped around his manhood, sometimes moving it out of the way as she gently cleaned her way through his no-no zone.
 
“Let me help you spread him out.”
 
Mrs. Hartmann pulled both of his ankles towards the sky, his back remained flat on the ground as his feet flew airborne, like a Flying V.
 
All of which added to his shame. The unnecessary exposure, and the fact he could feel his mess caked to his skin.
 
His bottom was now the star of the show, the main attraction, and he couldn’t do a thing about it anymore. The best he could do would be to lie down and get cleaned, he'd have to figure the rest from there, if there even was a way to move forward. He tried not to think about anything besides the change, there were too many variables to give him more than enough anxiety, and he already had his fill.
 
Comfortably out of sight, Katie caught this all on camera. Marisa carefully wiping away his mess, Mrs. Hartmann giving her sage advice, while Charity worked herself into a frenzy to the music of the baby toys, rocking back and forth, her raunchy dips drifting lower and lower above him. The cheerleader could barely contain herself, so turned on that she wanted to ride his face like he rode that poor unicorn pillow, regardless of the audience.
 
She growled as she briefly planted herself onto his mouth. “Adam, you’re such a dirty little baby boy.”
 
Surprisingly, Marisa was calm and precise for her first diaper change. He couldn’t tell whether it was Entity or natural maternal intuition kicking into gear. As the wipes moved up and down in a scrubbing motion, a pile formed from the dirty discarded ones as Marisa de-pooped his bottom. Her mom shifted his legs back and forth to help with angles, unseen nooks and crannies, Marisa worked her way through his diaper disaster one wipe at a time, maybe she was decent mom material after all.
 
Marisa asked, “Am I done?”
 
Mrs. Hartmann curtly answered.
 
“Not yet, you might want to spread his bottom a little bit. There are probably some spots between his cheeks. Here, let me help again.”
 
Suddenly, Adam’s legs flew even further over his head, he was now in a position he would have previously thought impossible. An instant reversal of body, his legs formed a wide angle towards the ceiling, his back as curled as a question mark. Adam peered up into his previously powdered penis, not messy anymore but not fully cleaned from talcum either.
 
“This is so fucking hot.” Charity whispered uncomfortably loud as she got a close up of his crotch, her gyrating hips now had a mind of their own.
 
The new position gave Marisa full access, and she took advantage, digging deeper into his crack with a wet wipe until she was satisfied with the clean. They were careful about shifting him out of 'pretzel form' and returning him to the floor. The discarded diaper was already sealed in a plastic bag, along with the graveyard of spent wipes, and Mrs. Hartmann was heading to the trash can. Adam readied himself for a fresh, new diaper.
 
"Oh look," Marisa squealed, "your friends Ernie and Bert are on your diaper."
 
Goodbye Elmo, Hello Ernie and Bert.
 
She held it up for him to see like he cared.
 
But, in some way, he kinda did care.
 
There was just so much sunlight within the way she looked at him. A powerful feeling that he didn’t want to shake. Marisa was all he wanted to see, her touch was all he could feel, and the love deep within those kind green eyes was where he always wanted to be.
 
Adam knew better than to think that this wasn’t the Entity. He’d never get that loving, longing smile from her without the alien intervention. He craved that look, it made him want to poop his Pamper again and again. It made him suckle harder on his pacifier, he hungrily stared at her breasts revealed by her low cut shirt as she leaned over him. Marisa was an incredible mommy, he was so lucky to have her.
 
"You're such a sweet baby, Adam." Marisa smiled as he spread himself out in front of her, she continued to radiate joy and happiness. "You're the best baby a mommy could ask for, a precious sweet bundle of joy, and you're quite the cutie. Isn't that right, Chars?"
 
Charity was still midthrust over his head, panting. "Yeah, that's right."
 
“That's right, Adam. Let me slide this diaper right underneath that clean tushie of yours.”
 
As promised, Marisa smoothly slid the new diaper under that clean bottom of his before folding it over his crotch. She was about to tape him up when Mrs. Hartmann cleared her throat behind them.
 
"You're forgetting to powder, lotion, and treat that bit of diaper rash."
 
Marisa turned to her mother.
 
"Thanks for reminding me, mom. I don't know what I'd do without you."
 
The cool baby powder showered upon his crotch like a refreshing talcum waterfall. The baby lotion came over like a warm summer wave, while the butt paste felt like butt paste, and her probing finger was a little too invasive for comfort. No penetration, but there was definitely a threat, an enemy at the gate.
 
Charity gasped as Marisa drove it home between his cheeks. Too turned on to hide anymore, openly convulsing in front of everyone. Was her hand in her shorts?
 
The commotion earned a raised eyebrow from Mrs. Hartmann, turns out public masturbation is where she draws the line.
 
The hot mom asked, "Charity, do you need a cold shower?"
 
"Yeah, I got to — um, you guys got the kiddo?"
 
The cheerleader finally removed her crotch from his face and her knees from his arms, but not before giving a final parting kiss on the cheek. But that kiss came with a lascivious whisper of a filthy promise.
 
"Adam, next time when we're alone," she whispered, "I'm going to take two oiled covered fingers, really lube them up, and stick them into your ..."
 
He clenched his butt as his eyes went wide.
 
The cheerleader rushed upstairs, but probably not for a cold shower, more like to take care of unfinished business. The guest bedroom lacked the facilities.
 
Adam remained on the floor, halfway into a diaper and halfway out of his trance.
 
"You can leave if you want, mom." Marisa wiped her fingers clean of powder, lotion, and paste with a multipurpose Huggies wipe. "I appreciate your help, but I can take it from here."
 
Mrs. Hartmann gave her daughter a literal pat on the back, plus a soft shoulder rub for a job well done, and she too disappeared out the front door. Where and why would remain a mystery.
 
That left him alone with Marisa, and camerawoman Katie, but the betrayer became easier and easier to ignore. The shining spotlight had a tendency to hide everything else in darkness. Adam didn’t want to have anything to do with her now that he had Marisa.
 
“You’re fresh now, baby.” Marisa taped him into his padded Pamper. “Now let’s get you out of this ridiculous costume.”
 
Adam became the human banana as she peeled him free from the footie, he was now naked except for his T-shirt and diaper. She pulled his T-shirt off next, leaving him bare chested, and only in his Pampers. She pulled him into a tight hug, and he didn’t fight her away. Adam was desperately lost in her care, her knowing smirk, radiant eyes, soft lips. Her skin felt warm next to his, as they breathed in unison, the rising and falling of their chests in tandem. She was so close to him.
 
Man, he wished he could just stay like this forever, remain in her arms. He’d learn to put up with the diapers, or had he already come to appreciate their nature? It was okay to be helpless, because it was free from responsibility.
 
Also, the diapers gave him Marisa.
 
She never looked at him like this when he pretended to be a big kid. He could be her baby, she his mommy, and life would go on in Lovington as intended. No one would know any better, he’d fade into the floral wallpaper, and become one of the forgotten lost to its weird ways.
 
He would give them what they wanted, he had finally learned to love ‘Big Mother’. Dystopian feelings aside, he sometimes wondered whether it would be easier to be happy if he became someone else, becoming more like what others wanted from him. That way his deviancy from normalcy, and lack of backbone, would become more a character trait instead of a fatal flaw. If he was more naturally inclined to be a baby, then maybe the Entity was right about him, or right about everything. However, he still hated Diane.
 
Enough thoughts, just focus on Marisa.
 
Her presence was music, a symphony to his senses. She was beautiful in the soft glow, she smelled of strawberries and candy, she felt like a warm blanket on the coldest day. All of the harmonies, melodies, the rise and fall of culminating movements, the sound of a masterpiece that flowed from instrument to instrument. She shushed him without a word as he pulled at the pacifier with his lips. They looked into one another, lovingly and longingly. She cradled him in her arms, he was fresh and free, padded in comfort, his diaper crinkled as he rubbed his thighs together. A reaction started in his diaper, a hardening appreciation for this intimate moment. Marisa was everything perfect, so freaking perfect that it hurt. A good hurt, but hurt just the same.
 
Marisa nuzzled his cheek with her nose before planting a soft kiss.
 
She whispered, “Adam, I love you.”
 
That’s when it all went cold.
 
This was fake.
 
Manipulated.
 
Entity-stuff — gone too far.

[Sarah Penguin]

hmmmmm

[Pierry Louys]

What a mean cliffhanger!!!

[direking]

On 9/15/2021 at 5:10 PM, Sarah Penguin said:

hmmmmm

Uh-oh. I've seen this 'hmmm' before, and it's rarely a good thing. -- Unless I'm misreading you.

I'm pretty sure you don't like the 'I love you, Adam' part, something to do with out of character 'wish fulfillment'. The same could be said about Adam's newfound appreciation for padding, or the smutty changing 'threesome'. Let me try to explain myself.

The truth is that Marisa not herself, and Katie controlling her is trying to give Adam what she thinks he wants. But he finally realizes that its lie.

There are few tells which giveaway when Marisa is under the influence; sniffing baby powder, liking babies, getting along with her mom, and actually being nice to Adam. In Chapter 14, where Adam has three conversations with three girls, she's under a similar influence; talking about wanting to be a baby sitter, snuggling Adam and rocking him. The influence around her sneaks into Adam and makes his eyes glow blue. She actually hates all the baby stuff, as evidenced by the Webber's parking lot and the chapter before. She's not caretaker material.

What makes this chapter different is this moment for Adam. This time the manipulation doesn't come in the form of 'cold tingles', it comes in the form of how he sees Marisa. She's beaming, a light source, capturing all of his attention. Actually caring about him for once.

His world had just been rocked, blindsided by his last confidant, his only butt-kicking plan B. He put up a short fight, but even he knew it wouldn't mean anything, he was done fighting the impossible. So he'd give in. 'Cling' to Marisa. Learn to love 'Big Mother'; harbor thoughts that maybe the Entity was right about him, and he begins to believe in his role as a baby. Mostly, because it gives him Marisa -- 'the dagger that strikes his heart'.

However, that fantasy is shattered when she says that she 'loves him'. Even Adam knows that's not true, those words are coming from Katie, and it jolts him out of this waking dream, feeling nothing but the sensation of Marisa around him.

I'm a rookie writer, sometimes my voice doesn't come across right. I think about Bob Ross when I write, 'It's your world do what you want with it', and mine is full of 'happy accidents' as I stumble along. I appreciate your interest in my story.

On 9/15/2021 at 8:06 PM, Pierry Louys said:

What a mean cliffhanger!!!

Yeah, sorry about that. It's not on purpose. I've had to reorganize a lot the ending chapters. I made a strategic error in revealing Katie as the source of the Entity in Chapter 28 when it was originally supposed to be revealed in the Epilogue. This has created a domino effect making me re-write, and re-think, absolutely everything about the ending. Adam's immediate reaction was intended to be in this chapter, but it got moved to the next for 'reasons' and tone.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Pierry Louys]

Great to have your feedback!! Love the story and dying to know what gonna happen next 

[D503]

This was an excellent (and hot) chapter. Just loved the descriptions of his helpless body being "manipulated" during his change and his burned-out tantrum. Plus an amazing cliffhanger which smashed his reverie completely! 

Can't wait for the end and of course a chance at an epilogue ?

[Sarah Penguin]

Cliffhangers are bad yes. we should summon up the portal to the dimension of endless tickling yes and banish the author through it.

[direking]

Thanks for reading! The final three chapters will be posted this week. They’re mostly ‘plotty’ instead of ‘smutty’, but they will bring closure.

As always, thanks for making this fun.
 

30
 
Adam pushed Marisa away.
 
The closeness they shared, on their knees interlocked with one another, all gone in an instant. The world tumbled as they rolled in opposite directions, only a few feet away from each other. The short distance between them was yet another chasm of misunderstanding.
 
Marisa was under Its control, and Adam wasn't, they weren't experiencing the world in the same way.
 
He remembered being lost under Its influence. It felt like swimming; no, it felt like drowning.
 
Her world was probably just as colorless, as bland and unimportant, except she probably saw Adam in a special light. Her own iridescent halo disappeared at the same time as her smile, the very moment that he pushed her away, the very moment he realized that this was yet another form of manipulation. The very moment the Entity made her lie to him.
 
Adam wondered if the glow came from his active imagination all along.
 
Marisa cowered with a trembling hand over her mouth, unsure of what she did wrong.
 
She stammered, “Why did you do that?”
 
This wasn't her fault, none of this was; well, this part wasn't. Her role in this nightmare would be later decided when things were less raw, less alien. However, she looked so helpless as she shivered on the floor, scared and frightened like a lost child. It would normally be his manly duty to comfort this damsel, but there were bigger issues at stake.
 
"I said that I loved you, Adam."
 
"No, you don't!" Adam snapped. "Stop saying that!"
 
Adam reeled back onto the floor, sitting in disgust, he was so angry at everything, including himself. He knew it was an illusion, but even if it was for just the briefest moment of time, he was stupid enough to believe the lie, and he wanted to live that lie. 

He hated the diapers, and Sesame Street was just about ruined now.
 
All of that confusion got wrapped up in that moment, in a lasso that didn't speak truth, that only kept him binded and enthralled. It spun a lie for him, gave him a special place where he could stay worry free in her arms, blameless and stupid. All good things except for the baby aspect of it, which he easily ignored, he’d come more used to the feeling of being padded and pampered. That prospect was even more frightening than the Entity.
 
That semi-perfect moment was killed when she first told him that she loved him. An absolute falsehood; just like Marisa's love for changing diapers and sniffing baby powder. Adam knew the difference between his 'friend' and body-snatched Marisa under Its spell. How had he let that slip his mind in just a few minutes?
 
She reached for him again, but his foot met her extended hand, kicking it away.
 
Marisa asked, voice quivering. “Adam, what’s wrong?”
 
He ignored her and scanned the room for Katie, he found her on the couch, finishing the nonsensical puzzle. Her long black hair flowed over her shoulders as she hunched over the coffee table, partly covering her face.
 
What she lacked in camera, she made up for with a look of punchable smug satisfaction.
 
The satisfaction probably didn’t come from the puzzle, that was a lost cause. Adam would've thought she was smart enough to give up on the endeavor, mostly because most of the pieces still covered the floor. Including the tiny bee that set off this entire chain of events.
 
“Yeah, Adam, what’s wrong?”
 
Katie mimicked her friend in a way that just reeked of contempt and dripped with malice.
 
She brushed back the obscuring black hair to reveal her full face. She was just a teenage girl, in all ways. Not a monster, or like Diane. On the outside she hadn’t changed, she didn't grow fangs or horns, or sprout antenna.
 
However, her face suddenly looked so young to him.
 
As if she couldn't be his enemy, the cause of all of his troubles, too vulnerable to be the bad guy. Still, her face read a multitude of emotions: angry, tired, worn thin; her eyes weren't glowing red, but they were narrow and focused on him, so freaking accusatory as if he was the one at fault.
 
“This is what you’ve wanted, all weekend long. Just for her to like you. No matter how mean she was, you found a way to look past it, because you were so desperate for her love and attention — but now when I make her nice, you push her away.”
 
“This isn’t real!” Adam argued, finger pointed towards the floor.
 
“What isn’t real?” Marisa looked about the room confused with watering green eyes.
 
Adam stared as deep into Marisa as he could manage, it was hard to watch her cry as the illusion was still so real for her, but it had to be done. You can rip away an emotional band-aid as quickly as a blindfold, even if someone is too far gone to see.
 
“All of this isn’t real: I'm not a baby, you're not a mommy, and you don't love me because you’re being controlled.”
 
"No." Marisa shook her head as if it would dispel her own bad dream, a single tear trickled down her cheek. “I just don’t understand, baby.”
 
Adam reared back at Katie. “You better do something to fix this.”
 
“Go to your room, Marisa.” Katie ordered with cold authority.
 
The teenage actress became a honey-haired, olive skinned doll, mechanically moving to her room upstairs. They both watched her ascend in silence, patiently waiting for the door to her room to close. When it did, Katie let him have it.
 
“A picture of a bee, really? That’s what gave me away? That’s literally the dumbest thing I have ever heard.”

She held up the tiny bit of puzzle that made a picture before crumbling it with her fingers, making that cardboard rain.
 
“I’d like to think it was more than that,” Adam explained himself as he rose from the floor. “More like an attention to detail that I didn’t notice before.”
 
“I had you, hook, line and sinker. I was so good! Even after you started figuring things out, I pretended to be your friend, on your side, and no one suspected anything.”
 
Katie continued.
 
“It took all I had to keep the girls in line. I wrote them a script, let them act out their fantasies, pry into their inner darkness, and they were dumb enough to think they were in charge of this show. Them in charge? Charity the ridiculous slut, and Marisa the girl with mommy issues? Still, all of my efforts weren’t enough for them. Picking on you wasn't as entertaining as they'd like, so they turned on me!”
 
Adam asked, "What do you mean?"
 
"Hey Katie, truth or dare?" Katie said with a mocking voice that may have belonged to Marisa, it was hard to tell.
 
But her impression was enough to send him back down the 4k rabbit hole, stumbling through memory again trying to see things from another perspective, catching things he missed on the first go-around.
 
He remembered the way Katie was 'downright nervous' on the couch during their stupid game.
 
“Me?”
 
“Is there another Katie playing truth or dare?” The actress pretended to look around the room wide-eyed and confused. “There isn’t a hidden side of you I should worry about, right?”
 
Katie spiraled from uncomfortable to downright nervous. Trepidation wasn’t a good word afterall, panic better described the way she shuffled on her couch cushion. The spotlight wasn’t her comfort zone, a sick part of him loved to see Katie squirm. Adam should have felt bad, but she deserved to be on the other end of intimidation for once.
 
Marisa giggled. “What do you think about when you masturbate?”
 
The Asian girl suddenly became stone faced and sullen, her sunken tired eyes revealed fresh tears forming in their corners. Too far, Adam thought to himself, this had all gone too far. He watched the moment in which trepidation became betrayal, but he didn’t know what Marisa had done to betray her friend.
 
Katie replied, “I’m not answering that.”
 
The words echoed through his head.
 
“You know that’s not the reason I’m mad, you promised you wouldn’t say anything!” Katie screamed.
 
Lightbulb moment. Adam pointed at her as he shouted the most obvious answer.
 
"She was going to give you away for being an alien!"
 
"No! You moron! You still don't get it!"
 
Katie slammed both of her hands onto the coffee table. Which was having a bad day. Luckily, it didn't crumble into a pile of planks and sawdust, Adam fully expected that it would.
 
There was a civil war within her body, Adam recognized internal turmoil. He was well experienced with his own churning pit. Katie shook where she sat, her anger palpable, and her face scrunched so tight it looked like it was about to pop. Her fuse was already lit, the only question became how she would detonate.
 
Charity was right, she did look a little like Shrek when she got this angry.
 
As calmly as possible, he asked, "Then what were you afraid of?"
 
Katie took an exaggerated long, deep breath, and cautiously rubbed the tops of her thighs. Nervous energy spent readying herself for something braver than he could muster.
 
"I'm gay, Adam."
 
Adam tried to pretend he wasn't surprised, he didn’t do a good job, his jaw rudely dropped, his throat felt dry, and he had no clue what to do with his hands. It wasn’t like it was some sort of big deal to him, it was just that it was so freaking human — and confusing. He didn’t know what to say. Was congratulations in order? Oh, jeez. He was bad at these kinds of things, even after spending a weekend studying these girls and their modern art.
 
However, it did explain why he never saw her with a boyfriend, why she was the only girl that never shared an encounter with him. In that way, of course.  Between being gay and an alien, he would've thought being outted as the latter would have been more of an issue. Then he remembered that she was ‘baggage’, or had baggage, or whatever. When Diane complained so much about not being able to drop the humanity from the human, maybe she was talking about Katie.
 
"I mean, so what?" Katie shrugged her shoulders. "I like girls. It doesn't give her the right to out me because I made a mistake of telling her in secret. 'What do you think about when you masturbate, dyke'? She's a fucking bitch, and I don't feel guilty about using her in any way."
 
It was odd how she referred to 'using' Marisa. A dynamic he'd never have suspected. She also slurred herself, put herself down; was that the way she thought of herself? Maybe she just wanted to talk, maybe he was different like her, but this was still all wrong, and he had voice to tell her why.
 
"Unfortunately, you did use her, and you're using me. I don't understand half of what's going on here, but I understand when someone is being mean to someone else. I know what it's like to be on the other side of bullying, and you know what you're doing is wrong."
 
She shrugged again. “I’m having a hard time seeing myself as a bad guy here.”
 
Adam held out his hands, a placating gesture also used to stop traffic.
 
"I understand why you're mad, you didn't deserve that kind of treatment."
 
“You’re right, I didn’t.” Katie interrupted him.
 
“Just like me.”
 
Their eyes met. His angry, hers discerning. Adam awkwardly postured himself as well as he could while wearing nothing but a diaper. He could feel her judgement roving up and down his diaper-clad form like a pair of hot lasers against his skin. It didn't make sense. If she was Entity empowered, she could just mind zap people, right? Adam couldn't figure out what she wanted, but it looked like Katie was just as confused about her own messed up puzzle.
 
She already proved that she could control him, the stinky situation earlier this morning at the window could have been blamed on her being the puppeteer. Why was she holding back? He'd have to figure that out, but it felt like a glimmer of hope. Especially given the fact that he was still him, and not a drooling baby, she was giving him a chance for some reason.
 
This wasn't the Entity talking, it was Katie, the one without the alien interference. The honor student and black belt, the girl just as shy as he was, or that pretended to be, all was fair game at this point.
 
Adam cleared his throat. "Why did you do this to me?"
 
"Did Diane go on her spiel about natural disposition?" Katie answered his question with one of her own, and with a raised eyebrow.
 
He literally put his bare foot down to the faux wood floor.
 
"No, you don't get to write it off as part of your nature. I'm not allowing you to get away that easily. If you want to talk, you're going to have to be honest. If you're not, just go ahead and turn me into a mindless baby."
 
Wrong words. Wrong words. The warning klaxons kicked into gear, red lights flashing in a circular motion in his head. He was hitting diaper Defcon 4, he was seconds away from being a baby, he was sure of it.
 
Still, Katie just sat there. Morose as heck.
 
"Don't tempt me, Adam. You know what I am, and what I am capable of doing."
 
"Then tell me why you did this to me!" Adam shouted.
 
His throat felt sore and he could feel the heat rising in his chest. He began to realize how much she broke him on the inside.
 
"I don't know! Honestly! I have no idea why I am the way I am, or why I do the things that I do. I mean, I know it's wrong control people; sometimes its harmless, like making Marisa and Charity believe they saw a Pampers commercial, or stirring their interests in babying someone, but that immediately went too far, and now we're here at this stupid lake house. I'm 'Entity', as you call it. This is what I do, I control people. Something happened last night, either from that stupid truth or dare game, or just being belittled all afternoon. It made me snap.”
 
“That’s when everything went wrong,” Adam uttered. “Isn’t it?”
 
Katie made noise that sounded part growl and part whimper. Like even she didn’t know how to feel about herself. A fiery expression took over her face, her eyes looked so dark as she stared him down.
 
“I showed Charity exactly where she could stick that ‘Spirit Stick’, I made her do things in front of me, and I loved the feeling of being in total control. Does that make me a bad person?”
 
Yeaaah. It really did. Adam was smart enough to not say that out loud. At least now he knew the source of that strange buzzing noise, a vibrating wand, as Charity described, ‘the kind us girls know and love’.
 
Katie giggled. A kinda evil giggle.
 
“Turns out that was just another one of her endless kinks, doing that in front of an audience. You know, every time I tried to mess with her she turned it sexual. That girl has a thirst that’s unquenchable.”
 
“Yeah, you’re telling me,” Adam laughed.
 
Then something magical happened. Katie laughed, too. It was like they were friends again, not on opposite facing sides of the board. Adam didn’t know how to feel about her, what she was doing wasn’t right, and it was downright cruel to him. It didn’t feel like forgiveness, it felt like regret. He felt regret for what she had done.
 
“I wish I could write it off as my nature,” Katie continued. “Place all of the blame on someone else — I mean, this is who I’ve been for as long as I can remember.”
 
Adam replied, “You can’t, and you shouldn’t.”
 
Katie sighed as she collapsed onto the old couch. She pressed her hands into her face, covered her eyes like a toddler prepared to play peek-a-boo.
 
"I'm just so fucking confused," she said.
 
Oh, Adam knew all about being confused. His whole life was subject to confusion, and it wasn't just limited to Lovington's secret alien invasion. Or girls.
 
Katie began outpouring truths about the weekend from her point of view, her tell-all best seller.
 
“I mean, I feel bad for what happened to you, but I loved doing it. You know? I loved diapering you in the bathroom. Making your little baby voice squeak in terror, and you looked so helpless and cute in your diaper. Later I felt different. Guilty.”
 
Katie glumly stared at the wrecked room, puzzle pieces everywhere, changing mat and supplies lazily strewn across the floor.
 
“I just went through all of that, right after snapping my fingers. I wanted them to rip your clothes off and put you in your Pampers where you belong. I loved watching you fight back, and get pinned down, I caught it all on video. Then guilt came again. It follows me around like a shadow.”
 
She looked at Adam with tired eyes, and placed a palm over her chest to point to herself.
 
"All of this was my mistake, all my fault. If I wasn't so distracted by Charity getting herself off, I wouldn't have let my control over Marisa slip, because you figured it all out in the upstairs bathroom. 'I see you as you, Adam', and all of that jazz. So then I took control over you — made you drink so much that you blacked out. That’s when I panicked. In the middle of the night, I pulled Mrs. Hartmann away from the arms of Alejandro, because I needed an extra set of hands, and a weak mind that I hadn’t screwed with all weekend. But I was so tired.”
 
“It took so much of me to hide from you and the others, you weren't the only one picking up on the strange happenings; Charity and Marisa kept asking questions, and I kept having to change their memories, and force them to do things. All the while pretending to be someone I'm not, partly regretting my role in turning you into a hapless baby. So I sent you away to Diane. She'd know what to do with you.”
 
“When you came back a total mess, I had to fix you, because it was my fault. So I came up with a stupid plan to try to turn things back. Maybe convince you that we ‘beat it’ or something, but you figured it all out because of a picture of a bee. I can’t lie anymore. You know everything now.”
 
The living room was unearthly quiet, a stillness captured in the air. This place felt so distant from the real world, another planet, and in some ways that feeling was more of the truth than he wanted to acknowledge.
 
"You're still not answering me." Adam felt so resolute after learning some truths. "Why do all of this in the first place?"
 
She removed her face from her hands with tears in her eyes. The whole weekend was breaking down with Katie.
 
"For once, Adam, I wanted someone to be proud of me. It would be harmless, I'd give them what they want. There's just so much outside pressure on me; coming from both sides of my nature. Be a good member of our Collective, turn someone into a baby. Be a good little honor student, don't disappoint your parents, pretend to be straight until it hurts. Let everyone make fun of you for being a virgin. Be smart all the time, make no mistakes, no second chances. It looks like I'm just as much of a screw-up as everyone thinks."
 
Literally no one saw her as a screw-up. Adam wanted to open his mouth to tell her that, then purposely kept it closed. One person thought she was a screw up — Katie.
 
Now, Adam saw her as something different; not as someone, or something, in total control. The exact opposite. Katie was a cornered animal, somehow powerless to everything about this weekend, her actions, and seemingly, her life.
 
Katie whispered to the quiet air, "I just don't want to be who I am."
 
Wow, they had a lot more in common than he realized. Adam found himself sitting next to her on the couch. Striking the pose of a caring high school counselor. His hands clasped together over his Bert and Ernie diaper, which was now so much of an afterthought.
 
“Who does?” Adam proffered, “I mean, does anyone actually like themselves?”
 
Katie recoiled from him.
 
"Quit bullshitting me, it's not going to help you."
 
He nodded, then swallowed.
 
"So — what happens next?"
 
"I have to erase your memory, and turn you into a baby, you’ve left me no choice,” Katie answered matter-of-factly.
 
Adam started. “What?”
 
In an instant he was off the couch and almost on the other side of the room. Just when he thought they were forming some kind of connection.
 
“You’re going to become a baby, Adam. Forget everything about this weekend, you’ll get to have Marisa as a babysitter, I’ll send her your way, and you can be happy. And this isn’t just for my protection, but yours, too.”
 
Adam scoffed, “How does that protect me?”
 
“You already know too much, even if you don’t know everything. I’m going to catch enough hell from the Council as it is.”
 
"Yeah, I’d prefer if you reconsidered,” Adam said with a nervous laugh.
 
“Give me one good reason why I don’t give you a full mind wipe and take your potty training down with you.”
 
He answered, “It’s not fair.”
 
“That’s an opinion, not a reason.”
 
Katie rose from the couch, careful with her approach, as if Adam would scoot away like a squirrel, and she’d have to break a sweat catching him.
 
“You don’t have to do this.” His voice shook as he stumbled back. “You have a choice.”
 
"How so?"
 
"We can come up with something."
 
"Adam, you really think that you can negotiate with me?"
 
Welp. She was right. It was a stupid thing to try to talk his way out of this predicament, but there were no other choices. If he stood down, and let her have her way, it'd be the last choice he'd ever make. He remembered moments staring at the pink ceiling fan in the pink room. He recalled wanting to stand up for himself, yet never having the guts to actually do it.
 
Things were different now, albeit a little more desperate, but there was a measurable change in him that he could feel coursing through him. Adam was made of steel, not origami. However, he had to choose his words wisely. This scenario was already tilted in her favor, he'd have to navigate that space, and get her to see things his way.
 
What about seeing things her way?
 
"I don't know, actually. What I do know is that you say me, and I, and not we and us. You're nothing like Diane. How come you're so different?"
 
Katie appeared happy that he recognized the difference, her lips formed a soft smile.
 
“I’m somewhat of a my own person, and they don’t like that. A rogue agent, so to speak. You’ve met Diane. Does she seem like the type that allows any freedom, any self-expression, someone who can understand what it means to be your own person? Well, she’s not the only one. There are others, all around town, and they are just as singularly minded as she is, some are worse.”
 
"And you hate them for it," Adam snapped.
 
Katie rolled her eyes.
 
"Don't pretend to understand me, you're going to make a fool out of yourself if you try."
 
Adam unconsciously located his closest exit, back door opposite the couch, closest to the mud and the shed. Was running still an option? She'd probably freeze him in place, if she had the same powers as Diane or whatever was happening at the baby store.
 
"Then what am I supposed to do?" His voice echoed through the high ceiling, and he didn't care who heard him. "Just take it. Let you do what you want with me?"
 
The quiet living room reared its ugly head again, Katie was lost for words.
 
They seemed similar on the surface.
 
There were countless times where they opened up to one another, mostly him to her, but he felt like he pierced her mysterious veil, discovered her secrets and heard her concerns.
 
Her dual personalities weren't all too different from his own inner personifications. There was Katie, and Miss Katie, the second an abrasive personality that was a front for her deeper insecurities. He had the churning pit, paper house, bubbling resolve.
 
Adam knew that at minimum some part of her was still human, and that 'human side' was dictating the mood in the room. The ubiquitous Entity was trapped away, and he had to take that opportunity to reach Katie.
 
"I'm not the one standing in your way from you being yourself, you can't blame me for all that you're going through. I'm innocent, Katie."
 
His eyes remained fixed upon her right index finger as it slowly extended from her hand at her side. Katie was preparing an invisible ‘mind splinter’, Adam had already met a similar acquaintance at the baby store from hell, and he figured this time the effects would be permanent.
 
“No one is truly innocent, Adam.”
 
Still, she was faltering in place. All she had to do was say the word, snap her fingers and he was toast.
 
If he was reading her correctly, she had major doubts about her next steps. Women were a different language to him, but he could make out a word or two, translate a meaning behind them, or understand the color on the canvas.
 
Adam wanted nothing more than to be normal enough to fit into a ‘conforming’ mold, and Katie wanted to be separate from the herd, her own person, her own alien. It wasn’t some kind of the grass is greener thing, their 'natural inclination' went beyond their needs and wants. This all defined them.
 
Even when Katie, the girl, had a tendency to fade into obscurity, it wasn't because she wanted to blend into the crowd, she wanted to maintain her distance from everyone else.
 
He partially understood the Entity, and the girl. Both equally separate, yet could have the same goals. A stupid paradox, just like everything else about this weekend. What did they both want? And how could he give it to them?
 
Adam offered, "You're not that kind of person, Katie."
 
“How do you know what kind of person I am? Huh? You're just being judgemental like Diane. She doesn't understand me either. She doesn't understand that things are different now that we’re here, the old rules no longer apply.”
 
Katie hesitated, turned away from him and found a part of the floor to stare at.
 
“I know I’m not perfect, I’ve made my own mistakes. You’re my first doll, Adam. I’ll admit that it’s been a rough first-go, but I’m learning along the way.”
 
Her words reminded him of the way that Entity-controlled Charity referred to him as a project and not a person. A poorly formed doll, if he wanted to paraphrase Diane. Not exactly a mistake, more a matter of poor execution. Adam was nothing more than a trial run, guess it was back to the drawing board for him. A butt wipe soon to be followed by a mind wipe. This infuriated him.
 
He gritted his teeth.
 
“I don’t deserve this!”
 
“That’s the issue, isn’t it?” Katie turned her attention back to his direction. “What we deserve, and what we don’t, it’s all a matter of opinion.”
 
He wasn’t planning on getting into a philosophical battle with Katie. Now he had to convince whatever it was inside of her, teenage girl or interdimensional alien, to not completely destroy him, even if it were the smartest decision that Katie could make. 
 
"Alright, fine. You at least deserve a last chance to 'use your words'," Katie giggled at her cleverness. "What would you do if you were in my shoes?"
 
Adam thought about it for a second.
 
“If you can’t control yourself, maybe you should work your magic on people who actually deserve it, unlike me.”
 
“Turn someone who merits it into a baby.” He quickly followed up, “But I don’t really know, I’m me, not you.”
 
"That's actually a good idea," Katie chuckled before wagging her finger at him. “You’ve gotten clever, Adam. I wasn’t lying when I admired how much you changed. You were such a weakling, could barely speak in front of girls your own age. And now, you know exactly what I am, what I can do, and you have ‘resolve’. I’m impressed, no lie.”
 
“Thanks, I guess.”
 
Adam went to slide his hands into his pockets before realizing that diapers didn’t have any.
 
“I'll consider your idea, but it's not enough to convince me not to Pamper you for good. You have to admit a part of you liked it, I could tell. You make a sweet baby, Adam.”
 
Adam gulped. His mind was completely blank, like every book in the library had already been checked out. There were rows and rows of empty shelves. Some had cobwebs.

So he kept talking.
 
“I can’t think of anything else. I don’t deserve it, but I know you don’t care about that. You only care about my suffering, and I’m probably going to disappoint you in that way, too.”
 
She looked perplexed for an all powerful alien.
 
“How so?”

He smirked.
 
“There’s nothing left of me to reduce, the damage is already done, I’d imagine the fun part is over.”

Adam started listing his humiliations as he counted them on his fingers.

“I’ve peed myself in public, sucked on a pink pacifier, wet a sailor suit while tied to a tree, and I’ve pooped myself, twice! It could be argued that I raped a stuffed unicorn. I mean, you can go for the kill if you want, but you’re not going to get anything in return. A drooling baby isn’t your end goal, or you would have done that to me already.”
 
Katie stopped and considered his words.
 
“You’re right, I’ve already had my fun, but it doesn’t change the circumstances.  I’m sorry it has to end this way. I’ve grown to like you, Adam. You’re interesting, especially on the inside. Completely different from this vapid place, this boring town of surface level expectations. That doesn't mean I can just let you go.”
 
She sounded so bittersweet, Adam could taste it in the quiet air, the dark lake house felt so empty now. She extended her hand his way, like she held an imaginary gun. The barrel was her index finger with the 'mind splinter', more like a 'mind bullet' now. Katie levelled it to his head as she came closer and closer. Adam dropped to his knees.
 
He whispered, "Please, don't."
 
Katie shook his words away with her head.
 
“I can't, Adam. I want you to know that I never wanted to be mean to you. It was all part of a game that you didn’t even know you were playing. I’ll also have you know that I didn’t pick you, that was all on Marisa and Charity, it gave them a little more of the illusion that they were in control of this thing. I'm so sorry that it spiraled out of my hands.”
 
"Don't, Katie. I swear I won't tell anyone, anything."
 
Adam had tears in his eyes, but he couldn't blame himself for crying.
 
"Adam, it's not just about what you say, it'll be how you act, this weekend will be in everything you do. This is the way it has to be. You have to remember, I'm answerable to everything that happened here."
 
He was well within her shadow now. The hand she was going to use to mind wipe him was now in his face, the index finger sat inches from his forehead. Adam closed his eyes, he didn't want to see it. He didn't want to feel it.
 
They sat that way for a few seconds.
 
Still, nothing happened.
 
Katie kept talking. Kept rattling around extending the terrible moment, pushing it away with her own reasoning.
 
"Even if I let you go, they'll come after you. They could be meaner, they could want to hurt you, they could —“

“I don't know! I can't do this!"

Katie pulled her hand back and spun away from him.
 
Was it over? 

Adam finally opened his eyes, Katie quietly stood in self-defeat unable to finish her doll. Her ‘hand’ gun was at her side. Did he win? It was hard to tell. It looked like he did. Adam was still himself, the world maintained proper color, and Katie was still Katie? 
 
That didn’t go as expected, like all things this weekend. The air came out of the balloon, a lame unceremonious end, and not soon enough. There was no musical fanfare, no congratulations, and no slap on the back for a job well done. It ended with more of a ‘fizzle’ than a ‘bang’.
 
No witch melted into the stone.
 
No one’s head exploded.
 
No one gained any XP.

Katie looked incredibly sad, shoulders drooped, maybe she didn’t know what to do with ‘her hands’. But that didn’t matter to him, in all shapes and purposes, this crazy weekend was over. Jeremy would never believe anything he had to say, if Adam even had the stupidity to tell him anything. He wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t be wise to say anything about this weekend to anyone. He’d have to make up a lie. The lie would be easier than telling the truth. 
 
How would he paraphrase the events of the weekend?
 
A clueless little eighteen year old, Pokemon-loving wallflower gets invited to a lake house by three of the hottest girls of his grade. However, nothing is what it seems on the surface, their real purpose is to turn him into a baby, and force him into all sorts of humiliation. After a few wardrobe malfunctions, and a pair of accidents later, he's in a pull-up in a pink room staring at a pink ceiling fan.
 
He has three conversations with the three girls, picking up on a rising tension in the group; tension that culminates during a fateful game of truth or dare, when everything falls apart.
 
That's when things got even weirder.
 
When they're about to kiss, the hostess with the mostess suffers a hostile takeover. Next, he's in a kaleidoscope dream with a strange little girl, a part of this story that was better left forgotten. But he learned rules there, about pictures and mirrors.
 
A cheerleader in an ill-fitting uniform convinces him he needs to wear diapers, then he had sexual relations with a stuffed unicorn. He becomes a diapered detective only to discover that he could be taken over as well, and not even remember a single thing about getting drunk from a sippy cup.

Next thing he knows he's soiling himself in front of a large window. The nicest of the girls changes his diaper, and lends a friendly ear; unfortunately, they're out of diapers and have to head to a suspicious sounding baby supply store. Guess what? He has to go without the nicest of girls coming along to help him. The good news was that she would stay at home, get to the bottom of things, and come up with a plan to save him. That's super trustworthy.
 
Turns out he was right to be suspicious about that baby supply store, it's practically a home base for the controlling force they're fighting against. He picks Pampers out of a line-up, tries to escape, wrecking the place and eventually wrecking his face against a glass door. He wakes up tied to a changing table, learns about a town-wide interdimensional alien conspiracy, and gets his soul taken away by a 'mind splinter' and a convincing dream sequence.
 
Luckily, the nicest of girls with the most trustworthy of plans wakes him up, tells him the best idea to break free from being a baby is to act like one on camera.
 
Yeah, trustworthy girl turns out to be the villain behind the whole thing.
 
But that's okay, because she's gay. No, that wasn't the point. She's human, she's unsure of herself and makes mistakes. This entire weekend being exhibit A. Somehow he convinces her not to 'mind splinter' him, and somehow he convinces himself that it's going to be all okay in the end.
 
Wow. What a wild weekend. Nothing like he suspected, but that wasn't always a bad thing. Unfounded expectations were weird that way. He'd learn from it what he could, try to repress what he couldn't, and never take an invite from the hottest girls in his grade ever again. Lesson learned.
 
Adam would never forget what happened this weekend.
 
Katie appeared trepidatious for some reason, still nervous about taking the next steps put everything back together.
 
He looked up at his distraught friend. “You can fix this, Katie.”
 
“You’re right, I can.” Without warning, Katie pushed a finger into his forehead.
 
He cried out, “Wha- ?”
 
But it was too late.
 
Like a second coming of a nightmare, Adam felt the return of the chilling touch, the sickly feeling of the Entity, swiftly rolling up his body. He became a rapidly sinking ship in icy waters, hull compromised, only seconds away from the depths. He held his chin higher to counter the rising water, but it didn’t do anything. It was all a metaphor. 
 
He felt all of his limbs freeze at once, completely petrified as the room continued to swirl around him. It was all in Katie's hands now, he didn't know what he had negotiated for, or how well he did, but he knew it was out of his control. 'Go with the flow' meant accepting whatever fate she would give him, a lifetime of being a baby, or something closer to normal. His old life.
 
Katie giggled, "Adam, you do look hella cute in a diaper."
 
The world blacked out.

[direking]

31
 
The toilet sat quietly in front of him, its lid open, like a gaping porcelain mouth just waiting for him to do his business. Adam waited, too. It'd been around 24 hours since he'd visited a toilet, and to be honest, the reunion was a little intimidating.
 
He decided to take his time and let it come naturally, if the girls had to wait longer in the SUV so be it. They were on his terms now, he knew it, they knew it, and it was just a matter of exercising that power now.
 
It was all too weird.
 
The subsequent blackout. Waking up the pink bedroom, wearing his regular clothes, and in normal undies after a pair of days heading towards diapers. It all felt like he was sleepwalking, still deep within a dream.
 
Probably because he couldn't recall anything after they started 'Katie's plan'. The one that involved a video and ‘complete baby mode’.
 
She was kind enough to help him fill in the blanks after she woke him up and pulled him out of the pink bed. That’s where they took him after he passed out.
 
Katie informed him that in the moment of truth, his eyes went all glowy, and he probably couldn’t remember the rest. That’s the way that the Entity worked, through gaslighting and memory manipulation.
 
Also, Katie explained how it all worked perfectly, how he was an absolute perfect baby, and that she showed them the video and they all turned back to normal. A perfect ending. That freaking easy.
 
And it made him feel uneasy.
 
Especially the way she smiled after he told her everything he could about the 'dream girl' in the pink room, every freaking detail he could pull together from all of the strangeness.
 
When he thought about it, Katie had a duplicitous smile, and she also came up with some weird rules. The most important being her warning against mentioning the Entity to anyone else. Especially to Charity, Marisa, and Mrs. Hartmann, or else they could get 're-infected'. Those were her words, and not his.
 
His head rang like a bell. Like it was emptied of something and filled with something else. A something that he couldn't feel or touch, just experience. He didn't know it, but Adam was already beginning to feel the events of the weekend sofly fading away, like a handwritten love letter left in the rain, until it became blotchy and subject to changing interpretations.
 
He studied the bathroom with a new pair of eyes. The variety of experiences here, the one with Katie and the diaper, the one with Marisa and the spanking, and the first grape candy scented bubble bath he received from Katie after he fell into the mud. All of which was carefully planned at his expense. Now that things had calmed down more than a bit, Adam had already started reflecting on the events of the weekend, recalling winks and nods between the conspirators, the way they all did their part in his betrayal.
 
Regression is just the best.
 
Those words belonged to creepy Diane, still out there under the influence, calling the shots at the baby store from hell. The words made him wonder just how much of the events over the weekend came from the cruelty of the three girls or the Entity from 'out of town'. He probably would never know, and if there even was a difference, things probably wouldn't have turned out too much different than they did.
 
He felt the need coming, Adam freely peed into the potty. It was exorcising his own demons in a way. He was still potty trained, the damage from this point would only be psychological, one could only hope.
 
He finished up, gave himself a little wiggle, zipped up his pants. Adam looked at his reflection in the mirror as he washed his hands, fully expecting to see blue eyes, or red eyes, or any color eyes but his normal ones.
 
But it was over, like it never even happened.
 
“I’m proud of you, Adam. It wasn’t easy, I thought for sure that you were a goner, but you did good.”
 
Adam choked when he recognized the voice, and quickly turned to see Princess Tinkles in the doorway. This time she was in a navy blue dress, like something from the Victorian era, when petticoats were a thing. A huge blue lacy bow tied her blondish hair into a drawn out ponytail. A tiny hint of a cloth diaper snuck out beneath the doily inspired underskirt. Almost as if it was designed to be that way on purpose.
 
He shot an accusatory finger her way, shooting water droplets into the air.
 
“You’re going to have to explain just who you are and what you’re doing here.”
 
The girl curtsied, her tiny little hands pulled her dress to her sides.
 
“I’m the forever baby, the one that stays in diapers, missed by my mommies and daddies. The one that hides alone in her room. My box. My tiny Cube.”
 
He asked, “Do you have a name?”
 
“Adam, I don’t have a name because I’m not exactly a person. I’m more of a feeling, an idea in corporeal form. You’re only seeing what I represent with human eyes, understanding with a human brain, trying to comprehend with your human experience. I’m what you think a toddler should look like.”
 
“You should still have a name,” Adam countered.
 
The toddler thought about it for a moment.
 
“I believe that you think I’m something of a Princess Tinkles," she answered. "I’m not sure that I like that name.”
 
“Whatever, Tinks.”
 
The girl looked unbearably cute even when she was angry.
 
Adam didn’t come up here for the existential lecture about human experience, he came up here to pee. Looks like he got to do both.
 
He dried his hands on a nearby towel. “Are you here to play dress up dollies again?”
 
"No. Maybe another time. You still need to make changes, don’t you?”
 
Adam hesitated. Looked himself over again in the mirror, then nodded.
 
“You can’t stay a kid forever, Adam. Trust me on this one, it’s not nearly as fun as you think.”
 
“I can imagine,” Adam started, “I’m pretty sure I still have a diaper rash.”
 
The guru girl giggled behind the tiniest of white gloves brought to her mouth.
 
“Go and grow up, stand for something, your life is waiting for you.”
 
“Thank you, if it wasn’t for advice about the mirrors and photographs, I wouldn't have been able to destroy them."
 
Princess Tinkles shook her head from side to side, like she was saying 'no' to a spoonful of mashed peas.
 
“They’re not destroyed, they’re just convinced to leave you alone.”
 
Big bad Diane came to mind again, and how her influence had seemingly infinite reach. He could avoid that baby store for the rest of his life, but he wasn’t sure if that would be enough, she didn’t seem like the type to just ‘let things go’. There was something else, however. Just on the edge of his mind, he couldn't quite reach it, even with a ladder. It was there, and Adam knew it.
 
Adam wondered aloud, “I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something important.”
 
“Let me be the first to remind you, the less you know, the safer you are.”
 
Adam scratched his head. “I don’t know about that.”
 
“Don’t worry, your memory is already starting to decay. Soon, I'll be gone. I just wanted to say goodbye before I faded away.”
 
Adam blinked. And everything about Princess Tinkles was gone.
 
After a mindless few seconds, he finished drying his hands on a towel, before shaking his head. He could’ve sworn he saw something in the doorway, but when he looked up, nothing was there. He also thought he heard the voice of a little girl.
 
Maybe this place was haunted?
 
He carried that frightening thought to the red SUV. All of the girls were already in the car, leaving him an empty seat. One that was noticeably free from a princess pink booster.
 
Slowly and surely, the supernatural was sucked out of his story.
 
The only thing left was a prank-filled weekend, where the girls put him in diapers, made him mess them, and he wore a Pikachu onesie. That’s what stood out from the brain fog, those were the facts on which he could cling.
 
........
 
The way home wasn't cathartic, exactly the opposite. Adam could barely keep still, the quiet in the car hurt his ears, it grabbed and pulled at him to say something.
 
There were nagging questions that needed answers, even internally he didn't have a clue to what had happened. However, those thoughts are like thorns or splinters, they can hardly be ignored once they've pierced the skin. It was digging at him. The car full of girls who picked on him, the feeling of being a victim to something he couldn't fully remember. 
 
Still, there were those girls. Right in front of him.
 
The whole world revolves around that unanswered question: Why?
 
Why did this weekend happen? Not what or how, those were lost causes by this point. Maybe if he figured that out, he'd pick up the parts he was missing. Could it all be blamed on the E-? He couldn't remember the word, it couldn't be finished in his mind, and somehow he knew it couldn't be pushed through his lips. It stood for something bad. Now, it was gone. 
 
Again, there were those girls. Right in front of him.
 
He had to get answers, and they were trapped in the car with him this time around.
 
Marisa turned around from the passenger seat.
 
“Adam, I’m sorry about what happened.”
 
Charity relayed the same message, shaking his thigh with one of her hands. "Yeah, I'm sorry kiddo."
 
In the driver seat, Mrs. Hartmann looked already in denial about her role in the elaborate prank. He guessed that kind of immediate repression came with a healthy dose of narcissism.
 
Katie said nothing. Staring out the window with a forlorn expression on her face, concentrating on the trees and distant skyline. She was always weird and quiet, but she put an end to all of the bullying. Adam somehow knew this, but it was like a movie he'd seen before, but not remember how it went. His brain told him a story, but it felt like a lucid dream or foggy memory.
 
“Thanks for the half-hearted apology,” Adam growled.
 
“What else could we do?" Marisa replied. "Things got weird, Adam. That’s not our fault.”
 
Things got weird, Adam. What things did she remember that he couldn't? It didn't matter. Anger took over the wheel now, he'd let it drive him to wherever it wanted to go.
 
“Not your fault?!” Adam fumed. “This is all your fault, don’t try weaseling out of that fact.”
 
The car got quiet again, he stared at the empty countryside as his rage boiled over. Time to make changes, time to stand up for himself. He thought about the steel inside of him, the part of him that kept him from being a toy. The coiled spring. The bubbling resolve. Fake things that defined him on the inside. He was done being a victim. He didn’t need sunlight, he was sunlight. These three girls and clueless mom made him suffer for being weak.
 
He loudly cleared his throat and began to finish this business.
 
"The problem is that life is too easy for girls like you. It's easy being pretty and popular, it comes naturally, like breathing or something."
 
"Here we freaking go," Charity groaned.
 
"That's not the case," Marisa argued, "and you know that you're oversimplifying all of this."
 
Adam leaned forward towards the front of the car and directed his venom at Marisa.
 
"Did they even have to count the votes for homecoming queen? It was so much of a foregone conclusion that all of the suspense was sucked away until it wasn't even a thing anymore.”
 
Marisa quietly scoffed from the passenger seat, but Adam sat taller behind her, just getting started.
 
“You're always the star of the show, the lead in every play, and you hit every note perfectly when you sing. You're always pretty, even when you're not. Why can't you see that you're not like other girls? You know, the ones who wish that they were you, and all you do with your lucky life is pick on a guy like me. What does that say about you as a person?"
 
There was no answer. Adam peered around the back of the front seat, and could see her shoulders softly shaking. Was she crying? Good. Great even. She deserved to feel worse. It felt good to strike back at them.
 
Charity grabbed at his shoulder. "You don't have to be so rude, Adam."
 
"Yeah, I do,” Adam snapped as he ripped her hand away, “and don't get me started with you."
 
"Start with me, I don't give a shit what you think."
 
The cheerleader braced herself as she crossed her arms, he could see the vulnerability through the 'tough girl' persona. He'd strike it with everything he could, make her hurt just like she made him hurt.
 
"You see, that's where you're wrong," Adam started in on the blonde bimbo. "You do 'give a shit' about what everyone thinks, that's why you are the way you are. You pretend that you are past other people's opinions, that you're so bored with everything. Sex is so easy for you. That's not the case for everyone. You should hear the way you're talked about in the hall —"
 
"I do hear everything," Charity interrupted, "but I don't care, they're all jealous of me."
 
He waved a finger in her face.
 
"And you keep lying to yourself. It's alright to lie to other people, you do it all the time. Just go with the flow, whatever happens, happens. You use people, Charity. You need everyone to become the mirror that tells you that you're pretty, that you're wanted, or needed; because you feel so incredibly ugly on the inside. If we were being honest, we wouldn't envy you, we would pity you. You're empty without desire, that's probably the reason why you are the way you are. You need idiots like Jeremy to stare at your tits to feel alive."
 
Charity reared back and slapped him across the face, but Adam didn’t flinch. He let the pain flare as he stared the cheerleader down. Every part of him felt on fire, his skin danced and his eyes burned. She crumpled like a coke can right in front of him, wrapping her arms around her knees before turning towards Katie in defeat.
 
As far as Katie went, the honor student just watched his ranting with a calm expression on her face. He’d go after her, too. It felt good to stand up for himself. Like running free in an open field, not daring to think about the consequences of his words that would become land mines beneath his feet.
 
Adam spun his hatred her way like a flaming frisbee.
 
“Katie, you're at fault, too. The whole reason you're here is that you want to fit in with these other girls, despite knowing that they were up to no good, knowing that they planned on mistreating me. None of this would have happened if you didn't go along with the bullying. Katie, it doesn’t take straight A’s to know that."
 
“Careful, Adam.” Katie warned him with her dark eyes flashing.
 
However, Adam wasn't careful.
 
"You can't blame everything on the E-, the E-."
 
Despite all of his anger and rage, he couldn't finish saying something. That something important that couldn't cross his lips got stuck in his throat, making him literally choke on his own words. He struggled for a couple of seconds, making a gurgling sound as he tried to pry it free with his hands.
 
"Are you having a hard time saying something, Adam?" Katie leaned forward around Charity.
 
Oh, Jeez. She looked really scary for some reason.
 
Katie asked, "Do you need help using your words?"
 
That's ridiculous. He could use whatever words he wanted, all except that one. He didn't remember it anyways, but that wasn't important. His anger didn't need to figure out what happened, it only needed to get even. It was no big deal that he couldn’t fully remember the crimes committed against them; they were all guilty because they picked on him. That was for certain, the bits and pieces he could pull together told him that much. They probably remembered the same.
 
He coughed a couple of times as he recovered. Luckily, anger was still driving him on autopilot across the finish line.
 
"You guys treated me like an object! I was a doll to you, a joke, at best a harmless prank! You didn't need to come ruin me like you did, but you were too pretty, too sexy, too smart to leave me alone. Now that you've done your damage, you want to pretend that this didn't happen, or weren’t the cause for this nightmare. It's all your fault! I hate you for what you did!"
 
Mrs. Hartmann shouted, "You can stop now! You made your point!"
 
The whole car swerved out of its comfort zone. Which always happens when anger takes the wheel. Adam would let it keep driving as long as he could, the heat in his chest burst, he was seeing red.
 
"You’re far from perfect yourself, Lindsey! You only show up when it suits you. You don't get to be the cool mom, hot mom, and honest mom."
 
"What are you even saying?" Marisa asked, sounding just as dumbfounded as her mom looked in the rear view mirror.
 
"I'm saying that I'm mad at the way you guys treated me."
 
"Fine. We get it. Shut up." Charity mumbled around her fingers as she chewed her nails.
 
They finished the long as hell car ride in silence. All the while, Adam wondered if he did the right thing by lashing out.
 
......
 
A few hours later, the car pulled in front of his house. It looked like most houses in Lovington, white picket fence, tiny yard, two stories of the American dream wrapped up in white washed planks and olive green window dressing.
 
Without another word, he grabbed his bag, left the SUV and marched inside, still shaking from the flood of endorphins that stuck around after he stood up for himself.
 
He opened the door and stood just inside his home. Adam felt like he should have remembered something about this spot, something about his mom with strange eyes. A memory, or another nightmare, he couldn't tell the difference anymore. It was all so splotchy.
 
However, there was a scar there, and scars came from scabs. Something about this moment wounded him, he couldn't quite put his finger on it, pinpoint the source of this feeling. He studied his mom in the kitchen as she cleaned dishes at the sink.
 
She turned and smiled at him. "How was the lake house, honey?"
 
“It was something,” Adam answered, “but nothing like I had expected."
 
This would be something new, a baby step towards normalcy. He'd have to get used to deflecting questions like all of the other teenagers, his mom would never understand. Did he even understand what had happened that weekend?
 
His tennis shoes scraped against the floor as he forced himself to shuffle free from his spot, no longer frozen to the floor, no longer petrified.
 
Adam had to find a way to move forward.
 
He was almost all the way upstairs when his mom called out to him.
 
"Adam, some strange woman came by earlier today to ask about you. Do you know any Diane?"
 
He froze on the stairs for a moment.
 
Adam muttered, "No, it doesn't ring a bell."
 
"How odd?"
 
His mom came from the kitchen wiping her hands dry with a checkered towel.
 
"She was pretty insistent on knowing you, are you sure you don't remember anything about Diane? I think she worked at some kind of baby store, she mentioned something about a discount for my new baby. I told her she must have gotten the wrong house, there's no babies here. Not anymore."
 
"Sorry, mom. I don't know anything about that."
 
And he was telling the truth.
 
The shower always helped him think, re-evaluate every step he took, helped him imagine the steps he didn't take, or the ones that would come from an infinite number of improbable futures. He won arguments that never happened, pretended to meet people too famous for the likes of him, the impossible became possible in his active imagination.
 
He normally stood in quiet reflection, a cleansing nirvana, and felt the water fall down his neck and back, letting it soak through him. Sometimes he thought to himself. Sometimes he sang. Sometimes he got shampoo in his eyes.
 
This time Adam cradled his knees to his chest on the floor, just outside the reach of the warm water, but it still splashed callously onto his face. His skin was raw from all of the scrubbing he’d done, but he still felt dirty on the inside, the part where the soap couldn’t clean.
 
That's why he was crying, he told himself.
 
It wasn't because he was bullied all weekend by popular girls, or the fact he couldn't remember something super important, or the fact that he 'told off' those girls in the car without thinking about the repercussions. Girls like Marisa and Charity wouldn't sit idle while a loser like him got the upper hand. There would be a reprisal, he was sure of it.
 
Why couldn't he figure out the weekend?
 
It just slipped away like sand from an open palm. There were diapers, truth or dare, somehow Mrs. Hartmann showed up. With every minute that passed, the more the puzzle became undone. Important pieces were pulled free, and put back into the box, leaving a picture more resembling swiss cheese than the truth.
 
All Adam knew was that he needed to make changes and stand up for himself. That's why he was a victim, not some intercosmic assault on reality.
 
Changes would start with his room.
 
He dried his eyes with the same towel he used to dry the rest of himself, and he managed to find a shirt without any Pokemon, a pair of shorts, and a clean pair of boxer briefs. 
 
That was easy, he was now Poke-free.
 
The posters on the wall were a different story. Stylized pictures of Bulbasaur, Charizard, MewTwo were relics of a past that had no future. Same could be said about his toys and action figures, or his awesome card collection neatly organized in a large binder. He went to task removing them from his life, making his room resemble how he felt on the inside: empty, barren, void of feeling and personality. 
 
It wasn't like he just ripped things from the wall, he softly rolled the posters, taking heed to their previous importance, but understanding how they were a closed chapter. His collection of cards would now sit quietly in their new home on a forgotten upper shelf in the closet, the action figures properly boxed and labeled, a 50/50 chance it would end up in the attic or given away.
 
He had just finished and begun to appreciate the changes when his mom came in wearing disbelief like a Halloween mask.
 
"Adam, what have you done to your room?"
 
"I felt like there needed to be changes, you know, to avoid needing changes."
 
Adam grimaced, because that didn't make any sense to him at all.
 
However, his mom seemed to brush it off, and gave him a special mommy smile that made him feel warm inside.
 
"You're growing up so fast now. It's hard to believe that you're a grown up, seeing this room without all of that childish stuff on the wall only reminds me of how little time we have left together. We’ve got to talk about your plans for next year, about getting you out of the house more, and away from your boring, old mom.”
 
“Mom, you’re not boring or old.”
 
His mom melted from the cheesy compliment.
 
“You're so sweet, Adam. I’m so proud of you. I just wish your father was still here to see how you’ve grown into a fine young man.”
 
Yes, Adam knew all about how wounds become scabs and scabs become scars.
 
During that very touching moment, the first message chimed on his phone, and Adam ignored the notification chime as he hugged his mom. He still got those hugs at eighteen.
 
After his mom left his room, he checked his phone to see what he missed.
 
A message from Marisa Hartmann, posted on the school-wide thread.
 
Even the tiny schools like Lovington High School had an online forum in the way of text messages, pictures and memes, where all was shared between all students. It was a place where the outsiders could enviously watch the cool kids, and the cool kids could show off what the losers were missing. It was a home for party pictures, test answers, cruel jokes about teachers, and it had a penchant for rumors.
 
Adam knew just what Marisa had to say about him: Diapers. It didn’t need to say anything else. Land mine.
 
He could try to brush it off as a cruel rumor, they wouldn’t believe the most popular girl in school, would they? Not unless someone corroborated her story.
 
Ding!
 
Another notification showed up on his screen. This time the message came from Charity Brown. He didn’t need to check that one either.
 
Ding! Ding! Ding!
 
One message after another, from more popular kids. Probably their reaction to what the girls said about him. There was no use seeing those either.
 
Adam slumped down the closest wall, his head hung low between his knees. Why did he have to be so stupid? It wasn’t fair. He could take short, or childish, but at least give him the intelligence to know better than to start a flame war with the homecoming queen.
 
Ding! Ding! Brrr! Brrr!
 
Switching to silent did little to stop the onslaught. He shook it off, did his best to ignore it. Still, it ate at him.
 
He tried to recall what else they could say. Pink pull-ups, pink pacifier, wet sailor suit, stuffed unicorn, pooping and pooping again. Oh, jeez. They even had a video at their disposal, why didn’t he ask Katie to delete the stupid thing? They wouldn’t share that lovely embarrassing moment with everyone in the school, right? It didn’t matter now. ‘Go with the flow’ and whatnot, Adam couldn’t change the past..
 
Adam hopped on his bike, he had to move forward.
 
More changes came from the mall.
 
New clothes were a part of the ‘new’ Adam, he bought a pair of nondescript shirts with brand names and artistic designs. He saw rows upon rows of shorts, but decided upon an expensive pair of jeans.
 
Next came a maturing haircut. Short on the sides, with a swooping thing across the forehead. It was something in style, he'd seen it at the school, and it was time for him to fit into the box like the rest of the teenagers. 
 
All of these changes were paid for by his 'Pokemon card fund', he didn't need the money for rare Charizards any longer.
 
His phone buzzed the whole time he was getting a haircut, his pocket was shaking beneath the towel-like cloth draped over him. He squirmed in his seat, impatient and angry. But even he had to admit that he looked ‘kinda cool’ after seeing the finished product in the large mirror.
 
The community college aged girl ran her fingers through his hair, not as a kid brother, but dare he say, sensually? It could’ve been just about getting a bigger tip, but his study in modern art told him something different. Especially in the way she softly but her lower lip as she massaged his scalp.

Making changes was nice, a freeing feeling like the last day before summer.
 
That feeling felt nice on the way home, and he completely forgot about his phone until he was alone in his room. He pulled it out of his pocket.
 
528 messages. Oh, jeez.
 
That’s a lot for a school of 300 kids. Maybe they were going on about something other than him. No, even he wasn’t that stupid.
 
He turned off his phone and tucked it away into his desk, removing himself from the thread before locking the stupid thing away. That night he wished for a meteor to take down all of Lovington, that way he wouldn’t have to go to school. Adam regretted the land mines he made with his words, for being a jerk to those girls, and wondered how bad it could actually get for him.
 
Even as he closed his eyes, the phantom sounds still came from his dead phone.
 
Ding! Ding! Ding!

[Sarah Penguin]

 

[D503]

Oh man, I hope it's not as a bad as we think. Great story-writing, really gripping.

[kerry]

22 hours ago, direking said:

Defcon 4

Do you mean DEFCON 2? 5 is the least problematic, not the most.

[ABAlex]

Really well done on this one. Love the slow burn, especially when you know where it will inevitably end up. Poor guy though lol. 

[direking]

Super cool! Sorry for the long wait, I had to do a lot of tweaking to the ending. A month ago, I thought I was 95% done, and that turned out to be a lie. But I’m 100% done now!

What a long and wonderful journey this has been. I was so nervous about posting my story, that closed my eyes when I posted my first chapters. Just hoping for the best.

Thanks for all of the positive comments, it really was writing fuel for me, and I hope you guys had fun with this story. I plan on writing more. I also plan on adding a short author’s notes to Without Merit at a later time.

32

The double doors to Lovington Highschool were some kind of portal.
 
On the outside, Adam looked them over, understanding just what kind of threshold they represented. They opened up into the Senior hall, where everyone would be waiting.
 
The new clothes fit him well, but the bland black hoodie and faded blue jeans weren’t as much of an anxiety suppressant as he had hoped.
 
Rumors had wings in Lovington, they flew from lips to ears, only to nest and fly again.
 
He didn’t know what they would say about him, or the events of the weekend. He had to own it. He now understood what Charity meant about regrets, things gone wrong. That sometimes came without merit, without fault of his own.
 
Unfortunately, it didn’t matter to the rumors, or the people who spread them. ‘Going with the flow’ meant brushing off the haters, the nay-sayers, and those who’d use their words to do him harm.
 
It took courage to walk through those doors, especially not knowing what kind of nightmare awaited. He pushed his headphones to his ears and pressed play. Popular mainstream music was loud and obnoxious, but it covered mistakes like whiteout, placating the nagging thoughts and regrets, and putting to sleep the constant anxiety that plagued him. 

Adam pulled his hood over his head and ventured inside.
 
Numerous groups of cliques congregated around the edges of the wide hallway, staking claims to their positions like it was prime real estate.There had to be at least a hundred of his peers milling about their morning as if nothing was special; however, that all changed when they saw Adam in the doorway. 
 
Adam felt their eyes as he walked through those doors. All of them stared at him.
 
The band kids, scene kids, nerds and jocks, popular girls, geeky girls, all the girls who found themselves in between, the wallflowers and quiet kids, the drug addicts, the cheerleaders, the rule followers, the honor students, the underclassmen, the upperclassmen, they all stopped what they were doing and watched his entrance with interest.
 
The double doors closed behind him.
 
Immediately, they turned to whisper to one another, and Adam watched the rumors take flight. This place was like an airport, or a pigeon coop.
 
He didn’t care to hear them, that’s why there was a volume button on his phone. He rapidly pressed it until the music drowned them out. The synthetic beat was the only thing louder than his heart. It was the mortar that smoothed over the metaphorical bricks he tread upon, filling in the cracks, making each step easier for him.
 
Adam gripped his backpack tighter as he brushed by the groups, cutting between cliques, making shortcuts through the onlookers. The music could only cover so much, he felt the heat from their stares.
 
After pushing through a gaggle of choir girls, Adam looked down the hall.
 
Thirty or so feet away, the entire varsity football team waited for him. At least it looked like the entire football team, about twenty huge Neanderthals hung around like they had a score to settle.
 
Oh, jeez. What if one of them was Charity’s boyfriend? He and the cheerleader held hands, and did other things, and now they would kill him. He probably deserved it, too.
 
Adam turned to go a different way, maybe try to cut through a non-senior hallway, but was grabbed by someone, and forced to turn around.
 
It was Jeremy.
 
His face was wild and full of passion, he was screaming something that Adam couldn’t quite make out, so he lowered the volume of his music.
 
“Adam! What the hell did you do this weekend? The whole school is talking about you.”
 
Adam pulled himself free from his grip. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I don’t want to talk about it.”
 
Jeremy wouldn’t let it go.
 
“I’m your best friend, you have to tell me everything. The rumors are freaking wild, man.”
 
“Maybe another time, I — “
 
Adam turned around and straight into the biggest football player he’d ever seen, or felt. His head bumped into the guy’s chest, knocking his headphones out, almost sending Adam to the floor.
 
The blonde gorilla-human hybrid looked down at Adam and ordered with the roughest baritone voice.
 
“You’re going to need to come with us.”
 
Half a dozen muscle bound arms grabbed him and started taking him to the epicenter of the school: the cafeteria.
 
There was already a crowd gathered in the cafeteria, and the full hallway followed behind in a make-shift funeral procession. They were taking him to a public execution. Adam just knew there would be a guillotine, or a gallows, maybe a firing squad would seal the deal. He was a dead man walking, or being dragged, his toes barely scraped the floor as he went to his doom.
 
Then he had the strangest, most awful thought. What if they were going to diaper him?
 
Bullies have done worse with less ammunition, the stories that could be told from this weekend were more than enough to warrant that kind of harassment. They’d call him a baby, force a pacifier into his mouth, maybe make him crawl on the tile floor. All in front of their relentless jeering and flashing cameras.
 
His heart sunk into the black pit again, the pit couldn’t be dispelled by loud music, new clothes and a haircut. It ran deeper than that.
 
They formed a large circle, resembling a ring of sorts. He couldn’t make it all out, being manhandled and all.
 
However, the throng parted as they stared at Adam and his escort, but they were packed so tight that Adam rammed into almost every backpack and shoulder, disorienting him until they threw him onto his knees in the middle of everyone.
 
In front of him stood three of the hottest girls in his grade: Marisa Hartmann, Charity Brown, and Katie Nguyen.
 
Oh, fucking, jeez.
 
He cowered on the cold tile floor, waiting for the worst to happen; he cringed, closed his eyes, and hoped that it wouldn’t hurt.
 
One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Three heartbeats. Still nothing happened.
 
He opened one eye, Charity was there, only closer to him. He opened his other eye, there was Marisa, and she had a smile on her face.
 
Both girls helped him to his feet.
 
Marisa leaned into his personal space and whispered into his ear.
 
“We took the liberty to spin the rumor mill in your direction.”
 
Adam gulped.
 
“Hey, kiddo.” Charity nuzzled up next to him, in front of the football team and cheer squad no less. “Just play along and enjoy the ride, think of it as a half-hearted apology.”
 
“It’s the best we could do,” Katie added.
 
Charity wrapped Adam up in her arms, her left hand trailed down his back until she gave his bottom the firmest squeeze. Then she ran her tongue up his neck, to a gasp from his gathered classmates. Marisa closed in for a soft kiss on his cheek, which elicited even more mumbling from the mob of students. Katie moved in for a fist bump, which Adam was happy to return. No one cared about that.
 
The blonde temptress known as Charity circled Adam as she faced the crowd.
 
“Who wants to hear about this crazy kid?”
 
They loudly cheered and clapped, jockeying for position closest to him and the three girls, before quickly quieting so that they could listen to the rest.
 
What was going on here?
 
The thespian and cheerleader played to the crowd. Katie kinda hung around, but Adam understood she was a part of this thing. Probably the planner.
 
“Let me tell you about this Legend,” Charity addressed the gathering with a hand on her hip. “This wild man shows up at the lake house and immediately starts doing mudslides in the backyard. I’m like, that’s too much party for me, Adam. Simmer down, dude.”
 
The audience let out a few uncomfortable laughs, but they were still laughs. Charity skillfully primed them like an engine, serving a tasty appetizer for what was to come, all a carefully wrapped package making them beg for more. And they wanted more.
 
“That was just the beginning,” Marisa added. “It’s safe to say that Adam brought out some weird things in me that I’m not sure that I fully comprehend.”
 
She could say that again, Adam thought. The strange fog that obscured his memories told him that much.
 
He felt strong hands on his shoulders and back, jostling, giving him pats, this was slowly building into a frenzy. He was in the spotlight, but not as a joke, but as a hero? He felt a smile forming on his face that accompanied a blush, he couldn’t hide from this, and he wasn’t sure he would want to if given the chance.
 
Charity strutted around Adam like he was a prize she’d just won at the fair.
 
“On the first night, me and him got so wild that we had to wash the bedsheets. And I’m pretty sure that we burned some pajamas in the process.”
 
The excited gallery of teenagers whooped and hollered. Adam spotted a collection of cheerleaders on his right. The worst rumor mongers in the school covered their mouths with their pom-poms. Their whispers were sure to condemn Charity for her ‘slutiness’.
 
Was he going viral, but in a good way?
 
“I dressed up like a Playboy bunny for him,” Marisa confessed.
 
“He slapped a pair of handcuffs on me, then he accused me of being a bad girl.” Charity crossed her wrists behind her back. “You know, guilty as charged.”
 
There was a rhythm to this crazy sideshow, the girls would say something that was half-true, then all of his peers would yell, scream, and cheer. It didn’t feel real. How the entire school was at his back, on his side; he didn’t even know most of them, but they loved him for some reason. Adam could feel the air around him change, was this sunlight?
 
A guy from deep within the crowd yelled.
 
“Hey Katie, what did he do with you?”
 
The entire cafeteria went quiet, awaiting her words, and Katie took some time to gather them. The honor student had somehow melted back into the surrounding circle, shying away from the attention. This wasn’t her kind of thing, and Adam wanted to respect that. Still, she stepped into the ring.
 
Boy, did she look trepidatious.
 
“Yep. He’s a legend.”
 
Crickets-crickets.
 
Charity shot a sideways glance at the black belt, and cleared her throat in the silence. A cue to come up with something, anything, to keep the hype train rolling.
 
“Come on, you can come up with better,” Charity mumbled out the side of her mouth.
 
Katie took a second try at working the audience.
 
“He — uh. Um. He spanked me like a naughty schoolgirl.”
 
The same voice from the crowd screamed, “That’s some kinky shit!”
 
Whoa. They went even more wild, slapping his back until it hurt. The guys were screaming things in his honor. The girls doing the same. The sexually repressed honor students started fanning themselves as Katie hid behind them. She wouldn’t come out to play again, and Adam couldn’t blame her.
 
“Yeah, this weekend was a freaking crazy blur,” Charity continued to weave a tapestry that wasn’t entirely true. “Adam spent half the time not wearing pants, the other half going commando. This guy was the center of our attention, a freaking Legend.”
 
Charity continued to strut around the circle, a ringmaster without the top hat and cane, and the people loved her circus. That’s what this was: a wild circus of barely controlled energy, an unstable reaction, and Charity shook the beaker with both hands.
 
“You know, ladies, I’m not the type to kiss and tell.”
 
The girls all giggled, because that was just a plain lie. Just like the rest of this story.
 
“My man, Adam the Legend. He’s a grower and a show’er, he can juggle and please two ladies at the same time, and he doesn’t have to go to a restaurant if he wants to eat out. If you catch my drift.”
 
Oh, jeez. The girls of the school batted their eyelashes at him as if he turned from a frog into a prince right before their very eyes.
 
“He’s college level crazy. We start drinking and this dude crushes so much booze that he pisses his pants, but he doesn’t even care! He barely remembers doing it!”
 
The football team went nuts, peeing your pants while drunk was a good thing in their eyes, who knew?
 
“And don’t get me started on Marisa’s mom,” Charity added in vaudevillian fashion, with a curved hand at her mouth as if she was revealing a badly kept secret.
 
The audience quickly quieted from her revelation, the hot mom was well known throughout the school, and was subject to just as many unfulfilled fantasies as her daughter.
 
Jeremy leaned into the circle and screamed with both fists clenched in the air.

“MILF!”
 
The war-cry was repeated by the under-sexed and overly-horny, a word used to describe any somewhat attractive woman over thirty. It hummed as it echoed around the teenagers until it became somewhat of a mantra to his classmates.
 
“MILF! MILF! MILF!”
 
They sounded their chant like cavemen around a large bonfire, a primal heartbeat to a slow and steady rhythm. The only thing missing was a bongo drum.
 
Charity skillfully waited for the group to simmer down, the thrill was palpable, a bouncing ball dropped from the roof onto concrete, and all Adam could do was watch and marvel at the kinetic energy.
 
“Yes, Charity, what about my mother?” Marisa whispered through clenched teeth.
 
All she got for a response was a wink.
 
It looked like the cheerleader wasn’t going to stick with the script, that’s something that Marisa should have expected from her best friend.
 
When it got quiet again, Charity continued the show.
 
“We’re all in this parking lot, and the next thing I knew, she’s taking off his shorts in the back of the S-U-V!”
 
Charity started pumping her arms back and forth like a locomotive, hyping up the crowd even more. It was loud, the circle was closing in on them, the people were crushing force held back only by anticipation.
 
He thought about that ‘moment’ in the parking lot. That was a diaper change, not whatever she was insinuating. However, Adam wasn’t going to be the one to correct her in front of everybody.
 
Still, his memory remained Swiss cheese. He remembered a diaper change in a parking lot, but which parking lot? He hadn’t a clue. Charity was changing the way he saw the weekend, a re-imaging of sorts, and Adam welcomed every alteration to his story.
 
The cheerleader stopped in the middle of the circle.
 
“That’s not all, my friends. Rumor has it that there’s a video.”
 
Everyone gasped collectively. No way!
 
Okay, this was going too far, and Adam had to stop her from talking about the video. A video of him getting his dirty diaper changed by Marisa and the gang. Also, a big part of that video was him acting like a baby, and loudly filling said dirty diaper. Why did he do all of that?
 
Adam scurried over to Charity, who was still in ringmaster form. He grabbed her arm, forcibly whispered in her ear with as much intensity as pragmatically allowed.
 
“Please don’t talk about the video, Charity.”
 
Sensing disaster, Marisa rushed to stop her friend as well, trying to apply the brakes to keep the hype train from running off the rails.
 
“Adam’s right,” Marisa started, “we don’t need to bring up that video.”
 
“Oh, I need to talk about the video,” Charity loudly countered.
 
“Please don’t talk about the video,” Adam pleaded.
 
“No need to mention the video,” Marisa insisted a second time.
 
Charity didn’t care.
 
“Who here wants to know about the video?” She announced like a boxing promoter to a sold out crowd.
 
“Video! Video!”
 
His classmates sure liked to chant things.
 
Charity stood at the center of the circle and slammed her arms out wide as if she was about to take-off like a jet. The whole cafeteria went quiet, and awaited what came next with baited breath.
 
“Yeah, there’s a video….
 
…. Starring Adam on his back
 
…. Marisa between his legs
 
…. I’m straddling his head
 
…. Mrs. Hartmann is giving us pointers
 
…. while Katie held the camera.”
 
It took a moment for the few hundred teens to do the math. A long, awkward quiet moment. Then, they erupted. An explosion of teenage hormones combined with horniness, the peer pressure of mob mentality only added to the blast. Their cheers were deafening, rocking the entire room, and shaking the very foundations of Lovington High School.
 
The football players lifted Adam from the ground, and before he knew what was happening, he was on their shoulders, held aloft over the entire school. There were high-fives and handshakes, screaming and pointing, as everyone lost their collective minds.
 
They started chanting again. This time about a pipsqueak on the shoulders of giants, about a kid that got invited to a lake house by the three hottest girls in his grade, and despite all of the odds against him, he came away a conquering hero. So a lie, basically.
 
“Leg-end! Leg-end! Leg-end!”
 
The cafeteria started raining tiny bits of ripped-up notebook paper like a ticker tape parade. It fell all around him, Adam grabbed a piece from the air, it was actually a scrap of a page from an out-of-date textbook. Oh, jeez. His school was freaking crazy and notoriously stupid, but his smile grew so big that it almost made him cry.
 
He was too busy glad-handing the masses to notice the parade in his honor had already begun to move. From his place head and shoulders above the crowd, Adam caught the pair of popular girls out of the corner of his eye. Charity was a cowboy simultaneously winking and shooting him with dual hand pistols, while making ‘pow’ noises with her mouth. Marisa rolled her eyes at her stupid best friend, but blew him a kiss and gave him a thumbs up. Katie was nowhere to be found.
 
“Leg-end! Leg-end! Leg-end!”
 
The hallways rang out with their voices, Adam surfed upon the physical tide of popularity around the whole school. It was a surprisingly glorious and smooth ride, besides having to dodge a pair of low hanging exit signs fastened to the ceiling, and not having the ab strength to sit up, he just laid down upon the wave to 'go with the flow'.
 
The parade followed behind, and all around.
 
His cretin friends were excitedly screaming how they knew him, like he was a famous celebrity. Jeremy went on and on about sticking to his plan to pick up girls. Random girls clutched at his clothes like he was the last TV on Black Friday, but were kept at bay by the football team, who proved to be good bodyguards as they carried him triumphantly around the school.
 
When the first lap was finished, they immediately took a second.
 
“Leg-end! Leg-end! Leg-end!”
 
As they passed the teacher’s lounge, Adam caught a few of the grownups taking one look at the oncoming wave of wild kids before heading for another cup of coffee. They just knew it was going to be ’one of those days’.
 
This was the best moment of his life, and he didn’t want it to ever end.
 
However, all good things, it ended at the sound of the bell. When the party was over, Adam found himself back on his feet and on the other side of the school from his locker.
 
He was still chasing his breath from running across the school when he got there. That’s where he found Katie, leaning against the row of cheap metal lockers like she owned the whole thing.
 
“Hey, Katie.” Adam grinned at her before opening his backpack for a book transfer. “Aren’t you worried about being tardy?”
 
“No, I have a special way of getting out of trouble. I would tell you, but I’d have to erase your memory if I did.”
 
She laughed like she told a joke, but Adam didn’t get what was so funny.
 
Katie slugged his arm, kinda too hard, and Adam rolled his shoulder as he grimaced. He quickly shook it off, but it smarted more than he liked.
 
“Quite a party this morning, huh?” He made small talk as he opened his locker. “I know I shouldn’t complain, but being nice isn’t very much like Charity or Marisa. I wonder what caused their change of heart.”
 
She answered, “I wouldn’t worry about it, Adam.”
 
He gave her a sideways glance, she knew something that he didn’t; and he didn’t like being kept out of secrets, almost as much as he hated being a joke. Adam leaned in close to whisper.
 
“I mean, they seemed to remember things differently. It felt like they left things out, but I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t want the whole school knowing about the diap— “
 
“Shhhh!” Katie interrupted him with a finger to her lips.
 
She was right, Adam shouldn’t talk about the weird diaper things. It’s be stupid to ask for the truth when the lie was better for him. However, the lie was harder to shake off than a punch to the arm.
 
Katie placated.
 
“Alright, Adam. It turns out that your crazy rant on the way home did the impossible; it gave them a conscience, made them use their powers for good.”
 
Adam asked, “Really?”
 
“Yeah, totally.” Katie shrugged then winked at him. “Or, it could have been something else that’s a little more persuasive.”
 
Why was she acting so weird, suddenly so chummy with him? He found himself grasping for puzzle pieces as they slid to the floor, toppled by a kick to a coffee table. What an odd mental image. There was something he couldn’t remember about her, something important enough to bother him.
 
After a moment of hesitation, Katie applied her hands to her hips.
 
“Adam, is there anything weird between us?”
 
Adam shook his head.
 
“Why would anything be weird between us? Your awesome plan worked, and I’m cool now. Or something.”
 
She leaned in with a raised eyebrow.
 
“And what plan was that, exactly?”
 
He thought about it for a moment. Then a second moment. He even rubbed his chin like an old school detective.
 
“I can't remember all the details, but - I don’t think it’s important anymore,” he answered.
 
Katie pulled him in for a surprising hug. A loving, caring, friendly and deep squeezing hug. She had some strong arms, strong enough to compress the air out of him as she lifted him from the ground. He couldn't figure out why she was so happy about his spontaneous amnesia, but he had to go with it, even after she returned him to the floor.
 
Adam closed his eyes and accepted her overly tight and awkward friendly embrace. He appreciated the moment before he opened them again.
 
Over her shoulder, and approaching from out of her sight, Adam caught Jeremy sneaking up behind Katie. He was up to no good, crouched low and on tip-toes with a devilish grin. His ‘friend’ had his flattened hand outstretched like a hockey stick, puck-thumping side leveled waist high and targeting Katie’s butt for a slap shot.
 
Oh, jeez!
 
Adam was an idiot, but it didn’t take any intuition to put together this oncoming disaster.
 
Was Jeremy stupid enough to spank Katie right here in the hallway?
 
Yeah, from the looks of it, he was decidedly dumb enough smack the bottom of an unaware, temperamental black belt.
 
Adam braced for impact. Neglecting to warn Katie, or Jeremy. He moved in slow motion while the idiot hurried in for the kill, getting a running start before —
 
SMACK!
 
It was cringe inducing. He closely watched Katie to see how she’d react. He saw the rage build on her face, like a stop-motion lego video, coming together piece by piece as she transformed into something else. Something really freaking scary.
 
Adam thought to himself. ‘So Jeremy dies as he lived: desperate and horny.’
 
Jeremy the Spanker made a goofy laugh, one with a snort like a pig, before settling into an even goofier stance next to Katie.
 
“Hey Sugar Buns, a little birdie told me that you like getting spanked. I thought you were a goodie-goodie, not a sexy-kinky thing, but I’m not against giving you a little smack to the ass if you get out of line.”
 
The only thing ‘out of line’ was Jeremy. Adam was about to open his mouth, to remind him that girls were modern art and not Sudoku, when Katie gave him a look. This one said, ‘I got this’.
 
She slowly slid her arms free from Adam, before equally slowly turning towards Jeremy with tight lips, burning eyes, and an ever so furrowing brow. Suddenly, her whole demeanor changed, it completely turned on a dime. She gave him some kind of sinister smile, there was a weird twinkle in her eye.
 
“Oh, I’m not nearly as good as I’m made out to be,” Katie claimed, kinda flirty-like.
 
In a jovial nature, she hooked an arm around his shoulder and started steering him the opposite direction down the hallway. Her voice sounded so low and sultry.
 
“You have no idea what I’m capable of doing.”
 
Needless to say, Jeremy was confused with the turn of events. Just as much as Adam. This kind of flirting lead to good results? What would GQ tell him to do or say next? All Jeremy knew was that a girl was touching him, and it wasn’t to push him away like usual.
 
Jeremy squeaked, “You want to go out or something?”
 
Katie giggled.
 
“Of course, bay-bee.”
 
Then, the newly formed couple moved down the hall and out of sight.
 
Adam chuckled at that strange course of events, it was a morning full of surprises. Unfounded expectations were weird that way. However, for some reason, he’d thought Katie was into girls. Who knew where that came from?
.....
 
A few weeks later.
 
It was prom night. Where kids dressed like adults in oversized tuxes and under fitting dresses, but they still played like children, with no regards to regrets or the passage of time. The dance floor was a sweaty pit of bumping and grinding under the flashing colors of disco lights to the loud, heavily censored popular music.
 
Everyone knew all the words, even Adam.
 
He found himself as the center of attention, something he'd gotten used to after being carried around the school. His mythos had grown even more since that fateful morning, a few girls added their own falsehoods about hooking up, and groups of dudes swore up and down that they'd seen the video on the internet. Both groups agreed on one thing: Adam was hung. 
 
Adam would allow the lie to exist, he didn’t want the truth to come out, but he wouldn’t let the lie define him.
 
There was a long line of girls who wanted him to take them to prom, he had somehow managed to steer them towards the gang, except Jeremy who was somehow going steady with Katie. Adam preferred to go without a date.
 
He took his prom picture with his mom.
 
Due to his newfound popularity, it wasn’t viewed as pathetic or loser-like, Adam was considered sincere and caring. In fact, he unknowingly started a trend where the popular boys would take their moms to proms, thus the “Prommy Mommies” fad was born.
 
The place went nuts every time he made his way to the dance floor, his uncoordinated efforts were met with praise as he refused to move to the beat. Every stupid thing he did made him cooler, every part that made him a wallflower made him a trendsetter. Turns out being normal was so freaking over rated, and being unapologetically himself made him cool. That and the fact that the prettiest girls always had his back.
 
He danced with Marisa. He danced with Charity.
 
He had an awkward encounter with Katie and Jeremy.
 
The latter wore an overly baggy tux to prom, he was surprisingly self-conscious about the whole thing. Adam caught him hiding away in a corner a few times, as if not wanting to be seen, and he had a weird waddling gait like he pulled a muscle. Katie carried around a large purse, stuffed to the brim for some reason, and she had that diabolical twinkle in her eyes the whole time as she bossed poor Jeremy around.
 
Adam actually felt sorry for him.
 
Especially the way he constantly begged for bathroom breaks while Katie pretended not to hear over the loud music, chastising him over and over for not being able to 'hold it'. There was definitely something strange going on between them, but that wasn't his problem, not his circus and not his monkey.
 
.....
 
Yearbooks came out two weeks before graduation. Adam found himself signing more than his fair share, and got special messages from three of the hottest girls in his grade.
 
His signing pages were also popular, most of the football team left their mark, his weirdo friends signed along the margins; but so did a few girls he had considered strangers, some left their phone numbers next to their names, and a few left the imprint of lipstick kisses next to their numbers.
 
Adam studied the opened yearbook as he turned to the section of colored photos, because only seniors deserved that kind of recognition. There sat an heirloom from his pre-transformation, a picture taken before the mostly-forgotten, re-imagined life changing events of the lake house.
 
The photograph was kind enough not to show the encyclopedia he sat upon to get into the frame, but it did capture his youthful essence just the same. A young man that looked incredibly out of place among his peers.
 
Shaggy brown hair, boyish face, a ‘Gotta Catch Them All’ motto on a childish shirt, and a half-hearted smile that told a story about deviation from normalcy, about a battle to stand up for himself, and absolutely nothing about the Entity and the diaper demotion that he suffered from one weekend at a lake house.
 
Beneath that picture there’s a name: Adam the Legend.
 
….
 
Epilogue
 
Katie Nguyen held her phone in her hand, her finger hovered over the delete button as she watched the video for the thousandth time. She should have deleted it by now, but something stopped her from erasing proof of the event from history.
 
The human part of her thought it was unwise to keep this evidence on her person. The other part, what Adam called the Entity, loved to watch this thing over and over again.
 
Her parents were far too smart to live in a podunk place like Lovington, they were brought here by the government to work at a secret laboratory. There was an accident, they opened a door, and something came out. However, the Cube wasn’t nearly as important as what snuck in unnoticed.
 
Dr. Nguyen, and the other Dr. Nguyen, lived off a generous pension. A shush fund designed to keep them fat and happy. Even they didn’t know about her, or the others, in town. Ones that spread influence like an invisible fog, or like Katie, who sparked inspiration like a lit match, igniting a flame that put Adam into a diaper.
 
Katie understood It’s influence long before the basement game room at the Hartmann’s house.
 
Unfortunately, the lake house getaway didn’t go exactly as planned. Give two idiot teenage girls a potential baby boy in a bassinet, and they still managed to mess it all up; not seal the deal, not tape-up the diaper so to speak.
 
That’s why she had to take total control during the game of truth or dare, they were spinning in circles, and trying to apply their cruelty to her, how dare they? She had already put up with being spanked by the clueless dweeb.
 
Also, there was her conscience. That was easier to keep quiet these days, but it was still there like annoying 'baggage'.
 
Laissez-faire regression and hands-off style didn’t work. If she wanted to do something right, she had to get her hands dirty, and do it herself.
 
The Council wrote off the weekend as a learning experience, and Katie learned what she could from the 'Adam debacle'. She had to answer to the Council for letting him go, there were others in Lovington already wary of her independent status. Katie had decided to focus more on being true to both sides of herself. And it was working.
 
Her latest project had won praise from those ‘like her’ around town.
 
Katie hungrily swiped the phone over to the next few pictures; these had an entirely different star.
 
Jeremy was quite the model.
 
The first picture of him was when he was still in pull-ups. She could see everything she wanted, his short t-shirt barely reached the top of his pull-up. And the shame on his face, yummy.
 
It was a picture of her progress, and of his regression.
 
Jeremy had a blue pacifier between his lips, a large teddy bear wrapped up tightly in his arms. Aww, such a sweet little boy heading back to diapers.
 
However, his face was what made it so perfectly delish. The red cheeks and tired eyes showed evidence of crying, all of the pain of being a victim of circumstances beyond his control. It didn’t make her feel bad like it did with Adam. Oh, no. It made her feel powerful and sexy. A liberated teenaged sorceress in a tiny town full of toys.
 
Jeremy’s decline moved quicker than she suspected, an accident on the first date, then another on the second, prompted by her intervention, her inspiration, her influence. By the third date, he was wetting himself without any unfair influence by way of her powers.
 
He had agreed to pull-ups, not the little kid type though. Jeremy insisted that he wasn’t a pants wetting baby. That was only the beginning.
 
Next, the blackmail came.
 
Katie pretended to be a third party with incriminating evidence of his lack of potty training, and unless he started sending pictures and videos to a certain someone, the entire school would know about his ‘piddle-pants problem’.
 
She giggled. She couldn’t get enough of her brilliant scheme, part of a lesson she had learned from manipulating Adam. If you act like you’re there to help, play the part of the shoulder to cry on, no one even suspects you.
 
That picture was already a month old. Katie swiped again to something taken more recent.
 
This time red-faced Jeremy was on all fours with his butt in the air, and puffy white diaper proudly on display. He still suckled that pacifier, which was actually turning into a nervous habit. A habit which occasionally switched to his thumb as a substitute, even as he was unaware and in public. Katie adored that. Especially when she got to point it out to him, and soak in all of that delicious second hand embarrassment. 
 
Also, the brightly colored dinosaur t-shirt was a good addition to the ensemble. Really checked that ‘childish’ box for her, it made her ethereal tummy growl, and made conjure impure thoughts.
 
Katie checked the time. A deadline was rapidly approaching for him to send her the next video, the third of the series, each escalating further into babyhood. Was Jeremy going to be a good little boy — or a bad baby?
 
The trip with him to see Diane, aka the new ‘Ma’ Webber, had better pan out, at least give better results than with Adam. That whole weekend was nothing but mistake after mistake, and Katie had to own up to them. Still, there was the Cube. It had tried to interfere before, but had never showed up in person, or dream. Adam was special.
 
The Cube gave him advice, Katie only knew because the idiot told her everything it said to him, in the form of a toddler ‘guru girl’. However, nothing Katie gleaned from her interrogation of Adam was useful. Only that the baby caught on to being babied, and that was the end of her little experiment.
 
It bothered her to let the catch off the line, the fish free from the hook. For all shapes and purposes, Adam was well on his way to babyhood, and she had won. But it bit at her, and the human side of her, and the Entity, seemed to both agree. Adam, while perfect for the role, didn't deserve his treatment.
 
It all came without merit.
 
Probably a dumb decision, but she wasn’t freaking perfect. Still, he was the star of a show that she watched over and over again. So, it wasn’t all a loss. 
 
She flipped back to the video taken at the lake house.
 
Diane was weird, but she was right, regression was just the best.
 
Katie watched as Adam was pinned to the floor onto the changing mat, beautiful Marisa changing his diaper, Charity shaking that little rattle around, while Mrs. Hartmann barked orders and advice from the periphery, circling the action like a hungry vulture. The camera caught all of that excitement, and it also caught their glowing eyes.
 
She remembered a warning from the Council, if Adam remembered too much, he would belong to them, and it would all be out of her hands. Katie wouldn’t let that happen.
 
Her burner phone chimed.
 
It looks like Jeremy had sent the blackmailer a video, with a few minutes to spare. Just in time for her to attach it to an email that she wanted to send.
 
She brought the other phone to her face, and pressed play on the video in the message.
 
It started with a typical boy’s room, posters of hot swimsuit models on the walls, a cliche unkempt bed, even dirty clothes in small random piles. Next, she got an up close and personal look at Jeremy in his big, baby diaper. He’d gone with Huggies after doing some internet research. He told her that there was more room in the front for his ‘goodies’ in a Huggies diaper, something about stretch technology for those so inclined, or ‘big in the bulge’. Even after all of the infantilizing and suffering, Jeremy was still concerned about bragging about his size, or his manliness, trying to impress Katie with whatever he had left: which was his penis. That’s what made treating him this way so delightful.
 
Adam was clueless, but he was right, it was more fun to use ‘her powers’ on someone more deserving.
 
However, Katie was less concerned with what Jeremy was packing in the front of the diaper, and more into what he would be packing into the back of the diaper. She turned her attention back to the video.
 
“Oh, man.” Jeremey grunted with his back turned to the camera. “It’s coming, it’s coming.”
 
Then, it came. The torrent of nastiness slammed into the back of his Huggies, as he lowered his stance and spread his legs for another round. Over the beautiful sounds of the mess hitting the back of his diaper, she could hear him crying, weeping, saying he was ‘so vewwy sowwie’. She didn’t know where the lisp came from, probably with the territory of pooping a Huggies diaper. Katie giggled as she watched things progress, more pooping, more crying. More begging for it to stop.
 
It wasn’t going to stop, this time Katie was prepared to go the distance.
 
He turned back around, now facing the camera, about to send the video to his blackmailer — when the best part happened. The door to his room opened up behind him, and who other than his mom, pops inside to check on her sobbing son.
 
The middle aged woman took one look at her big baby boy in an oversized messy diaper, and the screaming started.
 
She yelled, “What are you doing in a diaper ?!”
 
Jeremy struggled to answer his oncoming mother, the man with honeyed words for the ladies suddenly had nothing to say. He backed away from his mom, trying to hide the front of his diaper, then the back, then everything from the waist down. His eyes darted towards the camera, wondering if it would be best to turn it off or let it keep recording his misery.
 
Katie was thrilled that he chose the latter.
 
His mom loudly sniffed at the air.
 
“Tell me you didn’t,” she accused.
 
The red face thing ran in the family, the angry woman looked like she was preparing to spank him, then thought better of it after peering around at his messy diaper. 
 
“I can explain, ma. I promise.”
 
“Then explain,” his mom replied in a condescending tone.
 
There was silence. Jeremy knew better than to say something about the blackmail. His dating life depended on the whole school not knowing he just filled a diaper, that he was sucking his thumb, or that he had been doing things like that for weeks. His ego depended on believing he was someone he clearly wasn’t. The acceptance hadn’t yet shown up, but Katie was sure that it would.
 
Jeremy leapt towards the camera, grabbing it preparing to hit send. He had to appease the blackmailer, or else. His mom grabbed at it as well. There was chaos, fighting, and then the video ended. The only mercy Jeremy would get that day.
 
Katie pressed the spare phone to her lips as she considered her options, her next steps in regressing little Jeremy. She would have to get his mom involved now, but all of that could wait until later. She had an email to send.
 
She transferred the video of Adam to the burner phone. This was all about being careful, so that nothing could be tracked to her specifically.
 
All of this was blamed on the Entity, she hated that name, but that wasn’t what they were called. Neither was the name that the scientists came up with, but that’s how they knew her, and that’s how she would sign the email. The one sent into the mailbox of every secret alphabet organization in DC.
 
They were the ones that opened the door, they were the ones that needed a guilty conscience.
 
She wouldn’t be shushed, she wouldn’t be silenced by a pension fund, and under the lockdown of a non-disclosure contract.
 
Katie would make them pay for closing the door behind them. She typed out her email, short, sweet, and to the point; her fingers flying across the keyboard on the smartphone. It was all about sending a message.
 
Look at what I can do.
 
XOXO,
 
The Lovington Effect
 
She hesitated before attaching the videos to the email, her human half didn’t agree with taunting the all-powerful government agencies, but the Entity wanted to see what they’d do if she yanked their chain.
 
How much bite was there to their bark?
 
Maybe she could get them to open the door again, maybe she’d go back inside, or maybe she’d bring more like her to come and stay. The Cube had to go back home, it didn’t belong here.
 
They were starving. That’s what all the dolly stuff was all about; existing on artificial sweetener instead of real sugar.
 
The humans would have to return the Cube first. No. First would be this email, then their reaction. Katie thought for a moment about the poor analyst who would come across these videos.  His young face would pale, he’d probably wipe the sweat from his brow with his necktie, and maybe he’d even wet his pants. Oh. She liked that idea, she liked it a lot. Katie grinned an evil grin, giggled an evil giggle, and finished typing her sinister message.
 
PS: I’m going to keep being me until you stop me.
 
The End

 

[kerry]

I am even more impressed with this remarkable conclusion than I have been by the story as a whole all along. Major kudos!