Tale #138: Whiteout Wipeout

Tale #138: Whiteout Wipeout (Part 3 of 'Crib Notes in the Baby Book') (Content Tags: Reality alteration, regression, mental regression, messy diapers, humiliation, karma) Zachary watched with an amused grin as he saw Roy struggle to read the children's menu at the restaurant. It was another family get together, and Zachary had been placed next to Roy at the table. Roy, with his new diminutive size, was plopped atop a booster seat. The older boy knew that it must be a trip for his cousin, to not only be reduced in size, but to be reduced mentally as well. The little boy technically had his original mind and memories of the original timeline, but his age had been reduced to that of a second grader, and his academic acumen had been reduced to that of a first grader. General knowledge, literacy, mathematics, and the like had all been reduced along with him. So now the little paper menu, which had come with a pack of crayons and plenty of activities, was a literary work on the relative level of the Odyssey. Roy had to sound out the words slowly, and his parents looked proud of the herculean effort their little boy was making to read. "Chick...Chicken nuggets! A-and fries. With ketchup." Roy looked a little embarrassed about how long it'd taken him to figure that out, and he'd gone with the third thing on the list, purely because he'd already burnt so much time reading the first two menu items. "Very good, sweetie! Do you want juice, milk, or water?" His mother asked. "Umm, juice..." Roy was too little for soda now, especially with what a big supersoaker he'd proven himself to be. Which, speaking of, Zachary could very plainly see the bulk of the boy's diaper cutting a shape against the khaki shorts he'd been dressed in. Ever since his last changes to the baby book, his cousin had been stuck traipsing around in 'StinkerPants', which were significantly thicker than anything he'd been wearing beforehand. Zachary watched quietly as his cousin almost begrudgingly moved his attention to the activities on the paper menu; he gripped a dull crayon in his stubby little fingers and focused on the maze printed on the lower half. It had been like this for a couple of weeks. Zachary had made some big adjustments to his cousin's life and then he'd been content to simply enjoy the fruits of his labor. For a while now, he'd actually thought that he might be done meddling in the boy's life, since Roy seemed to be sufficiently taken down many pegs. Zachary had gotten what he wanted, hadn't he? He was the big cousin now, who was considered relatively mature and worthy of respect. Roy was now firmly the little cousin who had missed the deadline on all the important milestones; having to repeat Kindergarten, no closer to pottytraining than the average two year old, known for being a major pantsfiller, and a litany of smaller indignities that seemed petty in comparison. So why didn't Zachary feel fulfilled? What was missing from the equation? It actually wasn't very complicated. For every indecency that Zachary had inflicted upon his cousin, none had moved the dial on Zachary's own placement. His own parents were still the overbearing, overprotective people that they'd always been, and while there were some ways that Roy's devolution had benefited how Zachary was perceived by his parents, the opposite had also rung true. With Roy being five years younger, and a few extra years treated younger, it had made Zachary's parents even less concerned about their son being treated like a typical seventh grader than before. It was subtle, but undeniable, at least to Zachary. Roy was still just old enough to influence the parenting decisions of his own mom and dad. It'd left a sour taste in his mouth, and it'd made things a little harder to enjoy in this new reality that he'd helped to personally sculpt. It left Zachary hungry for something more. "Mmph...! Errrmmph...!" His thoughts were interrupted by the soft grunting of his adjacent table guest. Roy still had his eyes tilted down, and the crayon was still tightly gripped in his hand, but his face was slowly becoming the same color as the crimson wax he'd been using to solve the maze with. It was a sight that Zachary had gotten used to, and it only meant one thing. "I think Roy is going number two in his diaper." Zachary casually tattled. "N-nuh-uh...! Mmph...Am not!" The smaller boy argued, right before a muffled fart blasted against his booster. Zachary felt like laughing at the juvenile denial of what was happening. He'd spent so many years being jealous of his cousin, of resenting the difference in their treatment, and now that 'cool, mature boy' was sloppily lying about crapping in his pants like a naughty toddler. There wasn't anything left to be jealous of, and Zachary wasn't empathetic enough for pity to take its place. Another gassy outburst rumbled underneath Roy and what followed was the low crackling of a large log making its unstoppable exit into the puffy Pampers that Roy now called his underwear. "When do you think he'll be ready for the big boy potty?" Zachary coyly questioned, as if he wasn't the sole decision-maker on the progress of his cousin's toileting abilities. His aunt sighed, but her tone denoted more affection than annoyance, as if their seven year old son's lack of pottytraining was the same as a three year old not being ready. "Might be a while. We tried seeing if he was ready for Pull-Ups, but he's just not there yet. That's okay though, they say you shouldn't try too hard to force it." Child-led pottytraining sounded silly to Zachary, but even more-so because of the circumstances involved. Their precious little boy wouldn't be ready to train until Zachary decided so, and the older boy frankly didn't have any plans to make that happen anytime soon. "Oh. Well, are you gonna change him?" Zachary added, already knowing the answer to that question too. "He'll be fine. He's such a little stinker that we had to buy a special brand; they can hold until after dinner. Besides, he always needs to go when he's eating." Roy's face looked like a tomato, and he met Zachary's sly grin with a hateful, teary-eyed scowl. The rest of the time at the restaurant would prove Roy's mother absolutely correct, not that Zachary had disbelieved her; while Roy ate his little basket of nuggets and fries, he would go on to noisily unload in his diaper at least three more times. The comedically named 'Stinkerpants' did a fantastic job of not only containing the growing pile, but of keeping the stench to a minimum. Zachary eventually shifted his attention from his cousin's humiliation to the phone buzzing in his pocket. Without Roy's influence, Zachary's placement in the social hierarchy at school had seen a nominal improvement in this timeline, which had meant a slightly more robust group of friends. While Roy pooed on himself, Zachary was texting with 'the boys' and chuckling at the memes they were sending. Some of these kids were actually people that Roy had once been able to call friends, but it was doubtful they'd have any interest in hanging with a little stinker like him now; in a fit of irony, one of them was even the kid that Roy had been telling the story to about his 'cousin that was still pooping Pull-Ups in Kindergarten'. It was funny how much things had changed. In that conversation, Zachary got invited to go see a movie the next evening. All of his friends were going, because it was supposed to be the most action-packed spectacular of the season! "Hey, dad, can I go to the movies with my friends tomorrow?" "What movie?" "Dark Crisis. The one about the guy who has to fight the Greek gods after they cause the end of the world; it has that awesome trailer, where he finds that machine gun and--" "--What's it rated?" His father interrupted him. "Huh? Well, umm, PG-13, but..." "You're not old enough yet, Zachary. Maybe in a few months." It was Roy's turn to put on a smug smile, and it was Zachary's turn to get red and fight back tears of humiliation. Here he was, twelve going very soon on thirteen, and he couldn't go see a PG-13 movie with his friends? The other kids at school were already allowed to see some R-rated movies, and had been watching PG-13 stuff since before they were even ten! It shouldn't have been surprising, not with Zachary's parents, but it still stung more than anything. It still reminded Zachary of how his own lot in life hadn't been changed by diminishing the lot that Roy had. He could make Roy get treated more like a baby, but he couldn't make himself get treated more like a young man. And now he'd made a fool of himself in front of the very boy he was tormenting. He'd given Roy a reason to feel better about himself; a reason to let out a bemused giggle, even when he was sitting in the steaming disaster site of his fudge-filled Huggies. A disaster site that had only grown more cataclysmic over the course of the dinner; the back of his shorts made him look like he was smuggling a clutch of baseballs! He wouldn't stand for it. He *couldn't* stand for it. Zachary couldn't stand to be treated like this, and he couldn't stand to be humiliated in front of the cousin that he'd put so much effort into humiliating himself! Zachary narrowed his eyes at Roy, just as the younger boy tooted and made another unsightly lump, and decided it was time to open up the baby book again. Later that evening, whenever he had returned home, he cracked open the book and started to look at things from the beginning. In the absence of Zachary's further meddling, a lot of the pages had been filling up on their own, with the contextual information that had been set up by Zachary's primary decisions. The stuff that naturally came to be was less jarring than the absurd malice that Zachary had penned to paper, which almost made the book look somewhat normal as a whole. In many of the new pictures, his cousin actually looked like a normal, happy kid. Zachary frowned and wondered what there was to even do, with so much stuff already filled in. His phone buzzed again while he was digging through the drawers of his desk; he pulled out a bottle of whiteout, with the intention of carefully editing a couple of entries to mess with Roy as punishment for looking so uppity earlier. Zachary pulled up his phone and his mouth curled down into a frown. There were more messages in the group chat with his friends, about how awesome the movie would be tomorrow, but there was also a message from his mom. Apparently to make up for not letting him see a cool action movie with his buds, the two families would be getting together to go see a movie instead. Was it something cool or interesting? No. It was a total baby movie; it was 'Diaper Dave's Big Adventure', which was the big movie version of a lame kid's cartoon for dumb babies. It was something that made sense to take a seven year old to, but not a seventh grader. Zachary lost it. He threw his phone hard against his bed and uncapped the whiteout, while he was seeing nothing but white in a blind fury. This reaction had been building up for a while now, ever since Zachary had seen that he couldn't raise his own ship by sinking Roy. While not the most appropriate term for a boy on the cusp of thirteen, the boy was having a temper tantrum, and he sought to take it all out on Roy. The next hour would be spent wildly dabbing the whiteout all over the established text and reconstructing each page through the lens of complete contempt and mad malice; starting from the middle and randomly redoing pages as they caught his ire. In the frenetic frenzy, Zachary would make a mountain of mistakes; logical inconsistencies and poorly thought wording to punctuate the absurdities he wanted to force upon Roy. Midway through his rampage, he'd begun to implicate his own family onto the pages, with the misguided desire of finding loopholes that would improve his own standing. "Roy just can't seem to give up the pacifier; we hope it doesn't damage his teeth too badly!" "Our little boy is still making big presents at night; we had to find even thicker diapers than the Stinkerpants!" "The doctor said it was an intellectual disability, so it looks like diapers are going to be the norm for the long haul!" "Roy with a new bib he got from his birthday. Already soaked through too, he's such a drooly boy!" "Roy is lucky to have a cousin that's so understanding of his problems." Zachary flung things back to the start of the book and looked at the date he'd put: 2016. The boy smeared whiteout over the pages and changed the date once more, this time to 2020, to send Roy all the way back to being practically a toddler. There on that very page was a mistake already made. When Zachary had first filled in the page with 2016 as the date, his own name had appeared as a footnote of sorts; a small blurb about how Roy's cousin would be glad to have a friend. In that blurb, no date had been given for Zachary's birth, but an approximate age had been given. "Zachary is just finishing up with Kindergarten; we're so lucky that Roy will have an older cousin to look up to!" Zachary hadn't looked at that though. In his little tantrum, he'd missed a lot of things like that; parts that seemed uninteresting or unrelated to the mayhem he was trying to spread. Whenever his rage had been at its chaotic peak, he'd been at much later pages in the book, and he'd been stupidly trying to game the system without stopping to think about the mechanics of the reality-altering tome in front of him. He'd been writing with his hurt feelings, with his indignation, and not with his mind. Zachary had tried to put into words that he wanted to be treated in the same way that Roy was, but his thoughts had been on the original Roy, not on what Roy had become. He'd stupidly stopped looking at the baby book as a baby book, and instead he'd written in it like a wish fulfilling diary for grievances. Whenever he finished up, it was late and he was tired. He'd exhausted himself in his own childish fury and his eyes were drooping low. Zachary was still upset, but he had tuckered himself into a complacent enough state to kick off his pants and climb into bed. He knew he'd still be bitter whenever he had to go see that stupid baby movie tomorrow, but at least his cousin would be completely destroyed by the massive retcons that'd taken place tonight. Zachary had used up the whole bottle of whiteout, and he'd basically rewritten the whole thing in one go, save for the spots that seemed unimportant. He'd watched a few of the pictures slowly shift, so he knew that his strategy had been valid enough to work. Now there would just be the waiting game. He took some small solace in knowing how upset Roy would be when he woke up tomorrow morning as a dumb, drooling toddler with overloaded Pampers and no hope of anything ever resembling maturity. But whenever Zachary woke up the next morning, it was him who would come to be upset. When his eyes fluttered open, his nose had been immediately greeted by a noxious odor hanging in the air; his first thought was that Roy had already come over, and that he was in the room with a steaming pantload, but then Zachary rolled over and... **SQUISH** That got his eyes to open a lot faster. That woke him up as effectively as a bucket of water getting splashed on him. There was something big and squishy under his butt, and he was petrified at what he thought it might be. His hand quickly shot to his crotch and he felt something thick and swollen underneath his pajamas; then he looked at the pajamas themselves and realized they weren't the ones he fell asleep in. Then he looked up and saw that his bedroom was different than how it'd been when he fell asleep. The toys on the shelves and posters on the wall, they were all things that he had tossed aside years ago! Ninja Turtles, Beyblades, building blocks, and stuffed animals; the clothes on the floor had a similar age range to match. It was as if his bedroom had been flung back four years. He started to get off the bed, which rustled with the plastic of a waterproof sheet, and he nearly stumbled as his feet hit the ground. It felt as if he was closer to the floor, and he definitely had a big, loaded diaper under his pajamas. Just what was going on? Scrambling to the mirror, he was aghast at the sight that greeted him. Instead of being on the cusp of thirteen, he looked like he was getting ready to turn nine; his body had shrunk back to third grade, and his baby fat had returned to his tummy. He nervously pulled down his pajama pants and saw a sagging diaper underneath; stained yellow and brown, obviously lumpy and full from a night of usage. Why was he like this? What had gone wrong? He'd spent last night making a new baby book, but he didn't intend for something like this to happen! He wasn't the one who was supposed to be tossed backwards in time! He had to fix it, and fast. He made an awkward dash for his desk, which was now more colorful and no longer had the PC he had gotten for his tenth birthday. The baby book was gone. It wasn't on top of the desk, nor was it in any of the drawers or on the floor. It was just gone. The door suddenly opened and his mother poked her head in the room. "Oh good, you're up! Your cousin just got here, why don't you get dressed and--" She stopped midsentence and wrinkled her nose, "Oh, sweetie. Another stinky morning? I thought you said you were going to try to stay clean like a big boy? Your cousin could really use a role model..." Zachary wasn't sure what to say, or what to do for that matter. As he got his smelly diaper changed, and a new one taped on, he could only imagine how insane it would sound for him to try to explain that a magic book had altered reality. To explain he was supposed to be a middle schooler, and that he was well past the diaper days of old. "Umm, mom? There was a book on my desk last night, and now--" His mom interrupted him and tossed a pair of shorts at him from his dresser, "Get dressed, Zachary. I don't want your breakfast getting cold." On went the mesh shorts over the bulky babypants and he cringed; he'd been so resentful of wearing Pull-Ups to Kindergarten, but now it looked like he'd be wearing diapers to third grade, and all while his little cousin was now small and dumb enough to not be shamed for his massive diaper-dumping. He'd played himself.