Tale #107: 'Lesson' the Load ((Part 1))

Tale #107: 'Lesson' the Load (A spinoff to 'Shortcomings and Goings') (Content Tags: Age regression, reality warping, diapers, pull-ups, messing, wetting, humiliation) Ben enjoyed his work, even if it very often felt like a thankless job. It was up to him to help sculpt the minds of the future generations, and while teaching didn't pay very well, it did give him a sense of fulfillment that he didn't think he'd find in another line of work. Finding the right job hadn't been easy for him either; he'd spent his early twenties in a hedonistic denial of reality, where he slovenly moved from one dead-end job to the next, spending all his money on youthful pleasures. He'd only just gotten his teaching degree last year, at the advanced age of thirty, but he'd luckily been able to find a position rather quickly in a nearby town. The nationwide teacher shortage helped to secure him a job, but funnily enough that did little to also get him a decent wage. Still, his life was comfortable enough. He shared an apartment with his younger brother, who himself was currently going to college, and the two of them were able to make it work. The two have had a rough go of it over the last decade, but things were now steady and the future looked promising! Or at least that had been the case a few weeks ago. Now, Ben wasn't all that sure about it. It'd started with a feeling of dread in the bottom of his gut, as if his fate had already been decided, but he was simply a dead man walking. That dread grew and it felt like an inescapable blanket that was smothering him. And then there was that kid. Ben still wasn't sure what his name was, or who his real teacher was. What he did know was that the kid didn't belong in his class, and that there was something about him that rubbed Ben the wrong way. He'd only shown up a handful of times, but each occurrence had felt unsettling. It only happened when Ben was done for the day and finishing things up in his classroom. He'd look up from grading papers and there the little boy would be, standing right in front of his desk with an empty look about him. It was creepy. The boy looked around the same age as his other third grade students, but there was something unnatural in his aura. His smile didn't seem real, his eyes were dead, and he carried no real presence. The first time it had happened, Ben had been the dutiful adult and been nothing but polite. He'd asked for a name and why the boy was there, but he honestly couldn't remember if either of those questions had been answered. Instead, Ben had been the one to answer a question, and one that a kid shouldn't be asking a teacher. "How old were you when you went to college?" A little rude, but innocent enough. Ben had answered truthfully without thinking much of it. The truth was slightly embarrassing, since it revealed how long he'd rested on his laurels, as well as how inexperienced he was still as a teacher. Nevertheless, a simple question got a simple answer, and the mysterious kid left. Well, Ben looked down to continue grading a spelling test, and when he looked up, the kid was gone. Strange, but no reason to be alarmed. The next time he got questioned was a little more intrusive. It was a few days later, and like before, the little boy appeared while he was alone in his classroom. This time, the boy asked when Ben had gotten his first real girlfriend. Ben knew he should put his foot down about how this was going over a line, but the kid was young and Ben knew he probably didn't understand how inappropriate it was. So again, he answered. By his own definition of what a 'real' relationship was, he excluded everything from high school and below. So his answer was 'twenty-two'. It was after that day that Ben realized something was wrong. He started to see it in the mirror, that his rugged features were slowly softening; it was subtle, but undeniable, and the scale proved that he was losing an abnormal amount of weight as well. Something was happening to him. Everyone else couldn't see it. His students didn't notice, his friends didn't notice, his coworkers were clueless, and even his own brother was oblivious to the fact that Ben was seemingly reverting back to his early twenties. Ben even set up an appointment to see a doctor, but the doctor said that everything looked great. The next time that he saw that kid, Ben decided it was time to put his foot down. He knew it was crazy to blame some random tyke for whatever problems he had, but he also couldn't shake the idea that the kid was somehow a key part of this puzzle. It couldn't just be a coincidence that he was regressing back to the age that he'd discussed earlier! "Little boy, I need your *name*. You don't attend my class and I can't have you coming in here when I'm trying to grade papers." "How old were you when you first got drunk?" Putting his foot down didn't work. His questions never got answered, and instead, he was always asked a question. He felt compelled to answer it too, through his frustration and ire. Something else he'd noticed was that when he *did* give his answer, he followed it up by looking away from the boy, and that's when he'd disappear. Every morning in the mirror was yielding more horrific results too. He barely looked old enough to be driving now, let alone teaching. Like before, nobody paid his shifting appearance any mind; it was as if his age was a changing value, but that had no effect on other aspects of his life. Reality was almost adjusting itself to his shrinking shape, to keep everything else in place. "How old were you when you stopped wetting the bed?" Ben had been a late bloomer. Both in pottytraining and even more-so in staying dry at night; he hadn't been dry until he was thirteen! And as the man could have expected as a result, since it'd been the same with all the other questions, he indeed would shrink back to his middle-school years. More egregious than that would be his return to soggy-bottomed mornings, which was remedied by the Goodnites he was starting to wake up in. It was at this point that things had become truly absurd. He'd been a tall teenager, so maybe it could be excused that people didn't notice him shrinking by much, but now he was just barely above five feet! He'd lost a foot in height and over a hundred pounds in the span of two weeks; his neatly trimmed facial hair was completely gone and his face hardly showed any signs of puberty. Why was everyone else going on as if it was normal? And it wasn't even necessarily that they still saw him as a normal adult! His little brother, whom was now his *older* brother, had dropped him off at the school lately, because Ben no longer had a car nor the legal ability to drive. His students were starting to look bigger, now that Ben was standing closer to the ground... Hypocritically, Ben was still going to work every day, as if things were normal. The other teachers still spoke to him as a peer in the teacher's lounge and his students still respected his authority, but for how long? If he kept getting younger, then he'd become eye to eye with the little kids he was supposed to teach! One day, he came into work a little earlier than usual. A leaky Goodnite had ruined his sleep, and he decided he might as well get an early start to the day and get his lessons prepped. Ben still hadn't connected enough dots about the mystery boy to realize that being alone was a trigger for him to appear. "Do you remember when you pooped your pants in sixth grade?" The question had come before Ben had when acknowledged the presence of the little gremlin. This was more aggressive than what had been the fare up until this point, where the boy would wait until he was seen to ask his intrusive inquiries. It was a question that looked to be following in the theme of the last one that he'd been asked: toileting troubles. More-so this time, Ben could feel the memory burning brightly in his mind. It was vivid, as if he was truly sent back to his junior high days, which wasn't in itself a tough sell, since his size had been reduced to that. This incident had been just a little younger than how he currently looked; he'd been just an awkward sixth grader in his first week at middle school. He could remember the anxiety that he'd felt. The idea of going from top of the food chain, back to the bottom. Possibly related to that was the fact that he'd been constipated all throughout his first week, and desperate enough for relief that he'd poured himself a big glass of prune juice that morning. It had been his first and last encounter with the stuff, and while he'd simply hoped it would move things along, it would end up doing a lot more than that. He'd chosen French as his language credit that year, and that was the class he would be in when things finally went sideways. The cramps had become intense, worsened by the fact that lunch had been two classes prior, and so even more was beginning to make its way down through his digestion. Ben's hand had shot up, but his request had been shot down. His French teacher had been a real bitch and she'd balked at the gall he had to interrupt her lesson with his potty problem. 'That's something to take care of between classes. You're not in elementary school anymore...' Clenched and stiff as a board, Ben had sat there in a cold sweat for half the class. Until finally, inevitably, the levees crumbled under the immense pressure in his bowels, and he had no choice but to let go. It was fortunate he hadn't advanced to boxers yet, as his briefs were better suited to accommodating the toxic load he let forth; containment didn't count much in terms of *staining* however... "...I just sat in it, until my teacher smelled it and made me go to the front of the room, so she could yell at me. The other kids made fun of me all throughout middle school." Blasted back to the present, Ben felt something hot pressed up behind him; a dreadful smell, a familiar one, singed his nostrils. The back of his pants felt heavy, as if weighed down by the very memory he'd hoped to repress; pooping his pants in middle school had wrecked his confidence for years, and it'd been one of the most humiliating accidents that he'd ever had. His hand reached backward and his face drained of color as he cupped the lump he was sitting on. He'd shit himself, just like the flashback he'd just been forced to live through. How could he have let this happen? What was he supposed to do now? His students would be here within the hour and it wasn't like he kept spare clothes in the classroom! Certainly not an extra pair of underwear... The strange child looked like it was grinning. Like a cat deciding whether to feast or play first, the boy stood perfectly still and kept his eyes focused intensely on the diminutive teacher. "Did you ever wear a diaper after you were pottytrained?" The question was again like an involuntary time machine for Ben. Before he could assess damage control on his poopy briefs, he would have to endure another invasive memory that he would rather have kept suppressed. Ever since the boy had first asked about bedwetting, it was like he'd honed in on what connecting thread was between all of Ben's most shameful memories. "I stayed at my aunt's house, when I was ten. She had just gotten a new mattress for the guest room, and she didn't want me to leak on it. My cousin is special needs, so she just made me wear one of his diapers; I remember throwing a huge tantrum about it and crying a lot..." "Did you prove her right?" The quick shift into a follow-up gave Ben mental whiplash; he went from memories of the loud weeping to what would transpire the morning after. He'd woken up to a horrible smell, and rolling over would confirm that the diaper he was loaned wasn't just wet. Whatever he'd eaten the day before hadn't agreed with him, because he'd had diarrhea throughout much of the night, without waking. For the first time since his toddler days, Ben had pooed the bed in his sleep, and while wearing a big, stupid diaper! Needless to say, his Aunt had been pissed and had made him wear diapers all day and night for the duration of his stay. She'd still made snide comments about it years later, when he was a teen that'd been long dry at night. The smell in the classroom was actually a little less pungent when he snapped back to it. It was still present, but it'd been diminished by something, and a sweeter aroma mixed with it in the air. Was it talcum? ((Too big for one post, the rest is continued in the next post!))