Long Story #6: Spooky Tales for Twisted Tykes (I. One Wrong Jump)

I. One Wrong Jump: (Content Tags: Body-hopping, special powers, bad fate, messing, diapers, SPED class, mushbrains, humiliation, supernatural horror) One wrong jump had been all it took to end my journey forever. One wrong jump that made my ability turn useless. One wrong jump that forced me inside a container for which there was no escape. My name, my real name, was Alan Vogel. The name I now had to go by, was Franklin Carter. Normally, a temporary name change was no issue, as it was part of the game, but now I'd grown to detest having a different moniker; it was no longer temporary, it was forever. I was blessed with a unique power when I was born, one that allowed me to break my own consciousness down into an aerosol of sorts, and with it, I could jump into new lives; if I had to compare it to anything, then I'd say it was a lot like the show 'Quantum Leap', except my original life was so far gone that I had long abandoned it to the original reality I'd left it in. It wasn't mere possession, after all, because I really did become who my host was, just with my own consciousness. Whenever I looked in the mirror, I would see 'me', but everyone else would see the person that I'd taken the form of. Very much unlike 'Quantum Leap', there was no objective for me to take on whenever I jumped from existence to existence; no moral lessons, no guardian angel tribulations, just unadulterated fun. With this power, I'd had the chance to live thousands of moments across hundreds of lifetimes; I'd take control of someone, live as them for a time until I grew bored, and then I'd jump to a new one. With the nature of my power, I left people unaware they had ever been out of the driver's seat; they would be left with physical memories etched in their brain, where it was they who had been in control, even if I made them act peculiar. I never made them act too strangely though, because whenever I took shelter in their brain, I would feel compelled to live in the same way that they normally would; I would remain aware of myself, and of my own will, but I would be like water taking on the shape of its container. Usually, I had the luxury of jumping into those who lived with extraordinary privilege, or who lived fascinating lives; I'd been the president, a king, a billionaire, an astronaut, a professional athlete, and everything in between.  It was an opportunity to live an infinite amount of lifestyles, to understand all the different kinds of people in the world, and to not feel constrained to a singular path. There had been very few jumps that I'd regretted, and in those cases, I'd made my time short. I didn't always aim for those who lived in luxury, nor did I always have a choice on who I'd get; it felt important to sometimes allow myself to suffer, so that I wouldn't lose track of what a wide spectrum the human experience held. The jump I'd wanted to get out of, before landing where I was now, was anything but glamorous. I'd bounced myself right into the existence of a paraprofessional in the midst of a special ed classroom, and worse, the one primarily responsible for diaper duty. I'd lived several times as a parent, even once as a parent to such a special needs child, but I would never have considered those roles to be much fun; it was a lot of responsibility, and while the gross-out factor was limited by biological parental affection, there was still an element of disgust involved. For a paraprofessional, who had no relation to any of these giant toddlers, the mitigating factor was minimal, and therefore the disgust was far more palpable. Worse yet, this particular worker had hated their job, and seemed to harbor a disdain for the very students they were tasked with caring for. So after wiping down my third poopy butt of the day, and with many more on the horizon, I felt as though it was time to prematurely eject myself from these doodie duties. A brief visit to the teacher's lounge earlier had given me a look at another educator, who was having a torrid affair with an extremely attractive woman teaching a few classrooms down. That was where I wanted to be. I wanted to play part in a steamy romance, not be changing steaming diapers. This was where I made a critical error, due to my own impatience. Before I could leave the classroom, I was tasked with changing yet another dimwitted brat, and I frankly couldn't stomach the idea of opening another shit-filled pair of Huggies. I decided I would make a very temporary hop, into one of the students, so that the paraprofessional could deal with the change instead, and then afterwards, I'd hop right back in! Without much thought, I randomly picked some boy who was picking his nose, and I made the jump. Immediately, it felt very different than the normal sort of jump I would make. I'd rarely lived as a child, for one, and I'd never taken over someone with mental disabilities either. It was oddly warm inside my thoughts, like my mind was snuggled in a blanket, but it also felt laden down with fluff, like my head was full of cotton. It wasn't altogether unpleasant, per se, but it definitely didn't feel right. It was the first time I felt so completely hamstrung by my container; walking, talking, not drooling on myself, they all felt like huge challenges to manage, and I struggled to keep track. The diaper around my waist felt odd too. I had never really considered what one might be like to wear past infancy, and if I had to explain it, I would say it was like very thick underwear that was coated in a noisy plastic layer. The cushioning was mostly comfortable, though less so when my legs were bowed out by it, and it was immediately identifiable as being too warm. Oh, and damp. Clammy, maybe? That had taken me a moment to put together, but yes, the diaper had been urinated in some point before I jumped inside. Not a dainty dribble, but enough to make the padding swell and sag between my thighs, chafing me and setting the stage for an eventual rash. Making my timing all the worse, was the fact that my knees were begging to be bent, due to an unknowable sensation in my stomach. I couldn't discern what the feeling was, but it was like my body already had an idea of what I should be doing. Unwilling to go against the flow, I let myself lower into a squat, thinking perhaps I just had a tummy-ache. No, it was not a tummy-ache. It was poop. I was going to poop on myself. That much became abundantly clear whenever I began to thrust myself into a full-body heave: knuckles tightening into balls, eyes squinting down, drooly lips pursed, and an immense heaviness beginning to make its way through my lower intestines. If it hadn't been obvious by that point, which I must have been in denial about it, a juicy fart would ripple past my buttcheeks and sputter wetly into the diaper like a depressed whoopie cushion. But no, I must have desperately wanted to believe it must only be gas, because I was shocked whenever something chunky began to slip past my obviously untrained sphincter. That was when my eyes went wide as could be, and I desperately tried to abort what I was doing. There was no stopping it though, not whenever solid matter was already halfway plopping out, and my bowels were declaring a total evacuation. More gas spewed around the mass and loosened it fully, allowing a sticky steamer to drop into the back of the diaper like a sausage on the other end of a grinder. I heard the diaper crinkle, rustle really, with the same sound one might expect from dropping a clump of mud into a plastic grocery bag. It didn't even have to expand yet, since the garment was so absurdly sized for capacity; there was plenty of space for the turd to simply plop unrestricted, and there was where it could beckon to all of its friends that 'the padding is great, jump on in!' And jump in they would, with hardly any hesitation; there was going to be a party in the back of my pants, and every smelly lump was invited. As though to accommodate, or really to conspire, my body lowered further down on my haunches, until my bottom was mere inches from the floor. The shift in posture was exactly what was needed to loosen everything lurking deep within me; my midsection lurched forward another inch or two, and my cheeks began to puff out with air. "Hrrggggghhhh!" If there had been some vainglorious hope of secrecy, some unearned notion of privacy for this most intimate of acts, then it lay dead upon the grinding grunting of my vocal cords. In the same way that a dog looked to its owner while squatting down to befoul a lawn, so did my eyes search to meet with the poor para who was just finishing up on the dirty diaper I had skipped town on. In those exasperated eyes was frustration, and a mild pang of disgust. As I myself was painfully aware, this was no abnormal task for them to be saddled with, but as I also knew, it was one they had long grown tired of repeatedly being charged with. As the last Lincoln log dropped to build a luxurious cabin in my Pampers, and my strained expression transmuted to dumb relief, I heard a sigh as the paraprofessional sauntered over to lift me from underneath my armpits. "Okay, let's get you cleaned up too...The day is almost over, but I don't want your mommy thinking I left you in that poopy diaper all day." While a fragment of me was curious what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of a diaper change, after having changed several today, I more found the concept a little too debasing, especially after having just committed one of the ultimate acts of self-deprecation to warrant it. Thus, I decided it was time to jump again, to whoever was closest. It'd probably be another student, but I had played hopscotch before with my power, so a game of musical chairs wasn't out of the ordinary. As I was hauled off to the changing table, sack of shit sagging off my hips, I closed my eyes and tried to focus. Annnnnd... Nothing. My mind didn't have the fortitude any longer, the capacity to focus hard enough to engage my own powers; the hardware I'd jumped into was a one-way trip, because the infrastructure to exit simply didn't exist. Without having known it, my final jump had been into this lowly form. One wrong jump, and now I was stuck.