Premium Story #8: From Pride to Poobrain

Premium Story #8: From Pride to Poobrain (Content Tags: Fantasy setting, classism, diapers, humiliation, messing, niche brain-drain scenario) My thoughts swarmed as fervently and famished as the flies that buzzed around my bulging bottom; I'd stopped trying to swat at either, because both were a Sisyphean battle which couldn't be won. Both my thoughts and my flies had more in common than just their tenacity, or their inevitability; both were drawn to the same pungent muse. The squishy mass that had clumped up against my bottom was still warm, and its presence was beyond being something that could simply be ignored. Toxic plumes of fecal funk, wrapped up in the pleasant sweetness of talcum, were tickling incessantly at my nostrils. I made no move to hold my breath, because as much as I hated the fact, it had become true that I couldn't get enough of the acrid aroma. All considerations of past prestige was moot, all former accomplishments and accolades were old news, and the distinguished fashion I'd once been so invested in, was now completely lost on me. They didn't make beautiful works of art, just so that some drooling imbecile could soil himself in them. The designer clothes weren't tailored to house the thickly padded bottom of an invalid that spent his time appreciating his own messy masterpieces. No, the old lifestyle that I'd so enjoyed, it was just dust in the wind... The same wind that carried the message of my mucky situation. My hands clasped onto the crinkly plastic of the diaper's backside, the tips of my fingers patrolling the landscape in search of a mountain to scale, or even a dune of dookie. It wasn't just the scent that beguiled me so much, it was also the squishy sensation, and the mushy malleability. There were cravings carved into me, that there was a need to knead, and that was what my frisky fingers intended to do. Quickly, I felt the diaper slope directly in the back, and I stupidly had a smile curl my lips from the discovery. What providence it felt like, to stake a claim on the poopy plateau that surely awaited; my other hand skittered across the plastic to join in, and soon my palms were stuffed full of warm delight. It would be good enough to distract me for hours, if I was left purely to my own devices; once I was groping my own lumpy turdsack, then it was effectively game over for me to try to turn my attention to anything else, except for maybe something of equivalent interest. Maybe if my bowels intended to lend their help in befouling my pants further, or if a dirty diaper of another was set before my sights. It disgusted me on a deeply visceral level, that I'd become like this. Dignity, prestige, wit, class, intelligence, refinement...These had all been things that I'd considered core components to what built me as a person; these were the sorts of attributes that made me undeniably better than those around me. And they had all been taken from me! No, not taken... They hadn't been stolen, not really, but they had been corrupted into complete unrecognizable sludge. The principles that made me up, that I exuded, had been twisted and tangled into a malformed mockery of the person I'd once had so much pride in being. Where was that pride now? Surely not in the three inches of fetid filth that coated my buttocks like simmering mud, the same muck that made me no better than a squealing piglet that rolled around in their own dirty droppings. Well, actually yes, that was exactly where my pride had found new settlement. It was also the new dwellings of all my other treacherous traits, who had transformed against my will, as to please the new management upstairs. The smug upper-class countenance was now tied to my low-class incontinence, and while the reflection was smudged beyond recognition, the same sophic socialite still swam these tainted waters. That socialite was just now transformed, after an agonizing metamorphosis that sent me tumbling down the ladder of the hierarchy, until I plopped right below the bottom rung. It was a fall beset by the weight of expectations, but what was really weighed me down, was the pair of Pampers that were so laden with shame made solid, that there was nowhere for gravity to take me but down. A precipitous drop from the sheer side of a cliff, and the only cushion was the thick cotton and fly-attracting mudpie within. The nature of my mysterious malady was cryptic to most, but it was no enigma to me. After all, I'd been there for it, whenever my life was turned into this horrific nightmare where all earthly pleasures came from poop. It was no disease, or injury, or psychological break;  if it'd been something as normal as that, then I could have at least been given the small dignity of a proper diagnosis for others to pity. No, the state of my being was a product of war waged by human hands. It was what happened when vengeance was manifested into something more satisfying than murder or libel; there was a contradiction in how it felt so very permanent, yet with the minute-to-minute moments that made it seem almost temporary. Kill a man, besmirch his name, and the story is either over, or you have little control over how it ends. But if you change a man? From the inside out? Then you get a firm hand in the narrative, and all while depriving that man of ever being able to discredit you. Printed words were valuable as tabloid-fodder; they were ephemeral and vapid. But to let the man's actions speak for themselves? There was no hiding those truths, not forever. The clever trickster responsible was someone who had been firmly under my thumb, much like the lumpy load in my diaper was now firmly under the oppressive grip of my thumb. Alistair Artio, a conniving little whelp who spent his time constructing contraptions in the workshop that my estate paid for. He was a young artificer, perhaps one of the youngest ever, and while my father had seen great potential in his work, I myself had been less impressed. In the honesty that my current predicament afforded me, it would be safe to admit that there had been jealousy in my heart. My own name had been praised for being a prodigy of arts, of business, of culture, and now this little street rat had come to slurp at the bowl of glory that was so rightfully placed in front of my chair. Always pushing for more responsibilities, for more pieces of the pie, I had convinced my father to give me the reins on several of our family's enterprises. Most of them mattered little to me, and while I saw each one as a feather in my cap, they really only sat there as part of a smokescreen to take the workshop into my cloying clutches. The first time I marched down there, into the steam and cogs of the boy's creative labor, I'd done so with as closed as a mind as I could muster. Nothing would impress me, because I didn't want to be impressed; I was there to assert my authority, and to remind the insignificant waif about how little he really meant to my family's fortune. Alistair wasn't a polite boy by trade, which wasn't any different than what my expectations for him were. He'd grown up, for as little time as that had yet to be, in the slums of one of the poorest cities in the country; he had practically been born orphaned, and it felt as though only by divine intervention that he had the natural intellect and born talent that he did. He was covered in various grime: splotches of oil stained his coveralls, silt and sooth dusted him, and sweat had mired it all into a full suit for him to wear. The first edict I had in mind from the sight, was that I'd command the churlish child to bathe after every shift, so that he didn't bring such dingy disarray into the quarters that we had provided him. It was during that little meeting, arms folded and eyebrow raised, where I discovered a particularly intriguing factoid about our little engineer: he wasn't housebroken. Between me and my friends, who were of equal noble birth, we had often cracked jokes in the past about the devolved conditions of the less fortunate; we had mocked that their IQ scores may mimic the forecast, or that they were too stupid to realize how much the rich fleeced them, and on occasion, we had even compared their mental capacity to that of infants or pets. I could myself remember pointing out a scraggly runt on the street, tow-headed and in rags, and commenting about how he probably walked around in pissy pants all day. But this had been a stranger development than I'd anticipated, because while I resented Alastair with every fine fiber of my being, I also couldn't completely deny that he had more than a couple of brain cells to spare. The boy might be a dirty commoner from the streets, but he wasn't simple, he wasn't thick. But his diapers sure were. I'd thought it strange how puffy his coveralls looked, but I hadn't analyzed that thought very much until the answer was slapping me in the face. Such discovery had only come up because of my comment about hygiene and cleanliness; with a firm demeanor, I'd whisked the inventor from his workshop, so that I could show him exactly where the designated bathhouse and laundering room was located. It wasn't like he didn't already know, since he'd been here for more than a month at that point, but I'd been trying to make a point about how I viewed him. My plan to humiliate the whelp had been to first drag him to the laundry, where I would instruct him to get his filthy garments into the wash, and then I'd make him strut across the courtyard to the bathhouse. It'd been nothing but a callous ploy to damage his reputation, to make it clear what an unrefined urchin was at heart. Suffice to say, my expectations had been exceeded by what I would instead find. Underneath those grungy garments, there was finally closure for why he'd looked so peculiar, and to why he walked with an upset gait. Alistair the prodigal artificer was wearing a diaper. No, not just a diaper. He was wearing a very full diaper; a diaper not just dampened by sweat, or sagging from urine, but one that'd been packed full with dung. It hung between his thighs like it was heaving one of the anvils he banged his hammer upon; it carried stains like his clothes, but not ones that could be attributed to the product of his work; it was a mural of knobby lumps and strained fabric, and up close, he smelled no better than the horse stables. Such a surreal sight to behold, but a welcome one. My envy-poisoned mind had been on a tear all this time, and when it came down to brass tacks, it was all too obvious that I had no reason to worry. Maybe he was clever with a wrench, perhaps few other magical machinists could boast his youth, and it was possible that his schematics may be dutifully archived one day. But he was still a pitiful orphan who came up from filth, and who still wallowed in filth; his name would be lost to history, with all his works belonging to my family, because who would care to credit a professional still clad in the shameful cloth of a tot? It would be a blemish to strut out a smelly peasant like him, to put his name on the gadgets and gizmos that he was paid him to produce. It gave me a smile so broad, that my face hurt for hours after. It filled my icy veins with warm lifeblood, and it reassured my tortured ego that I had no reason to fear his accomplishments. Even more-so when I made him toddle across the courtyard in that attire, which really was more a lack of. Beaming and following him, with my hands clasped to one another behind my back, I watched the bowlegged waddle that only an overly dirtied diaper could enforce. It was a posture usually reserved for sticky-handed toddlers, whom hadn't yet learned the intricacies of toileting, and I was letting the whole estate see it in action. There was some level of intention that willed for it to become common knowledge, but I did restrain myself from singing it for all to hear; some bemused onlookers, some confused members of the help, and some tittering tykes in their play clothes, that was enough to satisfy me. It wasn't easy to see whether any of it truly bothered Alistair, because his pale cheeks were caked with too much dirt for a blush to effectively pierce; however, the flustered body language, the clenched jaw, the furrowed brow, and the subtle way he tried to cover his diaper with his hands, those were much stronger indications on how he felt. Low class he might have been, but even a dog might feel some shame for making a puddle or pile on the carpet. I was satisfied for a time. There were a few weeks after, where I leaned into my designated role as his management, and while it was fun to irk him with my demands or complaints, it soon came to feel like too much of a chore. There were other morsels on my plate that begged my attention, matters which actually held weight and offered reward. So I would leave him quite literally to his devices, thinking I had given him a satisfying slice of humble pie to chew on, and I'd pour my energy into new pet projects. He was still supposed to report to me, but I found that daily drudgery tiresome, and I smartly delegated the work out to one of my personal attendants. In a twist of irony, it was the same attendant who now was primarily tasked with cleaning my dirtied backside. My role wasn't the only one that had seen a backslide. Anyway, I wouldn't think much about Alistair until it was coming time for the birthday ball I wished to throw myself. Every year was an important one to me, because every year felt like a step closer to becoming the master of my family's fortune, and so I never skimped on making things perfect. It wasn't just for vanity either, because parties like this were of great importance when it came to matters of networking. The rich impressed one another with flagrant displays of their wealth, and thus I had to uphold that tradition. My father gave me a budget to work with, but it came up short for what I had in mind. Thinking about where the deficit might be made up, my mind eventually settled back on the workshop. The work that Alistair did, much of it experimental, cost a pretty penny to keep operating. Was it much in the grand scheme of things? No, not really. It felt like a large sum to someone like Alistair, but to an affluent lad like me? It was practically pocket change. Cutting his budget, along with skimming off the top of a few other unimportant projects, would be just enough to bring my grand party to the level I envisioned. The grease monkey didn't take it well, and his fury only doubled whenever I reminded him that I would still be expecting results on the shoestring budget I'd slashed him down to. He tried to argue it wasn't possible, but I already knew that, and I frankly didn't care. What did grab my attention was when he got to the begging phase, and he offered to make me something special, so long as I restored his budget to its former glory. The pleading piqued my interest, and thinking about the stylish costume I had in mind for my party, I decided it may work in my favor to use Alistair's skills for my own vanity. My request was for a grand crown, one that would stand out among all others; headwear that informed others of my importance, of my birthright to greatness. I wanted it to be ostentatious, to be glimmering and glamorous, and he just nodded his head along. I gave him one week, and the day of the party, he would claim to have delivered exactly what I asked for. Walking into his workshop, I saw him making some final touches on the design, sitting at his bench in nothing but a grimy tank-top and the diaper that had become so normal to see him in. He handed it over, but he mentioned that it needed to be calibrated, so that its full potential could be unleashed. The piece was intricate and interesting, so it was all the more tantalizing to hear that there was even more to come. It found its place atop my head almost immediately, and I grinned with my eyes pointing up at it; I couldn't wait to show it off. "Sit, please. I'll make it so much better, sir. Put on the earmuffs for just a few minutes, it'll be loud." There was no reason for me to disbelieve him. I sat on the stool with the headgear on, and I put on the earmuffs, and then I proceeded to put on the dimming glasses as well. It was my belief that the final adjustments would be noisy and bright, and I had no interest in subjecting myself to that. Which was why I didn't notice what the little genius was up to; there was no way for me to see him squat down, for me to hear the crackling of an enormous behemoth being beckoned for his diaper, or for the resulting thump to rattle me. The smog of the workshop masked the fumes of the fresh dump quite well, and even if that hadn't been the case, it wouldn't have come as a surprise. The next thing I would feel was a strange weight being put on the crown, which I would later learn was the balled-up turdsack that Alistair had personally crafted only moments prior. It was the final component necessary for the mystical machine to be complete, for it to unravel every bit of the complex knot I'd prided myself in tying together. It was more a dunce cap, than it was a crown. It was fit for a fool, not a king, and it wouldn't turn me into someone who commanded respect. It would turn me into a poobrain. And like everything else the little inventor had created, it would work extremely well.