Chapter 12: Take it back to old times. Back when I was still a girl.

September 5th, 2020, Salinas, California - Earth

“You're not my real dad!” Mira shouted as the door to her room was closed.

It was sometime after Charlie's regression but before Howard 'remarried', and Mira was in her terrible twos again. The Charlie with the tank sheets and diapers not the Charlie who was over ten feet tall and couldn't be trusted to watch the Home Shopping Channel.

It's confusing. The diaper dimension was always confusing even from the beginning. Alisa met her double, swapped bodies, was in a baby nursery, became the babysitter, became Emily for a while, who was secretly an Amazon who owned an entertainment channel, but had been turned into a baby. Or maybe a doll? Was Alice a news reporter, or was she the scientist's assistant? Was Naomi and Oliver World a news network or a cartoon? Why would you need to build an entire Truman Show just to film advertisements of a girl as your diaper model? And what was going on at the end with the TVs?

These stories were a bit too complicated to follow sometimes. Just keep things simple. Ten-foot-tall people, like to turn normal sized people into babies.

Back to Earth though, the real problem with turning an adult into a child is that it is a slow process, and at least the Amazons appreciate that. Sometimes they could wave a wand and you would crap your pants, but that only started the transformation.

To be fair to Howard, he had never done anything like this before. No one on his planet had. Think of all the stuff you must get right to properly regress an adult without their permission. He did not even know where to begin to look for ideas on such a crazy thing. The real world is not designed for turning people into babies. There were things you could buy online, paraphernalia to assist with all sorts of sexual fantasies, everything from a big crib to adult versions of the stuff you had as a child. Plenty of clothes and sippy cups, but nothing to help with the actual problems though.

• Doesn't Mira have a job?

• Could she run into a neighbor if she found her way outside?

• Doesn't Howard also still have a job he needs to go to?

• Who would he hire to babysit that could be trusted?

With the last one he could still find all sorts of people willing to babysit an adult, but they are all about consent and no amount of “we're roleplaying really hard here” was going to cut it.

You can't bring her to the store unless you went the full length of treating her like she was mentally handicapped. This story has already established she has parents. What happens when they call her? Do not answer? What if they stop by? What sort of legal recourse do you think they might try if they suspected Howard was doing something? What about his parents?

The one thing that helped is that it was the summer of twenty twenty and the country was still in lockdown. He just told everyone she had gotten some variant and that bought him two weeks to figure this out.

Grace hit a hole-in-one with Charlie, she picked a man who could disappear and who society would not question if he started wetting himself. He would even be paid to not work. He was estranged from his family, had few real friends, and his work colleagues hated him. Plus, the two had a sex-adjacent thing going, and Charles still felt a bit guilty over that, so was a bit more prepared to go along with his punishment.

Grace also had access to Amazons for advice on how to best deal with her new little. She volunteered for a few excursions and picked up some delightful material on parenting while she was there. She even ordered a swing set, which was not cheap. Something that big was not something you could easily find here on Earth. Her new boss was a bit confused on that expense, but she just said it was her equivalent of eating a dodo bird, and he let it slide.

Mira was a smart one. She knew how Howard wanted to parent children and was actively undermining it at every step. She had been married to him for nearly two decades and knew which of his buttons to push. Howard, despite thinking he was an expert, was a bit out of practice in handling naughty children. Mommy may have been a bit more load bearing last time around than he gave her credit for.

Howard had thought he had locked Mira in, but she had found a way to pop the door and still get out. She knew not to go outside without an adult, or to talk to strangers, but what about playing with the oven? Howard was smart to get rid of the matches in the house, but she could turn the knobs all the way up and put the mac and cheese boxes in the stove and see what happened. Fortunately for Howard he had set up a camera network and programmed some alerts to his phone. He immediately dropped the carton of milk in the supermarket, ran to the car, sped sixty in a twenty mile per hour zone and got to the house in time with only a minimum of damage to the paint on the kitchen walls.

The oven would be impossible to clean and would need to be replaced. The kitchen would smell of smoke for months and would need new paint. There was some scorching on the cabinetry as well, so he would need to install new ones.

Mira had probably spent twenty-five grand in the kitchen in the past seven years, just keeping the style updated. Now the only thing she cared to do was break her toys. In her mind she had only played with the kitchen set for like a week after she got it, and besides Howard would just buy her another one.

He spanked her.

It was one more spanking than Grace ever got. Mira was then relegated to staring at the corner the rest of the day. She cried and cried and cried when he said she was never allowed to touch any appliance again. Or make food for herself again. He spent an afternoon childproofing the house for the tenth time, this time with an eye for all the things an adult woman with an education in biochemistry could use to really mess him up.

That was day three. He had not slept more than three hours since the project began. He called Grace out of desperation. He had wanted to be a cool dad, to raise his child in a free and relaxed manner, and in less than a week Mira had nearly set the house on fire.

“I don't understand why Charles is so good and Mira is so bad.” His face was red, and he buried his head in his arm. Grace reached out and touched his hair before answering.

“It's because boys are less mature than girls. She has farther to grow down. Have you considered getting her all the way to zero?”

He turned his head and then pushed back up, “There's nothing I've done that can't be undone, but if I go that far... Look, the issue is she doesn't see me as daddy. How'd Charles come to see you as mommy?”

She thought of it, came to an answer, but realized it was wrong, her mouth had moved to start explaining but then stopped. Just go to the source.

“Charlie, can you come here?”

Charles waddled into the room. His arms crossed and he frowned as he looked at Grace and Howard at the dining room table. It was not easy to notice but his diaper had added some weight to his front crotch. He was a bit perturbed to be missing the rest of his shows.

“Mommy?”

Grace just decided to rip the band-aid off. “This is a weird question, but Mira has been having trouble seeing Howard as her father, but you haven't had any issues with calling me mommy. Why do you see me as mommy?”

“Um... because mommy looks like mommy.”

It took a second for it to trigger for Howard, who collapsed harder into the table with a heavy sigh. He picked up his head and asked bluntly, “Charlie, are you saying Grace looks like her grandmother?”

He tilted his head, and a sniffle began to appear. “I... don't know.” He shook his head and found the path, “I haven't seen mommy in a while, and she's had some changes, but her face and nose and ears and hair are the same. You smell like mommy.”

Grace shook her head, “Mom doesn't see you as her dad because you don't look like grandpa.”

The voice was powerful, but it could not fix something like that. It was hopeless. His tired eyes drifted to the smart device across the room. The small screen was filtering through pictures. It stopped a second on Alan Wu and Grace at her High School graduation, from just over a year ago, both smiling for the camera and Grace in cap and gown. Howard was in the background waving. The scene changed, folding out Alan, Grace, and Howard, replacing each part of the scene one small part at a time. Alan's face became Howard's and Grace's now became a younger Mira. She was smiling for the camera in her cap and gown, Alan in the background waving with a young Grace in his arms.

It felt wrong, stealing a father like that, but Mira had done it to her own daughter, so this was karma right?

He asked Grace to stay the weekend and watch her parents. He picked up the phone, called his father-in-law, and explained that he wanted to visit. He told them he had a project he was working on for his anniversary and wanted to keep it a secret. How did that story he used to read to Grace go?

Tonight, tonight, my plans I make, tomorrow tomorrow, the baby I take.

* * *

One of Howard's first tasks was to assign Bonny to keep the photographs coming. She had a system in place for the photos, but it was all buried in boxes deep in storage. She brought up another cardboard box labeled 'save – photos', which had been wrapped in brown acrylic tape. The precious memories had been preserved like a mummy, and if not for his expedition might been buried in the basement forever.

“This looks like the nineties. I see a picture of Mira's first car at the top.” Bonny offered as she entered the room with another box.

“Oh, this is just wonderful, thank you, she's going to be thrilled.” Howard faked the delight. They were into at least hour six by this point. Of course they took breaks, as reasonable, and Bonny was more than happy to serve food and drinks to keep Alan and Howard going.

Howard passed another set of photos to Alan who explained, “Yes, this was nineteen eighty-seven, Disney Land. What a fun time. You can see little Mira here. She was eight” Unlike the other photos, this one had a professional gloss. The older man pointed to a younger him in the second row holding a young girl with her arms way up in the air. A giant splash of water was about to hit them.

“I held on to her so tight and she just laughed. She wanted to go on the ride again, but it was getting late, and the line was a mile long. We told her we'd go again some other time.” His voice started to shake a bit, “Oh, that was the last time we went. We cut early so we could beat the traffic and we ended up moving across the State for work a year later, it just wasn't as convenient.”

Alan took his glasses off and shook his head, “I'm sorry, that's probably...”

“No, that's perfect. Exactly the type of thing I need for this.” Howard did not fake the sentiment on that.

Bonny came over, “You know for our twentieth we went to Hawaii, this seems like so much more work. Just take a nice vacation somewhere.”

Howard shrugged, “Well, you know, she's been a bit loopy lately since Grace went to college, but it's gotten worse since Grace quit out of school. She put too much into her daughter and not enough into who she is, and I hope this will help her get back to square one.”

He had told them it was a picture book slide show thing. The particulars did not really matter, Alan's and Bonny's minds filled in the details when he told them they were going to help him with this project. They would work with him for as long as it took and give as much detail for every single photo and memorabilia and video they could recall. Her parents here had a bit too much saved, and going through something like this would take the entire day. This was also his first attempt at using the voice on someone other than Mira, and he wanted to keep his expectations low. If things did not work out, he could always just pretend this was a weird anniversary idea.

He had brought recording devices, cameras, video, every word was being transcribed to a laptop. A digital copy of each photo and a wave file attached to it. The two in-laws only needed the smallest of pushes every now and then to keep going. They had started the day early in the morning and ended up finishing near eleven at night. Once they had gotten into the college years the photos and videos started to get less common, and they were fewer and fewer, until only the last one – only photos from Grace's graduation remained.

Bonny and Alan were fairly upbeat for having talked and moved boxes all day. The voice was like that, it was a rather good motivator, it could get a man to march ten miles if needed. When he came to the final picture, the one that he had seen in the kitchen, Howard decided to finally ask the question.

“When did you know Grace was not my child?”

They had been talking and talking and giving away the memories of the past four decades so freely, divulging the greatest secret of their lives came as easily as talking about a trip down splash mountain. Alan started first.

“She had called as soon as she realized she was pregnant. I explained that if she didn't marry the man who did it, we would disown her forever.” His face did a bit of a scrunch, like he was not sure if he had meant it to say it seriously there, or if it was a joke. Perhaps it had morphed into the second in his head over the decades.

Bonny continued for Alan, “He was married and had a lot of clout at the school. I talked with her and gave her advice to instead hook up with the smartest nerdiest guy on campus immediately.”

Mira had reached out to him through that website. An e-mail out of the blue. Bonny, she was the clever one, and her Mira took after her in many ways. Bonny finished, “Seems to have worked out pretty well, twenty years of successful marriage.”

It was probably his own fault, as he didn't realize women can't figure out, they're pregnant that quickly. He didn't question it at the time. She was already starting to show by Christmas, and they had a quick wedding before the start of his last semester in January. Mira dropped out and he got a serious job, she raised Grace, he worked his butt off, and the love never really came back like it had those first few months.

“Yes... well, here's to twenty more.” Coming here gave him an opportunity. He could at least get them off his back, buy himself some more time.

“I bet you're sick of this. I bet you're sick of seeing me and Mira. You've probably both gotten a lifetime's worth of us. So, if you don't hear from us for a while, that's perfectly OK with you guys, right?”

That was not a permanent solution. He would need to come back at some point, figure out what to do with the two. After all, if this worked, he'd be stealing a daughter from them.

A strange euphemism. Like what Alan had said when they got to the wedding photos. Here comes Howard to steal his daughter away forever.