Chapter 18: Somewhere in the south of France

10 Floréal Year CCXXXI, Potat, South Windland, Libertalia - Amazonia

There was an entire aisle dedicated to it, which seemed excessive since only the small ones were eating it, right? The containers were Amazon sized, but even if the shelf-life was very long, there was no way an Amazon feeding one little a sandwich a day could go through that much peanut butter before it went bad. Just one of these containers would probably last a decade.

And the jelly! Not just strawberry, but every berry and fruit. Blackberry, blueberry, lingonberry, snozzberry, lemon jam, orange jam, and coffee jam. And that's just the jam! Every single major brand had their own variant. The aisle was a mile long, and somehow, they had filled it. Was strawberry confit that different from strawberry fruit butter and strawberry jelly from strawberry jam?

It was here that Oliver saw something that made him want to puke. The Amazon was about to commit a crime against humanity. She was tall, maybe ten and a half feet, but looked too young (it was hard to tell an Amazon's age) to have a kid... or little. Her blond hair was done in a side ponytail, she had super tight mom jeans, plus over the top silver earrings that hung like fishing lures. They glimmered a nice contrast to her overly thin black shirt that said she still thought of herself as a party gal on the prowl and not a milf. She had stopped her cart about three fourths down the aisle and cast her line.

In her hands was a four-pound container with swirls of brown and purple. Both peanut butter and jelly in the same container! Disgusting! It was almost as bad of a crime as was happening to the small man who was locked in her cart.

His face was red and white with agony. He was bending back and forth in the seat. His mom had put him in an overly fluffy white baby dress, like the kind for a baptism, and it covered his legs completely except for two dangling pink booties. She had tied a pink bow to his neck, and he wore another white one over his head. His hair had grown about an inch too long for a guy's cut, and an attempt had been made to corral as much of it as possible into pigtails.

“Please, it's right there. You heard me, right? I am not going to be able to hold it.” He tried twisting and pointing at the room past the aisle. Even from here, Oliver could see the sign of Mars and Venus he was trying to point at.

Oliver had to go down this aisle. He had to measure the prices. He kept coming back here, hoping for a quiet moment so he could squeeze through and just do his work. For some reason, every mom came down this aisle and treated the intense decision of chunky versus crunchy versus creamy as if she were pairing a wine with dinner. They would spend minutes agonizing, “This one has too much fat” or “this one has too much sugar”. Oliver was a dude though; he didn't understand how important this was. Just grab one of each and toss what you do not want to eat. It is like five bucks.

It was not really about the peanut butter. It was about the fact the restroom was right there, and the little would be forced to sit and wait and watch and well, maybe mommy would just get wrapped up in her little world, and oops, looks like little Timmy or little Jamie had another accident. In public. Even an animal would find a corner to hide in. They were so close to the potty, and yet were not grown up enough to just hold it for just a few more minutes.

Oliver was done. He needed those prices. With righteous indignation he approached the woman.

“Heidi, are you thinking we should get the peanut butter with jelly swirls, or the jelly with peanut butter swirls?” She did not turn to look at him when she asked the question, his opinion did not matter.

“I don't care... just pick one I have to go.”

“Look this one has banana.” Something was tugging her arm.

She looked down. It was a small one. Dressed impressively for a toddler. Maybe he was lost? “Oh, hello there? You get away from your mommy?”

Oliver went straight to the point, “You're a new mother, right?'

Did it really show? “Well, that's an impressive deduction...”

He spoke louder, “New as in, this is his first time you're forcing him to do it in public? This is supposed to be the moment he gets the privilege taken away forever?”

Her eyes crossed; people were not supposed to admit what was going on. That is part of the game. Everyone had to help pretend they did not see. Just look away, not draw attention to it. “That's not...”

“I'm not from around here, we do it differently where I'm from. Like, for example, we don't put a grown man with a colon full of laxatives into a pull-up meant for a little girl.”

She turned and looked at her Heidi. “She's a cute little one isn't she.”

Oliver raised his voice, “I don't care what you think he is in your head, in about two minutes he is going to be shitting all over that dress and all over the floor and if you don't want the other mommies and daddies in this store getting pissed at you for failing to take proper precautions ...”

The words went right to her head. Pain between the ears. “Fail … to take ... precautions.” It snapped her out of it. What mother fails to take precautions? Only the worst would do anything with children unplanned.

Her baby girl was in the wrong diaper for this! How did she make that mistake? Heidi was squirming. There was not time to get a replacement from the diaper aisle or get to her car. Too many decisions, not enough time to think them through, all of them were awful.

“You're in luck. He, unlike most littles, appears to love you very much despite what you did to him. He's being a big man holding it in for you. Can't you see that? He has been trying to tell you without making you feel bad. He's trying to protect you.”

Why would Heidi do that? That does not make sense. It was mommy's mistake, why would she do this? Why would a helpless little girl fight through pain just to make mommy feel better? Why would a girl ever need to show her mom she was in control of herself?

“Every man will lose to himself at his own pace, you can't rush these things. He still has the fight in him, and he wants to show you how big and strong he can be in the only way he still can.”

The man strained, “please... muttie, not much longer.” He bounced from buttocks to buttocks and pawed at his dress in the crotch area. His breathing was getting shorter and louder.

The Amazon grabbed the cart. She practically jumped and threw herself and the shopping cart through the rest of the aisle, and let it slam into the wall next to the restroom. As the back wheels of the cart bounced up, her arms were already lifting Heidi out. His feet got caught on the seatbelt, but the Amazon pulled with the force of a train. There was a loud pain in his ankle as it twisted to get him out. It is just pain, he could take that, it was not as bad as shitting all over yourself in public.

With the aisle to himself, Oliver could finally complete his survey.

There he saw it, a crime against humanity that made him want to vomit in disgust. “Kranch? As in ketchup and ranch? This dimension is a nightmare.” He marked the prices and reached for his dimensional shift equipment.

Just as he was preparing to leave, he felt a tugging at his shirt. He turned and saw the man in a dress. His pigtail had been taken out and his hair combed a bit. Heidi was short, a couple inches over five feet tops, and his paper-thin booties gave him no extra height.

“I asked mein mutter if I could have a minute to … practice … talking to a new friend. I haven't been fitting in well here at daycare.”

Oliver gave a soft chuckle - I bet kid. This is not the nineteenth century. A mom cannot dress a boy up as a girl and expect them to turn out normal – oh wait.

That training he had to do for work, the new one he had skipped through to get to the test at the end. Oliver was so old he did not even consider that might be the case here.

“It is ... 'he slash him' right? I hope that wasn't wrong of me to do that.” Oliver actually said slash, he was such a coot.

“It's fine, I'm just smaller than the other boys here. 'Mu..my' thought it would help me fit in better.”

It most certainly did not help him fit in better. The girls threw things at him when he tried to sit with them. The tweener helpers called him a sissy when the Amazons were away. The boys pushed him at recess and would not let him play with the fun toys. Everyone was mean to him because he was small even for a little. The littles had been exposed to such cruelty for so long, they relished an opportunity when someone even smaller came along they finally got a chance for once to pretend to be big.

He had been at daycare for a week, and he had gone home every day with a big frowny face on his score card for failing to make any friends or play nice with others. The tweeners who marked the cards knew the others were picking on him, but they made sure the reports said it was his fault.

His accent, the shape of his eyes, small differences in posture, plus that something extra you can only get when you've lived under a different sun and breathed a different air. Oliver put it together. “You're not from around here?”

“Yeah... from a place called Zemlya.”

“Really? I've been there. I'm sorry, that might be the one place I've seen where coming here is an upgrade.” It was the start of his career in the diplomatic corps. He had been part of a mission a decade ago reaching out after the war to dimensions that were considered within the Terran sphere of influence. Mostly to let them know about the changing of the guard.

Terra had intervened in Zemlya's World War Two. The “bad guys” were close to winning after twelve long years of fighting. With Terran support the war went on for about fifteen more years before the “good guys” finally won. The whole planet was a wreck. It was there that Oliver's team had first picked up the rumors of a dimension of giants looking for immigrant workers. Some sort of paradise with advanced technology. Taken with a large grain of salt of course. Earth's North Korea was a paradise with advanced technology compared to Zemlya.

Heidi rolled with it. “And you?”

“Earth, as in Earth-Ter..” he was interrupted.

“The baby brother?” the short man in a diaper said excitedly. Everyone had heard of Terra.

Oliver had traveled the equivalent of ten thousand worlds outside normal distribution and the one thing anyone here had ever heard about Earth was that it was Terra's little brother. Not “The planet that saved the multiverse” or “The one with The Beatles.” We are twins! Terra is not even that much older on cosmic time scales!

Heidi chuckled a bit “Does the council even allow you guys to venture this far out on your own?” Oliver was being talked down to by a man who needed to ask permission to go potty.

“Yeah... the baby brother.” Oliver rolled his eyes. “Look, I don't know if I can get you out of here, but it would be legal since you're from...”

“Don't. I volunteered and got a fast pass out because I'm a political refugee. It's getting worse back home. This place is amazing, and I could die happy here if I didn't have to be a four-month baby girl. She even keeps talking about wanting to 'make the bottom match the top'. I don't know what that is supposed to mean.”

Oliver thought for a second, “There's something I want to try. I'm not even sure it'll work. Wait here a minute. If it does, when your mom asks you what kind of peanut butter you like, say 'I want to try the hazelnut spread, and along with real bananas' and when she comes over say, 'I want to make my own peanut butter. I like it fresh with real nuts.'”

Oliver went over to the mother and then reached into her cart and stole from it a bag of sugar and a container of paprika. When the giant saw him and reached to stop him, he did some sort of jig with his hands, like performing a card trick or magic. It caused her attention to be locked on his phone when it was pulled out. She stared at it for thirty seconds. Her head tilted a bit and then she turned and looked at her son in the aisle. She just kept staring, watching her child, as Oliver ran off. Two minutes later Oliver reappeared with a couple items. He casually threw them into her cart and then pointed at her boy. He waved to the other little, and the Amazon blinked hard a few times and shook her head. It would be the last time Heidi ever saw Oliver as his mother's cart turned around and blocked the aisle.

“Heidi, what sort of peanut butter do you want?”

“I want to try that hazelnut spread. With bananas. Real bananas. We never got to eat that back home and I always wanted it.”

She reached down and picked up the boy, carefully lifting up his dress so she could direct his tiny shoes back into the cart holes.

“OK, but what about the peanut butter? Mommy doesn't like hazelnut. We need to pick one we both like because Mommy wants to eat sandwiches too.”

“Did... did you see the big grinder over there.” He pointed to the corner of the store. His aim was off as his finger pointed to the ceiling as well. “I wanna’... I want to try it with real nuts. Can I have real nuts mommy?”

Her pupils got large and then small, and she looked at the man in the face, “My big boy just wants to see the big machine smash something. You're excited by big machines! Aren't you?”

He bounced and his smile got big. “Yes mommy. I like the big machines. Big machines like trucks and trains and dinosaurs and hello-chopers and race cars.” Dinosaur? Hello chopper? He had meant to say something else but trying to say the words made his brain feel like pulling on a stuck zipper.

Well, that is what you get for calling Earth a baby.

He looked around from his higher vantage, but he could not find Oliver. Instead, he saw what the strange man had put in his mother's cart. They were wrapped in plastic. He could only make out a few letters from this angle.

'rgots à la Bourgui.'

And below that, 'pped from Gaule'.

Those words might not have made sense to him, but you do not need the words when you have a picture. It was just like the grownups had taught him in daycare. A picture is worth a thousand words. A shadow black outline of a long worm with a swirl of shell on its back, and two stalks for eyes.

Snails! He loved snails! These had to be a half-foot long! His Oma would make them with a pound of butter and garlic and hard toasty bread. He had not had snails in twenty years, because they got too expensive. How did the funny Earthling know he wanted this?

Then he saw what was beside it. Frog legs? Yuck! What sort of uncultured people ate frog legs? This dimension was a nightmare.

She patted him on the head as she moved the cart along the condiment aisle. He had suffered so much, taken all the abuse, humiliation, and pain, just so she would not have to deal with even the slightest chance of discomfort. She made sure to stop at the Nutella as she continued shopping.

The store also sold it in these little-sized containers that came with crackers, so he could have fun making his own snack and dipping on the go. She opened one and gave it to him. Within a minute brown mud coated his lips and tiny fingers. When he finished eating, he wiped his hands on his white dress. He smeared dark color into the white cloth while trying to get the oily goo off his hands. His little princess dress now looked like he had worn it while sliding into home base.

“Hans, since you were my big man today, mommy will buy you a nice big truck to play with, and you can even take it to daycare tomorrow and all the other boys and girls will be jealous. Do you know why?”

“No” That sounded impossible, he was the smallest one there and had a foreign accent and his mom dressed him funny. No one looked up to him.

She had said the 'T word' though, and that was all he cared about now. He never wanted to touch a doll again. He would walk barefoot over hot coals to play with one truck. He started to bounce back and forth, buttocks to buttocks. Too much sugar was bad for a boy.

“Because you'll be the only one who can use the potty and all the other littles there are just babies still in diapers. From now on, everyone is going to know you're the most grown up little that's ever been.”

Hans had done it. He had passed the test. His mom had told him this morning it was his (last) chance to prove he was a big (boy). If he could hold it in and let her know, she would take him to the toilet, but if he failed, he would be in diapers forever. As a precaution she had put him in a pull-up, even though they both knew he didn't need one. All he had to do was let her know and she promised she would take him. And it worked! All the other littles had all failed, and he had succeeded! Only the strong survive.

She took out a wet wipe from her bag and started wiping his fingers and hands. The act of cleaning stopped her cart for a few seconds at the end of the aisle. The pause was long enough for her to see it.

This is perfect. Her boy would love this. One could not imagine a less spicy flavor combination. Like the marriage of bland and more bland. The packaging even said it was low in sugar! She tossed the bottle right next to the escargot. Tonight, she would fry him the frog legs and he could dip them in Kranch. It sounded disgusting to her, but four-year-old boys loved eating disgusting things. All mommies know that little boys needed to stay away from sugar and spice and everything nice.