Part 2

She glanced warily from side to side. She definitely didn't want to be seen in such a ludicrous outfit. It seemed to be some kind of cruel joke, intended to humiliate her. But there was no one around, and the massive hallway was eerily silent, save for the distant crackling of a fire.

She looked back at the diaper. She pressed a finger into the padding. She drew in a sharp breath. How could anything be this soft? She squeezed her legs together, and was shocked at how the material bunched up between her legs. She bit her bottom lip. It felt shockingly comfortable.

Still, she had her pride to consider. However ridiculously comfy it was, she couldn't just waddle around in a big diaper. Even nudity would be more dignified. Feeling conflicted, she dug a fingernail under one of the enormous tapes that held the silly thing on, and gently tugged. She dug another fingernail under, and tugged again. She grabbed the waistband-like leak guards, and pulled. She pulled harder. She struggled with all her strength. The diaper barely responded to her efforts, snapping gently back into place with a crinkling noise and a puff of scented baby powder the instant she relented, wholly unaltered by any of her wrenching and pulling. She lay in the hallway struggling ferociously with the strange garment, although her desire to get it off was quickly eclipsed by her fascination with its clearly unnatural properties. With a mix of fright and a very guilty kind of excitement, Kara gradually came to accept that she had been magically forced to wear a diaper, and that for the time being at least, there was little she could do about it. She wasn't sure how to feel about that.

Well, she thought, if she had to be diapered in this strange place, there was no point in dwelling on it. It certainly wouldn't prevent her from exploring further. She decided to try the nearest door. The diaper felt funny between her legs as she crawled along the shiny tile floor.

She stopped. She looked around herself again, confused. There was plenty of headroom here. If anything, the hallway was so spacious that it made her feel a little agoraphobic. So why had she been crawling? Could she really have gotten used to it so quickly in the crawlspace? Shaking her head at herself, she pushed herself off the ground, wondering why the simple act of standing up felt so awkward and unnatural. The floor was weirdly smooth under her bare feet, like a sheet of polished glass. Her knees wobbled. She held out her arms to try to regain her balance. The floor looked almost threatening at this distance. She felt like she was walking on stilts. Then, all at once, her knees buckled under her and her legs gave way. She waved her arms wildly, but she fell backward, squarely onto her rear. She was surprised that she felt no pain, as the ridiculously thick padding readily absorbed the force of the fall. If anything, tumbling onto her butt felt kinda nice.

She was disturbed by what she had discovered. She could not walk here. She was diapered, and she could only crawl. What sort of place was this?

She decided to keep searching and find out. Crawling long distance wasn't something she had done much of until today, but she found that the tile wasn't too hard on her knees. She approached one of the huge doors, sitting just a few yards from the tiny one she had entered by. The silvery knob was about five feet off the ground, and as big around as a cantaloupe. She struggled to reach it for a few minutes, but with her legs betraying her again and again, it was all but impossible to get a grip on it. After much struggle, she finally managed to get her hands around it. Hanging onto it for support and unable to put any weight on her feet, she struggled desperately to swing her body to turn the knob. It barely even jiggled before she lost her grip and went sprawling onto the floor, knocking over a decorative vase that had been sitting in a bronze stand nearby. Over the giant thing went, shattering across the floor with a crash that reverberated through the cavernous hallway.

Kara looked at the broken ceramic pieces in horror. She hid herself behind one of the huge marble columns and waited. Anyone who was in the house would surely come running at such a noise, wouldn't they? But after several minutes, neither the sounds of opening doors nor the stomping of gigantic feet could be heard. She sighed with relief. If that sound had attracted no attention, perhaps this place was actually deserted, although she knew better than to lean too heavily on such a conclusion. Finally, she abandoned her cover and crawled toward the other end of the hallway, hoping to find something in this weird place that wasn't sealed behind a giant door.

She soon reached the end of the hallway and turned a corner under an ornate arch. The polished tile gave way to fleecy white carpeting under her knees. She had to pause to take in what lay beyond. Calling the grotto that opened up in front of her a living room would hardly be doing its scale and sheer grandeur justice, although that was obviously its intended function. A long couch hugged the wall beside her, upholstered in royal blue and big enough to comfortably seat an entire football team. Another door lay just beyond it, next to the fireplace. The red-brick fireplace was almost big enough to be a bedroom in its own right. The fire inside would have been a serious hazard in any regular-sized house, but here it passed for a modest, cheerful blaze, much smaller than what the hearth could accommodate. Above the flames hung a heavy iron grating, on which a collection of shiny brown shells were steadily roasting. Kara wondered if they were actually chestnuts. She had never seen actual chestnuts actually roasting on an open fire before. It would have seemed charmingly quaint, and a little trite, if it weren't surrounded by such overblown opulence.

Another elegant arch opened on an equally gigantic kitchen, and it was immediately obvious that this was the source of the delicious smells that permeated the house.

The source of the alpine scent was even more obvious. The tree was so beautiful, Kara found that she was staring at it for quite a while before she really came to grips with just how ludicrously large it was. No wonder the scent of its needles hung in the air all through the house. Kara had thought that the ceiling was absurdly high in the rest of the house, but the Christmas tree needed an alcove in the ceiling all to itself. The opening shot up at least sixty feet, terminating in a skylight from which a soft, white glow was streaming down. If it had been the centerpiece of a mall or town square's Christmas display, it would have been considered a little much. The ornaments that covered it ranged from three to six feet in height, and the strings of lights that coated every available branch could have been impressive if they had been spread over an entire neighborhood. At the foot of the aromatic monstrosity sat a collection of huge wrapped gift-boxes, all glistening in different colors and tied with elegant white bows.

Kara listened carefully, but the house was still perfectly silent. She weighed her options. Like Jack in the fairy tale, she rather hoped that there might be something in here that she could carry back with her to her apartment through the little door. Maybe even something valuable enough to help her out of her financial troubles. The ornaments on the tree alone looked pretty valuable, some even looked like they might be actual gold, but even if she could somehow get one down, even the smallest would be much too big to fit through the little door. She tried to explore the kitchen, but the table and countertops were much too high for her to reach in her current state. She knew there were cookies in there somewhere, but even if she could have reached them, she was much too savvy to eat anything from this place. She remembered what had become of Persephone.

That left the presents under the tree. Some of them were clearly too big as well, but even that was just the boxes, not the contents. There were plenty of boxes of a more manageable size. The only thing that held her back was her sense of propriety. Swiping gold decorations or food would only be wrong in a vague, abstract kind of way. Whatever giants inhabited this strange place, they clearly weren't impoverished, and probably wouldn't even notice if some of their finery disappeared in the night. Opening Christmas gifts intended for someone else, though, was on another level from mere larceny. It was more like sacrilege, the violation of a sacred trust.

Still, the crisp, shiny wrapping paper called out to Kara with a familiar siren call. The temptation gripped Kara, making her purse her lips and grit her teeth to hold herself back. Foolhardy thoughts trickled unbidden into mind. Surely, when there were so many, no one would miss just one?

She crawled slowly toward the glittering heap. Her eyes kept darting over to the door in the corner of the room. It certainly didn't seem like anyone was around. The footsteps of someone who lived in a house like this would surely be audible from a long way off, wouldn't they? She would have plenty of warning, wouldn't she? Her heart raced. She picked up one of the smallest presents. It was heavy in her hands. She lifted the tag (on which a smiling Santa Clause was dashing merrily across a rooftop) curious and yet dreading what she might find.

To: Kara Espinoza

From: Your Nanny

Every vertebra in her spine proceeded to carefully fuse together into a single piece. “It could just be a coincidence” she thought, not really convincing even herself. She looked at the other tags as well. The pictures that decorated them were all different, but the same words were handwritten in an elegant sweeping hand on each one. Kara could keep the thought out of her head no more. These were all for her. The thought was both wonderful and frightening. It meant she was expected. It meant that whoever owned this absurd palace knew she would be here, and had wanted her to come.

The thought made her heart rush even more. What did this mean? Who was this “Nanny” who had apparently laid out a truckload of presents just for her?

By the time she had decided to open the present, her finger had already begun to tear through the wrapping paper of its own volition. The sound of tearing paper was viscerally exciting. She could remember how it had felt tearing apart the paper as a child, how profoundly liberating it was to be given permission to rip apart something so beautiful, to deliberately destroy something in front of her family without any fear of rebuke. That strange sense that she finally had permission to step across the sacred threshold. She realized, with the paper already halfway off the box, that it would not be Christmas for many hours yet, so it was too soon to open the gifts now, even if they were intended for her. The fact that it was a technical transgression just made it even sweeter. It was...naughty.

Inside the box, nestled in a bed of lavender-colored crepe paper, was a golden tiara studded with iridescent gemstones. Kara held it up to the light to admire its beauty. She was no expert in such matters, but the weight of it at least suggested that it was no mere toy. Everything about it looked both fanciful and absolutely genuine. Kara immediately wanted to try it on, but stopped herself with the heavy band mere inches above her hair. She wondered if casually putting something like this on her head might be a mistake, given where she was. She settled for securing it around her arm at the shoulder as a safer alternative. Emboldened, she grabbed a larger box and began to tear into the paper with relish.

She jumped when the box popped in her hands like a tiny firework once she had pulled off the paper. A puff of white smoke briefly blinded her. When she had fanned away the smoke, the box in her hands was empty. She glanced around, and gasped. Lying face-up on the floor beside her was the figure of a woman. She looked to be in her early thirties, and was dressed in a set of loose-fitting blue overalls, a red-and-white striped top, and red sneakers. Her dark brown hair was tied with red ribbons into a set of pigtails, her cheeks were dotted with painted freckles, and she had a bulbous red clown nose. Kara had only a horrible second to speculate just what sort of horrible trick was being played on her, when the figure opened her bright blue eyes and jumped up from the floor, grinning like a maniac.

“Ohmagawd, ohmagawd,ohmagawd! You're here! You're finally here! Wooooooo!”