8.)

It was almost five thirty when Blossom's ritzy sedan pulled into my driveway. I already talked to my mom about going away for the weekend, but I left a note on the counter all the same. I had my phone, in case she needed to call me. Blossom said they had service up there.

"Have you ever thought about car seats?" Blossom asked.

Yes, that was the perfect greeting for the author you idolize and adore when she sits down in your passenger seat. Blossom was often like that though, very stream of consciousness. That was why a lot of people thought she was a ditzy bimbo, that and her big rack and blonde bleached hair. She would just blurt things out because she'd been thinking about them.

Mia closed the passenger door and reached for her seatbelt. Blossom was wearing very very short denim shorts that looked even shorter because she had legs that refused to quit. She paired that with a white tank top straining over her large chest and a flowy red cardigan that she had pulled down off one shoulder. Topped with her large round sunglasses and straw hat, she looked ready to hit the beach despite the fact summer was long since over. Even if Blossom didn't know how to dress for the occasion, she sure knew how to dress.

"Car seats?" I asked.

"Like little kid ones, but in adult sizes," Blossom explained. "I bet they'd sell on Etsy or something."

"Uhh... I mean, I guess so."

I was always a passenger. I mean, I had a driver's license, but my mom and I shared a car. Sometimes I could borrow it in the evenings, but riding shotgun was kind of the norm. A carseat would probably make the otherwise boring experience a lot less boring.

"You don't have car seats in Academy Works," Blossom mentioned offhandedly.

"There aren't any cars in Academy Works," I countered. It looked like all her pent up question-asking was about to come out in full force. I checked the back seat: no one was hiding to jump out and laugh at me.

"What's that?" Blossom asked.

"Uhh..." I looked down at the tray in my hands, with the plastic dome over the top. "Cake? I was bored, so I made it. I hope that's okay?" Maybe Blossom didn't eat cake. She sure looked like the kind of girl that would scoff at carbs or something.

"I love cake soooo stinking much!" Blossom said unexpectedly. "That's so awesome. I'm going to spend a weekend with Mia Moore and the cake she made; that's so hot."

Now, admittedly, Blossom meant 'hot' here as a term to mean 'really good' or 'pretty great', but also she did find it a pretty attractive quality in a person for them to make cake for a road trip. She was positively glowing, and her sunglasses only served to accentuate the definition of her cheekbones. And her lipstick - a bright red - only served to make her smile all the more apparent.

"Thank you?" Well, that was a lot more enthusiasm than I expected, but it was appreciated all the same. I set the cake tray on the floor of the car and put my feet on either side to keep it steady. Blossom pulled out onto my street and started toward the freeway. Two hours in a car with Blossom Brixley: what could go wrong?

"I'm surprised that there aren't any cars in Academy Works," Blossom said. "I guess it makes sense that there aren't any in I or B, but in T there's a whole town. There's a lot of potential there. Like in this one other story I read, the girl had an accident in the car on the way to visit her friend, so her friend obviously had to put her in a diaper and baby her."

Blossom was as exuberant as usual, and thankfully that didn't distract her from driving. Her stereo showed the name of a song playing from her phone, but she had deliberately turned the volume down so she could talk with Mia.

"Do you ever read stories by other people?" Blossom asked.

"Yeah," I shrugged. "I mean, not so much anymore. I think I get discouraged, seeing how good other people are at writing. Like, you know Personalias? I feel like he writes an entire story before I can finish a single chapter. That guy is non-stop."

That was the first time I said Personalias's name out loud. I said it like two different words - Person Alias - but maybe it was supposed to be Personal-eeus? Person-el-eeus? It was strange, introducing my baby brain to the world of sound and speech. They felt incompatible.

"What, uh... about you? I guess you must have other favorite authors?"

"I've read a lot! There's that one Baby Dolls story by Fifers, but it hasn't had an update in ages. AB Alex has really nice short stories."

"Agreed," I said.

"And there's Sophie and Pudding," Blossom went on, "but their style takes some getting used to because it goes back and forth. But the colors help! I used to like Princess Pottypants too, but I don't think I've read anything by her in a long time."

Talking about this stuff out in the open was a little bit surreal, because until very recently this circle of Blossom's life was a pretty solitary one. It wasn't uncomfortable though, and saying the words out loud didn't feel that weird. It was just a new thing, and that newness was also exciting in its own way.

"Ha, yeah. Everyone writes in the Diaper Dimension. I'm not a huge fan." Did I sound jealous? I was jealous, but I didn't want to sound like it. I mean, who didn't want every ABDL author writing in the universe they made up? No one else wrote in the Academy Works world. Though I guess I didn't leave a lot of room for it...

"I don't mind it," Blossom said. "I think a shared universe is pretty heckin' cool, but a lot of those stories make the world their whole gimmick, so they feel pretty samey. I love your stuff because it's all so different. None of the Academy stories feel alike!"

"Thanks..." I sighed. Blossom had to hit the brakes kind of hard to avoid an annoying driver who tried to cut her off. I was glad I had been holding the cake tray between my feet, or it would have gone flying off my lap. "But I mean, all the Academies are in the same world. They are the same... uh... organization?" Was that the best word?

"So are there twenty-six?" she asked. "One for each letter?"

"I think so." That was a tidbit that probably would never appear in the written work. Maybe I was starting to trust Blossom after all. "There are what, 1500 Candies?"

"1508," Blossom corrected. "Nine if you count Angela."

"You shouldn't count Angela," I smirked. I felt like a cat with a secret. "And there are sixty-ish Candies in K and A."

"Which is..."

Blossom did the math faster in her head than I could have done on paper. It was kind of impressive.

"A little over 25 Academies."

"So the math checks out," I shrugged.

"But you're not writing 26 stories," Blossom said, almost like a question, but it had the wrong inflection at the end of the sentence.

"Nope. It won't take that many to tell the story I want to tell."

"So did you plan out the entire roadmap from the start?" Blossom asked. "Or have you been winging it as you go?"

"We're just going to shotgun Academy Works questions for two hours?" I asked, breaking her train of thought. I was just joking, but Blossom got a little flustered. Her cheeks took on a splash of color and she tightened her hands on the wheel of the car.

"I'm sorry. I must sound like such a little simp, huh?"

Blossom actually wasn't too used to being called out, joking or otherwise, and it took her a few moments to figure out how to stick the landing on this one. In the end, she settled on adjacency.

"Well, what other stuff have you done? What else are you into? Tell me about the real Mia Moore!"

"Uh..."

On the list of things I wanted to talk about, Academy Works was at the top. Me? I was at the bottom. So I decided to deflect back to her original question.

"I had a plan when I started writing, but I think a lot has changed since then. Maybe the core story is still the same? But all the pieces are different." It was kind of weird how things evolved over time.

"Oh hey now," Blossom said, "I was a cheerleader and I don't even think I'm flexible enough to have dodged like that!"

Which really only made Blossom more interested in knowing the answer! Something she'd learned on the train that first evening had been that brute-forcing things with Mia wasn't the cleverest idea, though, so she decided to do some give and take.

"Okay I'll go first! I love mind control and hypnosis stories, especially when the person is fully aware of what's happening to them. Certain words, like 'conditioned' or 'trained' are super mega ultra hot by association."

No wonder she liked Academy Works...

"Can't we just go back to talking about my stories?" I whined. Those were more interesting anyway!

"One thing about you first," Blossom countered.

"Ugh... I dunno..." Mind control was definitely up there on my list of kinks. I played with my fingers in my lap and tried to answer her question. "I don't really read a lot of stories anymore? I usually make up my own?"

She looked over at me out of the corner of her eye, raising an eyebrow. I sighed. Gosh, this sucked.

"I see a photo or a piece of art or something and I make up my own story to go along with it. Like, how did they get to that point? What happens after the picture?" And now it was my turn to blush.

"See!" Blossom said gleefully. "That wasn't so hard, now, was it? And that's super interesting and totally charming. You undersell yourself so much, Mia Moore; you're such a curiosity." Boldly, Blossom put her hand on Mia's knee in encouragement and winked at her.

"Uh... thanks..." I shrugged her hand off me and sunk further into the chair. "Can we go back to talking about Academy Works now?"

"Totes!"

"Actually, I had a question for you." It was the first bit of initiative I took since getting in the car.

"Shoot," Blossom said.

"Did you like the first one? Academy I? I try to write the stories as their own little standalone vignettes, since like… I know a lot of people just want to get off to this stuff and writing long-form stories can get in the way of that. I just want everyone to have fun reading them, even if they don’t get the whole plot, ya know? But I dunno. Maybe they aren’t good on their own?" After that comment, I was actually thinking about going back and editing all my posts to specify that the stories must be read together.

If Blossom had needed to think about the answer, it must have happened quickly because her answer came at the speed of a gameshow contestant hitting a buzzer.

"Mia Moore, if Academy I hadn't been so amazingly good, I wouldn't have read it. The whole thing is a masterclass in both meeting and subverting expectations, like the cupboard thing and the Flopsity thing. And it's like how movies become a series after the first one, like Star Wars? Star Wars had to be really good, because it might have been the only one. But it also had to be a good first entry to a series if it did well, and that's what Academy I is. It's a collection of extremely hot scenarios with a fun, curious protagonist. The undercurrent of mystery is just icing on the cake."

After gushing about it, Blossom summarized:

"It definitely stands alone."

"Even though it doesn’t answer any questions?" I asked.

"The fact that it asks them at all makes it better than most diaper stories. Plot isn’t exactly the metric by which you judge a diaper story."

I nodded. Maybe Blossom was right. If kink stories were about plot, we wouldn’t have so many ‘my wife wants a baby’ stories. We wouldn’t have so many people who liked reading about it. Maybe I was being too hard on myself; I wasn’t trying to win a Pulitzer. I just wanted ABDL stories to be more than fap rags. In a vaulting contest of expectations, the bar was so low that an actual baby could crawl over it. At least I was trying, right? So why couldn’t I shake the suspicion that I was digging under that bar?

I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

"Did you have any other questions?" I asked, which was a stupid thing to say. Blossom’s questions had no end. I kept thinking she would get sick of asking about my stories, but she didn't. I had doubted her motives before getting in the car, but by the time we arrived at the beach house I was well and truly convinced: Blossom Brixley was a fangirl of my diaper smut.

"Wait, how many more stories is "a few"? Two more? Three more?"

Blossom put the car in park and turned to me with undivided attention for the first time in two hours.

"I dunno?" I shrugged. "Something like that?"

On the drive, we talked about my inspiration for writing Academy Works in the first place: a video game called Xenosaga. My mom got me a PlayStation 2 when I was in middle school and I fell in love with the game. There was one character - MOMO - who was a little girl with a magical girl battle mode. I think she contributed a lot to my liking of Little stuff.

More importantly, Xenosaga was a wild narrative and psychological roller coaster. It was based on some stuff by Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, the fathers of pretentious college kids everywhere. It also had a lot of biblical inspiration.

Xenosaga - which was actually three games - also had a prequel game called Xenogears, but the game was so complicated that they had to make a guide book in Japan called Perfect Works. I thought that title was elegant, so I named my series Academy Works in reverence.

Perfect Works had six parts, but I wasn't confident that I could wrap up Academy Works in only six stories. I was already halfway through the fifth one and there was a lot left to say.

Blossom didn't know anything about Xenosaga or Carl Jung or Friedrich Nietzsche, which was probably a good thing. I didn't want her to get her expectations too high; I wasn't as pedantic or as visionary as my source material. I was, however, more comprehensible.

"So if you aren't going to use all the Academies... how do you feel about someone else doing it? Writing stories in those places?"

"Uhh..." Like how people write in the Diaper Dimension? "I'd be flattered."

"But Academy Works is kind of intricate, right?" Blossom asked. "Would they be non-canon?"

"Hm." I had never thought about that. "No, I think they could still be canon. The Academies are there to make obedient Candies, but not all of them are important to the main plot. So if someone wanted to make like... an Academy J story or something, they could design the Academy and fill it with whatever characters they wanted. And that could be like... a side-story?" I kind of liked the idea, to be honest!

"Like Paradox Space." Blossom nodded in understanding, and Mia looked at her blankly. She shook her head dismissively and smiled with her painted lips. "Come on, let's head inside."