Alterations - Exchanged Book 3 (Diaper Dimension)

Chapter 25
All I Want for Christmas...

I BOLTED OUT of bed and looked at the closed door for a moment, wondering what to do! I wanted my knives, but I had just given them to Grandpa Joe to get rid of the evidence… I noticed my backpack sitting by my desk and quickly searched through the pockets to find my switch. I pulled the pistol free of the casing and checked the clip. I only had two bullets left between the chambered round and the clip... I knew that I’d have to make them count!

I remembered the new safe box in the closet and looked up at Bella who somehow still asleep in the crib. “It’s okay Bella,” I whispered to her and tried to think of a way to get her into the safe box Fred had added. Unfortunately, there was no way I could get her out of the crib without her help. I knew she could barely sit up now; her climbing a crib wasn’t in the cards. Unfortunately, like in our dimension, drop side cribs had been banned for home use. I thought for a moment about climbing up and trying to pull her out, but I knew it would likely just result in me being trapped in the crib myself. I grimaced and instead found myself a hiding spot underneath the crib and aimed the pistol towards the door.

I heard rapid shots firing from an automatic weapon, followed by some shouting and screams of pain. Someone pounded on the nursery door trying to get in before I heard Amanda and Fred both begin screaming and heard something physically impacting against the hallway walls.

Thump!

Scream!

Thump!

Thump!

Thump!

I heard glass shatter!

Then there was silence.

I felt urine flee my body as I wondered what silence meant. The noises were scary, but at least I knew Amanda and Fred were putting up a fight!

I felt tears draining from my eyes, but prepared to defend myself and Bella if the attackers made it into the room.

Beeps came at the keypad on the door and urine began leaking out of the leg hole of my diaper. I held my breath and aimed my gun, and just prayed that it wouldn’t be a bad guy!

The door slowly opened and Amanda said, “Stacy? It’s just us. They are all down for the count,” she told me carefully. I watched her step fully into the room and believed no one would be dumb enough to let her do so if she was being held at gunpoint. I rolled out from my hiding spot and kept my gun pointing down.

She stepped over to me and picked me up into her arms to hug me, “only one made it past the force field,” she said pointing down to a body that she walked me over to. I recognized the tattoo and realized it was the lady that had tried to kidnap me the first time.

“She’s out?” I asked Amanda.

“Should be for a while with as hard as I hit her…”

“Why don’t we tie her up or something?” I suggested wearily.

Fred had the same idea and came around out of Amanda’s workroom just then with some nylon zip ties. Several of them made sure that she was quickly tied up and not going anywhere. I saw shattered picture frames and a vase cracked to pieces along the hallway.

Amanda carried me back to the nursery and checked on Bella. She was still somehow asleep and out cold! She was breathing normally though at least.

“How is she still asleep?” I asked her.

She shrugged, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they conditioned her to sleep through noise at night so she wouldn’t wake up and annoy whoever was taking care of her?”

I nodded and realized I needed to go to the bathroom again and should also hide my gun. “Mommy… might be a good idea for me to hide my gun, right?”

She looked down at my hand and seemed to have just then noticed the weapon. “This is what you had?”

I nodded.

“Put it back inside it’s hiding place, we’ll talk about it later,” she told me.

The police arrived with a SWAT unit that stormed the house a few minutes later.

By the time the sun rose, we learned it had been a team of the Trelini gang trying one last shot at us on behalf of the remaining interests of Venture. Twelve of their members had tried to storm the house like they had before, but the force field was something new they were not expecting. Eight of the morons died from ricochets as they tried shooting at it - and three were injured enough to keep them out of the fray. Somehow Serena Ricci had gotten through while the laser sights of their guns were pointed at the barrier, and then avoided getting shot… It was a bit of a miracle really that she survived!

Amanda had taken good care of her though! I could tell she had vented a lot of her anger on her limp body. Teeth lay next to her, her face was bloody, and her legs and arms seemed to be bent at unnatural angles as the medics hauled her away sobbing in pain.

“Fred, I think it’s time for us to get a new house…” Amanda said as the police finally finished questioning them.

“I agree, let’s start looking…”

“You folks about ready to get out of here?” An officer asked them right then. “We need to finish processing the scene.”

“Let me grab some diapers and things for my girls?” She asked.

“Sure,” the officer said. The man watched her as she filled my backpack with diapers for me, another diaper bag for Bella, and then grabbed some uniforms and clothes for both of us. Pulling away from the house I could see flashing lights of the police cars and caution tape everywhere. I wasn’t expecting to see quite so many news vans though!

All of us received strong hugs from Granny as we came in, and I saw that the news was on. I squirmed in Fred’s arms and he let me down to go closer to the TV.

A brown-haired woman in a fashionable pantsuit was on camera holding a microphone.

This morning we are still following our breaking news about the home invasion that happened early this morning. Our sources told us this morning that a group of armed men broke into the house behind me with the intentions of kidnapping their littles and killing the parents. Fortunately, the family had upgraded their security systems after two earlier break-in attempts, and were able to fight off the one suspect who got close to them. Our understanding is that it appears an unknown number of the suspects were killed by their own bullets. We understand that the homeowners and their little girls were luckily unharmed in the attack.

Incredibly, we also just learned that it appears that the two little girls were involved in the little mill operation that was just uncovered at the University Hospital yesterday…

The TV shut off and I looked at Grandpa who nodded his head towards Amanda who wasn’t doing well. I walked over to her and hugged her legs until she picked me up and cuddled me with Bella. We stayed like that for a long time before I definitely fell back asleep.

THE NEXT FEW months passed by to finish the semester in a blur! Even though there had been a few other challenges, I was exceptionally proud to have earned a perfect 4.0 GPA my first semester! I was currently enjoying the extended Christmas Break that students at Emerson were given. It beat the two-week school breaks I had grown up with! Six whole weeks off were amazing! My only regret was the fear of shrinking further, kept me from going home to my dimension to visit my family over the break like I had originally planned.

We had moved into another house two weeks after the last break-in. This one had a tall twenty-foot wall around the entire property, and a level of security that made the old systems look worthless… which I guess in a way it had been given the repeat break-ins we had dealt with! The new house featured plenty of bedrooms so that I had my own, Bella had her nursery, and we had two spare guest bedrooms, in addition to the workroom for Amanda and Fred’s office. It even had an indoor pool that I was able to swim laps in every day despite the fact it was cold and snowy outside!

The rest of the Venture company pretty much crumbled with the loss of Doctor Nimitz and the enforcers they had hired. Several of the captured nurses were singing like canaries in the hopes of lighter sentences, something I was personally very opposed to them getting! I had regretted not using the last two bullets on two of them!

Sadly, for all of us, Bella was barely responding to the treatments to undo the damage of hypnosis treatments she had received. The only real progress was her vocabulary had grown to that of about fifty words... But, potty training, being able to walk, or express herself properly, were still completely robbed from her for some reason! It was frustrating for her to want to talk normally to us, but clearly, she was unable to string more than two words together. We tried having her type at a computer, point at pictures… but no matter what, if it wasn’t a simple word, her brain wouldn’t let her express it.

I grew really depressed watching her struggle.

All of that being said, at least she smiled with the love that was showered on her from Amanda, Fred, and myself. It really was like having a one-year-old around the house at that point. We all tried to treat her with dignity, but it meant to keep her happy we had to in some ways keep pretending she was just a baby. She seemed happier playing with toddler appropriate toys than anything else we tried. Unfortunately, nothing that any of the specialists tried with her seemed to snap her clear of the damage the monsters had done to her.

The first couple of weeks I had off leading to Christmas I finally had time to work on a possible solution. I knew that Bella had been saved with nanites from the poison during the first attack, so like me she already had them inside of her. At the moment I knew they would be dormant. For the past couple of nights, I’d been running a diagnostic on her brain to discover exactly what had been done to her. It was horrifying to see the effects on the scans, as they’d gone beyond hypnosis and must have done some chemical alterations to her brain too. There were whole sections of her brain that were no longer communicating with each other! Essentially, they had performed a lobotomy with technology and chemicals instead of surgery.

After seeing the results of the scans, I began coding a fix for the nanites to reconstruct those pathways in her brain, but per my promise I wasn’t going to implement it until I spoke with Amanda. She found me typing on my computer on Christmas Eve and I decided to tell her what I was working on.

“What are you working on?” Amanda asked, “That looks an awful lot like the nanite code?”

I nodded, “It is… Bella still has them running in her system from the doctors fighting the poison…”

“You’re not doing things with her without telling me?”

She knelt down on the ground next to my desk where we could look each other in the eyes. “I haven’t done any fixes… but I did query the nanites to run a scan on her…”

She breathed a sigh that was both exasperated and relieved, “That sounds like editing code…?”

“It’s built-in, I just had to send a signal?”

“That’s actually something still accessible?” She paused, “Was there even a password?”

I nodded, “Yes, and I redid the password to something secure like I did mine.”

She sighed and asked, “What did you find?” She had a nervous twitch of running her hand through her hair that she did right then.

I pulled up the model of her brain and said, “The nanites show that they basically severed the fibers that connected these centers…” I told her the basics of everything I had learned from the nanites and researching their medical libraries.

We talked for a few minutes before she called, “Fred!”

“Yes Mandy?” he said a moment later.

She sighed, “Our little hacker is at it again… She managed to hack into the nanites that are still inside of Bella. Take a look at these scans…?”

We discussed them for the better part of another hour then before Fred made a couple suggestions, I tweaked the code, and then asked, “So do we upload it?”

Amanda picked me up and held me in her arms, “Are you sure it’ll work?”

I shook my head, “Sure? No…? But, it’s the best chance of fixing things, I think. She’s not getting any better right now.”

“I don’t think it could make it worse,” Fred told her sadly. “Nothing else has helped. That makes sense now though that we know what’s going on inside her brain. I can’t believe our imaging scans at the hospital weren’t picking this up…”

“Go ahead then Stacy… maybe we’ll have our girl back for real for Christmas…” she said with tears in her eyes. “Then there’s a little girl that needs to go to bed so Santa doesn’t put any of the coal she probably deserves in her stocking!”

“I’m a good girl!” I told her with a pout. “I just like toys… I just wanna be like my cool Mommy!”

Fred laughed, “She’s got you there.”

Amanda squeezed me and sat me down on the ground. I typed a few commands and the new code was uploaded to Bella. She was sleeping soundly in her crib on the other side of my wall. “Now bedtime,” she said.

“Yes Mommy…”

NORMALLY AS A kid I was as excited for Christmas as any kid could be. Even after I knew that Santa wasn’t real, I would wake up earlier to see what was under the Christmas tree! I think when I found out that my parents were really Santa, I loved Christmas more because I it showed they loved me. My real ones certainly did back in my home dimension… I’d managed to send home a family photo of my real parents and me, and a separate photo of the new me, in the 3-D art print that I’d done for Amanda and Fred. It had cost more than I should have paid to send it, but I wanted them to know I hadn’t abandoned them. We were planning on a video call later that day, and I hoped they would let me know it made it through when they got to the portal.

The real reason I anticipated the day though certainly had nothing to do with material objects, it had everything to do with what condition we might find Bella in! I woke up at seven when I smelled coffee coming from the kitchen. I rolled out of bed, pushed open my door the rest of the way, and walked down to the kitchen where Fred laughed at me. “You are so predictable…”

“And adorable!” Amanda said as she surprised me from behind and picked me up. I could tell she was trying to feel my diaper through the sleeper and said, “How about we get your sister up, and then we’ll see what Santa brought you both?”

I looked at her and smiled, “Okay!”

The walk in her arms to the nursery had me as nervous as I’d ever been. The nanite repairs should have taken about a half-hour, anything that it was going to do should definitely be done by now. She entered the code for the room in and opened the door to show Bella still asleep in the crib. She sat me down next to her, “Why don’t you wake her up,” she told me with a smile.

I wrinkled my nose a bit at the smell of a well-used diaper, but leaned over and shook Bella slightly and said, “Bella, it’s Christmas, time to wake up.”

She shot up then and something in her eyes told me she was there. “Oh my god, what’s going on?” She looked around at me, “Wait, I can talk again? For real talk, not just say Mommy?”

I hugged her, “So glad to have you back!”

“How?” She sobbed!

The next hour was made up of a lot of tears, changed diapers, and Fred doing what assessments he could of Bella’s recovery. She managed to stand up with some help, and even took a couple of steps with someone holding her hands like an infant learning to walk. Unfortunately, her muscles had atrophied enough in the few months that it was going to take time to recondition her legs to work right. Luckily, they had not forced her to only squirm in tummy time like some of the littles that had been recovered. That would have taken even more time to recover from – if she ever could have!

As far as I could tell the only negative effect from the nanites was that she had shrunk another two inches. I was only about an inch shorter than her now! That side effect of the nanites was definitely troubling to me, since I had edited my own code several times!

Once Fred was sure that Bella was on the right track, we all gathered around the Christmas tree. “Umm… Bella,” Amanda said, “when we picked out presents…”

“I was only in my baby mode, so you bought baby toys?”

Amanda blushed, “yes…”

Bella shrugged, “I’m not a grown up, or at least a tall big anyway. Even if I get my walking, potty training, and everything else back, I don’t think it’ll ever be safe for me to be living on my own again.”

Amanda shook her head, tears leaking from her eyes, “Not really.”

“Then Mommy it’s okay, because I’m still glad to be your baby!”

More tears were shed before getting presents passed out. I had a mix of gifts to open myself, including a set of building blocks that were kind of like Legos, but infinitely cooler! They contained circuits and you could build some neat projects like walking robots according the instructions. We both got baby dolls, new bears, and then she got a whole slew of toys appropriate for a crawling year-old baby. Some of them were meant for littles at least, and were a bit more mentally stimulating so she could relearn some physical skills with them.

Besides the toys, there were numerous new dresses, shoes, hair bows, pajamas, and little cheap pieces of jewelry that she added. The only jewelry pieces that weren’t cheap pieces were two charms to add to my charm bracelet. One had Bella’s name on a heart with ‘sister,’ the other was a little laptop looking charm. They also gave me a necklace that had a locket and the picture of the four of us from before everything happened. I hugged them both, and Amanda promised since she was back with us for real, she would get the same for Bella too.

My real present from them though was a computer that was the size of the one I had brought through the portal, but was almost as powerful as Amanda’s. “This thing is awesome!” I had told her after she gave me the specs. And it really was! I had been having some problems with the time it took to compile some of my code for class the previous semester, so I was really grateful for the upgrade!

“You’ll have to put it away though, it’s time to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s,” she told me as I salivated over the computer.

“Awwww!” I whined but didn’t fight her on it as she patted my bottom lightly.

She followed me back to my room where I sat it down on the desk. As soon as I was done, she lifted me onto the changing table to change my wet diaper. She dressed me in white tights with green and red poinsettia decorations on them, and red puffy bloomers over my diaper. She pulled the new Christmas dress that she had bought from her friend over the top of my head and settled it onto my body. The pretty dress featured a long-sleeved black velvet bodice and a red silk skirt with an overlay of red organza on top. The bodice featured little green holly embroidery along the neckline, and it was tied with a wide ribbon into a large bow in the back. I walked with her to Bella’s nursery and hung out in there while she changed Bella into a nearly identical dress that just featured a much shorter skirt and a onesie bottom inside of it. Since she could only crawl it had made sense… ‘Hopefully that will improve though!’ I noticed it seemed a bit baggy on her with the loss of size from the nanites.

The whole process of getting dressed into the holiday dress was still unique for me given I had been a boy until five months before! I had found that I enjoyed her attention to my hair, and being cute, so I didn’t really mind. The white tights I had on were thick and hopefully would keep me warmer on the cold drive to her parents’ house! I enjoyed staring at my reflection in a mirror for a few minutes.

We were eventually left alone for a few minutes and I asked Bella, “So you’re better?”

“I can’t believe how much easier it is to do things,” she told me. “Walking is going to take a while… but I’m just glad to be able to talk…”

“What was it like?”

She sighed, “I could understand everything you all said all the time… thank you for being so kind to me,” she added, “and thank you for saving me from the fate they had planned for me! They made sure to rub it into my face all of the time that I’d be doing nothing but popping out babies for them for the rest of my life…” And then it was clear a wall had broken and she was most certainly in need of counseling that wouldn’t have been possible before. I hugged her and Amanda came in and joined in, clearly having heard our conversation over the baby monitor.

We were able to eventually get away to her parents’ house though, which presented its own challenges in dealing with her sisters. Chloe and Cassie had dressed all of their littles and kids similarly to us, and there was a requisite ‘cousins’ picture taken when we were all there. Neville wore a ridiculous suit looking romper that left his bare legs visible past the snap crotch of the onesie bottom. The girls were all in matching holiday dresses, and diapers were worn at that point still by every kid and little except Kristina. Klara had continued on in diapers and I could see that there was a frustration in her mom’s face every time she had to change her! I personally believed having Neville treated as a baby around her all of the time probably wasn’t helping her cause. For all her mom picked on Neville, I saw signs that Klara loved him and looked up to him by the way she wanted to follow him around and play with him all of the time.

After the Christmas dinner, presents were exchanged. Other than Megan, Granny, and Grandpas gifts to me, all of mine were more appropriate for a baby shower! Bella’s were even worse given she was actually in that state until that morning, but we both just grinned and said thank you politely as we waved the colorful rattles at our ‘aunts.’ Fortunately, we had an appointment to keep at the portal to talk to my parents, so we didn’t get stuck there too long with all of them. Everyone seemed astounded though at how much better Bella was doing! Our ‘little cousins’ were clearly jealous that once again they would be the only ones babied to that extent.

I still hoped I’d be able to help them out one day though!

Our visit to the portal went like it had the past few times, except we had Bella with us. The shriek of an alarm as Fred carried Bella through made Amanda narrow her eyes at me. I gulped; she hadn’t noticed the alarm was quiet the last couple times when we passed through. I gave her an innocent look and we continued to the room. On the way in, “Did you do that…?”

I shook my head, “Venture did…”

“That’s asking for trouble!” she hissed. “If anyone takes…”

“Let’s talk at home, they definitely have this area under surveillance,” I whispered to her.

She sighed and continued into the video conference room we’d been given with our ‘family.’

“Merry Christmas Mom and Dad!” I told them as their faces lit up the screen.

“Merry Christmas to you too Stacy. Oh my God, you look adorable!” Mom said, “Amanda could you put her up there so I can see her dress better?”

I stood and turned for her as I blushed a bit. “I get it, I’m cute,” I told her.

“More than cute, adorable!” Mom smiled at me. “And is this Bella?”

Fred came closer with Bella who said, “Hi, it’s nice to meet you…”

“She can talk again?” Mom asked. We had talked about her, but she’d never been introduced because Bella had been staying at home with Grandma or Megan when we’d come there for our infrequent calls. We didn’t come too often because we were worried that the portal officials would get suspicious about our regular visits.

I nodded, “That’s new as of this morning. Really it was our real Christmas present. But let’s talk about you guys… did you get my presents?”

“We just got them a few minutes ago when we checked in to make the call. We didn’t think you would be able to send anything!” Mom said with some surprise, “It must have cost a fortune to send them through!” She scolded me.

“It wasn’t that much…” I told her. “Besides, I wanted to send you something!”

She sighed, “Should we open them now then?” Mom asked.

I smiled, “Please!”

“These are beautiful!” Mom said a few minutes later. They had clearly grown in the portal and were going to seem large on the walls at home, but I was glad that she had something of me, and the new me, to hang onto there while I was gone. “Thank you,” they both told me.

When we made it home later Bella and Fred went to work on helping her learn to walk again while I was left with my new toy. Once all of the spyware Amanda and others had placed on it was gone, I went to work on some new projects…