Chương 118: Book 2 Chapter 31.1: Doomsday Dorms Babies

"So, I don't know what I was expecting to happen when we told you guys," Vell said.

"But it involved less pokey bits."

"It's never too late to back out," Freddy said. After hearing about Quenay, and the stakes at play with Vell's ten-lined rune, Vell's friends had proposed several methods of experimentation and exploration that might provide some answers. After ruling out some of the more invasive and potentially dangerous ones, Vell had given the go-ahead on a few experiments he felt comfortable undertaking. Though they were all getting a test run on the first loop, just to be safe.

"Nope, we're fine, let's do this thing," Vell said. It was hard to seem chipper while lying underneath a two-hundred pound magical spectrometer, but Vell did his best.

"Alright, the tuning rods are going to poke into your lower back, but they shouldn't break skin," Freddy said.

"If you feel like they are, you remember the safe word?"

"Marsh," Vell said with a nod. Freddy nodded back.

"Do you think Joan would be offended we're using her last name as the safe word for potentially dangerous experiments?"

"She's the one who recommended it, actually," Vell said.

"I called her for some ideas."

"Oh. How'd that go?"

"Awkwardly."

"About what I expected," Freddy said.

"Alright, let me get this thing started up…" As Freddy moved towards the massive spectrograph's control panel. Vell took a deep breath and held it. And held it a little while longer. Then even longer. Vell had developed an impressive long capacity due to occasional apocalypses involving drowning, poisonous gasses, and one screaming contest against a sentient goat, but even he could only hold his breath so long. Vell gasped for air and then lifted his head to scan the lab. The spectrograph hadn't moved.

"Freddy?" No response.

"Oh boy," Vell said.

"Freddy, are you there?"

"Mom says I shouldn't talk to strangers." Frederick Froilan Frizzle had a naturally squeaky voice, but the voice speaking now was too squeaky by far. Vell picked himself up off the examination table and tiptoed over to Freddy's control panel. He saw nothing at first, and then he looked down. Beneath a mop of curly red hair was a diminutive little boy, tiny even by the standards of toddlers, who peered up at Vell with wide eyes made even wider by comically thick glasses.

The tiny toddler waved a chubby hand in Vell's direction.

"Oh. Hi. I'm Vell. And you are?"

"I'm Freddy Frizzle." Vell had been expecting that, but he was still not prepared for it. He stood up and took a quick look around the control panel. All the switches remained unflipped, and all the buttons unpressed, making it very unlikely that this experiment had caused Freddy's infantilization.

"Okay, Freddy, I don't think you're supposed to be here," Vell said. He extended a hand in his tiny friend's direction.

"Why don't you come with me and maybe we can find your mom." After a little more coaxing, Mini-Freddy agreed to accompany Vell. He had to hunch over to hold Freddy's hand, but Vell managed to lead him out into the hall, only to find exactly what he had expected. Students that had once been bustling between classes were now stumbling around the hall, all of them reduced to barely knee-high toddlers.

Nobody seemed to have any recollection of their older selves, and while most were curiously exploring their "new" environment, many had sat down to panic or even burst into tears. Vell chanted "oh no" to himself over and over as a combination of paternal and cowboy instincts kicked in, and he tried to corral as many of the toddlers as he could under his care.

"You, okay, you need to stay still, and you -you're Mazin, right? Mazin, you need to sit down like I told you to, and leave the girl alone," Vell said. He tried to calm a fussing child with one hand and pull out his phone with the other.

"Please pick up, please pick up, please pick- Don't eat that!" In spite of Vell's pleas, nobody picked up, and the toddler did try to eat it. He fished the plastic piece out of a slobbery mouth with one hand while making more and more desperate calls with the other. He burned through Lee, Harley, and Hawke with no answers before his phone started to ring.

"Kim, is that you?"

"Vell! Are you still tall?"

"I'm, wh- Yes! I'm an adult!"

"Oh thank god," Kim gasped.

"Everyone else is a weird tiny person. Like bigger than a baby, but not as big-""It's called a toddler, Kim," Vell said. For someone obsessed with being more human, Kim didn't seem to put much effort into learning about juvenile human development.

"You said 'everyone'?"

"Yeah, I've been walking around. Students, teachers, everybody's a 'toddler' now," Kim said.

"I'm glad you called. I was starting to think I was the only one unaffected, since I never was a child."

"Probably some rune bullshit," Vell said. The rune he and Kim shared protected them from some magical effects, apparently including being turned into an infant.

"How many of them are you watching right now?"

"None? Why would I be watching them? They look like they can walk around and find food just fine," Kim said.

"Kim! There are six thousand unattended babies wandering around an island that regularly explodes when the adults are in charge."

"Oh. Oh no. Oh god. We need to do something."

"I'm going to get as many of them as I can to the dining hall," Vell said. The school's food court had the lowest concentration of sharp objects, explosives, and mutagenic chemicals on campus.

"Can you reprogram the school's security bots into babysitters?"

"I can try," Kim said. Her robotics lessons had been brief, since very little conventional knowledge applied to her own existence, but she still knew her stuff.

"Okay, I need to get going, somebody just stole baby Freddy's pants," Vell said.

"See you at the dining hall." Vell hung up the phone and chased down the pants-thief before anyone else got any ideas. Kids were hard enough to wrangle with their pants on.

"Okay, I've got a weird playpen set up for them, and the bots are reprogrammed," Kim said. Existing chairs and tables had been set up to constrain as many of the toddlers as possible, although Vell and Kim had only managed to corral about a hundred of the school's thousands of students so far.

"They know what to do to keep the kids in line?"

"Not really, but they seem to be terrified of the drones, so it should work," Kim said. The towering, inhuman security drones were striking fear into even the most bold of toddlers. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Kim, you're going to traumatize them!"

"Well I'm sorry, father of the year, but they're not going to remember this and we've still got thousands of kids to wrangle," Kim said.

"Do you want it fast or do you want it non-traumatic?"

"You sound like my grandma," Vell said.

"Just stay here, keep an eye on the kids, and wrangle the robots. I'm going to go try and gather up more kids."

"We have to find out what caused this at some point too, you know."

"I know, but any possible investigation will go a lot smoother without the risk of being vaporized by a toddler left unattended in the nuclear labs," Vell said.

"The sooner we get all the kids, the sooner we can focus."

"Good point."

"Glad you agree. Now, I just need one more thing," Vell said. He headed into the kitchen and rummaged around a bit. While Kim wielded fear, Vell preferred to manage children with a different tool: snacks. After clearing out a few of the more explosive laboratories, Vell took a quick detour to handle a personal matter, and headed for Lee's dorm. Lee and Harley were usually a package deal, and Hawke didn't like being alone on first loops, so he was hoping he could knock out all three other loopers at once.

He didn't know if they'd remember their time spent as babies the way they remembered all their other first loops, but he wanted to be sure they were taken care of either way. The door code still worked, and Vell opened up the door to find a multicolored disaster in every direction. Lee's collection of highlighters for schoolwork and other important documents had apparently been repurposed for coloring, and her textbooks had been torn to shreds to act as the canvas.

Vell had barely taken in the vibrant sights when he heard someone inside the dorm squeal and run.

"Harley? Are you in there?"

"Yes!" The four-year old version of Harley came wobbling into view, with a crude and vibrant drawing in either hand, which she proudly displayed to Vell.

"Look what I made!"

"Wow, super cool," Vell said.

"Did you make all of these drawings, or do you have some friends in there with you?" Tiny Harley bared a gap-toothed smile at the praise, but quickly changed her tune when Vell started asking about friends. She tucked her drawings behind her back and looked at Vell skeptically.

"Are you Eckthy's dad?" Vell assumed that "Eckthy" meant "Excy", one of the nicknames Lee's parents used instead of her terrible given name.

"No, I'm not her dad," Vell said.

"I know the two of you don't remember me, but I'm your friend."

"Prove it."

"Your favorite color is red." Tiny Harley gasped as if this was a shocking display of knowledge, heedless to the fact that she was currently dressed head to toe in red clothing. She dropped her drawings and grabbed Vell by the hand to lead him into the dorm, cheerily calling ahead as she did so.

"I found a grownup!" The room's only other visible occupant barely looked up from their coloring, before returning to drawing a shark on some of Lee's hydrokinesis homework.

"Hi, you're Hawke, I assume?"

"I'm not Hawke." Not yet, anyway.

"Oh, right," Vell said.

"Well, kiddo, you are going to go on a very interesting journey of self-discovery later in your life. But for now, how about some pretzels?" Vell produced a bag of snacks from a pouch he was carrying and offered it to the kids. In a display of slightly uncomfortable willingness to take food from strangers, the tiny Harley and Hawke dug in. That just left tiny Lee.

Vell didn't see her yet, but there was a suspiciously lumpy pile of blankets and pillows on the couch that gave him some slight suspicions where she might be. He took a seat on the coffee table and looked down at the blanket pile.

"Hi, you under the blankets," he said.

"I know you don't like your real name, so how about I call you... Lee." The mass of blankets shifted as the child hiding within tried to peek out at the stranger. Vell pretended he didn't see the bright green eye staring out at him.

"You can come out whenever you want, Lee, but if you don't hurry, the other kids might eat all the snacks before you get a chance." Vell's food based temptations worked yet again, and Tiny Lee poked her head out through the blankets, followed shortly thereafter by the rest of her.

"Mom says I'm not allowed to have snacks." A ban that showed on a young Lee's unnaturally skinny frame. Vell started to understand the homicidal rage Lee usually felt towards her parents a little better. He kept the overwhelming fury buried for now, to keep up a kind face for little Lee.

"Well, your mom's not here, so you can have as many snacks as you want," Vell said.

"And I would like to take you to a daycare, where there's a whole bunch of other kids to play with, and snacks to-" Vell's admittedly vaguely creepy sales pitch stopped when Tiny Harley hurled a mug at his head and then screamed at the top of her lungs.

"Ow! What was that for?"

"My mom and dad say if a stranger ever tries to take you somewhere you should hit him and scream real loud," Harley said.

"Even if he says he has treats."

"Okay, that's- that's actually good advice, I can't refute that," Vell said.

"But again, I am not a stranger, you just don't remember me. I know your favorite color, and I know your last name is also Harley."

"Oh. Sorry."

"No, it's alright. In general you should not talk to strangers, but I am the exception," Vell said.

"There's no other grownups around except me and Kim, so you'll have to trust us to take care of you."

"No other grownups?" Little Lee poked even further out of her blanket nest at the idea of a world without her mother and father, or any of their hired caretakers, in it.

"Right! Your mom and dad are nowhere on this island," Vell promised.

"And they're not going to come get you for a long time." After a moment of contemplation, Lee pouted and threw up her hands, begging to be picked up. Vell gladly obliged, and tried to ignore how light and frail she felt. Thankfully Harley made it very easy not to dwell on such things -by force. While Vell was bending down to pick up Lee, Tiny Harley jumped on his back and nearly throttled him by wrapping her arms around Vell's neck.

"I want a piggy back ride," she said.

"Okay, okay, piggy back ride it is," Vell said. He tried to grab hold of Harley and Lee at the same time and hobble his way back towards the dining hall, with Hawke following close at his heels.

"Kim, thank god, are you busy?"

"No, why, what are you-" Vell handed off Little Lee without a word, and then carefully helped Harley dismount from his back. Kim stared at the juvenile loopers with a mixture of curiosity and disgust.

"There you go, plenty of other kids to play with, off you go," Vell said, giving Harley a push towards the other toddlerized students and faculty. She sprinted off to make new friends with no hesitation. Harley's social nature had apparently blossomed early, and all she saw in the crowded room was six thousand new friends to make.

"Ugh, thanks for that," Vell said.

"I think my spine was about to collapse."

"You could've just made her walk," Kim said. She carefully lowered Lee into the massive playpen they had constructed and turned her full attention to Vell.

"I mean, I could've, but she wanted a piggy back ride and if adult Harley remembers this, she'll be mad she didn't get one," Vell said.

"How're things on your end, is everybody here?"

"Mostly? None of the little shits will stand still long enough to do an accurate headcount," Kim said. She had to raise her voice just to be heard over the din of the toddler horde. While many of the infantilized students were playing nicely with each other, many were arguing, or just crying in a corner.

"Everything clear as far as you could tell? Everyone alive?

"Nah, we lost the Hazardous Materials lab," Kim said.

"Like you were saying, that place explodes when adults are in charge."

"Damn it," Vell said. He'd kind of been hoping they could get through today with minimal casualties. He felt that every day, but even more so now that he was protecting kids. Kim's protective instincts were a bit weaker than Vell's on a good day, and today was not a good day for her.

"Focus, Vell," Kim said.

"We've got the kids wrangled, it's time to focus on the cause."

"Alright, you start scanning the campus and I'll-""Vell! I'm not searching the whole campus on my own," Kim said.

"Let the bots babysit and let's go."

"They're toddlers, Kim, somebody should be keeping an eye on them."

"I know you pretty well by now, Vell, and I'm telling you this for your own good," Kim said.

"You cannot, physically, babysit six thousand toddlers. You are a people pleaser and you will work yourself to death trying to help five hundred crying kids."

"I'm not that-" Another child started crying, and Vell instinctively turned his head in the direction of the sound. Rather than belaboring the point, Kim grabbed Vell by the collar and led him out of the dining hall.

"Okay, fine, I get it," Vell said.

"Kids! Remember to share, behave yourselves, and listen to the robots! The grown ups will be back soon!" His shouted advice went unheeded by the toddler horde, who proceeded to throw things, scream, and generally cause havoc. Tiny Harley, who enjoyed havoc at any age, was gladly participating in the chaos along with six thousand new friends, until she spotted a slightly less new friend sulking in the corner. Lee was lurking in a corner of the playpen, curled up into a ball with her head tucked between her knees.

"Are you playing hide and seek?" Lee shook her head without lifting it.

"Okay good, because you're doing it bad," Harley said. She took a seat next to Lee.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't want grown ups to come back," Lee mumbled. She had misinterpreted Vell's final promise as saying that all the adults would return soon, including the bad ones, of which Tiny Lee knew many.

"Well maybe they won't come back."

"What if they do?" Tiny Harley looked up at the massive mob of toddlers surrounding them, and the sight of the toddler horde caused her to experience an important milestone in every young girl's life: her first plot for an anti-authoritarian revolution. She gave a sly smile, showing off a few missing teeth.

"We won't let them come back," Tiny Harley said.