Long Story #21: Into the Playrooms (Part 1)

Beside the table was a diaper genie, which like so much else, had yellowed in its age. A morbid curiosity came over me, and I suddenly wondered if that smell could seriously be from decades old dirty diapers. That didn't seem possible, did it? They may take hundreds of years to decompose in a landfill, but human waste didn't keep an odor for decades! "Well, if there's something gross in there, then I guess I'll be editing this part out..." Putting my foot on the pedal, and grabbing the flashlight again to peer inside, the can opened up. I bent over to look down into the can... And everything went black. That's not to say that I fell unconscious, because I didn't. No, instead it was as if I suddenly slipped through a crack in space, and plummeted into an inky abyss. It happened so fast that I couldn't comprehend it; one moment I was on solid ground, and then the next, I was falling in an empty void, as if the ground could no longer keep me up. Less eloquently, it felt as though I'd fallen through the map in a game; a small seam where collision detection had failed and so I'd clipped into oblivion. The blackness didn't stay for long though. Once the darkness dissipated, I was instead greeted by the sight of a wall decorated with colorful balloons. I felt nauseated as I regained my bearings, and it felt like my perspective had been shifted; it wasn't since a heroic dose of magic mushrooms, as a college student, that I'd felt such a precipitous alteration to my perception. My knees were buckling, and I felt myself dry heave a couple of times; the dizziness slowly began to fade, but something still felt very wrong. "J-Jesus...what the...what the fuck..." My eyes widened in horror. That wasn't my voice; it couldn't be! It was far too high pitched, far too squeaky! A hand shot over my mouth, and that's when I realized that my hand looked wrong too. My skin looked amazing, but my hand looked too small, as if I'd somehow had it shrink. Feeling sick, I put my palms against the wall and looked down at the floor; it felt like I'd just gotten off the 'vomit-comet' at the state fair, and that feeling was only about to get worse as I saw that my legs didn't look like my own. They'd gotten slender and hairless; I no longer was wearing jeans, but instead denim shorts, my socks were far longer up my leg, and my sneakers had become colorful. Just what the hell had happened to me? And where the hell was I? Stumbling like a sloppy drunk, I started to regain my footing, but just barely. I could only imagine that my theory about the gas leak had turned out to be correct, and now I was having some kind of horrible hallucination; was I going to die? I hadn't thought to tell anyone where I'd be going today, because this seemed so much safer than my usual business. Would I just rot away on the floor of this abandoned daycare? Fear gripped my heart, and I felt a sudden rush of warmth around my crotch. I didn't think much of it at first, since I had so much more to concern myself with, but then I felt something wet trickling down my narrow thighs. Looking down, I was greeted by the sight of my denim shorts darkening; I was pissing my pants! "No...no...no...!" I squeaked, suddenly crossing my legs in a desperate bid to slow the flow, and whimpering pathetically like the small child I felt that I'd been reduced to. "Uh-oh...Looks like someone sprung a leak!" There was a voice in the room. Or wait, was it even a room? Taking another moment to whip my head back and forth, I came to realize that I wasn't in a room, but in some kind of peculiar corridor that sprawled endlessly in multiple directions. The unease of the liminal space was a force multiplier for the anxiety that the unknown voice had provoked. The human mind didn't well-tolerate the veiled openness of such architecture, and I was no different; it didn't help things that I couldn't tell which way the voice was coming from, which added an extra layer of disorientation. Lighting was dim to the point of darkness in some spots, while disgustingly, oppressively florescent in others; I was reminded of bleak office spaces, or decrepit hotel complexes. As I shuffled into a splash of the darkness, the wet denim chafing between my thighs, I reached for the flashlight that'd followed me down this rabbit hole. No longer was it the picture of professionalism, picked up as a part of any respectable survival kit from an outdoorsy outlet like Dick's or Academy. No, that veneer of seriousness has been scraped completely, and now it was a fun, vibrant combination of bright red, yellow, and blue, and with a fat 'Playskool' logo on the side. It was more a toy than a piece of gear. Still, it functioned, and the beam of light tore through the darkness like a bullet. Just as soon as I'd started to point it, the light came back at me and hit my face. Reactively, I turned my head, but then I looked back and saw what looked like a mirror hanging on one of the walls. I was almost too afraid to look at it. One thing I knew about bad trips was that looking at yourself in the mirror could only make things worse; the same had to apply for whatever the hell *this* was, right? My curiosity won over though, and I squinted at the foggy mirror while pointing my light at it. Between the dimness, the flashlight, and the mirror's own state, it was hard to get a clear picture of the image, but the longer I looked at it, the more details I could glean; I was short, I was slight, my shoulders had significantly narrowed, and my features had softened. If I had to guess, then I'd say that I looked to be around nine or ten at the very oldest. As I stared, only barely holding my psyche together, a horrible pressure presented itself in my colon; it was so sudden and critical, that my body reacted before my brain could. My face screwed up into a pained grimace, and my free hand shot down to my tummy to soothe the suffering. I needed to take a shit, and I needed to do it now. While I could appreciate actually getting a signal on this one, unlike my rogue bladder, I was also concerned by the fact that I had no earthly idea where a toilet could be. I didn't know where I was, or whether or not I was even technically conscious, so what hope did I have at finding a restroom? Still, the facts of the matter didn't dissuade me. Instinct still called for me to look, no matter the hopelessness of the situation, and deeply ingrained social conventions prevented me from simply popping a squat on the seemingly abandoned floor. So I started moving again, faster down the path, keeping my head on a swivel to detect any restrooms that I might pass. Farts were slipping out without my control, and I could tell that the urgency was growing more desperate with each step I took; if I didn't find a toilet soon, then my pants would end up more than just wet. And then, like a beacon of light in a weary world, I saw the 'potty room'. That's what the sign above the doorway said at least, not that there was actually any door to conceal one's privacy. It just appeared, on my left, and a quick blast from my plastic flashlight revealed a lone plastic training potty that was surrounded by walls plastered in motivational posters that would look at home in a Kindergarten classroom. The oddity of it was overshadowed by the painful cramping in my belly, and while it felt demeaning to use something intended for a toddler, I knew that beggars couldn't be choosers. With a quiet groan, I stepped into the outlet and began to fiddle with the button and zipper of my denim shorts. The yellow training potty looked like it was sitting on a slightly elevated platform, almost like a tiny podium, and the front of it had a goofy, yet worn face printed on it. That was probably something fun and whimsical for the intended user, but it came across as somewhat unsettling to my more adult sensibilities. The shorts dropped around my ankles, and I noticed that my 'Calvin Klein' boxers were no more; that was a plus in the fact that I hadn't soaked a fifty dollar pair of underwear with piss, but a minus when I saw the red-trimmed bands of the cartoon undies left in their place; Pikachu wasn't the only yellow thing on them now. As I started to approach the training potty, I heard a muted rumbling from the floor, and then before I knew what was happening, the training potty began to rise off the floor. My mouth fell agape as I realized why: The plastic potty was just a head for whatever humanoid creature lurked beneath. It was like a mimic, except much, much bigger. In my current form, I probably only broke four feet by a few inches, but this monstrosity dwarfed me by at least double my height. A voice, unlike the one I heard before, came from within the echoing fortress of the bowl proper; it had the audio distortion of an old toy whose batteries were fading away, and while it was muffled, it felt impossibly loud: "Big boys make their pee-pees and poo-poos in Mr. PottyHead! Don't you want to be a big boy too?" I jerked backwards and fell to the floor from the shorts around my ankles; as I rushed to pull them back up over my waist, I could feel that I'd lost control of my bowels upon impact with the ground. There was hot mush inside my briefs, and the filth was still messily depositing itself without any further input from me. I couldn't worry about that though, not with what was currently approaching me. Getting back to my feet, with a dump plastering my ass and the flashlight back in my hand, I skittered as swiftly as I could back out of the room. The juvenile abomination gave chase, but it seemed slow and lumbering, simply repeating the same small handful of canned lines, while its gruesome hands stretched outward at me. I just ran and ran, with no care for which way I was heading, and with no worry about how I was smearing the fresh deposit inside my pants. It was impossible to tell which way would lead to where anyway, so it didn't really matter that I acting without a sense of direction. Eventually I hit what appeared to be a dead end though. I came to a stop at a closed door, the first door I'd seen since coming here, and as I tried to open it, I realized that it was locked. On the door, written in juvenile 'building block' letters, it said 'Littles Room'. To the left of the door, on the wall, was a pastel giraffe with a bunch of lines and numbers, which were clearly there for kids to check their height against. "What's the deal? Must be this short to ride, or what?" I grumbled in frustration. Uncertainty hung over me like a cloud, and worse than that, I could hear slow, plodding footsteps of the potty monster in the not-so-far distance. I could try running backwards and taking a different path, but that would likely mean crossing the creature again, and while I didn't know whether or not it would attack me, it wasn't a chance I felt I could take. I looked again at the door, as if trying to discern any more clues from it, and I noticed that another little block hung under the first row of them: eight. If I had to guess, then I'd say that eight was the cutoff age for getting into the 'Littles Room', and my earlier estimate of my age had been around nine or ten. Did that mean I was out of luck? Was there another door around here that had a nine or ten on it? There was no time for that. Wherever I was, and whether or not this place really existed, it felt unlikely that it'd corral me into a dead end without any way of progressing. I knew immediately that it sounded like magical thinking, to assume that this place's rules would be designed with any fairness or linearity, but something told me that I was right. This was like a puzzle, and as with any other puzzle, all the tools to solve it should have been available to me. Similarly, the key to my success should be out in the open! And what was the smoking Chekhov's gun? The height chart! The beast was lumbering closer and closer, and I could hear its muffled phrases more clearly; there were scant moments left before it fully caught up to me and did whatever unspeakable horrors that my brain had cooked up. So I looked back at the giraffe and traced my finger down its neck to look at each peg more closely. There were numbers on some of them, which seemed obvious that they were intended to correspond to different ages. The confirmation was that the 'ten' sat right around my own height, with the eight a few pegs down. I felt lost on what exactly to do, but then a stupid thought crossed my mind. I thought back to amusement parks, and whenever I'd tried standing on my tippy toes as a kid to get onto rides that I was too short for. What if I did the opposite? It was absurd, sure, but was it any less absurd than being ten, lost in a maze, and sporting soiled underoos? There really wasn't much of an alternative to grasp at here, and the potty monster was closing in fast. So I turned my back to the height chart and bent my knees down until I figured that I was at the 'eight' mark. The feeling made me wince, as it bunched up the messy underwear under my shorts and squished it against my backside. "This was stupid...It was never going to--" *Click*. I looked over and the door creaked a little bit open; had it really just been that simple? Perhaps not, because I suddenly became acutely aware of two facts: First, I no longer had a squishy butt or wet shorts, but instead I felt something thick and padded pushing against my rear and crotch. Second, I was no longer bending my knees, and was in fact standing straight, but my position on the wall hadn't shifted. As shocking as this should have been, and make no mistake it was, I wasn't given any time to properly appreciate these facts. Coming right out of the dimness was the creature I'd been desperately trying to escape, and now that I was smaller, it looked even bigger. "Big boys don't potty in their Pull-Ups! Are you a big boy?" No time or want to formulate a response, not that such a ghastly ghoul deserved one in the first place; with all the energy I could muster into the toothpicks that my legs had become, I dashed to the door and slipped myself on the other side of it, slamming it emphatically behind me. I wish I could say that I'd reached safety, or that my nightmare was over, but the truth was that it had just started; this had been but my first trial in The Playrooms, and it'd already cost me more than I could imagine. Just what else would I find down here? Would I find the truth? Or would I only find despair?