Lori placed a Diet Watcher's frozen entrée into the microwave and hit the start button. While she was waiting for her lunch to heat up, she reflected momentarily on the recent series of strange events that had disrupted her previously rather dull life.

=====

It had all started three weeks ago when Lori found a strange remote control apparently abandoned on a table in a cafeteria.

After discovering the incredible abilities of the mysterious device - by accidentally changing herself into a child - Lori had gone to her neighbor Sharon for help. Unfortunately, Sharon's two young daughters had absconded with the control and - after changing their mother into a five year old - proceeded on a rampage of age changing shenanigans at a nearby shopping center, reducing dozens of bargain hunters into children of various ages (and growing a few of the children shopping with their parents into fully grown adults).

With the help of Lori's coworker Lisa, she and Sharon had managed to regain possession of the age changer and restore themselves to adult women. Sharon had punished her daughters by changing them into babies for a week - giving them an opportunity to experience first hand the humiliation they had caused their many victims. When their punishment had finally expired, Sharon had marched nine year old Stacey and eleven year old Connie over to Lori's apartment, where the two sheepish girls dutifully offered their apologies and promised to never take anything that didn't belong to them again. Lori accepted their apologies, knowing that they were basically good kids. She could hardly blame them for getting a bit carried away; if Lori had been their age and had been tempted by finding a gadget that could change adults into children, she wasn't sure that she would have behaved much differently.

Over the past few weeks, Sharon hadn't mentioned the incident again. Lori guessed that Sharon was just trying to put an unpleasant experience behind her. Stacey and Connie seemed very contrite and averted their eyes whenever Lori saw them. They seemed eager to stay out of her way.

Lori's friend Lisa had reacted to the experience in exactly the opposite manner - not a day went by at work that Lisa didn't drop by Lori's office to talk about the age changing device. Lisa was obsessed with speculating on its origin, technology, and effects. Lisa enjoyed constantly recounting the various scenes they had witnessed in the mall, and was continually pestering Lori for an opportunity to see the mysterious device again. Lori knew full well that Lisa probably wanted to try it out on herself, and even though Lisa was one of her best friends, the thought of Lisa regressing herself made Lori a bit uncomfortable. It didn't take much imagination to understand that if Lisa suddenly showed up at work one day looking fifteen years younger, it would attract a great deal of unwanted attention.

After lots of soul searching and deliberation, Lori had reluctantly agreed to let Lisa "take a look at" the age changing remote control again. Lisa had helped Lori innumerable times, had served as a loyal mentor ever since Lori had started working in the marketing department, and had indisputably proven herself to be a trustworthy friend. Although Lori still harbored a few reservations, she was confident that Lisa was an inherently sensible woman and wouldn't do anything outrageous. Before leaving for work that morning, Lori had retrieved the device from its hiding place under one of her sofa cushions and stuffed it into her already jam-packed purse.

=====

In the wake of the evening of mayhem at the mall, a frenzied media began referring to the phenomena of "Instantaneous Age Alteration Syndrome". Skeptical investigators from a variety of academic and governmental institutions had arrived en masse to interview victims and bystanders, but the "experts" collectively remained unable to explain what had happened. The first popular theory was that the age-change incidents were nothing more than manifestations of mass hysteria; this hypothesis was dismissed after overwhelming evidence seemed to conclusively establish that dozens of people had beyond doubt been made physically younger. After a few days of confusion during which local schools and business remained closed out of fear that the unknown cause of the age changing was perhaps some type of contagious agent, life for most people had gradually returned to normal (except, of course, for the hapless individuals who had lost many years of maturity and now faced the prospect of experiencing childhood and/or puberty all over again).

Lori had spent nearly all of her spare time over the past several weeks secretly using the device to rectify the mischief caused by Stacey and Connie. This task was all the more difficult since Lori had to restore the victims back to normal without making it appear that she (or, more specifically, the age changing control she had discovered) was associated with their restoration to original condition. It also required considerable detective work to locate all of those who had been effected, although Lori did have some help in the form of a continuous stream of "first person" and special interest stories in the local newspaper and on television. Examples of newspaper articles included many with headlines such as "Jefferson School PTA Leader Reduced to First Grader", "Soccer Moms Younger Than Own Children", and "Victims of Mysterious Age Effect Face Many Adjustments."

The final challenge Lori faced after locating a victim was to figure out the person's "real" age. Even when Lori was able to determine this exactly, the control box had no calibration or reference mechanism that she was able to figure out, relegating her valiant attempts at restoring individuals back to their original age to rough approximations at best.

One benefit of her clandestine age casualty restoration activities was that it provided an excellent opportunity to familiarize herself with the operation of the device. Her first unhappy experience with the control had initially made Lori very cautious about performing any experimentation, but as the weeks passed she slowly regained enough confidence to try some of the buttons whose function remained obscure. She learned that, in addition to the age regression and progression functions, the control could optionally adjust the size and proportioning of shoes and clothing worn by a target subject. She also accidentally discovered that several of the buttons could be used to set a time delay effect ; an targeted individual would show no immediate change, but would gradually grow older or younger over a period of an hour or so.

Lori still had many unanswered questions regarding the device. The operation of many of the other buttons remained incomprehensible - when pressed, they had no discernable effect on anything. Another mystery regarded the power source - there was nothing resembling a battery compartment (in fact, the unit appeared to be made of solid metal), and yet the device had showed no signs of running low on energy even after extensive use. As she had come to understand, calibration was an issue - although she could make people younger or older, there was no way (other than visual observation combined with educated guessing) to determine their exact physical age. Lori often wished that the control had a numeric keypad. Piecing together what she had been able to learn thus far, Lori had tentatively started to write her own "instruction book" for the age changer based on her amateur testing and experiences.

=====

Lori's reverie was broken as she was abruptly snapped back to everyday reality by the sound of her cell phone ringing inside her purse. She snatched her purse off the kitchen counter and, as she took her cell phone out, immediately realized that something was missing.

Lori cursed herself under her breath. The age control she had found several weeks ago was gone!

Her blood ran cold as she suddenly remembered exactly where she had left the device ; right on the coffee table in the middle of Christine Vanowski's living room. Lori had wanted to show Chris where some of the text for the new print ad campaign needed to be changed, and had been rather hasty while rummaging through her purse for her yellow highlighter. In the process, Lori had dumped her keys, cell phone, lipstick, and various other items out on the table, and neglected to put the most important - and dangerous - item back into her handbag.

"Shit!" she exclaimed to the empty room.

The last thing in the world that Lori wanted was to attract any attention to the age manipulator. Once the proverbial cat was out of the bag, the rich and powerful of the world would surely want the "fountain of youth" to become their exclusive property, and would stop at nothing to get it. Besides the possibility that the rightful owner might try to claim it, she feared that some government agency would attempt to confiscate the device, no doubt for "national security" reasons. She had to get it back before anyone started playing around with it and discovered what it was capable of doing. Lori winced as she remembered how she had narrowly avoided accidentally changing herself into a baby when she had first found the control, and grimaced again as she recalled what had happened when the control got into the wrong hands.

=====

Andrea Vanowski had celebrated her fifth birthday several months ago, and to her mother's consternation had reached that challenging stage of development when natural childlike curiosity occasionally outweighed fear of parental punishment.

Shortly after Miss Sheffield had left, Andrea noticed a rectangular silver box sitting atop the table in the family room. She picked it up and was a bit surprised to find out how heavy it was. Andrea studied it for a moment before heading off to the kitchen, where her mother was having coffee with her friend Peggy Schwann from down the block.

Christine turned to face her daughter as Andrea entered the room. She was carrying some small object that Chris hadn't remembered seeing before. Did Lori accidentally leave something here before she left? The object was metallic and didn't resemble a cell phone. Whatever Andrea had found, it looked expensive - and possibly fragile.

"No, Andrea! Put that down before you break it!" ordered Christine as she finished pouring her cup of coffee.

"I won't break it, Mommy," insisted Andrea. Undeterred by her mother's admonishment, the five year old continued to study the box she was holding.

Peggy chuckled. "Kids will be kids, Chris," she laughed, taking a sip of coffee.

"Andrea, for the last time, leave that thing alone. Don't make me spank you, young lady!" threatened Christine.

"Don't worry, Mommy. I'll be careful, I promise," pledged Andrea. She wondered what the buttons on the box did. They reminded her of the buttons on the box she used to change channels when she was watching television. Experimentally, she pressed one of them.

Without warning, a faint, soft blue light emanated from the narrow end of the object, momentarily engulfing Christine, who was standing at the counter. It lasted for only a split second.

"Eeep!" squealed Andrea, who hadn't expected anything so dramatic to happen.

"Damn! What the hell was that!?" exclaimed Christine, nearly dropping her coffee in surprise at the blue light.

"I'm sorry, Mommy," whimpered Andrea.

"Wow, that was weird!" agreed Peggy, who had likewise nearly spilled her drink.

"Andrea! What did I tell you? You could have hurt someone with that. Now put it down!" demanded Christine, reacting more out of fear than anything else. It obviously wasn't a remote control. Maybe it was a high power cell phone. Who knows what kind of voltage that thing was capable of? She felt grateful that whatever kind of battery it contained, at least it hadn't shocked or injured her daughter.

"But Mommy," cried Andrea. "I didn't know it would do that!"

"From now on, " began Christine, adopting her sternest voice of parental authority. She stopped suddenly, realizing that something was very wrong. The kitchen counter on which she rested her elbow was moving - it was gradually escalating, rising upward from the floor as if on a slow elevator!

"What's going on?" she yelped, stepping back to take a better look at the oddly rising countertop. It was then that she noticed that the peculiar expansion wasn't limited to the countertop - everything in the kitchen, from the table where her friend Peggy sat to the refrigerator, was slowly moving upwards.

"Chris! Look at yourself!" exclaimed Peggy, a note of worry in her voice. As she watched in disbelief, her friend Christine was starting to slowly loose height, growing shorter inch by inch.

"I can't believe it! It's almost as if, like you're starting to shrink."

"Oh God! What did that thing do to me?" moaned Christine, a mortified expression on her face, realizing that Peggy was correct - the room wasn't getting taller, it was her point of view that was gradually but noticeably changing. She was getting smaller!

She soon became aware that her clothes, apparently unaffected by the ray, were slowly expanding relative to her steadily diminishing size. Her pants appeared longer, and now drooped over the tops of her shoes, while her top - a comfortable fit minutes before - now seemed to be growing baggier by the second.

"Mommy - you're getting shorter!" observed Andrea, her voice a mixture of fear and awe.

Christine tugged at her oversized sweater. She could see the material start to droop in front, and quickly realized that her breasts were dwindling from ample grapefruits back into the much smaller sized, pear-shaped adolescent mammaries she vaguely remembered from her high school days. Chris realized that she wasn't shrinking, she was getting younger!

"Hey - What the heck is happening?" pleaded Christine. To her surprise, she discovered that her voice was also changing.

"Chris, I think you're still shrinking, this is incredible, " was the only thing Peggy was able to say to her slowly but steadily youthening friend, who now looked like she was in her early teens. Chris tugged helplessly at her belt, noticing that her increasingly baggy and heavy pants had started to slide down her much narrower ; almost girlish - hips. All of her apparel looked several sizes too large.

"Peggy, I'm think that I'm getting younger," Christine moaned. "Like those people in the mall a few weeks ago, " Disconcertingly, Chris found that she now had to look up to talk to Peggy, who had always been approximately the same height as she was. Peggy was now at least four inches taller!

"You're shorter than I am," observed Peggy.

"Even my shoes are getting way too big," said Christine, noting that she could easily wiggle her toes inside her unexpectedly expanding footwear.

"You're still getting littler, Mommy," said Andrea, observing her mother's steadily dwindling stature.

"This is terrible, no, this can't be, look at my breasts," responded her mother, feeling her small teenaged breasts continue to grow even smaller. Her bra had become ridiculously oversized, and the big (but now empty) cups drooped all the way down to her belly button.

"Oh, Chris, this is so weird - you're really starting to look like a kid," gasped Peggy, still in a state of shock as she watched her friend's metamorphosis back into childhood. By now, Christine looked like she was a middle school girl. The woman-sized clothing that was a comfortable fit less than a minute ago was practically swallowing her up.

"No, no, I don't like this, ," groaned Christine, looking very distraught as she fumbled in her oversized outfit. She placed her smaller hands against the front of her chest, and discovered that it was now completely flat.

Finally, the youthening stopped. Christine had become a little girl, and found that for the first time she could stand at the same height and look eye to eye with her five year old daughter. They were almost the same size, and even had similar features, even though Christine's hair was still darker than her daughter's. The main characteristic that distinguished mother from daughter was the fact that Andrea was wearing appropriately sized girl's clothing, while Christine stood in a pile of garments that made her look like she had been playing dress up.

There was a moment of stunned silence as Peggy and Andrea stood gaping at what had become of Christine, while Christine simultaneously regarded her daughter and her friend Peggy from a completely new - and much shorter - perspective.

"Oh my god, I can't believe this. Andrea, look at what that thing did to me," complained Christine, wincing at her very high-pitched voice.

"Mommy, look! You're my size now!" squealed Andrea, a smile of pure delight on her face. When she had disobeyed her mother, she had been afraid at first that the remote control thing had hurt her. She was also afraid that her mother was going to give her a scolding. This was the best of both worlds ; fortunately, her mother wasn't really hurt by the remote control at all. Not only that, but her mom was now too small to deal out any punishment!

"This is awful, just look at these things, they don't fit me anymore," said Christine, holding her arms out to her side. She had been wearing a black sweater, which now draped down her body and seemed to have grown as large and heavy as a tent. The arms now hung down past her hands, and her collar was so wide that her shoulders (and a large expanse of her completely flat chest) were exposed through the neck opening. Fortunately, this impromptu "dress" maintained a bit of her modesty, since her slacks (and panties) had fallen in a pile around her ankles. Somewhere underneath the heap of clothing, her girl-sized feet were still standing inside her adult-sized shoes, except that her shoes now seemed comically large - almost like clown shoes.

"You look funny, Mommy ; your clothes are way too big," sniggered Andrea as she watched her reduced mother fidgeting with her outsized garments. "You'll have to borrow mine!"

"Young lady, this is no laughing matter!" scolded Christine. Her threat sounded silly even to herself, coming as it did in the piping soprano voice of a little girl.

"Chris, this is amazing," said Peggy, who now literally towered over both Christine and Andrea. She wouldn't have believed what had happened if she hadn't witnessed it ; her friend Christine, a chubby 34 year old housewife, had in less than a minute been reduced to the same age as her five year old daughter, apparently due to some sort of weird ray that came from a small metal box no larger than a remote control!

Peggy couldn't resist her sudden maternal impulse to pat the now diminutive Christine on the top of her little head. Her former plus-sized adult friend looked so cute as a child!

Christine now only stood as high as Peggy's waist, and had to crane her neck to look her onetime equal in the eye. "Peggy, don't do that!"

"Sorry, Chris ; it's just that you're so small, I couldn't resist," observed Peggy, looking down at her little friend. "You look so sweet as a kid."

"I sure hope that thing can change me back," said Christine, with a hint of concern in her voice. She briefly contemplated some of the likely consequences if it turned out her newly resized body was a permanent change, and shuddered involuntarily.

"Mommy is my size now!" called Andrea for the second time, giggling hysterically as she pointed at the little girl dressed in adult clothes standing in front of her.

"But not for long, I hope." Christine awkwardly looked her five year old daughter, who was now only a bit smaller than she was. Andrea seemed so big! With their relative statures nearly equal, there was no way Christine could even think of picking Andrea up - or giving her a swat on the behind for misbehavior.

"What are you going to do?" asked Peggy, looking down at Chris.

"Andrea, hand Mommy that box," Christine ordered, looking at her older daughter as sternly as a five year old could. Christine desperately hoped that the mysterious device that had reduced her mature body into that of a five year old child could also restore her back to womanhood.

Andrea was holding the remote control in one hand, but looked lost in thought for a moment and failed to answer her mother.

"Andrea, I said give me the box. Right now."

Andrea looked at her mother blankly, but still didn't respond. She was obviously thinking.

"Andrea, if you don't hand me that thing right now, I'm going to give you a spanking you won't forget." Christine realized how ridiculous her threat sounded, coming as it did in her little girl voice. It was even less convincing since neither her nor her husband had ever resorted to spanking either of their children.

"Mommy, if you get bigger again, I don't want you to spank me," pouted Andrea.

"Andrea, please give your mother that box," said Peggy. "I'm sure she won't spank you."

Instead of handing her diminutive mother the control, Andrea smiled mischievously and pointed the device directly at Christine. She pressed the same button she had before.

"Andrea! What are you doing?" yelled Christine in a sudden panic as a barely visible ray of blue light momentarily engulfed her for the second time. Andrea smiled silently and seemed to grow taller while Christine watched in dismay. She could feel her huge sweater growing even bigger and looser. Everything in the room was getting larger and larger, as Christine realized that she was becoming even younger.

"Young wady, you are in tho much twouble," shouted Christine to the best of her ability. Her scolding came out in a babyish lisp.

In a moment, Christine had to look up at five year old Andrea. She nearly panicked as she continued to get even shorter. Feeling a bit dizzy, she discovered that she now was having a hard time maintaining her balance. Her arms and legs were growing short and pudgy, and were becoming weaker by the second. Unable to stay on her feet any longer, Christine stumbled to her knees, her fall cushioned considerably by the pile of clothing that she had been wearing. She tried to rise and found that she could no longer stand up. She was an infant!

"No no no!" she wailed. "Pweggy!"

The kitchen was a huge place now. Her own daughter towered over her, and Peggy was virtually a giant. Andrea was giggling uncontrollably. Peggy stood off to one side as though in partial shock, her mouth hanging open as she looked down on the baby girl that had been a woman her own age just minutes before.

"Mommy, you're really a little baby now!" laughed Andrea.

"Pwease, make me big again," mewled Christine helplessly. It was hard for her to form words. Her mouth felt small and strange, and she realized that her teeth had receded back into her gums. She started crawling out from under her big baggy sweater, discovering that both of her shoulders now easily squeezed through the neck opening.

From her newly reduced viewpoint, Christine saw that Andrea still held the control box and that she was stepping toward Peggy.

"Miss Schwann, I can make you little again too," chuckled Andrea.

"No, Andrea," said Peggy. "Please don't point that thing at me!" Peggy started easing away from the youngster, but found that she was backing herself into a corner of the kitchen with no doorway.

Andrea grinned. For a five year old, the feeling of power was too great to resist. She aimed the box while pressing down the same button yet another time, and the barely visible blue beam of light momentarily bathed Peggy.

"Andrea, please, no, I don't want to be a child ; no, my god, I feel weird," groaned Peggy, holding her hand to her head.

"Pweggy," lisped Christine, trying without success to carefully articulate every word. "You're getting widdle too."

"Oh, no, not me too, " gasped Peggy, nearly panicking, recognizing the truth in her friend's observation. She noticed that her clothing had already started to loosen.

Christine hoped that her friend would have the presence of mind to try to grab the box out of Andrea's grasp while she still had a size advantage and was big enough to do so. Unfortunately, Peggy seemed to be frozen with terror as she stood helplessly and watched her adult body rapidly regress toward girlhood.

"No, this can't be ; no, not my figure," groaned Peggy, watching her breasts steadily shrinking. Now she knew how Chris must have felt when she watched her ample bosom melt away. Peggy had always been envious of Christine's full figure, since Peggy had never been blessed with anything more substantial than a B Cup. Peggy realized that in a few moments she, like her hapless friend, would be so young that she would no longer need to worry about wearing a bra of any size.

Andrea seemed to grow larger as Peggy youthened rapidly through her teen years and girlhood. In a few moments, her chest had become completely flat, and her arms and legs became skinny and girlish looking. She continued to get smaller, growing shorter while her loosened clothing sagged over her dwindling frame. In another few seconds, Andrea was taller than she was. Just as Christine had done moments before, Peggy lost her balance and fell on her rump, finding that she had gotten tangled up in her own outfit. Her tank top had acquired tent-like proportions, and she had to struggle to crawl free of her bra straps so she could poke her head out of the pile of clothing.

Peggy discovered that she was once again the same age as her friend Christine, the only difference being that they were now both reduced to six month old infants.

"Cwiss, you wook funny," Peggy managed to say, momentarily surprised that her voice was no longer a womanly contralto.

"You don't wook tho good youthelf," replied Christine.

"What are we going to do?" asked Peggy. "We can-th th-stay wike thith!"

Andrea continued laughing, watching as the two baby girls crawled out from under the heaps of clothing they had been wearing only a few minutes earlier.

"C'mon, I know where I can put you two," said Andrea to her little charges.

"Put me down!" demanded Christine, struggling ineffectively as her five year old daughter easily picked her up and carried her toward the spare bedroom upstairs.

"Mommy, if you and Peggy are both good little babies, I promise I'll try to make you big again later," said Andrea as she carefully lifted her mother up and over into her cousin Stacey's playpen, which had been set up last weekend in the spare bedroom when her mother had been babysitting for her aunt.

Christine marveled at how large her baby niece's playpen seemed to her in her "new" size. Reduced to infancy, there was no way she was tall or strong enough to climb out.

A moment later, Andrea returned from the kitchen carrying a naked and crying baby Peggy, whom she set down gently in the playpen next to Christine.

"You two look so pretty," gushed Andrea as she looked at the two undressed infants.

The doorbell rang.

"Andrea, change me back wight now!" shrieked Christine. "I have to anther the door!"

"You can't - you're way too little now," tittered Andrea. "Don't worry, Mommy, I'll see who it is."

Andrea dashed down the steps, leaving Peggy and Christine alone.

"Well, what now?" lisped Peggy, glaring at Christine.

"We can't get out of here ; ith too high," observed Christine, studying the confines of the playpen. To the two baby-sized inmates, it made an effective jail.

=====

The doorbell rang a second time. Andrea, totally disregarding her mother's long standing safety instructions regarding answering the door, went to see who it was.

Trapped in the playpen upstairs, Christine realized that it was Heather, the teenaged daughter of her next door neighbor, right on time as usual. Yesterday, Christine had arranged for Heather Mathews, who was a junior in high school, to stop by immediately after lunch and escort Andrea over to the Jefferson Elementary School for her usual afternoon kindergarten class, ensuring that Christine and Peggy could get a head start on a leisurely afternoon of shopping at the mall. Of course, due to the unforeseen circumstances, neither Christine or Peggy were in any condition to go shopping for quite a while - at least by themselves, without being pushed in a baby stroller.

"Hi, Andrea!" greeted Heather. "Is your mom around?"

"Uh - Hi, Heather," replied Andrea, obviously caught be surprise. She hadn't prepared an excuse for what had happened to her mother. "Mommy - uh - she said you'd be coming after lunch. She just left -um- a few minutes ago."

"Your mom just left?" asked Heather, puzzled. Mrs. Vanowski sure didn't seem like the type of person to leave a five year old home alone. Then again, she had asked Heather to come by right after lunch, and if she were in a hurry, well, maybe it was something important. After all, Mrs. Vanowski did know that her neighbors were home in case some emergency came up, and apparently she was only going to be away for a few minutes.

"Andrea, did your mom say how long she was going to be gone?" asked Heather.

"Umm, she said she'd back by, well, uh, right after she checked next door with Mrs. Smith," lied Andrea, referring to her other next door neighbor. "She said for us to close the door behind us and just go ahead."

"Well, I suppose it's alright," agreed Heather, albeit somewhat reluctantly. "Are you all ready?"

"Yep," beamed Andrea, who had surreptitiously stashed the seemingly magical age control box into her backpack. "Let's go."

The Jefferson Elementary School was only two blocks away. Andrea was lost in happy thoughts as she considered the possibilities of changing some of the teachers and other adults at her school into children her own age - or, in some cases, making them even younger, so that they would have to do what she told them to, instead of the other way around. It would serve them right to find out what it was like to be little again, she thought. Andrea self-righteously justified to herself that turning the tables on most of the grown-ups she knew would only be fair.

While Heather had her back turned for a moment, Andrea aimed the control at her and pressed the button briefly. She saw her babysitter quickly become slightly shorter and smaller. Heather had been reduced in age just enough to make her clothing fit rather sloppily, but was not youthened enough that she could immediately determine that she was smaller. No longer a high school junior, Heather was now barely old enough to pass as a freshman, although she didn't realize it just yet.

"What's with these clothes?" complained Heather, tugging at her waist. Her jeans seemed to keep slipping down off her hips, even though she had already tightened her belt twice. Andrea giggled to herself and slipped the control into her backpack again.

Andrea and Heather finally reached the school. "Well, here you are," said Heather, wistfully looking at the building where she had attended grammar school not so many years ago. "I kind of wish I could go in with you, Andrea."

"Well - why don't you?" asked Andrea innocently.

"Kindergarten is fun for kids your age," explained Heather, "but I'm too big for it now."

"Too old?" asked Andrea. "What if, ummm, what if there was someway you could be little again? Would you come in with me?"

"What an imagination," chuckled Heather, her eyeballs rolling. She continued to reminisce as she studied the familiar façade of her old school. She didn't notice her young companion digging into her backpack and producing a slim, rectangular metal object that she aimed in Heather's direction.

"Darn it! These clothes are so baggy!" complained Heather, realizing that her pants had become very droopy and loose. And her stretchy top wasn't fitting right either - it no longer flattered her figure, which seemed to be - smaller? Her bra seemed too roomy. She had just purchased most of what she was wearing no more than a week or two ago, and everything had seemed to fit fine then. What was going on?

Heather turned to look at Andrea. Andrea seemed taller than she remembered - much taller, in fact. "How'd you get so tall?" demanded Heather, surprised to find that her voice sounded rather high pitched.

She watched in disbelief as Andrea smiled and pushed a button on a small box she was holding and pointing in her general direction. Heather grew even shorter and smaller as she youthened further, until in a moment the unfortunate teen found herself standing at the same height as five year old Andrea.

"Hey - what did you do to me?" squealed Heather, still confused by her own strange sounding voice.

"Now you're my size," smiled Andrea. "You can come to kindergarten with me."

The unexpectedly pint-sized Heather looked worried and confused rather than happy. She looked at Andrea, and then down at herself. Heather's teenaged attributes were gone - her developing breasts and hips had disappeared, causing her newly spacious bra and panties to inexorably slide southward down her diminished body. She started tugging at her ill-fitting clothing, which had been rendered many sizes too large. Mesmerized, she started muttering to herself while staring down in astonishment and disbelief at her downsized body.

"This isn't possible, I can't be a little kid again, "

At that moment, the school bell rang. Andrea hurried up the steps.

"Last chance, Heather," she called to her former babysitter as she opened up the door. "C'mon!"

"No, this can't be happening. I've got to go home and get some help, " whimpered Heather, who turned away and started to hurry back toward her house. Andrea could barely help sniggering as she watched the thoroughly confused former teen try to sprint, struggling to hold on to her vastly oversized attire as best she could while scampering down the street to her home.

As a disheveled-looking Heather Mathews disappeared around the corner, Andrea entered the school door and dashed toward her classroom. She frowned for a moment when she realized that the weekly "Show And Tell" day wasn't until tomorrow. Andrea often bemoaned the fact that it wasn't very often that anyone in her class had something really interesting to show, and the age-changing control would certainly qualify as one of the best items of all time - especially if Andrea gave some live demonstrations of how it worked.

Even if "Show And Tell" wasn't officially scheduled until the next day, Andrea knew she could have plenty of fun showing off the weird control to her friends and letting them see how it worked.

=====

Kaitlin was one of Andrea's closest friends, so it was only natural that Andrea was quite anxious to show off the age changing control to her schoolmate.

", so then I changed my mom and her friend Peggy all the way back into little babies," concluded Andrea breathlessly as she finished describing the events of the morning to Kaitlin.

"Did you try it on anyone else yet?" queried Kaitlin, who was quite enthralled with Andrea's story, even though she was old enough to realize that her friend Andrea was probably exaggerating the facts by a considerable margin. Outside of a few television cartoons, Kaitlin had never heard of anything that could change grownups into kids again.

"I used it on my babysitter Heather right in front of the school here - I didn't change her into a baby, but I still made her a lot littler," continued Heather. "She's our size now. She didn't seem to like it much, she ran away. I think she went back home."

"Andrea, are you sure you aren't just making all this up?" asked Kaitlin in a politely skeptical way.

"No, here it is," said Andrea, producing the small, thin metal box from her backpack and handing it to Kaitlin.

Kaitlin squinted as she studied the device. "That doesn't look like anything great to me. It looks like it's for a TV," she pronounced, still unconvinced.

"No, watch," whispered Andrea, taking the control out of Kaitlin's hands. "I'll use it on somebody to turn them into a baby, then you'll believe me."

"Yeah, sure, like it's really going to change someone into a baby. Who are going to use it on?" asked Kaitlin.

"I dunno," said Andrea, momentarily at a loss for ideas. The other kids in class might be fun, but, after all, they were already just kids. The best demonstration ; and most entertaining result - would be to reduce an older person to childhood.

"How about Miss Aspen?" suggested Kaitlin, referring to their teacher, who had momentarily stepped out of the classroom into the hallway.

"But I like Miss Aspen," objected Andrea. "Maybe she wouldn't like being a baby again." She recalled how upset her mom and Miss Schwann had been when she shrunk them down into infants.

"You don't have to make her into a baby. How ‘bout you just change her to our age? Then she'd be old enough to play with us," said Kaitlin. "As if that thing really works anyway."

"You'll see. When Miss Aspen gets here, I'll make her five years old. That should prove that it works."

"I'll believe it when I see it," asserted Kaitlin, extremely dubious of Andrea's seemingly wild claims.

Maureen Aspen entered the room with a smile on her face. Maureen loved teaching. She had been acting as a substitute since she had graduated college with her degree in Elementary Education two years before, and thanks to a lucky break had just been awarded her first full time permanent assignment in the Jefferson School kindergarten at the beginning of the school year.

"I think it's this button here," whispered Andrea to Kaitlin while she pointed the device in the direction of Miss Aspen. Kaitlin observed carefully. She thought she heard an almost inaudible, high-pitched tone emanate from the apparatus as Andrea's finger pressed down on one of the shiny round switch contacts. A very faint blue light could be seen coming from the front of object.

"Well, hello class. After I take attendance, we're going to learn a new game. Won't that be fun?" Maureen began to quickly check off children's names from the list in her notebook, unaware that Andrea Vanowski was pointing what looked like a remote control in her direction.

Andrea kept the device aimed directly at Miss Aspen and continued to zap her with a low dosage of youthening radiation. Oblivious to Andrea's activity, Miss Aspen began to describe the rules for a game that involved learning the letters of the alphabet.

For about thirty seconds, Kaitlin and Andrea riveted their attention on Miss Aspen to see if they could notice any changes in her appearance. For what seemed like an eternity, nothing happened. Suddenly, the children the class began to gasp and stare in astonishment as they realized that Miss Aspen was shrinking.

Maureen paused as she saw the increasingly wide eyed expressions on the faces of her students.

"What's everybody looking at?" she asked, puzzled. She noticed that the familiar classroom looked subtly different, almost as if it were a bit bigger.

"Miss Aspen, you're shrinking!" shouted Erin, one of Andrea's classmates who happened to be standing close to her teacher.

"Huh?" asked Maureen. It was then that she realized that something was wrong with her clothing. It was very baggy, and she could feel her top and pants shifting position as they slid a bit lower on her body. Her shoes were too big for her feet.

"Lookit! She's still shrinking!" yelped one of the boys in the class.

"Hey! I am getting smaller!" Maureen exclaimed in surprise, noting that her voice sounded different.

"Look at her!"

The children began giggling as Miss Aspen continued to grow shorter and shorter. Her face looked younger and younger while her clothes sagged over her diminishing frame.

"Oh, my, what's going on?" she gasped, looking down at herself in disbelief. Beneath the material of her top, which no longer showed any projection where she would normally expect to see her breasts, Maureen could feel her empty bra cups sliding down the front of her chest, which was now flat and smooth.

Tara and Melody, two girls who were friends with Andrea and Kaitlin, approached the front of the class to get a better look at their teacher, who continued dwindling right in front of their eyes.

"You're getting younger!" exclaimed Tara.

"You'll be in kindergarten with us," said Melody, her mouth open in amazement.

In another few seconds, Maureen was roughly the same height - and same age - as her kindergarten students.

"This, can't be, ," gasped the diminutive teacher, experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance as she grappled with the strange concept that she had somehow been reduced to the stature of a five year old.

The children crowded around Maureen, unable to believe what they were seeing.

"Now class, I'm sure there's some logical explanation for, umm, what happened to me," said the overdressed five year old.

"Look, I'm taller than you are now," said Tara, standing next to Maureen. It was true - Maureen Aspen was shorter than Tara and several other of the girls in the class.

Melody tugged on one of Maureen's dangling shirt sleeves to show how long it was. "Look at your clothes, they're too big for you," she laughed.

Maureen pulled her shirt sleeve away from Melody. "Class, I expect you all to behave yourselves," warned Maureen. Since she now looked and sounded just like another kindergarten student, her authority was essentially gone.

The children in the kindergarten continued laughing as they watched their former teacher struggle to restore order to the classroom. Maureen was hampered by the fact that, although now only five years old, she was still wearing an outfit intended to be worn by a size 12 woman.

Just then, Paige Ranford, a teacher just a few years older than Maureen who had helped her out on numerous occasions, entered the classroom. Paige had helped to mentor Maureen when she had started teaching at Jefferson Elementary, and the two women had become close friends. Paige looked around the room in puzzlement, trying to find Maureen. Surely Maureen wouldn't have left the class unattended without some good reason.

"Where did Miss Aspen go?" Paige asked the class. Several of the children started to laugh and pointed at the five year old Maureen, who stood near the front of room, still struggling unhappily with her oversized outfit and sobbing in frustration at her strange transformation back to childhood.

"Paige, it's me!" she squeaked as she gazed up into her friend's face, a few tears running down her cheeks.

Paige studied the little girl for a minute. At first, she thought that it was one of the kindergarteners playing a dress-up game - but as she took a closer look, she could see that the child was wearing a woman's bra underneath her super-sized blouse, and was standing in a pair of woman's dress flats. Her attire seemed a bit too realistic for a game, and it dawned on Paige that she had seen Maureen wearing exactly the same outfit that this little girl was wearing when she had arrived at work that morning. The only difference was that it had fit Maureen snuggly early that day.

"Maureen? Is that you?" she asked.

"Paige, help me, please, something changed me into a kid again," pleaded Maureen, tugging at her friend's skirt. Maureen was normally the tall one, but now Paige towered over her like a virtual giant.

=====

Heather ran breathlessly nearly all the way back to her house, stumbling several times in her awkwardly oversized clothes. She finally had to slow down to avoid accidentally losing her giant sized shoes, which flopped and threatened to go flying off her small feet with every step she took. After a seemingly endless marathon, she finally arrived home and raced inside.

"Darcie!" yelped Heather, nearly running into her younger sister as she dashed through the front door. She immediately discovered that Darcie was no longer her "little" sister. From her new perspective, Darcie - who was only in the seventh grade at middle school - looked huge.

Darcie looked down at the oddly familiar little girl dressed in clothes several sizes too big for her. The baggy clothes looked a bit familiar too, Darcie was nearly certain that they belonged to her older sister. And the girl's hair - it was styled just like Heather's was. "Heather?" she asked hesitantly, not believing her own eyes. "Is that you?"

"Darcie, look - something happened to me!" exclaimed Heather, looking wide-eyed at her "little" sister. "I'm all shrunk!"

"Well, I guess, uh, " said Darcie, not sure what to say. For once, she was speechless. She wasn't used to looking down to talk to Heather, who was, or at least used to be, four years her elder.

"Darcie, please, you've got to help me!" wailed Heather, looking up at her (formerly) younger sister, who was now at least a foot taller than she was.

"Oh my god!" gasped Darcie as she accepted the impossible, staring at her shrunken sibling. "Heather, I can't believe that it's you. You, you look like you're just a little kid! What in the world happened to you?"

"Darcie, Andrea Vanowski did this to me!" wailed Heather. "She shrunk me! Look at me, I'm like a rug rat again!"

"Andrea? The kid who lives next door? How could she make you younger?"

"She has this weird box, it looks like a remote control or something, and when she points it at someone and presses one of the buttons, it makes them younger," sobbed Heather. "Look! Look at what it did to me!"

"Wow, you look like you're only five or six years old," agreed Darcie.

"I know," sobbed Heather. "Darcie, it's not fair! I can't stay like this. You've got to help me get that box from her. There must be a way of using it in reverse."

Heather despaired as she realized that she was now only as tall as twelve year old Darcie's chest. Eye level with the two small bumps pushing out from her sister's shirt, Heather realized that Darcie's budding breasts were now considerably more mature and developed than her own essentially flat chest. Heather and Darcie's relative physical status had been inverted. Heather felt a pang of guilt as she remembered the many times she had made fun of Darcie since her younger sister had entered puberty; at the moment, their status was reversed.

Darcie looked down at Heather and smiled. This is going to be an interesting situation, she thought, considering the practical everyday implications of her older sibling now being many years her junior. Heather was not only much younger than her own friends and high school classmates, she was now even younger than Darcie and her junior high school social circle.

=====

"Wow! That was neat! Can I try that box?" Kaitlin anxiously asked Andrea. While the rest of their kindergarten classmates crowded together near the front of the room to gawk at the scene of confusion that centered around the youthened Miss Aspen, Kaitlin and Andrea had remained quiet and unnoticed in the back of their class.

"Well, I dunno," hesitated Andrea, reluctant to hand over the amazing device. Using the control on her mother, her babysitter, and her teacher to cut them down to size had given her a feeling of power that a child her age rarely experienced, and Andrea was more than a bit intoxicated with her newfound ability to change the adult authority figures in her life into kids her own age - or even into helpless toddlers or babies, if she wanted.

"Please, I wanna try it," begged Kaitlin.

"Well, just for a couple of times," said Andrea as she grudgingly handed her friend the control box. Kaitlin was one of her best friends, and, after all, her mom always told her that sharing was good. "Who are you going to try it on?"

"I dunno. How about some of the PTA ladies?" suggested Kaitlin.

"PTA ladies?" asked Andrea.

"Yeah. I think they're having a meeting later on. My mom's here, and I think I saw Erin's mom too."

"Hey, that is a good idea," agreed Andrea.

Andrea and Kaitlin's classmates were totally absorbed by the ongoing activity surrounding their now five year old teacher and a panicked Paige Ranford, who was simultaneously trying to calm Maureen down while keeping the class under control. The two girls quietly left through the door in the back of the classroom, completely unnoticed, and proceeded to sneak down the hallway.

=====

"Look, they're all in there," whispered Kaitlin, directing her gaze toward the conference room door.

Andrea cautiously peered around the corner. The conference room was filled with about fifteen women, who were standing around in several discussion groups. Andrea and Kaitlin could hear the buzz of multiple conversations, punctuated by occasional laughter.

"Can this age thing change more than one person?" asked Kaitlin, referring to the control she held in her hand.

"I'm not sure," replied Andrea. "I didn't get a chance to try it out. But I guess it should work, as long as you aim it right."

"Maybe I better try it on just one person first," mused Kaitlin.

Peering around the corner again, the first woman Kaitlin saw was Ruth Hudson. Ruth was a tall thirty-six year old, and had a son in the third grade at Jefferson elementary.

Kaitlin aimed the control in Ruth's general direction and very carefully pressed the button just as she had seen Andrea do. She was afraid to press down too hard.

Ruth continued to fill her coffee cup, apparently unaffected in any way by the youth ray.

"Nothing's happening," Kaitlin hissed in disappointment to Andrea.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you, the harder you press the button, the quicker the person changes," explained Andrea.

Kaitlin responded by suddenly and emphatically mashing the button down with her thumb, using all the pressure she could muster.

Ruth Hudson didn't even have time to gasp as she began to rapidly shrink. In seconds, the unwitting woman was reduced to a one year old baby, crawling out of the dress she had been wearing just moments before. Andrea and Kaitlin could hardly contain their laughter at the sight.

Kaitlin turned and aimed the control at a group of four women nearest the door. Their backs were turned to the girls, and they were so engrossed in conversation that they failed to see what had just happened to Ruth (who, at her reduced new size, was hidden from view behind a table).

Kaitlin pressed the button again, just as hard as she had the first time. Zap! In the blink of an eye, all of the women were suddenly much smaller than they had been. A chaotic scene ensued.

The amount of youthening the women experienced depended purely on luck - where they had been standing when the radiation had flooded the room. The more fortunate ones, who happened to be standing behind their friends or who were in the far corners of the room, had lost only a few years. Others shrunk back to their teens. The women who were less lucky now looked like kids playing dress up. A few of the mothers and teachers who had been directly in line with the age altering ray found themselves regressed all the way back to infancy. Several of them started sobbing and crying in panic as they struggled to wriggle out of piles of their own clothing.

"What the hell is wrong with my clothes?" demanded the suddenly pint-sized Helen Stevenson as she discovered that her pants would no longer stay up by themselves and that her shirt sleeves had suddenly become longer - much longer. They now dangled past her hands, hanging all the way down to the floor.

"Oh my god, look at us!," gasped another of the women, looking around the room and seeing that she, along with approximately half of her fellow PTA members, had instantly undergone a drastic reduction in age.

"I'm a kid again!" yelped a preschool girl, incongruously draped in a huge blue dress. She was still holding onto the can of diet soda she had been drinking, and was obviously having a hard time balancing herself while trying to walk in high-heeled shoes many sizes too large.

"No, this can't be, this is impossible!" whimpered a cute three year old with curly brown hair who had just shrunk out of her own business suit. Her skirt had dropped to the floor.

"My dress!" exclaimed Karen Roberts. Karen was no longer a soccer mom in her mid thirties; she now looked like she was six.

"Please, help me, my breasts, they're all shrunk down to nothing," exclaimed Mary Sullivan, who (through dumb luck) had not been exposed to quite as much of the youthening radiation as her friends. Instead of being reduced to preschool size, Mary had retained enough years to pass as a fifth or sixth grade girl. She was tugging frantically at the front of her blouse ; which had assumed rather large, baggy proportions ; as if hoping to discover that her missing mammary glands were hiding under her drooping bra cups.

Ruth Hudson had by this time managed to crawl halfway to the front of the room, but on the way had lost what was left of her adult underwear. Totally naked, she found that she could barely manage to stand on her wobbly little legs, and when she tried to talk most of the words came out sounding like baby gibberish. Ahead of her, she saw two other baby girls, their nearly bald heads peering out from piles of clothes they had been wearing.

=====

From the perspective of Andrea and Kaitlin, the mothers and teachers now looked quite comical, reduced to the size of children but still dressed up in all of their baggy adult clothes.

"Andrea! That was fun," chuckled Kaitlin. "Can I try it again? Please?" she pleaded, glancing at the age changing control.

"Well, just once more," said Andrea reluctantly. "Who are you going to use it on this time?"

"How about Miss Ranford?" suggested Kaitlin.

"Why her?" asked Andrea.

"Well, her and Miss Aspen used to be friends, ‘cept now Miss Aspen is too little. I'll make Miss Ranford the same age as Miss Aspen, so they can still be friends."

"Gee, I guess that seems kind of neat," concurred Andrea.

Andrea and Kaitlin left the chaos in the conference room and snuck back through the back door of their kindergarten classroom. Standing in the center of the crowd of fascinated children, Paige Ranford was still trying her best to comfort little Maureen Aspen. Paige suddenly found herself swimming in her own outfit and looking at the kindergarten kids eye to eye, having become a victim of the youth ray herself.

=====

Andrea and Kaitlin watched while several of the women from the PTA meeting, now reduced to the age of little girls, managed to walk down the hall to the principal's office. Andrea giggled as she watched them struggle to hold onto their adult sized clothing.

The women entered the office and looked around for an adult help them.

"And who are you young ladies?" asked Julie, the office secretary, stooping down a bit to get a better look at the strangely overdressed girls.

"We are not young ladies!" shrieked Helen Stevenson, who looked panic stricken. "We are adult women!" Since Helen looked to be no older than 3 or 4, her assertion seemed ridiculous.

"I'm Barbara Vance, Tara's mother," explained a little girl, who looked no older than seven. She was wearing what looked like a woman's blouse, except it was big enough on her to make a passable dress.

=====

Andrea and Kaitlin laughed at the mayhem they had caused. After a few more pranks (shrinking Ms. Levitz the librarian down to adolescence, reducing buxom secretary Julie Winters to babyhood, and changing Ms. Seville, one of the teacher's aides, into a two year old), Andrea felt tired and decided to leave for home. Confusion reigned throughout the school. Given the ongoing excitement and general pandemonium, Andrea doubted anyone would notice her leaving early.

Kaitlin lived two blocks in the opposite direction from school. As the two girls parted, Kaitlin begged Andrea to lend her the age-changer so she could use it at home. Andrea reluctantly felt obligated to turn her best friend down, but promised Kaitlin that she could use it some time in the future.

=====

Darcie was intrigued by Heather's tearful description of the device that had sent her back to childhood. If Heather could be believed - and her wild story seemed to be backed by incredible but irrefutable evidence in the form of Heather's youthened body - then the neighbor's little girl Andrea Vanowski still had the age-changing device with her. Darcie decided to watch for Andrea's return from school, which usually occurred around three o'clock in the afternoon. At that point, she'd try to somehow get the age altering control from the girl.

Darcie periodically looked out at her neighbor's house to see if Andrea had returned yet from her kindergarten class. Shortly after 2;45 in the afternoon, after anxiously checking for what seemed like the hundredth time, Darcie finally spied Andrea approaching from the direction of the school.

=====

The age reducing control had certainly made for an interesting school day. Andrea dumped her backpack on the kitchen counter and went upstairs to check up on her mother and Peggy Schwann. She found the babies asleep in the crib where she had left them.

Andrea grinned. Having two real live babies to play with was going to be much more fun than playing with dolls. It would be amusing to play house with her mom and Ms. Schwann - of course, they would be the babies and Andrea would be the mommy. She would dress them both up in the old baby clothes her mom saved in the attic, and Andrea could pretend to do the shopping, cooking, and bottle feeding chores. Andrea wasn't sure if the unwilling babies would want to play along, but the former women had been made so much younger that they weren't big enough to protest much. And if they gave her too much trouble, their vastly reduced physiques meant that Andrea was large enough to spank them now.

Andrea felt like going outside for while. She would let her mom and Ms. Schwann finish their naps, figuring she could play with them later on. She hurried out to the back yard to play on her swing set before it got dark.

=====

Together, Darcie and Heather had gone through some old boxes of clothes in the basement, and had managed to find some things that fit Heather's "new" size much better than her own teen clothing currently did. However, "better fit" was relative ; since they couldn't find anything really old (their children's clothing having been long since given away to charity), Heather was dressed in a pair of corduroy pants and horizontally striped sweater that Darcie had last worn when she was in the fourth grade. Heather had rolled up the pants legs and the arms on the sweater, but her ensemble was extremely baggy. While not nearly as oversized as her original outfit, Heather still looked like a six year old playing dress up.

Darcie noticed Andrea playing in the back yard. She watched the girl long enough to satisfy herself that she would be preoccupied with her games for a while. Making up a false but plausible excuse, Darcie told Heather, who was still trying on clothes while complaining about being reduced to the age of a little girl, that she would be gone for a few minutes and would be right back.

Slinking around to the front of the Vanowski's house, Darcie found that Andrea had left the front door unlocked just as she had expected. Darcie cautiously opened the door, anticipating that Ms. Vanowski ; or someone else ; might be at home with Andrea. As she tiptoed into the living room, she found the house as quiet as a tomb. After tentatively sneaking a look around the room, Darcie concluded that Andrea was home alone and that the house was otherwise empty.

Darcie spotted Andrea's school backpack on the kitchen counter. Furtively glancing around, she opened the velcro flap and examined the contents. Next to an A-B-C "learning the alphabet" picture book and a half-full box of crayons, Darcie saw what looked like a small remote control.

Curious, Darcie removed it from the backpack and gave it a closer look. Superficially, it did resemble a remote control ; it was a small rectangular box with buttons on the top. However, unlike any remote control Darcie had ever seen, it had a substantial heft to it that gave the impression it was made of solid metal. As she scrutinized the top, she saw that the buttons were labeled with weird (and as far as she could determine incomprehensible) geometric symbols. Darcie realized immediately that this must be the device that had changed her older sister Heather into her new little sister.

"Wow ; this is way cool," she said to herself, slipping the mysterious little control into her pocket before making a hasty and surreptitious exit.

==========

Darcie had no plans to restore her sister back to her normal age - far from it. From Darcie's perspective, Heather was much too pompous for her own good. She picked on Darcie and her friends constantly, and as far as Darcie was concerned, turnabout was fair play. Her (formerly) big sister was going to remain her little sister as long as Darcie had any control over the situation. Now that Darcie had obtained the age altering device, there would be no limit to the fun she could have, and she resolved to enact her own brand of justice by cutting down a few of her older antagonists to size just as soon as an opportunity presented itself. Darcie made up her mind that she would start that very afternoon with some of Heather's more obnoxious friends.

Darcie contemplated the remainder of her schedule for the day. She had been rather indifferent toward attending George Washington Junior High's annual "Autumn Leaves" dance scheduled to start at 7;00 PM that evening. With some reluctance, she had decided to go, mostly because many of her friends would be there. Darcie brightened as she realized that an otherwise lackluster evening could become significantly more interesting with the addition of some impromptu age-adjustment magic directed at selected attendees, courtesy of the device she had just pilfered.

She returned to her house and found little Heather still digging through the box of old clothes. Darcie pretended to resume helping her, all the while remaining silent about the device she had recovered.

The girls heard footsteps coming up to the front door of the house.

"Oh my god. It's Cindy and Diane," said Heather, peering down from behind the curtain of her upstairs bedroom window. "They probably wondered why I didn't show up after lunch today. Darcie, you've got to tell them I'm not home or something. They can't see me like this!"

"Well, I guess you have looked better," agreed Darcie, taking stock of her (formerly) older sibling. "What do you want me to tell your friends, little sister?"

"Don't call me that!" complained Heather. "I'm not your little sister. I'm still the oldest. My, uhmm, my body looks younger, but I'm still really older than you are."

Darcie rolled her eyes in theatrical fashion. "What-ever. I doubt that anyone is going to believe that you're 16 years old. You look just like any other kindergarten kid to me."

"But I'm not a kindergarten kid. I'm in high school!" Heather protested half-heartedly. As frustrated as she was by her humiliating situation, Heather knew that her sister was right.

The doorbell rang.

"I'd better get that," said Darcie, heading downstairs.

"Wait, Darcie! Please, you can't let them in!" implored Heather. "Please, I don't want my friends to see me looking like this, "

Darcie, ignoring her sister and relishing the new opportunity presented by the two unexpected (and unsuspecting) visitors, dashed down the stairs to the front door.

"Hi, guys," said Darcie, greeting her sister's friends.

"Hi, Darcie. Is Heather around?" asked Diane.

"She's upstairs," replied Darcie.

"Is she alright?" Cindy asked. "We didn't see her in class after lunch."

"Well, my sister kind of, well, let's just say that she ran into a little trouble," responded Darcie. "C'mon upstairs."

The two teens trailed behind Darcie as she led them upstairs to Heather's room. Darcie stood aside and watched them as they squinted in disbelief at the five year old girl who greeted them.

"Guess who?" smiled Darcie, introducing her sister.

"Hi, Cindy. Hi, Diane," Heather said listlessly.

"Heather?" gasped Cindy, refusing to believe her own eyes. "What the heck, I mean, is that you!?"

"It's really me," sobbed Heather, looking up at her friends.

"Holy shit!" exclaimed Cindy.

"How did you get - you know, turned into a little kid?" asked Diane, looking down at her diminutive classmate.

Just then, Darcie silently entered the room holding the remote control. Cindy and Diane had their backs to the door and were questioning Heather as Darcie aimed the device in their direction and pushed the activation button.

Both of the unsuspecting teens began to youthen at a gradual pace. Watching them from the back, Darcie could see the seats of their (no longer very tight) jeans grow baggier at the same time their pant legs started bunching up on top of their shoes. Cindy's bra clasp was visible underneath the material of her cotton tee shirt; Darcie watched as it slowly slid further and further down Cindy's back as she became younger and shorter.

Diane and Cindy suddenly noticed that something was wrong with their clothes. At the same time, they observed that kindergarten-age Heather seemed to be growing taller and taller.

"Hey! What's happening to us?" wailed Diane.

"I don't know, " replied Cindy, a puzzled look on her face as she noticed how large her clothing had become.

"You guys are getting smaller!" exclaimed Heather in disbelief as she watched her friends quickly dwindling back into preadolescence. "That's just what happened to me, "

"Look - It's Darcie!" exclaimed Diane. The three girls turned to face Darcie, who was standing in the doorway.

Darcie smiled as she displayed the control in her right hand. "You jerks always seemed to enjoy making fun of me. Well, guess what - the situation is reversed. You're the little ones now. I think I'm going to leave you just how you are for awhile so you'll remember how it feels to be younger and smaller."

"Hey! That's the same thing that Andrea used to make me a kid," said Heather, staring at the device her sister was holding.

"Oh my god!" shrieked Diane, her eyes wide with panic. "Look at us! She shrunk us with that thing!"

"I didn't shrink you," corrected Darcie. "I just made you younger." She glanced down at the control in her hand, then back at the girls. "Let's see, I'd guess by looking at you that you're both about nine years old now. I can tell just by looking at those tiny little bumps in front of your tops, where your boobs used to be, "

"No, no, oh, shit, she's right, " moaned Cindy. "I'm practically flat again!" she wailed, frantically clutching the front of her baggy top and finding that her breasts had retreated back into her chest.

"Me too," sobbed Diane, who was also checking out her suddenly loose sweater and empty bra cups.

"You little creep!" squealed Cindy.

"Watch your language, young lady," laughed Darcie. "And I do mean young lady."

"Change us back!" demanded Diane.

"You're both going to find out what it's like to be the youngest one in your families," smiled Darcie. "Cindy, what do you think your little sisters are going to say when they see you? Let's see, Karen's in the fourth grade ; she's probably a year older than you are now. Not to mention the fact that she's a lot taller and bigger. That's going to be a big change in your relationship."

"You can't do this, " sobbed Cindy, mortified at what her sister Karen would do when she discovered that Cindy had been reverted back to the stature of a nine year old girl.

"Looks like from now on, you'll be the one wearing little Karen's hand me downs, eh?" asked Darcie, looking at Cindy's oversized clothing. "Maybe she can lend you some of her training bras. I mean, when you get old enough to need them."

"Darcie, please. Make us big again," Diane pleaded.

"Diane, aren't you on the varsity track team? And the swim team, too?" smirked Darcie. "I doubt you're going to be much of an athletic competitor in your new size. Maybe they'll let you stay on the team as a towel girl or something."

"But she was going to get a college scholarship," explained nine year old Cindy.

"If you don't appreciate your new looks, I can make you even younger," threatened Darcie with an evil grin on her face. "I can make you both the same age as Heather," she said, punctuating her remark with a meaningful nod of the head toward her sister.

"Darcie, stop it! You leave my friends alone!" demanded Heather.

"You can't boss me around any more, Heather. Remember, you're my little sister now. Watch this," said Darcie, glaring defiantly at her sister. With a sneer on her face, she casually took aim at Cindy and Diane.

"No, please don't use that thing again, ." pleaded Dianne.

"Darcie, please! We're sorry! Don't make us any younger!" whined Cindy.

Darcie savored her power for a moment and, ignoring the entreaties of the girls, pressed down the regression button briefly while directing the control toward them. In a moment, Cindy and Diane discovered their already grossly oversized clothes were growing even larger. In a few seconds, they had been further reduced to approximately the same age as Heather.

"Shit! Shit! I'm practically a baby!" squealed Diane.

"This can't really be happening to us," sobbed a distraught kindergarten-sized Cindy.

Darcie smiled down at the former teens.

"Hey, I just remembered, isn't the High School Homecoming Dance next week? I'd like see you guys all show up looking like that," laughed Darcie. "I just hope none of you planned on wearing a strapless dress, and I'm pretty sure that whatever you were going to wear is going to need some alteration now."

Cindy and Diane looked like they were going to start crying.

"If you little girls don't behave yourselves and do exactly what I tell you, I won't change you back ever," explained Darcie. "On the other hand, if you do help me, I just might be persuaded to change you back to your normal ages."

"What do you want us to do?" asked Heather.

"Hmmm, I don't know right now, but I'm sure I'll think of something. You kids stay put here until I get back from the dance. Don't go anywhere. If you decide to go out, or tell someone what happened, well - I just might forget to change you back." Darcie wasn't really worried about the possibility of Heather or her dorky friends leaving the house until she returned - in their new sizes, they would be too embarrassed to be seen by anyone they knew, and no strangers would be likely to believe the story that they had been changed from high school girls to kindergarteners.

I'm going to have some more fun with this thing, Darcie thought to herself, brandishing the device.

=====

Darcie glanced at the clock and was surprised to see how quickly the afternoon had passed. It was now nearly 6;00, and her two best friends - Claire and Rachel - were going to stop by shortly to pick her up on the way to the "Autumn Leaves" dance. She hurried up to her room to get ready. Stripping, Darcie quickly threw her jeans and T-shirt into the bathroom hamper and stepped to her closet to get her dress. She had picked it out several weeks ago, mostly over her mother's objections - "Darcie, that's not appropriate for a girl your age." Recalling the conversation, Darcie was suddenly struck with an exciting idea.

Darcie was twelve years old, and had started the seventh grade just a few months previously. She wondered how it would feel to be a bit older.

Darcie studied the control for a moment. It seemed clear that the front edge, just like any other remote control, was the "business end". The top of the control was populated by several buttons. Their function wasn't obvious, but with the supreme confidence of youth, Darcie felt sure she could figure them out. What more could one want in a simple age-altering device?

She decided to test it out on herself before proceeding any further. Somewhat awkwardly, she held the control at arm's length and, aiming the front of the device at her chest, gingerly pressed the one of the buttons a couple of times.

A mild tingling coursed through her body as a pale blue beam of light emanated from the control. At first, it seemed as if nothing was happening. As Darcie stared at her image in her dresser mirror, she suddenly realized that the top of her head and shoulders seemed to be moving slowly. She was gradually growing taller! She could see now that she was gaining several inches of height.

Suddenly, Darcie became aware that something was slowly squeezing her. She realized it was her underwear. "Ouch," she yelped as she felt the elastic in her bra band pinching under her breasts. She released the button and carefully setting the control back on her dresser.

Darcie smiled as she checked out her new image. Her face looked slightly different ; it was longer and more mature looking. Her hips seemed huge to her ; they were considerably wider, and her stretched panties accentuated this sudden growth. At first she was uncomfortable with this aspect of her new body and concluded that she now looked "fat". Her disappointment with her hips was soon negated by elation as she realized that her breasts were also bigger. Several cup sizes bigger, in fact. Darcie imagined that she now had the largest assets of any of the girls in her class by a wide margin. Of course, the girls in her class were still twelve year olds, and Darcie guessed that she was now older than they were by a least two or three years. She couldn't wait to show off in front of her friends and the cute boys when she showed up at school.

"Wow - I have some real cleavage," Darcie marveled, checking out her top. She was accustomed to seeing nothing more than small swellings around her nipples, little bumps in the front of her tightest clothing, and now she had very well developed and shapely breasts the size of apples. She could feel their weight on her chest. Her bra was much too small to be comfortable, and looked silly on a older teen with the figure that she now possessed.

She realized she had also gained quite a bit in height. Darcie guessed that she would now be almost as tall as Elaine Thomas, who was one of the tallest girls in her class. Unlike Elaine, who Darcie considered to be a skinny geek, Darcie now had the advantage of considerable breast development. The horny boys in class would be drooling over her, and all of her friends would be insanely jealous of her new and improved bust.

Darcie set her own dress aside - it was, she reasoned, probably a bit too small for her now. Stepping into the previously forbidden sanctuary of her older sister's room, Darcie helped herself to one of Heather's bras, grabbed a pair of panties, and selected a dress that Heather had worn to a high school dance last year. Everything fit amazingly well. Darcie strutted and primped in front of the mirror for a while, lost in a daydream as she admired her mature new look. The sound of car horn honking outside broke the spell.

"This is going to be so great," Darcie said. Smiling, she dropped the age control in her purse and headed out the door.

Rachel's mom was waiting in the driveway in front of Darcie's house with her minivan, along with Rachel and Claire.

"Hi, Misses Thompson," greeted Darcie cheerfully as she slide open the door and took a seat in back.

"Hi, Darcie," chimed Ms. Thompson. "You certainly look very nice this evening!"

"Wow! Darcie, you look great!" gasped Claire, checking out Darcie's new look. Rachel and Claire also gushed forth with numerous compliments, and Darcie couldn't help but feel just a bit superior as she felt the envious eyes of her friends checking out her enhancements. Of course, Darcie was now three to four years older than her friends, but seated in the back of the dark vehicle it was hard to tell anything specific had changed. To her friends, Darcie looked a bit more mature, but they naturally attributed the changes to the fact that she was all dressed up for the dance.

The girls giggled and gossiped on the short ride to the school. Rachel's mother dropped them off at the curb, reminding Rachel that she would be back to pick them up after the dance.

"See you later, girls. Rachel, behave yourself," admonished Ms. Thompson as she pulled away.

As the girls walked to the gymnasium entrance, Claire noticed for the first time that Darcie seemed to be quite a bit taller than she remembered. Attributing it to Darcie's high heels, she kept the thought to herself.

======

Andrea played on the swing set in her yard until she was nearly exhausted. She was starting to get hungry.

Suddenly, Andrea remembered that she had changed her mother and her mother's friend Peggy into babies. They were still upstairs, in her baby cousin Stacey's playpen. For a minute, Andrea debated which course of action would be likely to earn her the least amount of punishment. She was going to get in trouble one way or the other - either by trying to make dinner for herself using the stove without her mother's approval, or by changing her mother back to her normal size so she could prepare dinner. In the later case, she was quite sure her mother would deliver a good spanking before cooking anything.

Andrea considered that she could change Ms. Schwann back instead - at least Peggy would be reluctant to punish her directly. But, after some contemplation, Andrea realized that Peggy would just take the age changing device away from her as soon as she was physically capable of doing so, and use it to restore Andrea's mother to her full grown-up size as well.

The doorbell interrupted Andrea's indecision. It took Andrea a few seconds to recognize her next door neighbor Heather, who she had shrunk down to her own age earlier in the afternoon.

"Hi, Heather," greeted Andrea. She laughed for a moment. "I hope you're not here to baby sit - you're the same age as I am now."

Heather ignored the younger girl's jibe. "Andrea, you've got to help me. Darcie stole that thing you used to make me little. We've got to get it back. Where's your mom?"

"She's upstairs," said Andrea. "What do you mean, Darcie stole my magic control box? It's in my backpack."

"She probably came in and took it while you were in the back yard playing!" shouted Heather.

Sure enough, a check revealed that the control was nowhere to be found.

"How am I going to change my mom back?" cried Andrea.

"What did you do to your mom?" demanded Heather. "Did you change her into a kid like you did me?"

"Well, not exactly. I changed her and her friend all the way back into babies," admitted Andrea, who started to sob. "I was going to change you all back, honest I was."

"We've got to get that thing back," insisted Heather.

=====

Darcie surveyed the dancers and partiers in the crowded gymnasium, which had been decorated with paper streamers, colored spotlights, and a retro mirror ball to lend it a festive atmosphere. She couldn't resist the temptation to make a few minor adjustments to her classmates.

Elaine Thomas was the tallest girl in Darcie's class by several inches. Elaine was rather thin, and sported a pair of wire rim glasses that gave her a somewhat nerdish appearance. Darcie surreptitiously gave her a couple of quick zaps with the control, and was rewarded by seeing the twelve year old loose a bit of her height. The effect was subtle, but Elaine no longer stood out as being exceptionally tall for the seventh grade. Although there was no immediate way for her to find out, Elaine was now about a year and a half younger than she had been. Darcie was amused to notice that geeky Elaine hadn't even noticed what had happened to her.

Pleased with this result, Darcie similarly zapped a couple more of the unsuspecting seventh grade girls with mild does of the youth ray. Like Elaine, they became a bit shorter, and the small bumps in the front of their slinky dresses shrank or disappeared altogether as their barely developed young breasts receded back into nearly flat chests again. The changes weren't immediately obvious unless you knew what to look for. Darcie chuckled to herself as she imagined the frantic scenes that would be playing out in a dozen or so of her classmate's homes tomorrow morning when her unsuspecting victims discovered their small beginner bras were too big for them.

At first, Darcie was careful to use the device's powers very conservatively. She didn't want to call unnecessary attention to herself by doing anything too noticeable or obvious. After a half hour or so of reducing people a year or two, she grew bored and decided to adapt a more adventurous outlook.

=====

Toward the back of the gym, three of the dance chaperones were engaged in a discussion. Melody Loomis taught 8th grade social studies at Washington Junior High; her friends Anna Jerwinski and Michelle Hamilton were both 7th grade English teachers.

Darcie watched the trio for a while. She decided it would be really funny to see these women ; all in their mid 30s - reduced to the same age as their eleven and twelve year old students. They had congregated together in one corner of the gym, one or another of them straying from their conversation occasionally to look over the crowd of junior high students dancing. Darcie waited until she was sure that no one was looking in the direction of the three teachers.

"Going down, ladies," Darcie laughed to herself as she took aim at group, who were standing at least 50 feet away. "Next stop - junior high."

Ms. Loomis was first. She was a bit overweight as an adult, but - after a judicious application of a few seconds worth of youth ray - turned out to be quite a skinny little 12 year old. She squealed in surprise and attempted to hold onto her big sweater as she youthened back into adolescence. Ms. Jerwinski and Ms. Hamilton were next; in just a few seconds, the well endowed Ms. Jerwinski found herself rapidly reduced to training bra status, and Ms. Hamilton's suddenly oversized glasses slid down her nose as she looked down to discover that her blouse was now almost as big as a tent.

Darcie marveled at the sudden transformations of the women into adolescents. She amused herself by watching their initial reactions for a while, then went off in search of other prey.

=====

Darcie cautiously peered around the corner. She saw Donna Ramsey, the eighth grade class president, reading a book. Donna was sitting alone at the reception table near the gymnasium door, taking tickets as students entered. With the occasional exception of a few late stragglers, most of the students attending the dance had already arrived, leaving Donna with a boring job. Satisfied that no one was watching and that Donna was engrossed in her book, Darcie aimed the device at Donna and pressed down on the age reduction button. In a few seconds, Donna looked like a middle school girl. Amazingly, she kept reading, unaware of the fact that she now possessed the body of a fourth grader.

=====

Darcie noticed a group of eight grade girls standing near the entrance to the restroom. She recognized Blair Walton with her friends Amber Douglas and Cassie Garrigan. Blair often argued with Darcie in student council meetings, and was captain for both the girl's tennis and volleyball teams. Darcie and Blair were fierce rivals. Darcie had long resented what she perceived to be Blair's superior attitude, but being a grade younger made it difficult for Darcie to compete with Blair on a social or athletic basis. Darcie knew she now had the means to correct the situation.

"Hello, Blair," greeted Darcie in a sarcastic tone.

"Hi, Darcie," said Blair, a sneer in her voice. She noticed that Darcie was holding a small object in her hand. "What's that, something from the seventh grade science fair?"

Amber and Cassie giggled.

"It can do some cool things," smiled Darcie, unperturbed by the teasing.

"What cool things can a loser like you do?" demanded Blair.

"Cool things like this," replied Darcie, aiming the device at Blair and pressing the reducing button.

Blair felt a slight tingling sensation. "Cut it out, geekazoid," she said. She noticed that her voice seemed to sound a bit different.

"Look at yourself."

"Blair, you're getting shorter," said Amber, her mouth hanging open in disbelief.

"Hey! My boobs!" gasped Blair as she watched, incredulous, as the front of her dress slowly flattened.

"I think that dress is a bit big for you," observed Darcie, continuing to direct the youthening ray toward her rival.

Blair was suddenly alarmed. She tugged on her dress straps, which seemed to have grown longer and now threatened to slide off her shoulders. Blair was now the same height as Cassie, the shortest of the group.

"You shrunk me with that thing!" accused Blair, torn between the emotions of panic at what had happened to her body and anger at Darcie.

"Hey, everybody! Check out Blair Walton, queen of the sixth grade," laughed Darcie.

"I'm not in the sixth grade!" insisted Blair, but the suddenly baggy fit of her homecoming dress and relative reduction in height indicated otherwise.

"You leave her alone!" demanded Amber, trying to protect her friend.

"Shut up, Amber," replied Darcie. "Unless you want the same treatment, " she added menacingly, nodding toward the age-altering device in her hand.

Amber contemplated the possible consequences of facing off against Darcie and wisely decided to hold her tongue.

"Blair, she made you the same size I am," noted Cassie, seeing that Blair was in fact about the same height. Cassie was short for her age, but was a developing young woman with small but noticeable breasts. Blair may have been just as tall as Cassie, but now looked much younger by comparison - like a gangly preadolescent.

"You creep, change me back!" said Blair, putting her hands on her hips (or what remained of them) and directing a murderous glare toward Darcie.

In reply, Darcie aimed the device at Blair again. "You never learn to shut up, do you? I hope you like going back to middle school," laughed Darcie, reducing Blair another year to become a fifth grader.

Blair's dress now looked ludicrously big on her. Cassie was at least three inches taller than she was. Cassie and Amber both stared openly in amazement at their diminished ringleader. Blair looked down at herself in a combination of puzzlement and annoyance. She had gone backwards through puberty - her breasts were completely gone, her clothes and shoes were several sizes too big, and she was now probably the smallest and shortest girl at the dance (if not the entire school).

Blair looked down again at her girlish body, then glanced up at her friends. She had to do something - there was no way she could be seen like this. How could she compete in the eight grade junior high school social scene with the body of a fifth grader? If she wound up staying at her reduced age, would she get kicked off the volleyball team?

Blair gave a cold stare at Darcie. She was about to hurl some expletives at her nemesis when Darcie preempted her.

"Before you open your mouth, middle school girl, I'm going to give you a warning. For every bad word you use, I'm going to reduce you another year," said Darcie.

"You bitch!" shouted Blair.

"That's it! You asked for it. I'm afraid it's back to the fourth grade for you," said Darcie, pointing the control at Blair and pressing the regression button again. Blair was now a nine year old. She struggled to hold up her dress and, having lost her nerve, began to cry.

"Don't make me stay like this," sobbed Blair.

Darcie ignored Blair and now turned to face Amber and Cassie. The two girls stepped back in fear.

"Please don't make me little," begged Amber.

"We're sorry, we didn't mean to laugh at you," said Cassie, a hint of desperation in her voice. Cassie had a younger sister in fifth grade, and didn't want to wind up reversing roles with her.

"If you two behave yourselves and take care of your little friend here, I'll let you off easy," grinned Darcie. "Now scram."

The three girls needed no persuasion. They hurried toward the exit, both Amber and Cassie assisting Blair as she did her best to scramble away while holding onto her tent-sized clothes. Just for the fun of it, Darcie delivered a mild parting shot at the trio as they left through the door, shrinking them all another year or so.

=====

"Chris, listen! There's somebody downstairs," said Peggy, hearing distant voices coming from the stairwell outside the bedroom door.

"Andrea must be back," Christine guessed.

After considerable effort, Christine, with assistance from Peggy, was finally able reach the release lever on the side of the playpen. Dwindled down to baby size, it took Chris all of her strength to pull the small plastic tab. At last, the bar holding the plastic mesh swung down to floor level. Normally, releasing the side of the playpen would have taken her only a few seconds.

Neither Christine nor Peggy were able to walk. After a few attempts at toddling around on their legs, both of them realized their infantilized bodies were neither balanced well enough nor strong enough to walk unsupported for more than a few feet. They resigned themselves to the necessity of crawling on the floor to move around Christine's (now gigantic) house.

The two women - or, more accurately, former women - both felt uncomfortable being stark naked.

"I think I left some of Stacey's baby clothes in the bottom drawer of the dresser," said Christine. Her and Peggy made their way to the dresser drawer, only to be disappointed to discover that the selection of baby clothing was very limited. The few outfits she had kept were fancy (and, as Christine remembered, overpriced) outfits for special occasions.

"We can't wear these things," complained Peggy. In spite of her initial protests, the practical fact of the matter was that there were no other clothes their size to wear. In a few minutes, the two regressed adults were outfitted in baby dresses - Christine in a tiny white dress with puffy short sleeves which had been purchased to take Stacey to a wedding, Peggy in a similar outfit in a floral pattern with a peter pan collar.

"I would die if anyone sees me dressed like this," Christine remarked. She felt ridiculous.

"Well, at least we have something to wear. Now what are we going to do?" asked Peggy.

"We need somebody to help us," Christine replied, her brain racing for ideas. "We've got to get changed back."

Suddenly, a little girl entered the room. It wasn't Andrea. It wasn't any of Andrea's friends that Christine would have recognized, yet the girl did look somewhat familiar. She was dressed in very loose clothes that were obviously sized for a much larger girl.

"Miss Vanowski?" she asked, looking down at the baby girls.

"Who are you?" asked Christine.

"Don't you recognize me? I'm Heather - from next door."

"Oh my God - Andrea got you too," whimpered Christine. She felt sorry for Heather. Heather Mathews was very sensible and mature for a sixteen year old. She was a dependable babysitter, and certainly didn't deserve the embarrassment of being reduced to the same age as her young charges.

"My little sister Darcie took the control from Andrea," explained Heather. "She shrunk a couple of my friends too. We've got to find her and get the remote control thing back. I don't want to be stuck like this forever."

"That makes three of us," Peggy chimed in.

"You can talk too?" asked Heather, surprised to hear another baby speaking like an adult.

"I'm almost the same age as Christine. I mean, I'm the same age as she used to be. We don't want to wind up staying babies."

"Well, I don't want to wind up staying like a kindergarten kid either. Darcie went to the Homecoming dance at school. Is there any way we can get there and find her?" asked Heather.

"None of us can drive like we are now," said Christine, stating the obvious. "Maybe I can call a friend."

"Try calling Lori," suggested Peggy.

=====

"What happened to my clothes?" demanded Melody Loomis, suddenly aware that her sweater had grown several sizes larger. She looked over at Anna and Michelle and saw that their clothing had also expanded and loosened. After only a few seconds of disorientation, she realized that their clothing hadn't changed - they had. Instead of being a bit taller than most the students around them, Melody observed that she and her two coworkers were now about the same height as the rest of the crowd.

"My glasses are too big," complained Michelle. She felt disheveled and tried to tuck her blouse inside her pants, only to find out that neither her blouse nor pants fit very well anymore. Even her shoes were loose. "And my voice - my voice sounds all weird."

"How come our clothes are so baggy?" Anna asked, tugging on one side of her sagging top. "You guys look different. Melody, did you lose a lot of weight?"

"No, ," replied Melody, who suddenly realized that Anna's normally attractive - and very ample - figure looked wrong. "Anna, your breasts, they look like they shrunk," she gasped.

"Mine too," exclaimed Michelle, putting her hands to the front of her oversized blouse and finding only small protrusions where she used to have moderate sized breasts. Her bra cups had become uncharacteristically roomy and slumped down much lower on her chest than she remembered.

Melody couldn't believe what she was seeing. "Holy crap, we look like a bunch of eight grade girls!"

Hearing sudden laughter from behind, Melody turned around and saw one their students, Darcie Mathews, looking on with amusement at the predicament of the three teachers. Darcie was smiling and holding a small metallic box, like a remote control, in one hand.

"Darcie? What did you do to us?" demanded Anna. She was disoriented to discover that she was now a few inches shorter than her student.

"Well, Miss Jerwinski, since you enjoyed making us read all those boring Early American folklore stories in class, and since you relished making us waste time writing stupid reports on them, I thought it might be funny if you experienced some folklore first hand."

"Huh? What folklore?" Anna asked, looking up into Darcie's smirking face.

"Why, the Fountain of Youth, of course," giggled Darcie. She turned to one side. "Hey, Rachel! Come hear a minute!" she called out to her friend. "I want you to meet some new classmates of ours."

Rachel had been talking to Claire; the two girls turned to Darcie's direction and for the first time noticed the three reduced teachers.

"What the heck, ?" gasped Rachel, confused over the strange scene she was viewing. Standing in front of her, Claire, and Darcie were three girls approximately their own age - maybe a year or two younger - that bore an incredible resemblance to Ms. Loomis, Ms. Jerwinski, and Ms. Hamilton. It took only a moment for Rachel to notice the three girls were wearing oversized clothes identical to those she had seen her teachers wearing earlier.

"Ms. Hamilton? Is that really you?" Claire hesitantly asked one of the girls.

"Of course it's me!" insisted Michelle. "Darcie Mathews did something that made us younger." Michelle looked uncomfortable and kept tugging her pants up to keep them from sliding down her much slimmer, and decidedly girlish-looking, hips.

"It's true," beamed Darcie, proudly displaying the control so that Rachel and Claire could see it. "This little control box is how I added a few years to enhance myself - as if you guys didn't notice."

"Hmmmm, Darcie, I thought you looked different," said Rachel, raising her eyebrows in sudden recognition. "You mean you can use that thing to change people's ages?"

"Just ask these guys," Darcie giggled, nodding toward the three budding young adolescent girls who moments before had been thirty-something adults.

"Wow! This is amazing!" gushed Claire. "They look like they're our age now." Claire couldn't help sniggering at the sight of her reduced-size teachers dressed in baggy clothing.

"Claire Jarrett, we are not ‘your age' now, whatever may have happened to us," admonished Melody.

"I expect you to restore us back to our rightful sizes," added Anna.

"Look at the bright side, Ms. Janowski," offered Rachel. "Tim Adams and the other boys in sixth period English class won't always being trying to look down your cleavage in class anymore. At least for a few years."

Claire and Darcie burst into laughter, while the diminutive Anna suddenly looked as though she were going to burst into tears.

Melody felt anger flare up inside her as she realized how upset poor Anna and Michelle were becoming over their rather bizarre circumstance. Her body might only be twelve years old, but her years of teaching experience had instilled in her the ability to command the immediate attention of any student posing a disciplinary challenge. "Miss Mathews, I'm going to ask you nicely one more time before I go over to Principal Richards and recommend that you and your partners here are put on indefinite suspension from school. Change us back to our original ages - right now."

Unfortunately for Melody Loomis, Darcie's huge sense of power - combined with Melody's sudden and ignominious loss of adulthood - made Darcie immune to any threatening references she made to school authorities.

"I'll change you back to your original size, Ms. Loomis," agreed Darcie, an evil grin on her face. "Or pretty close to it." As Darcie's friends looked on in amazement, and as Anna Janowski and Michelle Hamilton looked on in horror, Darcie pointed the remote at Melody and pushed the regression button again.

At first, they all thought the Melody had disappeared. After a moment, the pile of clothes where Ms. Loomis had been standing started to move, and a few moments later a tiny infant's head emerged from the neck hole of the red sweater.

A bald-headed Melody Lewis - now reduced to infancy - looked up at the smirking twelve year olds who towered over her and started to cry. "Hewp me! Hewp me! I don't wanna be a baby!"

Anna and Michelle looked down at their former coworker in horror.

The loud music from the deejay setup in the front of the gym, combined with the noise of the crowd, had prevented many people from witnessing what had happened. Most of the junior high students were too preoccupied with their own friends to pay much attention to the events around them. However, Darcie started to notice that more and more heads were turning in their direction to stare at the strangely dressed Ms. Jerwinski and Ms. Hamilton, not to mention a crying baby trying to crawl out of a heap of adult clothes. Darcie needed to move on to avoid a scene.

"If you girls don't want me to change you into babies too, I suggest you take her out of here right away," said Darcie menacingly.

"Darcie, you can't leave us like this," pleaded a twelve year old Ms. Jerwinski. "Especially Melody."

"I'll make you a deal," offered Darcie. "Get Ms. Loomis out of here right away, and promise I'll change you both back to your grown-up adult selves - tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Oh, I almost forgot. Besides getting little baby Loomis out of here, both of you have to do one other thing," said Darcie.

"What do you want us to do?" asked Michelle. Darcie noticed that Ms. Hamilton now sounded timid and afraid, not at all like she had sounded as a teacher in control of the classroom.

"I want you and Ms. Jerwinski to swap clothes with Claire and Rachel," explained Darcie.

"Swap clothes?"

"Claire and Rachel's things will fit a lot better than what you have on now," Darcie pointed out. "Let's go to the girl's room and change."

Claire and Rachel looked quizzically at Darcie, having no idea what she was up to. She smiled and winked at them knowingly, signaling them to follow her lead. Anna picked up the crying Ms. Loomis out of her sweater, while Michelle retrieved the Melody's clothing and shoes from the floor where they had dropped when she had been shrunk to infancy. The three preteens (and naked baby) all followed Darcie to the girls' restroom, which was empty, and in a few minutes Ms. Hamilton and Ms. Jerwinski had swapped clothes with Claire and Rachel.

Anna Jerwinski was too frightened of Darcie to say a word, but felt as completely humiliated as she ever had when she was forced to hook on Rachel Thompson's little bra. She was used to wearing a 38D, and Rachel's undergarment was clearly not even an A cup. Worst of all was the discovery that it fit her regressed body nearly perfectly.

Michelle Hamilton was similarly concerned to see just how flat chested she was as twelve year old. She was secretly pleased that Claire's small bra was lightly padded. She had always been a bit envious of Anna's large breasts, but at their reduced ages - just starting puberty - Anna and Michelle had about the same chest size.

Still puzzled, Claire and Rachel donned the oversized underwear and outfits that Ms. Jerwinski and Ms. Hamilton wore. They knew they looked clownish, but possessed confidence that Darcie had something in mind.

With the addition of Rachel's dance dress, Ms. Jerwinski looked like a nicely attired twelve year old girl. Nobody would mistake her for a teacher at the school. Similarly, Ms. Hamilton looked quite cute in Claire's dress, which fit her very well.

"What, what do you want us to do now?" asked Anna, looking up at Darcie. "Are you going to turn us all into babies?"

"Just go home for the time being. Show up at school tomorrow. I'll meet you on the corner at 7 in the morning."

"But we're too small to drive," wailed Michelle, verging on tears.

"Just leave your cars here and take a cab," suggested Darcie. "I'm sure you have plenty of money in your purse. I suggest you get going before I change my mind and decide to change you into a kindergarten kid."

Anna scooped up the infant Melody, wrapped her up as best she could using Melody's own sweater as a blanket, and hurried out of the restroom. The preteen teachers made it through the noisy gym with Michelle leading the way. The dancing and talking students were oblivious to their passage as they made their way out of the door.

"Now that we got rid of them, we can have some more fun," said Darcie. "I'm going to enhance your figures a bit."

"Us?" asked Claire, a mischievous sparkle in her eye.

"Please?" asked Rachel, a hopeful smile on her face.

"Not a problem," said Darcie. "Stand over there, so I can hit you both at the same time."

The girls stepped aside into an alcove where nobody could see them. Darcie aimed in their direction and pressed the button that accelerated the aging process.

The drooping clothes and underwear that Claire and Rachel had appropriated from their regressed teachers started to straighten out and fill in as the two girls progressed through their early teens.

"This is great," said Rachel. "I'm starting to fill in Ms. Jerwinski's bra a little bit."

"I'm going to grow you up to be about the same age Jerwinski and Hamilton were," Darcie explained. "Everyone will think you two are new teachers."

In a few minutes, two women in their early thirties exited the alcove. Claire and Rachel were dispatched to the supermarket about four blocks away to buy some beer, while Darcie mingled into the dancing junior high crowd of to plan some more age-changing entertainment.

=====

Melody Loomis had no way to know that her threat to Darcie about contacting Principal Richards was a completely empty one. Kathleen Richards, the 43 year old principal of Washington Junior High School, had been hiding upstairs in her office most of the evening. When Darcie had first arrived at the dance, one of her first clandestine pranks was to hide behind a corner and shrink the hapless woman to the stature of an eight year old girl. In a panic, Kathleen had managed to sneak back to her office before anyone had seen what had happened to her. While the dance continued downstairs, a very distraught Kathy was busy trying to formulate an escape plan. Not knowing how or why she had suddenly been changed into a little girl, she had ditched her extraordinarily oversized business suit and donned some spare clothing from one of the girl's dressing room lockers. She hoped to wait until the dance was over and all of the teachers, parents, and students had departed. She could then call someone for help.

=====

As soon as she arrived at the Vanowski's house, Lori hurried up the to the front door. After trying the doorbell several times without a response, she tried the opening the door. It was unlocked.

"Anybody home?" she called out to the apparently empty house.

A reply came from the kitchen. "Lori! We're in here!" The voice sounded like a baby's.

Lori rushed into the kitchen.

"Oh geez, ," gasped Lori in dismay as gazed down at the two baby girls who stared up at her from the floor. She recognized them as Christine and Peggy. Even though they each had become so young that only whips of baby hair adorned their nearly bald heads, they were quite cute as infants.

"Lowi, wook at what happened to us," lisped Peggy.

"Andrea found this wemote contwol thing - and it changed us into babies," lisped Christine. "I think you've alweady met my daughters, Andrea and Stacey. Girls, say hello to Mith Sheffield."

"Hello Miss Sheffield," said Andrea shyly.

"Who's your friend, Andrea?" asked Lori, nodding toward a girl who looked to be the same age as Andrea.

The kindergarten girl looked as though she had been insulted and put her hands on her hips. "I'm Heather Mathews. And I'm not Andrea's friend, I'm her babysitter. I'm sixteen years old. Or, at least I used to be sixteen years old, until Andrea did this to me."

Lori listened to their stories and pretended to be surprised; the truth, of course, was that she had experienced the regression effect first hand and needed no convincing that it was indeed possible for adults to be changed into children - or even babies. Her problem now was to find out what had happened to the device and how she could get it back.

For Lori's benefit, Heather recounted her belief that Darcie had taken the age control with her to the Homecoming dance at her school.

"Come on. We're all going down to the school to try to get that thing back," Lori directed. She felt like a soccer mom presiding over a large family; Peggy and Christine were babies, and Heather looked just old enough to start school; only the "real" child, Andrea, remained at her correct age.

"We can take my minivan," suggested Christine. "My keyth are in my purth on top of the counter in the kitchen."

There was only a slight delay resulting from a shortage of safety seats for the children. After a short discussion, it was decided that it would be most appropriate for Andrea to use it. Lori jumped in the driver's seat, and they zoomed off toward the school at breakneck speed.

After running through several stop signs, Lori screeched Christine's minivan to a halt in the parking lot at the school. She felt a sense of impending disaster that lent urgency to the mission of retrieving the age changing control. She had to get it back before anything really bad happened.

As she sprung open the door and jumped out of the driver's seat, Lori looked back at her passengers. Christine and Peggy were babies and would only slow her down. Heather and Andrea were too young to be of any help. She was going to have to go in alone.

"You wait here for me," she said, dashing toward the entrance.

Nobody questioned Lori as she strolled into the gymnasium of Washington Junior High. The students and teachers milling around the entrance at the annual fall Homecoming dance assumed she was just another parent or school administrator acting as a chaperone; furthermore, there had been a score of improbably strange occurrences that continued to distract the attention of those in attendance.

Lori couldn't help overhearing part of a heated discussion that was going on off to one side of the entrance. There was a sobbing ten year old girl dressed in oversized clothes standing next to a woman who was apparently her mother. The mother was distraught, directing her wrath at another woman who Lori guessed must have been one of the teachers.

", find out what happened to my daughter. Just look at her! Her clothes don't even fit - the poor girl isn't even as tall as her younger sister now!"

"Mrs. Gabella, I'm sure that there's some perfectly normal, logical explanation for what's going on, "

Lori knew she was close.

=====

Lori looked around the room, seeking signs of Darcie's mischief. She didn't have to look very far. Standing in front of her was a curly-haired blond girl in a very baggy dress. She was wearing a plastic name tag that said "Miss Garvey - Phys Ed". She appeared no older than 13 or 14.

"Excuse me, young lady. Can you tell me where I can find Darcie Mathews?"

"She's over on the other side of the gym," said the girl, pointing. Pamela Garvey looked up at Lori a bit strangely, wondering why she had been referred to as a young lady. After all, even though she kept herself in good shape, she was nearly forty years old! She couldn't resist smiling at the complement, wondering again why none of her clothes seemed to fit very well today.

=====

"Pardon me, can you tell me if you've seen Darcie Mathews?"

"That's Darcie over there," said the boy, nodding toward a tall girl. To Lori, she looked like a high school girl, not a junior high student.

Lori approached her cautiously.

"Hello, Darcie? Darcie Mathews?"

Darcie turned to look at Lori. "Hi. Who are you?" she asked, suspicion in her gaze. She had never seen this woman before.

"I understand you may have found something that belongs to me," said Lori, looking directly into Darcie's eyes.

Darcie felt a shiver go up her spine.

"It belongs to me, now," snapped Darcie, suddenly in a panic. The age changer! She had feared that someone would discover it was missing from the Vanowski's house, or that someone would find out what she was doing.

"Darcie, please return it to me," Lori said evenly, holding out her hand for the control.

"Look, lady, I don't know who you are, but I'm not giving this up!" insisted Darcie, gripping the control tightly.

"I can see what you've been doing," said Lori, looking around the gym at the various regression victims. "You seem like a nice person who knows that stealing is wrong. And I'm sure that you know what you've been doing to people with that control is mean."

"It's not mean!" insisted Darcie. "I just cut a few people down to size. They deserved it! It's not like I really hurt them or anything."

Darcie's voice betrayed her sudden defensiveness. The girl did have a sense of right and wrong, and she knew in her heart that what she was doing was wrong. Lori hoped that this would provide the psychological leverage she needed to convince Darcie to do the right thing.

"You've got to give me that back to me so we can change all those people back to normal," said Lori calmly, again extending her hand for the device.

"No way," pouted Darcie. "I just gave everyone exactly what they deserved. It's not like what I did is permanent, I mean, they'll grow up again eventually."

"Darcie, you can't leave your sister and your classmates here like they are," said Lori.

"Lady, stop bugging me! Leave me alone!," shouted Darcie. She had been pushed slightly too far. Darcie pointed the control at Lori and pressed the regression button.

Lori realized she had made a terrible mistake in confronting Darcie directly. While trying to appeal to the girl's conscience, Lori hadn't been prepared for Darcie's level of desperation. It was too late now. Lori flinched and held her hands in front of her, as if she could block the age changing radiation. Of course, once the beam struck her, there was nothing she could do to prevent it from making her younger.

The room expanded rapidly and in a few seconds Lori was an infant. She struggled inside of her clothes, most of which had fallen immediately into a pile on floor around her, and after floundering around for a while finally managed to poke her head through the neck of her shirt. Her hands were lost inside her shirt sleeves somewhere, and she felt both of her bra straps slip off of her shoulders. Darcie towered over her, laughing in triumph at having reduced Lori from a mature woman to a helpless, crawling baby girl.

"Hey, short stuff, how's the weather down there?" Darcie gloated, looking down at the baby wiggling on the floor in a pile of clothes. "I think you need a new tailor."

"Change me back," demanded Lori, her voice now a tiny baby's.

"I've got a better idea," said Darcie, a note cocky assurance in her voice. "I think I'm going to change myself instead. I'd like to be your age - or, should I say, the age you used to be. What was that - thirty or so?"

"I'm thirty-two," lisped Lori.

Darcie chuckled. "You're not even thirty-two months now," she laughed. "I'll dress you up real cute in little baby clothes and put you in a playpen. You are cute as a baby, you know."

Seeing Lori's clothes heaped on the gym floor gave Darcie a new idea. "I'm going to change myself to be thirty-two. Maybe I can wear some of your clothes - they don't fit you too well now, do they?"

Darcie aimed the control at herself, once again trying rather awkwardly to hold it sufficiently far from herself to engulf her entire body while pressing the age progression button. Lori felt frustrated, but their was nothing she could do now. She was absolutely helpless as she watched Darcie prepare to change her body into that of an adult. There was now no way Lori would be able prevent the irresponsible girl from using the device to increase or decrease people's ages at whim.

For the one time that day, luck was in Lori's favor. The excitement of feeling absolute power mixed with adolescent hubris had made Darcie careless. Too busy gloating, she had pressed the wrong button.

Darcie let out a shriek that increased in pitch as she shrank. The control dropped to the floor. Darcie was almost instantly reduced to the size of a baby girl, and suddenly found herself trying to fight her way out of the tent of the clothes she had borrowed earlier from her older sister.

The two babies - both struggling in tangles of oversized clothes - were starting to attract the attention of the other students at the dance.

"Hey! Who let those babies in?" asked one chubby girl with glasses.

"Shouldn't somebody be watching them or something?" wondered another sixth grade girl. "They might get hurt."

"Aren't those Darcie Mathew's clothes?" a boy standing nearby inquired. He couldn't understand why Darcie would leave her dress on the floor in the middle of the dance, much less her shoes and even underwear.

Lori had by now freed herself from her clothing and, exploiting her temporary advantage, rapidly scampered to grab the device where the rapidly regressed Darcie had dropped it to the floor. She only hoped that it hadn't been damaged in the fall. Lori's tiny hands gripped the control while she pressed the progression button with her baby-sized index finger as hard as she could, and at the same time tried to point the business end of the device at herself.

Her first attempt missed; the barely visible blue beam from the device streaked past her and struck a group of three sixth grade girls who had just turned to gawk at the spectacle of the two infants struggling on the floor. The girls were hit by the ray and, to the amazement of the gathering crowd, instantly gained several inches in height. The rapidly growing breasts of one of them suddenly popped out the top of her spaghetti-strap red dress, eliciting a shriek as she tried to cover herself.

Baby Darcie managed to grab one end of the device while Lori was still struggling to point it at herself. Lori and Darcie were now in engaged in an infant-sized tug of war. Darcie desperately attempted to pry the control from Lori's grip, accidentally hitting one of the buttons and firing it again.

This time, the misdirected beam managed to strike the large 70s-style disco mirror ball that had been suspended above the streamers as part of the décor prepared for the dance. The reflected rays scattered across the gymnasium. Some of the reflections from the rotating ball harmlessly illuminated the ceiling or walls, but many of them bounced randomly into the crowd.

Lori and Darcie paused momentarily in their struggle as noisy pandemonium suddenly broke loose. Evidently, the optical properties of the mirrored ball had somehow altered the effect of the age-changing radiation in unpredictable ways, causing havoc as on or more of the reflected spots struck most of the people in the room.

An eighth grade boy timidly dancing with his girlfriend suddenly found himself staring at her breasts, which were unexpectedly at eye level. He now looked like an eight year old, while his date appeared to be about 25. Similarly mismatched couples throughout the crowd were letting out gasps of disbelief as they found themselves and their partners abruptly increased or decreased in age, often in different directions.

A cluster of parents, engaged in conversation near the refreshment table in the back of the gymnasium, unexpectedly found that it was hard to reach the plates of snacks - their bodies were now those of five and six year old children.

A group of four sixth grade girls shrieked as they suddenly expanded into women in their mid-thirties, their dresses stretching and tearing at the seams.

=====

Claire and Rachel had just returned from the liquor store with a couple of bottles of vodka stashed in their purses. As they expected, they had no trouble purchasing alcohol; they looked to be in their mid-thirties, and the old clerk at the store didn't even ask them for identification. Their luck ran out as they returned to the dance; unfortunately for them, their reentry into the gym coincided precisely with the age ray scattering off the mirror ball. A couple of fleeting reflections danced across the two girls, exactly reversing the age progression effect that Darcie had applied to them previously. Claire and Rachel almost instantly shrunk down to their original statures as twelve year olds. Since they had previously traded their own clothes for Ms. Hamilton and Ms. Jerwinski's, they found their borrowed outfits had become vastly oversized.

"What just happened?" Claire asked, startled to find her clothing had become several sizes too large.

"Shit! We changed back!" exclaimed Rachel, staring first at Claire and then at herself.

=====

Principal Kathleen Richards, who now had the physique of an eight year old child, had managed to don some appropriately sized clothing borrowed from the girl's gym. Luckily, the girl's volleyball team had just received brand new uniforms a few days previously, and Kathleen had been fortunate to find a decent fit - an extra petite size - among the new clothes that hadn't yet been distributed. Sized for junior high school girls, most of the uniforms were too big for her.

Kathleen felt more than a bit silly to be wearing an athletic outfit proportioned for a preteen girl, but it fit her much better than her adult sized business suit had. After momentarily pondering what to do about underwear, Kathy concluded that, given her new condition, she had no reason to worry about not wearing a bra.

Kathleen was still trying to understand what had happened to her. A few hours ago, she had arrived to oversee preparations for the Junior High dance. She had just finished talking with a few of the parents who were attending as chaperones, and had stepped back to the other side of the gymnasium, when - through some bizarre and inexplicable means - she had suddenly dwindled to the stature of a child. Frightened, confused, and embarrassed by her appearance, she had ducked into her office and hidden there while trying to figure out what to do. Because she now looked like an eight year old, she realized that nobody would recognize her.

After contemplating various options and dressing herself in more appropriately sized garments, Kathleen had decided to risk sneaking back into the gym and attempting to convince a member of her teaching staff what had happened. After some hesitation, she saw Nora Mataris, one of the school counselors, standing nearby and decided to approach her. Nora seemed much taller and bigger from Kathleen's new - and much shorter - vantage point.

The conversation didn't go very well. Nora refused to take the matter seriously, and was totally unwilling to believe that Kathleen was who she claimed to be.

"Look, young lady, I don't know who put you up to this, but you can tell your big brother or sister that Miss Mataris is not going to fall for their stupid joke," smiled Nora dismissively. She had to admire the creative fantasies of some of the students, even if they were a bit naïve to think she would fall for such a wild story. Imagine - the school principal had been magically transformed into a little girl! Nora supposed it appealed to the junior high students' desire to turn the tables on authority figures.

"Nora, please believe me! Somebody has to help me!" pleaded Kathleen.

Kathleen was about to give up in despair. As fate would have it, at that very moment, Lori and Darcie's struggle caused the age ray to scatter about the room.

The reflecting rays from the mirror ball hit Kathleen and Nora.

In seconds, Kathleen Richards was restored to adulthood, while simultaneously, Nora Mataris rapidly shrank down to preschool size. They looked at each other in shocked disbelief.

"Holy shit," gasped Nora, realizing that she was now only waist high to Kathleen. Her previously tight-fitting clothes slumped off her shoulders and slid down to the floor in a pile, giving her a comical appearance.

"Now do you believe me?" asked Kathleen, looking equally ridiculous and uncomfortable in her now seriously undersized volleyball uniform.

=====

In the midst of the confusion and panic caused by the wildly careening age rays, Lori and Darcie continued to wrestle for control of the age changing device. The two infant girls both vied for a secure hold on the box. Making a final desperate exertion to the limit of her remaining strength, Lori snatched the control away from her rival at last and managed to press the progression button while the device was aimed in her general direction.

The faint blue ray emanated from the control, and Lori found herself rapidly growing back to adult size - and standing naked in the middle of a gymnasium packed with sixth, seventh, and eight graders. Luckily, the mass confusion caused by the random age transformations continued to create an overwhelming distraction - virtually everyone was in a still in a state of shock from being reduced or increased in age. Lori grabbed her clothes from the pile on the floor (where she had been shrunk out of them a few minutes before) and quickly pulled her top and pants back on.

======

Lori looked around the gymnasium and let out a weary sigh of frustration. If she hadn't been so careless as to misplace the device in the first place, none of this would have happened. Once again, just like the incident at the mall several weeks ago, there were dozens of randomly age-altered victims in various stages of undress trying to comprehend what had happened to them and their friends. Bewildered parents and teachers had been reduced to teens, toddlers, and various ages in between, while several of the junior high school students now looked more like college kids (a few of them who had been most strongly affected appeared to be adults in their thirties).

Glancing around, Lori saw how the consequences of the changes were slowly beginning to sink in to members of the crowd. There were many unexpected role reversals. Some of the younger girls in the sixth grade had blossomed through puberty into buxom beauties and were now busy admiring their new endowments; their less fortunate friends, who had not been hit by any of the ricocheting age rays, looked like younger sisters in comparison to their now much taller classmates. Random members of the girls and boys athletic teams were shrunk back to middle school size; some former sports stars would no longer be big enough to compete. Eldest siblings were now realizing they had become little sisters and little brothers. Many of them would have a hard time adjusting to their new statures.

Lori felt a moral obligation to fix things as much as she could - applying what she had been able to learn about the age device would enable her to eventually change many of the victims back to their normal ages. It would take a long time. She would have to debate whether or not some of the victims who were largely responsible for their own predicaments (the infantized Darcie Mathews came to mind) deserved to be grown back to their physical age. Perhaps people like Darcie would benefit from spending additional time being treated as children.

Lori had originally promised to loan the control to her good friend and coworker Lisa, but that would be out of the question for a while longer. Lori's first item of business would be to change Christine, Peggy, and Heather back to normal. Restored to adults (in Heather's case, restored to a teenager), they could help her sort things out in the gymnasium. They wouldn't have long, perhaps only a few minutes; Lori knew that the authorities would soon be descending on the school, and she had no intention of being around when they arrived. She had a limited time to change at least some of the people back to their rightful ages (or reasonably close to them) before the police, paramedics, and other responders arrived on the scene.

Heather had also mentioned that Darcie had changed Heather's classmates Diane and Cindy into five year olds. They were still at Heather's house, hiding in her bedroom, too small to wear their own teen-sized clothing and mortified at the prospect of being seen by anyone they knew. Lori would stop by Heather's house and repair the damage.

As she hustled back to the minivan in the parking lot, Lori again studied the weird control in her hand. Although she had figured out many of its functions, many others still remained unexplored. The buttons that exhibited no apparent effect continued to intrigue and annoy her. If only she had an owner's manual!

Lori was no closer to figuring out the device's origin than when she had first found it. Who had created it? Was it some kind of secret scientific or military device, or something, alien? How and why was it abandoned?

In spite of her uncertainty, Lori smiled. She knew that she would be quite busy for a while, working behind the scenes with the age controller to undo the damage indirectly caused by her carelessness today. Nevertheless, she also knew that this self-imposed corrective duty wouldn't take forever, and after it was completed she could look forward to using the device in more "creative" ways. The thought of being able to change anyone's age - even her own - to whatever she wanted at a whim gave Lori a visceral thrill. The idea of having such an absolute power over everyone was intoxicating, and she was already dreaming up new ideas and new scenarios for age-changing fun.

One thing was for certain - Lori's daily routine was no longer boring since she had discovered the age control. She grinned as she realized that things were starting to look more interesting every day.

=====

THE END (of the beginning?)