Eighteen-year-old Nicholas Hammerstein is at the cusp of finishing high school in his hometown of Los Alamos, NM. He has a seemingly ideal life and is blessed with loving parents, a cute baby sister, and great friends. Nicholas is a gifted student and martial artist who has dreams of leaving for college at the end of his senior year. But, living in a world of Emergent humans, he will soon find his life turned upside down as his life and the fate of a kingdom hang in the balance. His future and theirs will be determined by how he navigates the drastic changes in his body and the magical and superpowered Mergent population he joins.

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The Legal Stuff: Emerald Princess © 2016-2023 By Sofia Hammerstein
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016-2023 By Sofia Hammerstein. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
 
 
Chapter 32: Oops

AFTER HANNAH AND I finished up, we hurried to the dedicated ‘clubhouse’ where the Aphrodite, Inc club meeting was held. As soon as we walked in the door, it seemed like every girl there turned their attention directly to me. “How old is she?” one girl cooed and quickly asked, “I’ve seen you around but was scared to ask!”

“Supposedly eighteen months,” I said to their surprise.

“Wait, the baby talks?” One girl asked.

“Of course, babies talk!” A beautiful blonde girl nearby said as she walked over.

“No, I mean…?”

“No, I’m not a real baby,” I said… “Well, at least I used to be older?”

My story, or at least most of my emergence, was told in the next few minutes. For the sake of Trident’s security, I had always been a girl, and Hannah had been my best friend. So really, the only lie there was that I hadn’t always had a girl’s body… The president then wrangled everyone’s attention, and they discussed some of the club’s business and upcoming clients and shoots they had scheduled. Hannah and I were accepted as new members during the meeting and asked to stay afterward.

“Sofia, do you mind if I contact a couple of diaper manufacturers about you?” the girl in charge asked. “I know we have a few clothing designers that would be interested in you too.” From the rumor mills, it was apparent Amanda Kensington became the club president by being voted the most beautiful woman on the planet. She didn’t look like she was in high school by any means!

“Umm…”

“Yes, that’ll be fine,” Hannah answered for me.

“Do you have some time right now that our photographer could go ahead and create some sample shots for them to look at?”

I swallowed but said, “I guess.”

“Hannah, we can get started with what she’s wearing, but would you mind returning to your room and getting a few other outfits?”

“Like…?”

“Some dresses, rompers, t-shirts, and maybe a few sets of pajamas?”

I sighed while Hannah happily said, “Sure!”

“Okay, Sofia, we can start with what you’re wearing now.” I had by now learned the girl’s name was Mandy. She led me to a large space where dozens of scenes and backdrops stood ready for shooting. I was posed in a few dozen scenes with my clothes on before she said, “Okay, I think we need to do some diaper shots to try and get those companies’ attention.”

I groaned but figured that was coming. Mandy helped me get out of the one-piece romper I had been dressed in and discovered the wet diaper. “Well, I guess you really are a baby?” She asked with a smirk but didn’t seem to be picking on me.

I dropped my head, “Sorry.”

She took her finger and brought my chin up, “It only makes you cuter, Sofia. Did Hannah leave you a spare diaper?”

I looked around and saw her walking back in right then. “I’ll change her quickly if you want,” she said.

I hugged Hannah quickly, and she embarrassed me by just laying out the changing mat and getting it done. I glared at her, “Sofia, you’re a baby, get over it,” she practically hissed in my ear.

I sighed.

We spent three hours when all was said and done taking pictures showing off how good I would be as a model. Then, they created samples of me for print ads, doing video demos without speaking, a couple with lines, and on and on. With the videos with speaking parts, I had to be sure I pretended to talk like my sister - which wasn’t easy! As Hannah carried me towards our room afterward, she said, “You know you’re going to have to get used to being that baby for that assignment for the FBI.”

“Yeah… I’m not quite sure how to do that, though.”

“Well, we’ll have to work on that,” she told me as she closed the door to our room. We had a brief nursing session before heading to dinner at Friar Hall.

“We have so much homework to do!” I complained as we left, and our friends mentioned getting together and having fun messing around.

“Yes, we do,” she agreed morosely.

After dinner, we both worked on homework for the rest of the night. I was happy, though, that I managed to get all of my current homework caught up from the weekend and had read through most of the stuff I’d missed in Magic Theory and Magic I. Unfortunately, I watched Hannah struggle a bit more since she didn’t have my new memory. I felt terrible about that!

About ten that night, she pronounced us both done, “Come on, Sofia, let’s get you a bath and go to bed!”

 

CAIREEN PICKED ME out of the crib where I had been crying to get her attention. The messy diaper definitely influenced the sobs, but I had become more comfortable just crying to get her attention.

“Good baby girl,” she told me as she wiped me clean. “You’re starting to see what you need to do to fit in.”

I wondered a bit at her words as she dressed me, but I didn’t say anything else. She nursed me and then fed me some fruit this morning before saying, “Let’s go back downstairs; we need to start working on helping you to be able to disguise yourself.”

As she carried me, Caireen kept up a running baby talk session that was driving me a little crazy, but I let her continue to prattle on. I giggled every now and then when it was called for. When we walked through the doors to the room we were in before, though, she changed her personality.

“Excellent, Sofia, this is the best I have seen you deal with babying.”

I sighed, “I’m trying… It’s probably the toughest thing ever to do, though, to let go of everything when you’ve fought for every freedom you can as a kid. I mean, growing up starts with using the potty, then deciding who you want to play with, what you want to play with, and the list goes on. Let alone being a teenager and being an adult…?”

She patted my head, “I think you’re doing way better than you were before, Sofia. So let’s begin your lessons today. First, I want to teach you a good spell to hide your eyes.”

As powerful as I had gotten, I wouldn’t have expected this type of magic to be so tricky, but it took me hours just to get my eyes to a more normal hazel color. Once I finally got it, though, it wasn’t too difficult to shift to blue, brown, black, and even purple.

We stopped for lunch before she began helping me change my hair color. This spell wasn’t as challenging because it was similar to what I’d been doing on my dolls. What did take forever, though, was to get every strand of hair to change! But, by the end of that lesson, I could at least change my hair and eyes.

Before we called it quits for the day, I asked, “Before you said the illusion you would teach me, I couldn’t be touched to maintain it… Is that the case with these too?”

She shook her head, “this one works slightly differently than that. We can do other things with your skin tone and shape your face. But, when you start trying to make a BIG change, like going from being a thirty-four-inch tall baby to a nearly six-foot-tall teenager, it’s a lot more fallible.”

I nodded before she picked me up and took me upstairs, resuming her coddling and babying of me. But, as much as it annoyed me, I felt content and very safe when she lay me down in my crib.

 

THE NEXT MORNING Hannah woke me up at about seven, and we began a morning of continuing to try and catch up with everything. I was pleased that I had finished catching up in Magic Theory and Magic I completely! I had even read up two chapters beyond where we were in both classes to prepare me for the next week!

Power Fundamentals was much slower for me as the book was even drier than a new diaper… Mythical Fundamentals, at least, was interesting enough that I was halfway through the stuff I’d missed in that class when Hannah told me it was time for lunch. We only had about another hour before the range time, so we both took a break and walked around exploring the campus some more.

It had turned much colder in the last couple of days, and I was grateful for my warm coat. Hannah was dressed just in jeans and a sweater and was fine. “How can you walk around like that?” I finally asked her as I skipped along beside her.

She shrugged, “I guess it’s my pyrokinesis ability. I could probably walk around in shorts and a tank top right now.”

“Not me,” I shivered.

At some point, she picked me up and began carrying me to Bechtel’s Safety Range. It was mostly a ghost town as we came in, but one gentleman looked like he was waiting for someone. “Emerald and Emped?”

“Yes, sir,” I responded.

“I’m Sergeant Reynolds; you can call me Gunny. They asked me if I could go ahead and give Emped some additional firearms training and start working with you, Emerald.”

“Great!” I said and extended my tiny hand to him. He shook it lightly.

“The Bureau had some people up late last night working on a pistol for you, Emerald,” he said as he held up a small locked box. “Emped, you’ll keep working with the nine-millimeter you’ve been training with so far. They would also like to see you start working with some distance and rifles here soon.”

Hannah nodded and carried me along. “Emerald, have you fired a firearm before?”

I nodded, “Yes, sir, my father taught me when I was growing up.”

He looked at me for a second, and I saw a smirk on his face.

“Yeah, I know it doesn’t look like I did much growing up,” I said, which made him laugh.

“We’re going to get along just fine here,” he told me.

Hannah sat me on the table in the range stall and sat down a box he was carrying. Sgt. Reynolds opened the box, and inside I saw what looked like a mini-Glock 9mm, “What kind of rounds does it fire?” I asked.

“From what I was told, they’re modified twenty-two caliber rounds that somehow pack the punch of a nine-millimeter.”

“Cool…” I said, a little disbelieving.

“I had the same doubts, it shoots straight, though, and the results look like at least a nine-millimeter.”

“At least?”

He shook his head, “I’ll never figure out what those technomages do. I shot it first to be sure that it was, in fact, safe.”

I nodded.

“Okay, I’m guessing you know all of these things, but we’re going to go over range rules before we go any further.”

In the end, he gave me a pencil and a paper test to verify I understood. Luckily for me, I could do it in two minutes with a perfect memory.

“I’ll never get used to seeing you all doing that, but seeing a two-year-old do it…?”

“She’s not even two, Gunny,” Hannah said.

With all of the safety stuff out of the way, he showed me how to load the clips, something I already knew, and I finally had my chance to start trying it out. I aimed down range with his instructions and fired at the paper target only fifteen feet away from me. Much to my pleasure, my strength meant the gun kicked less than I’d ever dealt with, and I emptied the ten-round clip into the target.

“That is so not fair, Sofia,” Hannah whined.

“What?” I asked.

“I can barely get three rounds to hit the target in a clip right now, and you land all ten in the bullseye?”

I giggled, “It’s not that hard.”

Gunny meanwhile looked at me incredulously and didn’t say a word as he sent another target further out. “Twenty-five feet,” he told me at my look of curiosity.

I shrugged, reloaded, took the gun off safety, and waited for his instruction. “Range is hot; fire at will,” he shouted.

I took the next ten off just as quickly as the first, while Hannah shot ten at fifteen feet next to me this time. Her rounds were all on the paper, but only one came near the bullseye. “You know, with your ability to move objects, you should be able to tweak your rounds,” I told her as my target reached me. I looked and saw everything was once again in the ring and smiled.

“What?”

“You can lift and grasp things, right?” I asked.

“So, can’t you make sure they go into the zone?”

A few minutes later, my target was as far down range as possible in that range, one hundred and twenty feet and Hannah had hers reset again to fifteen. This time as we were told to fire, I saw the look of concentration on her. Then, a moment later, I saw a problem as I pulled the trigger of my pistol. Instead of Hannah directing her bullet to the target, it ricocheted off an unseen force and headed straight for me.

“Shit!” I said while simultaneously putting up my shield with four ley lines.

Hannah shrieked as she realized what had happened, and the round bounced harmlessly off my shield.

“Umm… maybe we should figure out another way for you to practice that, Hannah,” I said as she tried grabbing me before I dropped the shield and ended up getting zapped. As she fell down, I groaned.

Sergeant Reynolds felt for her pulse immediately and called for a medic team. “She’ll be okay, Gunny,” I reassured him, “I guess I need to come up with a loophole for that spell for her to touch me…?”

He looked on incredulously at me as I set the safed pistol down on the stand and removed the clip and rounds. “How many more hours do I need to do to get permission to carry?”

The medics came in then, and he said, “with the way you shoot?” He shook his head, “Come back for another two-hour session next week, and we’ll get you signed off for it. You’re worse than my Master Chief from the SEALS! No one should be able to shoot that well!”

I watched as they picked Hannah up and carried her down the hallway that I followed. ‘How long is she going to be out, Caireen?’

‘Probably a couple hours; you had way too many lines involved… It might be overnight, actually.’

‘Crap…’ I said. ‘Can I speed it up any?’

‘Probably not.’

‘What do I do if she doesn’t wake up by this evening?

‘Well, I’m guessing we’ll have to find you a babysitter…?’

I groaned.

 
 

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