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 50: Grocery Run

I WOKE UP that morning with my feet being tickled by Hannah.

“Stop that!!!” I told her.

“I think you just used more words than you know…” she said and then tickled me further.

“Mama, no!” I cried.

“Okay,” she said, pulling open my sleeper. “We’ll get you changed and fed, and then we’re going to be on our way to our new home Livy.”

“Livy?” I said.

“Mommy has to have a nickname for her baby girl! Plus, she hopes you’ll be able to say that sooner than Olivia,” she told me.

“I hadn’t ever considered not being able to say my own name…?” I said aloud.

“Now remember, from this morning on, you can’t say anything unless we’re in our apartment, and I say ‘splendiferous,’ and you use a warding spell.”

I nodded, “This is going to be tough!”

She finished changing my wet and slightly poopy diaper. She dressed me in another cute jumpsuit outfit that would be easy for diaper changes. Like all of ‘Olivia’s’ clothes, they were obviously second-hand shop purchases. The Bureau had a team of people pick up used clothing and furniture for us to use at the apartment. A pair of older agents were pretending to be her parents today. They were doing the typical parental thing and moving her in with an old beat-up truck pulling a short U-Haul trailer. It was to be clear she was moving out on her own, but her parents weren’t kicking her out.

When we came out, they got their final instructions from Agent Sanders. I was able to enjoy a last real breakfast of eggs before leaving on the mission. Bacon was available too, but my mouth was missing so many teeth that Hannah nixed that one for me. I pouted and grumbled that I received no real sympathy!

“Remember, no matter what, you can’t break your cover. Emerald, I expect you’ll have the toughest job there.”

I nodded, “Yeah, it will, but I’ll do it! I’ve had practice; we’ll get this job done, sir.” Unfortunately, since I was missing some teeth, I had developed a very babyish lisp that made me blush as he looked at me.

“Good luck to you all then,” he said, and I soon found myself nursing a bottle of juice in the back of the packed junker car. A few of ‘my toys’ and animals had ended up on the seat next to me. A worn blankie was in my hands, and I knew I would be expected to love it throughout this mission. Pulling up to the apartment complex, I could see it wasn’t a bad neighborhood per se, but it was definitely lower-income housing. I was carried into the office wrapped in the blanket, and ‘Granny’ played with me while my ‘mommy’ signed the final lease paperwork. Before Hannah was given the key, the apartment manager declared me the cutest baby ever and cooed at me too. We walked through the one-bedroom apartment, and I found myself seriously unimpressed!

The first item they brought up was the playpen, and I was unceremoniously dumped inside. I sat, pretended to play while they carried stuff in, and began sorting through things. Since there wasn’t a lot of furniture and possessions, it didn’t take long before they said goodbye to us, and we were left alone. Hannah took that moment to call the daycare and make sure they would be able to take me on Monday.

“Well, little girl, it’s just you and me!” she said. “Ready for your din-din?”

“Mama!” I said.

“Oh, you probably need a diapee change too, huh?”

I sighed and nodded as she took care of that on top of a dresser in ‘our’ bedroom. A crib was crammed in, not far from her bed, with a mobile attached. She had a small vanity table that looked like something she would have been given as a kid, and the dresser might very well be old enough to be her old changing table.

After she fed me a jar of baby food, I grew quite bored that night, and we watched TV together. Eventually, I pawed at her shirt like a baby, and she nursed me to sleep.

 
 

I WOKE UP in my crib to the sounds of distant screams, jeers, and other sounds that I would forever associate with the beginning of war. Caireen was standing by my crib and came to pick me up as soon as I stood up. “Good morning, Princess,” she told me with a strained smile.

“Morning,” I told her in reply. She squeezed me in a gentle hug and wasted no time in conversation before placing me on her breasts. As soon as I was fed, she changed me and carried me to the room with the mirrors. A large map was now placed on a table showing the battlefield. There were wooden markers on it, which reminded me of a game of Risk or something. I could tell the markers denoted troops; unfortunately, the other side still had way more than we did.

“Any new information, General Slane?” she asked.

“My field generals report that yesterday’s fire took out a good chunk of the front lines. They estimate our initial efforts on their approach have removed three-thousand men from the fight.”

“How many have we lost?” I asked nervously.

“From the wall yesterday?” He smiled, “None, Your Highness. We have heard back from those ‘special forces’ troops you came up with. They’re down to about sixty-percent strength and consolidating their numbers. They continued making raids into the rear forces last night. From what we can tell, they’re having a significant impact on their supply lines. If they can keep that up, we believe they’ll be limited in the length of their siege.”

“What are the orders of the day?” Caireen asked.

“Your Majesty, so far, we’re holding the wall. We expect Camulus to approach himself again today. I would advise that this is the time to resume firing the trebuchets. We’ll use both the units in the citadels and from our lines inside the gate. The targeting plan the princess suggested can potentially remove another large chunk of our attackers.”

“So ordered,” Caireen told him. I spent the rest of the morning with Caireen on a few lessons, mostly to distract me, and I also received another sword lesson before lunch.

During lunch, the large scrying ‘screen’ she had set up showed Camulus finally approaching the walls himself. He’d spent the morning sending men foolishly to die during attempts to fill in the pits in some way with trees and even one spade of dirt at a time. I had no way of knowing, but I guessed he’d lost another thousand men by the morning’s end. Our archers on top of the gate had been able to leisurely take aim at their targets.

As he approached, he called out in a magically amplified voice that reached even the castle. “People of the Emerald Kingdom, I urge you to surrender and present your queen and princess to me so that I may spare your lives! Your queen foolishly rejects my offer of an alliance through marriage between my son and her daughter. Deliver them, and we’ll make an even greater kingdom than the one I have now!”

I wondered how we could easily respond to him about ‘going to Hell,’ but the troops did it for us. Right then, a volley of arrows fired simultaneously down the wall from up top while another volley launched from archers to the rear of the wall. It was like a cloud of locusts as they came down on the battlefield below!

Camulus seemed undeterred and began launching fireballs at the wall! Again and again, a nearly endless stream of flames left his hands. I felt like I could feel the heat from watching it on the mirrors. Just as I wondered if the granite in the wall would melt, a volley of trebuchet rounds hit simultaneously in front, behind, and directly on top of him!

I lost sight of him for a moment before seeing some of his aides pulling his injured body away. “He’s not going to die from that, right?” I asked Caireen.

“No, he’ll just be furious,” she said.

“That fire spell… it’ll eventually melt the granite?”

She shook her head, “I warded the wall against that spell. It’s going to take real physical force attacks to get through it. Hopefully, we can keep making it impossible to do that. The wall you built may be one of the strongest structures ever formed here… With the extra magical protections I added, we should slow them down from either of those passages for a couple weeks. Luckily the other routes should be just as difficult to get through too.”

I nodded and watched as their forces tried a few other random attacks but were again repelled by ours. Then, finally, I noticed that the forest leading up to the wall grew increasingly scorched with each hour. ‘That’s going to be a no-man’s land,” I thought.

Caireen eventually took me to the nursery and nursed me to sleep that night. I hoped nothing wrong would happen while I was gone!

 
 

THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up on my own and realized drool was dried all over my face. I stood up and made a face about that and the mushy feeling in my diaper. I said, “Mama! Mama!” a few times before Hannah appeared.

She smiled and cooed at me, “Oh look, who’s awake!!!”

I thought Caireen had some moments of fun with over the top babying of me… Now I wondered if she should take lessons from Hannah! She changed me and dressed me into a set of coveralls and a long-sleeved onesie while indulging in her inner mommy more than I had seen her do. ‘She’s taking this seriously,’ I thought. ‘Too seriously!’

I felt Caireen giggle, ‘It’s soooo cute! I love it! She’s awesome!’

I sent her an image of me mentally sticking my tongue out at her. Hannah strapped me into the cheap highchair and put a bib on me. She pulled out a pouch of apple oatmeal baby food and began spooning it into my mouth. My mouth felt so weird without all of the teeth I’d removed. I couldn’t get used to having nothing to ‘chew’ on within the back of my mouth. I wasn’t even sure how I would have something more solid, as you couldn’t really chew with the small front teeth that I had.

Fortunately, Volango’s device had made this taste a bit better too. So I was pretty full when she wiped a much dirtier bib across my face at the end of the meal. “What a drooly baby girl!” she teased me.

“Mama!” I told her.

“You’re right; I am your mama, huh?” she tickled me as she sat down on the one decent piece of furniture we had, a wooden rocking chair. I latched onto her and nursed until she was empty, and I felt a little bloated. ‘Maybe I need her to dial down the calories of that one a bit?’ I thought to myself.

She changed a poopy diaper and then sat me down in the playpen, “Mommy needs to clean up a little, and then she’ll play with you, okay baby?”

I shrugged and babbled at her in some nonsense syllables I had practiced. She smiled and left me to the few toys sitting in the playpen with me. Knowing my fate for the next, however long involved my hiding as a baby, I played as best I could. I spent a while playing with a stacking toy. Remembering my sister used to slobber all over hers, I put a ring to my mouth and drooled on it like she used to. The sound of a phone taking a picture made me jump. “Mama!”

“Okay, Mommy will play with you now!”

She spent the next hour pretending I was a baby she was playing with. It was embarrassing but also kind of fun to do with her for some reason. I had just felt my diaper growing warm when she looked at a clock they hung yesterday. “Well, let’s get you changed and get some groceries. Mommy needs lots more baby food for her baby!”

I made a face at that, and she laughed, “Oh come on, you know you love your nummy food!”

I sighed as she dressed me in a coat, strapped me into the car seat a short while later, and used her phone to find the nearest grocery store. She carried me, my blankie, and the diaper bag to a cart and strapped me in with the seatbelt. I grabbed the blankie like it was my best friend and nursed on the pacifier she’d clipped to my onesie. We’d made it just a short way in when a lady said, “Oh my gosh, your baby is so adorable! How old is she?”

“Thanks, she just turned one last week!”

“She’s so precious!”

Hannah kept moving and grabbing different groceries here and there, but not anything extravagant. Her own meals seemed to be chosen to be as cheap and easy as possible. When she reached the baby aisle, she grabbed a box of cheap grocery brand diapers, and more wipes, before pushing the cart by the baby food. I wanted to cry as I watched her put a week’s worth of meals and snacks into the cart. Finally, she put in some puffy apple rice pieces, which I knew at least weren’t horrible since I’d tried my sisters before. She patted my head, “Got to have food for you, huh? Maybe someday you’ll like solid foods, and we can stop feeding you this icky stuff,” she tickled me and made me giggle.

A nearby mom with a two-year-old girl smiled, “Can’t get her to move past baby food? How old is she?”

“She just turned one… and no. If it’s not pureed, she spits it right out. Her pediatrician said it’s okay for another month; if she’s still doing it, we might have a problem.”

The lady smiled at her, “Oh sweetie, the doctors think they know everything, but sometimes you just have a picky little girl. Maya here wouldn’t touch most solid food until she was fifteen months. She’s doing fine now and eating everything in sight. Babies move at their own pace. So enjoy it, and don’t rush it!”

Hannah smiled at her, “Thanks for the advice,” and pushed me onward.

In my head, ‘If I have to eat baby food for the next three months, I think I will go off and beat the whole staff up just to get out of there!’

Caireen shook her head at me, ‘It’s not that bad since the flavors were adjusted. If it was the regular stuff, you would be right. Your friend Beth really came through for you there.’

After some more cooing, embarrassing attention, and boredom, Hannah buckled me back in the car seat and headed home to our dingy apartment. Once we got there, she discovered the joys of having a baby as a single mom. Hannah carried me and a single bag to the apartment, deposited me in my playpen, and then ran back and forth twice more to get everything from the car. I could tell she was kind of tired herself when she strapped me into the high chair and began feeding me a lunch of vegetable chicken dinner. Unfortunately for me, Hannah forgot to put it in the device first! I refused to take spoons of it and cried before she realized her mistake.

“Oh, I am so sorry, baby!!! Mommy forgot she needed to touch up this food for you!”

I had almost broken character there and was grateful that she figured it out before I had to. There shouldn’t be any way that any surveillance would happen, but we had been told to never let our guard down…

“How’s this baby better?” She asked as she spooned in a spoonful of puree.

“Mama!” I said with a smile after that.

“Well, I take it that’s better!” She smiled and shoveled the rest into my mouth, one bite at a time. Thankfully after the device was through, it tasted like a good chicken and noodle soup. Once you ignored the downright awful and weird texture, it was almost tasty.

When I had finished the bowl, she said, “Let’s get you your num-nums, and then you can take your nap.”

I smiled and cooed as she brought me to her breast, and I began to nurse. ‘This at least tastes a lot better than the baby food!’ I thought, ‘I could see just having breast milk only at daycare if I didn’t need to drink like four bottles worth.’

I felt Caireen’s amusement at my statement but ignored her as I faded off to sleep.

 
 

THE REST OF the afternoon had passed by slowly as I had been limited to baby activities, playing with Hannah, and alternating diaper changes. Being nursed to sleep for my new early bedtime of six o’clock had been mildly infuriating! It was nice, though, because if I slept the day and night away, the less pretending I had to do! I felt like I was a rock star at the whole, sleeping like a baby thing!

Caireen woke me up in her world, and we began dealing with other barrages from Camulus’s forces. They had started setting up some massive rams to attempt to bash their way through the wall. Midway through the day, a suspicious bat was seen flying around the southern border. “What’s that?” I asked Caireen as I spotted it on one of the scrying mirrors.

“What?”

“That bat… it looks a lot like…”

Apparently, the archers had also thought something was wrong – or were bored – because a slew of crossbow bolts flew out! One of them hit it in the wing, causing it to rapidly spiral to the ground on the wall’s far side. One of the mirrors showed the bat turning into a woman.

“That’s not!” I said with a hiss.

“It is…” Caireen said, “What an incredibly resilient creature… She must have built up a huge reservoir of manna to return here just before she died?”

I shook with rage and wanted to go after her, but I watched her limp away with the crossbow bolt sticking from her shoulder. Not long after she left, the men abandoned the rams and returned to their camp.

“Decided the wall was too thick?” I mused.

Caireen laughed at that, “Well, it is… But, unfortunately, whatever they do figure out will have to be devastating.”

I nodded at that. We watched the front of the wall and the views from each citadel throughout the day. Just before nightfall, a small force of fifty men approached the valley’s northern end. I smiled at their faces as they obviously cursed at the sight of another wall that suddenly came into view. I smiled as the archers there killed most of them, leaving just a few alive to report back to Camulus that he was blocked that way too!

Knowing that it was inevitable that a determined enemy would make it past those walls, we began working on nearer defenses to the castle. There hadn’t been an immediate wall around the castle grounds, so I worked with Caireen to build a circular ring around the castle made of the same granite as the valley walls. These were seventy feet thick, with the outer ten ringed with corridors with narrow slots to shoot from. The top of the walls extended one-hundred-and-fifty feet high, with a new streamed moat that encircled the outside of that wall.

Caireen had added so many wards and spells over the years on the main castle that I felt it would probably be enough to stop most enemies. Still, between the valley walls, the new outer castle wall, and those, I hoped Camulus might run through his supplies before getting through.

 
 

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