File type: Text File (.txt) [Download]
-----------------------------------------
     Dungeon of Crawling.

     For Toya

     By Psudo Argyraspides

    

    

    

    

     Eventually, however, letting their food digest, the comfortable wait ended, and Toya heard the door behind him slide open. With looks of reluctance, everyone stood, gathered their things, and examined what was behind the door. A staircase, seemingly innocent enough, but the group knew better than to take anything at face value with this creature that had captured them. Anzu went first, testing the stairs. “They’re wet, watch yourself,” the crow said, and started climbing along one side, the rest of his team following suit. The room that the staircase opened into was tremendous, a huge dome the size of a small village, and leaking warm water from hundreds of small cracks in the ceiling. They were standing on a central platform that shouldn’t have been able to exist, given the angle at which they had ascended, and, from which, there were four paths, each of them constantly moving and shifting, obstacle courses by the looks of them, tests of agility, and, at the end of each, a bell. Beneath them, five yards beneath the platform, the floor of the room was covered by a deep pool of what looked like water, but might have been anything in the dim light of the cavern.

     “This is the obstacle room,” The faerie said casually, “Your goal is to reach the four bells, and ring them simultaneously. The pool below you contains a vial’s worth of water from the fountain of youth. If you fall in, you’ll start to slowly regress until you climb back out and dry off completely, which will only occur once all four bells have been rung at once. Eating so much might not have been a great idea, Toya. Hope you enjoyed your lunch, my adorable little cubs. Happy squirming!”

     A moment of silence passed between the four adventurers as they looked at each-other with dismay written clear on their face. “Hey, come on, it’s no big deal guys,” Toya said, clapping and trying to avoid the water that was dripping from the ceiling, “Come on, dodging’s easy!” He continued, trying to keep everyone’s spirits up as they all felt their tummies start to grumble, the familiar sensation that suggested soon they would all be very uncomfortable in their newly changed diapers.

     “You’re our rogue, of course you’re going to say that,” Anzu said dryly, in a very uncharacteristic display of pessimism on his part, “But yeah, whatever, we’d better just hurry up…” The crow continued, groaning and almost doubling over as the first weak cramps started in his belly, now full of food as it was, and briefly incapacitating him.

     “N-no…” Matteo whined, curling into a tight ball next to the staircase as he felt his bowels fought against him once again, cheeks going bright red. Farix took one look at him, then looked away. Everyone looked so broken down, like they’d all already lost…

     “Come on, Matteo,” Farix said, waddling over to the raccoon in his overly thick diaper, and sat down next to him, wrapping an arm around the bard’s back and letting him lay his head on his shoulder, “We’re going to get through this, I promise. We’ve just got to keep our chins up, right?”

     “I- I dun wanna be a stinky butt again…” The raccoon whimpered, and gave the skunk a look so pathetic that Farix just wanted to cuddle him silly. It was only natural that the bard was by far the least willful members of any given party, but he’d never suspected Matteo to be so vulnerable before.

     Sheesh, the four of you are turning into a bunch of proper pouty brats, aren’t you? The faerie said, and it took Farix a moment to realize that he was the only one who had heard it. Anzu and Toya were still bickering over on the other side of the platform, some yards away, and Matteo, still whimpering in his arms, clearly wasn’t paying any attention when he started up. Yes, skunky, I’m only talking to you, so listen up. I want you to tickle the raccoon.

     “The hell are you talking about?” Farix said quietly to himself, expecting that the faerie would be able to make out his words regardless of how loudly he said them.

     I’m talking about giving the four of you a little relief, the faerie said, again speaking directly into Farix’s head, and the skunk decided to focus on a great many rude remarks he would have liked to make to him, just to see if he could get a reaction out of the owl. That way, if he could hear as well as speak in thoughts, Farix would know. When he said nothing aloud, however, there was a momentary pause, then he continued, Maybe your little party can keep your diapers clean for another hour or so. Or did you all enjoy being babies so much that you decided to stay like that?

     “I;m listening,” Farix said, as quietly as he could manage. His giant striped skunk tail was flicking around behind him in annoyance, and if anyone was available to see it, they would have been able to tell.

     Get your group back into a proper spirit, and I’ll delay the effects of the laxative that’s in all of your bellies. You’ll have a better chance of getting through this room that way, he explained, and Farix listened, but, when he demanded more information, such as how long this delay would last, amongst other things, he received no further reply, and, with a sigh, looked around. Anzu and Toya had taken to sitting on either side of the platform and trying to shelter from the constant dripping. None of them knew whether it had any of the regressive water in it, but neither were they willing to take the chance.

     Farix took a few minutes, trying to decide what his best course of action was, and growing more and more frustrated as Matteo’s whimpering got louder, and he curled up more tightly in the skunks’ arms, his bare footpaws wiggling around in front of him.

     “Ugh, I am getting really sick of this!” Farix said in frustration, and, as everyone turned around to face him, the skunk rolled Matteo over onto his back, took both of his footpaws in his hands, and blew a raspberry onto them exactly as he would have a cub’s.

     “H-hey!” Matteo said, squeaking at the sudden ticklish sensations on his overly sensitive pads, and tried to squirm free, but Farix just grinned and did it again, muttering a spell under his breath that would make the raccoon more ticklish than he already was. “H-hhehehe! F-Farix, what the heck! S-stop it!” The bard continued, breaking out into laughter and beginning to kick more energetically as Farix continued to tickle his feet. Farix let him go, and turned to the other two.

     “Come on, guys. This attitude is more dangerous to us than anything that faerie can do. Toya? I want you to pounce Anzu and tickle him silly, okay? That’s your job for the next fifteen minutes,” Farix said, and accented it by grappling with the now wriggling bard and setting onto his belly and sides with fingers that didn’t need much skill to set him into a fit of squirming and giggling.

     “Farix, I don’t see how acting like cubs is going to-” Anzu said, or, rather, started to say, but was quite thoroughly taken aback when Toya swept his legs out from under him on the wet, heavily padded rubber floor and sent him slipping backwards onto his back. “H-hey! Ow, Toya, what the hell!”

     “Hey, Farix gave me a job,” Toya said, grinning with his usual, bratty little bugger smile for the first time since they were back outside, and grappled with the larger, stronger crow on the ground, using the fact that they were all thoroughly soaked through to the fur and feathers to make himself almost impossible to get a hold of.

     “Oh, you bratty pup!” Anzu said, trying to grapple with the wolf, but Toya was having none of it, and quickly managed to make the crow look slow and stupid in comparison as he dodged and rolled around him, pouncing him from behind and riding him back to the ground whenever he managed to get to his feet.

     “Come on, Matteo, play us something fun, all this doom and gloom is going to kill me,” Toya said, presently sitting on Anzu’s chest and playfully squeezing the thick padding on his backside, still only recently changed.

     “Get off of me!” The crow squalled, red in the face and clearly not amused by his team’s attempts to lighten the mood. He sat up abruptly, tossing Toya off his back and stood, looking around the room, “I don’t know what’s going on, but this owl thing clearly wants to turn us into a bunch of kids. And, right now, you’re all just giving him more stuff to throw in our faces later. Do you all understand me?”

     One by one, Anzu glared at each of the three other members of his team, Toya sitting cross-legged a few yards away from him, Matteo sitting out of the rain, a few steps back down the stairs, and Farix making a small bubble around him to keep the water off.

     “This is serious, and you’re all acting like it’s some sort of giant game? What the hell’s gotten into all of you?!” The crow said, going brighter and brighter shades of pink in the face with every minute, and stomped his foot in frustration, trying to play the decisive parent by crossing his arms and glowering at them.

     “A-Anzu…?” Farix said, a grin slowly crossing his face, and a small giggle escaping his muzzle. Soon, everyone was grinning at him, and the crow had to cast his eyes between the three of them again, wondering what the heck they were all grinning at.

     “What?” Anzu said in frustration, walking past Toya and staring right at Farix, “Gods below, what are you all giggling at?”

     “Anzu… You’re pouting,” Farix said, and suddenly everyone else broke into unbridled laughter, filling the giant, echoing chamber as the crow finally realized that he did, indeed, look like he was pouting, his normal forms of coercion being rendered hilarious while dressed in nothing but an oversized diaper and a onesie more fit for a hatchling. But before he could make so much as a word of protest in his defense, everyone else had keeled over in a heap, laughing themselves silly at his expense.

     “I am not!” Anzu said defiantly, but that only increased the mirth of the other three adventurers as they had five minutes of laughing at his expense.

     “Y-you totally are!” Toya said, rolling over onto his back and waving his feet up in the air like a cub, and, in the process, showing his diapered bottom off for anyone to see, as Anzu positively fumed at being played with like this.

     “Damn it Toya!” The crow said, and leapt onto the recalcitrant puppy again, and the whole bout of wrestling began again. As instructed, Matteo struck up a playful tune, an old dancing song from his childhood as Farix jumped into the fray as well, and a whole additional five minutes passed as the mage and the rouge tried and eventually succeeded at pinning the paladin on his back while the other tickled him. “G-get of… me, Toya!” He said, trying to kick the wolf off his chest as Farix, beneath him, held his elbows behind his back, and immediately began to squirm avidly as Toya did no such thing, but rather set about tickling up and down the crow’s belly and sides.

     “Tickle tickle, hatchie butt!” Toya said, grinning like an actual pup, tail wagging in labrador fashion behind him as he sent his teammate into frantic laughing and squirming, Farix’s spell having left all of them as vulnerable to tickling as any toddler.

     “N-no, stop it you thrice cursed w-wooolf!” The crow paladin whined, shaking his head from side to side, and Toya was suddenly vagluely aware that his seat, right on the front of the crow’s diaper, was suddenly considerably warmer and squishier than it had been a moment ago. He stopped tickling, and rather laid down on his friend’s chest.

     “D’awww, did lil’ hatchie Anzu have an accident?” Toya teased quietly, using the same regressive tone that he’d had used on him so many hundreds of times before, and heard the crow groan with discomfort.

     “You’re a total prick sometimes, Toya,” Anzu grumbled, crossing his arms again once Farix let him go, and Toya was surprisingly close to feeling guilty when all bets were put off, and Anzu flipped him easily over onto his back and returned the favor, “Unfortunately for the two of you, so am I.”

     “W-wait, Anzu, stop!” Toya said, squealing and breaking out into laughter again as the crow stradled him, then took one of his less waterlogged feathers and used it to send the wolf into convulsive laughter, playfully teasing the wolf’s footpads as he lay pinned on his belly.

     Another twenty minutes of this elapsed before, finally, the four of them collapsed in the still dripping water from the ceiling, all four of their previously dry diapers rendered soggy by the overzealous and magically augmented tickle fight. But, huddled together on the slippery, rubberized platform, the four of them felt surprisingly happy after their bout.

     “Alright, alright, guys,” Farix eventually said, sitting up out of their pile and cracking his neck, “I think that’s enough of an attitude adjustment. We should probably get this puzzle done and hope we get a bigger rest later on.” It wasn’t out of any desire to continue playing into the owl’s hands that he suggested it, but rather that the skunk was the only one keeping time, and he had no idea how long this grace period they’d earned by their twenty minutes of cubby debauchery would last, and whether they would be paying for their lapse with interest or not.

     The other three sat back up at his words, and, reluctantly but clearly in better spirits, stood, still blushing, and, for the first time, properly examined the obstacles which they were to be navigating. They seemed to be fairly simple constructions from where the adventurers were standing, and there wasn’t anything like designated paths for each of them to follow. One corner seemed to be separated by nothing more complicated than five giant spheres suspended upon pedestals that rose up out of the water a few feet below.

     The next corner had a giant disk that slowly spun, and two horizontal poles that stuck out at right angles from a central pillar that spun in the opposite direction, deceptively slowly from where the party stood. The next was a climbing puzzle, several dozen pegs sticking out of a wall that seemed to stick out and sink back in at irregular intervals. Move too quickly, and they’d be jabbed off by a climbing pole. Too slowly, and the one they were holding on to might disappear from beneath their wet and slippery hands. The fourth and final trap looked to be both the simplest and possibly the hardest at the same time. There was a large, cylindrical tube that spanned the distance between the central platform and the bell platform, only it was half in the regressive water below, and slowly spinning so that the uppermost half was always slightly wet.

     By Toya’s examination, they were all medium-difficulty platforming, but he was a rogue, and, aside from maybe Farix, he was the only one who’d done so much as climb trees in his youth. “Uh, alright… Does anyone have any ideas?” Toya said, feeling it his place to lead the group on this one, being the only person of competence in this particular regard present.

     Farix’s bushy tail, now mostly waterlogged, flicked a bit, “That climbing puzzle? I can see a pattern to how they pop out and back in again. I think I’ll take that one,” he said, and, after a few moments of examination, Toya saw it too, and nodded.

     “I guess I could just sink my sword into that rolling log thing and hold on,” Anzu said, shrugging, “Or maybe chop off that spinning pillar on the other one? He never said we couldn’t be violent about it.”

     “Alright. Matteo? You get the log,” Toya said decisively, and with much more confidence than he felt, “Anzu? Spinning disk. I’ve got the balls,” he said, and broke out into immature laughter as everyone glared at him. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” he said, then grinned, and took a running start towards the five giant balls, leaping soundlessly a few feet from the edge, and judged perfectly. Upon hitting the first ball, his feet sank into it like a giant trampoline, and, having expected it to be solid, Toya adjusted his trajectory and let it fling him skyward, mostly upward. He curled into a forward roll near the peak of the augmented jump, and fell flat on his face, overshooting the other four balls, precariously hanging off the edge of the bell platform. “Damn it!” He said, scrabbling to keep his claws sunk into the plastic coating over top of the padded platform, and felt himself treading watter up to his ankles, which tingled from the regressive agent inside of them.

     With a groan of effort, Toya curled and did a chin-up, then got his leg back up onto the platform and rolled, safely, next to the bell. Panting, the wolf held up one of his thumbs to show that he was alright, but the tingling from his feet had started to spread up his legs and torso, and, swallowing hard, he waved a paw at the others.

     “Hey guys? I got wet, hurry up, will you?” The wolf said, then groaned as the aching in his belly started to return again, and, wincing, crawled over to the bell, ready whenever the other four were. His bladder didn’t last long, though, and Toya soon felt his diaper growing warm and wet between his legs. “Guess it was too much to ask that I get through this dry…” He grumbled, pouting as he always did when soggy.

     “I’ll go next,” Farix said, cracking his neck, “that way, if either of you get dunked while we’re crossing, we won’t lose too much… age.” The other two nodded, but didn’t watch him as he moved to the starting position. Despite being a mage, Farix had actually learned a thing or two about climbing, even if skunks weren’t normally the most dexterity-oriented creatures. Taking his time, he moved with surprising ease through the pegs, timing his steps to the rhythm of the pegs, but quickly encountered a snag. There was a five foot gap in the middle of the puzzle where no pegs were pushing out, except one, and that one was two feet under the FOY tainted water. Which left him with a dillema: get a little bit wet, and take the safe road, or make a jump for it, and potentially get soaked right through.

     With a groan, Farix bowed to the necessity, and started climbing down, staff adhered magically to his back, and, squeamish as a child being lowered into a bath, stepped down into the tingling water so he could climb past.

     It occurred to the skunk, then, that maybe a sample would come in useful. Maybe he could reverse the effects once this was all over, so, as he crossed the three peg gap, the fur up to his knees totally soaked through and tingling, he muttered a spell to freeze some of it into a ball, and store it inside his staff.

     A sort of forced laughter broke out from Toya’s platform, and, confused, Farix turned his head around, still standing half in the regressive water, and saw the little wolf rolling around his platform and giggling tremendously. “What the hell, Toya?” Farix asked, suddenly remembering where he was standing and climbing out as quickly as he could. But then the skunk felt his own belly start to itch, almost like someone was tickling him, and, pulling himself out of the water, it was all he could do to keep from breaking out into mirth again himself, “W-what the… hehehe heck is this…?” Farix said, batting at invisible hands that were tickling up and down his belly and sides. Before it could get worse, he pushed himself forward, all the way up to the top, then collapsed, giggling like a skunk pup, onto the bell platform, begging for mercy. “N-no! S-stop, please!” The skunk said between bursts of laughter, and soon lost control of his bladder as well, feeling oddly giddy as the regressive agent had its way with his body, his paws slowly shrinking, fur lightening from its normal black, white and orange, now speckled with adolescent white.

     Matteo and Anzu’s performances left much to be desired. The crow had, expecting to cut through the central pillar of the disk like plastic, charged onto it like he would have a battlefield, albeit looking totally ridiculous in nothing but a bulky diaper and onesie, and was nearly thrown off his feet at once, not even halfway towards the center before the spinning side bar caught him on the shoulder and sending him flying, literally flying, across the disk and into the water, head first. His beak flooded with the stuff, and, coughing, he kicked and flailed his waterlogged feathers, trying to reach back up to the surface for air. But… his sword was dragging him down, the glistening blade as good as a heap of bricks tied to him in this deep pool, but the idea of dropping it…

     Get a grip, Anzu, you can come get it later…! He thought to himself, then, with much psychological effort, he let go of the sword, watched it sink another three yards to the bottom of the pool, then swam for the ladder on the central platform. Matteo, who had failed just as thoroughly as him, got up the ladder first, and had had the good sense to leave his lute there, rather than try to cross the log with it.

     “W-want to switch?” Anzu said, coughing up as much of the regressive water as he could before looking over at the raccoon, who was looking back at him with an equal expression of dismay. Despite being waterlogged, Matteo seemed to have lost a stone in weight in just that one quick swim, and several inches in height. He looked young enough now to get turned away from taverns and seemed to realize it at just the same time as Anzu did himself. “H-hey…! I thought this was supposed to be slow!” He said, his voice the better part of an octave higher than it had been before, and, blushing, realized only belatedly that his diaper was now as now totally waterlogged, and sagged out of the sides of his onesie’s crotch flap. “C-come on, Matteo! If we mess up again we’ll be…”

     He didn’t need to finish the sentence, and the two of them turned away from the other, not wanting the reminder of what failure would cost them. The room was already full of giggling by the time the water’s secondary effect had started to kick in for Anzu, who suddenly had to deal with his totally tickle-proof talons being tickled by some magical means. Closing off everything else, his lost sword, the fact that he was probably going to look like a five year old by the time this was done, and even that the ground seemed to be slowly creeping its way up towards him, Anzu focused single-mindedly on crossing the gap, and, somehow, the next thing he knew, he was scrabbling up onto the rubbery, padded platform, his hand on the bell-string.

     The water dribbling from the ceiling ceased at once as the four of them, as one, gripped the pull strings and shook them, filling the room with the soft ringing, and leaving the four exhausted adventurers with scarcely the energy to stand, let alone fight.