Regressing Lots

Chapter 3
Regressing Lots: Chapter Three

Chapter Description: The dice alter the terms of the spell, and Heather and Linda both get a dose of youth.

Heather cursed, the cursed again. Each turn of the wheel was accompanied by another profanity. She dodged out of the way of an oncoming truck, back into her lane, but an aggressive van driver had shot into the spot where she was. There was the blaring of a horn, and only about a foot of distance between Heather’s jeep and the van. She floored the pedal, shot ahead and got out of the situation. Hands shaking, and Linda making small noises of panic, Heather saw a rest stop exit ahead. With relief, she pulled into the slow lane, then exited the Interstate. As soon as she got the Jeep to a complete stop, parked as far away from the porta potty as possible, she looked at Linda.

“What the heck Linda!” she yelled, angrily. Linda, however, had pulled her feet up from the floor of the Jeep and was intently staring at the box. Heather unbuckled her belt and got out, running around the Jeep to open the door. What had happened? She picked up the box, which appeared to be closed, and looked it over. There was nothing different about it, though she felt the same tingle of power just touching the box as she had touching the dice. Gently, she put it down on the dashboard.

“Linda, what happened?” Heather asked again, softer this time. She put her hand on Linda’s shoulder, rubbing it supportingly. Linda took Heather’s hand and squeezed it, tight.

“The dice talked to me,” she said, very quietly.

“What?” Heather exclaimed. She pulled the box back down from the dashboard and, using her keys, opened the seal and looked inside the box. Her lucky charms were still there, and looked unchanged, but without even knowing why, or how, she knew only one of the dice applied to her now. The gold one. The glow within seemed more Heatherish, while the silver die made her think of…

“Linda,” she said softly. “What did the voice say to you?”

Linda shook her head, but was having trouble speaking. Heather closed the box, folding the box lids closed like one would a moving box, and placed it on the hood of the Jeep. Then she stood on the side step of the Jeep and unbuckled Linda. Poor thing must have been terrified out of her wits between the voice and the near accident. Heather was still shaking too, but she had to take control right now. She got Linda out of the car, on her feet, and hugged her tight. The shorter woman, technically older than her now, seemed to come out of her trance and hugged Heather back. Drawing from the hug, she looked up at Heather, eyes shimmering with tears.

“The voice told me that one of the dice was now bonded to me, since I was holding them so long,” Linda confessed. “I… I panicked and dropped it. Dropped the box. That was so stupid. I almost got us killed, and who knows what else. What if the dice had rolled Heather?”

Heather looked at the box, and suppressed a comment about how stupid a move it had been. She wished Linda could tell her exactly what the voice had said, but right now the poor woman needed a few minutes to get her wits back. Heather kept close to her, and gently ran her hand over the side of Linda’s face. When Kyle was upset, he always enjoyed being touched, caressed. He said it made him feel safe and secure. He would have a scare, or a bad day, and she would rub his face, and kiss him, and then she would get a smile out of him.

Without thinking, Heather pulled Linda closer to her, and gave her a kiss on the lips. Linda did not react with shock; she returned the kiss with a fierce need, as if she had been waiting for this kiss for months. A few long moments of time passed, and Heather felt a warmth and heat build up inside her that she hadn’t known in a long time. Arousal. Desire. Need. Her younger body was quicker to react, though she didn’t know it, and it took considerable willpower for her to break the kiss. Linda was smiling, very pleased.

“If that’s what I get for being stupid, you’re not going to encourage me to be very smart around you, Heather Banks,” Linda replied. Once more, Heather had to admit she liked the way her name came out of Linda’s mouth. She liked the way Linda tasted, and licked her lips to savour it. Maybe… maybe this wasn’t impossible.

“I promise next time you won’t have to scream or cause a near death scenario for us to kiss again,” Heather replied, unable to hide her delight in her own voice. She wanted to kiss again, but her mind was clear enough to keep their current situation present. They had a delivery to make. The dice had changed the terms, it seemed. She looked at Linda, and put her hands on either side of her cheeks, cupping her face. Linda looked up at her with adoration.

“Linda, baby, you need to tell me exactly what the voice said now. Before you forget,” Heather said, trying to appeal to the lawyer inside her girlfriend.

Linda looked briefly disappointed, then broke away from the embrace and thought. Cars roared by on the Interstate, but otherwise they were alone in the rest stop. After a minute of thinking, while Heather waited patiently, Linda brought up the words.

“The voice said that I had held the vessel of power for long enough that now one die would be bound to me, and one to you. It said each cast of the die would now affect us both.”

Heather nodded. “I think the gold die is bonded to me, and the silver to you.”

They both looked over to the box, on the Jeep hood. Heather was now curious to know if one single die could be rolled independent from the other. If the goal of the being was to release power in the dice, it would make sense. This… youthfulness must be a gift, of a sort, intended to entice Heather into rolling the dice and releasing the power. Something was beginning to add up. This power was caught in crystal, somehow, and it took a human act to release it. That had been the way of the crystal butterfly pendant, after all. But not only crystal. Glass seemed to trap the power as well, though crystal would hold it. The power had become stuck in the window as the being left her office, then that power had been sucked into the dice. Breaking up the ‘gift’ of the dice was, perhaps, the being’s way of recognizing that Heather was now unlikely to ever roll the dice again, if she could help it. Linda might take the chance. She was old enough that any result on the die would keep her adult.

A gentle wind tugged at Linda’s hair as she looked back at Heather. Her younger… well, now older girlfriend had now been dragged much further down the rabbit hole than Heather would have ever intended. She felt guilty about getting her in this far. This also brought something else to mind. Had the power arranged for Heather to set it free? Had her curiosity been stimulated by the trapped being to open the parcel and put on the pendant? Heather was curious enough, true, but looking back, she could not think why it had seemed like a good idea. Inspecting the package herself - she should have called in a peer to witness it at least. Heather had a good feeling that the power, trapped, was capable of subtly influencing people around it, which meant if they tried to hide the dice - they would be found. And rolled. What if they weren’t bound to the new person when they rolled it? Would Heather be in the middle of court and suddenly find herself tripping backwards in maturity in front of the judge and jury?

Suddenly, the gentle wind surged a little, and the cardboard box glided over the hood of the Jeep on a plane of static electricity, cardboard shifting on the smooth metal of the hood with ease. It fell to the ground, with Linda letting out a yell and running to grab it. Heather watched, stunned in place, and knowing right then and there the truth. The power would find a way to be free. Linda dived for the box, baseball style, but it was far too late. The box hit the ground on it’s side, and the folded panels popped open. The styrofoam packing came apart (of course), and the dice scattered towards Linda as she slid up.

Each die landed, by chance, with a result of 4. Heather felt the same tingle, the heat through her body, the sparkles shimmering in the air. She was too far away to see what the dice had resulted in, but knew that with one die, the largest result wasn’t too catastrophic for her. The changes were much less drastic, mostly a slight thinning of her hips and even more firmness returning to her breasts. It was Linda she had her eyes on. The sparkles shimmered up from Linda as she tried to catch the dice, but from the distance whatever changes the regression had caused in her girlfriend were not apparent.

“Twenty and five years you have walked free of your mothers womb. Now, this total is but twenty and one. Each cast of the die will release more of my stolen power, and restore your lost youth.”

So Heather was 21 now…

But her eyes widened, and she yelled. Linda had slid to catch the box, and tried to catch the dice. With hands still releasing the motes of light, the stolen power of the being returning into the air to go who knows where to, Linda had tried to snatch the dice. But they fell from her fingers as the shock of the ‘spell’ came over her, and rolled a foot away from her.

“No!” Heather yelled in panic.

She was next to Linda in a few hurried strides, and saw the dice as they landed. Her eyes widened in horror. Box cars. Double 6. That would mean -

The power surged through her this time, and she found it difficult to even keep her balance. It felt like someone was pressing her from every angle at once. She felt her shoes shift around her feet, loosening. She was still in her good clothes from the office, but she had ditched her high heels for a pair of simple flats. Her panty hose bunched as Heather lost, inch by inch, some of her height and mass. Her hips, always a little generous but never spread from childbirth, now slendering until they were barely a suggestion of a curve. Before her eyes, as the sparkles of power drifted from her body, she saw her hands shrink slightly, her skin becoming pristine and flawless as the glow of youth replaced her adult life. Her blouse seemed to billow around her, now several sizes too large for the teen, and her bra all but pushed away from her greatly diminished breasts. She had no immediate clue how small they had become, but the bra hanging under her blouse was comedically oversized for her teenage breasts. Even her panties slid gently down a hip, and her dress actually fell down her legs, pooling around her feet.

As if it were the voice of a judge laying judgment against her, the voice of the entity sang softly into Heather’s ears.

“Twenty and one years you have walked free of your mothers womb. Now, this total is but fifteen. Each cast of the die will release more of my stolen power, and restore your lost youth.”

Linda, shaking, rose, and looked down at the dice, the last sparks of light drifting from her own body. She looked still much her like herself, but her face was more clearly that of the college aged woman she had become. She’d regained 10 years of her life, or lost 10 years of maturity, in under one minute, and was reeling from the changes. Her hair was fuller, healthier, and she’d lost some weight, but the twenty year old was, in truth, just a slimmer and healthier looking version of the thirty year old she had been before. When she was the result, she looked up in panic at Heather, and then covered her mouth in shock.

Heather fell to her knees, then sagged backwards onto her butt. A teenager? She was a teenager now? And one more roll like that from the dice, and she would be - a child! Already Heather was far too young to pass for herself, and no sane person would believe the fifteen year old girl with Heather’s ID was the same person. The fingerprints, she guessed, would be the same, and she would be able to prove her knowledge, but what then? How would she ever explain to any authority what happened? Magic dice made her younger? She looked at Linda, tears welling in her eyes, and couldn’t decide if she wanted to hug her or punch her in the face! Linda had rolled the dice on her twice now!

With anger, she picked up the silver die. If she was going to watch her life fall apart around her, Linda was going to share her pain! Already she was keenly aware just how womanly even a twenty year old Linda was in comparison to herself, dressed in oversized clothes. Linda might even be taller than her now. Heather raised her hand to cast the die.

Linda, eyes widening, picked up the gold die as quick as she could. “Wait!” she yelled.

A tense moment passed. Tears streamed down Heather’s face as she clutched the silver die in her hand, body trembling. She wanted to punish Linda right now, anger clouding ever rational sense she had. She knew, rationally, that this wasn’t Linda’s fault. She hadn’t known about the dice when she first rolled them. Heather had been the one to set the dice on the hood of the Jeep. The extra roll was just an accident, after all. But here Heather was, fifteen years old now, while Heather was at least still an adult. One good roll would put them closer to even footing, and for some reason that appealed to Heather’s sense of justice. She would watch Linda shrink out of her clothes, watch her ample breasts diminish into girly bumps. But what then? Would Linda drop Heather’s die? No matter what the roll, every result now sent Heather further and further back into an increasingly complex situation. Fourteen to nine. That’s how old she would be if Linda dropped the die. Where as Linda, even on the biggest roll, would likely be in her late teens? Heather hadn’t seen the first roll - she was trying to guess Linda’s current age, but it was hard to tell exactly what age a twenty-something was.

“Think, baby, think,” Linda said, trying to calm Heather down. “I know you’re upset now! I understand why you’re upset. But at least one of us is still old enough to drive right now. Drop that die, and both of us would be teenagers, and then what? What do we do after that?”

Heather had a sudden image, alarming and amusing at the same time, of two toddlers trying to pick up the right die before the other one could roll the die in revenge. If she rolled, Linda would definitely roll in retaliation. And if Linda had a shred of sense, she would try and grab the silver die instead of rolling the gold die, and then should would have all the power. With dawning realization, Heather knew the truth of this situation. The being was trying to tempt Heather into rolling again, to release more of the stored power within. Was it capable of outright making Heather do it, even if she didn’t want to? Was this even her own desire right now? She looked at the die, now realizing that once picked up, she had to be very careful putting it back down again, or it would count as a cast die. And Linda - Linda had the gold die. One slip up, and Heather could end up as a grade schooler if she wasn’t careful. Heather let out a long, deep breath, focusing her mind.

“These dice, Linda - they want to be rolled. They’re like that ring from that hobbit movie.”

Linda stood up and came to Heather, sitting down beside her and putting an arm around her shoulder. She held onto Heather, and then held out her hand with the gold die in it.

“I would never have rolled this in revenge, I promise. I just needed to get you to think. If you’re angry with me, if you hate me for what I’ve done, just roll that silver die until you’re happy. I just don’t want you to hate me,” said Linda, softly. Her hand was trembling slightly.

Heather looked at the silver die in her hand.

“How old are you now?” she asked Linda.

“Twenty on the nose, according to the voice.”

With a deep breath, Heather took the silver die and placed it in Linda’s hand. For better or worse, the dice had been cast, and this is where they landed.

“You keep them, Linda. You’re the adult now. Keep these away from me, because right now, I can’t think straight. I want to roll that die, I want to see you end up like me, and that’s childish, and stupid. I’m childish. I was even before this happened to me, I was acting childish. Hiding from the world after Kyle died, just working through that pain as if I could just pretend I was all right. You’re twice the woman I am.”

Linda looked at the pair of dice in her hand, and carefully pulled the dice back close to her body. She was the adult now. She pulled the box over, and as if she were handling nitro glycerine, put each die back into the shipping foam, then closed the box. They would have to find tape, and seal the box again. Whatever happened, Linda would not let these dice be rolled again if she could help it.