The Artist's Touch

Chapter 3
The Regression Rollar Ride

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Chapter Description: Heather finds Derek, and decideds to keep him "in cognito".

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Heather looked down in amazement at the drawing that some spectral force had placed on Derek’s pad. A young boy dressed in completely over-baggy clothing; clothing that looked identical to the set Derek was wearing when we ran off stared at Heather. The boy’s hair was a lighter brown, nearly blond, and his fist was held up to his eye with a few stray tears trickling down his face.

“What, didja get bored of drawing?” Heather sarcastically asked the pencil, while she proceeded to turn the page of the sketch book.

“Okay, well I’ve seen you draw by yourself, and you only do it when people make requests, so magic pencil thingie, tell me how to find Derek! Or show me! Perhaps draw me a well detailed map?” At the request for a map, the pencil sprung to life again, and began to dance in the corner of the page. Heather quickly recognized it as the parking lot she was standing in; the pencil even got it down to each and every individual car. Slowly the field and the woods were etched into the paper, and as quickly as it began, then pencil marked a tiny ?D’ next to what seemed to be a river, and then it fell down again, motionless.

“Alright then, you better be telling me the truth, pencil, or I know a good mouse back at the office whose dying for something to chew on.” Heather threatened as she tucked the pencil safely behind her ear and ran towards the woods with the sketchbook in tow.

* * * * *

Back at the river, Derek still couldn’t believe his eyes. A flabbergasted child stared back at him in the slight flow of the stream instead of the sleep-deprived stubbed man Derek has become accustomed to for the last ten years. Whatever had done this to him, Derek was positive that he hadn’t swapped bodies with another boy, leaving his wanted body to run amok with an elementary schooler in his steed. Derek’s mother was nothing short of a photo-nut, she had pictures of him from the second he popped out of his mother’s womb hanging in what his old high school friends dubbed “the Hallway of Shame”. Being an only child, Derek’s hallway was nothing less then a shrine to the miracle of his life, and he distinctly remembered the searing heat he would feel in his face when his friends would point and laugh at a picture his parents took of him as he prepared to take a bath alone for the first time.

“Colin, shut up. I was six! Get over it!” The image in the stream before him matched the picture his friend Colin mocked perfectly, from his hair, which was bordering a dirty blond instead of its normal jet-black inkiness, all the way down to his shrunken manhood. Derek couldn’t help but let loose a small rain of tears as he saw himself in this humiliating state.

“That’s not who I am anymore, and that’s not something I’m ever gonna do again, so stop laughing and plug in the N64 Colin!” Apparently, sixteen year-old Derek has been wrong.

* * * * *

Heather followed the map down into the forest and up the river, praying that she wasn’t following another oddity like the strange picture of the boy playing dress-up. However, when she followed the stream into a clearing, she realized that the drawing may not have been such an oddity after all, fore as she made her way upstream, she found a boy no older then eight weeping by the river side. The most suspicious thing about this boy was the fact it was easy to tell his gender; he was completely nude.

“Hey there, little guy, are you okay?” Heather approached the wild boy as gently as she could, half expecting it to lash out in untamed fury like a little Tarzan. She was not, however, expecting for the boy to slowly stop weeping and, in surprise, stutter her name through the tears.

“Huh, huh, Heather?”

“You know my name?”

“Uh huh.”

“How?”

“Its me, Derek.”

“Derek? That’s YOU Derek?”

“Uh huh, honest!”

“Okay, sit your bare butt down and tell me what happened.” Derek quickly covered his exposed penis, the lack of modesty at his age already taking a subconscious grip on his mind. His mother always told the people who looked at that picture of Derek in the hallway that he was never a modest one until he entered fifth grade.

“A shy one, are we?”

“I can’t let you see my goods before the first date.” Derek laughed half-heartedly. He was positive that it must have sounded awkward for a six year old to hit on her like that. To his surprise though, Heather chuckled a little bit.

“I suppose so, but enough of flirting with me, tell me what happened. Is this stream the stream of youth or something?”

“No, I never touched the water. I was just running, and all of a sudden I fell out of my clothes. After that I hid under a tree and after the police came and took my clothes and stuff, I wandered over here ’cause I was really thirsty! Then, I looked into the water and poof! I looked like a little kid!” Derek hadn’t noticed, but as he spoke his voice slowly lost the adult mannerisms, talking on a childish tone of excitement. Heather took little notice, however, more focused on the reduced state of her friend,

“So howdja find me, Heather?” Derek asked Heather as he looked up with his hands at his side rather then covering his crotch.

“Oh, right. When you ran off, the pencil drew a picture of a little kid, and.” Both Heather stopped as inspiration took hold. She ripped open Derek’s sketch book and flipped through the Disney-filled pages.

“Whatcha doin’ with my pictures?” Derek asked as he made a pouty face, placing his tiny hands on his hips in annoyance.

“When I asked that you’d stay safe, your pencil burst into life and drew a picture of a kid in adult clothing. It was no biggie at the time, I thought the pencil had gone crazy. But then latter I asked for help finding you, which I used to lead me here.”

“Do you have a magic pencil?” Derek’s eyes grew big, his childhood imagination beginning to take effect.

“Maybe, lets find out. I think I should make you your old age again. How old were you?”

“I dunno.” Derek said as he raised his arms in the classical child’s ?I Dunno’ pose, with his arms stretched out straight to the elbows, with the remainder bent upwards with his hands completely open. Heather sighed at the quick loss of mental prowless her friend was experiencing.

“Well, you couldn’t be older then twenty five, since that’s when most of us graduated college. So, pencil, make Derek twenty five again.” The pencil whizzed back to life, sketching across the paper once again. Heather watched Derek as the drawing was made, but no change in her friend was apparent. When the pencil clunked down again, and Heather saw a nude young Derek on her paper with no change in the real Derek, she had given up hope; when suddenly, six-year-old Derek clutched his tummy, and whined to Heather.

“I don’t feel so good.” And it was then, after he stood up clutching his stomach, that she could see changes taking place. At first Derek’s height slowly crept up, and Heather watched in amazement as Derek’s body moved from seven, to eight, to nine, until finally he was in the double digits and had gained nearly a foot in height. As he entered sixth grade, the baby fat that covered his body began to give way, and a few pubic hairs began to pop up like sprouts around his private area. Suddenly, as he hit thirteen his body shot upwards with hair appearing all over his body, and it was at this time Derek realized that he was naked and quickly covered his indecent spots, although Heather thought she saw some growth in his “package” down there too. Even though he covered it with his now goofy-large hands, he couldn’t cover the onset of public hair that flooded out from his crotch, forming what Heather guessed to be a healthy bush, as well as hair on his legs, arms, and the beginnings of chest hair.

“Excuse me, but could you at least look away or something?” Derek yelled at Heather, who laughed in response to his voice cracking.

“I don’t think they show a film this in-depth in health class.” She snickered as Derek’s lanky limbs started to fill themselves in with a fair amount of muscle. Derek’s hair was black now, and he had a fairly decent bread, since technically he hadn’t shaved never. His hair was long and scraggly from “never” being brushed, and it reached halfway down his back. Heather got a kick out of that.

"Thinking more clearly now?”

“Yes, thank you. How about making me some clothes or something?”

“Mmm, no. I don’t think so.”

“What? Why not?

“Because, silly, you’re still a wanted man. However, you’re not a wanted child.”

“Are you suggesting turning me BACK into a child?”

“Make it so, pencil, only this time keep all of Derek’s adult emotions intact and give him some clothes that will make him look like a normal kid.”

“Hey!” But it was too late, the pencil erased the picture perfectly from the pad without any trace of lead or of press marks, an admirable feet to artists like Heather and Derek, and it sketched a picture of Derek, this time as an eight year-old, and as soon as the last time was in place, Derek began to shrink. To Heather, it was like watching a rewind of the last five minutes, with Derek’s arms deflating to their teenage scrawniness, then the public hair retreating and his height diminishing. The beard he had just a moment before retreated into his jaw as the last of his armpit hair disappeared. Derek’s adult emotions remained intact via Heather’s request, so Derek’s hands didn’t move from their position of shielding his penis, even as his hands shrunk to a child’s grubby hands. The fact that his manhood was not exposed signaled to the both of them that it was now Derek’s boyhood. Once his limbs reached a smaller proportion and all the hair on his body except for the locks on his head disappeared, Derek’s body merely shrank in tiny portions as it did when Heather first aged him, except it stopped before Derek reached the level of First Grader.

“Hey, what about clothes!” Derek sounded extremely childish with such a blunt command that even he blushed after hearing himself.

“The pencil’s working on it. You know us artists, naked bodies first then we dress them.” Heather was right as the pencil dropped again and as a army-style camouflage shorts, a black kid-sized muscle shirt and flip-flops suddenly appeared on him. Derek cringed at the outfit the pencil had assigned him, it looked almost adult-like except for its small size. Although as a teenager and an adult Derek had never liked muscle shirts, because of the amount of hair and body shape they exposed, Derek would have gladly worn one as an adult now, for instead of revealing his hairy adult armpits and his mediocre body shape, it showed the hairless body of a child not even considering puberty and with a chubby, round body shape. Although Derek clearly didn’t like it, Heather disagreed.

“Awe, you look so CUTE! No one would ever suspect you as being a wanted criminal for breaking Disney’s animation building.

“Well, couldn’t you have at least made me a teenager?” Derek meekly replied.

“Dude, I watched your entire body grow up and regress. I think I know at which age there’s the least resemblance between adult Derek and young Derek, and the oldest that is happens to be eight. Unless of course you want to be five again.”

“NO! Eight’s good.” Derek didn’t want to feel any more smaller.

“Great, so I’ll pretend to be your Aunt Heather as we try to figure this out.”

“Okay, so what’s your plan, Heather?”

“Aunty Heather.”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to call me ?Aunty Heather’. You need to practice now so you do it when it counts. So call me ?Aunty Heather’.”

“Okay, Aunty Heather.” Derek gritted his teeth as he spoke, but Heather took no notice.

“Great, lets get back to my apartment. I have a guest bedroom I can make up into a boy’s room for you. And of course you’ll need to get enrolled into school and stuff.”

“Enrolled into school? Why?”

“It’ll be pretty suspicious for an eight-year-old boy to not be enrolled into school.” Heather frowned.

“So, its not like anyone could trace me as a kid.”

“Sure they could, you still have the same fingerprints and DNA and stuff.”

“Oh yeah, well I wish I had a new, untaken set of fingerprints and DNA that matched yours enough for you to pass as my aunt! So there!” Strangely, the pencil popped to life and drew out an entire strand of DNA; Heather recognized the double helix shape from college biology, and then it made up a new documents for Derek too. Derek’s hands began to tingle as he looked down as saw his finger prints jiggle around before his eyes.

“Ha! Now they can’t trace me.”

“Yeah, but since you’re a new person now, you’re really just an eight-year-old who has no documented school time, and they’ll throw you into foster care if you don’t enroll. Thanks for agreeing with me.” Heather smiled triumphantly as she took Derek’s hand, who stared at his flip flops with the distinct feeling that he had been tricked.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

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