Melissa looked fondly down at the baby… wait, was he growing? Visibly?
Just then, with a frustrated grunt, the child shoved Melissa’s arm away and jumped down to the ground, landing in a surprisingly athletic crouch. Ethan felt the energy in the room pulse as the now-toddler on the ground had a growth spurt.
“What… what is happening here?” Melissa asked fearfully. “Why is my baby growing so fast? Carl?”
Ethan frowned and said, “I don’t know. But he didn’t have black hair before, right? This is new, something from you?”
“I guess… I…” Just then, Carl emitted a low moan and grew again, looking like a kindergartner.
“Carl, can you understand me?”
“Yes I can, Ethan.”
“Can you get up and walk over here?”
Carl got up and as he stood, the room pulsed again and he grew noticeably. Ethan beckoned him over to a Detecto scale, and Carl got on the scale. As Ethan lowered the height level, there was a scraping sound as Carl’s bizarre growth resumed.
“Fifty-two… no… fifty-six inches,” said Ethan. “He’s the size of a ten-year-old!” Carl looked down at himself and grew again. Ethan asked Carl to smile, and there were several gaps in his teeth. Ethan turned to face Doris and Melissa.
“Sixty-two inches. He’s the size of a teenager, but he’s obviously still a child. This is very strange.
Carl, writhing with energy, started to rock back and forth on his heels. The energy in the room vibrated harder as Carl shot up in height and build. Bones cracked and the scale strained as Carl stretched. Hair appeared in his groin, then under his arms, and on his legs. The beginnings of a beard started to poke out of the former CEO’s young mouth. A roar of impatience started in soprano range and dropped instantly into a bass. Muscles that wouldn’t have looked wrong on a college athlete bulged all around Carl’s body. Just then, the weird energy in the room quieted.
Ethan, Doris, and Melissa stared. Ethan recovered first and reset the scale. “Seventy-four inches and two hundred twenty pounds,” he said quietly into the silence. “And obviously a young adolescent, maybe 13 or 14 years old. Though with impressive muscle development and abs. I… don’t know what to say.”
In less than an hour, the newborn baby had become an enormous, muscular, early-blooming adolescent. Ethan tried to turn around to face Carl, only to feel a shockingly strong arm restraining him. Carl, angry and fully aware of his nearly superhuman strength, threw the unsuspecting doctor to the floor.
“YOU did this to me,” snarled the now-teenaged boy, with one hand hidden behind his back as the other held Ethan down. “YOU made me turn into a freak show. YOU put me inside that woman’s womb for months on end. Well, now you’re going to know what it feels like.”
Ethan stared up at the enormous young man, who smiled not at all nicely. Carl brought his hidden hand forward, brandishing a syringe.
“NO!” screamed Ethan as Doris gasped in horror. But it was too late. The preternaturally strong teen plunged the syringe into the doctor’s exposed belly and pressed down hard.
Ethan gurgled in pain as the heat of the serum coursed through his system. Almost at once, he started to shudder as his body rewrote its cellular patterns. His muscles, fought for so hard in the gym, tightened visibly, then started to atrophy as years of personal bests erased themselves. The broken nose he’d gotten when some young idiot had challenged the “old man” to a fight righted itself with a nearly audible pop. Carl, still very much in control, watched intently as Ethan regressed through his thirties, then his twenties. The increased testosterone of peak manhood flowing in Ethan caused him to try to fight the huge 8th grader, but then suddenly the elixir of masculinity started to wane in the hapless doctor.
Carl allowed Ethan to stand up, and closed the bathroom door so the full-length mirror was visible. While Ethan stared as the college freshman version of himself shrank down into a high school prospect, Carl snuck up behind Doris and, with lightning-quick reflexes, injected her with a syringe of serum.
The effects on the poor secretary were extremely fast; in the time it took for Ethan to move from fresh-faced med school student to hopeful college freshman, Doris’ breasts rose to their youthful firmness and her hips shrank slightly. Melissa gasped. “It’s happening to you, too!”
Doris ran over and stood near Ethan, watching in the mirror as her grey hair turned back to its beautiful auburn… and then darkened to jet black, and her sallow skin firmed up to its pink tone, then darkened to a rich olive.
Ethan bellowed in frustration as his impressive physique, fought for so long in the crucible of gyms all over the country, started to fade. Acne exploded across his face as his hairy barrel chest shrank into a lanky, glabrous teenage torso. His lab coat drooped as broad, masculine shoulders turned into a squared-off, thin frame. His trousers slipped down around his ankles and his boxers sagged as his waist and hips narrowed. His height dropped a few inches, leaving him significantly shorter than Carl, who now stood behind him with a devious smile on his young face.
“Wow,” snickered Doris. “You were a scrawny little scarecrow at sixteen, weren’t you.” Ethan looked at his former secretary, now a voluptuous, swarthy teenager herself, and had a predictable reaction—an enormous bulge in loose boxers. “I might’ve been scrawny, but at least I have a real big d—“
Just then, Ethan’s Adam’s apple wobbled and shrank, cutting off the former baritone’s sound. Frustrated, he turned back to the mirror, only to cover his mouth in horror as his pride and glory shrank… and shrank… and shrank again. As tears sprang to his eyes, he flew backwards through the growth spurt that had left him so tall and lanky.
The combination of his reverse puberty and a sudden loss of eight or nine inches in height was too much for his boxers, and they slithered down around his ankles to rest atop the now huge trousers as his age stabilized, presumably temporarily.
“You call that big?” laughed Carl. Ethan, mortified, looked in the mirror. Towering over him was his former boss. His ex-secretary was more than half a foot taller than him! He looked down at dewy hair, and just a tiny fringe at the very bottom of his ankles. “Nooooo,” he whined, then grabbed his throat as a child’s voice, unmarked by puberty, emerged.
“Come on, Ethy. Get up on that scale,” ordered Carl.
“Four foot eleven. And 84 pounds. This ought to be good… you got a stronger dose than you gave me.”