Tale #89: Don't Strain Yourself

Tale #89: Don't Strain Yourself (Content Tags: Braindrain, humiliation, messy diapers, supernatural, brother as an antagonist, genius into moron, first person perspective, fraternal twins, continuation possible) Just about any amount of mental strain would do it; would set into motion the mechanisms of my shameful self-destruction. It was a three-pronged curse, and each prong worked off the last, to prick me and damage me in sequence. It made things difficult for me to go through my daily routine, when doing so could easily lead to public humiliation. The first prong was that any mental strain above the absolute minimum would lead to an uncontrollable defecation in my pants. If I actually thought to answer something even as infantile as two plus two, then my body would react by forcing me to soil myself right there, with rosy cheeks and crossed eyes. The more intensive the thought, the larger the load that I'd squeeze out. Which led to the second prong, which was that I would literally be excreting my own valuable IQ points into my pants. It was a minimal amount, which was still scaled on the amount I deposited, but it was a permanent loss of some level of intellect. The third prong wasn't necessarily connected to the second in a truly meaningful way, but it did exacerbate the damage of the second; the smell of stool rapidly drained my brain of intelligent thought, though it was temporary, and once the smell was gone, then my mind would return to normal. Unfortunately, the second and third prong did have a certain feedback loop, since the dumber I became, the more I would mess my pants. In action, this looked like that I'd try to answer a basic question to prove my abilities, which would cause me to look totally stumped and overclocked by having to think, swiftly followed by me looking mushbrained as I strained a big turd into my diaper. (Yes, by this point, diapers had become inevitable and unfortunately very necessary.) That turd would slough off an IQ point or two permanently from my intellect, and then shortly after, the smell of my own poop would make me start becoming dimwitted and daffy. Which from there would likely mean the further filling of my pants, and a more pungent odor, and so on... For someone who had thrived in the gifted classes, this was an exceedingly cruel curse that'd been laid at my feet. The perpetrator of this affliction had remained unknown at first, content to view things anonymously; it hadn't taken them very long to leap forward and take credit for it though, once they'd been able to confirm it worked. It was my weirdo brother that'd set these wheels in motion: Mortimer. We were fraternal twins that'd taken very different paths throughout our lives so far and who acted in vastly different ways as well. I was the the smart one who took school seriously and took pride in my superior intellect, I was also social, sporty and charismatic; meanwhile, Mortimer was quiet and geeky, his grades were poor and he spent an unhealthy amount of times reading about the occult. I'd always lambasted his interests as being childish and mindless. Magic was so unscientific and superstition was for the mentally vacant, that I couldn't respect his obsession with the arcane. I mocked Mortimer for pretty much everything about him; his mediocre grades, his lack of athleticism, his chubby frame, his social awkwardness, his odd interests... He just made it too easy! And that was what had pissed him off enough to swear retribution against me. I'd taken things too far and he would make sure that I was punished accordingly, at least by his twisted standard. After a lifetime of living in my shadow, he wanted to be the respectable brother. The first time I'd become aware of the curse had thankfully been in a less public setting and in hindsight, it had been a test for Mortimer. We'd just sat down at the kitchen table to do our homework, and he'd had a mischievous glint in his eye. "Do you think you could help me with this question? It's pretty tough..." He had preyed on my ego, and I'd walked right into it, like a fly into a spider's web. He knew that I loved flexing my superior intellect, especially when it came to something that he himself admitted defeat on; it gave me the perfect setup to come in and show him how much smarter I was than him. By all measures, since I was in honors classes and he wasn't, I shouldn't have had any trouble. Looking at the page with the math problem on it, before I'd even begun to think about it, I knew that it was something far beneath my ability. Mortimer was in a remedial math class, so I could tell that this was a problem that I would've been able to ace even a couple of years prior! But then I put my pencil to paper and actually looked the equation over. It was the strangest thing, that instead of immediately being able to get it, I was having some difficulty in processing what was in front of me. I tried to work it out in my head, but something about my brain felt funky, like my neural pathways were being obstructed, and if I pushed too hard, then-- **FFFFRRRRT....PLOP!** That had been the first time since infancy that I'd soiled myself, but it would hardly be the last. The mental strain, as minimal as it should have been, had been enough to force an evacuation from my bowels; my underpants filled with a big, squishy load and my mouth hung open like an imbecile while it happened. My own homework hadn't gotten done that night. I'd been so ashamed of my accident that I'd ran out of the room, or waddled rather, and I'd avoided Mortimer for the rest of the evening. He teased me about it, but I should have been suspicious of how easily he let me off the hook for it. After a few barbed quips, he'd stopped, which I would later realize was because he knew that it'd be happening a lot more. The next day at school was a complete nightmare. The first two periods had just been listening to the material and taking notes, which was mindless, but third period had a test, and I pooed myself on the first question. I pooed myself *badly*, to the point that my shorts were totalled. I got sent home for the day, and I lied about my stomach not feeling good. But then it happened again, and again, and again...By the third or forth time that I'd soiled my briefs at school, my parents were furious and looking at solutions. Mortimer had innocently mentioned that perhaps I should go back to diapers, and regardless of my complaints, my parents were convinced by his pitch. It was partially for utility and definitely for punishment, and I felt that sentiment deeply. The first diapers I got were cheap ones from the pharmacy. They were bulky, uncomfortable, and their capacity was middling. I got put into them within a week of the initial accident, and while that'd been bad enough, the diapers themselves were kind of a secondary concern. Sure, they were totally humiliating to wear under my clothes, but there was something far more insidious about them, that my brother had thought out already: Wearing and pooping in diapers meant that the third prong of the curse could really start to take its toll. When I was messing my underwear, I didn't keep them on long enough for the odor to really impact me too badly, but doing my business in babypants led to delayed changes, and that meant I was catching extended whiffs of my own fetid befouling. It'd been the weekend when I'd had my first brush with that horrid little effect. Me and my brother had been quarreling a lot over everything that was happening, and after enough teasing about my sudden lapse in bodily control, I snapped back about the fact that he was taking remedial classes. I called him a 'remedial retard', and that pissed him off something fierce. Wanting to put me in my place, he challenged me to a trivia game. I'd been apprehensive, since I'd found a pattern in the fact that mental strain seemed to activate my bowels into releasing, but my pride was too powerful to deny the challenge. Our youngest sibling, Kent, had also been in attendance and had wanted to join in on the 'fun'. Kent was about half our age, but the trivia game came with different difficulties to play with, which meant we could slap down some 'early elementary' stuff to make him feel included. I'd been apprehensive to let Kent join in, especially with such an easy set of questions, since he'd been aboard the teasing train this week too. There was a distinct irony, because I'd been pretty hard on him about his bedwetting up until that point, and having to wear diapers to bed for it; now with the shoe on the other foot, Kent had been happy to point out not only my hypocrisy, but the fact that daytime 'number two' accidents were far worse than nighttime wetting could hope to be. The trivia game was turn-based. Each player got a question from their respective deck of cards, and if they could answer it correctly, then they received points relative to the difficulty of the question (while taking into account the differing decks). If they answered wrong, then the player got a penalty, and after three penalties, they'd be demoted to a lower deck. If they received a penalty on the lower ranked deck, then they were immediately demoted again. It was supposed to be an anti-frustration measure for floundering players, but it honestly just came across as a humiliating demotion. There were ten different difficulty levels, which went from preschool level all the way to 'genius', which were typically ridiculously difficult questions that only PhD holders would have a chance to understand. There was also an inverse mechanic, that if a player got five questions right in a row, that they'd be promoted to a higher difficulty level to keep things balanced. Kent got level two, Mortimer got level four, and I had opted for level six. In effect, that gave Kent questions intended for kids who were five to seven, Mortimer got questions for kids who were ten to thirteen, and I was getting questions for high school juniors. The game didn't go in my favor, not even a little bit. The first question that I'd had to answer was something about the periodic table, which was something I knew I had a firm grasp on, but when I went to search for the answer in my mind... I pooped in my diaper. It hadn't been a lot, thankfully, but it'd been enough that I could feel it. It also hadn't been too loud, so I just got a penalty for not answering in time, instead of mocked for soiling myself on the first question. By the time I reached my third penalty and got knocked down to the fifth difficulty, I wasn't just in last place, but my third bowel movement had come with a sloppy fart that made my brothers roar with laughter. They both asked if I'd just pooped myself, to which I of course denied, but the smell of my feces were beginning to linger in my immediate radius. I really didn't notice it at first, that my thoughts were becoming more sluggish and hazy; the more I smelled my own dirtied diaper, the more my intellect would be blocked off. Another penalty on my next turn sent me off to Mortimer's level, which made another mechanic of the game become relevant: it a player failed to answer their question correctly, then another player could opt to answer it, to get half the points that were originally on the table. Mortimer made use of that on my next turn, when I'd again failed to answer the question, and had instead pinched off yet another turd in the ever-filling poosack I had around my waist. "Wow, that should've been an easy one. Guess you're going down another level! At this rate, you'll be answering the same questions as Kent!" Mortimer smirked at me. He was definitely right, which I hated, and the smell of my own poop was really beginning to mess with my mind. While I wasn't aware of it, I'd temporarily lost over a fourth of my IQ points, which had made it even harder to focus on the game that I had no chance at winning. "Name the study of rocks." Had been my next question, which was something that even a third grader would have known, and I knew that I must know it too. This time though, instead of actually trying to think about it and attempting to uncover the information in my brain, I blurted out an answer: "Rockology!" That had been wrong, of course, but it had stopped me from having a payload squeeze out into my pants. If I'd known better back then, then I would have played the whole game like that, since I would have at least stopped myself from sloughing off precious permanent IQ points every time I pooed myself. Better to simply sound like an idiot than to be complicit in turning myself into one. That dropped me down to Kent's level, and I had the odd thought that I was actually starting to enjoy both the feel and smell of my soiled diaper. My mind felt fuzzy and that made me feel giddy, which put a big dumb grin on my face; a little drool was starting to seep past my slackened lips too, to dribble down onto my chin. "What is three multiplied by three?" "Duhh...Uhhhh..." Strangely, I didn't even feel like I knew that one. All the other questions, I'd at least known that the answer was in my brain, just inaccessible to me. This time, it sounded genuinely foreign. I tried to think about it, which was a mistake, because it resulted in a gurgling eruption in my diaper and the sound of multiple wet plops. "Eww! I think he just poopied again...! A-also, the answer is NINE." Kent smugly stated, looking very proud to steal a question from his supposedly genius big brother. "Yuck...I think you're right, Kent. That brings you down to level one, bro...Which, according to the box, is for ages 'two to four'. On the bright side, you can't get any more penalties! But you're so far behind, that I don't think it'll matter..." "Me can still win! Me da smarterest!" I'd insisted, pointing my thumb at my chest, even while drool was on my chin and stool was packed into my diaper. "Oh? Well, we'll make it interesting then. One final round, and if you get your question right, then you can have all of my points." Mortimer grinned, with the knowledge that I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting anything correct. "...If you can't even get a question right from the lowest difficulty though, and you lose, then you have to march your stinky butt up to mom and dad and tell them what a retard you are. Sound fair?" My brain was so discombobulated at that moment, with the fumes of my dirty diaper having effectively lobotomized me, even if just temporarily, that I readily agreed to the wager. I'd been rendered far too stupid at that time to recognize what a sloppy pitfall my brother had set up for me. "Last question... What is 'two plus two'?" I knew I had to really put on my thinking cap for this one, because all the marbles were on the line here! I furrowed my brow and looked intensely at the card in my brother's hand. "Hmmm...Nnggh..." My face got red and scrunched up even more, slobber began to freely flow from my pursed lips, and a large snot bubble started to form in one of my nostrils. "HHHHHRRRRGGGG!" It was like I was straining to lift up a car, not like I was calculating an insultingly easy equation that even a lot of SPED students would have no issue with. Like a boiler getting ready to blow, I was blasting loud farts into my diaper every couple of seconds, and semi-solid logs were following most of them out effortlessly. With how much mental strain I was exerting, it probably looked like I was going to blow a gasket and damage my noggin for real. "Two...plus...two...two...plus...two..." I repeated between exhausted grunts, until my eyes suddenly crossed and my tongue lolled out, "..Is POOOO-POOOO!" And like I answered, I also did. I filled my diaper with what must have been over a pound of piping hot 'brownies', while basically collapsing in complete exhaustion from trying to flex my brain so hard. I'd been a laughingstock to my brothers, but I could have lived with that; what was harder to live with was filling my end of that bet, which I was still stupid enough to agree to do. Getting up, my smelly diaper sagging with what was at least eight or nine *permanent* IQ points, I had waddled off to tell my parents what I'd done and what I was. That event would become the catalyst for my fall to become even more precipitous.