You Break It, You Become It

Debra sighed, looking down at her charge’s stupid toy bug: an amber see-through spider with a wind-up key. He’d asked her to watch it for him while he’d been gone to the bathroom, and the little twerp hadn’t come back yet. She missed back in the days when babysitting Greg had been something simple and not as much of a chore as it was now.

“Hey, are you done yet?” She asked, turning away from the little rubber spider with a scowl on her face. She didn’t receive a response, and the girl started to worry that maybe the brat had accidentally fallen or something. She stood up to see what was wrong, only to hear a loud crunching under her foot.

Debra yelped in surprise, looking down to see the source of the sound—and no doubt the sound of quite a bit of drama tonight. It was the toy spider, somehow having moved from the table to the floor when she wasn’t looking.

The girl’s mind raced as she stared down at the broken toy, eyes wide and heart beginning to pound. Even if Greg could somehow forgive her for this, his parents surely wouldn’t! And the dumb little plastic thing looked expensive too, having several different moving parts. She wondered how she could hide it—or if she could blame Greg for breaking the toy—only to yelp again as she heard a sound to her right.

This time it was the brat in question, and Debra’s mind raced as she struggled to find a way to explain herself. “I’m sorry, the thing moved by itself!” She managed. Not the most eloquent excuse, but she prayed it would be enough to mollify the child.

“You know, my last babysitter broke my bug too…” He glared at her quietly. “My parents will be most displeased.”

Debra blinked, holding up a finger. “Okay, first off: stop talking like a kid from The Shining, that’s really starting to creep me out. Second: isn’t that good news? Doesn’t that mean we can fix him?”

Greg scoffed. “Carrie’s not a ‘him’.” He tilted his head slightly, nodding at her words. “But yes, I do suppose we could fix him. The thing we used last time is in my parents’ garage.” He turned towards the room in question, pausing to look over his shoulder. “Be sure to bring Carrie’s remains.”

Debra shivered slightly, scooping up the broken toy in her hands and walking after the kid. “Creepy-ass little monster.” She muttered, looking down to the broken toy accusingly. “This is all your fault.”

Greg held the door for her as she walked into the garage. Debra offered him a nod of thanks; then gawped as she saw how high-tech the garage was. This was nothing like what she’d expected from their house! They lived in such a mundane place, but this room looked like something out of Star Trek!

“Carry him over here.” Greg pointed to a glowing circular pad on the ground as he walked to a nearby computer. “Last time I made her too stiff… I think this time I’ll need to go with a rubbery body, something unbreakable so we don’t have this happen again.”

Debra nodded, walking onto the pad and looking back to Greg with a rueful chuckle. “Yes, ‘unbreakable’ would be a nice trait for this little bug to have.” She rolled her eyes, wondering why the brat hadn’t done this in the first place. “So what do I do with the spider-bug-thing?”

“Do?” Greg asked, arching an eyebrow. “You don’t need to ‘do’ anything with her; you are her.” He said the words calmly, tapping a button on the computer’s keyboard.

Before Debra could say anything, the pad beneath her began to glow with an unearthly violet hue, and she squeaked in surprise, looking down in time for a flash to momentarily white out her vision.

She had to blink her eyes at least half a dozen times to clear her vision and still stars danced at the corners of her eyes. “What the hell did you do to me?” Debra asked accusingly, her eyes wide with shock. She took a juddering, jerky step forward like her joints were stiff, and the girl looked to the kid in horror as he simply sat cross-legged.

“My toy needed a replacement. You’ll do.”

His words chilled her to the bone, and Debra tried to run only for her body to stiffen completely around herself. “Wh-what’s going on?” She stammered, her eyes wide with fear. Her arms cramped and began to rise without her consent, and Debra’s heart began to pound. “What did you do to my body? I can’t control myself?”

With a loud and uncomfortable pop, her arms pulled further back than they should have been capable of, and Debra squeaked. It wasn’t that it was painful—if anything, it was the opposite, that it wasn’t painful in the slightest. Her whole body was so numb, it was like she was in a dream, feeling things through some mind-body disconnect!

“I don’t know. Why couldn’t you control yourself around Carrie? That wasn’t very nice what you did to her, you know.” Greg said flatly, his eyes dull as he watched Debra panic.

“W-what?” Debra stammered, feeling her hands begin to cramp. She looked up to find that they were shrinking smaller and smaller, her fingers sinking back into her palms which were balling up into the round tips that had marked the toy spider’s forelegs.

The sight brought with it a wave of cold realization, and icy fear howled at her heart as she looked to the child—no, the monster—on the ground before her. “That toy was your last babysitter, wasn’t it?”

He nodded slowly, and Debra became  aware of an acute whirring sound on her back.

Through some herculean effort, she managed to turn her neck slightly, her eyes widening at the sight of a massive key jutting from the base of her spine, turning slowly and inexorably, as though it were winding away her humanity.

“N-no!” Debra screamed, her head easily returning to its natural position, fixed forward. It was a monstrous metal thing, and now that she knew of its presence she could feel it inside of herself, twisting her body to its cruel machinations.

“I’m sorry,” Greg began, his tone indicating he was anything but, “but at this point you’re as much an observer as I am. You should have kept a better eye on Carrie for me.”

Debra hiccupped out a sob as she realized how helpless she was, an aching sensation coming from either side of her body. “Please, there has to be some way to change me back don’t make me a spider toy I don’t want to be a spider toy!”

The words tumbled from her mouth in a rush and were punctuated by a loud tearing from her top. She didn’t need to look down to know that she’d just grown smooth and clear spider legs, her plastic body just as golden as the previous toy had been. With a terrified tremble, she realized that she could feel her legs growing out, so empty and clear.

They were noticeably different from her original limbs, an emptiness to these though they were solid plastic. Without skin and bones, they felt oddly hollow—though Debra had a sneaking suspicion that the rest of her body would begin to feel like this before too long.

Debra whimpered as her deepest dreads were confirmed a moment later: her legs beginning to feel so much lighter and thinner. Before she could fully process their changes, they started to draw apart, her hips widening and sending them to either side of her body, running in parallel to her new plastic limbs.

This had the added effect of throwing her onto the ground, and Debra sobbed loudly as she fell onto her four new legs, her body now held by them and her original pair. This seemed to be the cue her body needed to change further, her posterior beginning to swell along with her lower back.

They grew as though they were being inflated with an ache that set her teeth on edge. She could feel her backside ballooning out, growing larger and larger just like that of a bug. Worse, she could feel it becoming that same round, smooth plastic; that same accursed material that was sure to haunt her for the rest of her… How long would she be changed for?

Debra began to panic, and she looked up to Greg with wide and pleading eyes. “You’re not going to change me back, are you?” She hiccupped. Her heart clenched, and tears began to slip from her eyes as she realized she might never see anyone she loved again.

“Why would I ever do that? I like having people as plastic pets.”

She had expected the answer, but that didn’t make it any gentler for her. The girl hiccupped loudly, her eyes wide as she tried to think of something, anything to say. The cold plastic of her rounded abdomen had begun to creep up along her unchanged back, leaving her with a horrifyingly numb feeling around her heart, which began to vanish within her hollow body.

A desperate plea finally came to mind, but she’d taken too long. Her lungs had been swallowed by the callous plastic that was overwhelming her body, and Debra could do little more than wheeze helplessly as it began to encase her head.

The feeling of this latest affront was worse than anything Debra had thought possible, made only worse by the fact that her hair was beginning to fall out at the root, cascading to the ground around her in small piles. Her tears fell upon these piles in turn, and the girl desperately tried to mouth her last plea as she felt her head begin to shrink and her jaw began to split into a pair of pedipalps.

The last thing to go were her eyes, which dissolved into a pair of shiny white orbs on her amber face. To her eternal dismay, Debra realized that she could still see through them; could still look at the world around her through a glossy plastic gaze.

She was a person-sized toy spider, a monster made of plastic with a metal motor on her back. But the transformation wasn’t yet done with her, a fact that she realized with another clench from her memory of a heart.

The metal in her abdomen began to creep out, small but strong joints working their way into the base of her legs; gears mating them with the motor that had been implanted into her back by the device she’d stupidly stood on.

They connected with loud clicks that reverberated through her body, gears from her motor spinning cogs in her abdomen, which moved the pins in her legs in turn. She jerkingly took one step forward; then another and another after that. All six of her legs on the ground were carrying her closer to Greg; her top two legs forever frozen in a menacing pose.

And as Debra continued to creep forward, she began to shrink. It wasn’t something she noticed at first, but by the time she’d lost a foot in height she noticed that Greg wasn’t growing bigger from proximity alone.

Down, down, down she went; growing smaller and smaller by the second. Somehow shrinking made the day’s events so much worse, a constant reminder of Debra’s current insignificance. She watched as the child before her grew ever-larger, looming over her like a giant as she reached his feet.

She couldn’t be any much larger than two feet from rear leg to front—and that counted that fact that her foremost legs were poised forward. Debra trembled mentally as Greg moved to pick her up, realizing that she was going to be stuck like this forever. She was going to be a toy for the rest of her life,a light and little plastic plaything.

Greg gripped her key with his small fingers—impossibly huge compared to her current size. He turned the dial on Debra’s back slowly, cranking it with a grin on his face. “You know, I guess it’s a good thing you were the one to break Carrie. You taught me that she had a way to escape.”

A brief flame of anger surged in Debra’s heart, only to be quashed by a damp despair. Escape? Did he mean by being broken? How long would it take for her too to wish that she’d be shattered underfoot?

“But don’t worry,” her new owner continued, a sadistic smile on his face, “I made sure that you won’t be able to. You’ll be like this forever; long after I’ve had my fill of you.” He set Debra on the ground.

Helpless in a body that was not her own, Debra began to clack forward slowly, her legs moving under the motor’s control. She mentally sobbed, feeling her mind already beginning to erode. This was it, this was her new life; her existence; her forever.

The only thing she could do now was pray for insanity—and hope that eternity wasn’t as long as it sounded.