✅ Younger Than You Think?

"M: School Room"

The place looked like a reception school classroom, although some of the desks might have been a little larger than usual. It was certainly better fitted to Iriña's size than the schools she had been to before. In a way it felt almost like the architecture in Titansville, where everything was made for people who were up to four feet tall. But it was still different, because this didn't look like it was a place for adults at all. It was a scene fo torture, where they would be treated like little kids again.

The elevator came out in a short corridor, with four doors off it. They were all battered wood, and painted with enough streaks and visible drips to indicate that the bright primary colours had been slapped on by someone without much skill in interior decorating. The school room was behind a blue door, with came out beside a teacher's desk. Then there was a large grid of desks, currently turned to face the front of the room but with angled edges which suggested that size individual desks could be placed together in a ring for group activities. And at the back of the room, the tiles were replaced by thick carpet. There, a dozen children were sitting around while a woman in a severe black and white dress paced back and forth. Iriña could only guess that she was the teacher, Maggie; which meant that the children looking up at her were most likely adults with various growth disorders, coerced into playing the role of children by the same kind of threats that Iriña had given in to.

"Good afternoon!" the teacher said, in an artificially bright voice. Iriña had only recently seen the sky outside, with the sun somewhere below the horizon, and she was sure that it couldn't be afternoon at all. But she didn't know how many time zones they had flown through, so there was no way for her to tell right now whether the sun had recently set here, or was about to rise. In the schoolroom it didn't seem to make much difference. In here it could be morning or afternoon, and nobody would know any different. "Do we have a new little baby here? Come sit down, sweetie, we're just about to start storytime, and then you'll have a chance to get to know everyone before naptime."

"No nap!" Iriña said quickly, the fear she'd had before starting to return. She didn't know what the rules were at this school, but she needed to make it clear from the start that she wasn't going to be taking a nap with all the other faux-children.

"Ohh, somebody's cranky. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be ready for a nap after storytime. You must be tired at this time of day. We can help if you need–"

"Actually, no." Sylvie cut in, squeezing Iriña's hand to reassure her. "Kelly will be skipping naptime. Jeremy and I have been poring over her medical notes while she was on the way here, and I understand that Lyle also managed to find some things that we missed. Her drug interactions chart is insane, and I must insist that we don't give her anything until we properly understand the effects. Naptime is good for kids, but I don't want to risk her life on it."

"She'll get tired and cranky without a nap," the teacher insisted.

"I won't," Iriña said proudly, letting herself ignore the slight lisp which probably made her sound a whole lot less authoritative. "I haven't slept in five years, until they dosed me with whatever it was that almost killed me on the way here. There's a little structure in my brainstem missing, I can't actually sleep, and any kind of sedative is almost certain to be a disaster if I'm not already in an emergency room."

"It's true," Sylvie nodded. "There's articles about her in medical journals. I missed those, but Lyle looked them up. She can't sleep. First the doctors tried to find a sedative that would let her sleep without causing seizures and brain damage, but they failed. Just like they did with everyone else who has this condition. And then her crazy disgraced-pharmacologist neighbour figured that they could try a pill that lets her function without sleep instead. So, no naps for Kelly."