✅ Younger Than You Think?

"N: Reading Circle"

As Miss Magdalene started to read, Iriña took a chance to look at the other kids around her. Some of them seemed scared, and others were more bored. Still others seemed to be confused, not quite sure what was going on around them. It was hard to imagine what kind of drugs or torture could have caused that; but Iriña decided that she was going to fo whatever it took to make sure that didn't happen to her. But with all their different moods, everybody sat quietly on the carpet with their legs crossed, and watched the teacher. That was perhaps more intimidating than anything else.

She tried to remember if she had ever seen them before. If these people were making a habit of abducting people from Titansville, then there was a good chance they would have targeted someone she'd spoken to in the past. It was a town now, not just a community, but it was still smaller than most towns. And in the chat rooms where Iriña had first heard that a place like that could exist, there were probably about a thousand people with medical conditions that made them smaller, people looking for somewhere they wouldn't be treated like children. She guessed that they would be the main prey of her kidnappers, because they were less likely to be noticed when they went missing. The actual residents of Titansville had houses the right size for them, jobs where they were accepted, and friends who didn't loom over them. Most of them wouldn't go out much; and she was sure that it would have been big news if any of the residents disappeared without warning.

There were perhaps a dozen people here; it was hard to count while they were all sitting around and she didn't have a clear view. About two thirds of them were girls; maybe a little more. That made Iriña wonder again about the motivations of the mommies and daddies who would want to 'adopt' an adult coerced into behaving like a child.

The teacher was reading from a storybook, but her eyes weren't really on the page. She had probably recited the same words so many times that they were permanently engraved in her memory. Iriña had read that a lot of repetition was necessary to get a normal child to learn something new; probably even more if you wanted to brainwash an unwilling person. And every new victim who came through here probably had to hear the same stories, probably hundreds of times. So as she spoke, Magdalene's eyes were scanning her audience for any sign of disobedience or inattention.

Iriña watched the teacher who was watching all of them. A small part of her mind was paying attention to the story, in case there was some kind of quiz later. It was weird even by the standards of children's stories, because the main plot seemed to be about a little boy and a little girl who were in school learning how to be good children so they could make their mommy and daddy happy. A clear metaphor for thewas all of the kids here were being treated; the situation that their captors wanted them to believe that they were in. It was almost like some kind of fairy tale, but all the magic here was on top of a mundane world where big kids could learn to be little kids. That was the insidious part of the story, Iriña quickly realised. Nobody could just talk you into being a baby, but someone hearing tales like this often enough could start to accept it as a part of their reality. If all the stories you heard took place in the same world, and that world's sense of what was normal was just a little different, you might start to take it in without realising. By presenting it as a hypothetical, a story that nobody expected you to take literally, they could get you used to thinking about stories in a world that really worked like that.

And once she started paying attention to the details, Iriña was sure that Magdalene was adapting the story as she went. A couple of times, after a glance around at all her students told her that she might be losing someone's attention, she might give the girl in the story a ribbon that kind of resembled the one the problem child was wearing, or little tweaks like that. Something to help them engage more, perhaps. And for every student where she spotted her mentioning something visible, Iriña was sure there were a dozen more subtle references to some captive's hopes or fears, hobbies, or interests. Something that would give the story a more personal meaning. It was horrible.