✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

Epilogue: Their Office Baby (3/3)

This bonus chapter is for liljennie, with thanks for all the support that you have given me.

Ffrances was jumping up and down in the passenger seat as we reached Upper Ashfields. I didn't think I'd seen her so excited before. I vaguely knew which parts of the town the convention would be using, so I went straight to the northern end of town and parked behind the Committee offices. I didn't want to embarrass my little one too much.

"Now," I said, "stay close to Mommy, and make sure you hold my hand until we meet some friends. I don't want my baby girl getting lost." She blushed and giggled, but waited obediently as I ce around to the other side of the car and unbuckled her seatbelt. This was a perfect day; and perhaps my chance to get a break from the punishments of the last week. I had wondered if Tess would order me to take on the baby role today; it would probably have been a fair response to the way I had forced her to be little so much over the last six months. But Ffrances had been so excited to run around like a toddler in public, amongst people who would understand. It wouldn't have been fair to make her miss out because of my bad behaviour, and I was glad that Tess could accept that.

I took Ffrances's hand, and led her down one of the footpaths through the park. There was a chance somebody would see us here; but I doubted that anybody would comment. Her dress was frilly and childish, but that wasn't entirely out of the ordinary. I'd seen on the news lately that some Japanese pop star had started dressing like a little kid as part of her stage aesthetic, and so it had reached the stage of being a 'weird' fashion; something that people might look down on but wouldn't actually comment about. Just like hair dye in primary colours, facial piercings, spiked hair, or visible tattoos had been in previous generations.

We reached the gates into the Rectory Gardens without seeing anybody else in any case. That was one reason I had chosen a quiet part of the surrounding area. There was a man sitting behind a desk next to the gate, with a clipboard in front of him. It took me a couple of seconds to recognise Cain Gordon; I'd met him once before, but he looked very different when he was in a customer-facing role.

"Hi," I said with a grin. "Cain, isn't it?"

He pointed at the badge on his chest, which had his first name written in blue marker; as '@PermissionerGordon', presumably a nickname from the forums. I tried to remember if I'd seen his comments online before, but nothing sprung to mind.

"Yeah," he said with a smile. "I wasn't sure if I'd see you here. I mean, you kind of had that vibe the last time we met, but I didn't want to say anything in case I was wrong. So... this is..." he gestured towards Ffrances.

"My baby," I said. "My fiancée."

"Pleased to meet you," he said, and offered a hand to shake. Ffrances blushed and stepped back, like she was hiding behind me to keep away from the stranger. But a second later she shook his hand, still blushing more than ever. She was really getting into this role, even without any hypnosis, and I was sure that she was going to have the time of her life.

Cain handed both of us registration forms, where we could write down our names and usernames. To check against the list of people he was expecting, I was sure. He gave us name badges as well, stickers about the size of a normal index card. There were a dozen different coloured markers on the desk, so we were free to decorate the badges however they wanted. I was amused to see that there were little sticker sheets on which the symbols '@', '&', and '¶' had been printed a hundred times, as well as the logos of a couple of popular social media sites. Symbols that wouldn't be easy to draw with the clumsy tips of marker pens, but which people might want to use so that people would be able to connect them to their online identities. I took a ¶ and a @, which I used to prefix my usernames from Fetish Library and CritMass; while Ffrances had two @s to represent her names on FL and on Kernigan's fan forum.