Xenomorphic

Chapter 35: Lining Up the Pieces

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That last month at camp had gone by swiftly, as had the whole past half a year. Indeed, six months have passed since Asteria flew through the Sea Monsters, six months since Asteria became a mother to a trio of little girls, six months since Annabeth was turned into a four-year-old with the mind of a four-month-old.

Gods was that a roller coaster of events.

Firstly, the number of diapers Asteria had to change. Annabeth might have looked four, but she had all the mental function of a baby, and therefore required the necessary items for a baby. However, there was a learning curve present in children of Athena, and Annabeth was even a cut above her siblings. Through her telepathy, and a generous amount of help from Bethany and Bertha, Annabeth's much older half-sisters, Asteria was able to progress her youngest through years and years of learning in just months.

Currently, Annabeth, with the body of a four-and-a-half-year-old (the child made sure to remind everyone that she was four and a half), had the mind of a ten-year-old. She could instantly do simple math in her head, and she could do more complex math by writing her finger through the air to set up the problem. She knew generous amounts of history and geography, biology and chemistry, and anatomy and physiology. She was a very smart young girl, but she still had her rough edges.

Well, not necessarily rough...but...quirkiness.

Especially in one area.

Asteria, in her fourteen years of life, had potty trained three girls. The first was Angel, and Asteria had done that from over a hundred meters away, using her mind. Angel had been the easiest, because she was eager to learn and didn't like having her poop smushed against her butt by the training pants the School had provided. Amelia had been the second, and Asteria had her potty trained in under two weeks, day and night time; it had taken only one package of pull-ups, and a bit of psychology. Back then, when she had had to babysit the Hunt's resident baby, the very first diaper that Asteria had to change had been the only one she was going to change, and so she motivated Amelia using operant conditioning. Now, the third child Annabeth had potty trained was obvious: Annabeth.

The problem with Annabeth was that, unlike her adoptive sister and spiritual sister...she had wanted absolutely nothing to do with the toilet.

Being a telepath made Asteria the only mother in the world that could instantly identify any al kinds of problems that her children had, and Annabeth's problem hadn't been that she was afraid of the toilet, or was too lazy to go to the toilet, or didn't want to ask to go to the toilet, or liked using her training pants as her toilet, or was afraid that if she was potty trained, she would lose something...it was that she enjoyed the attention she got whenever she had her pants changed.

Back when Asteria had been training Amelia, she had yet to embrace her full maternal role and was simply training the child so that she wouldn't have to go through the inconvenience of diaper changes. It had been purely for the benefit of herself, which was why it had been so easy to suddenly ignore Amelia after she had accident, and borderline emotionally scar the child into being fully potty trained.

When it came to Annabeth, though, Asteria did not even try to hide her love for her youngest daughter, and that was why she couldn't just turn on a dime and give the four-year-old the cold shoulder and emotionally shatter her...and so attention was given, and Annabeth had stayed away from the potty.

In her childish mind, it was simple: keep going in her pants, keep getting Mommy's attention.

Of course, things got worse because Amelia and Ariel did not comprehend why their sister wasn't potty training successfully. They couldn't have comprehended the details of Annabeth's psyche if they had tried, and simply thought that their sister was just having some kind of problem. So, like the responsible big sisters that they were, they sought to help Annabeth in their own unique (read: exceedingly irritating) way.