Scott felt dizzy, his vision blurring. Vaguely he heard someone shout "Look!" Then it felt like a weight was being removed from his chest and finally his head cleared a little bit, but just a little. It was still so hard to think...
His parents led him to his bed in his own room where he slept--like a baby, one might say, but he woke up in an hour. He looked around, looked himself over... He was himself again. His mother was standing over him. "What happened, Mom?" he managed to say.
"You and the baby sort of... melted together," she said. "That's a very powerful medallion you found. I don't know where it came from. Are you okay?"
"I just feel like I need to drink something, and sleep. Maybe crawl around a bit... what am I saying? The baby must be inside me. That's why I'm not feeling so good. It's as if I'm two people."
"You don't really seem like two people to me," said his mother.
"Mom... that must be because a baby doesn't think about a lot of things. There aren't that many strange thoughts being mixed up with mine. Just some instincts." But unconsciously he found himself staring at his mother's chest and starting to drool. "Damn it, Mom, I need to do something about this! Go away, please... I need to get some sleep..."
She left him alone, but he woke up in another half hour and got some orange juice--the baby wasn't influencing him enough to force him to get milk, but walking was very difficult for some reason. Then Scott went back to bed. He couldn't get to sleep this time and instead he just lay there. He tried to get up and watch TV but found he couldn't concentrate.
It wasn't until 1 AM that the next 12 hours had run out on the medallion. Scott yelled for his family--in his mental state, yelling did come easy--and his mother helped him walk into the living room. Scott knew that that experiment had been a failure. He and baby Scott could be combined into one person with the medallion, but not in a way that would do any good. But could he even fix it?
He picked up the slippers he had dropped just before the end of the birth, and lay down on the floor. Then he put the medallion around his neck and touched it to the slippers. He could feel his body shift around, and his head start to clear. He felt his breasts enlarge, and his penis disappear away to a small nub. He felt a different kind of dizziness--the gas he had had when he was last in this condition. He felt pain--labor pains, just like before, but Scott knew this time that it wouldn't last long. The baby had been almost completely out at the moment he had originally lost the slippers. A minute later, Sharon clamped and cut the cord. Some time after that, it was over. Scott was once again his mother, and he once again had a baby.
"So once wasn't enough," said Aunt Sharon. "You had to give birth to yourself twice?"
"I wasn't planning on it," answered Scott. "The baby was messing around with my head. We were sort of merged and I had to unmerge." He looked at the baby, who Sharon had put in the crib. "I bet he didn't want to be merged with me either. I wonder if it affected him?"
"Do you feel any aftereffects?"
"Not really."
"Then if merging and unmerging didn't affect you, it shouldn't affect the baby either, right?"
"I don't know," said Scott. "The baby has a weak mind and I have a strong mind. Compared to a baby, anyway. Wouldn't a strong mind affect a weak mind a lot more than the other way around?"
Though soon the answer became fairly obvious....
