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. Then everything sudden got dark.
Scott couldn't understand what had happened. He was no longer lying on the living room floor. He felt warmth all around him and some kind of pressure pushing in on him from all sides. The pressure came in waves and was getting uncomfortable. He felt like he was being squeezed to death.
As suddenly as the darkness had enveloped him, there was light; it was a blurry and indistinct light coming from somewhere above his head. He felt himself being pushed toward the light.
At first he felt cool air on the top of his head. Then his face emerged from the darkness and Scott suddenly realized what had happened: When he'd touched the slipper to the medallion he had expected that he would turn back into his mother and give birth to himself again and separate his and the babies minds again. He'd been half right: their minds were separated but he was wrong about who would be giving birth to whom.
Scott watched as his aunt cut the cord that was attaching him to his 'mother' who had not long ago been his baby, who was also himself. The confusion caused by this train of thought, as well as the quick slap on his rump to get him to breathe on his own cause Scott to start crying as only a newborn baby can.
