The Nursery Trials

An original story by SolaraScott

Chapter 44 - Trial 8

The last echo of the buzzer hadn’t even faded when the whirring began again. Ivy’s breath caught as the padded ground beneath them began to tremble. Slowly, a wide seam formed in the floor directly ahead, the lines hissing with steam as the panels pulled apart and slid away. A mechanical groan followed, and then something massive began to rise from below. Ivy watched, speechless, as an entire room emerged from the depths of the warehouse floor, lifting and unfolding like a pop-up storybook built on an industrial scale.

It was a living room.

But not just any living room. It was massive, designed to make them feel small, much like the earlier trials Ivy had experienced. The carpet looked thick and plush, and a pink and cream checkerboard stretched from one end to the other. There were two couches and a towering playpen in the corner with enough room for all five of them. A TV screen was built into the far wall, framed with cartoonish pastel trim. Shelves lined the room with toys, bottles, and towering stacks of diapers. 

None of them moved at first.

Ivy’s mouth hung open, her mittened hands planted beside her on the soft floor. The whirring above them quieted again, the machinery locking into stillness. Around her, the others sat just as stunned. Mason tilted his head to the side, as if not quite trusting what he was seeing.

Ivy swallowed hard and looked away from the furniture, back to the others, trying to read them. She needed to see something, a tremor, a hesitation, a sluggish blink, a falter in coordination. Anything to suggest the medicine the Mistress had mentioned was real. Anything that might confirm someone had been dosed.

But they all looked the same, and Ivy still felt nothing, was she the undercover caregiver? The thought terrified her. What if the others caught on? What if they figured out it her was?

Ivy’s breath hitched, and she forced it down, tried to breathe slower. Don’t draw attention. Don’t look like the one in control. But she couldn’t shake the sense that every eye was measuring her, just as she was measuring them. That every blink, every twitch, every nervous glance was another data point, another tick toward suspicion.

If she moved too confidently, they’d assume she hadn’t been drugged. If she hesitated too much, they’d assume she was pretending.

She caught Finn’s eye again, and this time his stare lingered, and Ivy was suddenly very aware of just how hard it was to control her expression.

For a long, stretched moment, no one moved. The silence held them all in its grip, the wide, pastel-swathed living room before them. Ivy didn’t breathe, her heart fluttering behind her ribs like a trapped bird, as the others remained seated, stunned into stillness. The light overhead buzzed softly, bathing them in the sickly glow of manufactured calm. Then—finally—someone moved.

Finn planted his mittened hands against the padded floor and began to rise. Ivy watched him closely, every nerve in her body humming. He got one foot beneath him, then the other, his onesie stretching at the joints as he pushed himself upright—and then, suddenly, his arms buckled. His knees hit the floor with a soft thump, and he collapsed forward onto his hands, catching himself just in time to avoid a full faceplant. He let out a grunt of effort, his head hanging low as his arms trembled beneath him, visibly shaking with exertion.

A gasp sounded nearby—Maria, maybe, her breath catching, clearly about to ask him if he was alright. But what emerged wasn’t speech, it wasn't even words, it was babble, high-pitched and incoherent. A stream of nonsense syllables tumbled from her lips like a toddler’s first attempt at language. "Buh... muh... tah–" The words slurred into one another, soft and clumsy. She slapped a mittened hand over her mouth, face going crimson, her body curling in on itself with shame.

Ivy’s heart sank.

Across the circle, Mason shifted to glance at the others, only for a thin line of drool to escape the corner of his mouth. It dripped down his chin in a lazy thread, unnoticed by him at first, until he blinked and swiped at it with his sleeve, eyes darting in embarrassment. 

Her gut twisted. So it’s real, she thought, throat dry. Mistress hadn’t been lying and it was growing increasingly clear to Ivy that she was the odd one out.

Ivy stared at Finn. He remained on all fours, breathing heavily, his knees trembling inside the booties.

Ivy’s heart thudded in her chest, louder now than the mechanical hum of the warehouse, more audible than the strained breaths of the others. Every instinct screamed at her to do something, to move, to run—but there was nowhere to run, and worse, nowhere to hide. Plus, acting in such a way would only draw attention to herself and then she’d be voted out. She watched Finn struggling on all fours, his arms trembling like twigs ready to snap, his face drawn in effort. Maria sat frozen, hands still pressed to her mouth. Mason was trying to compose himself but failing, his eyes flitting from contestant to contestant like a cornered animal looking for the first break in the circle. 

If I’m the only one not broken, she thought, they’ll come for me.

So she moved, not with the certainty of someone executing a plan, but with the frantic resolve of someone leaping off a cliff because it’s better than being pushed.

“F-Fuh…” she stammered, forcing the word through lips that wanted to shape it cleanly. She garbled it on purpose, pushed the syllables around her tongue like marbles. “Fuh… F-Finnah…”

The babble poured from her mouth in a stream of syrup-thick gibberish. “Fuh… ba… ba-ba… Finnahhh.” Her cheeks flamed as she let the nonsense slur outward, loud enough to be heard. It echoed, slightly distorted by the warehouse’s sterile acoustics, and she saw heads turn toward her.

Perfect.

She pushed herself onto all fours, exaggerating the movement as though her limbs had become sluggish. The booties made her knees slide across the padded floor, her mittened hands grappling with no grip, her diaper rustling beneath her with every movement. She crawled forward toward Finn, who still hadn’t risen from the ground. Her breath came in short, gasping puffs as if simply crawling took all her strength.

Then, halfway there, she let her hand ‘slip.’

Her right arm collapsed dramatically beneath her, and she let her body slump onto her side with a soft grunt, sprawling clumsily on the floor. Her head turned toward the others, just enough to let them see. Her back arched slightly, presenting her diaper in full view. The thick padding bulged between her legs, the pastel print on the seat still clean and dry.

Time to fix that. If anything would convince the other contestants that she had been drugged, this would.

She exhaled slowly, letting her bladder relax, and a faint warmth spread through the core of her diaper, the padding swelling as it drank in the sudden flood. She felt it wrap around her, pressing back against her with the shameful familiarity she hated. A soft hiss was followed by the muffled sound of squishing as her body soaked the padding, the diaper growing heavier.

She held still for a heartbeat, letting it sink in—then blinked in mock confusion. Her limbs twitched. She babbled again, softer this time. “Mmm… uh… ahh...”

The others were watching now, looking to her with pity in their eyes. Her plan was working, if she kept this up, the others would never suspect her as the caregiver.

Maria turned to Sarah and whispered something incoherent. Mason glanced at Finn, then back at her, yet no one moved.

Ivy lay there on the floor, mittened fingers twitching, diaper soakek and her mouth slack with feigned helplessness.

Let them wonder, she thought, her eyes fixed on the floor.

Let them think I’m just like them.

She didn’t know for certain if it would work, but it certainly seemed to be.

The others began to move, slowly at first, like figures wading through syrup. None of them looked stable. Mason struggled to get onto all fours, grunting softly as his mittened hands slipped against the padded floor. Maria followed, her limbs trembling as she pushed herself upright and began her clumsy crawl toward the living room. Sarah made a low noise of frustration as she pushed forward with a kind of bitter determination. Even Finn, the most physically confident among them, looked like he was dragging his own weight uphill, inch by inch, the drugs turning every motion into an effort.

Ivy moved with them, careful to match their pace—no faster, no slower. Her diaper squished wetly between her thighs with every shift, the padding spreading out and pressing awkwardly between her legs. She made sure to falter once, to slip slightly on her elbow, letting out a low babble as she caught herself. Every detail had to match, every motion had to belong in this sea of supposed helplessness. She crawled through the open doorway and into the room beyond.

It was… massive.

The scale of it hit her all at once. The ceilings arched high overhead, designed not for adults, but to dwarf them in a space that mimicked a living room while reinforcing their supposed smallness. The carpeting was plush and pastel, thick enough to make crawling slow and exhausting. A soft rug in the shape of a smiling bear lay at the center of the room. In the center of the room stood a line of bottles, each marked with a number in oversized crayon-like font.

Hers was easy to find. 24. Ivy stared at it, heart pounding behind her ribs.. The bottle was large—bigger than the ones she’d been given in the nursery—and filled to the brim with a creamy white liquid. She could see the faint fog of condensation against the inside of the plastic. If her instincts were right, and she was the caregiver, this wouldn’t be formula. Drinking this would confirm her suspicions, or atleast, she hoped it would. If nothing else, she just hoped it wasn’t spiked.

She reached out with both mittens, mimicking the shakiness she’d seen in the others, and wrapped her hands around the bottle. Her arms trembled slightly—on purpose—and she leaned down, bringing the rubber nipple to her lips.

The moment it entered her mouth, she knew she’d been right.

This wasn’t formula.

It was milk. Sweet, smooth, almost pleasant—a far cry from the cloying, thick, vaguely metallic taste of the nutrient sludge they’d been force-fed. 

It was milk. Just milk.

Ivy sucked slowly, eyes flicking sideways as she drank, her shoulders relaxing a touch at the realization, watching the others out of the corner of her vision. Sarah had already reached her bottle and collapsed beside it, clearly unable—or unwilling—to sit up any longer. She rolled onto her back, one arm curled awkwardly over her chest as the other held the bottle at an angle. Her legs bent at the knees, spread slightly by the thickness of her diaper, and she began to nurse with closed eyes and flushed cheeks.

Ivy followed her lead.

She eased herself down onto her back, wincing as her diaper squished beneath her, the wet padding spreading and pressing higher up her lower back. Her arms brought the bottle to her lips as she drank, mimicking the slow, shaky motions of a baby struggling with coordination. She let her head roll to the side, eyes wide and unfocused, yet watching the other contestants, as if she was looking for oddities..

Mason sprawled out beside a toy bin, the bottle tucked between both hands. His eyes drooped, lips nursing steadily. Finn, on his side, propped his bottle up with one arm and let the milk flow into his mouth as he blinked up at the ceiling. Maria, for her part, had turned herself toward Ivy slightly, her expression unreadable as she sucked on her bottle in silence.

Finn was the first to break the rhythm.

Ivy had been watching him closely, the way his fingers twitched around the bottle, the subtle tension along his jaw. He’d finished his bottle only moments ago, the last few drops sliding from the bottle into his mouth with a wet slurp before he let it drop limply to the floor beside him. Then came the sound—a soft groan, low and pained, the kind of sound you made when something deep inside you was turning against you. His hands fluttered clumsily to his stomach, pressing over the pale onesie stretched taut across his middle, his diaper crinkling beneath him as he rolled onto his back. His face twisted, brows knitting, and he let out a high-pitched whimper, barely coherent. A string of babble spilled from his lips like water through cupped hands—nonsense syllables, baby sounds.

And then it happened.

Ivy saw the moment his body gave in. Finn’s legs shifted apart slightly, and his entire frame tensed as the thick seat of his diaper began to bulge. It was subtle at first—just the slightest lift of the back, the crinkle giving way to a soft, wet sound as the padding expanded outward. His breath hitched. His head tilted back. And then his shoulders sagged in defeat as the bulk swelled beneath him, the onesie straining faintly as it accommodated the mess spreading across his backside.

Ivy’s lips parted in shock, though no sound escaped. Her mind was racing, the formula had done its job. Finn had lost control and as she glanced around the room, she saw the others following close behind—Mason curling into a half-ball, whimpering softly, Sarah biting down on her bottle with closed eyes, her legs twitching as she cradled her belly. Maria, too, had rolled onto her front, her hands beneath her, face flushed as a pitiful sound escaped her throat.

Ivy froze.

If I’m right, she thought, the words striking her with the weight of a sledgehammer, then this milk… isn’t laced at all. It won’t make me go. Not unless I choose to.

The idea lodged in her chest like a stone.

Every part of her recoiled from it—the indignity, the submission, the sheer, willful choice to do what the others were being forced into. And yet… if she didn’t… they’d know. The trial wasn’t about who had control. It was about who looked like they didn’t. Mistress hadn’t picked a caregiver to lead. She’d picked a scapegoat to hide.

Ivy’s fingers pressed against her belly as she let out a staged groan, mimicking the others. She curled inward, letting her face contort in mock discomfort. “Ah… mm… guh…” she murmured, letting the babble slip from her lips, not trusting herself to make it sound authentic without noise. Her face flushed a deep crimson—not from effort, but shame. This was what it meant to lie in the Nursery: not with words, but with your body. With everything, you didn’t want to give up.

The warmth in her stomach wasn’t real, but the performance had to be.

She squeezed her eyes shut and let out another groan, louder this time. Around her, she heard the sound of diapers growing heavier. 

And as she lay there on her back, her bottle empty beside her, she prepared herself for what she had to do.

A whimper slipped from Ivy’s lips before she could stop it—this one not faked, not staged, but raw and fragile in a way that scraped something deep inside her. It came unbidden, a breathy gasp wrapped in a quiver, escaping as her body tensed and her legs lifted slightly, instinct pulling her into the position she’d been trained to accept. And even though her mind screamed against it—don’t, not like this, not on purpose—her body moved anyway, one motion flowing into the next with the terrible momentum of inevitability.

Her cheeks burned, a vivid crimson rising to the surface of her face, hotter than the lights above, hotter than the milk in her belly. It felt like her skin had been peeled away, and every eye in the room was watching, even if no one was looking. Even if they were all too wrapped in their humiliations to notice hers, that didn’t matter. 

She pushed.

The act was deliberate, forced, unnatural—and yet the most natural thing in the world inside this twisted place. The pressure in her abdomen shifted, and with it came the soft, sickening sound of surrender. Her diaper expanded slowly beneath her, warm and thick as the mess filled the seat, spreading with slow, revolting finality. She could feel it molding to her, clinging, the onesie stretching slightly over her swollen padding as it tried and failed to contain the indignity of it all.

She whimpered again, a whisper of sound caught between sob and breath, her legs twitching as her muscles gave way.

Ivy lay there, motionless, her back cradled by the plush carpet, her diaper now warm and heavy between her thighs. The air around her was still filled with quiet groans and wet crinkles, with the soft, pitiful sounds of others meeting the same fate. But in her mind, the room had gone silent—because this wasn’t about them. 

This had been her choice, and that made it far worse.