Submarine Shift
The door of the submarine closed shut with a loud clang. That noise was followed by the turning of the door from the outside and the dull hiss of decompression. The trip had begun.
The Ladybugs – a hot new pop band of young women from London – weren’t sure exactly what their motivation was to take this journey. Bitty, the shortest member of the group and its lead vocalist, had the idea but it was not intended to satisfy any specific purpose. Rather, she simply wanted to “explore the sea” for artistic purposes, and the others had all agreed. After a longing glance at the closed hatch the sky and the outside world, she climbed down the ladder and joined her band mates.
“Right, we should be headed off, then?” Asked Meg, the band’s lead guitarist. Both Meg and Bitty were blonde and thin, and would have looked quite similar if it were not for their difference in height, as Meg was significantly taller.
“We should, if we are on schedule,” replied Taylor, the band’s back up vocalist and guitarist. Taylor had reddish orange hair and a smattering of freckles up and down her petite physique.
“When do you think we’ll get back?” Asked Chloe, the band’s drummer. “Do you think in time for supper?” Chloe had a dark mane of hair and thick eyebrows, and was the only member of the band who was just a couple of pounds past skinny.
“We’ll be out as long as is needed for us to be inspired,” answered Bitty, who in addition to leading the vocals, wrote the lyrics to most of the Ladybugs songs.
None of the girls knew how to operate a submarine of course. All of them were around college age and, with the exception of Taylor who had once spent a week on her cousin’s yacht, none of them had even been on a seafaring vessel of any kind. Fortunately, the course was going to be conducted via computer, remotely. As long as they didn’t mess around with the equipment on board, Bitty had been told by the man who had rented them the sub, nothing unexpected would happen to them.
~
It didn’t take long for the Ladybugs to start getting bored and restless. Even after Taylor figured out how to turn on the outside lights and allow the group to peer into the ocean, their boredom didn’t abate. They were in a section of the ocean with relatively little fish, coral reefs, or other items worth spending hours looking upon.
It was in the spirit of finding something that was, the spirit of curiosity, that the girls started to explore the rest of the submarine. The navigational controls were non functional and incomprehensible to them, and the idea of quarters seemed silly for short trip. So the underbelly of the sub became the biggest pull of interest. It contained a symphony of twisting gears and cogs, all likely performing some essential function.
Bitty, always trying to see the creative value in the mundane, jotted down in her songwriter’s inspiration notebook an interesting irony: the ironworks of the submarine presented a more living, vibrant image than the real life ecosystem just outside the sub’s walls.
At least, it had been. But just as Bitty finished writing down her observation, the craft swung into view of school of tropical fish. The bright colors and strange shapes invited “oohs and “aahs’ from the girls.
Being fish, they did not linger long, and soon swam upwards. Meg, eager to continue to watch them, stood on some of the controls so she’d have a better view up the large, viewing porthole. She slipped, and in trying to regain her balance, grasped the hand of a large clock directly above her.
As Meg pulled on the hand to regain her balance, it made a loud clicking sound, followed by a dull whirring. Meg let go of the clock and stepped down, and remembered the instruction of the owner of the vessel: do not touch anything.
“Are you alright, then, Meg?” Bitty asked. But her voice surprised her, and the other Ladybugs. It was a bit more high pitched and youthful sounding than she was used to.
“Meg, your voice!” Chloe said, but it had happened to her as well.
“Does anyone notice…these gears seem to be getting bigger?” Taylor asked. Soon, the other girls did indeed notice.
“It’s not the gears that are getting bigger,” Meg said at last. “It’s us that are getting smaller! Pull out your mirrors, girls. Look at yourselves.”
The girls all fiddled with their purses and pulled out their hand mirrors. Sure enough, Meg was right. They were not only getting shorter, but younger.
Taylor’s body had shrunk down to that of a child. Bitty had shrunk even further than her, making her look like a munchkin. Even Chloe’s famous curves had faded away, as if puberty had been undone. Surprised, innocent stares of horror were etched on the faces of the now very young girls.
“It must have been the clock,” Meg said at last. “They told us not to touch it. If we don’t fix this, we might all turn into babies.”
“And then what?” Bitty asked. “Disappear entirely?”
“I don’t want to wait long enough to find out!” Meg said. “Someone, come over and help me. We’ve got to get this thing going clockwise again.”
Taylor rushed over towards her, and Meg stood on her shoulders. She climbed onto the control panel, then as the hand spun towards the six, she grabbed it and pushed it in the clockwise direction. The familiar clicking and whirring noise ensued, and the clock began to move clockwise.
Almost immediately, Meg realized it had worked. She didn’t need Taylor to help her down from the panel, her legs were rapidly growing back to their original long length.
“Well, that was a close one,” Bitty said.
“Yes, that was brilliant there, Meg,” Chloe chimed in. “If you hadn’t thought of that, we’d all be fertilized eggs by now.”
“Come off it, Chloe. If it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t have even be in this mess,” Meg said.
As the girls gazed at one another, they saw their adult forms almost fully restored. Bitty grew in height not by much, of course. Taylor and Meg regained their tall, thin, model looks. Chloe’s womanly body returned, and as it did, she remarked “It had to come back exactly just like that, didn’t it? I had enjoyed losing stone in weight.”
Bitty looked at Chloe and was about to make a teasing reference to her weight, but then she stopped. Chloe did look heavier, substantially so. She had gained more weight she needed to in order to reach her old total.
“Why is everyone looking at me?” Chloe asked anxiously.
“Chloe, your weight,” Bitty began.
“I know, I know, ok? I could stand to shift a few, but there’s no reason to…” Chloe shouted.
“No!” Taylor interrupted. “Look at yourself.”
“Agh!” Chloe screamed. “What’s going on?” Her breasts had gone up at least a cup straining against her shirt. Her baggy jeans were now tight and restrictive, cutting into her sides. A little muffin top of fat had started to spill out over them.
“Oh no,” Chloe moaned. “These are my favorite jeans. And now I’m so fat that I’m spilling out of them. What did I do to deserve this?”
Chloe’s face, which had always been a bit on the soft side, grew even rounder. Her cheeks inflated, as her overall face became heart shaped. Had she smiled, she would have discovered prominent dimples, and laugh lines. Her eyes started to get the faintest of crow’s feet and bags under them as well.
The underbelly of the submarine was filled with shrieks and cries of confusion as the girls all noticed their changing bodies. Taylor watched as her skin became even more covered in freckles, as if 10 years of basking in the sun had done its damage in 10 minutes. Bitty noticed her ankles disappearing into “cankles,” and Meg felt her body getting heavier and flabbier. She shook her upper arm in disbelief as it jiggled with classic old lady arms.
“What’s going on?” Bitty cried. Her metabolism, slowed down with her advancing years, was claiming her waistline and everything below it. Her figure became comical as she gained a set a thick, juicy thighs and wide hips. Her hair grew longer, frizzier, and grayer as she noticed little wrinkles popping up all over her face in her hand mirror.
Taylor saw her breasts get larger, heavier, wider, and more saggy. They now were drooping low on her chest, and underneath them, a potbelly sprouted up. She shook it by her newly formed love handles and it wobbled like jell-o. Even her hands, she noticed, didn’t look as youthful, now with slightly older looking skin.
Meg noticed with horror that all of her friends were fast approaching being middle aged. They were teenagers just a few moments ago, and yet each of them had perhaps doubled their physical age in a few minutes. Each girl was paralyzed by the sight of their own reflection. Meg noticed it was happening to her as well, of course: she could see her face starting to get jowls and a double chin. Her shorts exposed her legs, which were thickening and forming cellulite. Her flat tummy stretched and grew into two droopy rolls.
“The clock,” she realized. “Pushing it back into place must have caused the problem to reverse itself. I have to stop it.”
She tried to step onto the control platform again, but she lost her footing. Her new weight, including her expanded derriere, had thrown off her center of gravity. She crashed to the floor, her plump body hitting the ground with strange sounding “thump.”
As she struggled to pull herself to her feet, she noticed the urgency of the situation. The other Ladybugs were continuing to advance in years rapidly. Bitty’s face was now getting more and more wrinkled, and her pear shaped body made her look more like an old lady than a young teenager. Taylor’s hair was flecked with grays and her skin was starting to get age spots. Combined with her increased freckles, her skin had lost all of its youthful former color and tone. Chloe’s weight had soared with her age, and now she was getting much bigger. She had started out just a small amount over thin, and had graduated to chubby in short order. Now she was approaching full flown fat. Her upper arms were getting beefy, her thighs were massive and tree trunk like, and her belly spilled over her like an apron. Her breasts had busted out of the shirt and were barely contained in her tiny cups.
Meg finally pulled herself to her feet, noticing that her hips weren’t as flexible as they used to be. She just had to get to the clock, or they’d all become old ladies soon.
As she walked back to the panel, she looked out the port window and could see another yellow submarine swimming right past them. She could see them as they were a few minutes ago, when she had caused them all to become children. This only convinced her that stopping the clock would stop the aging. With great carefulness this time, she stood upon the panel and pushed the clock hand to stop.
When she gingerly got back down, she surveyed the damage. Bitty’s face was framed with a shock of grey hair, and her body was wrinkly and a bit lumpy. Her plump butt was sticking out comically and her arms sagged a little with excess skin.
Taylor’s signature red hair had changed from red to white, and her spotty skin had only become worse, getting more wrinkled and rough looking. Her breasts had drooped even further south and her stomach was fat and flabby.
Chloe was now a bit of a blimp. Was this her destiny, to lose her willpower in her old age and eat whatever she wanted? Her circle face helped hide some of the wrinkles, but her eyes were filled with creases and her hair was grey. Her breasts, too large to be free from the effects of gravity, were like heavy weights on her chest, dragging her down and giving her a slight hunched over look.
Meg hesitated to even look at herself, but curiosity eventually got the better of her. She looked down and couldn’t see her feet, as her big tummy rolls were now in the way. Her upper arms were husky and her legs were covered in cottage cheese cellulite. Meg’s hand mirror revealed that her face was aged and wrinkled, with deep jowls, forehead lines, eye bags, crows feet, and a wobbly neck.
Bitty and the others had stopped yelling and asking questions. Out of breath from all the excitement, the girls gradually sat down and stared at their altered forms.
“So I guess that’s why they didn’t want us to mess with anything,” Chloe said finally, her voice sounding more deep and throaty.
“They could have told us why,” Meg chimed in, her own voice croaky and sounding more like an old lady than a young girl.
“Well, Meg, at least you stopped it,” Taylor said. “Who knows how old we’d be if we had let those hands keep spinning? We’ve got to be in our 60s now.”
“I wonder,” said Bitty, thinking of a song, “if this is how we will all look when we are 64?”
~~~
THE END
The Ladybugs – a hot new pop band of young women from London – weren’t sure exactly what their motivation was to take this journey. Bitty, the shortest member of the group and its lead vocalist, had the idea but it was not intended to satisfy any specific purpose. Rather, she simply wanted to “explore the sea” for artistic purposes, and the others had all agreed. After a longing glance at the closed hatch the sky and the outside world, she climbed down the ladder and joined her band mates.
“Right, we should be headed off, then?” Asked Meg, the band’s lead guitarist. Both Meg and Bitty were blonde and thin, and would have looked quite similar if it were not for their difference in height, as Meg was significantly taller.
“We should, if we are on schedule,” replied Taylor, the band’s back up vocalist and guitarist. Taylor had reddish orange hair and a smattering of freckles up and down her petite physique.
“When do you think we’ll get back?” Asked Chloe, the band’s drummer. “Do you think in time for supper?” Chloe had a dark mane of hair and thick eyebrows, and was the only member of the band who was just a couple of pounds past skinny.
“We’ll be out as long as is needed for us to be inspired,” answered Bitty, who in addition to leading the vocals, wrote the lyrics to most of the Ladybugs songs.
None of the girls knew how to operate a submarine of course. All of them were around college age and, with the exception of Taylor who had once spent a week on her cousin’s yacht, none of them had even been on a seafaring vessel of any kind. Fortunately, the course was going to be conducted via computer, remotely. As long as they didn’t mess around with the equipment on board, Bitty had been told by the man who had rented them the sub, nothing unexpected would happen to them.
~
It didn’t take long for the Ladybugs to start getting bored and restless. Even after Taylor figured out how to turn on the outside lights and allow the group to peer into the ocean, their boredom didn’t abate. They were in a section of the ocean with relatively little fish, coral reefs, or other items worth spending hours looking upon.
It was in the spirit of finding something that was, the spirit of curiosity, that the girls started to explore the rest of the submarine. The navigational controls were non functional and incomprehensible to them, and the idea of quarters seemed silly for short trip. So the underbelly of the sub became the biggest pull of interest. It contained a symphony of twisting gears and cogs, all likely performing some essential function.
Bitty, always trying to see the creative value in the mundane, jotted down in her songwriter’s inspiration notebook an interesting irony: the ironworks of the submarine presented a more living, vibrant image than the real life ecosystem just outside the sub’s walls.
At least, it had been. But just as Bitty finished writing down her observation, the craft swung into view of school of tropical fish. The bright colors and strange shapes invited “oohs and “aahs’ from the girls.
Being fish, they did not linger long, and soon swam upwards. Meg, eager to continue to watch them, stood on some of the controls so she’d have a better view up the large, viewing porthole. She slipped, and in trying to regain her balance, grasped the hand of a large clock directly above her.
As Meg pulled on the hand to regain her balance, it made a loud clicking sound, followed by a dull whirring. Meg let go of the clock and stepped down, and remembered the instruction of the owner of the vessel: do not touch anything.
“Are you alright, then, Meg?” Bitty asked. But her voice surprised her, and the other Ladybugs. It was a bit more high pitched and youthful sounding than she was used to.
“Meg, your voice!” Chloe said, but it had happened to her as well.
“Does anyone notice…these gears seem to be getting bigger?” Taylor asked. Soon, the other girls did indeed notice.
“It’s not the gears that are getting bigger,” Meg said at last. “It’s us that are getting smaller! Pull out your mirrors, girls. Look at yourselves.”
The girls all fiddled with their purses and pulled out their hand mirrors. Sure enough, Meg was right. They were not only getting shorter, but younger.
Taylor’s body had shrunk down to that of a child. Bitty had shrunk even further than her, making her look like a munchkin. Even Chloe’s famous curves had faded away, as if puberty had been undone. Surprised, innocent stares of horror were etched on the faces of the now very young girls.
“It must have been the clock,” Meg said at last. “They told us not to touch it. If we don’t fix this, we might all turn into babies.”
“And then what?” Bitty asked. “Disappear entirely?”
“I don’t want to wait long enough to find out!” Meg said. “Someone, come over and help me. We’ve got to get this thing going clockwise again.”
Taylor rushed over towards her, and Meg stood on her shoulders. She climbed onto the control panel, then as the hand spun towards the six, she grabbed it and pushed it in the clockwise direction. The familiar clicking and whirring noise ensued, and the clock began to move clockwise.
Almost immediately, Meg realized it had worked. She didn’t need Taylor to help her down from the panel, her legs were rapidly growing back to their original long length.
“Well, that was a close one,” Bitty said.
“Yes, that was brilliant there, Meg,” Chloe chimed in. “If you hadn’t thought of that, we’d all be fertilized eggs by now.”
“Come off it, Chloe. If it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t have even be in this mess,” Meg said.
As the girls gazed at one another, they saw their adult forms almost fully restored. Bitty grew in height not by much, of course. Taylor and Meg regained their tall, thin, model looks. Chloe’s womanly body returned, and as it did, she remarked “It had to come back exactly just like that, didn’t it? I had enjoyed losing stone in weight.”
Bitty looked at Chloe and was about to make a teasing reference to her weight, but then she stopped. Chloe did look heavier, substantially so. She had gained more weight she needed to in order to reach her old total.
“Why is everyone looking at me?” Chloe asked anxiously.
“Chloe, your weight,” Bitty began.
“I know, I know, ok? I could stand to shift a few, but there’s no reason to…” Chloe shouted.
“No!” Taylor interrupted. “Look at yourself.”
“Agh!” Chloe screamed. “What’s going on?” Her breasts had gone up at least a cup straining against her shirt. Her baggy jeans were now tight and restrictive, cutting into her sides. A little muffin top of fat had started to spill out over them.
“Oh no,” Chloe moaned. “These are my favorite jeans. And now I’m so fat that I’m spilling out of them. What did I do to deserve this?”
Chloe’s face, which had always been a bit on the soft side, grew even rounder. Her cheeks inflated, as her overall face became heart shaped. Had she smiled, she would have discovered prominent dimples, and laugh lines. Her eyes started to get the faintest of crow’s feet and bags under them as well.
The underbelly of the submarine was filled with shrieks and cries of confusion as the girls all noticed their changing bodies. Taylor watched as her skin became even more covered in freckles, as if 10 years of basking in the sun had done its damage in 10 minutes. Bitty noticed her ankles disappearing into “cankles,” and Meg felt her body getting heavier and flabbier. She shook her upper arm in disbelief as it jiggled with classic old lady arms.
“What’s going on?” Bitty cried. Her metabolism, slowed down with her advancing years, was claiming her waistline and everything below it. Her figure became comical as she gained a set a thick, juicy thighs and wide hips. Her hair grew longer, frizzier, and grayer as she noticed little wrinkles popping up all over her face in her hand mirror.
Taylor saw her breasts get larger, heavier, wider, and more saggy. They now were drooping low on her chest, and underneath them, a potbelly sprouted up. She shook it by her newly formed love handles and it wobbled like jell-o. Even her hands, she noticed, didn’t look as youthful, now with slightly older looking skin.
Meg noticed with horror that all of her friends were fast approaching being middle aged. They were teenagers just a few moments ago, and yet each of them had perhaps doubled their physical age in a few minutes. Each girl was paralyzed by the sight of their own reflection. Meg noticed it was happening to her as well, of course: she could see her face starting to get jowls and a double chin. Her shorts exposed her legs, which were thickening and forming cellulite. Her flat tummy stretched and grew into two droopy rolls.
“The clock,” she realized. “Pushing it back into place must have caused the problem to reverse itself. I have to stop it.”
She tried to step onto the control platform again, but she lost her footing. Her new weight, including her expanded derriere, had thrown off her center of gravity. She crashed to the floor, her plump body hitting the ground with strange sounding “thump.”
As she struggled to pull herself to her feet, she noticed the urgency of the situation. The other Ladybugs were continuing to advance in years rapidly. Bitty’s face was now getting more and more wrinkled, and her pear shaped body made her look more like an old lady than a young teenager. Taylor’s hair was flecked with grays and her skin was starting to get age spots. Combined with her increased freckles, her skin had lost all of its youthful former color and tone. Chloe’s weight had soared with her age, and now she was getting much bigger. She had started out just a small amount over thin, and had graduated to chubby in short order. Now she was approaching full flown fat. Her upper arms were getting beefy, her thighs were massive and tree trunk like, and her belly spilled over her like an apron. Her breasts had busted out of the shirt and were barely contained in her tiny cups.
Meg finally pulled herself to her feet, noticing that her hips weren’t as flexible as they used to be. She just had to get to the clock, or they’d all become old ladies soon.
As she walked back to the panel, she looked out the port window and could see another yellow submarine swimming right past them. She could see them as they were a few minutes ago, when she had caused them all to become children. This only convinced her that stopping the clock would stop the aging. With great carefulness this time, she stood upon the panel and pushed the clock hand to stop.
When she gingerly got back down, she surveyed the damage. Bitty’s face was framed with a shock of grey hair, and her body was wrinkly and a bit lumpy. Her plump butt was sticking out comically and her arms sagged a little with excess skin.
Taylor’s signature red hair had changed from red to white, and her spotty skin had only become worse, getting more wrinkled and rough looking. Her breasts had drooped even further south and her stomach was fat and flabby.
Chloe was now a bit of a blimp. Was this her destiny, to lose her willpower in her old age and eat whatever she wanted? Her circle face helped hide some of the wrinkles, but her eyes were filled with creases and her hair was grey. Her breasts, too large to be free from the effects of gravity, were like heavy weights on her chest, dragging her down and giving her a slight hunched over look.
Meg hesitated to even look at herself, but curiosity eventually got the better of her. She looked down and couldn’t see her feet, as her big tummy rolls were now in the way. Her upper arms were husky and her legs were covered in cottage cheese cellulite. Meg’s hand mirror revealed that her face was aged and wrinkled, with deep jowls, forehead lines, eye bags, crows feet, and a wobbly neck.
Bitty and the others had stopped yelling and asking questions. Out of breath from all the excitement, the girls gradually sat down and stared at their altered forms.
“So I guess that’s why they didn’t want us to mess with anything,” Chloe said finally, her voice sounding more deep and throaty.
“They could have told us why,” Meg chimed in, her own voice croaky and sounding more like an old lady than a young girl.
“Well, Meg, at least you stopped it,” Taylor said. “Who knows how old we’d be if we had let those hands keep spinning? We’ve got to be in our 60s now.”
“I wonder,” said Bitty, thinking of a song, “if this is how we will all look when we are 64?”
~~~
THE END
Want to read another story about several women being age progressed? Check out Golden Girls Spa. A television executive wants to create a show called "New Golden Girls," all about older women, but no older actresses return his calls. So instead, he decides to improvise, dropping some young actresses off at a very special spa. A spa that will quickly help them look the part. It's an age progression tale filled with vivid transformation sequences in the perfect setting.