Eighteen-year-old Nicholas Hammerstein is at the cusp of finishing high school in his hometown of Los Alamos, NM. He has a seemingly ideal life and is blessed with loving parents, a cute baby sister, and great friends. Nicholas is a gifted student and martial artist who has dreams of leaving for college at the end of his senior year. But, living in a world of Emergent humans, he will soon find his life turned upside down as his life and the fate of a kingdom hang in the balance. His future and theirs will be determined by how he navigates the drastic changes in his body and the magical and superpowered Mergent population he joins.

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The Legal Stuff: Emerald Princess © 2016-2023 By Sofia Hammerstein
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016-2023 By Sofia Hammerstein. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
 
 
Foreword

Emerald Princess is set in a world with humans who have evolved unique characteristics that make for superhuman abilities through 'Emergence.' The concept was partially inspired by many such works from comics and other fandoms. While published initially as a fan fiction piece in another universe, I have worked to edit it into its own unique universe. I have made sure to edit out anything that might be considered the copyright of other parties.

This work is meant for adults; the main protagonists are all eighteen or older. It contains Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) themes. If diapers, bottles, and babying of regressed adults are not your cup of tea, you may wish to give this a pass. (However, I do believe this particular work can be read even if those aren't normally your thing as it is much more than your typical such tale) If those items don't offend you, I hope you will enjoy this tale!

Thank you to my readers who have commented and encouraged me throughout my postings online! Thank you to anyone who purchases my novels and/or takes the time to read them! A special thank you to a reader, Chloe, who continually badgered me to finish this tale after I left it unfinished for several years!

The full edited version of Emerald Princess is available now on Kindle here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTBTTGX1 I will be posting a new chapter about every other day until the full work is posted. (62 Chapters and Epilogue)

Chapter 1: Jealous

I STARED AT the road as Mom drove me to school. The town where I grew up was in a category of its own reality as one of the most unique towns in the world. Just for me to come to school, we had to drive through a checkpoint with a guard shack manned by an MP! As usual, though, my mom was waived like normal without stopping. The only time they really checked vehicles like a military base was when there was some sort of alert.

The town of Los Alamos was on the backside of a beautiful mountain that was a part of the Rocky Mountains. I loved hiking and fishing the mountain streams with my dad on the occasional weekend when he wasn’t bogged down in his research projects.

I felt a prod in my side and looked over at my baby sister in her rear-facing car seat. She poked me with the play hairbrush she used on her doll. “Why’d you poke me?” I asked Lily.

“Play?”

I sighed, “If I get a chance, I will later, Lily. I have a lot of assignments due soon…”

Lily looked at me with her pretty green eyes, “Please?”

I sighed again, “We’ll see Lily Bear.” With that, I tickled her a little to make her smile.

“Stop dat!” She giggled.

I smiled at her as Mom pulled up to the loading zone at the school. Lily was probably the prettiest baby sister that I knew! She was a total oops child for my mom a bit over two years ago. My parents apparently forgot where babies came from one week while I was out of town at a music camp. As I opened the door of the Toyota Land Cruiser and swung out, Mom reminded me, “Don’t forget that you have Tae Kwon Do tonight,” through the window that she had rolled down.

“Like I could forget?!?” I asked with a bit of incredulity. I was testing for my second-degree black belt tonight! I just hoped I could manage to pass this test. If I could get this belt, I would be able to really think about teaching in my own studio after college. After this belt, though, I would no longer be able to just test at home; I would be flying to major cities or maybe even Korea! For something I had been practically forced to do at the start, I had really grown a love of it!

I walked down the hallway to my locker to drop off some things. I passed my reflection in the window of a dark classroom and shook my head. I was one of the nerdiest of the nerdy kids to my peers, and in Los Alamos, that was saying something! I was a decent height, five foot eleven, but was a total stick. It didn’t matter how much I ate - it took tons of fat just to get me to 105 pounds. That was with my clothes and shoes on! My brown hair was also really long - three inches past my shoulders in a neat ponytail. As far as anyone else was concerned, I was just riding the fad, but there was a deeper reason for it that I wasn’t about to share with anyone.

“Nick!” I heard behind me.

“Hey Jacob,” I said as I turned to one of my few real friends’ voices.

“Did you get the math homework done?!?” He was in a panic. I groaned, like always; he hadn’t done anything but play games last night. I spent the next few minutes walking to our first-period band class, being cajoled into helping him finish - i.e., copying my homework.

“Please, Nick!” He pleaded.

“Jacob, you’re not asking to copy Nick’s homework again, are you?” Hannah asked with disdain.

“Umm… maybe?” Jacob said, “Unless you’ll help me out?” He asked and batted his eyelashes.

We both laughed. Jacob, Hannah, and I were like the three musketeers. Hannah and I had been friends for a long time, and she was one of the few people I felt I could trust with anything. She also happened to be Lily’s go-to babysitter if my parents and I weren’t available. I had a crush on her that confused me regularly since I really just thought of her as a best friend.

I looked at my cell phone for the time and figured we had about ten minutes to save Jacob’s rear again. It’s not that he was stupid… he was probably as bright as I was, but he was lazy when it came to homework. Amazingly he managed to keep good grades up - of course, his parents probably would have killed him otherwise. That’s the thing with having two parents with PhDs; slacking isn’t even a remote option. I was fortunate that my parents only had one Ph.D. between them… It didn’t matter, though, because it might as well have been two since the only reason Mom didn’t have hers in Chemistry was that she found it too hard to take care of me and work on her doctorate. Dad was considered very useful at the lab due to his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and his Doctorate in Physics. Their graduate degrees both came from MIT, and their undergrads were at rival Ivy League schools.

Needless to say, my parents were brilliant! In any other town, their resumes would shine like a star, but they were practically a dime a dozen in Los Alamos. The number of well-educated parents in the community was absurd!

As the first bell rang, I pulled my flute case from my backpack and went to sit in my first chair spot that I had fought for so hard. Playing flute as a guy is never a task that will prevent people from giving you grief. Fortunately, I was one of three guys in the flute section, so I wasn’t alone, but still… I quickly figured out that the way to shut up most of the chatter in junior high was by being better than everyone else. Well, that and the Tae Kwon Do lessons that they figured out I took by then. My Sensei trained me never to be the aggressor from when my parents had me start in second grade. That didn’t stop me from protecting myself when attacked, though. It sadly took until seventh grade before the last bully figured out the folly of attacking me.

“Morning,” the band director said as he sipped a cup of coffee.

“Morning, Mr. Muñez,” I responded politely. We both shared the opinion that there was no ‘good’ in mornings and had our private joke with this greeting.

Before too long, rehearsal began, and I once again had to hide the guilty pleasure that we were playing music from Frozen for our Christmas Concert in three weeks. But, of course, it might have been just that we were playing music that wasn’t traditional Christmas music too! That had to be played that day, too, unfortunately. It didn’t matter what a composer did with Jingle Bells; it still got old!

At lunch, I sat with Hannah, Jacob, and a couple other friends. “So your big test is tonight, huh?” Hannah asked.

I blushed but nodded, “I hope I don’t fail it.”

She gave me a hard stare, “Of course, you won’t fail it. Didn’t you like just win those competitions this year?”

I shrugged, “This isn’t a competition, and even if it was, there would be just as good of a chance of things going wrong.”

She kicked me under the table, “Come on, positive attitude!”

I smiled at her, “Okay, if you’ll quit beating me up, I’ll think positively.” That led to her kicking me again for spite.

“I hear it’s supposed to snow tonight?” Jacob asked.

“Yeah, but don’t you go jinxing it!” I said with a warning. Truth be told, it would take a fair amount of snow for school to be canceled. Living in the mountains, you just had to learn to deal with it much of the time. It’s why families like mine that lived on the outskirts of town had to have a four-wheel drive vehicle.

Hannah gave him the glare too.

“Think the ski resort will open this year?” I asked thoughtfully.

“Even if it doesn’t, we could always hit Sandia or go up to Wolf Creek over Christmas Break,” Hannah suggested. “My parents have offered to take us up to either.”

“That would be sweet!” I said with a smile. “I’m hoping my parents will get me a new board for Christmas.”

We spent the remainder of our lunchtime talking before having to go our separate ways to classes. I managed to get through the end of the day, and my Calculus test, without too much trouble. After the bell, I fought my way through the hallways full of students as quickly as possible and found my mom was waiting for me in our car. I climbed into the back out of habit to sit next to Lily.

“You know you’d have to do a lot less driving if you’d let me get a car,” I suggested to her.

“Your father and I want to wait until after Christmas Break,” she reiterated. I had just turned 18 the week before, but for whatever reason, my parents still didn’t want me driving by myself yet. It was like she could see my whining getting ready to increase, “Besides, you haven’t gotten a job to pay for it either…?”

I sighed.

“Just be patient, sweetie,” she said.

I looked to my left and saw my baby sister sleeping quietly in her car seat. “How did you get the princess to sleep?” I asked quietly.

Mom shook her head; “She had a playdate today with Becky’s daughter Zoe. They didn’t stop running from the time I dropped you off at school until I packed her up twenty minutes ago.”

“Whatever works, huh?” I smiled. I looked over at her red hair that mom had put into pigtails this morning. One of the rubber bands was starting to slide off, so I gently fixed it.

Mom drove us home to our house outside the city limits. Los Alamos is a weird town because it’s technically all government property. That means you had to move outside of town and commute if you wanted to own your own house. I didn’t mind because it meant our house backed right up to the forest. Well, sort of… Due to past forest fires, my family decided it was for the best when we moved here to clear the land immediately around the house. No sense in making it easy for the house to burn down when someone couldn’t figure out how to put out a campfire!

Our house had two stories and a full basement containing a workout room, playroom, and home theater. As I grew older, the playroom became more of a hangout room for my friends and me. The playroom was back mostly in use now, though with Lily, and had dolls and other baby toys scattered everywhere in the room. Once Mom parked, I threw my backpack on my shoulders and went to Lily’s side of the car. I opened the door, quietly unbuckled her highness, and then picked her up gently. Mom gave me an appreciative smile. I had to appreciate that she only weighed 25 pounds at this point. She was tiny for her age of two-and-a-half.

“Is she wet?” Mom asked quietly.

I felt her diaper under her tights and nodded as we walked into the house. “Here,” she motioned, “hand her to me, and I’ll change her before I put her down to finish this miracle nap.”

I smiled at her, “I’ll do it, Mom.”

“How did I get lucky enough to have a son that doesn’t mind changing his sister’s diapers?” She smiled at me.

“I don’t know,” I told her with a smile and walked upstairs past my bedroom door and to Lily’s room. My parents had switched her crib rails out last month for her toddler bed version of the bed but had kept Lily’s changing table in there. I gently sat her down on it and took care of the wet diaper. Truth be told, I loved taking care of my sister! She was the most precious person in the universe to me. I managed to get her tights pulled back up and lay her down in her bed without her stirring a bit. The pacifier in her mouth never once looked like it was in danger of falling out, either!

I crept out of her room and went down the hall to mine. I sat down at the desk to start doing my homework. I only had about thirty minutes until Mom would call me down for dinner, and then I would need to change for my testing. But I figured it was just enough time to start typing the ridiculous essay I had to write for English. My teacher wanted three pages analyzing Dante’s satirical use of people in the Inferno. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of people and characters to use; it was that all three of those pages would have to be perfect for her to be happy. I sighed and began typing. I managed to get through the first page when I was invaded.

“Can I help?” Lily asked me as she climbed into my lap with her favorite doll.

I smiled at her, “I wish you could!”

“Play with me?” She asked with a smile.

“Hmm… I kind of have to get this done,” I told Lily while squeezing her in a hug.

She frowned. “Please?”

I looked at the clock. Mom was going to call us down for dinner any minute. I was just about to give in to her sweet eyes when Mom came in. “Dinner’s ready, you two.”

I looked at Lily, “Maybe tomorrow night?” I suggested gently.

She looked like she was going to go into crying tantrum mode, so I started tickling her. She instantly started laughing as my fingers danced around her mercilessly for a moment. “Stop…” she cried, and I stood up with her still in my arms.

“Let’s go eat,” I told her and carried her downstairs. At the table, I set her in her highchair.

Dad came in the door right as I finished buckling Lily in. He kissed Lily and mom, said “Hi,” to me, and went to wash up. Then, we sat down to mom’s roast and potatoes she had put in the crockpot that morning. She looked up at the clock as I finished eating, “Nicholas, go get ready,” she told me.

“Okay,” I said with the butterflies flying in my stomach. It took me less than ten minutes to get dressed in my gi, and I ensured I looked ready for my testing. Then, I walked out of my room to see Mom changing Lily again. She usually had a messy diaper right after dinner, and it seemed like this was the case tonight, too, as I could smell it from the doorway. She had her bottle in her hand while she was being changed.
“I’m ready,” I said with a smile.

“So is Lily, huh?” Mom said and gave her a kiss. I loved my sister, but I have to say she was fortunate to always have so much attention from us. ‘I wish I received half that attention!’ I smiled.

My parents and I loaded up the Land Cruiser and headed to the dojo where I studied. Mom hugged me, Dad said, “Good luck,” and I went to my place at the front of the middle line. Other students trickled in, and before I knew it, our Sensei had us warming up and running through some simple forms as a group.

A few other parents were there for the younger children that night. A couple of my friends were also there to take their own belt tests. “Tonight, we have twelve students testing for their next belt,” Sensei announced as he had us gathered around the outside edges of the room. “We will go in order of lower belts to higher belts.” He explained the process, and I watched the other eleven students test through their forms, breaking boards, and sparring.

It seemed like no time at all before I was called up. “Nicholas Hammerstein, please step forward.” He smiled at me.

I walked to the center of the room and stood at the ready.

“Nicholas is testing for the highest belt he can earn here. After this belt, he will have to test elsewhere with a grandmaster present. Good luck,” he told me.

“Thank you, Sensei,” I said politely, bowing.

He asked me to do my forms, and I hoped I did a credible job for him and the visiting masters. I was less worried about this part than the breaking test. I sized up the boards I was to break first with a punch and was relieved to see all of them broken after I tried. Next, he had me perform a kick break which I successfully nailed! I was feeling confident as the sparring portion came up.

“Nicholas, you will spar against Randy,” he told me. He motioned to a student who had just successfully tested for his first-level black belt the previous month.

I watched him like a hawk and would have been declared the victor by points if this were a tournament. At that point, Sensei concluded the match. I stood at attention before him as he discussed my test with the guests.

“Nicholas, you have performed well on your test, and it is my great honor to bestow your second-degree black belt to you.” He handed me my new belt, and I bowed to him.

“Thank you, Sensei,” I said.

Suddenly I was attacked from below by a pink bundle. Sensei laughed at me, “You are going to need a higher degree belt to deal with that one!”

I held Lily back to the car and put her in her car seat. “You so cool!” She told me with a smile.

“Thank you, Lily,” I told her and reached over to hand her doll to her.

That night we found a place to get ice cream before heading home. We talked about my confidence as I progressed through the testing. Dad mentioned he thought I might even have a chance of sparring against Mergents, but I shook my head. I knew how good they were from some of the tournaments that ran side-by-side with mine sometimes! They usually had too much speed and faster reflexes, even if they didn’t have the strength to throw a car a block away!

We eventually finished our ice cream, and I fell asleep as soon as we got back into the car. It had been a long day!

MOM WOKE ME up at home, and I discovered the snow had indeed started to fall! “Snow!!!” Lily said excitedly, waking back up.

‘Uh-oh,’ I thought, ‘I bet she’s going to be a hyper handful for the rest of the night. I looked at my phone and groaned when I realized how late it was. ‘10 pm already?!?’

I went upstairs, showered, and put on my pajamas before trying to finish some of my homework. The essay could wait until tomorrow night, but the math homework wouldn’t. So I scrambled to do the six calculus problems but was still struggling on the final one when my dad came in. “It’s time for bed, Nicholas,” he said.

I sighed, “I have to get this last problem done first, Dad; I just can’t figure out where I’m going wrong.” I hoped that would get his attention, and maybe he would help.

He gave me a stare that told me he knew exactly what I was up to, but he looked at the clock next to my desk and said, “What is it?”

Dad looked at it for five minutes and scratched his head too. “Okay… If this number was different, this would work out to a nice even number, but the way it’s written… It has to be a mistake,” he said to me.

“How would you solve it, though, if it’s right?” I asked.

I watched as he found another piece of paper and started solving the equation using the much higher math knowledge he’d gained from his physics doctorate. “Well, this is the solution as written, but you can’t fully solve it because of this,” he pointed to errors. “Why don’t you…?” He walked me through what he had done to get to that point, and I copied it down to talk to the teacher the next day. I understood how he did it, but like him, I was pretty sure there was an error. This way, when I spoke to the teacher, I would have both an answer and a question on whether the problem was wrong!

“Okay, time for bed now!” he said.

“Thank you, Dad,” I said as I hugged him, “I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t know math!”

He laughed, “You’d be fine. My parents used to look at my calculus homework and then walk away as quickly as they could!”

I decided to go to the bathroom one last time and watched Mom put Lily down in her bed. As much as she was growing up, she still wanted to be held in the rocking chair and told a bedtime story each night with her bottle. I figured one of these days, Mom would have to be mean and finally take away her bottles, pacifiers, and potty train her, but she seemed in no hurry to do so.

She turned and saw me walking back to my room, “You should have been in bed a half hour ago,” she said with a look.

“Sorry, Dad was helping me with homework. Besides, why should I go to bed before my baby sister?” I asked with a smirk.

“She takes naps,” Mom said with a smirk. Then, she gave me a hug, “Good night, Nicholas.”

“Night, Mom,” I told her and crawled into bed.

My last thoughts before going to sleep were, ‘I did it! I’m a second-degree black belt!’ Then, ‘I’m so jealous of Lily. I wish I could have a bedtime story and a bottle!’

SOMETIME LATER, IN the middle of the night, I woke up soaked with sweat and chilled. I pulled a blanket that had fallen on the ground and wrapped myself tighter, but I couldn’t stop shivering. I must have been audibly whimpering because my door opened, and Mom came in. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head, “I’m cold and shi-hi-vvv-vv-ering.”

She took one look at me and turned the lights on. I felt her hand on my forehead. “You’re burning up,” she said with concern. I watched her leave the room, and she returned with a thermometer and a washcloth. She stuck the thermometer in my mouth and put the washcloth on my head.

“This can’t be right…” she said. “Levi!!!” She shouted.

Dad came sleepily into my room. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s burning up… you don’t think…?”

This wasn’t making much sense to me as I was just not feeling it. All I could focus on was how much nicer it would be if Mom could just pick me up and hold me. Maybe I’d be warm enough then...? “I feel like I’m going to be sick,” I said, suddenly standing up and trying to run to the bathroom. As I got to the bathroom doorway, I saw my baby sister standing in her nightgown with her pacifier squeezing her bear, looking at me, scared. I felt terrible that I had woken her up; she looked so cute.

‘I wish I could be that cute,’ I thought. ‘Lily is so lucky that she’s a baby girl!’

That was my last thought before everything suddenly went black.

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