(Female Age Regression, Male to Monkey)

Marcus stood at Lena’s side, a look of curiosity and wonder on his face. Where once a healthy adult capuchin had stood, now only an adolescent simian remained. He let out a small breath of exhilaration, turning to her with a smile. “The future is now, huh?”

She was similarly dazzled, and took a moment to reply. The brief exultation he’d experienced faded in his usual dislike of the woman, and he watched her delicate features struggle to come to terms with what they’d seen; what he’d invented.

“We’re going to be rich,” Lena said with a slow smile. We. The word sent a stab of anger through the man, and he was barely able to let her continue. “We did it. We found the fountain of youth. Think of the possibilities! Just a few drops of this, and anyone could return to the prime of their life!”

The implication that Marcus was too narrow-minded to think of such an obvious application grated at his nerves further. The fact that she likely hadn’t intended such a connotation didn’t escape him, but he also didn’t quite care. “Indeed,” he began carefully, palming a vial of their creation. “I think this deserves a toast.”

He turned from the monkey’s cage with a grin, a practiced gesture rattling it shut. He doubted such a thing would be necessary, but one could never be too certain when dealing with apes. Filthy creatures, but necessary ones. “What do you say? We pop the top on our victory champagne?”

As expected, Lena didn’t notice anything was awry. She was too caught up in triumph to even consider the possibility of Marcus’s plan, and so the blonde gratefully quaffed a glass of spiked Chardonnay. The effects were near-instantaneous, her few crow’s feet vanishing almost instantly.

Much to Marcus’s surprise, she smiled, watching the wrinkles vanish from her hands. “You did not!” She seemed excited, and she turned to him with a grin. “What better way to make our announcement than to show up as excited collegiates, hm? So, how young are we getting? Twenties? Thirties?”

Her vapidity never ceased to amaze—or to irritate. He looked to her with a smug satisfaction, finishing his own glass with a grin. “I am not getting any younger.” He watched the dawning confusion in her eyes with a great degree of satisfaction. “You, however… Well, I suppose I won’t be needing to co-sign any patents with you.”

“What… What are you…” She trailed off, jumping in shock as a clang resounded through the office. She looked down to her shoes in horror to find her bracelets had slipped from shrinking wrists, then looked to her arms. Her now-baggy coat covered her hands completely, and she whimpered in horror.

“What’s the matter? Only realizing it now? You know, the serum wasn’t supposed to decrease your intelligence before you reached infancy.” Marcus patted her head, each thump of his hand costing her another few inches in height.

“Intelligence? What are—no! The monkeys!” Lena looked back to their test pen, remembering the prior experiments they’d had. Every time they’d returned one to a natal state, the animals had showed a marked decrease in intellect. A chill ran down her spine at the thought of the same occurring to her.

“But… I don’t want to be younger! I don’t want to be a baby!” She wailed and dwindled further, breasts receding into her chest, wobbling on preteen legs. Her face took on a softness similar to baby fat, long-forgotten features returning to her with the onset of your youth.

“I’m rather assured it will,” Marcus gloated. “Of course, you’ll remember who you are… But in time, you’ll forget how to read, make the serum, and even how to walk.” He leaned closer, watching baby fat settle on her face, watching her hair curl back into her head. Any minute now…

“N-no! No dumbew, pweese! Dun wanna baby!” Lena clapped her hands to her head, eyes unfocussing slightly. The motion unbalanced her, and she fell onto her rump with a huff and a wail of distress. “My bwain smaww!! No wan smaww, wan big! Wannabblll gaa!”

She thrashed her tiny arms and legs, her baggy lab coat swallowing her body. Marcus watched the wriggling lump with a cruel grin, and he toed the bundle curiously. A small hand poked from some part in the fabric, and a dimwitted baby emerged from within. “Lena?” He asked.

Her lower lip quiveredand her mouth fell slack. The wailing of an infant filled the room, and Marcus chuckled at the sight of his colleague reduced to a crawling baby, unable to escape the voluminous confines of her own clothing. Then a crash from behind him nearly stopped his heart from shock.

He spun to find the adolescent monkey wreaking havoc on the laboratory, a few bottles of serum shattered beneath its oafish feet. The man cursed, reaching for a radio only to pause. What if security noticed Lena was little more than an infant? Could he be tried for that?

The questions were rendered irrelevant as a man rushed into the room, clad in EndoTek’s lime-green janitorial uniform. “Howdy, sir, is there a—” The worker cut himself off at the sight of the escaped monkey, and he quickly, smartly shut the door behind himself.

Marcus nodded with quiet approval, then tasked the man with apprehending the loose monkey. It took more time than he’d planned on, his every plan upset by the housekeeper’s seeming inability to comprehend trigonometric enclosures, but at last they’d managed to pin the creature and return it to his cage.

“And don’t be so soft with the damned thing!” Marcus barked, nursing a cut on his arm. “There’s priceless instruments here that have been damaged.” He realized a moment later that he might as well have been lecturing a dog—the man wasn’t possessed of a remarkable intellect.

“Um… Sure. Instruments,” the janitor muttered, scanning the room for no doubt tools of music. His eyes alit upon the infant Lena, and Marcus’s heart sank. “Wait, is that?”

“Hm?” Marcus quickly feigned innocence, only to gasp in mock surprise at the sight of his regressed colleague.

“That there’s a baby!” The janitor proclaimed, displaying an impressive ability to state the obvious. “The poor thing must’a been separated from her parents at that last tour!”

Marcus didn’t bother to even think about how an infant could crawl from a public tour to the private laboratories beneath EndoTek. Instead, he smiled and nodded to the man appreciatively. “Very astute! She must have gotten in the same way our little simian friend escaped. Why don’t you turn her over to security, then get back here to clean up this mess?”

“Right away!” The man scooped up little Lena, unaware that moments prior she’d been worth a hundred times his salary. “I won’t letcha down, sir!”

“See to it that you don’t, and I’ll find you a rather generous bonus,” Marcus chuckled. He watched the janitor depart before turning towards one of the loose vials of serum, a slow smile dawning on his features. Lena might not have been good for much, but every now and then she certainly had a brilliant idea.

He doled a healthy pour from his decanter of champagne, following it with precisely enough serum to return him to a healthy adulthood. As Lena had chanced upon, revealing his younger self to the world would be a prime way to demonstrate and advertise his trillion-dollar idea’s potency.

“The best part is, I won’t become a drooling imbecile like Lena.” He chuckled to himself, falling back into his chair and watching the wrinkles vanish from his hands. More importantly, the cut he’d earned earlier had disappeared as well, proving the serum had rather potent healing applications as well. “If my brain remains at the same size and state as it was in my adulthood, well. Imagine the possibilities.”

He curled and flexed his fingers before turning his attention to his right arm. The white hairs that covered his arm were darkening back to a natural black, and he beamed at the miracle of science. More and more dark hairs joined the first, and he combed his hands through the luxurious strands—and paused. “You know… I don’t recall my arms quite being so hairy.”

Marcus rose from his chair, perplexed yet still elated. His body was stronger than it had felt in years, a vibrant energy to his every step. “Perhaps it’s undoing the effects of natural hair loss as well, and every strand I’d naturally shed is growing back?” His underarm itched as he spoke, and he dug his nails into it idly.

“Or… Perhaps… I… Ah… Achoo!” He sneezed, his nose aching. He wiped at it with the back of a hairy hand, groaning as he looked to the mucus on his arm. “Hardly fitting for a man about to make history,” he lamented. Luckily, there was a nearby sink he could use to wash himself clean.

The man strode to it purposefully, stumbling a bit as his younger feet cramped within his shoes. They felt looser and tighter all at the same time, as though they were longer in length but compressed in width. Naturally, his brilliant mind was able to solve this by walking at a half-stoop.

The sink’s water was warm on Marcus’s hands, and he noticed an odd leatheriness to them. He paid it little heed, though, instead itching at his collar and wriggling his hips. Even though he was in the prime of his life, the base of his spine was aching like mad. “I’ll get some medicine for that, before meeting the press. Or a hot pad.”

He chuckled at the thought of his younger self saying such a thing aloud, his voice losing the raspiness age had brought. As a young man, he’d simply have ‘toughed it out’, little knowing what damage he’d done to his body.

Marcus realized that his hands were likely clean by now, and despite the odd pleasure he derived from feeling the water over his palms, he turned to grab a towel to dry himself. In the corner of his vision, he saw a black-furred object, and the man whirled towards it in shock.

There was nothing there, save the remains of Lena’s clothing. Marcus curled his nose, twitching his upper lip slightly. He played his tongue along his teeth, before baring them at the sight of that furred object again. This time he was fast enough to catch a glimpse of a monkey’s tail.

“A-ha! Damned thing, I knew you’d escaped again!” The scientist growled, wondering where the creature could have escaped to. He backed towards the cabinet, only to yelp as something bumped into him from behind, a sharp pain lancing up his tailbone.

He whirled about for the second time in as many minutes, and stumbled, falling from his shoes onto the ground. Immediately, he was glad he’d taken the serum. A fall at his old age would have at least bruised a hip. Instead, he felt ready to spring up and monkey around.

The man looked up to the steel cabinets before himself, yelping in surprise as he came face-to-face with the loose animal. “AAAH!” He yelped. “AAH AAH OOK!” He scampered back, kicking his pants away, his hands bunching up in the loose sleeves of his coat.

His brow furrowed as the monkey did the same, and slow, dawning, horrified comprehension trailed down his spine like ice. He lifted his arms, keenly aware of how Lena had done the same earlier, and saw how his sleeves were bundled. He remembered the strange aching in his nose, and in his thumbed feet.

The final nail in the coffin came with a glance between his legs, not at his manhood but at the tail that twitched between his spread feet. “NUHAAAH! Wha-HAHHAppen to MEEK!?" He yelled. A second later, realization rushed into his mind, along with a thrill of horror. "The OOKing monkOOK must have dAAHmaged my sEEE EEE EEKrrruuum!”

Marcus looked down to his furry body in horror: just a monkey in a lab coat, wearing an oversized shirt. Dark fur covered his body, rustling and swaying with every motion of his form. His feet soon distracted him from this, their long toes curling and tapping on the ground. The motion reminded him of when he’d drum his fingers on a desk, and he absently clapped his hands against his face.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. A short, blunt muzzle pressed against his fingers. His thumbs pressed against thick, clumsy, silly lips. The thought of looking so ridiculous filled him with ire, and in a pique of rage, he surged against his reflection, coat falling to the ground. His simian fists pounded against the silvered cabinets, and when that did nothing he settled on destroying his shirt.

“OOOH-AAH AAH!” Speaking was hard, his mind collapsing into hysterics. Frantically, Marcus struggled for quick solutions, but his mind was grasping at straws only to have them pulled from his reach. He knew what was happening, knew that his shrinking frame meant that his brain was shrinking with it.

And he was smaller now, he could tell from how large his discarded clothes looked compared to his current form. He had to be as large as a small capuchin now, barely knee-height to a human. If that was true, it meant that he had little time left of higher thought. Soon he’d be a monkey, and nobody would be able to tell the difference between he and any other animal.

Still, the man couldn’t come to terms with that. “NAAAHT UH MONKOOK!” He wailed, jumping to his computer and frantically applying oafish keystrokes with his clumsy hands. What little of his fading genius remained finally met with a solution, and fortunately his virtual assistant was adept enough to parse through the typos, reverse-engineering a serum.

One of the beakers to his left began to fill with a purplish liquid, and Marcus fell onto his simian backside, with a sigh of relief. “Guhuh-ook. Aaah!” He breathed, no longer able to form the words his mind wanted to say. It mattered little. A simple quaff of the formula, and he’d be right as rain.

Warm hands gripped his sides, and a familiar voice cried out in triumph. “Gotcha!” The janitor grinned from ear to ear, holding his prize before his face.

The imbecile was about to ruin everything! Marcus flailed in horror, looking back towards the serum, straining a furry arm towards it in vain. Unfortunately, to the rest of the world he was little more than a Colombian white-faced capuchin, and his pinkish features couldn’t convey the intellect that lurked behind his glazing eyes.

“Ooh, you sure are a feisty one!” The janitor chuckled, roughly tossing Marcus in with the younger monkey. “Sorry ‘bout that pal, but doc’s orders. Ain’t supposed to treat you nice ‘cause you’ll break stuff. Hope you don’t mind, I’ll getcha a nanner later.”

The door slammed shut before Marcus, and the monkey wailed in horror, pawing through the cage. He could feel his genius slipping away, then even average intelligence drifting beyond his grasp. Soon he reached for a cure he no longer comprehended, just for the sake that it looked pretty.

Left as nothing but a babbling imbecile, the monkey screeched for attention. Finding none, he fell onto his backside, picking his nose and drooling. An oafish grin played across the capuchin’s features as he ignorantly watched the janitor return to the room.

The man tidied up, his mouth making noises that the monkey was no longer capable of understanding. Had he been able to, he’d perhaps have found some irony in the Janitor’s words: “Sure am glad I caughtcha so quick. Doc Marcus’d be proud of me.”