The Visitor Untitled Babysitting Story (Yes That is the Real Name, Deal With it) chapter 4 by 2kfsk

If Jason slept for more than a few minutes, it didn’t feel like it.

“Wha… huh?”

He shot up and looked around the living room… when there was nothing amiss, he curled back up in the couch cushions. Was it his guilt at leaving Franky to her acrid fate in his stomach? Certainly not, probably just a fluke. He closed his eyes and laid his head on the throw pillow.

Then, he heard it again. A *thump*, the sound of something hard being lobbed against glass, like a baseball or a pebble. He woke again, gentler this time. “What was that…?”

Franky was feeling woozy, but she was lucid enough to detect that Jason had left his sleeping position. Sure, it resulted in another deluge of acid saturating her sensitive skin in its corrosive compounds, but it did provide her with a glimmer of hope. “H-huh… Jason…? Are you gonna let… me out?”

Her voice was practically a whimper, impossible for the giant to hear from the outside. Jason was no longer concerned with the goings-on in his stomach, as he was venturing upstairs to locate the source of the sound (but not before grabbing the shrink ray and sticking it into his waistband of course).

The only room upstairs with a window was Franky’s bedroom. He walked inside the dark abode, careful to avoid stepping on—or even touching—any number of her clothes, gadgets, or trinkets strewn about the domicile. He tiptoed around them and made it to the window, where he peered out.  

Nothing.

Then, it came. *Plink!* A small stone ricocheted off the windowpane and startled the daylights out of Jason. And this time, it came with a voice.

“*Psstt! Franky! Open up! Fran-kyyy?!!*”

Jason glanced at his stomach nervously, then back to the window. Whatever the origin of the voice, it was too close to the house for him to get a look past the decorative overhang, though he was reasonably sure it belonged to a girl. Mustering up some courage, Jason unlocked the window and lifted it. The pane scraped up into the house and held in place, creating a gap wide enough for a human to crawl through, if they managed to make it up in the first place.

Jason waited for a moment. The pelting had stopped, but so had the voice. Was she waiting on something?

“*Well? Throw down the rope! C’mon, Franky, don’t go cold on me! We’ve done this a million times!*”

This filled Jason with an additional level of consternation. He really didn’t know what was going on, but considering where Franky currently was, it may be better to simply play along until has an opportunity to quell this girl’s curiosity than leave the possibility she could squeal about Franky’s disappearance. So, he scanned the room and eventually found a coiled up fabric bundle beneath her twin-sized bed. When Jason unwrapped it, he found a firetruck-red emergency rope ladder. Somewhat dully, he tossed the end out of the window, and it unfurled before hitting the ground. Jason hung his end of the rope on the knob of Franky’s bed.

“*Thanks!*” The slack rope ladder suddenly went taut, and from here all Jason had to do was wait. Patiently, nervously, the sounds of exertion with every step of the rope became louder and louder before:

Her hair emerged before the rest of her. It was a frazzled mess of fibers twice as big as her face, which grit a set of brace-sewn teeth as she grimaced, launching her body onto the shingles of the eaves. Her stomach rose and fell rapidly, and she squirmed forward, grimacing as she scraped her shins on the rooftiles. Now fully visible from the corner streetlight, Jason noticed the rest of her fit: a navy-blue tank top, some short shorts that may have been pajama-wear, a pair of striped shin-high stockings, and a pair of rainbow tennis shoes.

“Agh, *finally*,” she said, finally wrapping her fingers around the windowsill to pull her inside, where she collapsed to the carpet with an additional *thump*. “I was starting to think you were never…”

For the first time, the girl got a good look at the man who’d let her in. Rather than the nine-year-old neighbor she knew all too well, she instead was staring up at the face of a dorky, lanky young man who was almost twice her size and presumably at least twice her age.

Madeline cocked her head and gave a pointed and confused sniff. “You’re not Franky.” Of all the emotions she displayed, Jason noted the chief one to be “annoyance”.

“Hi, I’m—” Jason stopped. Was it a good idea to tell this girl his name? “…a friend, of Franky’s.”

But no sooner had the words left Jason’s mouth did her eyes bulge in acknowledgement. “Oh, *ohhh!!* You’re the babysitter I’ve heard so much about! Jason, right?”

Jason grinded his teeth, and he replied quite stilted: “Y-yes. I… am.”

“I’ve heard plenty about you! Don’t know how or why, but Franky can’t stop talking about you. Like, seriously, it’s *all* she talks about. Deborah and I can’t wait for her to shut up. Hey, where is she, anyway?” Without skipping a beat, Madeline skirted around Jason and pulled open Franky’s dresser, through which she rummaged. “Needed to borrow a baseball glove,” she explained, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to break and enter into a neighbor’s house to search for Little League sports accessories. Jason was aghast. Then, the girl said, “Oh, I’m Madeline, by the way.”

As if that made it better. Jason was about to give her a stern talking to about the dangers of sneaking into a neighbor’s house, especially if rather than meeting the neighbor in question, you end up meeting a stranger, but was interrupted when Madeline exclaimed, “*Found* it!” She held the glove with the triumphant glow of a video game protagonist, and she slid it between her armpit.

“Anyway, see you soon. Tell Franky I said hi. Seriously, where *is* she? She *can’t* be asleep. Is she downstairs? Watching a movie? *Without me!?*” Madeline didn’t wait to have her question answered as she climbed onto the windowsill in a squat that made it look sort of like she wasn’t wearing pants at all. Jason was disturbed by the ease with which this girl had essentially just stolen from his babysitting charge, and he felt that he had to do *something* before she left.

This is when Jason had one of his ideas. And not a mere normal idea, but a *brilliant* idea. An idea that might solve the very problem Franky was encountering in Jason’s stomach.

He unholstered the shrink ray and held it in his hands just as Madeline was about to step outside the window…