Ellen's Daycare for Worldwalkers

In polite society, "daycare" and "boarding school" are incompatible terms.

"Daycare" is as temporary as public school, a place where parents can temporarily leave children unable to provide for themselves in anything while their parents took care of grown-up matters. "Boarding School" is a place where older children who are self-sufficient enoughfor a microcosm of adult society, divorced from their parents in almost every way.

A daycare that is also a boarding school is an oxymoron that students who are also oxymorons are exactly what they need. Ellen's Foundling Daycare is a daycare, and also a boarding school.

The students are all special people under special circumstances, all of whom share a commonality that no other institute or place of office can care about.

Each and every one of their students aren't children. Not even teenagers. They're babies. And they're adults.

Everyone loves a fantasy, and the students of Ellen's have all lived a real fantasy. They're all found a mysterious door carved into a tree in the woods, or opened a briefcase with a staircase leading to another world within, or were hit by a truck, only to wake up and discover that they were alive in a meadow unfamiliar to them. They were whisked away to worlds full of magic, fairies, rainbows and unicorns, dragons and knights and witches and vampires and every insane thing that stokes the imagination.

And for some reason, it would all end with them in diapers.

In some worlds it was instantaneous. Worlds like Candyland and Toyland turned your clothes into onsesies and underwear into diapers the moment you walked into them. Other worlds like Wunderwald and Samhainville start out as whimsical lands with problems that need solving and a hero (i.e. worldwalkers who stumble across the doors) to solve them, only for a slow transition into bottles and toys, being "adopted" into royal families or being cursed with the evil wizard's dying breath. The circumstances differ, but the results are the same.

Ellen Lost, current dean of the school and graduate, claimed that this was because they all grew up too fast, and the worlds had come to them to be what they truly were: happy little children without a care in the world. She herself had run away from home when she was a young woman, wanting to join the circus, only to find herself going through the wrong tent and into a world of magical clowns and talking animals. By the time her parents found her, she was completely unpotty trained and crawling on all fours.

Ellen was one of the lucky ones. The magic on her was temporary, and her adulthood eventually came back to her no worse for wear. Not only that, but the magic ensured that she was well-taken care of, the glamour making it so that her parents thought she was a baby the whole time. They fed her like one, played with her like one, changed her diapers as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Even as she "grew up" again, a part of her longs to go back to those days.

Not everyone who went through what she went through was so lucky. Some worldwalking lostlings were dumped back into their normal lives to families who presumed their husbands and wives and children had suddenly become incontinent or brain-damaged. There were even cases where the world walkers had de-aged, their own families not even recognizing them and sending them away into the foster system.

This was why Ellen had started this daycare; it was a place where these little lostlings could be taken care of and either allowed a chance back to normalcy or a safe space to be the babies they were meant to be. The staff were all either graduates who were perfectly fine with meeting their student's special needs just as they had, or professional caretakers or babysitters who had been let in on the masquerade. They had lodgings, food, visitation, sanitation, play areas, and everything they could ever need until graduation.

"Graduation" in context to Eleanor's school can mean one of three things: restoration of adulthood, resignation in babyhood, or returning to the worlds they found themselves in.