Chapter 14: 12: Of two minds.

I still felt drowsy as I was waking up, and I started looking around to see unfamiliar surroundings as I was in a room far smaller than what I had grown used to. I immediately started to feel anxious, and I let out a breath as I began my taijutsu meditation. It was one of the things I had regained from my previous life, a way to keep my mind focused even under the most stressful of situations. And, right now, this was my first time in this life seeing any space other than the nursery I had been raised in for the past half year or so.

The meditation, while lessening it, did not completely eliminate the stress or anxiousness. But, I had realized it was at least something that kept me from crying which seemed to be something I had been doing a lot more easily since being reborn as a baby. It does not eliminate or control my emotions, it only allows me to continue functioning and making effective decisions while in a stirred up emotional state, preventing me from acting purely on instinct. And, due to having become a baby again in this life, my instincts were now to cry whenever I was upset. It made me glad somewhat that this focusing of the mind at least allowed me to not do something as embarrassing and non-productive as acting like the baby I’ve literally become.

With my meditation focusing my mind, I was able to keep alert. However, with me not being able to let it out by crying, the anxiousness I was feeling quickly decided to take another form as I instantly became restless despite how drowsy I was. Before I even managed to fully confirm my surroundings, I was already violently struggling against the confines of the blanket I was wrapped in. I looked around and noticed that Levin was not holding me. In fact, he was not next to me at all. This managed to make my infant brain even more anxious as my body was now almost completely controlling my actions and emotions while my mind full of my past-life experiences was now only able to just barely constrain the urge to break down crying as loudly as I could.

Without even thinking about whether or not it should be shown in front of others, I immediately sat up the moment I threw the blanket off. I found Gaerien next to me, but after that I immediately identified Rolwen and Levin across the room. This looked like it could be an opportunity to find out from Gaerien exactly what the situation was. That is probably what I would have done had my past-life consciousness been in control. However, my baby Aerien brain had completely taken over by this point. Before I could even stop myself, I found myself reaching out toward the boys.

“Levin! LEVIN!!!” I started crying out in a distressed voice. I was sitting on some kind of mat of some kind of organic matter, which in turn seemed to be on top of a low table. As soon as I saw Levin, my urge to go toward him was enough to overpower any rationality, and my meditation did not help. In fact, if anything it backfired on me. The main cause of this was that my taijutsu meditation almost demanded that my body remain active. Image training or preparation for action can become a weak substitute, but nothing beats actually moving your physical body, and so since what my baby mind wanted and what the meditation demanded were one in the same at this point, I leaned forward and took a tumble right off the edge of the low table.

“Wow! Aerien!” One of the boys exclaimed, and I was happy to realize it was probably Levin.

In my case, as soon as my mind realized the crisis I was in, baby Aerien’s impulsive desires were instantly banished and the old 60 year old taijutsu master was back in complete control. In my old life, if I was falling a distance of my body length or greater like this, I would have put my arms up over my head , ducked my head down, made my body into a ball and attempted to make my elbow get first contact with the ground before going into a tuck and roll. However, there were two things working against that here. One, my head was now more than twice as big compared to my body as it was when I was an adult in my previous life. The second was that the entire length of my body was only about a foot and a half. And, if gravity in this world was even close to what it was on Earth, this meant that instead of the 1.1 seconds I would have to pull off this maneuver at 6 feet, at 1 foot I would only have 0.4 seconds. That difference of over half a second really mattered.

Fortunately, 1 foot was not enough to build up a lot of momentum. Unfortunately, it was still just enough to kill me if my head hit the floor. So, what I ultimately wound up doing was something very close to the instinctive action of any falling person. I used my arms to brace myself against the fall. I did not, however, throw my hands out in front of me. That was a really good way to get a broken arm. Instead, I pulled my hands toward my chest and allowed myself to land on the backs of my hands, which were then followed immediately by my forearms and finally my elbows, and I managed to land like a cat as my knees touched down at exactly the same time as my elbows.

“I old yuuu dat uss a bad idea!” (I told you that was a bad idea!) Rolwen’s voice said as the two of them were now up and running in my direction. In the meantime, I was kinda surprised that I didn’t feel much pain from having my knees and elbows come in such hard contact with the wooden floor. Well, it wasn’t that far of a fall, I didn’t weigh a whole lot, and I still had baby fat, but still! It was like there was zero pain at all. And, if anything, having to face a crisis situation and awakening my full past-life mind had made my meditation which emphasized physical movement deeper. And, without pain and the crisis situation averted, baby Aerien’s innocent desire to be close to the person she was used to being in physical contact with her 24/7 managed to re-assert themselves in an instant and I began pushing myself to my feet.

“Levin!” I yelled again when he got up to me. I grabbed at his shirt, almost pulling him down on top of me as I used him as a support to pull myself to my feet.

(Oh jeeze! Aerien!) Levin, meanwhile, plopped himself into a sitting position right in front of me, causing me to have to put my hands on his shoulders in order to stand. As soon as I was standing, not even consciously aware of the fact that this was the first time I had actually stood up on my own in this life, I threw myself at him and clung to the front of his shirt. Now that baby Aerien was happy, my previous-life mind started laughing and scoffing at my actions inside my mind. It was perfectly normal and understandable for an infant to act this way, given the circumstances, but it was like some sappy love reunion of some sort. Considering he was actually a boy and I was a girl now, that immediately made me feel somewhat embarrassed.

Up until now, I had been realizing more and more that I seemed to have some kind of a double consciousness. I had already figured one was my new self as a baby and the other was my past life self. The two seemed to be slowly merging together over time, but in periods of high stress like this I found more often than not it was my baby self that asserted itself with my past self only able to mildly guide my actions. Well, when you get right down to it, it’s not at all different from being in a dissociative state. I was not entirely unfamiliar with this experience. In my past life, I had found my mother after she had passed away from an accidental overdose of her pain medication. I knew that she was dead just from looking at her, but that didn’t stop me from yelling and shaking her in order to futilely try to wake her up. My mind kept scoffing at the pointless actions my body was taking. Finally, my disconnected mind told my body which seemed to be acting on its own ‘you have to call 911.’ That finally got me taking the appropriate actions.

In much the same way, when I was under stress in this life, it was as though I lost control of my body. In those times, anything that comes from my past life knowledge stops guiding my actions and it is the impulsive baby Aerien that does the moving. And, for a baby’s mind, there were a lot of things that were stressful that would seem perfectly normal to an adult. Such as, in this case, waking up without my living “security blanket” next to me, especially when I was in a strange place I had never seen before.

“ueres dat uguy?” (Where’s that guy?) I asked, clinging to Levin’s shirt with my little hands as I looked around anxiously.

“Huh?” Rolwen responded.

(That was scary! Ok, we shouldn’t have them up there, maybe we should get Gaerien down too.) Levin said. After I had gained the ability to talk, I had finally straightened them out that I was Aerien and she was Gaerien, so they have been calling us correctly since then.

(Yeah, I told you it was a bad idea!) Rolwen says again, pulling Gaerien off the table and holding her to his chest as he flopps down on the floor himself.

“Ahh!” Gaerien responds, apparently awake as well. I realize about now that they are not planning to answer my question about where that bastard was, so I begin looking around more and straining my ears in order to try and locate him.

(Well, he said that we didn’t need to hold them as much while we were here, but I didn’t think they would get up and fall off like that!) Levin said. I felt my breath catch in my chest as I heard it was him that was a part of the reason why I was by myself when I woke up. As I felt myself finding yet another reason to dislike him, my past-life mind just had to laugh at how illogical my baby thought process was. Indeed, it may be the case that my baby self completely took over when I was stressed, but I could feel my two minds in action almost all the time now, the baby self and the past-life self.

Most of the time, it just gave my past-life self a good source of entertainment as it laughed and tried to straighten out my baby self. Indeed, my past-life self seemed to be quite capable of teaching my baby self, and since my baby self never had trouble understanding my past-life self’s meaning, I learned very very fast and was considerably smarter than a normal baby. At some point, I had reached the conclusion that the source of this was probably the difference between my physical brain and my memories from my past life that were too advanced for it. Both were the real me, and when I was alone in my thoughts I could easily access both, but in order to make it something natural for me my past-life self had to teach my physical brain these concepts it couldn’t currently process.

In this case though, both my baby brain and past-life mind hated that Eirlathion guy, and so the admonishment from my past-life self did nothing to calm my baby self. I was still accepting the poor logic concept that it was his fault that all that just now happened, even though I knew it wasn’t.

For the most part, I had managed to make this two minds thing work out alright for me. However, right now, the far more impulsive baby Aerien had taken far too much control and, not finding any nearby sign of Eirlathion in this room and not hearing him in the immediate vicinity, decided that now was the right time to deliver a message my past-self and been meticulously preparing for quite a while, but never finding the right time to say it.

“I haf to tell yuu zomething.” I said, holding on to Levin’s shirt. “Levin! I haf to tell yuu zomething!” I was shaking him, trying to make sure he was paying attention to me this time. I was a little annoyed that they didn’t answer my last question about where Eirlathion was.

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“Whad!?” Levin responded, looking down at me. It seemed my activity and insistent tone had gotten Rolwen’s attention as well, and he was curiously looking over in my direction. At that moment, I decided to deliver the one line that would leave no doubt to the claims I was about to make. I had picked it out as something they could instantly relate to, and it was something that only someone from our previous life could possibly know. More importantly, it was not something either of them had ever talked about when they were chatting with each other about their previous life before they started becoming more cautious about it.

“doughnald rump us bresident before we died.” I said. After these words, what greeted me in response was pure silence. Not a single person said a word. “I’m like you!” I said after they had enough time for it to sink in. “I’m like you nd Rolwen!” Despite being impulsive, my baby self had managed to deliver the exact message, down to the exact word, that my past-life self had decided on.

I had noticed from their conversations that they seemed to have been a lot younger than I was, and so they talked about a lot of pop culture that I didn’t know about. And, due to the generation gap, I was not at all sure if they would be able to relate to any cultural references I might be able to make. However, naming the US president was something that any English speaking person would know immediately, regardless of what generation they were from. So long as they were not an elementary school age child, they would know who the current US president was, even if they lived in another English speaking country like the UK or Australia, and even if they lived in some other non-English speaking country and just happened to have learned English themselves, chances are they would still know it.

As for why I said that as the very first thing out of my mouth before I delivered the actual message that I was like them, well, there were two reasons for that. One was that my hard palate had not fused yet, so no matter how hard I trained my ability to speak it was impossible for me to say something like “reincarnated” without it sounding like a total mess that they would never understand. I had to stick to simple words such as “I’m like you.” However, if I had said that first, chances are they would mistake my meaning as something along the lines of “I like you,” since that wouldn’t be too unusual for a baby to say once they knew how to speak as well as I did. They simply would not understand what I meant until I said the thing that could not possibly be disregarded or misinterpreted.

And, going by the shocked expressions on their faces, it seemed like it had the exact intended effect.

“What!?” Levin said, looking down at me with eyes bulging out of his head.

(I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.) I said, looking down in my embarrassment and shame.

“Wow!” Rolwen said, looking over here as he cradled Gaerien in his lap.

(Wow! Seriously, Aerien!? You… why didn’t you ever say anything!?) Levin says, lifting me up and looking me in the eyes with an excitement so great it actually started to scare my poor baby self. Fortunately, she trusted Levin, and because my past-life self kinda expected this kind of reaction, so did my baby self, and thus I was kinda prepared for it, so I was able to keep my cool and asnwer his question calmly.

(Well, I couldn't talk well enough before. I’m only about half a year old! And also… them.) I looked toward the nearest window as I finished this sentence, and upon following my gaze Rolwen and Levin seemed to immediately understand.

“Yeaah.” Levin said with a far-off and somewhat darkened expression. (Well, I’m happy to know you’re like us though. It would be scary if it was just me and Rolwen in this house.) Levin said.

It is at about this point my past-life self realizes just what was probably going through my baby self’s mind when she decided to pick this moment to spill the beans. It seemed like a rather inappropriate time, but.. really, it turns out my baby self was probably thinking about how Levin and Rolwen were feeling. Did this mean, somehow my baby self was expressing empathy? No, no, that’s WAY too freaking advanced of a mental concept for a baby to have. She could have picked it up from my past self though. While we oddly separate on the level of surface consciousness, this was not the first time I came to notice that my baby self was able to access what could only be subconscious knowledge from my past self. Of course, that was the exact reason why my baby self was always able to understand what the past self was trying to explain to her immediately, and why I was able to understand these things so quickly.

At any rate, well, it was an impulsive action but it was definitely for the right reasons. And, even if Eirlathion was near by, I don’t think he’s likely to understand the contents of this conversation very well.

(Oh! Levin! I just got an idea! Can you take care of Gaerien for a little bit?) Rolwen said, gently placing my sister next to him. Gaerien got an irritated look on her face and began pulling off her own blanket as soon as she was on the floor. Meanwhile, Rolwen ran off toward a set of stairs leading downward that I hadn’t noticed before. And, as soon as he got there, he crouched down, put his hand on the bars holding up the hand rail, and began trying to creep down the stairs as quietly as he could.

Levin and I were both watching what he was doing, and it was immediately clear what he was doing. So, neither of us said another word about it and instead Levin’s gaze fell to Gaerien for a moment and then he looked back at me with a concerned expression before talking to me in a hushed tone. (Hey, what about Gaerien?) He asks.

(Yeah, me too!) She answers for me finally getting the blanket off successfully. Unlike me though, she is not yet capable of sitting up on her own, so she is just left to flail around on the floor for now. Well, at least she can more easily look around now and turn her head to take in the room.

(Yeah, her too.) I confirm. (That’s how we can both already talk. Also, both our English is better than our Elven.)

(Yeah, that’s right.) Levin comments. (Why didn’t I ever notice that!?) Levin has a face that looks like he’s kicking himself.

[Hey Rolwen! Is that Aerien I hear up there?] All of us immediately freeze at the sound of those words spoken in Elven. More to the point, the person who said them. Rolwen seems to take the most reasonable response for a kid in our position to take in response to that. He does not say a word, and simply runs right back up the stairs, and then immediately comes straight to us, only stopping to reach down and grab Gaerien before huddling in with us and holding on to Gaerien protectively.

Well, it seems our important conversation has been cut short for now. We all hear a sigh, and then with barely a sound in the seconds to follow we eventually see the head of long dark hair and pointed elven ears attached to Eirlathion cresting from the stair well. And with that, the excited conversation is switched to silence and a heavy atmosphere between the four of us as the man who betrayed our trust enters the room.

Author's note

For anyone who noticed that Aerien starts switching between the 3rd and 1st person when talking about her baby self and her past self, and doesn't even stay consistent with which of the two get talked about in the 3rd person, that's completely on purpose.

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