Chapter 4: 2: What I have discovered

It is really hard to keep track of time when you can never seem to stay awake for more than a few hours. However, since the whole confusing episode where I tried to get the attention of someone to feed me, I seem to have spent every moment being held by the small child the woman gave me to, and my sister, who I have definitely confirmed at this point is my identical twin sister, was given to this child’s close friend. It’s unusual for someone who doesn’t even seem to be 2 years old to have a friend they interact with like this, but these children also seem to be reincarnators like myself, evidenced by the fact that they speak English at a level of fluency not normal for children their age, not to mention the fact that English does not seem to be the language spoken here.

Actually, because we are always being held by them, it has become a lot easier to at least keep track of night and day. While I can’t trust my own internal clock at all at this point, I can roughly keep track of how many days have gone by according to when the kid holding me is sleeping. There are some times when I will wake up where they are asleep for just a little while. These children are also rather small, so I presume they are young enough to still need naps in the middle of the day. However, there are also times when they are asleep for quite a while, I will wake up several times in a row and every time I find they are still sleeping.

Going by how many times the children holding my sibling and I have been asleep, I figure it has been somewhere between 3 and 5 days since I was born. I have not eaten even once in that time. Under normal circumstances, I ought to be so weak from hunger I could hardly move. I would be right at death’s door after only one full day of getting no nutrition as a newborn infant. However, it seemed as though I was perfectly fine. If anything, I felt like I was growing more energetic.

There’s no doubt about it. I don’t know what I am, but it’s quite clear I’m not human. The other people around me seem to know this as well. This is why nobody even tried to feed me. They knew I didn’t need it. That was one question answered. With that answer though came additional questions. If I didn’t need food to live, why was it that everyone seemed so concerned when I was crying and trying to get them to give me food? Well, I can probably guess that my behavior might have been a bit strange for a child of whatever race I am. If I don’t need to nurse, then of course it would be strange for me to make so much effort to get that sort of thing.

Well, I could probably account for why they seemed so concerned, but would just that really have caused the reaction I was getting? All those children, they did seem rather worried, and they really have not let me be alone even for a second since then. It’s clear there is something about me that has them very scared for me. However, the ones I have been stuck with couldn’t be more than 2 years old themselves.

That’s another thing I have observed. While I can’t tell exactly what anyone else is saying, the two children who are holding me and my sister seem to get yelled at every single time they even attempt to put one of us down, and we are immediately thrust back into their hands. This behavior truly does seem bizarre, but… could it be some kind of clue to what species I am?

From what I can gather, these two children seem to be the youngest children aside from my sister and I. Could it be? I am some kind of creature that is nourished by being near children? That’s a scary thought in and of itself. It makes sense though. Actually, the more I think about it, the more frighteningly accurate that conjecture seems. Every time I woke up and cried before the incident a few days ago, an adult took me and put me into the hands of a child. After that, I would start to feel comfortable and drift back off to sleep. The comfort I felt, could it be because I was feeling satisfied from the nourishment I was getting from the children?

This makes even more sense when I think that they must have actually been worried about me when I was crying before. They got so worried that they made the youngest children here, presumably the highest quality “nourishment” available, hold me at all times. Meanwhile, the other children are made to enforce this rule to the ones holding me and my sister.

I begin to get an extremely uneasy feeling. Now that I have had this thought, there is simply no denying it. All the evidence simply lines up. I hear a soft sigh as the child who has been with me every second of every day since I started protesting a few days ago stirs in their sleep. Now that I know that I am somehow feeding off this innocent child, I am beginning to feel an entirely different kind of uneasiness than what I had felt before. These last 3 to 5 days, I have been deathly afraid I was going to starve to death. However, now that I know that’s no longer an issue, is my feeding killing this child? They don’t seem to be growing weaker from what I can tell, but… I’m not certain what exactly I can do about it right now though. I will have to keep a close eye on them.

Speaking of eyes, my eyesight has been improving rapidly since I was born. My vision is still a little blurry at this point, but I have started to reach the point where I can recognize things on sight. I have even spotted my twin held in the hands of the other toddling English-speaking child. In addition to this, I have also learned what our names are. I heard it from the kid holding my sister when they were speaking to the one holding me.

“Dey say theiir names are Gaerien and Aerien.” While they seemed to talk quite fluently, they still did not have a completely closed hard palate in their mouth, so it seemed there was still a bit of an oddity in the way they talked, lisping slightly from time to time.

“But whith one’ss whithch?” Levin, the one holding me asked in return. Yes, in addition to our names, I also heard them calling each other by their names too.

“I don know, dey said dat the older wan who was born first is named Gaerien so the younger one is Aerien,” Rolwen, the other kid who’s holding my sister informed him. I’m not entirely sure if they are boys despite the fact that, well, we have been together for every second of every day. I am still swaddled in the same cloth I was born in after all. At any rate, their names do sound somewhat masculine, so I will assume their genders for now.

“But how do we know whi-CH one is older?” Levin, the one holding me, asked again.

“I dunno, maybe we just sould not call them eithher one?”

“Or we can keep changging wha- we call ‘em” Levin made what sounded like an extremely irresponsible suggestion. What a way to confuse a child. If I didn’t have my memories of my previous life, I would definitely be very confused as I tried to start learning the language of this world if I couldn’t even be consistently called by the same name.

Rolwen didn’t seem very comfortable with that suggestion either. However, the irresponsible Levin just decided to go ahead with it, and so for the last few days it seemed like he(?) alternated completely randomly between calling me Aerien, which was my actual name, and Gaerien, which was supposed to be my sister’s name. Perhaps I should start making it clear which one I am by just not responding whenever he calls me by my sister’s name. I’m not really sure how far that tactic will go at my age though. Infants aren’t exactly known for their attention span to start with.

Those are the things that I have figured out in the few days since I was reborn in this world. For an infant that is not even a week old, this could likely be seen as an extraordinary amount of awareness of the world around me. Well, really, any coherent awareness of the world around me beyond just being amazed and confused by everything is extraordinary for a newborn who is not even a week old.

Now, however, as extraordinary as I already was, I felt it was time to start working on something else that no infant should be able to do. I was growing sick and tired of not being able to do anything in the way of communication except for cry. So, now, while everyone else was asleep, I was going to try and talk.

“Aaaaa…. aaaaiiiaaaiiiii…” I wanted to say the words “I will try to talk,” but that was as close as I was able to come to merely making a sound that was similar to the first word in the sentence. Ok then, how about the alphabet?

“Aiiii… bbbbb bbbbbaaaaa… hahahahaha!” No good, I just thought about seeing myself from a parent’s eyes as I was making sounds like a bleating sheep. Just imagining how cute it would be if I had walked in on one of my children or grandchildren back when they were this age making sounds like this. At any rate, it seemed like I was not going to be making sounds that were quite like what I would be able to after my mouth muscles and the motor language muscles of my brain developed better. Perhaps I would just have to feel satisfied with these close approximations. I would call these sounds so far good enough for A and B. So, let’s try C now.

“Azzzzzzz zzzsssszza” Not even close. I don’t think my mouth can form that sound yet. Ok, let’s give up on it. D. “aaeeeeeee. Eeee… hahaha!” Seems like I skipped one. I was genuinely trying for a D, but no matter how I look at it that sounded like an E. This really is too cute. I wish I was my old self from my previous life looking at this child trying to talk now. I began to experience nostalgia for my children and grandchildren in my previous life. I have no regrets dying in order to keep my granddaughter alive, but… I feel a pain in my heart as I begin to miss them. “Aaaaaa. Aaaauuuu.” Well, the F I tried to attempt in order to shake of the nostalgia was a complete failure even worse than the attempt at C.

Perhaps my infant mouth really just isn’t ready for this. Or, maybe this is good exercise to improve for the future? Yes, if I learned one thing well in my previous life it’s that any skill takes repeated practice, thousands and thousands of hours and millions of failures, but with every failure you learn where you went wrong and you get better, and eventually you get it right. Yes, I’m trying to talk long before a child should ever even be capable of such a thing. The motor language section of my brain hasn’t even developed yet.

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Under normal circumstances, what I’m trying to do should be impossible. However, with my previous life knowledge, it should become possible. It’s not like my brain was damaged and the motor-language section of my brain was destroyed. I have the brain of a newborn infant right now. The brain of a baby is very well known for its plasticity. If I challenge my brain to develop the motor-language section early, it will respond. All I have to do is keep practicing. “Eeeee..” Hmm… I can see a lot of As and Es in my future. The G wound up sounding like an E too.

It was an absolute slog working my way through the entire alphabet like that, and aside from the vowels I don’t think I got even a single one sounding remotely like the letter I was trying to say. By the end of it, my brain was completely burned out and I eagerly allowed sleep to overtake me. Just going through the alphabet was pure torture.

I had always felt a degree of sympathy while working with patients in my job as a nurse when they had neurological damage. I had sympathy, but there was never any way I could relate to their experience. Now, however, I had real first hand knowledge of what it felt like to try and do something when the responsible part of your brain is simply missing. There is really no way to describe how monumental of an effort it takes just to do the simplest of tasks.

Every time I had gone to sleep before up until now in this new life, it was either because I had cried myself to exhaustion or was lulled into a content state after being soothed by… by being “fed” by the children. The memory of my new primary concern drifted back to me in this moment. That was another reason I was going to have to learn to talk. If I could talk then maybe I could at least tell Levin and Rolwen about my suspicions and maybe ask them how they are feeling.

Ideally I would like to not be constantly feeding off of them as I am now, but without the ability to communicate, I doubt anything I can do will convince the people around to stop forcing the two of them to constantly hold me and Gaerien at all times. Well then, that just adds a degree of urgency to my efforts to learn how to talk. I guess I had better get to it, but first, I have to sleep. This will be my first sleep from an exhaustive exercise in this new life… what a truly nostalgic feeling.

-

Winding back the clock, on Earth and before the car wreck that had killed Aerien in her previous life. Or rather, at the time of the incident. A vehicle was driving down the road with the radio blaring. The speakers were so loud that it almost made the entire car bounce with the heavy base.

In the front seat, two teenage boys, aged 17 and 18, were laughing and kidding around with one another. “Hey, look back! Look at Karie!” One of them, the 17 year old passenger, said to his friend. Karie was his own 14 year old sister riding along with them in the back seat. She had both her hands clamped tightly over her ears.

“It’s too loud!” The young girl complained, but she was unable to even hear her own voice over the loud music. However, despite her complaints, her brother and his friend only laughed at her. If she had known this trip home would be like this, she would have just waited for her parents to finish up with their boring party instead of going home with her brother.

“Haha! It’s alright, you’ll get used to it!” Her brother’s friend said from the driver’s seat. “Wow!”

“Oh my God! Look out!” Her brother screamed in a panic. Karie looked up to see what it was that was making them scream. A car ahead of them had just collided with a mini van, and both cars had spun out and were now blocking the lane ahead of them completely. Her brother’s friend slammed on the breaks, but they had been following way too close to the driver ahead of them. The sound of screeching tires against the pathment could be heard, and then, there was the heavy feeling of an impact and Karie felt her head snap forward at the same time as she saw the fragments of shattered glass from the windshield shattering rain all over her brother and his friend. The airbags had blocked most of it, but she still found the sight of all those pieces of glass raining down on her brother horrifying.

After that, she heard screeching tires again, and then there was darkness.

After this, the next thing she remembered was a bright light and a cold harsh air. She felt like she had just left a warm space that she had been for a while. She felt like her whole body was in pain.

‘Am I in the hospital?’ She thought as she tried to make sense of what had happened to her. She felt like her body was being lifted up, and then it seemed as though she was being turned upside down. She hadn’t even realized that she felt like she was choking. She coughed and felt fluid being forced from her lungs, and then she heard the sound of a baby crying.

‘What is that?’ She thought as her body shook and shivered through the experience of expelling the water from her lungs. She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but it felt as though her entire body was in pain.

“hoommm ummmm ummm unn muu nnaaa uummn.” She heard a very muffled sounding voice. It sounded tender, but somehow very large. She felt herself being carried and laid on something soft.

“hummm unnn um unu ummm auuu.” Another muffled and distorted voice was talking. Karie began to get scared at this point. Had her hearing been damaged by her brother’s loud music? Soon after she had this thought though, she felt the back of her head being held. That hand seemed to be forcing her face against something soft, it was warm and soft, and kind of jelly like. All she knew though was that she hated whatever it was. She did her best to try and turn her head away, and she cried again, more and more.

‘Wait, is that my voice crying? Why do I sound like a baby?’

“uuu au unn ummm hamuuu unnn ahauuu nnnuu, haaa iiuuu uuu aaa iii hau ha.” Another voice was saying something again. It seemed like the first person who was talking before, and they seemed to be talking to someone on the other side of where Karie was now. Wait, why did this woman’s voice sound like it was coming from so high up?

“Ahhh annn haa.” Karie felt like the entire surface she was on top of vibrated that time as she heard the voice from directly above her. No, she was starting to realize it now. The surface she was on top of was a person. This person was gigantic, or rather… no way! No freaking way!

Karie was stunned with the realization. Was she a baby now? How did this happen!? Wait, she remembered having heard some things about reincarnation, and there were starting to be some anime these days where being reincarnated was a theme of the story. Could that be…? Did she actually… die?

“an mmuuuu haeenn. Ahhh auuu hai” The voice from above her… her mother? If this is her mother, she was speaking to Karie again. She was still struggling as Karie tried to lift her head away from the thing her face was being squished into, but… she was starting to figure out what was going on. She had just been born as a baby. This was her mother. She was trying to feed her right now. That’s what was going on. Karie was still very confused and upset at the situation, but if that’s what was going on then it was probably best to just cooperate with her mother. She couldn’t quite see properly, so she allowed her mother’s hand to guide her head, and eventually her lips were able to find the nipple she was being guided to.

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