Chapter 2: A Baby's Life

  Several months passed as I spent most of my time napping, eating, and dirtying diapers. I saw a couple of new people during this time, but it was mostly the old woman who was at my birth that took care of cleaning me, and my mother who would feed me.

  Every chance I got I was appraising anything and everything that I could see that wasn't a person. This ultimately boiled down to my bottle, my crib, my blanket, the curtains of my room, and of course, myself. Anything that wasn't nailed down I seemed to be able to appraise, and I did so repeatedly until roughly six months had gone by.

  In that time, I managed to gain 4 more levels in my Appraisal skill, making it to level 6 and raising me from 9 experience to 25.

  After that, I found out that I seem to gain experience as I grow. Slowly strengthening my body, and practicing my fine motor skills seems to be the most natural way to raise my experience at this stage.

  I gained 10 experience when my neck became strong enough to support my head's weight, 5 for forming an intentional fist, and an additional 10 when I began to crawl.

  This brought my new experience total to 50 out of 125.

  ***

  Now that I was mobile, I spent more time with my mother looking after me instead of the old woman. I hoped I could spend most of my free time learning the layout of my parent’s house, but that didn’t really work out given how large the house seemed to be.

  Despite the house's apparent size, my days seemed limited to my bedroom and the room my mother would watch me in. After thoroughly crawling the width of that room, I came to the conclusion that it was some form of office or study. The lack of a bed, and the desk and bookshelves lining the back wall, reinforced the idea in my mind.

  My mother seemed to be splitting her concentration between me, and a stack of papers most days. She was still quite attentive, given the way she noticed everything I seemed to do, but she was always working. It made me wonder if she had some sort of split perception skill, but I had no way of confirming the idea.

  When I finally caved into the boredom of having nothing to do, I decided to show an interest in what my mother was doing. This essentially boiled down to me tugging on the hem of her dress until she lifted me into her lap, but it got the job done.

  Once I was up there, I think she tried to explain to me what letters and reading were. She pointed along the page as she spoke, but I was still far too young to grasp any of what she explained, especially considering I only understood a couple of words. Still, the fact that she had even tried led me to believe I had a good chance of reading being one of my next skills.

  ***

  Another two months passed in the blink of an eye, and I learned two major things.

  First, I learned the world I lived in seemed to be in a medieval age. Technology was extremely limited so far as I could tell, but some necessities like running water, and indoor plumbing were possible through magic. I couldn’t tell how these magics worked, but I figured I’d learn about it eventually.

  Secondly, I learned that my family was relatively well off. Given the obvious value of knowledge, I knew the presence of the bookshelves in my mother's room meant we had to have a decent amount of money. The simple metal toys my father would often bring me to play with couldn’t be cheap either.

  Unfortunately, I was still too small to be able to see any of the books on the shelves well enough to appraise them. Unable to see the books clearly, I caught myself thinking about the books I had read in my past life.

  ‘I wonder if the books lining the shelves are all informational, or if fiction existed in this world as well…’

  Some of the last memories I had recovered from my past life were of a bunch of fictional books I think I had read. Though I couldn’t recall my personal feelings for the stories, I could tell that I had an apparent love of worlds with swords and sorcery given the stories I recalled.

  I thought about these stories for a long time after that. Slowly, days turned into weeks and then months and I had a small library of incomplete stories in my head that I’d work on fleshing out from time to time. After a couple of months of this, I noticed my father occasionally dropping by the office. He would drop by and speak to me, and give me toys to play with before kissing my mother on the cheek and departing.

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  I never knew where he was going, but one time he came in wearing armor and smelling of iron. My mother seemed to chastise him for his appearance or maybe his smell, and he never came back wearing the armor after that.

  At first I wanted nothing to do with the toys he brought… But eventually boredom overtook me, and I began to play with the toys my father gave me. It was mostly in an effort to further refine my motor skills, but after months spent trying to mentally recreate the books from my past life, I welcomed any new way to distract myself.

  At first after examining the small pile of toys closer, I questioned my father's sanity. Giving metal toys to his infant son seemed crazy. He seemed well intentioned, but the metal jangly trinkets he often brought were definitely risky for an infant to be left alone with. Granted I was never really alone, and they weren’t much more than a metal ring with some spinning bits attached to them, but still I thought it was unwise.

  Sure enough, my mother had taken them away the first time I hurt myself with one. It happened when I was holding one of the rings above my face. My little fingers fumbled, and down it came. My mother was quick to rush to me and swoop me up into her arms before I could even cry.

  Hurting myself sucked yeah, but it wasn't all bad. Because of my injury, I got to see real honest to goodness magic for the first time. My mother angrily muttered something under her breath, as she pressed her hand to my injury. Then, I felt her channel a warm healing energy into me. It quickly surrounded my bruised eye, and then penetrated deeper.

  The relief was instant, but as the energy faded from my body I felt a profound sense of fatigue. I was so captivated by the magic that I forgot to react to the initial injury. The lack of a reaction seemed to worry my mother, but I was too tired to play along now. I faded into sleep soon after that, the last thing I remembered seeing was her concerned face.

  The next day I awoke without a hint of pain, and feeling refreshed. I’m not really sure how the healing magic worked, but I resolved to work hard not to hurt myself again. The last thing I wanted was for there to be side effects that would negatively affect me in the long run.

  When my mother eventually brought me back to her study, I noticed the toys were all put up. I still wanted to use the toys to train my hand eye coordination after that, but it was going to be much slower now that I had to earn them back. Thinking about how I lost the toys in the first place, I decided that I didn't want to make my mother worry like she had. From now on I would try to behave more like how I thought a baby would. It just so happened that begging for toys back fell into that category.

  She quickly gave in to my persuasive cries.

  ***

  At 9 months old, I finally started to understand my parents' language. At least, I began to understand enough that I could reasonably start to say words and be confident in their meaning. It seemed a little early to me, but I could do little more than babble at this stage so I wrote it off.

  Saying my first words did net me a cool 25 experience, and as an added bonus it noticeably became easier to understand more of the words I heard spoken.

  Even though picking up the language of my parents became significantly easier, I didn't pick up a skill for it. After considerable time thinking about it, I decided to dub this phenomenon “pseudo skills”.

  I had come to the conclusion early on that 5 skill slots was far too low a number for the skills an infant would have to learn just to grow up. Initially I had worried that everything would take up a skill slot in my allotment but after learning that talking wouldn’t, I was relieved. That let me decide I would need to learn more about how skills were gained when I have the chance.

  With great reluctance, I shelved the idea. I didn't want to, but I recognized that there was nothing I could do about it until I at least learned another skill. I just hoped I would remember to revisit the idea when that time came.

  After that revelation, I had gotten to thinking about how quickly I had accepted my first skill. Realistically, I had rushed the decision in my excitement. I would need to plan my next skill acquisitions more thoroughly.

  I didn't regret taking the Appraisal skill, but I definitely got lucky with its usefulness. Thinking about it like that, it made taking more skills a daunting prospect. Until I figure out if I can gain more skill slots, the few I have are a precious commodity.

  In the meantime, I was just happy that pseudo skills would still allow me to learn the necessary skills to grow up. It did make me wonder just how fast children were supposed to advance in this world, though.

  ***

  After another 3 months, I expected a birthday celebration. Instead, I never received more than the normal attention from my parents and the nanny I now knew was named Granny Olbeck. I didn’t know what was normal for this world, so I didn’t think it was necessarily abnormal not to have a celebration, but it still felt strange. Lacking any form of acknowledgement, my birthday passed, and the months flew by as I was walking, talking, and moving about.

  Just like with talking, it got noticeably easier to repeat certain actions after completing the first milestones. Walking and running granted me an additional 25 experience.

  This brought my total experience to 100 of 125. It was slow progress, but progress all the same. I only needed to unlock one more pseudo skill to reach the experience cap, but pseudo skills seemed to be few and far between.

  I would be lying if I said I wasn't getting antsy to find out what reaching the experience cap would do, but there was only one way to find out.

  Around 4 or 5 months after my birthday had passed, the weather outside began to cool. I didn’t realize it before, as the house always remained at roughly the same temperature. I wouldn’t have even realized it now if I hadn’t grown tall enough to see some of the trees outside begin to lose their leaves. I spent most of my second winter in this world wondering what type of magic was used to keep the house temperate, and searching for the means by which it did so. I had little success.