Verbs, nouns, and adjectives were used to make simple sentences. Short stories with the occasional picture were used to make reading fun and approachable. Small numbers are bundled together for simple mathematics. A bland but palatable version of history was delivered as part of social studies and civics. I was the reincarnation of one who spent thousands of years being rigidly trained, and indoctrinated, to be the ideal ruler of a transdimensional empire. Yet, those first days in 1st grade were actually quite enlightening for me.

I’m not talking about the actual classes…No. That kind of basic material, and the material going as far as the high school level was fed to the Endless Red Empire’s children via prenatal psychic-indoctrination. Even if I were any other child of the empire, I’d have been well beyond that kind of stuff, so long as I wasn’t reborn in a tabula rasa state. Though I looked forward to learning in this school, I never intended to pay serious attention to the school’s actual pedagogy.

Most of my learning was done by paying attention to the people that came in and out of the school. I also began to haunt the school’s library. The Grand-Basin Public School shared a campus with the Grand-Basin College, and their shared library was the biggest in the city. Together the school, the college, and their shared library, formed the Grand-Basin Academy.

Up until now, my world had been limited to the small house of the Dunkels, the house of old Mz.Bright our babysitter, and the area near both houses. Now my world was a great deal larger, encompassing the path that led to the school, and the school itself. I could observe the teacher, and the students.

Eventually, when my central nervous system reached another plateau in its development, I’d be able to expand this range of observation and start properly paying attention to the full range of my perception. However, that would take a few years more. In the meantime, it was good to have a whole new pool of people to watch and learn about.

The library was a good source of information as well. I was happy to find that students of the school could visit it freely during the time in-between and after classes. I withdrew the bulk of the library's stored knowledge using data-abstraction abilities. The entire cosmos was made up of three elements, data, energy, and laws.

Data was the abstracted essence of all existence. Operating sort of like the code in a program. Data was an informational construct, and base materia, that made up what things were. Energy was the thing that supported and powered the existence of things. Laws were the things that defined how the myriad sets, and forms, of data and energy were supposed to behave and interact with one another.

Data-abstraction abilities and spells allowed me to directly interact with the “data” the informational structures that made up what things were. Thus it only took me an instant to store all the data in that library in a small folder in my memory. Once I had that data, I spent the next few days slowly processing it to further develop my working knowledge of my new world. I could have done it in an instant, but it wasn’t like I was in a rush, and doing it slow would A) assure less chance errors, and B) keep me from being bored.

Here’s what I learned in my first week of school. My new world was called Tesson. Technically, I already knew that from paying attention to the radio, and the conversations of the adults. What I hadn’t known was Tesson’s place in its solar system, and the fact that the planet only had five continents. Our city, the City of Grand-Basin, was located in the Blau continent. Based on my own internal store of knowledge, I roughly guessed that Tesson was one of countless alternate-earths that could be found within the cosmos.

This term could be used closely, or broadly. Used broadly, an alternate-earth was just any world largely dominated by humans, or “human-analogues”. Used narrowly, an alternate-earth was literally one of the countless multiversal alternates of the first earths, sharing a similar history and culture with those first earths. Tesson was probably more the latter, than the former.

Its history, culture, and technology roughly equaled what one would expect from a mid 2010s-era earth, up until a few decades of chucking trash into space, resulted in eldritch debris from a dimension that intersected Tesson’s impacting the planet’s surface. A kind of f-u and your mum too, from a civilization that the people here had inadvertently annoyed. The cascade of anomalous debris destroyed Tesson’s prior-civilization, and triggered Tesson’s transition into a world of magic.

At the moment, magic still wasn’t greatly understood, but people had been clumsily utilizing it, to great effect, for generations now. The magical powers that mankind had been able to tap into had been used largely for the purposes of defending themselves from the various magical threats that cropped up in the world.

Civilization had somewhat stabilized, and the technology was somewhere between the 1800s and 1980s. The tribalism, and make-shift fiefdoms that had cropped up, in the period of chaos between the meteor shower and now, still showed effects on the make-up of current-day culture. Creating a society that was semi-modern and semi-feudal at the same time.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

To tell the truth, I’d already guessed a lot of this before getting sent to the school. However, now I had a bigger pool of observations, and external sources of information, to confirm, or negate the models I’d built regarding how this new world of mine was supposed to work.

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I felt a pressure build in my lower body. Then the pressure vanished almost as quickly as it appeared. Warm water flowed over my legs. My pale blue sheets turned into a darker shade of blue. I had wet the bed. Naturally, this wasn’t an actual accident. Never mind the issue of my mental age, my body lacked the inefficiencies that resulted in most other forms of life creating physical waste materials. I’d long stopped needing to actually do “that” sort of thing, shortly after I was potty trained, and there was no longer a need to worry about alarming my parents. In the years that followed, I only went to the bathroom to flush the toilet, for the sake of giving my parents peace of mind.

Now though, now I needed to pee in order to sell a story. Once the urine was in place, I raised my heart-rate, I triggered some lacrimation, I lowered my body temperature, I made myself perspire, and then I carefully tapped into the well of negative emotions and traumatic memories that I needed to carefully curate since I could no longer forget things, like other people forgot things.

My face and limbs began to shake as memories of some of the less horrific, but still quite unpleasant, wars I’d been forced to take part in, swept over me. I got up and hunched my shoulders. Pulling into myself to look smaller than I was. Then I headed over to the room shared by my three parents. I knocked on the door. My little knuckles rapped the wooden surface twice.

“Mnh…Who is it?” said the tired voice of Reina.

“It’s Eddy…I…I had the dreams again…” I said. Sounding sincerely distraught after my careful preparations.

“Oh, baby…Come inside,” said my mother Yijun. Her tired voice filled with warmth and sympathy, making me feel extra guilty for my deception.

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So, after some consideration, I’d decided to slowly reveal that I had some memories from my past life. I wasn’t going to be clear about the fact that these were memories of a past life. Nor was I going to be particularly specific about the memories. Instead, for the past few months since I’d started school, every few weeks are so, I’d wake up distraught, having had an accident and complaining of vivid nightmares involving strange machines, and wars with strange fantastical creatures.

At first, my parents thought this was the result of some strange radio show, or book, I’d been exposed to, but they quickly found that this was not the case. I generally only listened to the news, light-hearted comedy sketches, and educational broadcasts. I was still a 1st grader, and talks with the teachers would reveal that I wasn’t really exposed to anything too stimulating there either. So all that was left was a set of strange mystery dreams and night-terrors.

One might wonder why I didn’t just reveal that I could remember my past life directly to my parents, but I’d been taught that sometimes people neither needed, nor desired to know all the details of a thing. Just the pertinent details. To do more could confuse them at best, or anger them at worse, leading to a loss of trust, despite one’s attempt at being candid.

Hotdogs are tastiest without the eater seeing the offal and low-grade meat bits getting ground up. Vegetarianism works best when you don’t realize that even plants have their own basic intelligence. In this case, even though for most universes, at least two-thirds of the population would be made up of old souls cycling through the cosmos, having someone claim to remember their memories of a past life was likely to be met with skepticism and suspicion.

I liked the Dunkels, and they seemed to like me. Even the most advanced of cultures would tend to hold onto problematically primitive beliefs and fears. I didn’t want to be alienated as a potential changeling, demon-spawn, or body-thief. Nor did I want to have to spend the rest of my life hiding all that I was capable of. Thus I was taking the time to establish a setting where I had these “strange and vivid dreams” that would serve as a suitable explanation for unexplained bits of knowledge that I might end up revealing.

I figured if I soft-peddled the concept now. It would be less of a shock in the future, when other things were revealed. The confusing nature of the dreams also allowed me to control how much I revealed, because there was still a concern about receiving harm for my differences, and the powers at my disposal. My mother’s command regarding never again allowing anyone to exploit me for my talents, still rang loudly in my mind.

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Of course, there was always a price to pay. Later that morning, as me and my brother were walking to school my brother spent the entire walk giving me grief over my little accident.

“Ugh…I can’t believe you wet the bed again,” groaned my older brother, Thad.

“Sh-, shut up…I’m only six. Mommy said that you didn’t stop wetting the bed until you were eight,” I grumbled, discontentedly.

Thad's eyes went wide, and his ears turned red. He looked one way and then the other, and then gave me a quick punch in the arm.

“Tell anyone and you’re dead!” said Thad. Waving a fist in my face.

I rolled my eyes at the little boy’s fierce threat.

“It’s no good to resort to violence, you know,” I said. Chiding my brother as I pretended to rub my sore arm.

“Hmph,” said Thad. Snorting angrily and speeding up to get away from me.