99.98%.

The mouse clicks sounded like gunshots in the dark silence of my room. They were frantic and unrelenting. It was a sound I was used to and found therapeutic despite being the type of thing everyone else would find annoying. Thankfully, I had given up thinking like healthy people a long time ago.

99.99%.

My headset blazed with voices and static from the bad microphones used by my guildmates. There were frantic warnings from cooldown timers being announced and mobs being aggroed. The boss was in its final stage and our consumables were running low.

One of the boss’s minions died and it gave me the push I needed.

Level up. Yes, yes, yes!

Finally, level 120.

I open my skill window and put a point into the current ultimate skill of my Elementalist class. The only one I still needed to unlock.

“Convergence of the Elements, huh?”

I start casting it.

“Hey guys, I got the new skill. Casting it now, please protect me!” I warn my party.

My character on-screen waves his staff around, says some gibberish, and 3D particles start gathering around him. Cool effects, overall, but nothing to write home about.

It takes longer than I expected to cast it, but soon it is finished. A huge beam of light shoots from my character’s staff and keeps going on like a laser.

“Oh! It is a channeling skill…” One of my teammates says.

“Fuck yeah! Look at your damage man!” Another exclaims.

The numbers go up like popcorns out of the boss’s model, all in the 6 figures.

It is even more broken than I expected after reading the description, huh.

The mana consumption is high and it burns through my reserves in a flash. But it doesn’t matter. Before I am empty there is an explosion and the boss is down.

A perfect skill for finishing up a mob.

My colleagues cheer through my headphones and I allow myself a smile.

This felt… nice.

Just… nice.

This was the final boss of the latest update of one of the MMORPGs I play, “The Last Empire”.

I had been pulling all-nighters for the past week in order to level up the new 10 levels available and get the new skill. This was the kind of thing that usually gave me a rush. Leveling before everyone else, getting skills and loot faster than all the other players, and showing off how strong I could get. It was far from rational, and it shouldn’t ever have felt so good, but somehow it was what I had been addicted to for a long time.

This time it felt… muted. A fuzzy feeling but nowhere near what I wanted to feel. What I remembered feeling all the other times.

People on the voice chat kept exchanging pleasantries and discussing the strategies we had used. The loot was split and soon everyone disconnected from the voice chat.

I also disconnected, closed the game, and turned off my monitor.

Soon, the darkness of my room embraced me and only the colorful rainbow LED lights from my desktop illuminated my face.

Although I could barely see around me, I knew my room was a mess.

Dirty plates and glasses littered my desk. My garbage bin was overflowing with empty energy drink cans. Dust had gathered on the floor and there would be visible footprints everywhere when I turned the lights on.

Disgusting.

And I was foul too. Past the point in which you are smelly but can’t feel it because you are already used to the smell. I could feel my own body odor and let me tell you: it was not good.

No human should live like this.

I get up from my gaming chair and my joints creak with the effort. I am overweight and old. Way too old.

I stumble to my bed and lay on it, looking up at my ceiling fan. It is spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and getting nowhere. Nowhere at all.

Such a dumb fan. Just like its owner.

The truth is that I am bored. Not momentarily bored like most people. l am bored by reality. Permanently.

And it is not like I didn’t try to be like other people.

I have lived a normal life like people are supposed to.

I had a job.

I had a girlfriend.

I had friends.

Everything just turned out to be… disappointing. Ending in ironically predictable ways. Eventually, just plain… boring. Not worth the hassle.

And I had to live every day of my life seeing in the eyes of everyone around me how entertaining everything was. How rewarding. How fulfilling. And how fucked up I was for just not getting it.

Go to the physiatrist, they said. I did. I took meds. It was not enough.

Nothing ever felt like enough to make life worth living for. To see existence as something more than a burden to carry. Be born, learn about the world, be disappointed with how things actually are, and then die. It always sounded like a bad joke to me.

Eventually, I just gave up.

Now I just did whatever could give me that small boost of excitement… even if for just a few moments. I was in my thirties, living on my last savings, and ready to die.

Thinking about all that, I closed my eyes and let my sleep-deprived body slide into unconsciousness.

Unbeknownst to me, for the last time.

image [https://i.ibb.co/RCgQMXF/Picture1.png]

Warmth.

Bliss.

Comfort.

Fullness.

Satisfaction.

Pain.

Pain. Pain. Pain!

PAIN!

Pressure involves me like a cocoon and I feel my bones being squeezed like an old ketchup bottle.

Redness and then light.

Oh so much light…

All around me.

Blurs come and go in my vision but all I can feel is extreme discomfort akin to that of when you are asleep and someone rudely wakes you up.

I am confused and my thoughts feel fragmented and scattered, as if I am heavily sedated. Nevertheless, when a blue screen pops in my face, I can’t help but focus on it.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

REGALIA PROJECT

System Initializing…

…What?

For a moment, curiosity, wonder and disbelief clash in my mind. Soon, however, they are consumed by the torrent of drowsiness that permeates my being.

It doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep.

image [https://i.ibb.co/RCgQMXF/Picture1.png]

I wake up.

And not for the first time, I pinch myself in defiance of reality. Or try to. I have barely any control over my chubby little fingers and they hold no strength at all.

It took me a long time to understand what was happening to me, but eventually, the truth of the situation made itself known to me.

I am a baby.

Over the past few days, weeks, or months, that realization kept hitting me over and over again. Time passage still feels confusing and I have no idea how long I have been drifting between wakefulness and sleep.

I was never a religious person at any point in my life. It all always felt too much like wishful thinking to me. Like people were trying to make good things be real just by believing in them hard enough.

Now, as if mocked by the universe, I find myself in a situation in which skepticism fails me. For all effects and purposes, it appeared I had been born anew. Reincarnated.

Spiritism it is, huh?

The problems with this theory were twofold. First was the fact that I did not remember dying. I was just going to sleep after a gaming binge and next thing I knew was me babying here. Second was me having the memories of a grown-ass adult while possessing the body of a little baby. Memories were not supposed to carry over lives, were they? That just isn’t right.

At first, all I could see were blurs. Colors and shapes threatening to form themselves into something resembling meaning but never quite getting there.

Sometimes, I could feel someone getting close, picking me up and then giving me a soft and warm form which I instinctively grabbed and sucked with ravenous hunger.

The rationale of what was happening in those moments shamed me to no end. Nevertheless, being breastfed was the only thing that assuaged the baby hunger that overcame me over and over again. I refused to cry out when I felt the hunger, but thankfully I never had to wait long. The woman never forgot me. She was always there to give me sustenance when I needed it. It still felt deeply uncomfortable, but eventually, I managed to accept it. When it was done, the familiar baby sleepiness always attacked me, and in moments I fell into slumber.

Worse than feeding, however, was all the shitting and pissing. I had absolutely no control whatsoever over what my body expelled. Soiling myself was the only situation in which I allowed myself to cry out in desperation. Usually, the mother came pretty fast. Still, even the experience of having someone cleaning you up was already pretty humiliating for a grown man.

Confused as I was, I knew one thing for sure: I hated being a baby.

image [https://i.ibb.co/RCgQMXF/Picture1.png]

Sleep came to me many more times and with it the cycles of confusion, realization, and wonder. An untold amount of time passed before I gained full control of my consciousness and managed to maintain a coherent flow of thinking over the passing days.

Eventually, my vision cleared and sounds became distinguishable. By now, I’ve started to notice a few things.

Worrisome things.

First of all… the place I was. My parents talked to each other in some foreign language and things around me looked very rustic. The sounds of the big city I was used to were nowhere to be heard. At first, I thought this was some kind of Eastern European rural village.

As time passed, though, I realized there was not a speck of technology anywhere in the house. And don’t mean just in the obvious forms of computers or smartphones. I mean at all. The clothing, the furniture, the food, and even the diapers that were used to cover me. It all looked handmade. There were no signs of the industrial revolution having ever happened.

My crib itself was made of wood and had bedding stuffed with itchy straw. No soft fabric and microfiber blankets for this baby. The few toys the mother used to play with me looked handcrafted by herself out of wood, straw and coarse fabrics.

The walls and furniture I could see when the woman picked me up were also very rustic. Everything was made of wood and there wasn’t actually much to see. A table here, a few chairs there and that was all. It all looked very bare to me.

As the days passed and the mother carried me around more and more as she did her chores, I got to see the rest of the house and a bit of the outside. And that only worsened my worries.

There was no fridge, no stove or not even a sink in the kitchen. What I caught myself calling “kitchen” was actually a room with an open chimney and a round fireplace under it.

The bathroom was even worse. It consisted, basically, of a hole in the ground. It smelled terrible, even for my undeveloped baby senses.

A few times the mother also took me outside and I got to see what I already kind of expected: farmland. Our house stood atop a gentle hill surrounded by plantations of yellow wheat. The fields stretched into the horizon, going up and down over different slopes. Scattered on the view I could see other houses similar to ours, where other families like ours probably lived.

For a city man, bred and raised in the concrete jungles of modern society, living in such a place was a completely alien concept. Surprisingly, though, the idea actually brought some degree of tranquility to me. People had already disappointed me enough. Living in the middle of nowhere could be for the best.

As I watched, the serene winds that blew over the fields caressed my skin and I actually let out a baby-like giggle. At the time, the mother looked positively surprised at my reaction, and after that, I got to see the outside a lot more.

Which led to another, even more disturbing discovery. During one night in which I soiled myself and ended up waking up the mother to clean me, she took me outside and I looked at the night sky.

What I saw shocked me.

A gigantic moon, way bigger than I was used to, illuminated the night like a lamppost.

Even worse, though, was the second one, tainting all the surfaces with its greenish hue.

My first thought was ‘At least the green one is regular-sized’.

Immediately followed by ‘Two fucking moons…’.

It took a long time for me to sleep that night.

The image of the shining rocks in the night sky kept popping up to the forefront of my mind. I made theories of reasons for what I had seen and kept arguing with myself for a long while.

The conclusion I reached was something that, somehow, I felt I already knew since I first opened my eyes to this body. Deep down, I was sure of it.

This was not planet Earth.

image [https://i.ibb.co/RCgQMXF/Picture1.png]

As days passed and my realization that this was not my world cemented itself into my mind, observing my parents and the world around me became even more important. I had to listen to every word they said and learn the language as fast as possible. Not only my curiosity was piqued at having a whole new world to rediscover but also the safety of my baby self was at stake.

I had no idea what was the culture of this place and what I should expect of the future. As far as I knew, these people could have the custom to abandon their welp as soon as they could walk. Could they even be considered humans? Was I a human?

Observing the mother, however, gave me some degree of peace. The care she had for me at least was unmistakable.

The mother was a woman with a face that could be said to be… unremarkable. A mid-weight, round-faced brunette. She wasn’t ugly, but neither was she an unblemished beauty. She was… normal, I guess. The face of the lady that scans your groceries at the supermarket and then you forget about it after a few minutes. She had a pretty smile, though. When she fed me, she sang little lullabies and looked at me with an expression of pure love. It was… strange. It felt good and warm to be loved so fiercely, but at the same time I felt a profound sense of guilt at being a grown man in the body of her child. Was I really deserving of that love? Would she feel the same way if she knew what I was?

The other parent, the father, was someone I saw a lot less. He was a big man, with sunburnt skin and short-cropped hair. His eyes were dark brown and he always looked tired. He only came to my crib occasionally, and when he did, he just stood there staring at me with a pondering expression. I had no idea what he was thinking about, but it was honestly a bit scary to be stared at for those long periods of time by a man so much bigger than me. He only picked me up a few times, and usually it felt as if it was much more out of curiosity about the workings of a baby body than out of love or care.

I could understand the man. Despite not having any particular feelings about babies in my previous life, the miracle of life always fascinated me. How could a living bag of flesh have come out of my partner and how could it actually be the beginnings of a person? An actual human being who would have its own set of ideas, wants, likes, and dislikes.

Unfortunately for him, this one already had all that. That was a thought that was ever present in my mind and sobered me when I caught myself getting too involved with these parents.

Sure, I could let myself be swept under my body’s biological demands and accept those two as my parental figures. I remember even reading about it in my last life: humans aren’t like ducklings that imprint themselves on the first thing they see as they are born, but our organism still seeks to create psychological bonds with caretakers to ensure safety. My baby blood was probably fuming with hormones trying to influence my brain into forming psychological bonds with those two people.

It would be really easy to just let go. Give control to my sensorial experiences and just live like a mindless baby. But the question was: should I?

No, I don’t think so.

Currently, I feel like an entity split into two halves. The middle-aged man with a depressing past and a cynical outlook on life versus the innocent little baby with no baggage whatsoever.

The middle-aged man had the power of experience, rationality, and consciousness. Good stuff, but nothing compared to what the other half had. The baby had the flesh, the bones, the blood, and, more importantly, the brain. And whatever it wanted, even though it couldn’t actually control the body, it tried to get by influencing my consciousness through the brain. Biochemistry was a bitch. I could feel the mood swings, the intrusive thoughts, the sudden urges, all the marks of dissonance between body and mind. It was, frankly speaking, terrifying.

It left me thinking about what would happen if I surrendered the control. Maybe as I stopped accessing my memories and forcing my adult consciousness to stay at the top it would slowly sink into the deluge of new experiences of everyday life. Maybe it would dissolve and I would cease to exist, becoming finally only the baby these parents deserved. Losing myself.

And that was why I wouldn’t do it. This was not a fight that was new to me. It was all too familiar to me: my depression and anxiety diagnostics were just words to describe precisely this feeling. Having a body that felt things differently from what I wanted. A body that would simply kill me off as soon as I let go and stopped fighting.

I had been nearing my wit’s end before waking up as a baby. Giving up now that there was an actual change to my circumstances was a no-go. Maybe this world would finally give me the answer to my problems. In a way, this is my last chance.

So, I would fight those influences and preserve my sense of self as much as I could.

Slowly, the mantra solidified in my head:

I am not a baby.

My name is Jack Keller and I come from another world.

Nothing will change that.