The carriage ride felt never-ending. We must have stopped overnight at five different inns along the way. During the day, my parents would trade-off holding me while the other got out a portable desk to write on. My dad finally realized I was not made of glass, and holding me started to feel more natural. He liked to hold me up, so I was standing on my feet to watch as my mom worked on her stone tablet. In this regard, I was delighted. By him helping me stand, I was able to level up some of my stats along the journey much faster than doing them independently.
[Strength +1]
[Constitution +1]
I didn’t level up dexterity yet, but I will start using my hands more in the future and see if that makes a difference. When my parents are not working on the stone tablets, they are always talking or singing. Their harmonies brought a tear to my eye on some days. I hoped singing was going to become a part of my everyday life going forward.
On our sixth day of travel, I could feel our carriage slow down and start taking more turns. It felt like we were navigating in a city, but it couldn’t have been later than mid-day, so I don’t think it is time to stop at an inn yet. When we arrived at our current stop, my mother carried me inside a large building with those colorful quarts panels along the sides of the door. My father follows us in holding a bundle of papers.
When we arrive at the desk inside, we are greeted by a very bored-looking clerk. He takes the papers from my father, asks a few questions, and then returns a small portion of the documents to my father. The clerk looked at me several times while he questioned my parents, so I think they registered me? They must have said all the right things because we returned to the carriage not long after entering the building.
[Intelligence +1]
[Wisdom +1]
It appears my deductive reasoning is correct in this case.
We were not in the carriage too long before it made another stop. This time when we exit the carriage, we are in a residential neighborhood. Every house on this street looks the same. There are about two feet of stone at the bottom of the homes that are then finished with another eight feet of logs stacked vertically to create an A-frame house and roof. Each cottage has two quartz windows on either side of the front door. There are about twelve feet between each of the places but no fences around them.
As we enter the house, I see a fireplace on the left built next to a kitchen area with a counter and some cabinets for storage. There is also a table with two chairs not far from the kitchen for dining. Across from the kitchen, there is a living and working area with two desks and comfortable chairs, and a couch. The walls inside the house are all slanted inward the higher they go because of the A-frame design. In the very back third of the house, a wall has been erected with two doors a few feet apart. I am going to guess those are bedrooms. There is a ceiling 8 feet above us, but I cannot see any stairs to get up into the attic at this time.
After being fed and changed, I am carried into the leftmost room and placed in a crib to take a nap. I can see that my room also has a quartz window for light, but my mother closes a curtain to mostly block out the light. It is the first time I have ever been alone in this new life. I will enjoy the freedom of being unobserved to attempt more complex things that a baby would not usually do just as soon as I’m done with my nap.
Level
1
Health
40/40
Strength
3
Constitution
4
Dexterity
2
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Intelligence
35
Wisdom
24
[Traits] [Skills] [Magic]
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After a few days at home, we started to get into a routine. In the mornings, my mother will wake me up to feed and change me. Then she will cook breakfast for the two adults in the house. After my father is done eating, he leaves the house to go off to work. My mother then cleans the morning dishes and then bundles me up in a carrier to go to her workplace. I use the term carrier loosely. It is closer to an oversized basket than any modern-day carrier I am used to seeing.
My mother sets my carrier down near a wall when she gets to her area inside a research warehouse. The stone tablets she has been studying all this time are copies of originals hanging on the walls in the warehouse. Now and then, she trades out the documents she is working on for different ones. They must be tough to decode because she has been working on them since I was born. There are quite a few other people in the warehouse who come up to greet us. The only thing that stands out is they are all wearing yellow. I am beginning to think it is a uniform or dress code that everyone must adhere to. Yellow does not work for all skin tones, and it looks plain terrible on some people in this warehouse.
I was able to see my reflection in one of the glass cases that house the original artifacts. It is the first time I’ve seen clear glass or quartz in this world, so it must be costly to make. I lucked out and did not have orange hair! It looks like my hair is blonde, just like my mother’s, and my eyes are a fascinating shade of purple.
After my mother is done with work, we walk back to the house. Well, she walks, and I am lugged around in my carrier. Strollers may be a good invention for this world. We get home before my father does almost every day. Mother starts dinner and often has it done or almost done when my father gets home. I am not sure where the ingredients for our dinners come from, we have never gone to a market of any sort, but every three days, there is a fresh batch of groceries on our counter when we get home. I am a little weirded out at a random person coming into our house while we are away. There are no locks on any doors I have seen in our home.
My father often comes home covered in dust and dirt. I can tell from my mother’s expression and her always pointing to the wash bucket outside that he is to clean off the dust and dirt before coming into the house. I think he is constantly breaking her rules to pick on her playfully. He always has the most innocent grin on his face every time she catches him not washing up before coming into the house. He likes to wink at me like he shares the joke with me when my mother is not looking.
After dinner has been consumed, my father jumps up to clean the dishes. My mother takes this time to pay attention to me, making sure I am fed and clean. I try not to cry unless I am hungry or dirty to save my mother as much headache as possible. It is difficult for me to be so dependent on another person.
Once the adults are done eating dinner and the dishes are clean, they each have a craft they are working on most nights. My mother is often humming while doing needlepoint embroidery. She stitches geometric symbols in artistic patterns. She has embroidered little yellow triangles and circles on the neck of my white dresses. My father often spends his time carving pieces of wood or whittling. The dishes and utensils that they use to eat off of are all wood. They are polished and lacquered in something, so they remain smooth.
There is a carving around the inside of our door frame that leads outside. It depicts the eight symbols that were on silken robe guy’s robes. Each symbol is painted a different color. Red for the diamond, blue for the teardrop, orange for the square, yellow for the triangle, green for the leaf, purple for the star, white for the heart, and black for the swirl. The green leaf stands out the most for me because it looks almost exactly like the mark that the child who was taken away from his mother had.
We did nine days of this routine before my parents didn’t work on the tenth day. To say my parents didn’t go to work is correct, but they still worked. My mother spent this time doing the laundry and beating the rugs in the house. Behind the house, there was a communal clothesline that went the whole length of our housing block. Our neighbors must not have the same day off as we did because nobody else was out hanging laundry when my mom was, and there wasn’t any laundry on the line that I could see.
While my mother was working in the house, my father was working outside of it. Quite a ways behind our house, there was a communal woodpile that he was working at. Foresters must chop the trees down and just drag them behind the house for the places to make use of. He was stripped down to his waist, working with an ax to cut the trees into firewood. When he had a large enough stack of firewood to last us nine days stacked up beside our house, he started a long process of getting water from the well down the street to fill our water barrel. I wonder how the water is kept sanitary in an open barrel like that. It has a lid, but it looked like it only loosely sealed the barrel when not in use. Something to inquire about once I’ve learned the language, I guess.
Another thing to note, there was no bathroom in our house. I have not seen any chamber pots inside, so I assume one of the buildings must be a communal restroom behind our house. It looked like there was one building for every three places.
I am around two months old now, and I am starting to pick up on bits and pieces of the language. My father’s name is Zarek, and my mother’s name is Lyra. They have named me Violet. I can think of many other names I would like to be called, but I am thankful that Violet is something I can live with.