Over the course of the next few days, I learned more about Grum, or should I say Grumbonk, this being his full name…Or what he told me it was. He used to be a prestigious elf on an elven country, his research varying from the rules of reality to the differences between species.

Two distinctly different topics, but he managed to showcase new ways to view things which helped him gain prestige, which in turn made him want to try even newer ideas. This, in turn, made him follow a few too crazy ideas which made the other folks in his country exile him for an undefined amount of time.

In the society from which Grum came from this basically meant politically and socially dead for the people you knew. This was the situation in which Grum found himself in, again all coming from his words, so I really don’t know whether to believe in them or not.

We also talked about us, my sister and me and what a rarity we were. Grum told us that basically all Rakshnurians are born as halflings but after undergoing some sort of process they “evolve” into Rakshnurians, making an impure race a pure one. But even so there have been some Rakshnurians which differ from the norm, usually smaller and smarter than the others, more similar to their mothers than fathers.

I guessed that this was the case with the second in command in the tribe we were born in, which I didn’t tell to Grum, as to keep as much information to myself as possible, which wasn’t much, as Grum could easily read me by my body language and also by his experience in different careers. Well, we were special because we didn’t go through that process.

But Grum noted that there was something else that made us extra-special, well especially me and that we didn’t fit with what he had seen before, as I was too little Rakshnurian and too human to be physically possible. I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I had also realized that I was quite different from my brothers and sisters while I was still inside that building, meaning that the first theory wasn’t enough to detail the whole situation. These were the most important things we talked about while he was also training us in different aspects of what he called day to day life.

Our days started with personal hygiene. We had to wash ourselves until Grum approved of how we did and just then could we all eat breakfast together. But it wasn’t a simple breakfast, instead we had to cook by ourselves and eat the first thing we cooked, no matter how safe it was. This was, of course, without knowing a thing of plants and the kitchen being filled with possibly lethal foods. After we finished the plate, we could get healed and rest for a moment.

But only a short one, as some physical training followed. First resistance and then heavy lifting. Almost all day was spent learning things which required thinking, but every second day we climbed a nearby mountainous hill and we had to run down, trying not to get hurt, at first just preventing natural dangers but then Grum started placing traps and shooting us with wooden arrows made not to do any significant damage, being rounded at the tip and the traps being mostly ropes and wood to hit or slow us down.

Getting hit still hurt and my sister being better than me wouldn’t hurt as much if she didn’t only get praised for it and I punished for getting hit but she also tantalized that her, the so-called “great Arabelle” was better. What was the big deal? I could beat her if I really wanted to… probably.

But I still didn’t let myself get beat by her in all aspects, in some it was actually harder to be worse than her. For example, in the sciences his sister had a bit too much energy for the environment needed to follow the experiments, so she usually either broke the limited resources she had at hand or ended not even getting to the third or fourth step because she got bored, leaving the room as soon as she was in that situation, meaning that Grum could focus all his attention on me, which meant that he would notice if I faked not learning much too much.

Still, over time, I learned to hide my feelings better, or at least Grum wasn’t noticing my feelings as often as he did before. I didn’t know whether he was acting or not, so I kept improving my skills in all aspects, in what he taught us and in what I considered to be important to be safer.

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By the time a year had passed, so I had spent about half my age with Grum, I measured to about one meter and forty centimeters and had reached some level of knowledge or skill in very varied areas, such as the three most common languages in the world; the human one was the first, talked in all their territories, the ones nearby and their main trading partners, this being most relatively peaceful humanoids. Humans were the ones that invented this term to differentiate different kinds of monsters when they couldn’t yet understand other sapient species and simply had two-legged beasts and more-legged beasts.

After they understood other humanoids, they started spreading their language as fast as they spread capitalism. Well in many places coins and money existed, but the humans were the first to expand it as fast as they did. Experts in trade and travel they departed far and wide, starting an era of exploration reaching the whole continent where I was in. The technology of boats wasn’t good enough at the time, so that was as far as they reached for the first great exploration age.

All humans from that time are already dead but some older folks of some longer living species are still alive. Grum told us that from the country he came you could count with your hands how many elves were left. Well, with some simple counting, Grum specified and then taught us a useless way of counting over a hundred without hands, which would clearly fall under the category of “counting with your hands”.

All the times he did things like this I did listen and paid attention, but many times Grum would overspend the time explaining every little intricacy which either I already knew, and my sister hadn’t paid attention before so she wouldn’t pay attention then or it was simply so boring that I myself got bored. So as time passed on, I used the time during those situations to observe the rooms we were in.

You see, Grum didn’t let us enter almost all rooms, we were confined to our rooms, the toilet, the smallest of the dining halls, the kitchen connected to it, one of the living rooms and the garden, but during classes we could enter other rooms which let me see that there were no windows to the outside, only to the inner garden.

When my sister and I got here for the first time I knew little about everything, but Grum’s teachings helped me understand things he wanted me to learn but also quite possibly things he didn’t want me to know, such as the structure of the house. It wasn’t a rectangle, as you’d expect, but instead a very big triangle, so big in fact, that you don’t realize that it’s a triangle unless you pay attention to where you’re walking. This couldn’t be seen from the hill because the house was under a cloaking spell according to Grum and only advanced magic could break it.

But I still wasn’t completely sure of anything I learned, as when I got here for the first time it was by force, not by inviting us. Well, we were the ones that fell into his trap, that’s true, but he still could’ve waited for us to wake up before taking us with him. That’s why maybe this building was actually in a spell, or this was just all an illusion crafted by Grum! Maybe Grum didn’t even exist, and it was a creation of a more powerful wizard? How would I know?!

Anyways, I did realize that spending too much time on these interesting ideas was interrupting with my time to organize my thoughts. So, I continued reviewing the second language we learned. It’s called the “Low”. The name originates because of quite obvious reasons, it was first talked by smaller people, using more acute sounds because of their smaller vocal cords. On Low there are about ten unique vocals, but only about 15 consonants, which makes the language sound more interesting; at least in my opinion.

Now the last language is called “Up” but also named “Fly”. The language originally came from flying creatures which live in the sky, using some advanced technology or magic to live there. Or at least that’s what Grum believes. They are very protective of their own and their terrain and the language was only known when someone had an accident and the accidented was saved by a “dirty land-walker”.

Trade is basically non-existent between the ones above and the ones below, but there is at least some form of recognition, recognizing each other as sapient species. The language is also quite complicated, maybe it affected their feelings of wariness against other people, or their wariness created their language.

But well while we were learning all this, I realized that Grum wasn’t such a bad guy after all, I mean he taught us so much in so little time and if he were planning to do something bad to us why bother spending so much of his time teaching us information or skills that could make us more dangerous to him or help us escape from here?

Still, I hadn’t mentioned exiting or escaping during my whole stay, more information for me and less for him is always an advantage. But the worst was that I had to think on my own, because my sister would ask Grum so that he could help her solve her problems which would lead to problems for me, and I didn’t want that. That night I went to sleep hoping to have someone else to talk to.