Chapter Text
Harrison was not a happy camper. First, he’d been rejected, again. It turned out even a grocery store cashier required at least a year’s worth of job experience in the field. Second, his debit card declined on a bag of ramen. Harrison had never been closer to crying. Third, he’d been run over by a pickup truck rolling coal in the parking lot.
At least that would put him out of his misery, right?
Wrong.
Harrison woke up to a pink-red wall, and a squeezing sensation pushing him down a tube. Harrison tried to go down. He was being pushed so hard, there wasn’t even room to scream. He twisted, trying to get out. Then, woosh! Nothing but cold air. Something huge smacked him. Harrison tried to shout, but the words came out wrong. His voice came out wrong. His words were murmured.
“It’s wrong.”
Harrison blinked. He shifted his head. He looked up. There was a man staring at him. A giant! Harrison wasn’t big (5’4”) but this guy was easily twenty times his height.
“It’s a child,” someone else said.
What? Harrison tried to ask.
“It has scales.”
Harrison looked down. He did not see skin. He saw scales, black as night, gleaming in the flickering light.
He screamed.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Harrison woke up. He stared at the ceiling. It was blurry, which was already wrong. It certainly wasn’t the peeling white-lead popcorn ceiling he was used to.
He turned his head. He looked at his arm. Scaled, ending hands with clawed fingers. He wiggled his fingers. At least his thumbs were still opposable. He tried to sit up, but no. He couldn’t do that yet. Harrison guessed finding out if he had a cloaca would have to wait. God he hoped not.
Speaking of which . . .
God? Harrison asked. What . . .what the fuck is going on?
Would you like to see your Character Sheet?
The words appeared out of nowhere, floating in his mind’s eye dark and bold as night against day.
Char–Character sheet? Harrison thought, his mouth making unintelligible sounds.
Character Sheet for REDACTED
Class and Level: Child 1 (children grow into other classes with training)
Race: REDACTED
Alignment: Undecided . . .
The rest of the character sheet was either redacted, or undecided. Huh, Harrison thought, trying his best not to have an infant heart attack, I don’t even get to know my own name?
Notification Alert! New Quest Generated. Learn Your Name. Reward: 1 exp
Harrison stared at the notification. 1 exp. One.
Notification Alert! New Quest Generated. Learn Your Race. Reward: 1 exp
Notification Alert! New Quest Generated. Learn Your Location. Reward . . .
Rolling for abilities . . .
Wait! Harrison panicked. Don’t I get to do a point buy? Can’t I–
It was decided those options were less entertaining.
Harrison felt rage gathering in his belly. Less enter–
Thump. Thump. Thump. Three six-sided dice landed upon his mind’s eye, determining forever his fate.
Strength: 12 + 8 (racial) = 20, reduced to 3 due to age
Harrison stared. It was a decent roll. An good roll, considering the odds. Combined with the racial bonus it was a marvelous score. With that sort of strength he could do anything. He could lift wagons, he could . . .
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Dexterity: 8 = 8, reduced to 1 due to age
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Constitution: 13 + 2 (racial) = 15, reduced to 5 due to age
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Intelligence: 14 + 2 (racial) = 16, kept due to Feat: Insert’s Mind
Harrison stared. He hadn’t even considered the mental characteristics. Did this mean he was getting smarter? He liked to think he was fairly intelligent, but a sixteen? That was far and above what some random Art History major could hope for.
Then again, intelligence wasn’t everything. Wisdom . . .
Thump. Thump. Thump
Wisdom: 12 = 12, kept due to Feat: Insert’s Mind
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Charisma: 13 + 2 (racial) = 15, kept due to Feat: Insert’s Mind
We will begin calibrating your body now.
Calibrat–
Harrison screamed. His eyes watered, steaming tears blinding him to the stone ceiling above. He twisted, his black, stonelike scales cutting into the crib as he thrashed back and forth. His muscles burned with an unholy might. A great fire burned within him, and burned without. He could hear chanting, singing, and cursing in a sacred tongue. He could hear grumblings of ancient beings buried beneath centuries of rust. He heard the roar that shook the world and the crack of the moon that birthed all life.
Harrison did not know how long he lay there, tossing and turning his tiny body, his wails growing louder and louder until his lungs gave out, too young to keep going. Yet as tears ran freely down his face, as his mind exploded with new words and meanings, as his adult memories and minds ran panicked through day-old synapses trying desperately to make sense of the world, an angel appeared. She emerged from the torchlit door, a flickering orange halo around her silver-gold hair. Not even in the Aldobrandini Tazze were the two colors so wonderfully mixed. She stepped closer, revealing in the place of eyes two gemstones, colored like amethysts and shining like purest diamond.
“Little one,” she whispered. “Why do you cry so loud?”
Harrison said nothing. His mouth opened. He reached. His stomach gurgled.
A frowned grew upon the angel’s face. “Ser Symond!” she snapped. “Has no one fed him?”
“No, your grace.”
Your grace? As the pain and awe faded, Harrison once more wondered where he was. When he was. What he was.
“The King did not–”
“Then I will,” the angel said coldly. She bent over. One moment Harrison was in the cot, the next he was in soft arms, his scales shifting comfortably against silk and skin. “Come, little one. We shall see to the wet nurses, and you have a cousin to meet. Tis not your fault he is your father.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Harrison would like to say he didn’t waste time before getting started on his quests. That he hit the ground running and started racking up exp. After all, a point a day from ages zero to ten added up!
Unfortunately, he had no such luck. For one thing, he was an infant. A literal newborn. Even with a magically enhanced brain, there wasn’t much he could do besides eat, poop, and sleep. His body simply wasn’t awake long enough for anything else. It took Harrison threescore naps before he spent enough time awake to finally catch the name of the angel who’d rescued him, Rhaena, earning him that first precious experience point. He’d tried to say it too, but that didn’t go nearly as well. It came out more like “ee-aa.” Very dignified and distinct.
Additionally, Harrison had discovered his mind and body were not so separated, even with the magic of feats and character sheets. He was, regardless of his past life, a baby. He was easily distractable, quick to cry, and quick to frown or hiss. It was quite frustrating, having to learn to manage such raw emotions once more. He’d already spent a decade going through therapy to deal with this, shouldn’t that have been enough?
Time worked in strange ways as an infant. Harrison–Aenar, as he had eventually come to learn–had no true sense of the passage of days, weeks, and months. He had no idea of how often he was fed, nor of how often or how long he slept. He knew that when he woke he tried to stand, failed, and tried again. He knew that while he slept there were plots ongoing, that the angel and the devil fought against each other in the court of iron-clad men. He could hear their whispers as he woke, the gossip of the maids as they spoke of the King and his many wives, of the beast (Harrison–Aenar, you fool, Aenar, you must blend in!–suspected that meant himself) and his dead mother. Aenar mourned for his mother. He knew it could not have been easy to birth a body covered in scales and claws, and doubted the medicine of this medieval world would have handled the necessary care well. Yet neither did he care for being referred to as a beast, though Aenar supposed he learned much from that as well.
It was after Aenar’s four thousand, six hundred, twenty-eighth nap that he finally managed to stand. His feet were unsteady, clawed toes clutching the straw mattress as he perched upon it. His hands gripped the top of the wooden crib. Yet he stood. Slowly, holding onto the railing, he began to walk. One foot. Then another. Then–
Oh. That was the mattress again, straw poking through it against his scales. Aenar sighed. It seemed he’d have to start again. But not now. Now it was naptime, part four thousand, six hundred, twenty-nine.