Life of Change

The days passed quickly, and with them, my boredom grew. Not that I wanted to complain, but being a baby had a lot of disadvantages. Actually, it was all a disadvantage. It sucks that my days were all eat, shit, and sleep. I needed something to do, and fast.

The only good thing about these days was that the people around me were increasing. Every time I woke up, there was a new person in my care.

Usually, it was a servant I didn't know, but other times it was one of my sisters or even my father. Strangely I never got to see my mother outside of the times when she came to feed me.

One would think that since we were a noble family of some sort, they would have a nanny to do that job, but apparently in this world things were different. Or at least it seemed to be that way in this family.

Makila was the only one who was always there. A new person and Makila. If I needed to be changed, Makila would do it. If I needed to sleep, Makila would do it. If I needed a bath, of course, Makila would do it.

The only thing she didn't do was feed me, and I'm sure if she was able, she would do that too. It was interesting that other than that, Makila was more mom than my real mom. Which made things much more confusing than I would have liked.

To my surprise, one day when the boredom that was eating away at me was almost at its peak, Makila began to take me out of the room I had been in since I regained consciousness and took me on a tour of much of the house, or should I say mansion.

It was huge. Let me repeat that. It was HUGE. A mansion was the only thing that fit the description. It took us a long time to get from one place to the other because the rooms were so far apart from each other, and each was as big as a small apartment.

Thanks to these walks around the mansion, I learned a little about the places of interest, for example, my sisters' rooms. Which, surprisingly to no one, were side by side.

My parents' rooms. Yes, rooms. Plural. There was the joint room, where they usually slept together. Then, a separate room for my father and one for my mother.

Makila's room; who seemed to have a room all to herself too, although it looked quite empty. I couldn't tell if it was because she's austere or because she doesn't usually use that room.

Then the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the offices, and finally, some of the maids' rooms. One of these was occupied by the emerald-eyed maid, who, by accident, we found changing her clothes when we walked in. It was amusing and... enlightening.

I noticed that the underwear is in keeping with how you would expect from the era we seem to be in. A pair of panties, which looked something like baggy pants; those they usually call "pumpkins shorts" and a somewhat tight, frilly t-shirt.

Well, if I was ever going to come up with an idea for making money in the future, I suppose this would be the ideal one. After all, I'd be profiting from it myself.

One of the advantages of being a baby is that other people don't seem embarrassed to have me around when they are changing clothes or bathing, so I could see her body in all its glory.

Small breasts, very smooth tanned skin, a cute little butt, and somewhat slender thighs. In a couple more years she will surely have an amazing body.

Aside from this moment of culture, I managed to finally learn her name. Ameli. Yes, Ameli, like a certain demon in love with a blue-haired human *wink wink*.

I also took a look at the extra parts, the wings and tail. They had great mobility, being able to stretch and flap them as she wished. The wings, at full extension, were about 10 to 15 cm longer than her arms if she stretched them out to the sides. They were very similar to the wings of a bat and had the same basic shape. If I had to guess, I'd say they were 100% the same, anatomically speaking. That is, a pair of arms/hands that evolved to become pseudo-wings. They grew from the top of the hip, and when fully open, they were as wide as your forearm. I would say approximately about 40cm.

Her tail, on the other hand, was a little longer than her legs. Fully stretched it was about 10cm longer, having also the advantage of being very flexible, able to bend in many different ways. It was born from where the coccyx bone should be. It was thin, perhaps as thin as a whip, from base to tip, and have an elongated heart shape. Pointed and firm.

Makila chatted with her for a while as Ameli wiped her body with a damp cloth and changed into her maid's uniform.

Why Makila could watch her while she was bathing? I have no idea. I'm as confused as you are. But, hey, I'm not going to complain. It was a delight to see that nice naked body.

In my defense, I'm not a pervert, I'm just admiring something beautiful. Mere scientific curiosity about her anatomy... that's all...

Anyway.

After that, she joined us on our tour of the mansion. Thanks to both of them I memorized quite a bit of its structure.

There were more benefits from these tours. I managed to learn one of the things I most wanted to know about the outside world.

A couple of days after that first walk, we left the house and arrived at the garden, apparently our backyard. There were long rows of bushes, filled with flowers of different colors. Flowers that, if it wasn't already obvious, I had never seen before in my life.

They had strange shapes, some looked like boats, which made you think that if they fell into the water, they would float away like a paper boat would. Others were shaped like a saxophone, an inverted bell, with its widest part pointing towards the sky, another that looked like the tail of a peacock, and the most impressive of all. A dragon's head. That flower was as big as I was, crimson red. On its top, it even had eye-like markings, and inside its petals, there were something like thorns that mimicked fangs. It gave the feeling that at any moment it would come to life and start spitting fire. It was the most impressive plant I had ever seen in my entire life... both lives.

We continued walking through the beautiful garden, until we came to an area with a leafy tree of extensive branches, with leaves of a soft yellow tone. At its feet, there was a kind of bench with a wooden structure with a roof and a small white stone table. It was a space that was often used for tea in the garden.

Makila sat down on the grass under the tree placing me on her lap. She wanted to bring me here so we could both relax and enjoy some sunshine and fresh air. Well, suns...it was 2 suns that I could see. It was breathtaking and at the same time, it wasn't. I was kind of used to fantasy stories adding something like that, but it was still impressive to see such a thing for the first time.

It was curious that I hadn't noticed this when Sathalia showed me that image of the planet. I guess a giant, scary crack in space is more striking than a solar system with 2 stars.

Every couple of days, Makila would take me out into the garden to sunbathe, play in the grass, admire and smell the flowers that adorned the place, or just "have tea" on a terrace on the other side of the garden, where we had a beautiful lagoon; yes, a fucking lagoon, with duck-like birds and several species of super strange fish.

Thanks to these walks outside, I could see that the weather felt similar to that of the earth, I even got to see the change of seasons. I saw how the leaves of the trees were changing their colors and falling to the ground, leaving a natural carpet of varied colors, giving way to what seemed to be the beginning of autumn.

The wind felt colder and colder and the people in the mansion, especially my family, looked much busier. There was a good chance that, from the number of days that seemed to have passed since I first awoke, my birth was around the beginning of summer. Although I had no way of checking at the time.

The days seemed longer, and I began to feel the need to measure them a little more precisely. I tried to calculate how many days had passed since I saw the sun... suns, for the first time and concluded that about 3 weeks had passed.

But that would be according to my calculations. I didn't know how days were measured in this world, so I was at a bit of a loss. That's not to mention the time that passed from my birth to the first time I went out into the garden.

Luckily for me, and almost as if it was divine help, Papa Bear came into my room to play a couple of days later. He sat on the couch as usual and started making those silly faces that he still thinks make me laugh. When he realized that I was not reacting, he remembered his pocket watch, took it out, and showed it to me. It was there that I managed to understand time, relatively speaking.

Okay, bad joke, sorry. Let's move on to the explanation.

First, the hours, minutes, and seconds seem to last the same. I can only say "seems" because the second hand was going at a similar speed to how I remember it. How do I know? You know, one second equals saying "elephant". It's a simple but unbreakable spell. So, I went around counting each time the second hand moved and, surprise, surprise, it was about 60 elephants to make a full revolution.

That was the same, but there was a difference. The numbers on the clock, or what I think are numbers, since I don't know what those symbols mean.

Imagine a circle divided into 5 equal parts, each dividing line of that circle has bigger numbers; from the top, 15, 3, 6, 9, and 12. And the other 10 smaller numbers among the big ones. Implying 15 hours, for a total of 30 hours a day.

On the same clock, 2 other smaller ones. One with 6 symbols and the other with 12 symbols. From what I could understand, the one with 6 symbols was for the number of days per week, and the other one for the months. Taking all that into account, the calculation would be like this.

The number of hours per year is still 8760 hours, at 30 hours per day, that's a total of 292 days per year. 12 months, each divided into 4 weeks of 6 days each, or, in other words, 24 days for each month. Don't ask me about the decimals that are left over, it's already too much that I have managed that calculation by myself and I don't intend to question how the scholars of this world solved that problem... if they did.

And don't blame me for doing all these calculations... I'm a baby who can't do anything but being carried by my parents, sisters, Makila and some maids. I literally have nothing to do but think about all this... I'm bored, help me

Thanks to this and what little I know about babies, I concluded that, by this time, I should be around 4 months old. Which put me in my first quarter of a year. If I woke up for the first time over a month ago, then I "gained" my consciousness around the 3 months. Well, I had to be grateful that I didn't get to experience my birth, but why wake up at 3 months? Why not a month, or 2, or even 6? I had so many questions to answer. Next time I talk to Sathalia I should ask her.

Apart from all this, there was more good news. I finally started to understand the language. And just to be clear, I seriously felt stupid realizing how easy it was to understand. Well, not as easy, but enough to quickly grasp the meaning of some words.

Oddly enough, the language has the same word order as Spanish/English, except for a few sentences that are weird. Super easy to understand once you get the hang of it. Things like "Hello, how are you?" had the normal order, but others like, "La comida estará preparada en breve" (The food will be ready shortly) were ordered like this: "En breve comida preparada estará." (Food ready soon will be) It was like talking to Yoda. Confusing at times and even irritating.

Still, I started to memorize a good number of words and phrases from the moment I noticed that trick, which was about a week after we started the mansion walks. When I had the opportunity to listen to different people speaking it and could compare pronunciations it was easier for me to understand what they were saying.

I was already pretty good at understanding new languages, although not as good as I would have liked. I struggled quite a bit this past month to make sense of some phrases, but I am satisfied with what I accomplished. After all, it was all I could do during the day. Listen and mentally practice everything I learned.

Thanks to that I was filled with an enormous amount of information regarding many things, and I was able to answer the vast majority of questions I had.

And what I learned; was why I was kept "hidden" in that room in the first place.

To begin with, it was due to several factors, although I will only mention the most important ones.

The first was due to my mother's health. According to what I heard from some adults; she did not have the strength to carry the pregnancy. My mother's health weakened over the years, and shortly after getting pregnant with me, she was found to have a type of heart disease. Carrying so much stress could have made her condition worse, but she decided to take the risk and bring me into the world. Luckily, she was given a lot of care and didn't go through the worst of it, although she ended up much weaker than before.

When they sent her to our home after determining that she was stable enough, they put her in a special room, where there were several, uhh… something that heals. I didn’t get that word at the time.

Anyways, this place had been prepared beforehand, building a wall in the middle to separate her so that she would have some privacy, but that it would be easy for her to come to me and be able to feed me.

All this was done because she wanted to have a place where she could relax and be with her family without being in, as I understood her to say, that horrible prison in Alika's temple. Which would be something like the hospital of this world.

The second big reason was that my birth occurred during a complicated time. I didn't fully understand the words they used, but every few decades there were days when the heat was extremely intense. This room had its windows removed to prevent it from causing problems for us. And it seemed to have some kind of system that regulates the temperature... something like a magic air conditioner. I don't know anything other than that. It was more intriguing how the others could survive such extreme weather, but I figured I would know once I grew up.

Thanks to my improved language skills, I understand what my family says much easier, especially listening to my mother and sisters. Zenya was, surprisingly, the MVP. She would come in every day to play with me, talking for hours, telling me a myriad of things, many of which were what she learned from her tutor or folk tales she had learned.

Many times, Makila had to correct her in the middle of her stories because Zenya mispronounced a word or got some part of the story wrong. For this, Zenya won the medal for the best older sister from me. Seriously, she was a real wonder. Thanks to everything she told me, and of course to Makila's help, I was able to learn more about our family. The Baelian house.

To begin with, I will speak first in a general way.

House Baelian is one of the 4 great houses of the Roitlan Empire. It is a ducal house, headed by the main branch of the family, the Urden Baelian. Below them, there are 3 secondary branches. The Razoro, the Kirdo, and the Galmari. These secondary branches are in charge of administering important territories of the Baelian family, while the main branch remains in the house of the capital attending to political affairs.

Apart from these secondary branches, we also have several subordinate nobles, ranging from several hundred knights, which are of non-hereditary title, houses of lords, with jobs related to business administration or medium important positions, and a few dozen houses of Barons and Viscounts.

There are also alliances with houses of Counts, merchants, and families from other kingdoms and empires. I don't go any further, because I still didn't manage to understand most of it, since there were many difficult words that I didn't understand.

Much of that information was provided directly by Makila, who seemed well-versed, and... strangely enthusiastic about telling it. Both Zenya and I were somewhat stunned when Makila started talking about the family situation. Although it was a good way to put us both to sleep in the evenings.

This brings me to the next important point, my family's situation.

We are that main branch. The Urden Baelian. Papa Bear, my father, Duke Halfred Kant Urden Baelian, is the current patriarch of the family. His wife and my mother, the Duchess Irlana Gala Urden Baelian. The demon I met before Papa Bear arrived, is my older brother, Losward Bhias Urden Baelian. My first older sister, Sarka Lara Urden Baelian. My second oldest sister, Zenya Dria Urden Baelian, and the youngest of the family, Orinthya Nita Urden Baelian, that is me.

That was the totality of my immediate family. But! There was someone who took me by complete surprise. Fiana Baelian de Galari. I didn't understand at all, because her name had our family name, but still, it was different. I only understood that "Makila" is something like a title, though I don't know the meaning. And since the only sounds I could make were babbling and Zenya was not interested in asking, I could not delve further into that topic and was left without a proper explanation of the matter.

But there is more good news. Well, it's both good and bad. The good part is that my mother, Irlana, seems to be getting better, slowly regaining her strength. By early autumn, she was able to join us on our walks in the garden, sometimes it was even just her and me. Moments that I took full advantage of to bond with her. It almost always ended up with me being riddled by her constant kisses and tickles... not that they bothered me, I was getting used to her displays of affection. The bad news was that a few days later, she started showing up less and less. She changed from spending a good part of the day with me to barely showing up to breastfeed me and leaving almost immediately.

…

…

Look, I know she's probably busy with what I imagine is her job and all that, now that she’s getting better, but I started to enjoy my time with her, and these last days without her started to feel kind of lonely. I wanted to spend as much time together as I could. I know I shouldn't be so selfish, but fuck it, I'm a baby, I have to be selfish and I have no intentions of changing that. So, my solution was the most appropriate and logical one... cry my eyes out for my mommy.

And it worked... for a couple of days. At least she would stay a little longer after feeding me, and in the evenings, she would stay with me until I fell asleep.

There was nothing I could do about it, so I had no choice but to accept it and keep quiet. Upset and lonely. At least now I had more free time, and I was able to focus on other important things. On myself. And by that, I mean, both my new body and appearance and the mental changes I've been experiencing over time.