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Penitent Ch 3: Learning, Guessing, Growing
🕑 Added 2025-02-28 18:46:48 +0000 UTCMichael awoke in the very early morning, the fiery pain in his limbs having subsided enough at some point to allow him to fall asleep. He had a taste of some kind in his mouth which indicated to him that he’d been fed at some point in his sleep and he assumed he’d been cleaned as well. It was an indignity, but one that he’d been very familiar with during his stay in hospice care before he’d passed. He realized very quickly that his vision had improved. The shades of gray that everything had been were starting to become full color, and he could now see far enough to see all of the walls of the room. He lifted an arm, and found that it responded to his will without difficulty. He opened and closed a small hand that he managed to hold in front of his face. It felt clumsy, but it was a vast improvement over what he had been capable of the previous day. He tried to roll himself onto his stomach, but found that to be the limit of his current abilities.
He looked around and tried to pick out details around the room that would tell him more about the world. There were no vents, at least not on the ceiling or walls, so he imagined they didn’t have air conditioning. The walls were painted a simple shade of whitish yellow, and seemed to be made of concrete, though he couldn’t quite tell from where he laid. The crib he was in was simple, but well made. The wood appeared to be varnished. He knew the romans had concrete, but was varnish around in the middle ages? Or some equivalent? He had no idea. He saw a table on the far end of the room with a number of cloths he guessed were to be used as diapers, but saw no disposal. Were there chamberpots? Or did they have plumbing? If they did have plumbing was it closer to roman aqueducts or something else? His mind grasped for anything he could connect, but found his own knowledge as lacking as the information he could glean. He had a general knowledge of history and old societies, maybe even more than the average person, but he had no way to tell what kind of a society he was in other than they were likely focused on their military given his own treatment. Even if he was able to identify some things, a man had placed a cross on him and translated two languages simultaneously. He’d cast a spell. With magic, who could know how far development could deviate from what he considered ‘standard’? What he told him also indicated that people from other worlds had been there before and who knew how they’d impacted history and development there. Were all of the people who’d come there from Earth that he knew, or were there some people from worlds he couldn’t even begin to imagine? His mind swirled with the possibilities for a while, and he let it happen. It was better than the guilt. Better than crying. Better than dwelling on what he’d done.
In the midst of his pondering the door opened and he managed to tilt his head enough to see a woman in gray approach his crib. She didn’t greet him, but simply grabbed a chair, dragged it to the side of the crib. She unlatched one of the sides of crib bars and removed them, then she lifted him up brusquely and propped against the other side, giving him a better look at her. She had a young face, but an old expression with furrowed brows, and her blonde hair was tied in a neat bun that let not a single strand hang loose. She had a stack of thick looking paper on her lap and was wearing what looked like a gray military uniform with silver buttons. Its styling reminded him of something between the civil war and world war one. Were women able to serve in the military regularly here? Or was she just in a support role?
She held up a card, it was a simple drawing of a man.
“Tauk,” she said, pointing at the picture. She did this several more times, then she held up another card. This time, a simplistic drawing of a woman.
“Tauch,” she said, pointing again. She repeated the word several more times. It wasn’t hard to understand what she was doing. Michael needed to learn the language, and it was her job to get him started. He couldn’t speak it yet, but giving him a basic vocabulary to understand what was going on around him and get him started had value. She spent the entire day with him. Slowly building up the vocabulary, mixing it into simple sentences, and emphasizing a few key phrases.
There were some breaks for him to be fed and cleaned, but the alchemist visited only once, and the majority of the feeding seemed to be regular milk of some kind. He found that the words actually came very quickly and easily to him. That made sense given his current physical state as a near-infant. His brain was a sponge that was eager to take in everything it possibly could. He wondered how Stent had managed to create this teaching program. It seemed very deliberate and advanced to him. Had it been through the advice of other lifetakers? Or were they societally farther along than he’d thought? He assumed that these teaching techniques were utilized, if in a different fashion, to teach regular children and had been adapted to lifetakers, though maybe it was the other way around. That was another motivator for him to learn the language, he had a lot of questions and could really use a way to ask them.
The rest of the month progressed in much the same way. He would awake from a night of agonizing growing pains, followed by being awoken for a feeding and a visit from the alchemist. After that was hours of language training broken up only by regular feedings to help sustain his speedy growth. He went from barely being able to move his head, to being able to sit himself up, roll over, stand himself up in the crib, and even say some simple words. They were difficult to say at first, but when his teeth started to come in quickly toward the end of the week he was able to speak a bit more clearly, though at the cost of tremendous mouth pain being added to the persistent burning in his limbs. Any free time he had he spent pondering his situation, looking at the four walls of the room, and missing Sara.
The people that interacted with him were cold. They did not smile in his presence, they touched him only as much as was necessary, and their tones ranged from neutral to hateful. He couldn’t blame them, from their perspective he was a monster in the shape of a newborn.
At the end of the month, instead of a visit from the alchemist, Vance, the man who had fully informed him of his situation appeared.
“It is time to go,” he said. “Can you understand?”
“Yes,” he managed, the word feeling particularly awkward in an unfamiliar language coming from an unfamiliar mouth.
“Good. I will talk simply for you. We go to a wagon that carries new recruits to the camp. The trip will take four days. Understood?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, and knocked on the door. The woman who’d been changing and feeding him came in and jammed him into what seemed like a kind of gown and wrapped him in a simple blanket. The gown was a bit odd, but it made sense that they wouldn’t bother getting him anything fitted. He wondered how many other otherworldly arrivals had worn it over the years. From there he was lifted and taken out of the room he’d stayed in for the last seven days.
He looked around, absorbing everything he could as he was moved. The room he was transported through seemed to be some kind of office. There were simple desks, reams of paper, inkpots and pens. There were also a number of men and women in dark gray uniforms with silver buttons milling about, writing, and talking though he couldn’t make out all the individual parts of the conversation.
They walked through another reception style area and made their way outside. The air was cold. Not quite winter cold, but maybe early spring or late fall. His instructor hadn’t told him the words for the days of the week or seasons, so for all he knew this was the weather this world had year round. The streets were paved, with some of them made of brick, and others of cement. Most of the buildings were simple, uniform, and unpainted. He wondered if that was simply their cultural aesthetic, or if it was because he was in a more bureaucratic and administrative part of the town. The only decoration he saw was a marble statue in the middle of a square that showed a young man in a gray uniform holding a sword in front of his face.
There were a number of people in the street as well. Most of them wore gray uniforms, but a few of them wore more casual clothing. He saw several men in long black and brown coats, and a few women as well, none wearing dresses. It appeared as if even the casual clothing in Stent was influenced heavily by military stylings. He saw a few armed men walking around, but they were wearing green uniforms rather than the gray he’d grown used to seeing. He saw no firearms, instead they seemed to be primarily wielding spears, though one of them had a sword at his waist. There were streetlights, but they seemed unlit and their tops were shaped like ovals. He wondered if they were lit by gas, or magic, but as it was daytime he had no way to tell.
“Stop moving,” said Vance, adjusting his grip on him.
Michael couldn’t quite manage the word for ‘sorry’ so instead he simply did as he was told.
They arrived at the wagons, which were surrounded by a large, but orderly crowd. The wagons themselves were maybe ten feet long, and covered. Powerful looking draft horses were being hitched to them as they arrived. Horses were a good sign, that meant the animal life may not be too far from that of Earth. Though, he had hoped for some exotic creatures to be the norm there. He’d spent a few of the board days in the room imagining that he’d see a dragon, sphinx, or griffin.
The crowd was primarily of young men, though he saw a few young women as well. They were all holding packs, and many of them were saying goodbyes to older men and women that he assumed were their parents. Most seemed to be around fourteen or fifteen, and he saw that no one else that appeared as young as himself was there.
Vance moved to the back of one of the wagons, where a middle aged woman in uniform was standing and watching the goodbyes. There looked to be some marker of rank on her shoulder, a silver mark on the black fabric of her left shoulder. He noticed then that Vance had two of those same marks.
“Evra?”
“Yes sir.”
“This is the lifetaker. He has been cooperative.”
The woman nodded, and took Michael roughly from Vance’s grasp. “Good, the last one was a real-” Michael hadn’t been taught the words that followed.
Vance nodded to her. “I leave him in your care.”
She gave a nod, and balanced Michael roughly as she sharply placed two fingers on the shoulder that indicated her rank in a crisp and practiced motion. A salute perhaps?
Vance returned the gesture, and he walked away.
The woman looked down at him. “Alright murderer. If you cry, I will dislocate your arm and call it an accident. If you are quiet and reasonable. You will be okay. Understood?”
Michael regarded her vaguely annoyed features. “Yes,” it didn’t seem productive to give any other answer. He didn’t exactly have a lot of options in the most vulnerable state a human could be in.
