Chapter 4: She’s Me

Chapter Four: She’s Me (Edited)

I pushed the stool into the dusty storeroom. It was a bit difficult as I was still so dang small and this stool was clearly designed for an adult, but it was infinitely more manageable than it had been when I first woke up in this world. I continued huffing, puffing, and pushing until I reached the otherwise dusty, empty room’s sole point of interest: the full-body mirror.

It was the only reflective surface worth the name I’d found in the entire sea fort that was my new home, and it was obvious why. My mom had clearly scavenged it from somewhere (and it was still strange to think of her as Mom, but I found myself liking thinking of her that way as time went on). Half of the mirror was missing, and the rest cracked from some unknown impact. The metal frame was blackened on one side and flaking with rust on the other.

Tail twitching, I felt an urge to just jump up in one big hop, but I restrained myself after bouncing in place. My legs still weren’t quite strong enough to accomplish that much, even though this new body seemed to always want to jump and pounce around. Instead, I climbed up onto the stool. It was a bit awkward given its size, but I managed. I glanced into the mirror and pulled out a piece of pointed charcoal and a notebook Mom had given me.

For a few moments, I let my hand dance over my old and faded notebook with experimental lines to capture the figure in the mirror, but the desire, the motivation I’d had when I first started this whole process eventually faded. I let the notebook drop onto the floor. For the first time, I let myself well and truly look.

A young girl looked back at me.

She smiled when I smiled, frowned when I frowned, and made stupid faces when I made stupid faces. It was surreal.

In what I was rapidly beginning to refer to as my first life now that I was fairly certain I wasn’t in a coma dream; I’d been a guy. I wouldn’t say I was exceptional. I had short, black hair because I couldn’t make any style but “straight hair” work to save my life. I’d been average in height and the runt of the pack as far as presence in my family went. However, I’d argue with anyone that I had the prettiest damn blue eyes of anyone I’d ever met, and I wouldn’t back down. According to my father in life, they were a gift from the human mother I never met.

The young girl across from me was different. Besides the obvious age difference, she had curly red hair and pale skin. Her cheeks looked pinchable, but there were hints of strong cheekbones even now. She already had a few freckles here and there.  Her eyes were piercing green, just like her mom’s. They were nearly identical, in fact. Slowly, my gaze trailed up.

Two fuzzy, rounded ears sat perched atop her head and were capped by white, fuzzy tips. They weren’t quite as pointy as Mom’s, but that was probably an age thing she would grow into. If I focused, I could make them move a bit. A long, red tail with occasional black and white speckles moved behind the girl. It was far more responsive and prone to twitching according to mood and was honestly a bit of a hassle sometimes.

She wore dull blue trousers and a blue long-sleeved shirt with a green overshirt, more than a bit oversized for her but with rough stitching to modify them. Around her neck was a simple twine seashell necklace.

She waved. Even her hand was a little fuzzy and odd, proportioned just slightly different from a human hand. If Mom was any indication, her claws would become more pronounced with time, but for now they were smol and kinda stubby like a human child’s with just a bit more point to them.

She sat on the stool and lifted a foot up. Her feet were bare and just slightly different from a human foot. More akin to a melding of a paw and a foot that seamlessly blended into a human calf. She had toe beans, too. I’d checked.

Finally, she smiled. It was a nice smile, but one that already displayed a slight abnormality in how her teeth were just slightly more pointed than I’d expect of a human child.

All in all, she looked like a cute kid I’d expect to see in an anime, particularly given the adorable ears and tail.  I moved the tail, its length easily flexible enough to reach around so I could hold it. It was soft.

The girl in the mirror wasn’t some secondary character in one of my shows back on Earth.

She was me.

It was strange, it was weird, and a thousand other words that barely scraped describing what it was like seeing a face that both was and wasn’t mine, and—

“Gwen! Where are you? It’s time for breakfast.”

I was out of time, as it turns out.

“I’m coming, Mama!” I shouted. I leaped off the stool and only stumbled slightly on the landing, my tail shooting out to stabilize me as I wobbled. I regained my balance and ran through a crack in the doorway.

Home was, in a word, anachronistic.

A first glance at the halls and rooms would indicate an older structure from the stonework alone. Roughhewn sandstone bricks formed walls in a way that only older architecture made using local resources appeared, barring the super-rich with a desire to be artsy.  The slight arch of the tunnel alongside tattered but intact grayish blue cloth banners depicting a stylized maiden with a sword riding a tiger along the walls only complimented the feeling of age. Scattered remains of paint along the wall indicated some lively artwork of daily activities such as hunting or fishing at one point, but much had deteriorated, leaving bare stone behind.  The make of the bricks felt as if they’d fit in anywhere from my old world’s bronze age to the age of exploration.

Between the dust, sandstone, and dim light, I could easily picture ancient scribes making their way down this hall, fretting over tributary transcripts on clay tablets. Yet, the illusion was broken by the dim blue glow of light strips stretching along the ceiling.

The dim light was amazingly easy to see in, to the point I was certain I saw better in low light than I did as a human. It exposed a combination of rusted and intact pipework stretching along the walls and ceiling. Scattered here and there along the floor were leftover pieces of equipment ranging from hand tools like a hammer or wrench to pumps to tools I had no name for but had a lot of dials and glass tubes on them. Some of these tools were left for who knows how long to the point they were more rust than machine while others looked new, clearly brought in and stored in this hall before being forgotten about. Old and new, scattered intermittently to the point I still had trouble figuring out what was here before my time and what had been brought in far more recently.

This was not quite like the standard isekai experience the anime community had prepared me for. Anachronism in those stories was nothing new, but near modern lighting and machinery in a roughhewn bastion-like sea fort that’d fit into a Renaissance setting just didn’t quite mesh. I felt as if I was on an archeological site with some amenities and had skipped over the obligatory peaceful country village to start life in.

Then again, I’d expected to just show up with my penis and that certainly hadn’t happened, so I probably shouldn't put much in my past expectations for the typical isekai experience. In some ways, I felt I should have had more reaction to that fact. There…there was a lot to unpack in that statement alone, but one reason I found my reaction to my rebirth induced sex change muted was that I could at least move again. Being a baby might be fine when your cognitive thought process amounts to “Gah?” but it was enormously less so when you could question existentialism.

Honestly, I would be happy just finding my new body feel natural. Body dysphoria would not have been fun, at all.

Having more energy than I felt like I’d ever had in my previous life helped too, of course.

Passing a few more dusty rooms we didn’t use, I neared our living quarters, or our “apartment”, as I kept thinking of it. It was a separated area of the fort converted from the rest of the into something livable. It even had colorful sheets on the walls.

I did not skip my way back into the apartment to greet my mom. That would be undignified and way too little girly. I certainly didn’t occasionally feel a need to hop over cracks in the sandstone floor, either. Instead, I maintained a dignified jog through the tunnels, and if I had a slight rhythm to it that was my business alone.

“Gwen, girl, there you are — sweet spirits, what have you got all over you?” Mom said to me, turning from a bubbling pot in the kitchen’s portable stove with a swish of her ragged apron to scrutinize me with a disappointed air.

I tiled my head. I didn’t think I was that dirty.  I tried to say something along the lines of, “What are you talking about, mother? I am perfectly fine.” Unfortunately, my brain decided to fuck it up as I responded in both English and my mother’s language, so it came off sounding like, “Whapesd etq adta? Muii!”

We both froze. My cheeks burned while she looked worried.  In a smooth movement, she was across the room and kneeling to my level in an instant, perky ears atop her head up and listening as she touched my forehead. “Gwen? Are you okay? How are you feeling?”

I nodded. I clicked my tongue and with some deliberation I wet my lips. I very, very carefully moved my mouth and tongue through words foreign to my old life. Finally, I told her. “I’m okay.”

She studied me intensely for a moment before nodding, patting me on the head and giving my ears a light scritch before she turned and turned back to the stove. “Take a seat, soup’s almost done.”

I hopped onto my chair and held in a sigh. I had to get better at language.

Sometimes, in moments like this, I was still just a touch bitter about how I hadn’t received a universal translator with my reincarnation. I was never great with languages in the life before, and I’d always envied all the protagonists in fiction who never had to deal with language difficulties. They usually had some form of translator, magical or scientific, fixing the actual problems of learning a language. Boom, no worries, everyone understands each other, and life can move on.

Now, that jealousy burned. I didn’t get one with my rebirth. It’d have been nice and would’ve made learning my mother’s language far easier if not automatic, but evidently, I didn’t get nice things. Instead, I’d started like any child knowing jack and all. My gift was doing things the hard way.

Over hard-won lessons in language from baby talk to basic grammar from my mom, I’d learned what I think was called teanga, although whether that was the term for language in general or just my mother’s tongue, I didn’t know. I was still learning it, but I could actually talk with my mom most days. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the scattered languages I’d learned in my old life and what I’d learned in this world sometimes collided and resulted in whatever the Hell I’d just said.

I hoped I didn’t have brain damage.

I was distracted from the worrying state of my brain when Mom placed a matching tin plate and bowl before me before taking her own place with a bowl. The tin plate held a small pile of rice porridge. At least, it looked like rice, but if the rice was faintly blue colored. It was typical fare Mom usually served some with a meal with a light sprinkling of salt and increasingly rare spices. Unlike rice back in my world, this rice always tasted faintly sweet even with no sugar added, but I’d grown used to it and found it satisfying, if a bit bland on its own, sweet or not.

Unfortunately, the other bowl had my stomach threatening revolution.

Green goop greeted me. It faintly steamed so I knew it was warm which, frankly, didn’t help. I poked at it with a spoon. The goop parted before the spoon, glistening as I stirred it sunk in. It was thick like syrup, only a bit of green broth pooling at the top in another layer. The steam wafted upward, delivering its aroma in a pungent wave.

It made me think faintly of the sea, but if the sea hated me.

In my old life, I’d had a fondness for seafood.  Odd, given I was a landbound country boy back then, but maybe that made my fondness for the aquatic side of things make an ironic sort of sense.  Regardless, I’d sought out such seafood where I could which led me to delightful discoveries like the humble seaweed roll. This wasn’t that, not even close, but even shoving those in a pot and boiling the living Hell out of them shouldn’t produce green snot this horrendous.

“Seaweed soup, Gwen. It’s good for you,” Mom said, taking a big bite from her own soup. She didn’t so much chew as gulp it down in one smooth motion. I’m not sure she even tasted it.

I still wasn’t sure she wasn’t lying about this. Oh, I’m sure it had nutritional value, but…

I knew the seaweed harvested for this. It was all we’d been able to harvest a few days ago.

Smellyweed.

It was edible in the same sense that a bag of just slightly off raw onions were.

I stared at my spoonful of green slime and tendrils. It was shaking in my hand. Mom’s eyes zeroed in atop my head and I realized my ears had folded without me telling them to again. “Do I need to hand feed you, Gwenneth?” Mom asked prettily. Mom saying my full name nearly prompted me to hyperventilate.

The rapid headshakes I sent her way were a touch exaggerated, but only just.  I’d learned being a picky eater in this life was ill advised. Still…

I brought up the spoon of green hate. I re-evaluated my life decisions.

 “Is there anything else?” I asked, doing my best to postpone the inevitable.  This wasn’t even the first time she’d made “seaweed” soup. It never got better.  “Can I just eat rice?”

Mom sighed and set her spoon down. “We’ll get something better when we forage later. Just eat, you need the nutrition,” she said, before downing what was left of her bowl in one go. She stared at me expectantly.

“Do I have to?” I asked. I knew I was whining. My traitorous ears folded.

Mom’s eyes narrowed. “Gwen, just eat. It’s what we have for now.”

I gulped. Part of me noted the total Mom tone and its authority made me shove the spoon in my mouth. I successfully avoided tasting for the first few seconds. I was even hopeful that today’s soup was miraculously okay. Unfortunately, five seconds later I knew life was cursed.

The bitter, sulfurous taste did not bother me nearly as much as how it felt like the seaweed slithered down my throat. Somehow, being warm did not help. If anything, warmth made it worse.

Mom’s laughter didn’t help. “It’s easier if you eat quickly. Less time to taste it.”

I raised another spoon dubiously. I tried her suggestion. She was right. It didn’t help much.

Sometime later, I conquered the bowl of green hate and moved onto my light blue rice porridge. It was faintly sweet and a gift of the gods.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Mom patted my shoulder as I dug in.

“I’m not,” I protested, but it was weak. I hid my indignation behind more porridge which fortunately was wiping away the lingering taste of the goopy nightmare I’d eaten.

Mom smiled. She held a rag to wipe my face but paused.  After a moment, she set it aside with an odd look. My eyes trailed over her own long finished bowl of horror and noticed something amiss. “Aren’t you going to have any rice?” I asked. It was a mainstay. Since I could eat solids, we had some form of blue rice.

Mom shook her head. “I’m not that hungry today,” she said, gathering our plate and bowls up to put in the kitchen sink. “Go get dressed in your wading clothes. I think today we’re going to the northern beach. We need something special.”

I blinked at the sudden topic change. “What’s so special about today, Mama?”

“Silly girl, that’s the surprise.” She had the audacity to boop my nose.

I sniffed, but I let her have her secrets. Her tail twitching as I walked back to the bedroom to get dressed was all I needed to spot to know she knew I wasn’t buying her silliness.

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Chapter Four: Author’s Note

Fun fact: of a chapter was started in November 2022 and now, posting it here, I find myself having to divide the chapter up.  I got the first scene with the mirror written in a couple days and then progress slowed to a sentence a day until mid-march 2023.

A lot of the hold up comes down to a major alteration in the backstory for Gwen’s mom in this world and the setting as a whole that, in retrospect, was needed, but definitely turned the pace to a crawl while I was already distracted and down with other things in life.

Still, most of the issue comes back to depression. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Also and in cheerier news, here is some art I had commissioned of Gwen and her mother from the wonderful YoruAlice. Check her art out, btw, she’s awesome and takes commissions. :3

 https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:etk2u3rfnonr3tid67mlawbk/post/3lwjiwxx7qi2s

Until next time.

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Support me on Patreon, Ko Fi, or Subscribe Star. Check them advance chapters uploaded every weekend, too. Or check out my website for links to my other author accounts, contact, socials, etc. Anything is appreciated :3

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