She may or may not have passed out after the blue screen flashed in her face. Being born for the second time was a traumatic experience for her. A blue screen popping up out of nowhere was too much for her. When she woke up again, her mother was attempting to feed her. It was a little awkward at first for her, but she eventually gave up when she figured out she wouldn't be eating any other way for a minimum of a year. While she was eating, her mother started to hum a lullaby she had never heard before. She fell asleep to the soothing sound of the humming.

When she woke sometime later, she felt like they had placed her in a straight jacket. She was wrapped in a blanket that made it almost impossible for her to move. Her muscles were not responding to her the way she felt they should, and it was hard for her to focus on objects in the distance when she looked around. Eventually, she had used all of the energy she had and fell back asleep.

The next time she woke up was to an unpleasant feeling near her nether region. She had no control over her bladder and would have to put up with this indignity for the foreseeable future. It was time to see how quickly her new mother responded to her when she cried.

It turned out her mother was doing an excellent job of watching her. As soon as she started to cry, her mother came over and changed the offensive cloth diaper, and as a bonus, she even got a free meal out of it.

It took her over a week before she got around to trying to call up that blue screen again. To be fair, she thought it was a figment of her imagination initially. It wasn’t until she got another message that she wondered if she was in a game world. She was not a gamer in her old life, but she had a cousin who was really into it that would rarely shut up when she was around him.

[Skill gained: Mathematics 1]

She was trying to count the number of times she had eaten to figure out how many days may have passed. It did not take her long to abandon that method of calculating the days after realizing that she was eating quite a few more than three times a day. After quitting any thoughts of counting the days, she started doing simple addition and subtraction in her head to relieve boredom and keep her mind off the past. As soon as she began to do multiplication tables, the skill notice popped up.

After seeing that she had gained a skill, she started to think of a way to bring up that big blue box that she had seen a while ago. When she tried to speak commands, her mouth wouldn't work right, and all that came out was babble. This had the added benefit of a free meal but no blue boxes. Next, she started to think the commands she wanted.

‘Character’

‘System’

‘Computer’

‘Status’

Level

1

Health

20/20

Strength

1

Constitution

2

Dexterity

1

Intelligence

32

Wisdom

21

[Traits] [Skills] [Magic]

Bingo! No wonder why she could barely move and fell asleep so often. Her stats sucked! At least her intelligence appeared to be high. Hoping this was like all the games she had heard way too much about, she started mentally clicking on each word to see if it would reveal any information.

Level

(10/100)

Health

Your current physical condition.

Strength

Your physical power.

Constitution

Your endurance and amount of health.

Dexterity

Your agility, balance, coordination, and reflexes.

Intelligence

Your logic, knowledge, and memory.

Wisdom

Your perception, insight, and mana.

That was a little helpful. Sarah wondered how she would increase the stats on her sheet. Hopefully, it was as easy as exercising and doing mind teasers to gain more stats. It was a little odd that she had a health amount but no mana amount. Magic was one of the options she had, so it had to exist. She decided to click the three options she had below her stat sheet.

[Traits]

Linguist

The ability to learn written and spoken language quickly.

Limitless

There are no limits on what you can learn.

It seemed her knack for languages would follow her to this world. She hoped it wouldn't take her too long to puzzle out the local language. Her parents were supposed to help their children learn words, right? The limitless trait seemed a little odd. She couldn’t think of a reason for there to be a limit on what she could learn in the first place. She wondered if she could find a manual to help her understand the rules of this world.

[Magic]

Well, that one was blank. Sarah guessed it kind of made sense. She didn’t have magic from before, so why would she have it now? It was exciting that magic was a possibility. She would have to pay attention to see when other people were using it around her to see if she could learn it from them. Or maybe it was like some books she had read where the main character just had to focus hard and sense the magic in the air to gain magic. She hoped it would be easy for her to pick up.

The next time she woke up, it was due to hunger. It was a common occurrence these days for her, unfortunately. She felt bad for her new mother, who had to constantly get up with her when she was hungry or soiled.

The house they were staying in felt almost like a hotel room. There was a bed, a desk and chair, and an opaque window in the room we were living in. Except for a few paintings on the walls, their room was bare. Every time she would wake up in the middle of the night, her mother would have to light a candle to see.

The one time she was able to see out of the open window, she could see that they were on the second floor of the building. There was a fountain in the middle of a central courtyard, and she could see more rooms on the opposite side of it. The walls both inside and outside of the building were composed of plain rock. The rocks looked expertly placed, but they were not the modern-day stone bricks she was used to seeing. The whole area gave her the feeling of living in the past.

There have been very few visitors that have come into their room. The first person she saw was a person who brought her mother meals. After the lady delivered the food, she would clean the room by emptying the chamber pot and removing any soiled diaper cloths. She would also stock their supply of clean diaper cloths and make sure there was fruit available. The odd thing about the cleaning lady was that she never spoke to her mother unless it was to answer a question.

The second type of visitor they received was who she assumed was a doctor of some sort. The man in a red shirt was quick and to the point with his examinations. It felt like examining women and babies was a routine for him with how efficient he was. She only saw him the first day and then a few days later, so she guessed they were both healthy.

When she was not sleeping, she was working on gaining more skills. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do as a newborn baby physically, so she tried to think of mental skills. So far, her efforts had granted her stats instead of skills, but she would not complain about that. She had gained two intelligence and two wisdom over the last couple of days. The stats didn’t seem to make her any more intelligent, but she liked to see progress regardless. It could have just been a case of it being a gradual increase, so she did not notice a difference.

She made a point of exercising her arms and legs every time she was awake to get those muscles to respond to her better. It was difficult for her to keep her movements up because she was constantly running out of energy and falling asleep. Today when she was doing her exercises, she received a bump to the stats she was working towards.

[Strength +1]

[Constitution +1]

[Dexterity +1]

She started giggling after the message popped up, which inadvertently got her mother’s attention. It was not a bad thing because it meant she got another meal. When her mother picked her up, she smiled and asked her something. Based on the tone, it was probably something along the lines of “what’s so funny little one?”

Her mother spent a lot of time sitting and writing at the desk in the room. She had a journal that she was often writing in. Sometimes she would bring out a stone tablet from her bag to study. The tablet looked like something that would come out of an ancient ruin back in her old world. She wondered if that was where this tablet had come from. If it was an artifact, she pondered why it was in a bag instead of a protective case inside a research facility.

She also wondered why she had not seen a father figure yet. Was her poor mother going to have to raise her alone? Her mother was a beautiful woman. She looked like she could have been a college roommate while she was still attending university. Her age was probably somewhere around twenty-five. She had long blonde hair that she always kept braided in a french braid down her back. Her eyes were an unreal shade of emerald green. Her body was slim, with hints of muscle on her legs and arms. The only clothing she wore was a yellow dress when she was not in her sleeping shift. She wondered if they were poor and that was the only dress her mother owned or if they were in some sort of prison. She didn’t think they were in jail because her mother had opened her door a few times to ask for things.

After being in their room for what felt like a month, she woke one morning to something new. A loud trumpet-like sound was playing something very close to the Reveille song could hear in early morning military camps from before. She, of course, started crying because the noise had scared her, and being in a child’s body was messing with her. Her mother quickly picked her up and soothed her while she tried to pack up their belongings. After feeding and changing her, she was placed on the bed while her mother packed their belongings. It only took her a few minutes to have all of their possessions packed up and sitting by the door.

They were sitting on the bed when somebody came into their room to collect their bags. They followed their baggage down a very long hallway until they got to a set of stairs. At the staircase, another person was waiting to help her mother down the stairs. Once they had made it down the spiral staircase, they walked into a spacious room that held multiple chairs facing the same direction. Her mother took a seat near the back of the nearly filled room. There was a podium in the front of the room with a raised table right next to it.

It was time for them to hurry up and wait while more women with babies were led into the room and seated in the chairs around them. It was the first time she had been outside of their room since she was born, and she was excited to see so many other people.

Gazing out into the crowd, she noticed that hair color was not limited to the shades back on Earth. She could see people had hair of every color of the rainbow. The only color that was not present was black, but she didn’t think the color was impossible because someone was very dark brown. The lady next to them had purple hair and grey eyes.

It seemed like their skin color was similar to what she was used to seeing on Earth. Skin tones ranged from pale white to milk chocolate brown. Her mother’s skin was a tanned bronze shade. It was hard for her to judge height with everybody seated, but there did not seem to be any significant discrepancies in the height of the seated women. The people standing along the back wall were all around the same height of five and a half feet for the women, and the men were as tall as six feet.

One thing she did find odd was that everyone sitting in the room was wearing the same cut of clothing. Every woman with a child was wearing a maxi dress. It was floor-length and flowy but more fitted at the top with short sleeves and a slight v neck. There were various colors, but all were the same cut.

There were several women wearing shift dresses lined up along the back wall. This dress was boxy and sleeveless, almost like a flour sack that was sewen to look like a dress cut off just below the knees. She did not see a single woman in a pair of pants. The men in the back of the room were all wearing vests and roughspun pants. While the people on the back wall had colorful clothing, it was all muted colors compared to the women with babies seated throughout the room.