Samantha had called Brian—Mr. McLane—immediately after Bath’s slip-up. He told her to hold on until he got back home.

Samantha had begun to blurt out random explanations for his behavior, as though by stating them out loud she would receive some kind of sign that one of them was right.

Bath absolutely refused to humor her and played as dumb as possible. In other words, he turned off his hearing and fell asleep.

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He woke up to the McLane’s shaking him.

Bath reactivated his hearing to find them shouting in panic.

“He isn’t waking up—oh, Bath!” Brian called out in relief. “You're awake.”

Bath looked at both of his parents and wondered at their worry. He'd awoken fast enough, as soon as they nudged him from rest. Were all humans this prone to overreacting?

“Dada,” he said tentatively. Brian immediately broke out into a huge grin.

“Hi, little guy,” he said tenderly.

“I told you,” Samantha murmured. “He started speaking as soon as I left the doctor. It’s as though he realized he was supposed to speak by listening to Doctor Green and I talking.”

“I'd say that was impossible if I didn’t know better,” Brian sighed. “And then he said a sentence?”

“Yeah; he said, ‘mommy, mommy give me food’ as though it were the easiest thing to say in the world,” Samantha grimaced. “I don’t know if he’s just really good at repeating things, or if it’s something else.”

“I'm inclined to believe he’s just good at listening. You told him to say mama and dada and he said the words. You then told him to say something else and he repeated that as well. Until we can prove he actually understood what ‘mommy give me food’ actually means, I think we have to assume he was just parroting uncannily well.”

Ah, Bath rather liked Brian’s reasoning.

“Should we test it?” Samantha asked, unsure.

“I don’t see why not. Bath, can you say, ‘hello’?”

This seemed safe enough. “Hello,” Bath said.

“Can you say, ‘how are you’?” Samantha asked. Bath mulled this one over for a second. Perhaps if he repeated the phrase but messed up the pronunciation, they would believe that he was just parroting well. Bath was starting to realize that, having never tried to trick any creature before in his life, he was absolutely terrible at it.

“How you,” he said, then giggled.

“Well,” Brian began slowly, “I think it’s safe to say he’s just repeating what you were saying.”

“Alright, I agree,” Samantha conceded.

Finally! Bath began to feel like he hadn’t completely failed at impersonating a human infant. To further solidify his burgeoning confidence, he began an attempt to crawl towards his parents. From what he understood from the doctor, children of 6 months weren’t supposed to be crawling, but were supposed to be trying to crawl. Apparently, to humans, trying to do things was just as important as doing them. Trying to talk. Trying to crawl. The entire concept reminded him vaguely of little fledglings trying to fly. He supposed a bird would consider it a disaster if its progeny didn’t try to fly before flight feathers came in.

To humans, gurgling out random syllables and trying to crawl about were just as important.

There’s still a lot I have left to learn...

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When Bath was two, his parents decided to enroll him in what they called “Three-Year-Old Preschool.”

This was, perhaps, the most useful thing they could have done.

Every day, Bath observed other children his age and how they interacted with one another and the adults supervising them. Bath realized that his conceptions of what a two-year-old should do weren’t quite in line with what they actually could do. He had already displayed a bit of reading aptitude at home, while not a single 2-year-old in preschool could read a word. He also hadn’t tried running, assuming that small humans were too ungainly to try, though every two-year-old he encountered was zooming all over the room.

He also observed most attentively the process of “making friends.”

“Bath, let play,” a small human named Lisa exclaimed. Today was a typically warm May day. By now, nearly all of the children had turned three, Bath among them. His birthday was in September, so he had been one of the first children to celebrate his 3rd birthday.

He intoned, “Mm!” in response. Lisa was one of Bath’s closest human friends. She liked to play ball with him outside. This kind of human play reminded him of his time with a pack of wolves many years back. Simple, yet enjoyable; characterized by living in the moment.

Lisa also liked to play tag and often beat him. She was quite fast and adept at zigzagging around the jungle gym outside of the preschool building.

Bath thought smugly to himself that he could beat her if he really wanted to. He could always shed this form for another, after all, one faster than any human.

“Lisa,” he cried out, “catch!” He threw the soft, green, head-sized ball at Lisa. Lisa caught the ball and threw it back. Each time the ball was thrown, Bath and Lisa ran in random patterns to increase the challenge of both throwing and catching.

After a few minutes, the two sat down on the grass and look off into the distance.

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“Lisa!” Bath exclaimed, a grin on his face. “Look what I got!”

“Woah!” Lisa cried out. “"Is that a scooter?”

Bath nodded excitedly. “You can ride it, and it makes you go way faster than walking!”

“Oo, let me try!” Bath handed the scooter to her and Lisa took off, a total natural. Bath felt a bit jealous; he'd been quite unwieldy at first on the strange apparatus.

“This is so cool!” Lisa crooned as she zoomed down the driveway and the sidewalk. “Your parents are the best!”

“I wish school was over,’ Bath sighed. Kindergarten was fun enough, but he'd prefer to be home playing.

“I know! It’s only just started though, silly,” Lisa giggled. The August wind tousled her hair. Bath felt an urge decisively not appropriate for his current age group, one he quickly quashed. Though he had the body of a child, and was able to get into the childish mindset often enough...part of Bath longed to do what he had always, always done, since the beginning of time that he could remember.

Standing there, watching Lisa zoom around, he could envision her as she would be. He could envision her in all her womanhood, accurately so, with her perfections and birthmarks. He knew what she would look like down to her bone structure, to her genitalia and every hair on her body. He knew her form so well that, had he the desire, he could become her. And, as he was only limited in form by his whim to enter human society as one of them, the idea that he was only a child barely crossed his mind. He wanted Adult Lisa with all the passion of a male, of the form he would take when he, too, was mature.

But Bath stomped these flames of passion out. He didn’t really want Lisa in that way, he was beginning to realize. Since assuming the form of a human, Bath had begun to recognize that they were infinitely more dissimilar from other animals than he had ever expected. Back thousands of years ago, he could have sworn they differed very little. They attacked each other, lived in small packs, and seemed to live only to reproduce. This was what Bath understood: this was natural.

The human society in which he now found himself was as different as he could imagine. Not only did people not attack each other—he had never seen a human be seriously violent to another outside of the few cities he had visited—but they didn’t even seem all that intent on anything necessary for survival. The humans had created a place almost outside of nature where they could suspend the natural rules. They didn’t have to hunt or gather, or even farm. Their food could be procured at huge markets and stores for the exchange of currency. Being an apex predator, no creatures threatened them with violence, so they didn’t have to worry about defenses or staying alert.

‘I could kill literally all of them without trying,’ Bath internalized while watching Lisa giggle with delight. He saw their blood dripping down the street, the cars ripped apart, the streets sundered by his immense weight. All these flimsy houses, these complex machines shredded.

The image...he didn’t know how he thought about it. Bath normally never thought about these kinds of things. Other animals lived a simple existence, and any carnage he could cause would be limited. They didn’t normally have fixed structures, nor did they rely on tools. If he wanted them dead, he could kill them, one by one, but that was just about all he could do. These humans, in being strong, had become incalculably weak. They fixated on their buildings and civilization, all so breakable.

He remembered how people claimed they could evacuate the coastlines. But Bath knew now how most cities surrounded bodies of water. He had read this on his mother’s computer. Washington D.C. was on the coast, after all. He already knew that the waterline was high enough to inhibit the digging of graves humans took for granted further into the mainland.

Bath was more than conscious of how even small changes in water level could wreak massive destruction.

“Bath,” Lisa called out. “Your turn!”

Bath smiled and took the scooter from her.