On the 31st of October, the Dunkel family greeted their second child. Edward Dunkel…i.e. Me. I spent those first months mostly sleeping. Being a baby is surprisingly exhausting. It’s like being an astronaut who’s basically spent their whole life in near-zero gee. Your basic muscle systems weren’t developed yet. Your digestive tract and immune system still needed fine-tuning. Your brains were still only half-baked at best. Also, incontinence is never fun for anyone. There’s a reason normal infants cry once they realize their diapers are full. You’ve gone from being part of a greater whole, to being a helpless mass of flesh in a world that’s alien and massive, and it’s actually pretty miserable, but fortunately, you're too stupid, weak, and sleepy to realize most of it.

Unfortunately, for me, I “wasn’t” too stupid to appreciate the unpleasantness of my circumstances. Mind you, I am self-aware enough to know that my smarts were likely lacking. Otherwise, I probably should have fled my mother’s control ages ago, when the control chips and binding spells no longer held any effect. I have been taught through rote lessons and personal experience that intelligence does not equal smarts, because smarts were an expression of life experience, common sense, judgment, personality, and reasoning skills. Smarts were to intelligence, what an operating system, was to the pc tower. Or what the driver at the wheel, were to a car’s engine and handling.

That being said, I “am” highly intelligent. No…I’m not just highly intelligent. I am monstrously intelligent. I make most advanced quantum computers look like hand calculators…From the moment of my rebirth, I was instantly one of, if not “the”, most intelligent beings in this universe. This is not me bragging, this is an objective fact. My consciousness has technically been sublimated by and supplemented by, the matryoshka brain to end all matryoshka brains. My nervous system has been merged with a machine born from the sacrifice of 122 galaxies, and my neuronal processing power has continued to grow at an exponential rate ever since that day.

The point being, that I was fully self-aware and cognizant of my environment much more quickly than the average baby would have been. What’s more, my cybernetically enhanced nervous system had spent the last 57 millennia, 9 centuries, 33 years 11 months, and 12 days in what was basically a cosmic sensory deprivation tank, if you don’t count the spiritual phenomena I’d been observing to keep myself sane. So, now, having returned to the material plane, my brain was kind of freaking out. Light was too bright. Dark was too dark. Sounds were both too loud and too soft. Every sensation was off-balance, and I’d yet to see my first year, but I was already longing for the numb nothingness of the space in between the worlds.

Eventually, it got better. Eventually, my brain wasn’t the only part of my original body that was translated into my new body by the energy that formed my “soul”. Slowly but surely the data within the energy that made up the spiritual part of my being gradually overwrote my new body. It didn’t completely swap out the genetics that I had as Edward Dunkel. Instead, it used Edward Dunkel as a blank sheet to transfer the key information for what made me “me” into this reality. Resulting in a being that was essentially a fusion of Edward Dunkel, and my former-self.

Once that transition was over, the world was a whole lot less painful to deal with. I was more capable of shutting out the jarring parts of my hyper-perceptive reality. Thus I set my attention to the tasks of learning about the world around me, integrating with my new family, and slowly and gently revealing to them that alas fate had not given them a completely ordinary child. I felt that the final task was quite important because how I handled this task would likely be pivotal to my relationship with these new blood-related strangers I’d received.

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My new father, Ferdinand Dunkel, was a tall, athletically built man with dark skin. He had spiky, slick, gray-brown hair that he kept in a short military cut. He had a narrow face, a large nose, and thin lips. His hazel eyes were round and he had thick eyebrows. Ferdinand had a reliable, yet rascal-like, feel to him. Giving off the jaunty vibe one would get from a former delinquent, or troublemaker, that had gone straight.

Ferdinand’s wife, Reina Dunkel, was 5’8, and also pretty athletic. She had tan skin, brown eyes, and thick brown hair. She was an expressive woman with a square face, a large nose, and middling lips. She worked at a municipal bank, had a head for numbers, and was generally pretty calm and even-keeled. She seemed pretty good-natured, as far as I could gather. I also got the sense that she was likely the brains in this little familial unit that I’d been plopped into.

Then there was my mother, Yijun Schwarz, petite and wide-bodied, with fair skin. My new mother’s personality was quite sunny and free. She had a round face, a small nose, and large lips. She had hip-length, curly, black hair. Her dark brown eyes were large and round, combining with her persistent smile to make her look pleasantly surprised. Back in my old universe, the fact that my mother was not my father’s main wife, wouldn’t have been anything too surprising.

Here, it was clear that there was a story behind this. Polyamory and polygamy were still a semi-common thing in my new world, but nowhere near as prevalent as it had been in my old world, and it was mostly a thing that the extremely powerful and wealthy did, not regular folk like the Dunkels. It seemed that around my birth, my father was just barely managing to climb out of the dog house. Fortunately, for him, Ferdinand, Reina, and Yijun had been extremely close and while some damage had been done by the infidelity, they all somehow managed to work it out. Becoming one of the moderately uncommon, blue-collar, polyamorous, households.

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Life carried on. I became one, and then two. By that point, my parents were roughly aware of what kind of child they had in me…A phrase that I now realize sounds a whole lot more sinister than it was. Honestly, it was fine. I at least, tried to be a good son, and I didn’t just throw the whole “eldritch vampire-baby” thing at them…I eased them into it.

Using my near-total control over my physiology I was able to engineer a state of pallidness, fatigue, torpor, low-body temperature, and irregular heart-rate. I mimicked symptoms of extreme anemia to make it clear that I had an extreme need for iron. I pretended to suffer from chronic photosensitivity, especially in the presence of sunlight and refused to sleep at night.

I also made myself teethe early, and ensured that those teeth grew in a touch more pointed and sharp than they’d be for a true omnivore. The teeth, and the anemia, plus me throwing a few tantrums during the instances where the family ate meat, and a few incidents where I ended up getting into the freezer drawer and suckling on the raw, frozen, meat was enough to establish my identity as a creature that needed a supplemental diet of either blood, or raw meat.

I was basically doing all I could to be vampire-like, stopping just short of sleeping upside down as some folk would. If my moves seemed a tad too bold, I was aided by the fact that anomalous magic-based mutations weren’t an unknown thing in this world. I mean, we were down in tne nebula, living in a cosmic sewer. Surrounded by an overwhelming amount of anomalous energy

The fact is, so long as they weren’t accompanied by debilitating illness, the emergence of a supernatural lineage in one’s offspring was actually a thing often sought after and celebrated. If the child was lucky, it could lead to the status of the entire family sky-rocketing. This allowed me to push a little harder than I normally would have dared.

I didn’t reveal everything that I was, and everything that I could do. I wasn’t “that” stupid. I’d learn my lesson from my last life. I would not, and will not, give others an invitation to exploit me again. I revealed just enough that I’d be able to get away with being a little different, in the future.

I couldn’t reveal I was a vampire, but I could reveal that I liked my meat, raw, or at least practically raw, I could reveal I was sensitive to sunlight, and I could reveal I had funky teeth. I couldn’t reveal my magic, or psionic abilities, in full, but I could create instances of clear paranormal activity, to hint that I might have “something” going on in that direction.

It helped that, unlike my mother, my new parents didn’t seem too interested in what I could or couldn’t do. I mean, they did care, but curiously enough, their concern for my state stopped at seeing that I was healthy, and at least seemed to be happy.

It was a strange experience, but a refreshing one, and it made my life a great deal easier. I had half expected to have to do a balancing act of showing myself as being useful, without being “too” useful. Now I could just flatly hide the bulk of my capabilities, while attempting to play the part of a normal child.

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At some point, I found myself holding another smaller child. A few months short of my third birthday, I gained a sister. Though I already had data on human reproduction from my own universe, I still found a spark of extreme skepticism inside me at the idea of there being humans tinier than my current small existence. Yet here I was holding a human smaller than myself.

I don’t know why that felt so…significant. It’s not like I hadn’t had siblings before. In this world, I had an older brother that I intermittently interacted with, and in my past life, the stories about me being my mother's 3rd son were somewhat incorrect. I wasn’t her third son. I was just the third eldest amongst her surviving children. There had been 14 others who’d died to numerous wars, plagues, and calamities. I was actually 17th born amongst the offspring of the main Sullivan household. 17th out of a total of 21 children.

I’d had a total of 6 surviving siblings back in the Endless Red, but I’d never really been all that close to them, due to various reasons. Then once my mother began to train me for the sake of making me her heir, I ended being totally isolated from the rest. Spending most of my time either sent to grueling learning expeditions in distant locations, or locked away in a training facility meant to help me cultivate and hone my skills and natural ability. Then when my mother came to her senses after decades of despair, and living with blinders made of “duty”, I was locked away while the Empire figured out what to do with me. So, I never met the two additional children that the good prince gave my mother.

This time…With baby Emile, I felt a strange connection. I think it was at that moment that I first started properly thinking of myself as a “Dunkel”. As the baby’s dark chocolate-brown eyes looked up into my own red-brown eyes, I found myself unconsciously surrendering to the idea of becoming this small being’s family. Since I was “her” family, and I had been entrusted with holding her, I had to be the rest of their family as well, so I could continue looking after this little lifeform. It was a moment of warmth unlike any I’d ever felt before.