I sat, focused on my breathing, forming my breaths into mantras. Contrary to what some have been led to believe from videos of Buddhist chanting and such, A mantra did not need to contain vocalized sounds of any sort. A mantra is a part of meditation, and it is any kind of regular use of your mouth, throat, or vocal chords that are simple and routine enough to aid in inducing a state of meditation.
A deep breath in, a deep breath out. The mantra of earth.
A long breath in, a short breath out. The mantra of water.
A short breath in, a short breath out. The mantra of fire.
A short breath in, a long breath out. The mantra of wind. Also the most challenging of the mantra.
Frozen breath, no breathing or no audible breathing. The mantra of void.
These were the five mantra of the core meditation that aided practitioners of the taijutsu-based art I practiced. Taijutsu was the art of body movement. It hyper-focused how to gain an advantage as a result of your position relative to your opponent. During grappling, you move to a position where you are on a strong line and the other guy is on a weak line. This allows you to better take advantage of your strength. While striking or wielding a weapon, you move to a position where you can take better advantage of your full reach than they can, such as being slightly to the left side of a right-handed person, or slightly to the right side of a person who is wielding a two-handed weapon since those always have their reach determined by the left hand.
It was a style hyper-aware of very minute things about distance and measurements, and how best to make them matter in battle.
In this style specializing in motion, this meditation helped center and relax the mind so that we could better allow our subconscious mind to just flow. This meant movement was also a very important part of the meditation. And yet, here I was, still unable to walk properly.
There was a lot of clattering in the room, and I looked up to see Tia moving through the latest absurd permutation on her unorthodox movement style. It looked even more painful that what she had started out with. For the best I could tell, she was just flailing her arms and legs around like she was having one of the worst grand-mal seizures I'd ever seen. She would flail and flop, and for some reason she was always rolling, in a side to side manner as opposed to end over end. And yet somehow that rolling and flopping about always resulted in some rather quick forward propulsion. It was eerily reminiscent of the way I'd seen a spirochete bacteria swim through a fluid medium under the microscope.
Only this was blown up to the macro scale, and she was also somehow managing to propel herself in that manner while on dry land. And she was fast too! She could likely give an adult running full tilt competition with this unorthodox movement.
Whenever she'd get to a wall, she'd flip end over end like a swimmer reaching the end of their lane and land feet-first on the wall before pushing off and going the other direction. In every way, the manners in which she was moving were more akin to swimming than any manner of movement that belonged on dry land.
I closed my eyes and took another deep breath, trying to block out those painful looking movements. Right now, she and I were the only ones awake. The boys were asleep. It is a strange new development that has come up in the past couple months. Me and Tia simply stopped having a need for sleep. I don't know if it has something to do with our elven biology or what. We can already see in the dark, so having no need for sleep wouldn't be too outside of bounds if that and potential energy vampirism are the standards.
It's strange, the more I find out about this, the more we seem a lot more like actual vampires than we do elves.
Although my eyes were closed, I was still hearing Tia flopping around, and this made it rather difficult not to think about her strange style of movement even if I couldn't see it. It really did not make sense for a reincarnated human from earth to decide what she was doing was a good idea. It was more like she was an alien consciousness that had inhabited a humanoid body and had no clue how the body was supposed to work, and showed no hesitation at all in taking actions that usually ought to cause her a fair amount of pain in favor of just achieving her goal. She hadn't really even been putting efforts into talking like I had, she just put all her attention into this incredibly reckless manner of movement.
I took one more deep breath and slowly opened my eyes just in time to see her make some new type of rolling and tumbling maneuver that now had her flipping backward, feet-over-head, and finally planting her feet on the ground with her butt in the air, face planted on the floor. Pretty much a far less comfortable looking rendition of Yoga's downward-dog position.
She only stayed in this position for all of a second though before she pushed off the ground with her hands, but instead of doing more wild tumbling, it just sent her up into an erect standing position. Then, she started flailing her arms as she was very unsteady standing properly on her feet, but she did manage to find her balance long enough to look over her shoulder, make eye contact with me, and beam a bright smile before loosing that momentary precarious balance and taking several very fast staggering steps backward and finally falling on her rear.
Did that count as her first steps just now? They were backward, hap-hazard, and for the best I can tell it seemed almost coincidental that she even ended up in a standing position in the first place. However, that's definitely the case. She took her first steps before she even turned 6 months old.
She grinned at me again from her position plopped down on the floor, and I was able to appreciate all this enough to graciously grin back at her. This does mean I'm officially behind her on the development track now, which I have to admit is somewhat frustrating with how hard I've been trying at it, but I can also appreciate it from the perspective of a former father and grandfather in my past life that this is a major bench-mark that should always be celebrated. And it also does make sense, she has been putting all her efforts into movement while I was dividing my focus between movement and speech.
Well, I do hope this at least gets her to start moving in a more normal fashion. I guess the only reasonable thing to do is let this motivate me to get competitive and try to catch up with my older twin sister.
I used the wall to prop myself up, and promptly took my own first steps while using a wall for support. Guess we're going to start really pushing each other from now on. So, I'd better make the most of my time before morning comes and the kids are back. They have become a lot more respectful of Levin and Rolwen's space, but finding out they were capable of tossing them across the room like rag-dolls did not deter them in the long run from their daily visits.
While the elven children are cautiously hovering around Levin and Rolwen, they assign their own human companions to play with us in the meantime. If I'm understanding the elven dynamics of this all right, it feels like they mean it as some kind of temporary trade or something. A trade of human beings, and made completely without permission given on our part. On the surface level, it seems to be just kids playing, but there are some rather disturbing connotations under the surface of what's happening here.
It is not something I can do much about right now though. In the meantime, I make the most of it by doing my best to learn the elven language from the companions of the other elf children who have come to hover around us, most of them adult men and women.
I was expecting it to be more of the same today, but instead it was that doctor-like guy. He has been coming around about once a month since we were born.
However, our checkup for this month had only been a few days ago. Something was off about this.
His presence here was only made stranger when he started hanging strange paper talismans around the the room. It was like some kind of Shinto ritual. He even went and kicked our caretaker out of the room part way through it, and that was when he really started getting into it, going into all kinds of chants and waving his arms. The place did seem maybe a little isolated, but I didn't think the local doctor here would turn out to be a witch doctor.
At one point, he even knelt down and planted his hands on... no, wait... IN the floor! The floor had actually absorbed his hands like it was wet cement.
Ok, there's definitely some kind of real magic or something at work here. This is starting to freak me out just a little.
He chants in a deep droning voice that could give some of the best Buddhist mantras competition, and seems to be in some kind of focused trance the entire time.
This goes on for a while, but then, he suddenly goes silent and then stands up slowly.
"In azilu dir," he said. I roughly recognized the words he said, and they were not words that fit with some kind of ritual. That probably meant he was done now.
'In' essentially meant "should," and 'dir' more or less meant "now." I was having a little trouble with the main subject line of the sentence 'azilu,' but I think it had something to do with danger... maybe? It was conjugated in some way I didn't understand.
After this, he stepped out of the room and called our caretaker back in. He spoke to her for a while, mentioning things about the talismans. Then he finished off with a quick check on me and Tia. He simply touched each of us on the forehead with his palm for a bit and looked as though he was concentrating. This was a common thing during our check-ups, and after seeing that performance, I'm fairly certain there's some magic connected to whatever he's doing.
He seems rather satisfied with whatever he found in his examination and gives a happy nod, and then with a few final words to our caretaker he leaves.
I had no idea what just happened. It had something to do with magic, and I can assume it had something to do with benefiting us. That is literally all I'm able to understand about what just happened. I feel like I'm going to need to learn a lot more about magic in this world, otherwise it will drive me crazy.
-
That night, I came to a rather interesting realization. Our caretaker hadn't given us our solid food for the day. Those berries she would always stuff in our mouths had been a part of our regular routine pretty much since soon after our birth in this world, the boys were doing their usual exercises, and Tia was... she was standing? And with relatively little effort too. She just stood and walked right over to us from clear across the room.
How? How was she walking so smoothly all of a sudden.
"Ahh... this is so much nicer, the levels of spirit energy in this room now are at least somewhat close to a quarter what they were back on Earth. There's so much more I can do with this," she said perfectly, barely even lisping a single word.
"Whad da fuk!" Rolwen exclaimed as we all stared blankly at her.
Seriously! How?!
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although I'm too late to vote, I have never once felt the flow of your writing had problems and today isn't that day either. You could probably write a chapter while unconscious from a concussion and i'd still find it good enough to not break immersion.
It's great you're great
Seems fine on the flow. The singular viewpoint is working well
Omg Tia is just sooo cute, and the part where she stud up grinning was really good xd
That was totally hilarious
Thank you for the appreciation.
Just so you're aware, I feel I slowed down somewhere between chapters 10 and 25, but I do promise it picks back up after that.
(I've considered re-writing that section of the story several times, but I've got too much to focus on with moving forward with the story now to worry about that.)
epiku
I only caught two errors in the entire chapter. It flows well enough.
Are there going to be many more chapters covering these slow days and weeks in the nursery from the point of view of baby Asa? That is, will it be long before it gets to a time skip of months or years?
I'll try to be more patient. But, while the story premise sounds interesting and exciting, this seems... slow. I say that even though I've read and enjoyed some slow burns before.
So far, neither Asa nor Tia are really able to talk and Asa can barely communicate with anyone. It's mostly Asa trying to figure out her situation, her new body and observing the strange world she now lives in.
This story, thus far, does remind me a lot of another slow burn ScribbleHub story that I enjoyed and wish would continue: "My Goal: Living eternally as a loli surrounded by my women". (Sadly, it's been on hiatus.)
However, despite how the MC in that story has yet to be born (still a fetus as of the last chapter), it had dialog and certain events that really held my interest. Specifically, the unborn MC was able to observe things in the womb such that she could train mana abilities and certain skills, preparing in advance to become a mage. Moreover, the MC learned to magically tap into the mother's senses to listen in, learn the language and even watch some drama going on, learning a lot more about the world and her mother's situation.
Anyway, I think your story has considerable potential. And I can appreciate world building and what the MC has to go through, thinking things through and all that. I just wish it would get to something more exciting.
Also, I'm a bit worried that the elf society the MC finds herself in might be an elf-supremacist nation filled with human slaves. I get that elves are often depicted as haughty and self-absorbed. And that thing about the fae kidnapping children being in folklore is interesting, as is the explanation of elf children being energy vampires. (It is also convenient, since the MC doesn't have to go through diapers and the daily experience feeding, pooping and being cleaned up.) Still...
Q: If elf children have always had the need to subsist off of the energy of human children in order to survive, then how did elves manage to survive before there were any humans nearby for them to kidnap? Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
Chapter 2-chapter 3: 2 week time-skip.
Chapter 3-chapter 4: 2 month time-skip.
Chapter 4-chapter 5: 2 week time-skip.
Chapter 5-chapter 6: 2 month time-skip.
This is not really an intentional pattern, I really just space the time-skips however I feel is appropriate to where they will have the development for the next step in where a significant event can happen in their lives. Obviously, chapter 6-7 is going to have zero time-skip with the way this one was ended.
As for an answer to your question, I have something in regards to the fey society and how it works as to how the whole energy vampire relationship works. I went into it in some fair amount of detail in the previous "sister of a goddess" version of the story, and I've worked it out in great detail. I am trying to tone down the straight-up exposition dumps this time around though, and it was with those exposition dumps that I'd delivered that information last time around. I will be needing another way to explain it better this time.
Long story short though, the nature of all fey races is such that they don't exist without humans existing in the first place, so they will always be near humans. However, they don't necessarily require humans for their children to grow either. It just makes things more convenient. So much so that they likely don't even know how to go back.
It somehow seemed eerily reminiscent of the way a spirochete bacteria swims through the fluids of the body.
Heh! What a comparison! I had to laugh out loud at that.
Anyway, I would not recommend rewriting this chapter. Nor would I say that major details need changing.
That said, it wouldn't hurt to spend more time looking for grammar mistakes and try to make sentences flow a bit better. Do you give a separate read over what you wrote just to check the grammar? There are many "online grammar check" sites on the web, as well as some editors with a grammar check tool. Though, thus far, I haven't done much writing and I have yet to rely on such.
Enough grammatical errors can add up to make the work seem jarring. You did say that you ran out of time for editing. And that implies that you were rushed.
Below are the main grammatical errors I found. That said, some of these sentences I suggested changing because they seemed too clunky. Your main issues seem to be run-on sentences and the lack of a comma where needed. But those are common problems for a lot of people.
I sat against the wall, silently contemplating the situation that had been going on with the older kids over the time since the older kids started occasionally coming in every day or two.
I sat against the wall, silently contemplating what's been happening since the older kids started coming in every day or two.
The bad things about being harassed by a bunch of elven children and the human kids they drag with them.
There are several bad things about being harassed by a bunch of elven children and the human kids they drag with them:
I can't say for certain whether or not the humans are slaves at this point, but at a minimum they do not seem to have any authority to command the visibly younger (but likely same aged) elves they are partnered up with.
At this point, I can't say for certain whether or not the humans are slaves. But, at a minimum, they do not seem to have any authority to command the visibly younger (but likely same aged) elves they are partnered up with.
However, there are a few that are rather irritating. Especially a young girl named Elias.
However, there are a few that are rather irritating, especially a young girl named Elias.
This is more of an esoteric issue than the previous two, but because of the moral difficulties and the concerns it raises for me, it manages to linger and continue bothering me long after the children leave.
This is more of an esoteric issue than the previous two. But, because of the moral difficulties and the concerns it raises for me, it manages to linger and continue bothering me long after the children leave.
Tia's as well for that matter.
Tia's as well, for that matter.
We don't exactly sleep in the day either though.
We don't exactly sleep in the day either, though.
The style I'd dedicated 35 years to specializes in gentle fist.
The style I'd dedicated 35 years to specialize in is "Gentle Fist."
I would have been able to see if he was throwing them off their balance, but it looked to me like he was just violently threw his arms about and even threw one of the kids over a strong line, the direction where his foot was planted and could easily resist a force trying to throw him off.
I would have been able to see if he was throwing them off their balance. But it looked to me like he just violently threw his arms about. He even threw one of the kids over a strong line - the direction where his foot was planted - and could easily resist a force trying to throw him off balance.
That doesn't really make sense at all though.
That doesn't really make sense at all, though.
Her first steps before she even turns 6 months old
Tia took her first steps before she even turns 6 months old.
I knew we were young to be learning how to talk.
I knew we were too young to be learning how to talk.
But, if she was teaching, I didn't see any issue with reciprocating to her expectations.
But, if she was teaching, I didn't see any issue with reciprocating her expectations.