Awakening
The first thing I clearly remember is feeling somewhat confused.
For a lot of reasons: I was no longer twenty-two years old (at least judging by my pudgy hands, blurry vision, and attention span of a mosquito), other children were roaming around, the adults people around me were not speaking my home country language mother tongue, and I was enthralled by a bright, orange wood cube.
Don't get me wrong, I normally don't don't normally despise orange, or wood, or regular geometrical 3-D objects, it's fascinating, really, but before my first memory in this shrunken form, I'm quite sure I was just about to submit my thesis for my Bachelor degree in History.
From there my confusion was born.
It most definitely was not a dream This was definitely not a dream, simply because if you can think about being while in a dream then while you are sleeping, it's easy to distinguish it from reality. At least this is that's always been something I could do.
My confusion was slowly subdued by my rising panic.
WHAT THE FUCK!?
I was almost hyperventilating, and boy is it not something stupid to do? The other children would notice something was wrong with me, so would the adults, and I would found myself in some secret military lab being dissected for some reason or another.
Because seriously, what else could it be? I wasn't two years old! And yet I most certainly appeared as such. I forced myself to calm down.
Looking around, I noticed a distinct lack of cameras or soldiers or even mad scientists for what mattered.
Maybe the cameras were super small though, so I couldn't start studying my environment like the paranoid adult I was.
Following a gut feeling, I spent the following hours crying, playing and mindlessly roaming on my unsteady legs, blending in with the other children.
From what I can observe, they were your regular annoying little toddlers, I looked to be in an orphanage of some kind.
I didn't hate the children, I was the same slobbering mess at their age, but that raised other questions. Like why was I the only adult in disguise? And why were they all talking in what my limited experience with animes identified as Japanese?
Not that there was anything wrong with japan, just, I'd always thought that strange experiments regarding transplanting an adult into a baby were more up America's alley.
Another problem was that I couldn't read Japanese. That meant that even if I managed to somehow find a random document that explained everything, I wouldn't understand it. I only hoped that the official documents would be in English.
At the end of the day, I wasn't equipped well enough to properly investigate.
Laying low was my only option until my body caught up with my mind and I found a way to escape.
That is, in a worst-case situation.
For a time that I could hardly define, it could have been a few months or a year, I tried to fly under their radar.
I started recognizing some words and the mysteries of Japanese were slowly starting to unravel before me.
However, the orphanage had some inconsistencies, like the wooden floors, that I thought was something for they appeared far more appropriate for more refined environments. Yet, the food was bad food.
I mean, if you can afford both posh wooden floors and their maintenance, then you can afford something different than rice at every fucking meal.
Bread! I needed bread and cheese! And what is it with the fish? It was everywhere! Sometimes pork, okay. ? But what about beef? Hell, pasta! Ravioli! whatever! I needed something that at least could remember bore some resemblance to Italian food!
I could make do with noodles, noodles were awesome, but it wasn't the same.
The names of the other kids had been something I could seldom say right, at least until I became (following my gut) four years old. Around my 'fourth' birthday, the Japanese suddenly clicked, the cadence of the language fell in place on my tongue, and I started thinking in Japanese.
It was then that I realized that I already had the reputation of being a dimwit, it was subtle, but the way the matron of the orphanage waited just a little more for me to answer to her questions was were proof enough.
Excuse me if I had to learn a whole new language on my own. I thought bitterly at the time, before realizing that it could be something that kept me even more sheltered from scrutinizing eyes.
Another strange thing that I'd noticed was the complete absence of newspapers, and there wasn't television that we orphans had access to.
And also, the games; there wasn't a single western chess board anywhere, or a monopoly, for what mattered not even a monopoly for that matter. All the books the children had access to were filled to the brim with ninjas, or more rarely, samurais.
Animals and trees were still there, And while I'd never been allowed to leave the premises of the orphanage, I never heard a single-engine, nor saw a single airplane crossing the sky.
Me being dimwitted had kept me from being displayed to the occasional parents wishing to adopt, but that hadn't stopped me from recognizing their clothes: often kimonos of some kind, almost always accompanied by sandals. I thought that I lived in some kind of Amish reserve in the middle of nowhere.
I was maybe five when I saw it for the first time. It wasn't a coincidence that I hadn't noticed it until then, after all the courtyard of the orphanage didn't face the mountainside. But once I was given permission to leave the orphanage's grounds, it was unmistakeable, unavoidable. It was bullshit.
It was a sunny, cloudless day. Late autumn, I would have said. We were in that a time of the year that which belonged to neither summer nor winter. The time when mornings were becoming colder and the afternoons shorter.
Probably, me asking to the matron how to write my name on the previous day had helped in her decision of allowing me to go play in the park with the older children. It'd been a strange moment.
I'd been sitting alone under a window, absentmindedly tracing my fingers over the few kanjis letters over the illustrated book. I was trying to decipher them, but beyond recognizing the same symbol here and there, I was having little luck.
The orphanage's matron leaned over my shoulder out of nowhere: "Reading, are we?"
I summoned all my cuteness and stared at her with wide eyes, grabbing my Japanese and stringing it together in what I hoped was: "Teach me?"
It worked. The woman smiled and ruffled my hair, making me smile impishly. She chose to teach me only how to write my name. I was skeptical, but it turned that learning how to write was more difficult than I'd previously imagined.
My name was Daiki, and the woman had shown me that (dai) meaning "big, great" combined with (ki) meaning "brightness", or (ki) meaning "tree", or even (ki) meaning "valuable".
She told me that while they all sounded the same, the meanings were very different.
She told me that I was a 'big tree' instead. I didn't care, it was my name, I would bloody write it as I wished.
And while I had to resist the urge of rolling my eyes at her patronizing tone, I found the idea of kanji simply beautiful. Oh, it wasn't effective at all, I knew that.
E... that alphabet was extraordinarily versatile and precise. But in my opinion, lacked the subtle elegance kanjis were capable of. I asked her if she could teach me how to write properly write, and that, I think, surprised her.
She'd told me that I could start learning in the following week. I had a couple of months of catching up to do, but I could sit along with the others six years old kids.
Back to us. After my display of what I guess could be called maturity, I was allowed to play in the park on the other side of the road.
Luckily, but perhaps due to my often blank expression (unnatural on a child) or general quietness, the other kids tend tended to leave me alone, and the matron, besides the occasional bout of kindness, was far too busy to keep a close eye on me. So my general loneliness, while swinging between nerve-wracking and welcome, went unnoticed.
It was then that I realized I was reborn into a cult of some kind. Seriously, why in the fucking hell there would there be a Mount Rushmore with anime characters on the north side of the city?
All the inconsistencies had come together that way It all came together. The magically being reborn in there raised a shy objection in my mind. I'd read enough fanfictions to recognize the beginning of an SI-OC in Naruto when I was starring in it.
I stared at the monument that was the trademark of Konohagakure no Sato for what looked like a lifetime. My blood rushed to into my ears and I could only hear the beating of my heart. I forced myself to look around and try to find out if it was only a big cosplay movement moment or not.
The park had a low wooden fence and a number of benches, with an abundance of bushes and skimpy trees, slides, and even a sandbox. I walked around a bit in my short legs, casually noticing how most girls had frilly dresses and jumpers while the boys (myself included) wore cargo pants of some kind and tracksuit covering our torsos.
The popularity of sandals was mind-blogging, even if I'd I had little choice but to go with the flow. Everything us orphans wore only second-hand clothes, but the material was sturdy and managed to keep me warm. I couldn't complain.
Trees were sprouting everywhere between the condominiums, and while there wasn't a single cloud in sight, leaves were fluttering everywhere over our heads.
Looking back, even cultists wouldn't give wooden kunais to for children to play with. Or would they? After watching "The Following" I thought that everything was possible for a cultist.
A noise broke the pattern of children squabbling and I turned to see three older kids walking down the road laughing among themselves, I immediately recognized their Hitai-ate (forehead protection).
They had forgettable faces and moved... well, like civilians actually, no show of magic chakra powers of any kind. I was starting to relax. It's only a cult of Naruto. I thought, somewhat relieved.
The situation still had a lot of problems and issues I needed to solve, but I had to deal with humans, no strange shit. Physics was still real, and I wasn't going to attend Hogwarts, I didn't have to find a strange ring to toss into an active volcano. Surviving was doable.
I blinked, and in a gust of wind, a man with a shiny Hitai-ate appeared in front of them, scaring everyone shitless. Probably the trio had done some bullshit, I had other thoughts running amock amok in my head. It's real. sounded in my head.
I stumbled towards an empty patch of bushes and puked what was left of my lunch. Shit shit shit shit shit this cannot go worse shit shit shit shit.
"Hey did you eat a slug?" a kid asked, triggering a waterfall of laughter out of the other children that chose exactly that moment to look at me.
I looked up from my vomit to stare at the laughing kids in the eyes, before stopping my gaze on the one that expressed such a refined example of humor.
"Yeah." I deadpanned. "Yeah, I ate a slug."