My life at 23 Karlitz Street, Eaglecourt was rather uneventful. My parents were both doctors, but my mother took maternity leave to take care of me. She was all in all a good parent. She tried to read every day to me and get me interested in the various toys she bought me. Zoe took a deep liking to me. She thought my various reactions to her antics were somehow funny. I tried to act like a normal baby, but she thought I was special.
"Give me a high five Sam," Zoe said while sitting on the ground next to me.
"Goo," I responded while high-fiving.
"Good job Sam."
I was being treated like a dog. I don't know if she knew the difference. She even got her friends in on 'training' me. They treated me somewhat like their dress-up doll. It was slightly humiliating but I just let her do what she wanted.
At three I was forced to go to Kindergarten. Kindergarten was hell. Toddlers are germ monsters. Their boogers, spit and other weird disgusting shit were everywhere and they often smelled unbearable. I caught myself gagging and vomiting way too often. The one upside was that I managed to get a tablet. I had to beg my parents for months and emotionally blackmail them. So I had my touchpad, which helped me get to know this place.
First of all the planet's name was called Earth or EarthMother, just like our planet. I guess that kind of made sense. Seems like an obvious choice for what you would call a place covered in earth. The continent I was on was called Ortia and the country was Clestia. There were four races on this continent: Humans, Dwarfs, Orcs and Elves. Rather than being naturally occurring races, these races came about due to various genetic experiments a few hundred years ago.
Ortia was once an interstellar empire called the Ortia Union. But they collapsed around two hundred years ago. The fall of the Union wasn't thoroughly explained, there were varying hypotheses on the why, one of the more famous ones being that the Illos Confederation had something to do with it; Illos being the neighbouring continent to the east. The Illos Confederation also fell during the same time period as Ortia. Maybe they took each other out. There was also a conspiracy about aliens and secret cults having something to do with it, but the evidence supporting it was rather questionable.
Anyway, after the fall, there was a lot of racial and ideological strife. Elves were initially engineered to serve as the administrators of the union, so they had prolonged lifespans and better memories. Orcs were the industrial workers and they had more strength and better resistance to pollution and chemicals. Dwarfs were used as Zero-G miners and had far more strength and overall durability. Humans were the all-rounders, they're comparable to our humans although slightly longer lived, and stronger.
After the fall, the Elves abused their position as administrators becoming corrupt and developed into a new elite, amassing massive amounts of capital. They got filthy rich and that wealth accumulated exponentially due to the Elves' longer life span. The major flaw of the Elf design was that they were not as fertile as the other races, meaning there were a lot fewer Elves compared to the other races. As racial tensions mounted the Elves found themselves isolated. They were powerful in how rich they were, but that was their only source of power. The other races more or less ganged up on them. In desperation, the Elves created Half-Elves that could reproduce faster, but in turn, their lifespan was shorter. Two hundred years, instead of the three-hundred fifty years of the normal elves. Still, the elitist nature of the Elves, caused them to alienate most of the other races, including even some of their own Half-Elves. In short, the Elves were overthrown, and some places went as far as to commit Genocide against them.
After the Elves fell, Ortias fell into Anarchy. All kinds of ideological tendencies developed and battled against each other. The lifespan in Ortias briefly fell to ten years. There were drug epidemics, slave trade, Genocides, and all manner of war crimes. Ortias was in a delicate balance between various factions. Over time some sort of Proto-Nation states reemerged, one of them being where I live now, Clestia. Clestia is ruled by an authoritarian Centrist regime, which is a sort of statocratic Constitutional Monarchy. The military and parliament are in a delicate balance of power, with the figurehead King acting as a stabilizer. The left is heavily suppressed within the country, leading to many left-wing underground organizations, some of which employ terror methods.
That about sums up most of what I learned while reading this world's equivalent of Wikipedia, called Netpedia. I had no real idea, how reliable any of the information was, but I thought it was a good start. I also started looking for ways to train my body. I didn't feel like becoming a passive person in this life, and right now the world here was extremely dangerous. So, I might as well leverage my reincarnation to get a head start on training up my body. I ended up looking up various training tutorials on this world's equivalent of YouTube, called WatchHub and followed their instructions religiously. The motto of 'A Fascist worked out today, did you?' was ingrained into my brain. At four, I already had a sort of six-pack and could perform backflips with ease. When my sister found out, her jaw metaphorically dropped and she immediately went on to record me, to put it up on WatchHub. I became famous almost overnight.
After I turned six, I was enrolled in the Natalie Ulivaris Greenfield Elementary School. That was where I met my first real obstacle. My first day was simply the entrance ceremony for first-grade students. My mother had gotten me my new school uniform the day before. It was a nice navy blue suit, with the school insignia on it, which was a white unicorn on a black and Red checkered shield. She had also gotten me my Sugar Bag, which was something all first graders would bring to their school entrance ceremony. It was a simple cone-shaped bag, filled to the brim with candy. My mother and Zoe woke me up early at six. My father couldn't come along because he had patients to attend to. We took the metro from Eaglecourt station to Greenfield station. Along the way, I saw security cameras on the sides of every second building or so and I could always spot one or two watchout towers. Greenfield was a more suburban environment. You had small densely built houses, with small front yards and the streets were lined with mostly Birch and Chestnut Trees. As we walked down another leave covered street we arrived at the school. The school looked like a mixture of a compound and well a school. The schoolyard was surrounded by a thick wall and there was a security guard station at the entrance. The school building was a three-story tall building with sand-yellow walls.
The school entrance ceremony took place in the large Gym building. Plenty of Benches were lined up within and a photo booth was set up to take our pictures. Next to the entrance, a large stage was set up so that the teachers and principals could welcome us to the school. The speeches took almost over an hour, and by the end, I was almost completely zoned out. However, here is where the fun part began. The teachers asked us if any of us had any special talents we wanted to perform on the stage. The first person to take a go was a girl named Clara Yllaris. She had long black hair and her eyes had the epicanthal fold typical of people who in my previous world would be described as Asiatic. But her most obvious feature was her long ears, showing that she was an elf.
She recited an old poem that she memorized about two lovers, one an elf and one a human, torn apart by their pride and fate until they overcame their flaws and reunited as lovers. For a six year old it was certainly impressive, I guess? She of course received thunderous applause. So, I thought why shouldn't I give it a go? Sure I was competing with first graders, while I was a grown-ass man in the body of a child, but I also thought that this might help boost my standing in society for later purposes. So why not? I went up on the stage and performed some athletic moves, imitating Sportacus. I finished it all off with a backflip into a split. I of course got a thunderous applause as well. Unbeknownst to me, the girl that performed before me, took some major issue with me taking the spotlight away from her. What I also didn't know at the time was that she was none other than the daughter of the richest man in all of Clestia.