Reborn Gamer

Chapter II: Reborn

The view of the world around Minerva or Athena or whatever you want to call her became nothing more than light at the end of a tunnel. As I started sinking through that tunnel,, my vision got turned around and I found myself staring at the other end of this dark place.

When I first saw the light at the end of the tunnel, I assumed someone had found me. Maybe someone saved my life and this crazy dream would come to an end.

I sank through the light slowly.

The first thing after the light that I was aware of were the giants. Huge men and women surrounded me, wearing colorful scrubs. They were speaking rapidly in a language I couldn understand.

I thought I was losing it. My brain was deteriorating even more as I was getting closer to death. Or this was a near-death hallucination that came after my last one. Either way seemed pretty plausible at that moment.

One giant passed me to another, who in turn passed me to another again. A giant woman was laying down on some kind of angled bed. She was younger than me, no older than her early twenties. She had a head full of red hair, a face full of freckles, and the clearest bottle green eyes I had ever seen.

She was naked from the chest up, with a nice pair of perky tits. Her lower body was raised and covered with some kind of blanket. When she took me, her face lit up like I was the best thing in the world. She looked so happy to see me.

And I was happy to see her. One of my biggest regrets in life was never losing my V card. I had never seen a real woman naked before and I didn care that this was some dream. Or that I was dying. She was pretty as all hell and DAMN was she a knockout!

Maybe she was a doctor coming to save me? That perked me up a little bit… But why wouldn she be wearing a shirt?

”Mon fils! Mon Bébé! ” the woman squeezed, hugging me to her face. All around us, the giants in scrubs watched on. I couldn see their faces, hidden behind their masks as it were.

I tried to move my arms or legs, but there was no strength in my body. Just moving my head from side to side took considerable effort and that alone tired me out.

I wanted to ask just what the hell was going on. Who were these people and where was I? But whenever I tried to speak, incomprehensible babbling sounds were the only thing I could make. The giant woman cooed and rubbed her nose to mine.

Jeez, lady, I know you
e hot, but theres something seriously wrong with me! Can someone please tell me whats going on? All of that came out as cooing sounds.

I was sticky and icky, but they didn wash me for hours. When the glorious time finally came, I got to see myself in the mirror for the first time. My reflection wasn the chubby, thirty-six-year-old man that I had come to expect. Gone was the fat, the beard I was working on wasn there anymore. In my reflections place was a small, pinkish, red thing. The writhing pink blob could only be a baby and as it watched me in the mirror, I got a sinking feeling.

When I turned my head, the baby turned its head. I turned my head the other way and it followed. It took all the effort I could muster, but I raised my right hand and the other baby copied me.

It came as a shock to realize that the baby staring back at me was my reflection. Then the giant holding me dipped me into the world and started cleaning me.

I was a baby. I was a baby. I was a baby. I had a flash of panic and I started to shriek and struggle until I got so tired that I fell asleep.

Huh. Maybe this was a continuation of my first dream. Athena claimed she would have me reborn, so maybe Im dreaming that I am a newborn.

The giant lady was released from the hospital a week later, and she took me with her. If I was really a baby, and I was still half convinced that this was a fervor dream, then this woman was my mother. She took me to an orange car that I would later come to find out was a Citroën C5 Aircross.

As we drove through an unfamiliar city, I only had to look at the buildings to know where I was. I had never been to Paris in person before, but I had seen the city on TV and in books more times than I could count. Driving by the Eiffel Tower was all the convincing that I needed.

So I was laying in a hospital bed, dying, and I was dreaming of Paris? Sure, the city was beautiful, but I never wanted to live here. Maybe visit once or twice, but live here? No. I wondered why my brain was showing me this.

We stopped in front of a building that I would come to find out was our high-rise. Our apartment was at the very top of the building, at the penthouse.

It took me a month to realize that this wasn some crazy fever dream. I wasn laying on an operating table, slipping closer to death. No one found me in my apartment and no one saved me. I was dead. I had died and… Been reborn?

If that were true… If that hadn been a dream and I was really reborn, then…Was Athena real? Was everything she told me about her and Set real? Or maybe that was the dream while I had been reborn?

It was July 2013, and there was no virtual reality. Athena said that virtual reality would be real because the titanic didn sink. I wished I could ask someone about the boat, that would go a long way to prove it, one way or the other.

If only I could speak French. No, even if I could speak French, I can only make babbling baby sounds. So that meant that the titanic and virtual reality were questions for later.

I was reborn as a French boy. If I had to be reborn, why couldn I have gone to a fantasy world? Something like Jobless Reincarnation, where I could go learn real magic or become an adventurer? Why did I have to be reborn on boring old Earth?

If I had to be reborn on Earth, why couldn I have ended up in an English-speaking country? I knew dick about France or the French language. I didn want to live in France and I didn want to learn the French language. If I could have been reborn in an English-speaking country, at least I would be able to understand what my mother was saying. What the people on the TV were saying.

If I had to be reincarnated in a country that didn speak English, why couldn I have been born in Japan? The land of anime and ramen. The life of a handsome Tokyo boy wouldn be so bad, or maybe Kyoto or Okinawa.

France? Why France? I could have been reborn anywhere in the world and it was France. Maybe Andrei Petrov was French and that was why Athena sent me here? If Athena was real and not part of my imagination. If Andrei Petrov was French, it would make sense why I was here in the first place.

Andrei kind of sounded French… Or was I deluding myself? If I was being honest, Id say his name sounded Russian. So if he was Russian, why was I here? Shouldn I have been reborn Russia? Then again, Russia didn speak English and Id still have to learn a new language from scratch, so there was that.

If I had to pick a country to be reborn in that didn speak English, it wouldn have been Europe. I had never wanted to live in Europe. My heart had always been set on Asia when I thought about these things. Japan or Korea or China or Vietnam. Maybe the Philippians. Though Id still prefer an English speaking country.

The first thing I found out after I was reborn was that being a baby sucked. I couldn speak, not that it would help if I could since I didn know French. I could hardly move on my own. I needed my mother to carry me and do everything for me, including feeding me. I was being breastfed and while some guys might have liked that, it was extremely awkward.

The worst part about being a baby was not being able to control my bowels. I couldn stop shitting myself and stewing in my own foulness for however long it took my mother to notice.

I learned that I was born on June 13th, 2013. It was a funny coincidence, being born on the thirteenth day of the thirteenth year of the 2000s. . I still wish I had landed in Asia or an English-speaking country. The UAE would have been cool too. Or Brazil. Maybe even Egypt or Kenya, now that I had more time to think about it.

I found out my name was Calixte Lescheres. I was the only son of Madeleine Lescheres and I had no idea who my father was. He didn seem to be in my life and the few men that I saw my mother interact with didn seem to be my father. It wasn like I could understand them if they were.

It took me six months until I could control my bowels. Another six months for me to relearn how to walk. When I started walking, I walked all over the apartment so much that I drove my mother a little bonkers.

It was around the year mark that I started picking up French. I could understand the basic words and I could even hold very basic conversations with my mother.

That was when I learned that I had been born into a life of wealth and privilege that I never could have imagined before. I knew we were well off from day one when she brought me home to a penthouse that overlooked the freaking Effie Tower!

But I didn know just how well off we were. I never spoke French in my first life. My only hobby other than gaming was anime, and if I was going to learn another language, it was going to be Japanese.

So I would have never heard about the band, Aphrodite. It was a French rock girl group that dominated French language charts. It was founded in 2010 when my mother was twenty.

On a side note, my mother was born in 1990. I was born in 1970. I was twenty years older than her, but I was her kid. That was always an embarrassing point in my new life.

Aphrodite so was popular they had concerts all over the world. Mostly in French-speaking countries, but not always. She had taken a year off from live touring because of me, and stuck to writing new songs with the other four girls in her group and recording albums. When I turned one, she went back on tour and took me with her.

In my first life, I wanted to travel and see the world. Paris had on my bucket list, but it was far from the only city. It was ironic that I needed to die before I could see the world.

Honestly, though, I wasn complaining.

***

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