05 ~ Walking Is Harder Than Flying

Deciding to at least slow down his attempts at walking to not terrify his parents, Jason turned his attentions down another avenue of discovery, his own light. He'd found that he could only maintain his sight in the dark for a very limited time frame of maybe 20 minutes at best. Previously this was a lot less, with only about five of the short instance bursts being his limit at the start.

The manipulation of his light was something he should have been very familiar with, but he hadn't really taken the time to test it out due to his own excitement. When his parents were asleep the tests would continue in full swing, but it started off well with higher energy bursts resulting in his usual vision, still could only be projected in one direction.

Testing out his light night after night, he pulled it around in different directions trying to create complex patterns with it but to no avail. While also finding that bending his light across his whole body and releasing it like that would result in a picture far more like the all-encompassing visuals he was used to.

'This visual is almost exactly what I'm used to, wait, if I can see through everything with enough energy what if I just passed it through myself as well...' making no delay in testing resulted in a visual that was far more interesting than anything else he had done before.

What he saw that surprised him so much, was of course he himself.

'My reactionary pathways and the lines that connect it to the rest of the body are all white with a strange crossing pattern of lines on top...'

'I also have a level of complexity in my mind that only a few have as well, and certainly not at this age and it's only going to keep growing from here!'

Taking a moment to pause and go over every detail a wave of darkness swept him. In that moment, he had lost track of how much of his light he was using, he even watched as his brain turned darker as time went on.

The spectacle was hard to take his focus off of, resulting in him knocking himself out from using too much energy.

When he woke up he still couldn't take his mind off of his mind. 'What I had seen was something no one must have. This must be the result of me trying to save that child, instead from the looks of it, I ended up altering it entirely, maybe even altering the child's body entirely for some reason.'

'This must mean I have changed the child's body into mine, so this is me, at the cost of the child who if given more time I could have possibly saved or maybe, no, mhmm, If my thoughts are right I would have made a half me. I suppose that's the closest to what they did in the first place to have it though anyway, so should that mean I'm like a third parent?'

Confused, he left this thought to rest, though if this body was his, and that light and mind he saw were also truly his.

'I can accumulate more light when I enter that resting state!'

Focusing his mind to ironically be unfocused, and reach out towards the world around him with intent like he did when manipulating his own light.

As if beckoning the very world around him towards himself involuntarily, he was amazed as the light, a similar color to his own black and white marbled iridescent gleam, began to come towards him in large volumes.

This was at a far faster rate but then he remembered how much of his own light needed to be poured into one child's brain. He also remembered how that was enough light to scan large spaces in real time - enough to fit an unthinkable number of these human homes in the nothing between each something that he unwillingly had traversed before.

Making the assumption that the body must also have a drastic impact on the way he uses his light. As he continued this he felt his body grow warm which was something he rather enjoyed, but something Irina and Damir would also be sure to notice given the chance.

Though the worst part was when he was like this he could not understand what was around him either. To his dismay this all had to be put off to only times when the two were asleep.

Upset but somewhat content, Jason spent his days in Irina's arms going around the farm as she recovered. But at night he would enter that state of rest he was growing to always long for, and with it his body began to develop in strange ways very slowly as well.

Time passed by very quickly in this cycle and Jason was getting closer and closer to when he would be expected to start walking according to Irina and Damir's discussions. He was excited but he has also naturally begun to be able to speak some words too.

Irina and Damir were beyond excited about how well he said the few words that he did, unknown to either of them that he'd been watching on as humans progressed back millions of years ago; he's had plenty of time to practice.

Though it did take him five or six human life times to figure out the most basic of words since he had no way to understand many of the words such as 'sad' and 'happy' since he could only observe humans and not relate in any form or fashion to them directly. He still doesn't even know why they call themselves human. The best answer he got while watching them has always been something along the lines of "That's just the name".

Scanning memories was never any real help for learning their languages either, it was always broken and fragmented the further he went back. The amount of fragmentation varied from human to human but even the most pristine memory's could still only ever be watched and not felt. He would see through their eyes, hear what they heard but never any more than that.

Being in a physical body was a game changer however, drawing on these past memories he'd been putting some words together with all the feelings and urges he would randomly get beyond his own control. The lack of control was sometimes infuriating to him, his insides would move waste at the most unwanted times and bouts of hunger were just as unpredictable.

There were plenty of other feelings and sensations he couldn't understand even when watching himself internally to see why and how they occurred. The odd time he'd let some slip through to the surface and end up performing random actions without his own initiative, such as crying or letting out odd noises from his stomach.

Being human was truly exhausting, the amount they spent resting was really starting to make sense to him.

Though at this point his rest was drastically different than their own, absorbing more light at night always made him feel far better than any amount of sleep ever would. So he'd mostly just spend his days riding around in a pouch on Irina's back while she helped Damir tend to the animals. Night was his time to mess around in his crib freely which was now located right next to their bed in accordance with what Alec told them.

So as the days passed on, he was now reaching close to his first birthday as Irina and Damir were discussing recently, it was apparently a month from now, whatever that meant.

Their way of talking about the sphere spinning has been another of his endless human mystery's. He thought he got it a couple of times and then they go talking about how the two other spheres that rotate around the Earth, as they call it, have something to do with it too. He's left this one along with all the others for the day when he can ask them himself.

But with his 'first birthday' approaching, Damir decided today was the day he'd start getting Jason to walk. Their home wasn't very big, like some he'd seen before, but it was more than enough for the three of them. The house was mostly made of logs except for the room on the back left which was interlocking stones, that room had a floor much lower than the rest of their home. This was something humans had been doing for quite some time, this let the food they ate keep for much longer.

The other two rooms were rather straight forward, when walking in the through the front you'd come into a room stretching the width of the house with two doors in the wall directly ahead. One leading to the food storage room and the other the bedroom. The main room had a fire like the bedroom only it sat in the middle of the room not enclosed on any side but sunken into the floor quite a bit, the roof had a opening above to let the smoke out. Above the fire sat a large simple grill Irina could cook directly on, or place one of her few pots and/or pans on depending on the food she was making. To the right of the fire was their dining table which was big enough to sit six people, and to the left was the sitting and storage area.

A couple of wooden chests sat to the left of the food storage room door, holding their clothes and other odds and ends like blankets and sewing supplies. In between the two doors was a couple racks, shelves and cupboards to store all the things used to make their meals. In front of the chests on the left, the couch sat facing the window out the front of the house. Made of some kind of animal skin, it was far comfier than the wooden rocking chair they had by the fire.

Damir had apparently made it himself for Irina when they first met. The back of the rocking chair had a small metal plate with the words 'A life with peace, is all I seek.'

Carrying Jason out to the main room, Damir sat him on the floor to the far right side of the dining table, then walking over to the rocking chair where he sat down. He began coxing him over with some words of 'encouragement'

"Come on buddy, come over to Daddy! Come on, you can do it." clapping his hands with an awkward smile on his face. Clearly clueless on anything to do with helping a child take their first steps.

Irina looked over as she made lunch with an equally awkward smile while looking at Damir "You're not going to get him anywhere with a weird look on your face like that. Haha hold, wait, he might learn to walk even faster to get away from you though if you keep acting so strange you meat head."

Though to both their surprise Jason's look of confusion faded after a moment and he gained a determined look of supreme focus on his face. Trying to balance himself he set both his hands on the wooden floor boards, stretching his legs out to have just the balls of his feet touching as well, assuming a trapezoid like stance. He's been able to crawl for a while but he's never attempted to stand.

Damir smirks at Irina, not missing a beat he quipped back, "What was that? Huh? Huh?"

Just as he said this Jason began to lean back, lifting his torso up and moving to stand straight up.

"What the...?!" Irina looked stupefied at the father son combo not knowing who was more outrageous, the fact that Damir was somehow getting through to him, or the amount of thought being Jason's putting into his attempt at standing.

As Jason's body stood straight up, both Irina and Damir's faces went white as snow. Jason's upper body didn't stop at being straight up it kept going right back. Smacking the back of his head right into the hard floorboards behind him.

*CRACK*

"You killed him."

"I..."