Part One: Consciousness in Meat Suit
Being a baby was, I quickly determined, a system error in biological design.
My consciousness was fully formed—I maintained the memories of being twenty-five, the cognitive ability to process complex concepts, the frustration of someone who understood calculus but couldn't move their own head without assistance. But my body was three days old and determined to operate according to biological impulses that made absolutely no sense.
I needed to sleep, but not at logical times. I needed to eat, but then immediately expelled what I'd eaten through mechanisms that seemed designed purely to humiliate me. I had opinions about things, but my only method of communication was involuntary vocalization that no one could interpret accurately.
*This is extremely inefficient,* I thought while Lyra was changing my diaper for approximately the eighth time that day.
"There, there, little one," she murmured, making the cooing sounds that adults apparently manufactured when around infants. "I know you're fussy. You're probably just adjusting to the world."
I wasn't fussy. I was experiencing existential frustration at my complete inability to communicate. I was also experiencing digestive distress, which complicated my emotional state, which was making my power twitch in ways I didn't fully understand yet.
A glass sitting on the nearby table suddenly shifted approximately two inches to the left.
"Oh," Lyra said, looking at it. "That's odd. This table must be uneven."
She adjusted the glass back to its original position and didn't think about it again.
I filed away the incident mentally: *Power activates on frustration. Adjusts reality in small, practical ways. Lyra's plausible deniability threshold is extremely high.*
This last part would become very useful in the coming years.
The first month of my new life proceeded in a blur of biological necessities and increasing frustration. Lyra was kind and attentive and made the cooing sounds constantly. Torvin was present but less communicative, spending most of his time at his blacksmith shop and returning in the evenings smelling like metal and smoke.
By the second month, I had started to develop a philosophy about my situation:
*I am trapped in a biological system I don't control, with a power I can't suppress, in a body that won't cooperate with my consciousness. The most efficient approach is to accept this and develop coping mechanisms.*
My primary coping mechanism was deadpan observation. My secondary coping mechanism was very careful management of my emotional state to avoid power activation.
This second mechanism proved significantly harder than anticipated.
Part Two: The Pattern Begins
Master Thistle was still visiting regularly.
He was a cheerful man, approximately sixty years old, who ran the village bakery and appeared to have no concept of tone-deaf delivery. Every time he visited, he brought bread and attempted to discuss his baking process in excruciating detail.
"The key to excellent dough," he was explaining during my third month of existence, "is understanding the yeast fermentation timeline. Too short, and the flavor doesn't develop properly. Too long, and—"
"Thistle," Lyra interrupted gently, "I'm sure your bread is lovely, but you've explained this process at least a dozen times."
"Yes, but each time I refine my understanding! The art of baking is—"
He began to sing. Not well. The melody was approximately correct, but his voice seemed personally offended by the notes he was attempting. It was like listening to someone try to describe music by hitting it with a hammer.
I was, from my bassinet, experiencing genuine annoyance at this performance.
And then—because I'd learned by now that my annoyance had consequences—the dough on the table began to bubble.
Not normally. Aggressively. The yeast fermentation accelerated to approximately ten times the normal rate. The dough expanded like it was being actively inflated. Master Thistle watched with increasing horror as his carefully prepared mixture swelled to monstrous proportions.
"What—why is it—I don't understand—"
The dough reached critical mass and exploded.
Flour covered everything. Master Thistle looked like a ghost. The kitchen looked like it had been carpet-bombed by a bakery. Lyra stared at the devastation with the expression of someone trying very hard to maintain composure.
"The yeast must have been defective," Master Thistle said weakly.
"Mmm," Lyra replied, which wasn't commitment to either agreement or disagreement.
From my bassinet, I experienced what I could only describe as the internal equivalent of a sigh. *Definitely going to need to work on controlling this,* I thought.
The dough incident established a pattern that would continue for the next two years.
Things would happen around me. Unexplained, technically explainable if you were generous with your interpretation of coincidence, but definitely caused by my power responding to my emotional state.
Books would float back into specific hands at precisely the moment I'd be thinking about how inefficient it was for someone to be searching for them.
Puddles would appear under locations where I felt people should be more careful about their footing.
Insects would attack people whose presence I found annoying, with suspicious precision suggesting something more intentional than natural insect behavior.
And every single time, the explanation would be mundane enough that no one questioned it seriously.
This was, I had to admit, working better than I'd expected.
Part Three: The Observation
By my fourth month of existence, Lyra had begun noticing.
Not understanding. Noticing. There was a difference.
"You know," she said to Torvin one evening, while I was in my crib attempting to sleep (unsuccessfully, because my consciousness wanted stimulation but my body demanded rest), "I've been thinking about some odd things that happen when Haru's around."
"Like what?" Torvin asked, his tone suggesting he'd already stopped paying attention to her explanation.
"Well, books fall back into people's hands when he's watching them search. Things break specifically around him when he seems frustrated. And Master Thistle's dough incident—I can't explain that one at all. The fermentation shouldn't have accelerated that fast."
"Babies are coincidence magnets," Torvin suggested. "Superstition. People project meaning onto randomness."
"I suppose," Lyra said, not sounding fully convinced.
But she stopped bringing it up in conversation, which I appreciated. Open speculation about my power would have been inefficient for my long-term goal of maintaining plausible deniability.
The key to my survival, I realized, was being boring enough that people didn't question the impossible.
I was very good at being boring.
Part Four: The Growth Process
My first birthday (in this incarnation) passed quietly.
Lyra baked a small cake. Torvin hammered something celebratory in his shop (it was a small metal toy, theoretically). There was no party. No gathering of friends. Just quiet acknowledgment that I had survived one year of existence in my new form.
*Progress,* I noted. *I have developed sufficient motor control to sit up unassisted. Walking remains inefficient. Speaking remains impossible due to my vocal cords being insufficiently developed. Estimated another six months before my communication capabilities match my cognitive state.*
At fourteen months old, I achieved walking.
This was simultaneously efficient (I could now navigate space without external assistance) and inefficient (I could now navigate into situations that triggered power activation more easily). The first time I walked across the village square, I was concentrating very hard on not being annoyed about my physical limitations, which meant I walked very carefully and didn't accidentally destabilize any structures.
It was exhausting.
At eighteen months old, I spoke my first word.
"Inefficient," I said, which was probably not what Lyra had been expecting when she encouraged my verbal development.
She laughed like I'd made a joke. I had not made a joke. I was describing the process of learning language from scratch when one's consciousness had already mastered it.
By my second birthday (third year of existence), I had added approximately forty words to my vocabulary, most of which were descriptive of various forms of inefficiency.
Part Five: The First Documented Witness
Mira appeared in the village around the time I was sixteen months old.
I didn't notice at first. She was just another person in Lunaris, working for the healer, mostly invisible to a toddler who spent most of their time trying not to accidentally warp reality through emotional regulation.
But then I noticed her noticing me.
She was approximately eight years old, which meant she was old enough to have observational skills but young enough that adults still dismissed her observations as overactive imagination. She'd been in the healer's office getting treated for something (scraped knee, based on the bandage I observed) when I'd been brought by Lyra for routine health check.
While I was sitting in a chair waiting for the healer, bored and trying very hard not to express that boredom in reality-warping terms, a book fell off a high shelf.
Directly into my line of sight. Specifically positioned so that someone would have to hand it to me to retrieve it properly.
I wasn't even aware I'd done it yet. The Glitch was becoming more subtle—less explosive dough, more convenient coincidences. The distinction was that the coincidences always seemed to benefit me in small ways.
Mira watched the book fall. Then she watched me look at it. Then she watched the healer hand it to me without commenting on the fact that there was no logical reason for it to have fallen.
Her eyes went slightly wide.
For just a moment, I thought she might say something. Might point out the oddity. Might voice the question that was obviously forming in her head.
Then the healer called her attention away, and the moment passed.
But she'd *seen* something. Something more than coincidence. Something that registered as wrong in her developing brain.
This was going to complicate things later. But later was still several years away, so I filed the observation and moved on.
Part Six: The Street Child
Mika appeared in Lunaris around the time I turned two.
She wasn't from the village. She was a street child—approximately five years old, dirty, carrying a scavenged bag of possessions, looking for food or work or anyone who might offer either.
I noticed her because Lyra was kind to street children. She'd offer them food, sometimes money, always the cooing sympathy sounds that adults manufactured for people in unfortunate circumstances.
This particular afternoon, Lyra had sent me with her to the market to gather vegetables. I was walking alongside Lyra (still unsteady, but improving daily), and Mika was nearby, watching the market activity with the eyes of someone calculating which stalls might leave scraps.
There was an apple vendor. A large display of apples, carefully stacked in a pyramid formation. A very inefficiently stacked pyramid that made my eye twitch every time I looked at it.
"Can I help you?" the vendor asked Lyra, completely ignoring the street child lurking nearby.
"Just some apples, please," Lyra said.
While the vendor was selecting fruit, Mika made her move. Quick fingers, practiced motion—she was a thief out of necessity, not skill. She grabbed an apple from the bottom of the stack, probably hoping the whole thing wouldn't collapse.
It did.
But not in a normal way.
The entire pyramid of apples destabilized in a specific pattern that sent the apple Mika had stolen directly into the face of a nearby dog. The dog, startled, ran in several excited circles and knocked Mika over in the process.
Mika fell backward into a nearby puddle. A puddle that hadn't been there five minutes ago.
She emerged covered in mud, her stolen apple still in hand, completely soaked, looking like she'd been personally targeted by the universe.
I watched this happen with the internal equivalent of interest.
*So my power doesn't restrict itself to my immediate vicinity,* I noted. *It activates based on annoyance triggers regardless of proximity. And apparently, I was annoyed about her attempted theft. Or about the inefficient apple pyramid. Difficult to determine causality with precision.*
Mika looked at the scattered apples, at her mud-covered self, at the confused vendor, and began to cry with the specific despair of someone who'd failed at the one task they needed to accomplish.
Lyra, who was very kind, bought her an apple and a pastry and asked if she had family. Mika didn't. Lyra gave her some money and told her about the healer's office, which sometimes had odd jobs for people desperate enough to accept them.
Mika left still covered in mud, but with food and information.
I didn't see her again for several years.
But I remembered her. Remembered the precise way her misfortune had unfolded. Remembered that my power seemed to have opinions about street children who attempted theft, even if I didn't consciously register that judgment.
*This is going to become a pattern,* I predicted accurately. *I'm going to spend years unconsciously tormenting this specific person without understanding why. And she'll never know that it's me.*
From somewhere in the cosmic void, Lady Ætheria was probably laughing about that too.
Part Seven: The Accumulation
Between my second and third birthdays in this incarnation (my fourth and fifth years of existence), the pattern intensified.
The village became accustomed to minor oddities when I was present. Books that fell back into hands. Objects that rearranged themselves slightly. Weather patterns that seemed personally targeted at specific people's minor inconveniences.
No one died. Nothing was destroyed permanently. It was all just slightly wrong in ways that could be explained through coincidence if you tried hard enough.
And people *did* try. Hard. Because the alternative—acknowledging that a two-year-old had reality-warping powers—was too implausible to seriously consider.
I was, by my third birthday, essentially invisible through sheer mundanity.
Everyone knew who I was. Nobody questioned my presence. My acts of power went largely unnoticed because they were integrated so seamlessly into the background of village life that they became scenery.
This was, I had to admit, a pretty efficient solution to a fundamentally inefficient problem.
"You know," Lyra said to Torvin one night, when I was supposedly asleep but actually listening from my crib, "I don't think Haru's quite normal. But he's such a *quiet* abnormal. It's hard to be concerned about him when he's so well-behaved."
"Children are just strange," Torvin replied. "He'll grow out of it."
I wouldn't. But Torvin wasn't going to figure that out for several more years.
By the time he did, the pattern would be so established that my behavior would simply be accepted as quirks of personality rather than symptoms of godhood.
Part Eight: The Efficiency Achievement
On my third birthday (my fifth year of existence), I made an assessment of my situation:
**Positive Developments:**
- Successfully maintaining plausible deniability for power activation
- Developing sufficient language skills to fake normalcy
- Establishing pattern of minor coincidences that don't trigger investigation
- Building tolerance for emotional regulation to minimize power activation
- Creating reputation as "quiet, well-behaved child"
**Remaining Problems:**
- Glitch still activates when I experience strong emotion
- Infant body remains inefficient for any meaningful activity
- Growing boredom with infant-level stimulation creating emotional instability
- Awareness that I'm going to need to maintain this act for potentially decades
- Lyra is observant and will eventually figure something out
**Overall Assessment:**
I have achieved a fragile equilibrium. I am boring enough that nobody questions my presence. My power manifestations are subtle enough to blend into background coincidence. I am not currently suspected of anything superhuman.
This is the most efficient outcome I could have achieved given my constraints.
However, it is fundamentally unstable. In approximately six months to a year, Elara will arrive. Someone will eventually figure out that I'm not entirely normal. The Glitch will become harder to control as my emotional state becomes more complex.
*I will probably fail to maintain this equilibrium,* I acknowledged. *Spectacularly. But in the meantime, I will continue existing as efficiently as possible and try very hard not to be annoyed about anything.*
This last part remained impossible.
But I was getting better at pretending.
Epilogue: In the Village (Brief Ætheria Perspective)
In the cosmic void, Ætheria was absolutely delighted with how things were progressing.
"Look at him," she said to Sylvara, showing a cosmic projection of Haru sitting quietly in the village square, trying very hard not to be annoyed about a bird that was flying inefficiently. "He's maintaining perfect cover while his power activates around him constantly. He's created an entire system of plausible deniability!"
"He's also miserable," Sylvara observed, adding glitter to one of Haru's minor power manifestations (a book falling back into someone's hands—normally invisible, but with glitter, actually beautiful).
"Miserable is better than boring," Ætheria corrected. "Well, he's still boring to most people, but *entertainingly* boring. Also, did you see? That street child he accidentally knocked into a puddle? She's going to remember that. Years from now, his power's going to keep targeting her specifically, and she's never going to understand why. That's *comedy*."
"That's also trauma," Sylvara pointed out.
"Same thing," Ætheria said happily.
Valthor, from his cosmic ledger station, just sighed.
He had approximately fifteen more years of impossible paperwork to prepare before Haru hit puberty.
This was going to make the reincarnation paperwork look simple.