Time moved on and soon enough an entire year had passed since I was reborn into this world and a few things had happened. First Vex had left the orphanage for good, most likely already having joined the Thieves guild. Second I had forced my body to learn how to stand and walk. It was hard and my sense of balance was shit but I could walk. The third was that Meralda had started teaching me how to speak after hearing me trying to baby babble mimic what everyone else was saying.-
With actual teaching I made quick progress on comprehending the language though actual speech was impossible. Any attempt I made was that cute slurred similar sounding thing kids do before they fully figure out their voices. Thankfully I did have that learning buff all children have at this age so it only took me roughly a month to more or less understand what everyone was saying. I'd like to say it was something that made me happy and it did, until Grelod got involved. The woman was cruel and petty and regularly crushed the spirits of the children in the orphanage by mocking them as unwanteds and never going to be adopteds.-
Some of the beatings she handed out sometimes didn't even have good reasons behind them beyond her being in a bad mood, like it was the kids fault somehow. Her cruelty wasn't just relegated to the other children either as I'd gotten more than a fair share of it just for existing as an infant turning toddler. She didn't hit me but insults and open threats about my future treatment once I was big enough were plentiful. Additionally there were more than a few slurs because as it turned out I was not fully human.-
Turns out I had slightly longer pointed ear tips which was the mark of a half elf. That left me in a VERY awkward position as I flat out wasn't sure what that meant for me. Half breed children were not really something I looked into when playing Skyrim in my past life and so was in the dark what that even looked like. I knew they were possible since that one blacksmith in Dawnstar was married to a Redguard while being a Nord and they were expecting. But the game just didn't have half breeds in any visible manner, likely a limitation from being a game if I had to guess.-
What me being half elf DID mean however was that I got talked about when I showed up in public. I didn't realize it before learning the language roughly as Meralda would bring me along on her grocery shopping trips but afterwards I couldn't fail to pick it out. There was even apparently a bet going on about what my parentage actually was since at my current age not enough features were set in place to tell.-
The Nord was easy to tell apparently with how bulkily I was built even as an infant. It was the elf side of the equation that was being bet on. Apparently I had silver colored eyes which made more than a few jump straight to Altmer but there were a few who argued I could have Bosmer in me. There were some who joked about me having Falmer blood but it was a dark sort of joke as the implication was not a pleasant one. Still these short trips into the city of Riften let me confirm definitively that this place was not the same as in the game.-
There was always complaints in my past life about Skyrim as a whole being "empty" and lacking people while the cities were cramped, tiny things. It made sense with the game being just that, a game. The real world however? Only vaguely familiar to my memory of the city in the game. The best way to explain what I saw was "bigger". The city was not that pitiful thing you could cross from one side to the other in under thirty seconds in the game. In fact the city was so large in reality you could easily fit two dozen of the video games version into it with room to spare.-
This space meant more people, more shops, more everything really. Most importantly was more thieves. Unlike the game where you could see a thief coming from miles away in their obvious armor they weren't so conspicuous in reality. You'd have to really pay attention to spot these ones. They wore clothes that let them appear as just another person in the crowd but they moved with a quiet sort of grace that held a predatory confidence.-
The actual thievery was smooth as silk and you could miss it if you weren't watching closely. A flash of metal and a coin purse lifted, a slight apologetic bump and a pocket picked. There was no crouching or other such nonsense in the middle of the day. My personal favorite so far had been a thief that used magic to relieve some careless tourist type of their necklace. It was a sort of misty green gleam at the back of the guys neck and a bump that got him to turn around. Only when he did his now unclasped necklace dropped to near the ground before moving into the shadows behind a decorative clay vase.-
I had spotted a few thieves eye Meralda since she was an easy mark being distracted by both me and her shopping but other thieves would show up and whisper something that got them to drop the idea. If I had to guess it was probably a sort of unspoken rule that you don't steal from the orphanage people. More likely than not this was because a good few members of the thieves guild came from the orphanage. Or it could be because even thieves have enough honor not to rob an orphanage, either option would work really.-
I had spotted Vex a couple of times while on these trips and every time she'd sense my gaze or something and look at me before moving away out of sight. The city was always super busy with soldiers moving through it to the mountains past behind us that led to Cyrodiil. The Legion wore the steel and red leather proudly as they marched to the heart of the empire to fight to war waging as the Thalmor invasion pushed ever closer. The White Gold Concordat hadn't even been thought of by this point of the war as the empire and Thalmor both thought they could win the war and as such were still in the fierce fighting phase of the war.-
I only knew what the game provided about the war but if this world was as much bigger than the game as I suspected then the true scale of it was horrific. I tried not to think about it as there was nothing I could do about it in the end. Even a decade from now when the war "ends" I'll only be eleven at most, nobody would take me seriously.