บท 2: Anos Arcana (Rewrite)

When I woke up, I found myself staring at a white ceiling in a large and open room.

'Another unfamiliar ceiling...' I thought to myself before chuckling a bit. I looked around the area I was in and I found out a horrible truth. One I can deny no longer. I am small.

I'm a baby right now, as a matter of fact. I was currently in the hospital, surrounded by other babies in cribs. I tried my best to turn over, to lay on my side rather than my back, but the blanket they wrapped me in was extremely tight. Eventually, I was able to see around me a bit more. Everything was rather hazy still, I'm guessing because I was a newborn, but that didn't make this any less uncomfortable.

After a few moments, I tried speaking. I'm not stupid, I obviously know that I can't speak now as my vocal cords are still undeveloped, however, what I was actually trying to do was to call for help. If I was able to see what the attending nurse looked like and hear her talk to me, trying to calm me down, I could make out where I was reborn into. This was incredibly important information.

I believe that I was granted my wish to be reborn into a distinguished Magus Family, but since I currently wasn't in a fancy crib in a mansion, then my parents have either fallen on hard times or there was a complication with my birth. Of course, the possibility existed that I simply wasn't born into the nasuverse, or that the ROB lied to me, allowing me to reincarnate but without any of my wishes.

To be honest, that's a good trolling tactic to be fair. You really can't get mad, at least you got to be reborn, even if it's without a cheat.' I thought to myself.

"Hwwu (Hello)" I tried saying out loud. My voice was high-pitched and child-like, just as I suspected.

After a moment, I heard the sound of a few papers rustling and a pen hitting the desk from somewhere behind me. I tried to turn my head to look at the nurse but I wasn't able to until she got much closer due to my hazy sight.

She was a Black Woman in her mid-twenties, with short curly black hair and a small beauty mark on the lower-left side of her cheek below her lips. She was wearing red lipstick and chewing on what I could only hope to be gum. What REALLY shocked me, though, was that this dark-skinned beauty looked like she jumped straight out of a Sakimichan drawing.

Perhaps it was only because my sight was hazy before, so I didn't notice it, but the entire world looked like a super-high-end animation background. The nurse herself didn't even look like she was in that weird 2.5D state when moving. I had guessed that this meant that people from anime actually saw the world like this, which made sense. How can they react to impossible expressions, like crumbling to dust or the soul leaving the person's body without being able to see them? They could never be physically expressed in the real world after all.

For a few moments after seeing her, I had kinda regretted that I wasn't isekai'ed into Nichijou, just to see how some of those scenes looked in real life.

"Hey, there baby." The nurse cooed as she picked me up.

I was still stunned at seeing what anime in real life was liked, so I tilted my head to the side and looked at her stunned for a bit. Of course, this was taken by her to show that I was a rather curious baby, though she was looking at me stunned a bit while I was in a state of wonder at how the mechanics of this world's visuals worked.

"M-my deary. I didn't know you had such... beautiful golden eyes..." She said as she carried me over to her desk. She then spent a minute setting me up in a nice baby pose before pulling out an old polaroid camera and snapping a few shots of me.

"Aww! You're just too cute! You'll be a lady-killer in the future, I just know it, little guy." She said as she started to tickle my belly. I started laughing uncontrollably. Unfortunately< I was tricked.

*Click!*

"That should do it. Your parents are going to love these little..." She stood up and walked over to my crib in the distance before grabbing my chart. She started reading it as she walked back.

"Anos? What kinda name is Anos Arcana. Sounds like something outa Tyler's D&D books." She said, putting down the clipboard.

It was at that moment that I saw that language on the board was both English and Japanese. That, combined with the black woman in a nurse's uniform, could only mean I was in an American Military Hospital in Japan, probably Okinawa. The woman spoke English rather than Japanese, so that means it's her first or preferred language, and she even used slang subconsciously. Since having black skin in Japan was incredibly rare, that must mean she either transferred here or grew up here. Japanese would never be on a clipboard in an American institute anywhere other than a base in Japan where a lot of Japanese doctors probably worked.

'Alright. There are worse places to be. Judging from my name, it's possible that either my mother or father isn't from Japan, so they would be here for a purpose. One doesn't simply travel to Military Bases around the world for no reason.

Unfortunately, while I began thinking about why I was here specifically, I began to feel incredibly tired. The stamina of a newborn isn't all that high in the first place and overusing my brain on something I'd later find out to be a coincidence had exhausted what little mental stamina I had.

'Oh well... not like I can do anything about...' I thought as I fell asleep.

"Aren't you just precious!" The nurse said as she picked me up and placed me back in the crib.

(A/N: The nurse is based on my own mother who grew up in Okinawa. While she was never a nurse there, she did become a nurse here in the USA. She used to take pictures of all the cute newborns she took care of before she got rid of them all when I was young. She probably realized that i was creepy, but the 80s were a different time.)