Nothing noteworthy really happened over the next year of my life. I started house training, mastered that the same day I started. Started to toddler slur speak full sentences and started learning letters for Tamrielic. That was it for the most part, not super exciting but growing up a second time really isn't. Honestly it's more annoying than everything as let me tell you growing in teeth for the first time or just growing at all is PAINFUL. Something that tipped me off that I might need to start looking into the whole killing Grelod thing was that as I got praised as a prodigy for how fast I was learning and she heard it her expression would turn particularly cruel.-
Additionally the crone had been trying to run off Meralda for some time now as the Altmer woman was kind to us children and not someone she could bully. She'd certainly tried plenty but Meralda would shrug it off so long as she wasn't physically attacked. Grelod never went that far though because for all her sadism the hag was well aware of the law and if she crossed that line with an adult they could legally kill her. -
It took me a few months to learn how to read to any real degree and devoured every book I could get my hand on to refine that particular skill. To my surprise that caused the status screen to finally click into place and let me use it. I found out why as I looked over my own status.
{Name: Alexan
Age: 2 years, 3 months, 7 days
Race: Nord/Altmer
Strength:3(average adult is 10)
Dexterity:2(average adult is 10)
Constitution:6(average adult is 10)
Inteligence:12(average adult is 10)
Spirit:21(average adult is 10)
Magicka: 210/210
Skills: English(mastered), Tamrielic(7/10)}
The entire status screen was in Tamrielic so I needed to be able to at least read the language in order to use it. As for the whole seven out of ten thing I could easily guess that was based on my mastery of the language. Ten out of ten was probably me mastering the skill fully. Until I could speak without my letters sounding like other letters that wasn't going to happen probably. My stats also made sense if you thought about it as well. -
My physical stats were all well below the average adults, I was two so not surprising at all. My intelligence being two points over the average adults also made sense as I had the mind of an average man from Earth stuffed into the body of an infant. The extra two points were probably from the learning buff all kids my age had letting me go a bit beyond the average. Finally was my spirit stat that was a single point over being double the average persons. If that stat meant what I thought then as a reincarnated person my soul was naturally going to be abnormally strong by comparison to the average person.-
The fact that my magicka pool was directly ten times my spirit stat though made me suspicious that they were related, could be a coincidence though. Not enough information on the topic to say for sure. My skills were also accurate as obviously my knowledge of english came with me but any skills I had besides that needed to be retrained if I even wanted them back. Having my status screen was nice and all but honestly not all that helpful at the moment since I was two and all. -
I spent the next few months quietly polishing my speech and reading ability until I was finally fluent in the language and mastered it. Once that was done I began to look for any mention of the dragon language. The topic was not one widely covered apparently which was fair I suppose since after the battle of red mountain and the way of the voice was created the language was relegated to a handful of people, the Greybeards. The crazy thing was that nobody tried to learn how to shout without their help for some reason, they just accepted that only the Greybeards way was right.-
I swallowed my inward cringe at it and played the part of a clueless innocent kid when I asked the bookseller if they had anything on the topic. I turned up the cutesy to eleven and just wanted to know all about the dragons. The people of Riften were calloused from the thieves guild being located here but even those callouses softened in the face of a big bright eyed two year old. It was despicable of me but I lost whatever shame I had in the first few months of being an infant.-
I couldn't take any of the books but I was allowed to read them so long as I didn't damage them. I still got watched like a hawk as I did read the books but since I was just sitting there happily humming as I read I got left alone. My "prodigious" title had long since gotten outside the walls of the orphanage so only the out of towners were confused by me walking around town by myself. Grelod was NOT happy about it though. Not the me walking around part since she preferred the children make themselves scarce during the day but the prodigious title getting out.-
I had overheard her more than once directly rejecting people who offered to adopt me. Honestly I was more confused why they even tried. Her antiadoption policy was VERY well known across all of skyrim. She didn't let kids get adopted, EVER. You either died, ran away or aged out, those were your options here. She made up all sorts of excuses too why adoption couldn't happen. Unfair to the others, too young, not enough money, improper housing, the list was extensive.-
While I was learning the dragon language, which was ridiculously complex by the way, I also secretly read the few alchemy books the shop left lying around. [Herbalist's guide to Skyrim], [A game at dinner] and [Plantlife of Tamriel] were the only ones available but they were dense with knowledge. It took me right up to turning three to sneakily memorize all of them and the books on dragon language. Thanks to these books and my knowledge from the game I had a mental recipe list for a poison that should take out Grelod in a hurry.-
Impstool + Deathbell + Red mountain flower + River betty = zero survival chance
The best part was that even an absolute novice at alchemy like me could turn these into this poison as they just needed to be crushed together and boiled to form it. My current problem was that I had no money for the Impstool and it didn't grow near Riften. The others were all easily source able locally as Deathbell grew in the graveyard, the red mountain flowers at the edges of the city walls and River betties swam all through the canal in the center of the city.