Key to the Void: A self-made isekai

Life as a fetus in the womb was... well... it was quite horrible to be honest. I had expected to be able to relax in the cozy warmth of my mother's womb, maybe having to deal with the occasional irritation of my twin bashing me when they got a little excited, maybe we would have some pushing contests from time to time. But, overall, I expected to just fall into a routine and be able to relax and sleep my time away until I was ready to be born.

That was the hope anyway. What I did not expect was the one thing few people ever consider and just think is an obvious part of being a fetus without considering the implications. I was connected to my mother's blood suppy through an umbelical chord. And, that meant that I was subjected to some substances running through my mother's bloodstream. There was a fetal blood barrier that kept things like viruses and bacteria from affecting me, but it was not a complete barrier. It had to be open enough for me to get nutrients after all.

There was something else small enough to pass through the barrier, smaller than even a virus, and it was making life in the womb absolute hell for me. Hormones. Or, to be more specific, adrenaline. Occasionally, I would hear a lot of noise going on outside the womb. Some yelling voices. Some of them high and likely female, others low and likely male. I couldn't make out any words. It was all muffled by flesh and fluid, and all I could tell was that it was clearly not English. The exact words are not important though. What was important was that whenever the voice I'd identified as my mother started to become frantic, I felt a sense of absolute existence-rending terror wash over me.

Objectively, I knew that this was an outside influence. It was this adrenaline being pumped into me. It was entering my bloodstream in quantities far higher than my tiny undeveloped body could handle, and I had nothing I could do about it. Well, almost nothing. My sibling seems to have made the discovery that getting really aggressive with their kicking can sometimes do more than just work out some of the energy the fight or flight response is demanding we utilize. Sometimes, our mother actually calms down pretty soon after one of us starts kicking as hard as we possibly can. Unfortunately, it's not only the wall of the uterus my sibling kicks.

So, every time our mother gets agitated by whatever is upsetting her, I am driven into a position where I have to protect myself against my sibling while I'm also trying to help them in expressing our protest against whatever our mother is doing. We have gotten better at our coordination lately, and I'm getting kicked far less and far more of the kicking is actually getting directed at the walls.

Once again though, this winds up raising several questions. I don't think our mother is dealing with any real imminent threat to her life. Most of the things that get her agitated seem to be verbal arguments, while some of the other voices seem to be trying to reason with her and calm her down as our mother gets worked up. This makes me feel a lot less guilty about joining in with my sibling's protest efforts with the only method we have available, but it still makes me wonder just what it is that gets our mother so upset.

The other far more disturbing thing though is that my sibling seems to have gotten way too good at directing all of the kicks in a way that avoids hitting me lately. We have even begun working out ways to get the most leverage as we possibly can out of each other's bodies. Recently, we have even begun falling into patterns where we will take turns. One of us will hold still and brace against the other as they do the kicking, trying to help one another get as much leverage as we can.

My sibling is way too smart for someone in their fetal state. This has me facing two separate and equally hard to parse possibilities. Either we are not actually human and instead belong to a far more intelligent species that develops this level of learning capability even in the womb, or my sibling is exactly like me and retains memories from their previous life. Both of those prospects have some pretty serious implications to them. The strange thing is that it's the latter that would be the easier to stomach of the two. I mean, it's already happened with me, right? I would have to be stuck just babysitting my babbling infant twin if I was the only one after all. If they are like me, then we really will be the same and even able to relate better to one another.

Well, I couldn't do a lot more than just think about it until we were born and had more freedom to figure each other out anyway, so for now I suppose it's just a matter of waiting.

After a while, it became increasingly clear that my sibling was just like me. As things became more cramped here in the womb, we became increasingly careful not to accidentally hit each other. We would take turns stretching our legs, but we only pushed for our stretching. Neither one of us actually kicked unless it was in protest over our mother torturing us with adrenaline down our umbellical cords.

This restraint over when to kick and when not to kick in particular was a dead giveaway that my sibling absolutely had to be someone like me. I had already confirmed that this body possessed the stepping reflex and Babinski reflex through various tests I'd managed to carry out in this state. These were the two reflexes that, in combination, help infants later on when they are figuring out how to walk. But, in the womb, it creates an involuntary compulsion to extend your leg quickly. The only way to avoid that becoming a kick is if there's some intention there to stop it from happening. I don't think that kind of intentionality could be worked up by someone who's new to this whole existence thing no matter how smart they are.

After a while, we did manage to settle into a bit of a routine. Our mother's agitated states became less frequent. I don't know whether it was us very consistently delivering kicks that really must have been quite painful and occurred only when she got riled up, or if it was the people around her talking with her and working out whatever it was that was getting her riled up. Whatever it was, it was quite nice not having to deal with that all the time. It was a good thing too, because things were starting to become very cramped in here with two bodies filling the same space. I'm quite sure we're well into the third trimester by this point.

We had already managed to get both of our heads pointed downward, but that's nothing to judge our development on. We were both sentient and aware beyond what we ought to be, and we had flipped ourselves intentionally. I had just started the effort myself at one point, and my sibling very quickly picked up on what I was doing and followed suit. But, things have definitely gotten very cramped.

We spent most of our time sleeping these days. What else is a pre-natal child with adult levels of cognizance supposed to do? It's an excellent way to pass the time when nobody can tell us now much longer we are going to have to wait around in here, and every day we have our faces pressed tighter and tighter against each other.

I have begun to wonder lately exactly what it is that triggers a woman's water to break. It happens when the placenta bursts, but is it an internal or external force that causes it? It makes me wish I had actually researched pre-natal development beyond the general overview all nurses are given back in nursing school. Clearly the infant kicked a lot during it's development, so it would probably require some rather extraordinary freak conditions for the infant to be able to burst their placenta before it was time. So, some hormone probably weakened it before hand.

The question though is what will cause the contractions to start? Obviously, it was Oxitocin that actually triggers the contractions. I still have nightmares about learning the hormones of the hypothalamus and their functions, so there's no way I could forget the function of Oxitocin. But, I also know that all hormones that come from the hypothalamus or petuitary are, in turn, triggered by some kind of signal that comes from the body. So, it's a chicken and egg thing here. What causes what?

This has been bothering me because it's quite obvious there's some hormone that weakens the placenta, and then it probably makes it so some innocent movement by the infant can make the placenta burst. But, what happens if the infant is content to just sit still long past the time they were ready? Would the placenta stick around for longer? Or would contractions just start on their own and grind the side of the placenta against the baby's body until it was broken? Or, on the other end, if the placenta was burst early would labor start in order for the baby to be born safely before something could go wrong from the premature rupturing of the placenta?

This seems to be a definite hazard of having just too much time to think. I start constantly obsessing over things and fearing something might go wrong. Well, you really can't blame me. The two of us are in a pretty vulnerable state right now, and there's about a million things that can go wrong in the gestation or birthing process that can cost one or both of us our lives, possibly even our mother's life too. Well, medical technology these days is pretty good, so I don't think anything will go THAT wrong, but then what if we are born on some other planet to some humanoid alien species that's still living in the stone age?

Yeah, as I said. Too much time to think. But, I suppose it's not really that outlandish of a possibility either. I have given up on ruling things impossible. I'm a reincarnated infant who can somehow thing like an adult despite having such an underdeveloped brain after all. I should probably accept that there are just things well beyond what I can understand out there.

Well, speaking of the devil, the contractions went ahead and started. I must have missed our placentas bursting, because right now my arms are wrapped around my sibling with no membrane barrier between us.

My sibling winds up being the first one out. Guess that means I'm the younger twin. When it comes time for me to be forced through the birth canal, I was not ready for just how much it would hurt. This passage was just too small for a baby's head. I knew the skull literally had to deform in order to make it through the birth canal, but I never really understood what that meant until I felt like my brain was being forced down my spinal cord and my face was being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste to the point I am certain my nose would have broken were it not made almost entirely of soft cartilage at this stage of development.

I felt like the only think keeping my eyes from being squeezed out of my skull was the fact that the walls of the birth canal were also pushing them back into their sockets. After my head and shoulders contorted in order to fit through, the rest of my body somehow managed to fit through by momentum, relieving me of the intense pain. But, the discomfort was far from over. As I reached what I consciously know to be the outside, I almost immediately wished I could go back in. I felt as though my head was ducked into a vat of ice as I felt the cool air of the outside for the first time in this new life, and I immediately knew why babies cried so much.

And cry I did. I came out of the womb crying the very second my head was clear and before I was properly even fully born. Someone caught me as my birth was complete, and then I lay crying there in my birthday suit as my skin felt the first sensations of cool air upon it until someone finally swaddled me in a blanket.

There were several voices talking to each other rather excitedly, but I couldn't make out anything about it. I was a newborn, and this obviously wasn't English. I would have time later to figure this stuff out.