Aegeus didn't grow up like your average child; he started to hold his own head up before most babies did, though nobody thought much of it at that time— some babies were just early.
Instead, they simply cooed over him every time he reached the so-called milestone, gushing over normal, mundane developments that didn't actually mean anything.
By one, he was already crawling, heading straight for whatever had caught his attention and staying with it far longer than your typical one-year-old.
He said his first words pretty much on schedule, more or less, though his mother liked to point out that he had skipped straight past "mama" and "dada" and progressed directly to full, if wobbly, sentences within a matter of weeks.
By eighteen months, he could count to ten. By two years, he could read simple words off the cereal box, sounding them out slowly at first, then not so slowly, until one morning he simply read the whole thing.
It wasn't just numbers. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division— whatever they handed him, he absorbed it at a startling pace. Reading and writing came just as easily. By three, he had worked through basic math and the beginnings of simple science.
At first, Aegeus didn't realise he was different from everybody else; it was a little after he learned how to speak that he realised— that not everyone had a stats window.
He also discovered that he didn't bruise as easily as everyone else; he once fell down the stairs, and he learned from his parents' reaction that most children didn't walk away scot-free from a fall like that.
Not to mention his magic— although he could barely use it— wasn't something anyone else had.
He began his training by placing a coin on his child-sized desk, and then he sat across from it, cross-legged on the floor, and stared.
Nothing happened for a while. Then, slowly, it rose— barely, an inch, trembling in the air before dropping back down with a small clink.
He was halfway through his sixth attempt, sweat beading faintly at his temple, when he heard the sound of Hermione crying down the hall.
He stopped at once, and the coin fell with a dull, heavy clink.
He found her in her room, red-faced in her crib, starting to cry— the kind that started as a whimper and, if left alone, turned into an ear-splitting wail that could go for hours.
His mother was at the dental clinic covering an emergency appointment, and his father, judging by the muffled sound of running water, was in the shower and hadn't heard her yet.
Aegeus climbed up onto the step stool beside her crib, the same one still kept there from the day he was born, and looked down at her.
"Hey," he whispered, leaning over the crib rail. "Don't cry."
She did not appear to find this argument compelling. If anything, she cried harder.
He glanced around the room for something to distract her, and his eyes landed on the small pile of stuffed animals and rattles scattered across the floor. He moved a hand in that direction.
A stuffed rabbit lifted off the floor, wobbling just like the coin had done, and drifted toward the crib in a crooked path. Hermione's cry was caught in her throat, then she let out a small hiccup, then stopped.
She watched the rabbit with enormous, wet eyes as it bobbed unsteadily in the air above her, entirely unaware that what she was looking at shouldn't have been possible at all.
Encouraged, Aegeus brought a second toy up— a small wooden block, clumsier than the rabbit, spinning slightly as it rose— and then a third, until there were three objects hovering, in a loose circle above his sister's crib, held there by nothing.
Hermione laughed. And it was, as far as Aegeus was concerned, the single best sound he had ever heard.
He held it for as long as he could— thirty seconds— before his concentration finally slipped and all three objects dropped at once, thudding softly onto the blanket around her.
~~~pov Adam~~~
When Adam got out of the shower and walked to his daughter's room to check on the noise, he saw his son perched on the step stool beside the crib, one hand raised in the air, toys hovering above the crib, Hermione laughing happily, a kind of laugh he had never managed to get out of her himself, no matter how enthusiastically he peekabooed.
"Hey, bud," Adam said slowly, taking a step forward, his eyes darting between the floating toys and his toddler. "What... are you doing?"
Aegeus turned to look at him, lowering his hand at last. "Hermione was crying," he said, as if that were a complete and sufficient explanation for everything Adam had just watched.
"Right," Adam muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "Sure... Makes sense."
None of it made sense. Absolutely none of it. But Hermione was already giggling and reaching for the rabbit again, and Aegeus was turning back to her without a second thought.
Adam stood in the doorway for a long time, watching his son levitate a stuffed rabbit six inches above his daughter's delighted face, and thought, and decided to panic about this later.
He wasn't as shocked as he should have been; after all, he had already heard from his wife how their son had literally teleported, but still, seeing something like this with his own eyes was something else.
He thought, for a moment, about saying something more— asking questions, demanding an explanation, doing whatever anyone else would do in his position when they discovered their three-year-old could make things levitate.
Instead, he just stood there, watching Aegeus reach for the rabbit and set it gently back down beside his sister, patiently, like none of this was worth mentioning at all.
He would talk to Jean the moment she got home. He had no idea what they were supposed to do now— but the first thing he needed to do was make sure Aegeus didn't do that in front of anyone else. At least for now.
[Name] Aegeus Granger
[Age] 3 years old
[Strength] 6
[Intelligence] 10
[Magic] 8
[Defense] 6
[Control] D-
[Skill]
Mathematics: Level 1 (35%) (Key Stage 1)
Physics: Level 1 (20%) (Key Stage 1)
Chemistry: Level 1 (14%) (Key Stage 1)
Biology: Level 1 (3%) (Key Stage 1)
Geology: Level 1 (11%) (Key Stage 1)
Geography Level 1 (14%) (Key Stage 1)
Astronomy Level 1 (50%) (Key Stage 1)
Linguistics Level 1 (4%) (English (Key Stage 1))
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
~~~
What do you think? If you like my story, leave a stone, if you hate my story, throw a stone, maybe it would hit my head. You never know...
PS: I have made every skill stand alone so I don't have to keep changing the names; for example, kids don't study biology in Key Stage 1, but they study science. But the subject has some biology content in it.