Taking Stock
Alexander Mary feels herself coming to, and she begins to blink rapidly, intent on clearing the sleep from her eyes. He She looks around and reluctantly notes the absence of Alexander's full-dive pod; instead of being enclosed in the comforting and sterile pod, she finds herself in a truly gargantuan yet opulent bedroom. For a moment, she hopes that this scene is some virtual fantasy world, and she has found herself in the bedroom of a giant.
She frowns in confusion, knowing that Alexander had not acquired access to anything of the sort before the first of several realisations hit her.
‘So, it was not a dream then.’ She thinks to herself in dismay, ‘Apparently this is really happening. That bastard Leslie really did kill me… and I really did get reborn as a girl.’
Having now remembered that she is a baby, Mary quickly understands that the gargantuan room she is occupying is not that of a giant; instead, to her dismay, it is she who is tiny and no doubt will be for many years to come.
With fresh eyes, Mary looks again at the room and realises that it is simply unnecessarily large rather than truly cavernous.
With nothing better to do and noticing that she is currently alone, Mary determines her primary object should be to take inventory of her surroundings.
“Baby or not, this is a king-sized bed; I’m certain of it.” Mary says to herself in amazement, On Earth space had become a true premium; only the super-rich or those few who still lived in the countryside could hope to have such an unnecessarily massive bed.
Even more amazingly, this bed is for her, who is currently a baby. Mary shakes her head at the sheer waste of it; she was nearly certain that a bed like this would be uncomfortable for a genuine newborn to wake alone in this massive room… With a start she stopped and checked again, confirming what she had previously noted, that the maids were strangely absent. Where were they?
Leaving a newborn baby in a room like this, if done enough times, would take a toll on a baby's psyche. If she screamed right now, would they respond or would they leave her alone? Mary tries to remember what she had understood yesterday. What does her new family plan to do to her?
But then maybe that was the point? Intimidate her into compliance? Mary wishes she could have more faith in the people who were now her family and believe that they wouldn’t plan to do something like that to a newborn… But Alexander had watched the news before. And Mary had understood enough of yesterday to be wary.
“No use thinking about it.” Mary breathes out, dismissing the depressing thoughts.
Before she could continue, Mary found herself stopping as she finally registered what she had said, or more specifically what she had not said. While Mary had intended to speak in common English, her infantile mouth instead spouted what could only be called random baby nonsense, albeit random nonsense that was perhaps slightly more coherent than might be expected of a newborn.
“Well… I won’t be found out if I’m not speaking properly at least.” Mary attempts to reassure herself, trying to ignore the feeling of aggravation that is beginning to dig into her due to her now apparently lacking language skills. “I can work on it… it’s just muscle control.” she says, still attempting to soothe her aggravation.
Shaking her head, she once more attempts to dismiss her increasingly depressed thoughts; instead, she tries to distract herself by continuing to inspect her new bed.
‘This monument to excess,' Mary reflects to herself, ‘is a canopy bed.' A canopy bed was something that Alexander had never seen in person, of course, but he had encountered them in virtual worlds before.
The curtains and bedding, she notes, are a dark crimson; perhaps the dark fabric was chosen to help deal with the mess a baby would make.
However, she notices two significant differences between this canopy bed and a standard one; the first difference, which is expected for a bed where a baby rests alone, is that a short railing is installed between the four corner posts to prevent the occupant from easily leaving or rolling out.
“Clearly, this bed has been adapted for a baby's use… or someone who rolls in their sleep. It might very well be the largest and most expensive crib I’ve ever heard of.” Mary expresses her disbelief before shifting her focus to the other, far less ordinary difference: "This light," she says to herself in open awe.
Mary had seen this light before, of course; since she had woken as a fetus it had quite literally been within everyone and everything she had seen. But yesterday she had focused on the people and conversation, not on the room and objects. Here, while she was alone, she instead focused on the room and saw that everything, every single object she could see—emitted a faint light of mana.
To her the light seems to make things appear somehow more real, sharpening the reality around it, like adding an extra level of definition to a picture. But that is merely the visual effect that radiates from the bed; more important is what she feels.
The pillows and cover—and the bedding in general—provides her with a strange feeling of comfort, restful sleep, and cleanliness. From the curtains she again feels cleanliness but also silence and darkness. From other parts of the bed, such as the corners and railing, she feels a sense of durability combined with softness.
“What is this?” she asks herself in bafflement. “Enchantments? Ambient mana?” For a moment Mary considers digging further into this curious phenomenon; surely the observe skill she discovered could tell her more about this.
But Mary decides against it; surely that is a rabbit hole that could take up many hours of her time, assuming it is one that ends at all. Better that she finishes looking around her new room before anything else. However, her determination faces a severe test as she continues to explore the room.
To her right, she sees light—real physical light—that enters the room through a large, curtained window. The window itself is a wide stone arch that Mary would consider atypical of a medieval palace; on Earth, windows like these should have been smaller and thinner, used to let in some natural light but keep in heat.
The design looks more like it was designed in a virtual world that had less consideration for practicality and more desire for a grand-looking building. In her inexperienced eyes, it did not look like it was built with the real world in mind.
Perhaps even worse, from the perspective of a normal world with mundane considerations, are the curtains. Mary is certain that the curtains are not normal. To Mary's eyes, they appear to be lightweight and very nearly see-through, clearly intended to let natural light into the room.
Alexander would have expected curtains like these to be in an arid climate, perhaps even a desert where letting as much air flow as possible into the room was paramount.
Instead, the lightweight-looking curtains barely sway at all; such behaviour would be normal enough, except Mary, with barely any focus at all, can clearly hear the violent-sounding winds beyond. Yet no matter how violent the wind sounds, the curtains only ever seem to sway lightly, as if there were nothing more than a pleasant light breeze beyond.
Even more damning is the fact that Mary can clearly see a snowstorm completely unsuited for the lightweight type of curtain that she’s looking at.
“Magic curtains?” Mary asks herself in mild disbelief.
When considering the situation objectively, a royal family should have heavy curtains for windy days, but it is unusual to see such light curtains used here instead. For a snowstorm of the magnitude that Mary can hear, heavy-duty curtains that wouldn’t move for anything or even just no window at all would make more sense, but clearly magic changes things dramatically.
Considering the curtains seem to be outright magic, Mary is not surprised at the feeling her magical senses provide her. The curtains radiate an aura of heaviness, durability, and warmth – clearly, magic has been used to make them heavy in spirit and apparently counter their physical lightness.
Mary glances at the stonework around her room, especially those that are adjacent to the outdoors, and notices that, much like the window arch itself, the stonework appears to have a warmth enchantment, along with a more obvious durability and a rather intriguing maintenance enchantment.
Are the walls capable of self-healing?
Other than her bed, there are only two fixtures that she can see.
One of them is perhaps the most absurd for Mary's current age; it is a large, shining vanity table, seemingly made from some magical silver wood. Above the table itself, Mary sees what could only be a genuine silver mirror. This is something Mary feels she will avoid using at all costs; the part of her that is still Alexander simply refuses to entertain the use of a vanity, although the chance to use a real silver mirror may make her reconsider that at some future date.
Her magical senses provide her with a rather exotic feeling about the vanity; she recognises durability, comfort, and cleanliness as useful qualities for any piece of furniture or, indeed, most items. What confuses her is the feeling of what she can only call beauty.
"Is a vanity supposed to evoke a sense of beauty? I get that they are used for makeup or something but…" Mary allows herself to trail off. Does it make someone sitting at the table more beautiful? Better at letting the beauty out? What a strange enchantment.
The other fixture is much more straightforward, a simple set of chairs gathered around a small table. Is what she would like to think, except that all the chairs and tables look to be made from the same material as the vanity.
The only other things of note that Mary can see in her room are the three doors. These, she feels, are straightforward enough; the doors themselves look respectably heavy-duty, built from an extremely dark wood with what might be two steel bands imbedded to further increase durability.
“The one opposite the windows probably goes into the palace hallways. At a guess, one of the doors goes to a cliché walk-in closet and the other to servant quarters.” Mary declares firmly.
The doors give off two different feelings; one, durability is not surprising – that, after all, is a useful quality for a door. The other is more exotic, and Mary looks at the door with renewed interest.
“Weight?” Mary looks at the doors intensely; she would have expected either lightness or heaviness. “Does that mean that the weight of the doors is somehow variable?” she asks herself with interest. She goes to move on but then remembers that the doors were the last intriguing thing she could actually see.
Her inspection of the room finished for now, and Mary begins to frown. This is a richly decorated room; indeed, she would go so far as to say that it was worthy of a princess. Based on her understanding of yesterday's conversation, Mary is now a princess.
However, she is also certain that her fate would be much more restrictive and darker than that of a European princess from the 13th century; Mary believes that her prospective family has a significantly different understanding of a princess's royal duties compared to her own.
No princess on Earth would have been subjected to what appears to be mind control.
If Mary was essentially a slave in waiting, why was this room so opulent? From what she had inferred yesterday, it seems certain that she was to be groomed into a compliant princess that would apparently take being enslaved in stride without suffering the health problems that her supposedly independently minded mother has experienced.
Surely, raising her like a typical princess would lead to the exact opposite outcome?
“It’s no use thinking in circles like this.” Mary sighed, her frown deepening. Instead, she began to look around again. “I need to find something to distract myself.”