When Elaine woke, her first thought was that she probably wasn't dead yet, seeing as she could still feel things...
Apart from a very sore throat, there was nothing else wrong with her body.
She opened her eyes onto an unfamiliar ceiling. She was lying on sheets woven in pale grey, and the whole room was excessively clean.
The curtains were drawn, letting only a little grey-white daylight through the gap. On the bedside table stood a cup of water, a medicine bowl, scissors and gauze, and a copper basin that had been washed out, with a faint residue of blood and mud settled in the bottom.
Elaine looked at that basin for a few seconds.
Then she slowly lowered her head. The quilt came up to her chest.
The nightdress was white, buttoned high and close at the collar. Her privacy had been protected.
Unfamiliar clothes still made her uncomfortable, though. Last night's black coat was folded over the back of a chair, torn past recognition, its cuffs crusted with dried mud and blood. It looked as though it had just been dug out of a grave.
She was silent for a while. She wanted to think, and had no idea where to start thinking from.
Everything had happened rather fast. Elaine herself was thoroughly scrambled.
Never mind. Go back to sleep... In the end, as though resigning herself to fate, Elaine pulled the quilt up to her chin.
Resign herself, like hell. Where in the world was this? Elaine badly wanted to roar about it, but her throat truly hurt, and opening her mouth produced nothing but a rasp.
With nothing else for it, she started staring at the small hand poking out from under the quilt. The fingers much thinner, the knuckles a size smaller, the palm wrapped in gauze. A girl's hand, completely and utterly.
Her throat hurt too much. Elaine tried to speak anyway.
"...Water... no, wrong. Is anyone there?"
The voice came out soft and light and slightly hoarse, with the frailty of illness still in it.
The colour drained out of her face by degrees as she gradually remembered what had happened yesterday.
Damn it... she should never have touched a thing like that, and now this was what her body had become.
She really had gone from Elaine White to a white-haired loli.
Elaine glanced down and immediately looked away.
No. The impact was too strong.
Reincarnator or not, and even knowing this world came stocked with every sort of chaotic transcendent phenomenon, having one happen to her personally simply felt unreal.
She tried to push herself up. She had barely lifted one shoulder before her chest and her waist ached in unison and her vision went dark with it. She held out, with considerable backbone, for half a second, then dropped back into the pillow.
Just then, footsteps came from beyond the door.
Elaine's body went tight all at once, her fingers grabbing the corner of the quilt.
The door opened... Right, it occurred to her that yesterday she had assumed some stranger had carried her off, but seeing as the person had dressed her wounds, they probably weren't a bad sort... Probably.
The one who came in was the woman from last night. She carried a medicine bowl and wore only the Judgment Tribunal's white judicial coat, sharply cut, a short sword at her waist and long golden hair falling loose to it. Even from across the room she gave off a brisk, gallant impression.
The woman raised her eyes. Grey-blue, and as cool as a lake at night after rain.
"Awake?"
Elaine opened her mouth.
She had meant to ask who are you... "No, wait, um... thank you. For saving me." Under that gaze Elaine wanted to sit up, and simply couldn't manage it.
Her eyes weren't focusing well just then, but that face was slowly settling over a figure in her memory.
In the memory she was still small, her hair always tied back very tight, following Elaine around like a little shadow and glaring warily at anyone who passed nearby.
Then trouble came to House White and she was let go. Elaine remembered that at first she had offered to go on working for House White for nothing.
She had been dismissed anyway... Elaine couldn't remember why. It had been seven or eight years ago at the least.
"Young master. It's been a long time."
A great many years had gone by.
She had grown taller, and her manner had turned much colder. If not for those slightly hesitant grey-blue eyes, Elaine would almost have failed to recognise her...
No... no!
Elaine stared at her for several seconds, then spoke uncertainly.
"...Raea? Raea, is that you?"
Raea. Placed at Elaine's side as a maid from childhood, right up until House White began to fall a few years ago...
No... that wasn't the point.
Elaine looked at Raea's face. That she could recognise Raea was normal enough. But... with her body turned into this ridiculous state, how had Raea recognised her at a glance?
"It's me." Before Elaine could think it through Raea answered, then slowly crouched down and looked at her with open worry.
"Cough, cough... what... what actually happened to me?" She still didn't understand how Raea had known her, but what mattered right now was asking what had happened to her body.
Elaine knew perfectly well that Raea might not know either.
Most of what had happened to her came back to that white mirror. It was only that the questions inside her could no longer be held down; less a question, really, than a way of venting how unfair all of it was.
Raea didn't answer. The grey-blue eyes went first to the slight swell of Elaine's chest, then moved up to her face. Then she reached out, and cold fingers traced across Elaine's forehead.
Elaine's instinct was to dodge, but her body was as sluggish as if someone had taken it apart and reassembled it. All she managed was a slight turn of her face.
Raea drew her hand back.
"Still feverish. You were out in the rain too long last night, and you were hurt. Waking up at all counts as doing well."
Elaine stared at her.
"Where is this?" Seeing that Raea hadn't answered her question, Elaine seemed to recover a little of her sense.
"My lodgings. Here. Take your medicine first. You are very ill."
Raea lifted the bowl, stirred it with a spoon and brought it to her lips.
Elaine looked in silence at the black sludge in it. Obviously bitter. Then again, what bitterness hadn't she swallowed these past few years? She had been one step short of fighting rats for her food.
"I... cough, cough. I'll do it myself."
Raea handed her the bowl and Elaine reached out to take it.
Three seconds later the bowl nearly went over onto the quilt. Raea caught it, quick of eye and quick of hand, her expression unchanged.
Elaine's face wouldn't quite hold.
"My... my hand slipped."
"Mm. The young master's hand simply slipped."
Elaine was certain she was being humoured. A faint flush surfaced on her small, pale face.
In the end Raea fed her the medicine. Elaine had meant to refuse, but her hands were shaking so badly there seemed to be no grounds left for refusing. So all she could do was open her mouth with a flat expression and take down, mouthful by mouthful, a medicine bitter enough to pickle a soul.
When it was finished she went entirely quiet.
Wherever Raea had found that medicine, it was bitter enough to leave Elaine without words.
Raea took a cloth and wiped the residue from the corner of her mouth.
The motion was so natural that Elaine was the one who stiffened.
"Young master, what exactly did you do yesterday?" Raea asked.
Elaine was quiet for a moment.
Her memory wasn't whole. She only remembered wanting to go down to the manor's storeroom to find some valuable Sealed Objects to sell... and then touching a white mirror, and ending up like this.
"I... I don't really understand it either. I think I touched a Sealed Object. I don't know what the thing does, and this is how I ended up."
Raea's fingers stopped on the rim of the bowl.
"What kind of Sealed Object?"
"White. No catalogue number, and... no documentation either, I think. The cellar was completely empty. It was the only thing still standing there."
Saying it out loud, even Elaine thought it sounded stupid.
Who sees a strange thing and puts their hands on it? At the time, though, it really had been as if something had hold of her, and she hadn't had time to think it over.
Raea lowered her eyes.
Watching that reaction, Elaine felt less sure of anything than before.
"You know what it was, don't you?" Raea sat down beside her, grey-blue irises angled slightly downward, and Elaine felt uncomfortable all over.
"I don't know what any of it was. I saw a white flash appear over the young master's house, and then I found the young master nearby... turned into... mm... a girl. So I brought you home."
Elaine blinked. That casually?
What if she had taken home the wrong person?
Then again, it did fit Raea's character. If she decided a thing was right, then it was right; Raea had never appeared to care what anyone around her thought.
"Cough, cough. Let's change the subject. What's it like out there now?"
Raea set the bowl back on the bedside table. Elaine already had a fair guess as to what had happened outside.
Raea had mentioned an explosion a moment ago, and that pushed her thoughts in a bad direction.
"Everyone is saying you're dead, and House White is completely finished." Raea answered truthfully.
Elaine opened her mouth, and could only conclude that Raea still had no idea whatsoever how to comfort a person.
"Then... I..." She wanted to ask what she was supposed to do about her current condition, but however she arranged it in her head, it came out strange.
"Please rest properly, young master. Everything else can wait." Seeing that Elaine meant to ask more, Raea stood.
Seeing Elaine reduced to such frailty, the calm Raea normally held inside her had long since broken into wave after enormous wave.
Elaine was small now, and helpless. And Raea, yesterday, as though following some guidance she couldn't account for, as though an unseen hand had steered her, had picked her up out of a drain near the White manor.
Even though Raea hadn't been entirely certain at the time that this white-haired loli was the Elaine she carried in her heart, something seemed to have led her, and from somewhere deep inside she had decided that this girl of unknown identity was the Elaine she had been thinking of.