Preface.
A few of you who have read the Second Revision that was released on Amazon Kindle a year ago maybe wondering why re-release the novel. Why bother?
There are two reasons.
The first is that the book will now have a custom made cover. When I first released the story on Amazon Kindle, I used a premade cover that fit the story content to some degree. However, I later discovered that the elements of the cover had already been used so I commissioned a custom cover.
The second reason is that the story was not well received. To be specific, the numbers were so low they were practically insignificant. So why not take the opportunity to rewrite the story, and release it again. It wasn’t as if many people would mind. I have the numbers to back this up. But was my reason to rewrite because of the poor reception?
No entirely.
My decision to rewrite it was because the story fell well short of my original vision for it.
It was a story with potential that I proverbially fumbled and dropped. It lacked depth. It simply wasn’t even worth earning reviews. I felt that I had done this story a disservice. I let the characters down. It was time to make amends, and in order to do so I had to go back to my roots; to change my way of writing to the way I used to write. It was time to scrap the light novel approach.
This story originally came to life when I decided to post a quickly written light novel on Royal Road Legend (RRL), with the intention to write something easy to read, that fit alongside the genres being explored by many writers on RRL. But when I tried taking it, cleaning it up, and releasing it to mainstream readers it tanked.
It was time to start from scratch, and get it right, or at the least to write it in a manner that was satisfying to my original vision of its breadth and scope. Thus, in many respects, this release of “Princess Royale” should be considered the first release.
With these words, I can now present to you Book One of the Princess Royale series, Gun Princess, the way I intended it to be.
Chapter 0.
- # -
Before I begin telling you how my life was unsuspectingly turned upside down and inside out in the span of one fateful afternoon, I should begin by telling you a little about myself, and about my immediate family, including my elder sister Erina.
My family, and by no means were they unique, did not fit the definition of normal. They were above normal, or should I say, beyond normal. To begin with, my parents were smarter than the average Jane and Joe, and that included my sister. My family belonged to the category of humans known as Alphas.
More than a century ago, a very intelligent group of people discovered how to read a section of the black code of our human DNA – I refer to the significant percentage of our genome that doesn’t code proteins, the so-called noncoding DNA – and made a notable breakthrough. Without delving deeply into the details – quite simply because I don’t understand them beyond layman’s terms – these very smart people figured out how to read these few pages of code in our genome, and decided to make some changes for the better.
They gave birth to a means of recoding the human brain, and essentially bootstrapping it to a higher level of processing capacity. It was the equivalent of upgrading the CPU on your computer except they were working with human minds, arguably the smartest computer in the universe. I say arguably because the large grey men that humanity succeeded in pissing off when people began venturing well beyond their home solar system would undoubtedly say that humanity was a collective of simpletons by comparison.
I agree. Compared to the angry grey men, humanity wasn’t in the same intellectual league. We weren’t lagging behind them by a country mile, but we were still quite some distance behind them. So when these relatively smart humans discovered how to make a percentage of the population smarter, they began to shorten, hand over fist, the lead the angry grey men had on humanity.
And the war began to swing in our favor.
That was a hundred years ago and the war is still ongoing, but now it’s been pushed out into the far reaches of the human held territories. In many respects it’s out of sight and out of mind, except for the crews of the immense battlefortresses that venture forth into harm’s way to protect our borders.
Why is the war still with us? Well, because the angry grey men were tougher than anyone gave them credit, and they were stubborn enough to refuse humanity’s attempts to bring the war to a diplomatic end. I also suspect, as many people do, that humanity had become the tiger playing with its food. Sooner or later, humanity would triumph. They just had to be careful about how they went about it, and avoid any sudden surprises such as cataclysmic plagues, et cetera.
However, our war with the angry grey men isn’t part of my story. At least, it’s not part of what I want to tell you. I’m simply pointing out that when the genome breakthrough took place, some humans got smarter, while others didn’t. This caused a disparity within the species known as humanity that went beyond race, social, or monetary divisions.
This was about smarts, and the Alphas were at the top of the intelligence pyramid, followed by the Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and finally those that no amount of bootstrapping would spare from mediocrity, the Menials. In other words, they were immune to the bootstrapping, and were relegated the status of not having a status beyond belonging to a collective mass of people that lived lives, contributed in their own humble way, but would never make the ground breaking achievements of the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, or even the Deltas.
Now I can tell you about my family.
My parents and sister were smart enough to qualify for the Alpha category. They were bootstrapped in their late teens, and went on to make worthwhile contributions to the human species. My parents went into the research fields of trans-light mechanics. They were chasing the hitherto unachieved depths of trans-space where outside relative distances in the universe became so small as to be insignificant. It was the holy grail of space travel – to be able to move between vast distances in the blink of an eye. My sister’s interests lay elsewhere and so she entered the science of human genetic engineering. My sister wanted to help humanity reach new heights beyond what bootstrapping their minds had achieved.
In their own separate ways, my family was looking for better ways to combat the angry grey men. Perhaps they were looking for a way to end the war within their lifetimes.
I didn’t know, and that is because I had little contact with them.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
They were special. I was not, and as such my existence was far removed from theirs.
In fact, before my life ended and began anew, I had barely qualified for the Delta category, and could look forward to a productive life working for some company, perhaps marrying and siring offspring, before eventually passing away and beginning a new journey in the afterlife. Or maybe I’d be re-incarnated for another attempt at life in this realm that we humans perceive as reality.
I feel depressed when encapsulating my life that could have been in such a fashion.
Perhaps it was better that things turned out the way they did.
At the very least, you could say my life so far has been a Hellish roller coaster ride with no end, but at the least it hasn’t been boring.
Now I’ll tell you a little about the me from before the incident.
- # -
My name was Ronin Kassius.
When the event took place, I was fifteen standard years old going on sixteen, and a first-year high schooler attending Telos Academy on Telos Island just off the east coast of the northern continent, scarcely a kilometer away from the sprawling city-state of Ar Telica, on the world of Teloria, the fourth planet of an eleven world solar system.
At the time of writing, Teloria was one of fourteen colonized planets across a dozen star systems that had been partially terraformed through human ingenuity to make them habitable for people. They weren’t perfect, at least not perfect in the way Earth was millennia ago, but they were capable of sustaining human life with a minimum of fuss. In fact, Teloria was pretty close to Earth before it was over populated and over polluted.
In keeping with learning from our mistakes, the planet was being slowly colonized, and the human stain – I mean footprint – across its surface was thus far restricted to a total of seven city-states – five on the east coast of the northern continent, and two on the west coast. Also, our technology was far better now than it had been on Earth two centuries ago so over pollution was something we were quite capable of preventing thanks to the smarts of many Alphas and Betas. In short, our recycling technologies were top notch.
That’s a little about the world I lived in.
However, as I was saying, I was an almost sixteen year old, male high school student at Telos Academy, a rather prestigious school within the city-state limits of Ar Telica. It wasn’t the only school in the city-state – there were nine others – but it was considered one of the best, and all my immediate family had been students there at one time or another. I expected to graduate from the Academy in three years time, and possibly head on to tertiary education, before finding a job and making a life and family of my own.
That was the basic plan, until Fate put its foot down and intervened.
Fate can be such a bitch.
To say I was manly would be a stretch of the definition. At five foot three, I was considered short for a first year high school student. In fact, there were some girls in my class that were taller than me, and probably stronger. In effect, I wasn’t manly at all. I had disappointingly girlish looks that landed me in hot water during my last year of middle school when the high school Cosplay Club coerced me into a cross-dressing for them during the opening week of club recruitments. I ended up wearing a princess outfit from a popular animated show, and paraded about with a placard advertising the cosplay club. I was so convincing as a girl that I received a number of invitations from the high school boys to eat lunch with them, or meet them for cake or snacks after school.
I will admit that until the time of the incident, I’d never been more terrified in my life, as the prospect of being beaten up by large, burly males when they discovered my true gender and identity sent me into a panic that had me fleeing down the hallways and hiding in a closet in the cosplay clubroom until one of the girl’s found me. Back then I’d resolved never to dress as a girl while male, and it was a truly frightening experience that somewhat scarred me both mentally and physically for life. The club girls probably understood this because they promised never to reveal my identity as the Silver Blue Princess.
In hindsight, I should have made them sign a legally binding agreement with the penalty of being sued for damages if they broke said agreement.
Was I unhappy with my school life?
No, but I can’t say I was happy either.
I apologize for sounding ambivalent, but truthfully I wasn’t friendless or ostracized, as evidenced by the fact that many of the girls in my class were eager to include me in conversations, but it was undoubtedly because they didn’t consider me a threat the way other boys in my class were viewed. In other words, they were comfortable around me probably because they didn’t see me as boyfriend material. To that end, they treated me like one of them, and more often than not forgot that I was a boy at all.
I found that unsettling and disappointing to say the least, but had grown to accept it by telling myself that one day my turn would come and Mother Nature would give me the growth spurt I was long overdue. One day, I would be a man’s man, so to speak. But for now, I wasn’t manly and that meant that my chances of scoring highly with a girl were close to zero. I was friends with them, but not the kind of friend that I wanted to be.
Boyfriend and girlfriend were just not on the page for me.
The very best I could hope for would be a platonic relationship.
Again, this drove home how different I was from my family. For example, my father was a solid six foot two in height, and my mother and sister were both statuesque brunettes at five foot eleven. So when the heck would I start catching up to them? I will admit that I often wondered if I was blood related to them at all, more than likely adopted.
It wasn’t just my family that I was falling behind, but my one true male buddy and best friend – Tobias Matheus Praetor the Third. We had been best of friends through middle school, but things were rapidly changing between us, and once again it was because he was growing into a man while I was still stuck in the body of an effeminate middle-schooler.
I believed someone high above was testing my patience and my metal as a man – testing to see how far I could bend before breaking, and honestly, I was tired of bending like a reed before the squall.
Then one afternoon, a little over a month into the year, during the first week of the school semester, my life was rear ended in the most bizarre and unimaginable way, and I came to understand just how insignificant all my problems had been.