[Camilla “Milla” Vodello, Psychonauts Agent]
Milla didn’t expect Tanya to win against the Heartless Machine. These things worked like a tug of war. Each defeat Milla dealt the mental construct gave Tanya additional strength when it came to overcoming her personal demon, but Milla still has three more baggage tags, this wasn’t going to be resolved after two defeats. Will she need all of them?
True to her prediction, the Heartless Machine had re-asserted its suppression of Tanya’s will, and charged. “The truth hurts sometimes.” The machine said using Dr. Boole’s voice. It abandoned their judge gavel and had resorted to fighting with reckless abandon, copying the attacks that Milla used against the censors, but faster. It would have been a horrible mistake if Milla could hurt the thing with her own psychic fists.
Instead, she just had to keep deflecting and dodging as she led it back to the room where it went when it was pretending to be some middle manager. She tasked her agent archetype to attempt to organize and decipher the clues to Tanya’s first life, and split off her caretaker archetype again to intercept Lili when she shows back up. Meanwhile, she waited for her moment.
There was this little downward double chop move that Milla used on occasion to finish off weakened mental entities that should never be used against a person under any circumstances. It was a lethal concentration of telekinetic energy, for one. But more importantly, it required the psychic energy to drift away from her actual limbs for extra leverage and reduced recoil, so anyone with even a small amount of martial arts knowledge could do… basically whatever they wanted with a counterattack. Sasha preferred pulling her into a grapple, which was always a fun way to end a spar.
Milla seriously doubted that a copycat like the Heartless Machine would be able to understand such matters, so she faked a vulnerability right when the cluster of cobwebs was behind her, and as expected, it went for the finishing move. A Japanese woman’s voice announced the attack: “You didn’t win! First loser is nothing!” Which she rewarded with a throw right into the cobweb cluster and a third burst of pyrokinesis fueled by the emotional energy she saved from the previous baggage.
“This might be enough.” Milla said to herself as she took out the duffel bag tag and connected the baggage to the machine.
Indecision. Pressure. Confusion. Pressure. Ambivalence. Pressure. Discovery. Understanding. Confidence. Relief. Contentment. A phantom feeling of being pushed. An instantaneous flash of agonizing pain. Regret. Dissatisfaction.
Milla understood this one even less than most of the others. It was vague, less defined by specific events than the others. The emotions must cover a longer timeframe. It did corroborate her guess that Tanya’s previous life died by being pushed in front of that train… and she had regrets about her life.
The room’s more defined features showed that the shelves were full of trophies and medals. Despite the place still being rather monochrome, she could still see that the trophies were mostly silver, with a small smattering of bronze. Not a single gold. At least seven different sports were there, with several repeats, and there were even some that were blatantly academic, math, essay-writing, science, and… programming? Milla didn’t even know what that was.
Tanya once again woke up from the trance the machine had placed her in, ignoring the red-hot interior of the white-hot machine and screamed in rage, a harsh growling sound that resisted rising to the pitch that Tanya’s usual voice was kept at. The glasses shattered and her skin flashed with iridescent blue as she tore out the door that was the Heartless Machine’s chest and leapt out…
…until the nightmare tendrils returned, wrapped themselves thoroughly around Tanya, and yanked her right back inside, maintaining their presence to keep her bound in the now gaping chest of the machine. It rose once more, and brought its metal fists to the sides of Tanya’s head, dazing her and allowing the machine to reassert the trance. Her now-slaved lips spoke with another masculine voice, a new one. “You’ve ruined everything!” It said angrily. “All of our plans for you, down the drain!” A scoff. “Go, then!” It changed posture, standing tall and placing two fingers on their temple. “-it simply must die.” It quoted using Sasha’s voice before unleashing a powerful PSI blast.
Milla flew away after getting hit by the fast blast, her mental projection damaged, but not critically so. Curses. She didn’t think it could manage one of those, but apparently it could. PSI blasts were normally rather weak, requiring more hostility than most people had access to do anything resembling serious damage to a mental projection. Tanya’s PSI blasts, on the other hand, could shatter stone and drill holes into tree trunks. She needed a second or two between blasts, but when you only needed one blast, that wasn’t exactly a problem. This projections… not quite that strong, but strong enough that Mila really doesn’t want to get hit by a second one.
Milla’s agent archetype re-integrated itself into Milla’s mind, sharing its conclusions with her. Tanya used to be a Japanese boy whose parents were the opposite of supportive, constantly pushing him to gain first place, which he never managed. He fell into a depression, which led to him becoming an underachieving corporate drone. He eventually was fired, and was shortly thereafter murdered by being shoved in front of a moving train. Tanya’s feelings about this are complicated, but primarily regret that she never accomplished anything.
It was an incomplete picture, but Milla was reasonably confident in her conclusions. She went to the central courtyard, where there was a statue of Tanya in Polite Castle. At the time, she thought it was a little strange how the statue was larger than Tanya in reality, but seemed quite small for the size of the pedestal. Here, the statue spot was instead the largest collection of cobwebs, and it was of a much greater size than the Tanya statue. It fit the pedestal nicely. Quite a few of the more confusing aesthetics could probably be explained by another castle’s reflection of the room, now that she thought of it.
The Heartless Machine steadily walked into the room with Sasha’s gait, copied precisely as it adjusted invisible glasses before launching another PSI blast that Milla ducked behind the cobwebs to avoid. It appeared to have learned its lesson on getting close to cobwebs, going around the courtyard trying to get a clear shot rather than allow Milla to get close now that Tanya was exposed. Milla kept going around the only piece of available cover to make sure it did not get that shot. A stalemate.
“Tanya?” Milla said loudly, looking for a response. “I know that you’ve had a rough time of things, darling, but sometimes you need to just let things out.” Milla ducked as the machine shot at her again. “Cry, scream, get mad! Life’s unfair, as you well know.” Milla leapt back from the statue as the machine used Sasha’s bouncing PSI blast trick.
Well, it appears that the machine forgot the first thing Milla used to deal with it. She launched a confusion grenade, stunning the machine. This time, Tanya seemed to be present enough to wake up. “After all, Tanya, Passion is the spice of life!” Milla released half of the flames she held from the last baggage and burned the cobwebs, taking the suitcase tag out and pressing it to the baggage revealed along with a giant statue of what Milla assumed was Tanya’s previous life, a tall, broad shouldered man wearing a business suit and trench coat. She immediately channeled all of the emotional energy at her fingertips into a pyrokinetic assault on the machine, which burned inside and out.
Derision. Contempt. Disregard. Pain. Regret.
A simple set of emotions, but with it came a memory as clear as any memory vault. “You heartless machine!” Shouted an angry man, eyes filled with tears as he left flanked by security guards. The memory jumped ahead. “Hey Deguchiya…” said the concerned voice of a Japanese man, thin and small. “...You did the best you could for him. It was his problem, and you did the right thing, letting him go. But… you should watch your back, okay? He seems like he might do something stupid.” The voice that the mental construct had been using, resounding in that special way that indicated first person speech, said the last line of the memory. “That layabout? I’m not concerned.”
Absently, Milla’s agent archetype updated her theory.
--------------------
[Tanya Dosva aka Tanya von Degurechaff aka Tenya Deguchiya]
It was hot. Not in the sense that she was on fire, although she technically was, but in the pulse-pounding way that was felt after a life and death battle.
Every time Miss Milla burned away the cobwebs, she did… something that heavily weakened the mental construct that had attempted to overwrite her with some flavor of madness. There were worse fates… well, the worse fates were all ‘the same thing but done by something even worse’, but that still left her inside of a bunch of molten metal that somehow burned with emotions she had not felt since the Great War.
What’s worse, is that every time that energy surged… she started remembering. Among the many indignities that Being X had inflicted upon her was to replace her memory of her name with the one he bestowed upon her. She always knew, in her second life, that her name was Tanya Degurechaff. Even before the nuns said it. Who she was before? As far as she could recall… Degurechaff Tanya. She even started referring to her previous life as ‘the Salaryman’ in order to distance herself from that violation.
She assumed that it wasn’t the only thing Being X did to her mind in the transition, but it was the only thing she could tell was obviously wrong. But now? It was aggravatingly close in sound to Tanya Degurechaff… But Tenya Deguchiya was a proper Japanese boy’s name, and it did make sense that Being X would pick a name as close to her old one as was plausible.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t all she started remembering. She looked upon her old life with rose-tinted glasses when she was in the war, and while it was better in every way… Even if she never had a subordinate as loyal and competent as Visha… Except for Visha, it was better in every way than her second life.
But that didn’t mean that she was happy, either. That it was a life well spent. She remembered that transformative lesson on economics that she, at one point, saw as the ultimate answer to human thought, the key that she had missed all of this time… The only difference between Tanya and other people was merely a different set of preferences, they weren’t fundamentally… wrong, or broken. But… the truth was… that they were.
Tanya reached up and pulled at the melting steel of the mental construct, shaping it around herself into armor… which somehow transformed her into her old body, cast in metal.
It didn’t feel right. It felt awkward, and wrong, with everything seeming tiny and insignificant when it shouldn’t be. Her limbs were too long and her legs didn’t move right. She remembered this wrongness, she felt it so keenly in the first several years of her second life. It went away… eventually. She chalked it up to hatred of being weak and helpless, and she couldn’t point to when exactly it fully faded, only that it was after the propaganda shoots, because she definitely still felt it when wearing that dress. But no, that misalignment was completely absent in her third life, even when she was helpless. She walked up to the statue of her old self, and felt anger build up in her chest. It was a familiar feeling, if one that she hadn’t felt in a long time. Back in the war, thinking about the General Staff, or the communists, or Being X felt like this. This was what Agent Boole was expecting her to feel, when he brought out the therapy puppet.
The anger built, tears flowing freely from her face as she considered the life of Deguchiya Tenya. “You were a fool.” She found herself saying. The words flowed from her mouth before she could fully consider them, unfiltered and raw. Her voice was the deep baritone of her first life, which prompted a shudder as the wrongness of it echoed throughout the room “You were born to a rich family, in a rich country, in a rich era. You were given healthy food and as much education as you could handle. You grew tall, and strong, as genetically lucky as you were economically.” After experiencing the poverty of being an orphan and the lower-middle at best lifestyle Miss Milla provided, Tanya couldn’t consider her first life as anything but rich. “But you wasted it. Impossible standards were set, and when you merely excelled, you broke. You had so many options to become somebody worth respecting, but you passed them up because you just… couldn’t handle it. Focusing on your worst skills so you could give yourself an excuse for failure.”
Tanya knew she was being unfair. Unlike now, she was actually a child back then. And those skills did come in handy when managing the 203rd. She also couldn’t call them her worst skills anymore, from those experiences. But few things indicated wisdom better than understanding that your past self was an idiot. That was one piece of wisdom that her old grandfather passed on, before he died. She didn’t care about the unfairness. No one else ever does. “Never in your life did you possess conviction, surrendering the idea of ambition. Only in death did you find a spine, in front of the most capricious and unfair authority that has ever existed. Even then, you backpedaled and begged for mercy, not like that bastard understands the definition of the word.” Tanya spat to the side, which didn’t make any sense but it was a mental world so Tanya didn’t bother questioning it. “You didn’t even grovel adequately, and to think, you thought yourself good at ass-kissing.”
Tanya knew that she was substantially more emotional in her second life than she was in her first. She stoked the flames of her spite for years as she grew up in that orphanage, and even the insincere prayers to draw out power from the type 95 didn’t diminish that hatred. She made far too many mistakes in her second life by acting without fully thinking through her options, arrogant in her assumptions and analysis.
But now? Being X had lost track of her. For this life, she was free. At least, until Mary’s prayer reached the bastard, but the fact that it wasn’t immediate was promising. There’s no way both Mary and X could resist immediately confronting Tanya at the first opportunity to gloat, so until that occurs…
Well, she should still stay prepared, just in case.
Tanya took a deep breath in an attempt to disperse the metaphorical flames in her chest. Smoke and red-hot embers escaped her metal mouth, instantly evaporating the tears. “I’m not you.” She said with finality. The metal armor instantly developed a massive crack on the face. “I’m stuck with you, but I refuse to be you.” Her real voice, high pitched with a deliberate roughness left over from her times as a drill sergeant, came out simultaneously with the deep voice of her first life. Another crack. “You are dust in the wind, dead and gone, your only legacy mere scraps of memory.”
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Idly, she noted that the mental cobwebs that were still visible from her location had started catching fire. No matter. “I will take no action to honor you, for you deserve none.” She said harshly, before taking another calming breath. “But neither will I act to spite you. You are someone who refused to reach to the limits of his grasp, who strived for the peace of nothingness.” Spending two lifetimes accumulating responsibilities in the name of eventually divesting them… it was so hypocritical. She sees that now. “That peace is the only request I will grant you.” The cracks in the metal shell multiplied, and Tanya pounded her chest with a fist to shatter it completely. The feeling of wrongness went with it, and she felt comfortable in her astral form once more. The final nail in his coffin.
“I will live a life of ambition!” Tanya announced, the masculine voice gone for good. “I will harness the power of dreams to create wonders so grand that even your world will weep in envy!” The mountains of cash that usable VR machines would produce… it was more than she could ever spend.
Tanya could feel a slight tremor. Kyomu castle was beginning to break apart. Well, that sounded appropriate. She seized the reins of the castle, stabilizing it for a moment. “Now… rest in peace.” She said with finality as she launched a PSI blast at the statue in time with breaking apart the castle.
“Tanya? What are you doing!” Miss Milla shouted over the din of the crumbling stone.
What? Oh. She heard all of that. Whoops.
----------------
After convincing Miss Milla to leave so Tanya could finish reorganizing Kyomu castle, she kept the mirror world theme and shaped it instead into a palace she called Yashin castle. Psychic construction was primarily fueled by imagination and intuition. As long as the system you came up with was both possible and sensible, it just happened. Yashin castle was designed to process all of those first life memories, archiving as much knowledge as possible while divesting it of emotional context, letting the emotional energy on the matter accumulate in a small shrine dedicated to her first life. Eventually, she’ll be able to transform the place into a more generalized archive for information, which should improve her retention of engineering knowledge. She’ll need that if she wants to accomplish her goals.
Miss Milla had gone ahead and handled the last outstanding emotional baggage in Kyomu while Tanya was talking to herself, which almost certainly cleared out the ‘blockage’ that Agent Boole had diagnosed. In a happy little accident, Milla seemed to think that Tanya only had the one previous life, which Tanya allowed her to believe… for now. With Mary around, she’ll probably have to come clean eventually. Just… not yet. Later. Much later.
In the meantime, one of the experiences from her first life seems to have made a reappearance: she has a hangover, presumably from the massive amount of sweat she was caked in as she tried to stand back up from the floor of the counselor’s room. Her head was pounding, colors were brighter, sounds were louder, and… “Lili, shut up!” Tanya snapped. She was quick to lash out.
“Eep!” Lili’s eyes widened as she backpedaled away from Tanya like she would an unexploded bomb. Was she really that scary?
Miss Milla whispered, although her voice was clear as day to Tanya’s oversensitive ears. “Lili, why don't you read True Psychic Tales number five? I know that one’s your favorite, darling.” Lili nodded furiously and ran back to the camper’s room in the girl’s cabin. “Tanya darling, a lot’s happened inside your head over the last however long it was. Give it time, and it’ll pass.” Miss Milla rubbed Tanya’s back as she tried to steady her breathing.
“Four raw eggs mixed in a 1-2 ratio of daikon brine, poured over eight hundred milliliters of sticky rice.” Tanya muttered, her old hangover breakfast. “Drink one liter of water while it cooks.” She continued. “For best results, mix in two hundred milliliters of the brine with the water.”
Miss Milla stared at Tanya. “...That sounds horrible.” She said, a look of disgust on her face. “Also, you can’t drink that much water.” She added.
“Right, I need to adjust for weight.” Tanya murmured. “One-thirty kilos then, forty-ish now… Just gimme a fourth of everything, this one’s not so bad.”
“Oh!” Miss Milla said, finally understanding Tanya’s request. “So that’s a hangover cure?” She asked, amused.
Ow. Ow. “Not so loud…” Tanya whined. “The storm’s bad enough, you know.” Tanya yelled in pain when the storm decided to make itself known with another crack of thunder. It resounded like an artillery shot that impacted close enough to shred a passive barrier.
“Well…” Miss Milla whispered. “I don’t think we have any of those except the eggs… and maybe the rice, but I’m sure Ford will be happy to whip you up a hangover cure of his own. I’ll go ask him.” She vanished in a teleport, something she usually preferred not to do, but apparently the rain was an exception.
Faintly, Tanya could make out Lili recounting an overblown and inaccurate story about what just happened in her head. “And then the robot was like ‘you’re fired!’ which was weird, but then there were censors everywhere! And I was like bam! Whack! Fwoosh!”
Mary’s voice was quieter, but still audible. “So there weren't any guns? Or soldiers? Or prayer? Nothing?” Oh, this was an unexpected benefit.
“Nnnnnope.” Lili replied. “Just office stuff. Not even Psychonauts office stuff, it was weird.”
“What about the first part?” Mary continued.
“Knights and castle stuff.” Lili said after a moment of thought. “And some stuff from the Motherlobe. OH!” Lili exclaimed suddenly, which sent off a lance of pain in Tanya’s head. “She also keeps her baby room in her mind, which is hilarious AND appropriate!” Damn it, Lili…
Mary sounded confused at that. “What? That’s normal, though. Isn’t it?”
“Oh, you too?” Lili said with glee. “No, Milla had her thinking face on when she saw it. That means it was super-weird.” Argh! Tanya didn’t even consider that. Not like it matters anymore, but it kind of ruins the point of Tatemae castle if it contains hints like that. She should change it to the room she shared with the other three girls in the group home. She had that one longer, even if she was rarely able to sleep while those girls were doing all that loud thinking.
“Yeah, there’s nothing like that in either of our minds.” Norma corroborated, presumably referring to her sister. “You saw that Sam’s mind didn’t have that either.”
Mary made… a sound of some kind. “I-it must be because I remember being a baby because I was already an adult at the time!” She insisted, which was probably correct. The weird part was probably that it was a clear memory.
“This again?” Sam said skeptically. “No one believes you, Mary.” A beat passed. “Except Lili. But she’s three.”
“I dunno…” Gisu said, uncertain. “It does kind of explain why she can speak Swedish.” So that’s what Legadonian was. “I asked Agent Nein, and he said that Mary’s American, without any family that speaks it. It’s real Swedish, too.”
“Have you heard what nonsense she’s made up about her past life?” Lizzie asked, scoffing. “Being a flying witch soldier in a fantasy world where all the countries have different names.”
“England is a stupid name for Albion.” Mary insisted.
“You just used a synonym for America!” shouted Sam. “Even the squirrels think that’s dumb!” There was some chittering.
“Woah, where did those come from!” Exclaimed Gisu.
“They were cold and wet!” Argued Sam. “And they agree with me.” Sam’s voice took on a menacing edge. “Right?” Various squeaks sounded out in agreement.
With a small pop, Miss Milla reappeared and handed Tanya some kind of shake. “This should help, Tanya.” Tanya then discovered that her oversensitive sensorium extended to smell as well, the nauseating odor from the concoction somehow rivaling the front lines… on a good day. At least it included brine somewhere in its recipe, or perhaps just pickles. She choked it down, long being used to enduring crappy food from her time in the army, followed by the slop the baby care industry calls food. It was a crime against taste, and the only thing that was better tasting in the early 20th century, when the nuns just mashed up real food.
Still, enduring such things didn’t usually end up with her convulsing from the horrible sensation. It was just… so terrible, her stomach rebelled as her sinuses burned, Tanya couldn’t quite explain why this was so much worse than the other things. It was somehow the most disgusting thing she had ever put in her mouth. Even worse than the foulest of Germanian sausages and K-Brot.
Miss Milla giggled at Tanya’s plight. After she managed to fully resist the urge to vomit up what she just drank, Tanya glared at the counselor. “This is one of those hangover cures that’s meant to get you to swear off drinking, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.” Miss Milla replied impishly. “Are you feeling better?”
Tanya stretched as she stood up, wincing as even that had intensified to be vaguely painful. “My head’s stopped pounding, at least.” She admitted. “Everything’s still too loud, though.” She added.
“About that.” Miss Milla said. “I took a peek at your senses with clairvoyance, and everything seemed normal.” Tanya stared at her in confusion. You could do that? “Meaning, your senses haven’t become oversensitive, they’ve just been impaired until now.” Ah, her dress was too bright. Tanya closed her eyes and rubbed at them. “I suspected it when I noticed how dull the colors were in your mind, and how everything seemed slightly muffled, but this just confirms it.” After a moment, she added: “You should also experience an increase in intelligence and psychic power, as any depression strong enough to psychically inhibit your senses should also impair your thinking in a more general sense.” Miss Milla snorted. “If you weren’t a genius before, you sure are now.”
Ah, right. “So… what happens now?” Tanya asked. “Now that you know… enough.” There wasn’t a single soul that knew about her first life until now. It was new territory… fear creeped in as her supposedly improved mind concocted scenario after scenario.
Miss Milla hummed at that. “I think… that things haven’t changed as much as you might think.” She eventually said. What? “You’re dedicated to starting your life over, and while normally I would say that you’re being a little extreme… These are extreme times, darling. Your schooling situation would need to be adjusted, and we’ll need to have several conversations later about this…” She patted her lap. “But I’m still willing to be your mom if you’re still willing to be my child. Remember, no one should be without a loving family.” Tanya’s chest felt like it was going to burst as Miss Milla echoed that line, the first rule of the group home she ran.
Tanya found herself taking Miss Milla up on the unspoken offer of a hug with no hesitation. Her traitorous tear ducts worked overtime as the simple act, done hundreds if not thousands of times, suddenly felt like clinging to a rock in the middle of a raging storm. All of the tolerance she had painstakingly built up to the addictive experience, gone. As if cued, a rumbling approach of thunder reminded everyone why they were inside.
How did it come to this?
----------------
Eventually, Tanya ended up falling asleep, exhausted from the events of the day. She woke up from her nap when dinner time came around. The storm was still going on, but it wasn’t that difficult to create a barrier large enough to act as an umbrella for everyone. Like before, everyone used Levitation to avoid touching the muddy ground, even if Lili and Gisu had to be carried/restrained in order to prevent them from jumping into the storm for fun.
“Come on girls, she can’t hold all of us!” Gisu shouted, pumping her fist like a communist as Tanya’s giant telekinetic hand around her legs kept her elevated.
The audacity! “I can, and I will.” Tanya said dangerously, growling in annoyance. With the intimidation being successful, the campers went to dinner without complaint.
Mary had sat down in front of Tanya after she was seated, waiting for Agent Cruller to deliver the food. Pizza, apparently. Tanya didn’t know how he managed to install a brick oven while it was raining, nor how he was able to acquire the ingredients, but didn’t question it. She assumed teleportation was involved. “So…” Mary said, buying time.
Annoyance spiked, bringing a scowl to Tanya’s face, but she smoothed out her expression and took a deep breath. That was an overreaction. “In case you were wondering, the cause of the incident with the emotional baggage has been diagnosed and treated. It shouldn’t happen again.”
“Oh!” Mary said, visibly cheered at the news. “Does that mean you’ll be helping Mr. Cook and Mr. Janitor too?”
Tanya nodded. “I’ll certainly try. Tomorrow, maybe the day after.” She said, rubbing her temples to emphasize her point. “There may be some side-effects of the treatment, it could impair my performance.”
“Is that why you cried yourself to sleep?” Mary asked, coughing awkwardly.
“Yes.” Tanya said immediately. “It was part of the treatment.” It was a small misrepresentation, but it was close enough to the truth. Speaking of, Tanya drank the diluted pickle brine that she requested from Agent Cruller. Delicious. Dehydration was an insidious malady, but at least it was easy to treat and prevent.
“I guess that makes sense…” Mary said, looking away. “...Do you think I’m crazy? Do you believe me?” She said, a pathetic look on her face.
Tanya choked as her heart tried to leap from her chest at the idea of denying Mary’s request. She was supposed to be immune to the kawaii eyes! Tanya checked to see if anyone else was listening in: Lili had decided to bother the siblings tonight, and everyone else was too wrapped up in their own interpersonal nonsense. She considered admitting about all the lies she’s fed that adorable little girl. Before she realized she was talking: “Yes, I believe you.” She said tiredly. “You really did have a past life in an alternate world, I’m sure of that much.” She added, to mitigate the disaster. Curse the return of her impulsiveness!
“Thank you, Degurechaff.” Mary said, sniffling.
“Don’t push your luck, May.” Tanya warned, responding in kind. “You’re still crazy, just not about reincarnation.”
Mary took her napkin and blew her nose with it. “Sasha was talking about getting me to skip grades if I already had the education, and I was thinking about how I wasn’t getting good grades in school, and… If I really did go to school before, why is it so hard?”
Tanya rolled her eyes. It was obvious. “What year did you say you were from?” She asked, leading her to the proper conclusion.
“I died in 1929.” Mary replied despondently. At least she missed the Great Depression. The stock market crash was, surprisingly, on schedule, and it contributed to how disastrous the logistics situation was on the Eastern Front.
“It’s been fifty years.” Tanya pointed out. Closer to sixty since she was in the same grade, really. “Educational standards have increased, and if you were a child soldier like you claimed, you probably weren’t that great of a student then, either.” Tanya couldn’t exactly comment on the state of public education in her second life, but Mary was in America. She didn’t have a notice of future conscription to justify her decision to enlist. No one with a bright academic future would make such a decision.
“So I’m just stupid?” Mary said, even more miserable as tears fell from her eyes.
Tanya’s traitorous tongue refused to agree with her accurate statement. Damn those kawaii eyes… How to end this… “You have knowledge you’ve never learned in this life. How to maintain a firearm, how to dig a trench…” Or at least, Tanya assumed she had to go through basic training. Also, the math knowledge should come in handy at some point, assuming she didn’t just pray her way out of needing to know what she was doing. “How to speak your native tongue. Whether other people believe that you learned these things in this life or not is irrelevant. The knowledge is real. Thus, the memories are real.” There, an unassailable logical premise. She was excellent at giving advice.
“Thank you…” Mary said again, sniffling. “You’re a lot nicer than I thought you would be.”
Why did Tanya get the feeling that this was going to explode at the worst time?