It would be several weeks after the ball that the second major incident occurred. This time our family would be hosting a grand dinner, attended by many high and important officials. Not the crown prince – he had many duties that precluded his company – but the third prince, the youngest – as well as the prime minister and his son. Unlike the crown prince there was no tense relationship between them and my sister. Indeed there was very little association at all. She had little reason to associate with them, or so I thought.
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The grand dinner started as per tradition, a dignified and somber affair. But this adherence to etiquette would soon be upended by my sister’s unorthodox approach to high society. Hitherto her lapses of etiquette had been small affairs, easily ignored by my parents, easily forgiven by wide society, and only rousing any form of doubt in my own self. But now my sister - either through highly doubtful incompetence or through reckless intentionality – committed several large mistakes in short succession. First she ignored the standard seating arrangements, placing herself opposite to the grand minister's son, leaving me entertaining an awkward and embarrassed aunt whose seat had just been stolen. Secondly she had chosen to adorn herself not with a subtle and reserved dress fitting the more private and ostensible less formal affair of a house dinner, but rather with a dress much reminiscent of the one she wore at the grand ball. The scandalous nature of which was soon upended by her repeated interruptions in the discussion between the grand minister and my father. A girl of sixteen should not participate in advanced discussions of national economics but if she were to do so she should certainly not participate in them with an ease and cunning that matched men three times her age. So witty was her repertoire that she had soon pulled in the grand minister’s son into the conversation. And he was younger than she was. At least he did not display knowledge far in advance of his years, though that in itself did not do the exchange many favors. And worse still it did not take long for the shock, mild horror, and stunned surprise of my sister's eccentric behavior to be replaced by an impressed admiration of her eloquence, first from my parents, then my relatives and the guests and finally by the servants in the room. I appeared to be the only one to find little charm in my sisters quite strange degree of knowledge. It was as if her intellect had become an entirely separate entity from her own self, driving her into strange patterns of thoughts and behavior. And while her grasp of dry topics such as national economics should have been far beyond her years, her grasp of basic dining etiquette was atrocious. And this was something she had first learned as she was able to speak, while the first time I’d seen her crack open a book on economics beyond her standard coursework was little over a month ago. This was the moment I fully resolved to investigate similar cases to my sister. If it really was her great fever that had precipitated her great change then there must surely be other instances where similar events had transpired. By the end of the dinner my sister had quite charmed not only most of the guests but in particular the leading minister of our grand kingdom as well as his son. This however would not be the end of her new found desire for increasing her personal array of well-connected associates.
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After the events of the grand dinner I slowly started to shift from my passive observation to more active research. Admittedly my initial forays into this were haphazard and hesitant. I simply did not know what to look for. I spent many days in the library, trying to find examples of similar personality shifts in other cases. And while I found nothing explicit, after a while I started to sense a sort of pattern to various incidents across many times and places. While nothing definite was jotted down in those great tomes, there were incidents that might be similar to what had happened to my sister. I could find little connection between them and they seemed to occur with no specific limitations in regards to what era of history or what locale or country they occurred in. However there was something there, some subtle shifts in historical events, or at least the appearance thereof. But I could not say for certain that my logic was sound. Indeed it appeared to me that I was merely filling in what I wanted to see, that I might have unintentionally picked out cases that fit this pattern, instead of discerning the pattern from the cases that I found. Simply put I needed a definite instance of a similar incident, some clear-cut shift in a person’s sensibility from which to compare with my own observations and extrapolate potential future events. But my research was forced to be put on hold as the next great event my family was set to participate in approached. An event I found I had started to dread, so expectant was I that my sister would do something strange.
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The winter tournament was an annual competition among all of the kingdom’s top knights. The flags swung high in the cold air, and the skies were a brilliant blue as we took our seats. The intense cold was amply kept at bay by my large fur robe, with only my nose being slightly cold in the clear air. My sister however shivered next to me, her lighter fur robe somewhat inadequate. Having grown used to her new ways I quickly noted her new ’target’. She paid special attention to the young son of the knight captain. The poor boy had earned quite the honorable distinction of being the youngest knight to earn his rank, but his connection to his father had sent many crude tongues wagging, speaking of the inherent nepotism of such an act. Being familiar with the young man’s skill with a sword I looked forward to him silencing such vulgarity. In truth even if my sister had not gazed at him with such excited eyes I believe I could have predicted where her attention would come to rest. She seemed to have cultivated a deep interest in the sons of our kingdom’s most powerful families. But to what end? And how would she possibly approach the young knight errant? The answer to the latter question would come quite soon, and the answer to the former would come far too late. As we found our seats my sister was nowhere to be found. She must have wandered off almost immediately. My father dispatched the manservant to find her and we settled in to watch the great event. As the introductory displays of martial skill and opening speeches were starting up we spotted our darling sister at the front of the pack. She had strapped a sword to her waist. This greatly disconcerted our parents, and my father hurriedly left the stands to go and collect his daughter before she hurt herself. She did manage to go through the introductory swordfights before he managed to extract her from the situation. But whatever scolding she was about to get was delayed by the approach of the knight captain's son, and the praise he offered for my sister's beautiful swordplay. But my sister did not know how to wield a sword, of this I was absolutely certain. As the worries of my parents eased my own only increased.
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It would not be until our entrance into the Royal Academy several months later that I first discovered a fracture in my sister's otherwise so thoroughly solid masque. The Royal Academy was the preeminent educational institution in the entire kingdom. A select elite of the nation's finest prospects were allowed entrance each year and indeed even our prestigious lineage could not guarantee a spot within its honored halls. It was therefore with a great sense of pride I had entered this ancient institution. But my pride was marred by the distance I felt to my sister. She had quite taken to the social aspects of school life - aspects I could not measure up to – and as she quickly ingratiated herself with the various cliques of the school I found myself in solace. I did not overly mind being a shadow in comparison to my sister but losing her company stung even with all the odd occurrences in the last few months. But even with all that had been going on I would never have been able to predict what would happen next. We had only been going to the academy for a few weeks. Spring had come and I had taken to reading in the internal courtyard of the Academy during lunch and other moments of free time. The early warmth hailed of the coming summer, the sun shone high as birds sang in the trees. As I sat pondering the tome I had selected for the afternoon – a soft discourse on an ailment of the mind rendering the individual prone to hallucinations and odd delusions – I spotted from one end of the garden my sister walking by, chatting idly with two girls from her new entourage. From the other end of the garden I saw what looked to be a lowborn girl, dressed in the cheaper version of the Academy uniform, dark gray with none of the usual accruements. It was not only her dress that pegged her as a lowborn, her brown hair was short in a page cut, and she walked stooped over, looking into the ground. Only half a year ago I would have expected my sister to walk past her without giving her a second glance, and even now I half expected my sister to start up an idle conversation but to my surprise neither reaction occurred. As soon as my sister spotted the woman she stopped in her tracks, an expression of shock and what I could only read as fear overtaking her. Giving her companions some quick excuse she stayed behind, and as soon as those girls turned their backs to her she hid in the shrubbery. My sister, proud, confident, and fearless, squatted down behind a bush and hid. The commoner girl walked past me, lent me a soft smile in greeting and sat down next to a nearby tree. She set up to have a light lunch in the solitary courtyard in a display I felt oddly similar to my own relaxed reading. Meanwhile my sister climbed up a window on the side of the courtyard to make a quick getaway, preferring this to being seen by the poor girl. Confounded beyond my means to express it in words I hesitated for a few minutes before standing up to approach the girl, and with a nervous wave of my hand in greeting, and with an equally nervous smile asked if I could sit down with her for a while. Carmen – as was her name – turned out to be a moderately interesting sort. A talented lowborn granted access to the Academy on a stipend, quite the impressive feat. Yet aside from her natural talents and high intelligence I could spot nothing that would inspire such craven behavior in my sister. Indeed her skillful nature made her appear to me as more likely to be a target of my sister, similar to those other prestigious sons she had already bound to herself across this last half a year or so. Though a lowborn woman would have little connections to the upper crust of society, and that may be the most important priority of my sister. Regardless in my loneliness I had found an interesting acquaintance, and I would come to spend a few odd evenings throughout the coming months conducting idle conversation with her. Yet my sister's reaction could never quite leave me. Certainly my sister had never met this woman, Carmen Mores. And yet she immediately recognized her and reacted in a manner she had never done before.
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My tension only continued to increase, until my eerie dread and nervous curiosity had metastasized into a near uncontrollable obsession. I needed to understand the true nature underlying her recent behavior. The half-formed and unnamed suspicions which had swirled within me for so long had grown to the point I needed a release. I needed to know.