She was awakened again, as she had requested, when the sun was already high in the sky and her sore limbs ached as she got up to stretch. The carriage was still imprinted on her backside, she could tell.

Only Ava was there to help her wash and dress. And when she went down to the dining room, she knew what was going to happen.

Norina, who came in with a cart and a kitchen maid in tow, smiled brightly when she saw her mistress.

"Good morning, Lady Rowena," she said, though she rarely used her name to address her, "I made sure to get all your favorites for your first day."

She emphasized the words just as another figure appeared in the doorway behind her. "Just hers?" Colin said, pretending to be a wee bit fazed by the remark.

And when she sat down to be served, he placed himself right in front of her, on the other side of the narrow but long table, since she hadn't chosen the master seat.

Several plates with different dishes were placed between them. Colin didn't even know what to look at first. This was a Sunday lunch on a Monday, but instead of just pork, potatoes, vegetables and gravy, there was also steak, and he even saw a crab consommé.

Rowena, on the other hand, secured the map that had been placed softly next to her plate and silverware before she could get engrossed in her lunch and forget about it. "Thank you."

It took about ten to fifteen minutes for the older brother to realize where he was wrong. When he had sat down, he had expected the kitchen to be over-prepared, now that not one but two Varnhagen heirs had graced them with their presence.

But he had known something was wrong the moment the blonde maid had looked at him with such badly concealed smugness.

She was young, so subtlety was probably not her strong suit. 'It really was brought just for her?'

As he watched his irregularly small little sister wolfing down plate after plate with barely enough elegance to call it "manners", he had to understand where that smugness came from. In fact, he had to wave down the kitchen maid who had come up with the annex maid to get some food as well.

"You... do have an appetite today. What happened?"

"Hm?" Rowena looked at him with a blank stare, wondering why he was bothering her while she was eating, when she suddenly remembered that she had told him to talk to her during lunch somehow. 'Tough luck, I thought he would forget about it. I sure did.'

"I was just wondering if the trip up north had really taken its toll on you." Maybe that was why she was so mellow now?

Rowena herself wasn't exactly interested in arguing with anyone during her first meal of the day, she still had to meditate, and she wanted to figure out a way to find Ansgar, the blacksmith from the book.

But first, she concentrated on the magnificent steak in front of her. She really did get everything she liked best, as one would expect from Norina. As she chewed happily, she didn't notice the suspicious look that was shot at her from the other side of the table, only interrupted when a new plate was placed between them.

When her brother started to eat his pork chops with potatoes, he resorted to giving her the stink eye instead of actually nagging her, because there was nothing else he could say. He had actually come here to scold her for the things she had done this time, for she had gotten herself into deep trouble for once.

She hadn't been particularly easy to deal with over the past few years, but the way she hid in her annex made her position as the only biological daughter of the Grand Duke of Varnhagen impregnable. But while Colin himself, as well as their first brother Alan, had already found their place in the future of the family and the Empire at large, she was the only one without a purpose.

Not that he would force her, they had enough wealth, but she wouldn't live it down to become known in society as the crazy annex lady. It was also damaging to the family name. Marrying the crown prince and bearing the heir to the Empire would be one way to avoid that fate.

But the Emperor had already set his sights on something else, using her as a scapegoat to cover up a deal between the Arlen Empire and Lodden. Now that even the Crown Prince didn't seem to want Rowena anymore, and rumors of his interest in the Saintess had gotten loud, there was no way their engagement would be announced at her social debut.

A debut that had already been postponed from this summer to next spring, even though she would be eighteen by then. It would be obvious to nobles with even the slightest sense that something wasn't right.

Frowning, he stared holes into his meat as he tried to cut it with far too much force. "You're going to break the table," Rowena dropped nonchalantly, before silently dabbing her lips with a napkin, eyes closed as if she hadn't said anything at all, to get rid of the grease.

"I won't," he replied, sounding a bit offended for real this time, "so are you going to tell me what you needed a map for now?"

She opened exactly one of her eyes to look at him. "Have I not already told you?"

"Not that I remember."

"Good," she said, closing the eye again and getting up from her seat, grabbing the infamous map, "because I still can't remember when that became any of your business, Young Master Colin. Now, will you excuse me?"

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"Wait," the lavender-haired boy who looked nothing like her raised his voice, startling his sister across the table, "I mean it, you can't leave the chateau. If I have to follow you wherever you go to make sure you don't, I will."

"Be my guest," she said coldly, turning away and walking out of the dining room. 'Seriously, what did he even want?'

Her brother couldn't quite fathom all the ways this had gone wrong, but he decided to just stick to his word instead of wallowing in his loss. Meanwhile, Rowena returned to her assigned room, obviously the original Rowena's bedroom, sat down at her desk and took out a quill.

There was something she wanted, and she had to make sure she got it. Starting with a blueprint was her first step towards getting just that. A ruler at hand, along with a graphite pencil and a few other simple tools from her drawer, she scribbled away.

Norina, who had cleaned up the rest of the mess they had made by putting away her mistress' clothes a little faster than planned, wondered what said mistress had been working on all this time. Then again, it was not her place to know.

"Norina," the blonde maid heard and sharpened immediately, "could you get me some matches?"

Since she had a set of sealing wax and even the tools to use it in her workspace, but nothing to actually light a fire and melt that wax, she was in a bind.

"Right away, my lady," Norina replied, diligent as she was, and hurried into the kitchen where she knew she would find what her mistress was looking for. Again, she wondered what for, but she didn't think it would be anything too serious after all.

"Matches?"

The questioning word, uttered by none other than her colleague Ava, made the younger maid smile and say: "For Her Ladyship."

"Does she want to set the room on fire after all?" It wasn't a mocking tone, in fact, she said it very matter-of-factly, tilting her head.

"What? No!" But Norina didn't see it as anything but slander. "How could you say that?"

Ava, who knew she had said that to the wrong person the moment the words had left her mouth, already held her arms up in defeat. "Don't get mad, I was just joking." Although she wasn't.

Norina smacked her shoulder twice for it anyway, then stormed off, ready to return to her mistress with the matches. It would be a lie to say that she hadn't thought of a similar reason, but the way her mistress had asked for them, and the way her pen had been scratching over the paper for at least three hours, there was no connection to any ill feelings.

As she handed over the goods, she stood right next to her and involuntarily looked at what was lying on the tabletop in front of her. "Is that... a sword?"

Blinking, Rowena looked at the young maid after her pupils had probably dilated from the way she had glued her face to the paper for a while. "Yes."

The blade drawn on the paper at various angles had a strange shape that Norina had never seen before. It was strangely pointed, but from the very straight edge at the top, it went diagonally down to meet the bottom edge, making it look quite angular. And in the drawing, it looked like there was only one truly sharp edge, the bottom one, to begin with.

It was as if someone had forged a very straight blade with no tapering, with just one sharp edge, and then cut off the front part of the sword diagonally to hide the fact that it didn't have a tip. It was simply strange to her, and there was no better way to describe it.

To Rowena, her puzzled face made sense. 'No airplanes, no Asian swords. On the other hand, did they have katana blades in this world? They were never mentioned.' She thought for a second. 'That, and this type of blade was derived from the Japanese, but westernized by the Americans, so maybe it's just a thing that wouldn't exist here in this specific form, since the people aren't the same.'

What they were both looking at was a short, straight tanto blade, a type of blade that was very good at cutting, but especially at stabbing and prying. The original ones weren't as angular as the westernized version, the belly of the blade was still the slightest bit rounded, even in the Shinogi style that most resembled this one. 'Also, tantō literally means 'short sword', because they were essentially daggers, while mine will be ninety centimeters, with a blade of sixty centimeters and a handle of thirty centimeters. To have that kind of sword here would mean that they were treading the same path as us, even in such small details.'

Almost everything that was eerily similar still had those tiny details that were different. Starting with their improved electricity compared to the Victorian era of Celia's world, and their use of Mana Stones in so many ways, they weren't quite the same.

So what about those specific things that were entirely up to the people of certain cultures going their own way?

'It has happened before. Though it is rare.'

'Your input is getting more and more random, you know that?'

He didn't answer. She shook her head and sighed.

But it really was a chore. She had to stretch her arms and back just to sit up straight. On her first draft, she'd accidentally used inches for the measurements on the paper, which meant she had to start over because she didn't want to start explaining what that meant. It was grueling.

In a sense, this was similar to a weapon she had been graciously given by the government, namely VAULT, as she was one of their employees. It suited her fighting style, but the materials and craftsmanship were shamelessly cheap. So she had to opt for a new one at her own expense, paid for out of her already meager income as an in-house Executor.

When she opened the map she had received, while Norina was still busy trying to understand her mistress's drawing, explanations about a core and the distribution of materials and how they blended into each other.

Rowena had already seen the map when she looked at it shortly after lunch, but now she actually had to figure out a way to get to this once infamous village of blacksmiths without her older brother noticing.

She inhaled and exhaled deeply, feeling the flow of Mana around her body, tingling her skin as if asking for an invitation, but she wasn't inviting. She tried to figure out the flow of Mana in her room, which was possible since there was no great fluctuation.

Mana was energy, and it was everywhere, but when someone left their own residue behind, it was like solid matter without being solid matter at all.

Strong winds could obstruct the Mana in the atmosphere, as everything in the world carried a bit of Mana itself. You could wash Mana away if you wanted to. It wouldn't disappear completely, but it would dilute it by spreading it everywhere, making it impossible to track.

Right now, though, she was in a quiet room with only one other person, which made it easy to notice the trace of Magic left by her door. Someone had used Magic right outside her room.

It had seeped into the ground, and she assumed it had turned the floor into an open wound. Every time someone stepped on it, it would begin to hurt and alarm its owner.

It was a simple way to use Intention, but he must have put a lot of Mana into it, which was probably why he hadn't done it anywhere else. 'Or he simply didn't want me to know. Sneaky bastard.'

Anyway, she wasn't going to fall for it. If he wanted to be petty and try to have his "got'cha" moment with her, he would soon realize that he had picked the wrong opponent. But if he wanted to catch her so badly, she would give him what he asked for.