Chapter 3: Chapter 2: Growing, learning and anticipating

By the time she was twelve years old, Alice was considered a bright and kind child. As everyone said, she was small for her age. With her pure white hair and her green eyes, she was adorable and, although she was quite frail, she had already received some marriage proposals. However, since it wasn’t rare for children to dedicate themselves to learning as much as possible before their awakening, she had an excuse for not thinking about marriage at all, and she always got away with it.

Moreover, in the house of Ravendall, Alice was only the daughter. Alistair, Alice’s little brother and the son of Edgar and Leila de Ravendall, was the main individual to target for a marriage. Hence, marrying their daughter before finding a fiancée for their son was not a priority.

 

During the last two years, Alice learned to accept herself and what she liked, and she tested for herself almost everything she wanted to try. She had managed to make peace with her identity issues since she still felt like being herself. At some point her normal dreams, not related to her former self in any way, had even started to occur at night again. She thus decided to continue her notebook of dreams by writing about them in detail.

For the last two years, like almost all children of nobility, Alice had also begun her studies with some tutors in order to educate herself and develop an interesting magic. 

Without much surprise, possibly because of her former self’s preferences, her favorite subject was physics over biology, geology, mathematics and the likes.

On many subjects, she actually knew even more than her tutors. For instance, not all kingdoms believed that their planet was orbiting around their star. In the past, the end of Geocentrism in this world even started religious wars between some countries. 

At least, Alice thought, the Ouronia Kingdom was one of the kingdoms where Heliocentrism was taught to children. Even so, the specialists didn’t know much about space in general. 

They had no robust method to accurately tell the distances between their planet and the distant stars, and they could barely distinguish these stars from other planets of the solar system. 

Astrophysics was her former self’s speciality, and Alice had to agree that the subject was fascinating, so it was annoying to her that scientists were not willing to discover new things in this domain. 

Even worse, when one of the tutors was teaching her the constellations, the lessons were mostly about astrology, as if it was a totally normal thing.

(Why are they teaching me this BS? Are they dumb? What magic type are they even expecting me to get with this?)

Just as she was reading a book about astrology, someone knocked at her door. Upon being told to enter, a maid slowly bowed her head.

[“Lady Leila requested to meet you soon, my Lady, if you’re not too busy at the moment.]

[Sure, I don’t mind.”]

(Frankly, I’m glad to have an excuse to stop reading this book.)

As the maid guided her, Alice saw her parents sitting down and waiting for her. 

Her father, Edgar de Ravendall, looked calm and collected, with a smile on his face. His eyes were the color of gold and he had pitch black hair. He was a good looking noble and appeared to be quite sturdy. His skin was pretty tanned, surely because his job required him to move a lot within the kingdom in order to meet people. 

Her mother, Leila de Ravendall, was quite the beauty. She had blue eyes and the same white hair as Alice. She was pretty tall for a woman, to the point of being nearly the same height as her husband Edgar. She too had a slight smile on her face but Alice could see that she also frowned a little.

[“Good morning Ally, did you sleep well? Aren’t the lessons too hard for you?]

[Thanks to my tutors, I am able to learn a lot of different subjects that I like. I don’t mind the lessons being difficult.]

[You heard her, Leila. Alice, I was told multiple times by your tutors that you are a smart girl. If you want, some of them suggested accelerating the pace of your lessons.]

[Thank you Father, but the current pace is fine. I can learn just enough to not be late in my studies while enjoying the tutoring.]

[Indeed, I believe it should be enough to learn the minimum amount of subjects required for nobles in time for your awakening. This leads us to the reason we have called for you even though you were reviewing your lessons. I have been told today the exact date for your coming of age ceremony. It will be held in two and a half years, exactly one week before you turn fifteen.”]

(So, they’re planned years in advance? Talk about organization. What happens if a noble child dies before then?)

[“I will have to finish my studies in the meantime then.]

[Be sure to tell your tutors and us what subjects you prefer, Ally. This way, we might focus on these ones and less on others so that you can work in good conditions.]

[Thank you, Mother. For the time being, I’m not so sure what I prefer and I would like to continue discovering new subjects. I am not really interested in astrology, though.]

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[I was not fond of this subject either when I was your age. For now, keep on learning a lot, my daughter. We will discuss this again some other time. You can go now."]

***

The young lady was seated on her couch in her room. She was supposed to read books about fire magic, but she probably already understood it better than some specialists.

Still, there were various individuals who knew at least as much as her about fire.

In this world where knowledge was equivalent to versatile magic, mages used their own magic to experiment on themselves, thus furthering their own comprehension of their elements. 

They did not do this only for themselves though, since their magic could hardly change after the awakening. Instead, mages did it for their children and the future generations. By gathering knowledge, future mages would understand even better various phenomena and could get stronger or more refined magics than previous generations. That was a virtuous circle.

This was the reason why the way fire could manifest was quite known and its history was well described in Alice’s study book. It even included previous theories that were refined or replaced decades after.

For example, specialists had at first thought of something strongly resembling the phlogiston theory that was proposed on Earth: in the past, mages thought that all matter contained more or less of an unknown and invisible substance that was called phlogiston back on Earth. As such, inflammable objects were thought to have a lot of this substance, making them burn easily. Then, it would be released in the air and the fire would stop after all the phlogiston-like substance left the object.

Decades later, discoveries were done almost in the same way as Lavoisier did on earth, with the fire being seen instead as a self-perpetuating reaction between the air and a fuel, which was initially triggered by being heated. They suspected that the intensity of the reaction depended on the very structure of the object. 

Alice thought that they were close to discovering atoms and molecules and that it would be useful for understanding oxidation and the very nature of heat. After all, if they knew cold and hot temperatures were the two sides of the same coin called molecular agitation, future generations might be able to combine ice and fire elements into one magic type.

 

(Alright, now that the date of my coming of age ceremony has been decided, it’s time to think about what element I would like to get!)

Imagining way more advanced magic types made Alice want to chose her ultimate cheat magic.

(I would like to have an Item Box. Don’t they always get something like this when they transmigrate into another world? It would be hard to get something like that to work, though. I would need to have a pocket dimension accessible by a portal.) 

Even on Earth, it was impossible to create such a thing or even confirm that it was possible. Some crossable wormholes were theorized and could work on paper, but it seemed impossible in reality since negative energy would be necessary for the gate to remain stable. Alice thought that the idea of connecting many points by distorting spacetime was pretty cool, so she was a bit disappointed. Still, although general relativity was good, the best power she could imagine was found within special relativity.

She was thinking about time dilation. While it was also a thing in general relativity with gravitation, which even had a famous movie in space about it, she thought this phenomenon was much more elegant and simple in special relativity. Indeed, it was simply one variable called the Lorentz factor that would change depending on the speed of a system relative to another. For example, a person who was immobile on Earth would have a Lorentz factor of 1, meaning that one second for them would be exactly one second for the rest of the world. However, by moving faster, the value of the factor would ever so slightly increase. If you were moving at lightspeed, however, the Lorentz factor would be infinite. As such, a fraction of a second for the one moving would take an infinite amount of time for the rest of the world, making any displacement in space instantaneous for the caster. If Alice was able to freely manipulate her own Lorentz factor without having to move, thanks to magic, she would be able to manipulate her own proper time as much as she wanted, effectively changing the flow of time of the world.

Even though such a magic would not really be affecting the whole universe but only the way time flowed for the caster, it would look exactly like it.

This was the perfect superpower Alice’s former self imagined after learning about it in college. After all, if you could basically stop the entire universe, you were invincible in combat. It was the perfect cheat.

For hours, Alice just sat on her couch thinking about any magic type she could imagine, and how she would use her powers in many situations.

 

By the time she stopped thinking about this, her maid came to get her to the dining room, where she would eat with her parents.

Just as Alice was calmly walking, a frown appeared on her face. Feeling her whole body trembling and a sharp pain in her head, she immediately fell on the floor without any warning.

[“M-my Lady, what happened?! Somebody, please help Lady Alice!”]

Terrified, the maid didn’t know what to do in this situation and looked like she was about to cry. She tried checking the temperature by putting her hand on Alice’s forehead, and realized that her master had a very severe fever that put her unconscious in just mere seconds, even though she seemed perfectly fine a minute ago.

As they were near the dining room, butlers, maids and even the Count along with the Countess came over.

[“Ally! Where are you hurt?!”]

Even though her mother was screaming just next to her, she didn’t move an inch.

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