I pushed the doors of the Bracklin mansion open with wind magic and flew in with a bang. I stayed hovering in the air as I threw my arm out and shouted.

"We are now commencing a full audit of Blianca's finances! Anyone who can read and write is excused from all other duties immediately!"

And with that announcement, the mansion went into an uproar where no one slept for several days.

Mother was shocked at first, but her face turned sour as I told her about the unfixed infrastructure and the epidemic sweeping through the slums and immediately went to work.

I had all the reports rewritten into the same form templates I put in place back at the royal capital, and ordered that all future reports be arranged the same way. Even the little kids I picked up in Windal helped transcribe reports a bit, as it was a way for them to practice writing letters and numbers while supervised. I tried not to work them hard, but they were fast learners and were eager to improve. Marina, meanwhile, was a beast. She scanned through documents like they were nothing and was quick to spot trends and inconsistencies. Her vast knowledge from reading all the time also helped her devise various explanations and procedures. And she was a real ten year old genius. I shudder to imagine how much scarier she would be if she had cheat-like memories and abilities like I did.

"Ojou-sama, these reports don't add up."

"Go down to the office and find the people responsible."

"Ojou-sama, these bridges were reported to have been fixed."

"I literally tripped on one of them yesterday, find out who wrote those reports."

"Ojou-sama, a lot of money has been sent to these noble's stores for trivial things."

"Send in our spies."

I sighed and clutched my head. It was numbers, numbers, numbers, day in day out. I'm sick of numbers! Yet the stack of papers on my desk are ever growing! It was a blessing that the maids that came to the Bracklin house were mostly well educated girls from lower ranking noble or merchant houses, since it gave me a lot of manpower to use. I made sure to stress that if they leaked any info to their houses it would be the end of them though.

Alfus gracefully walked through the hastily arranged desks and struggling servants to bring me tea.

"Thank you, Alfus."

"Tiana-sama, a group of... rather unsavory people showed up claiming to know you."

"Huh?"

I walked over to the window and used my telescopic light magic to stare at the gate. It was Rohan's rowdy band.

I sighed. "Well, they know me all right. Bring them to a guest room."

Alfus bowed and left, and after a while a maid informed me that the guest room was prepared. I took a break from my work and went to meet with Rohan and the others. There were fewer of them left from when I last saw them in Windal, and their ragged appearances looked severely out of place in the fancy guest room.

"What do you want with me?" I asked as I sank into the sofa across from Rohan and sipped my tea.

"You just left without saying anything, it took me a while to find out where you were," said Rohan.

"I didn't think there was anything left to be said."

"We finished up with the immediate rescue and repair efforts at Windal. Some of us stayed behind there, but I felt like coming and seeing if I could be of use to you."

I wriggled my eyebrow. "Why?"

Rohan shrugged. "Just thought it felt like a good idea."

I was about to turn them away, but then it hit me that I needed more people right now. "Can you read and write?"

"Yeah. A few others can too." Rohan nodded at the men behind him.

"Good, you're helping me with my audit."

Rohan's jaw fell. "Helping with your what now?"

I stood up and pointed at the ones that couldn't read. "You guys do the usual maid duties while this is going on - bring people drinks, help carry stuff around, clean, that kind of thing."

"Why the hell do we have to become maids?!" asked one of the former bandits.

"If you don't like it then learn to read and write! There's no time to waste, let's get to it." I left the guest room and led Rohan and the few literate ones to where we were sorting documents, while Alfus took care of leading the illiterate.

More manpower acquired.

Rohan proved himself to be useful pretty quickly, delivering reports and analyses to my desk frequently. I raised an eyebrow as I read through them.

"You're a rather smart sonuvabitch aren't you, Rohan?" I asked. "How did someone like you end up a bandit?"

He made a self deprecating laugh and sat down in a chair across from my table. "I used to be part of a merchant family. But, well, sometimes life deals you a bad hand. Shit happens."

"I know how that goes."

He scoffed. "How would a young rich ojou-sama like you know anything about that?"

I gave him a dark smile. "You don't have to believe me if you don't want to. You wouldn't believe me even if I told you the reason. I'll just say that I've seen some shit, been through some shit."

I guess he saw something in my eyes, because he didn't argue and meekly backed down.

I resumed writing as I kept talking to him. "How bad were the crimes of you and your boys?"

He sighed. "Mostly just looting and robbery. We do what we can to get by."

"Don't sugarcoat it," I snapped. "I may look like this but I'm not ignorant of the world."

"I'm not." He shrugged. "I'll throw your words back at you and say you don't have to believe me if you don't want to. But I never did any of what you're imagining to women and children. Strictly ordered my men not to do so too."

I looked up from the documents in front of me. "Why?"

Rohan closed his eyes. "I used to have a wife and daughter. They were both greedy and bossy. You remind me of them, actually." He laughed. "I think that's why I helped out at Windal, and what made me look for you here. It's a stupid reason, isn't it? But I just felt like following you. Odd for me to be a sentimental idiot, right?"

"It's not a stupid reason."

"If you say so."

An uneasy silence hung between us.

"Well, don't expect me to call you 'papa' or anything," I joked.

Rohan laughed. "I wouldn't want to hear words like that out of the jaws of little miss savage."

"How ironic, a bandit calling me savage. I'm just an innocent little noble girl."

"An innocent little dual-wielding magic-casting noble girl."

I snorted.

Rohan sat forward in his seat and leaned his arms against his knees. "Even if you can only give us a pittance, please give us a job."

"I'll think about it. It'll depend on your team's performance in this next job."

"What job?"

I handed over a stack of papers. "Infiltrate the darker side of Blianca and report back to me."

A few days after Rohan's group showed up, I received another set of visitors.

Lumina ran towards me and half-tackled-half-hugged me the moment her carriage door flung open.

"Tia! You're okay! Thank goodness you're okay!" She cried into my shoulder as her arms crushed my ribs.

"Lumina! What are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to stay in the capital?" I asked.

"I had this sudden dream, something happened and you were in pain, it felt so real, I just had to!" She sobbed.

I was touched, but also confused. They wouldn't let the crown princess travel on a whim like that.

My father emerged from the carriage behind her. "When we investigated, we found that the timing matched the incident in Windal. I'm glad to see that you're okay, Tia." He pat my head.

"Thanks, but I didn't think even you would-" My eyes snapped open wide. "Let's go get a room." I held Lumina's hand and quickly dragged her to an unused room as my father followed. My mother and Marina were also there to greet Lumina, and I let them stay but chased away everyone else before erecting a sound isolating wind barrier.

I held a hand to my head. "Instantaneous transfer of information over long distances. That's your unique magic, isn't it, Lumina?"

Lumina blinked and tilted her head. "I don't think I have any unique magic."

"Maybe you think that, but others..." I turned to face my father. "There's no way they would let Lumina or the Prime Minister leave on a whim of a dream like that, let alone at the same time. You know something, don't you?"

Father pursed his lips. I took that to mean a yes.

I paced around the room. "Unique magic of great strategic importance. Lumina herself doesn't know about it, but others believe in it enough. So it's hereditary? A magic unique to the Edelgard bloodline?" I recalled something I read in a history book and clapped my hands together. "The Battle of Wyrmden. The general was a close friend of the king, and old stories tell of him offering up his life for the king to send reinforcements in time. I thought it was all bullshit, but..." I took a deep breath and sighed. My father was sweating a river, so I was probably close to the truth. "The activation condition is for harm to come to someone close to the user. That general gave up his life to signal to the king of that era."

Father sank into a chair and held his head in his hands. "You scare me more and more, Tia." He made a stern face. "This information does not leave this room."

"Of course not!" I threw my arms out as I paced around the room faster, to the confusion of Marina and Lumina. "Instantaneous information over distances! Instant! Information! Even studying under Lux I've never heard of any magic with that capability before!"

"Is it really that important?" asked Lumina.

"Important?!" I chopped my hand into my other palm with each word to emphasize my point. "The transfer of information is so vital that the advanced era of my previous life was called the Information Age! Battles are lost and won on information, empires rise and fall on information, even the Roman Empire couldn't expand beyond how long it takes for information to-"

I froze as everyone stared at me with wide eyes.

"Information Age?" asked Father.

"Previous life?" asked Marina.

"Roman what?" asked Mother.

I sunk into a chair and held my head in my hands. "Oh, fuck me." I stared at everyone with cold eyes. "Again, none of this information leaves this room."

Everyone gulped.

"What happened two years ago, when Lumina was attacked?"

"You woke up to your unique magic and advanced abilities?" asked Lumina.

"That's only part of it. The most important part, is I woke up to the memories of my previous life, on another world."

I told them everything. How I was supposed to be a boy in the other world, how there was no magic there, and how my memories resurfaced. How I used that knowledge in the past two years in this world, and how I realized that my feelings for Marina and Lumina were really romantic and not a child's misunderstanding. I told them about my worries over the existential question of whether I was still the same 'Tia' as before the awakening.

"I want to think of myself as the same 'Tia'. I still feel like myself, I still have all memories of my life here. I still want to be a part of this family." I looked at my parents in this world with a tear in my eye. "But I can understand if you don't feel like I'm really your daughter anymore." I turned to Marina. "I understand if you can't accept me as your girlfriend." I sighed and stared at the floor. "I'm sorry for keeping it a secret. But I want to still be accepted as 'Tia', I want to still be the same person, and I want to still be loved."

A heavy silence fell across the room.

"This explains a lot," Father muttered. "You were way too smart for a regular child, though that made my job a lot easier."

Mother walked over to me and hugged me. "But you are still our daughter, Tia. No matter what."

I clung on to her and cried into her chest. "Thank you, Mama."

Marina pat my back. "I'm surprised, but I've always known you like this. So you're always the same Tia to me."

Lumina knelt down next to me. "I would be dead without you, so you'll always be precious to me, Tia." She smiled.

"Thank you." I sobbed and cried. "Thank you, everyone. Thank you."