The Weight of Legacy

Restrictions were dumb. Oh, Malwine understood she was, for all intents and purposes, a literal toddler. Telling her she could only stick to this corner of the manor’s library would have been reasonable. It technically was, as far as anyone else knew.

But—certainly not out of mere spite—Malwine loved to remind herself of how well she knew how to behave herself. As such, she immediately started firing off [Remote Reading] in the direction of random books she saw on the relatively distant shelves. The fact that her Skill and Aspect made all restrictions meaningless was irrelevant to her annoyance.

Ugh. Where has my patience gone?, Malwine lamented, before swiftly looking back to what she recalled of her life as the widow. Oh, right, I never had any. Short-term patience, anyway.

Some people made the mistake of assuming that just because the widow had been old and experienced, she must have been such a patient researcher. How else would she find information scattered across so many sources?

But the widow had been a more straightforward type of gal—she worked by positively inhaling every batch of documentation in front of her to find whatever she needed as quickly as possible. If she needed to find something, she would speed through all digitized images from a microfilm at inhuman speeds, find what she wanted after her neck started to bemoan the hours she had craned it for, and cheer at how it had—technically—only taken her a single day to find it.

Ah, the joys of a strong work ethic.

Malwine was somewhat aware of the irony. Waiting years for something was acceptable—expected—now that she was a child. But having to go through so much effort to find something to read now that she finally had access to a library? It was so unfair. The two situations weren’t true equals, of course, but it hurt the part of herself that like to claim she was indeed perfectly capable of patience.

The truth was… the widow hadn’t been perfect, and neither was Malwine. Anyone could say ‘Oh, nobody’s perfect!’ even with relation to the self, but actually internalizing and trying to better oneself accordingly was a different matter. There were parts of the widow—like her relative abrasiveness—that simply did not suit Malwine this time around, so to speak.

Thinking of it almost made her dizzy, as if recognizing any of the widow’s flaws by name would just send her down a spiral of fearing that she might repeat the widow’s mistakes. Realizing she might have changed—for better or worse—was a bit uncomfortable.

Sighing, Malwine passed another page on the children’s book she was pretending to read. It was something about a horse. She’d skimmed it with her Aspect and already knew the ending (it rode off into the sunset with another horse). Matilda was reading another book to which this fictional Sir Heinrich was also the protagonist.

I mean, at least I think he’s a fictional character. Malwine honestly hoped he was, because children’s book or not, if she were a knight and there were books out there in which she was depicted fighting a water wheel after mistaking it for the leviathan, she might die of embarrassment.

Finding something to actually read was slow work, in no small part due to another factor Malwine that rationally understood and accepted, yet could not stop being annoyed by—few books included any type of summary.

Most of her attempts at looking through any book just ended with her picking pages at random and trying to find something that interested her. Not all had titles, either, though she found most of them just had the type of title that said a lot without actually saying anything, like ‘A treatise on why the moth fears light: or an examination of how we mortals too burn if we try to approach that which we are unworthy of in the wrong time and place or so help me Sáinz’.

Malwine never even found out who that was.

On the bright side, at least she wasn’t stuck on an endless loop of accidentally hitting the same book, as she’d mostly been aiming for those within her line of sight. It wasn’t perfect as far as strategies went, but it was working well enough.

She had to give her new family credit—they did have a lot of books. The library probably wasn’t as large as it looked to her, seeing as she was currently toddler-sized, but it could have easily had as much space as a small cottage. Malwine was not great at measurements.

Malwine would have guessed most of the books had some situational relevance to them—it was just that a lot of them were useless to her, at least currently. She didn’t have much use for a book about reconstruction techniques for broken chandeliers, but she could see why there should be one in the household at all times.

Really, the source of her growing frustration—maybe sadness—was that even with access to these many books, she couldn’t figure out what to read. None of those she’d skimmed so far seemed to have immediate answers for her.

Of course there wouldn't always be useful books for her to find every time she looked. There could also always be useful books around that she hadn't found yet. Surely, just around the corner.

…Sneaking around for a better vantage point was unfortunately not an option.

It reminded her a bit too much of how the usual bookstore trips went for her in her first life—she’d spend 3 hours reading the back of every book that looked even remotely interesting, then buy a book she’d never read because the awkwardness of not buying anything after having spent that long in there was unbearable.

Still, Malwine tried to retain her confidence—she could probably find something. Continuing her search sounded far better than settling for her ‘I-guess-I’m-stuck-with-this’ shortlist. She only had a book about what appeared to be tips for when traveling in there anyway, and she doubted she could have put any of it to good use anytime soon.

They did have what Malwine was pretty sure was an antiquarian. The guy didn't look like he knew what all the books they had were, let alone how to organize them, but he sure knew they had them! At least the man’s presence somewhat explained how the oldest booked appeared to be fine despite their age… mostly fine.

Malwine made her way to the antiquarian slowly. She’d yet to accept how what she didn’t recognize as a long walk still took her time because of her size. It served as an excuse to take note of the placement of even more books, however. “Mister Fastēn? Do we have any language books?”

She might as well get herself more Skill levels.

The man himself looked down from the folio he was reading—with its grayed pages, the thing looked so much like a newspaper that it had caught Malwine off-guard the first time she saw it. “I have shelved away many tomes on the languages of Grēdôcava.”

“Noted,” Malwine said. “But are there any books about learning other languages?”

“No? You needn’t learn anything beyond Grēdôcavan,” Johann Fastēn gave her an odd glance—she could have sworn his eyebrow twitched. “No others would be used in polite company.”

He could have just said only one language was widely used on the Principality or something—instead, he just had to go for the phrasing that made her want to channel the widow’s true temper. “And dictionaries?”

“…Eh?” Fastēn had the gall to seem taken aback. She did briefly wonder if she’d overplayed her hand, but children did tend to be quite curious, didn’t they? She was probably fine. Shaking his head, the man finally replied. “There might be some in that box over there?”

Malwine nodded as he eyed her. He seemed torn between telling her she couldn’t go there, and just letting her. Fastēn hadn’t stopped her from walking up to him anyway, even though she’d technically gone past the carpet Bernie had insisted she and Matilda stay within.

Before the man had any more time to think, Malwine gave him the mandatory “Thank you!” and shuffled back to the spot she’d been sitting in prior, weird horse book still in hand.

Annoyingly enough, she found her issue with blind aiming resurfaced—it made [Remote Reading] all the more likely to send her to the same book twice, which in turn meant she had to refocus on another book to ‘reset’ it.

Who’d have thought even Aspects need some troubleshooting…

Malwine frowned, barely remembering to pass another page at random as she came to the conclusion that, actually, most of the books in that box did not appear to be dictionaries.

She found herself hoping this man’s one and only actual job was book preservation. If he was getting paid for sorting the books or anything of the like, her family was most definitely getting scammed.

At last, she stumbled upon something lining the bottom of the box, something that made her grateful the Aspect applied to any ‘eligible text’ without requiring it being a bound book. It appeared to be a collection of leaves of paper, conjoined so loosely that [Remote Reading] stuttered as she brought it up, almost as if uncertain that they were all part of a whole.

A comparison of ancient Grēdôcavan words to the modern equivalent in local seafarer tongue

The preface was brief—apparently, the author was convinced that the language of the seafarers had deviated from their own at some point. They acknowledged they had no sources on the matter, but insisted they meant to make a compelling case.

This was a manuscript, Malwine realized. It didn’t bear the hallmarks of what she’d assume to be a finished piece. Some words were crossed out, parts rewritten after older versions. Who wrote this?

Her heart skipped a beat at the idea of learning more about her family from this. Was someone here a writer, a scholar? Granted, none of the relatives she’d met looked like they’d be into something like this, but people could be multifaceted.

Unfortunately, unless she’d missed it, there was no signature anywhere. I guess I wouldn’t sign some random draft, either, but still…

Malwine had gotten so sidetracked by the potential of finding some scholar relative that she momentarily forgot why she’d started to read this in the first place—it promised language details.

She frankly didn’t even like the topic that much—but it could probably give [The Plurilingual Psyche] a good boost. Perhaps [Write Anywhere] might benefit as well if she took notes. How even [Meditation] had surpassed it was beyond her.

As promised, the book contained word comparisons, including the modern Grēdôcavan word, its ancient version, and the seafarer word in both the Grēdôcavan syllabary and on what appeared to be seafarer script. The information was even arranged in a neat table, much to her surprise—though it did not take long for the confusion to begin anyway.

What the fuck?, Malwine stared at what [Remote Reading] was showing her. ‘Local seafarer’ script looked closer to the angry cursive of an overworked scribe than to the near-pictographic writing system Grēdôcavan used. That didn’t make it readable, but she suspected it might at least have an alphabet instead of a syllabary. I’ll try to ignore the implications of this just being the ‘local’ one. Like there’s more of these out there waiting.

She wasn’t sure whether to be thrilled by the Skill-leveling potential, or terrified by the prospect of learning to read something that wouldn’t help her universally.

Dialects are some scary shit.

Still, Malwine could work with this. Since the words were also shown in Grēdôcavan—or at least what they presumably sounded like in Grēdôcavan—she could get a general idea of them. Some of the words were even conveniently basic.

A cursory glance told her that was indeed what most of the remaining pages were—tables. It was also indeed incomplete, much to the pain of her little heart.

But there was still much to be explored, even if this would clearly do little to aid her in learning the language. There seemed to be little distinction between verbs and nouns, with no examples on how to use any. That made sense given the context of the manuscript, but it did mean she probably wouldn’t be applying any of what she learned here.

At least learning the words was still something that would be rewarded by [The Plurilingual Psyche], especially after [Understanding] came into play.

There was something oddly nostalgic about it—in her first life, she’d learned to identify key words in various languages for the sake of reading foreign documentation. In the end, the widow could read entire baptismal entries in other languages without understanding said languages outside of that context. Most of the words had even been too niche to be of any use, ever, elsewhere.

Now Malwine was trying to learn an admittedly pretty random set of words, just for the sake of trying to level a Skill. It was better than endlessly browsing books that continued failing to grab her attention, and she was no stranger to learning for self-serving reasons anyway.

“Do you want an easier book?”

Malwine started with a jolt, looking around for the source of the disruption.

“Sorry, I just noticed you kept staring at that page…”

“Oh!” Malwine gave her a nervous smile. “I'm just… scared for the horse. It fell into the river! And horses can’t swim. So I’m scared to find out.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve read it,” Matilda winked. “You should keep reading.”

Malwine instinctively sent [Remote Reading] ahead… before realizing she should probably flip the pages normally. Her half-aunt was watching her intently still.

“Hm,” she read, hoping she was doing a good impression of a surprised child. “Ooh!”

“Yes!” Matilda smiled. “Have you gotten to the wheelbarrow part yet?”

“They saved the horse!”

“Yes!”

With a final giggle, Matilda approached her. “Should I get you another book? There’s more where that came from!”

“No, no,” Malwine hoped she didn’t come off as ungrateful, but she didn’t exactly look forwards to being questioned about yet another book. “Now I want to reread it!”

Seemingly satisfied as Malwine started looking at the book from the start again, her half-aunt settled, turning to her own book.

That’s the one thing I don’t like about this place—company. No offense, Matilda, it’s just…

Malwine shook her head softly. She was glad to have a family that was alive… though being grateful didn’t mean she had to want them to be around her 24/7….

Oh, the blessing and curse of being a child.

She became aware of a notification a split second before she went to check it out.

You have unlocked [Multitasking]

Would you like to slot [Multitasking] into your category?

[Multitasking]

There is never enough time to get everything done, so why not try to do it all at once? Greatly enhances your capacity to perform more than one task simultaneously, improving consistency and accuracy for both tasks. This will only apply to actions you know how to perform by heart—anything requiring active effort and/or focus will not be eligible. Surpassing more than two concurrent actions will greatly diminish this Skill's benefits.

Trait: None

Aspect: None

Malwine didn’t ultimately waste much time before accepting the Skill—she’d been struggling with stagnation for far too long anyway, and this was a good Skill.

It wasn’t her first passive Skill—she was fairly certain [Unpacifiable] qualified, at least—but a constant bonus sounded great. Especially if getting sidetracked by various matters counted as doing more than one thing at once…

She was excited to test this, and her current circumstances were more than appropriate enough. Who knew? Maybe she’d be able to put up an actually convincing façade while ‘reading’ the book while studying the manuscript’s tables…