Rebirth

She jolts as consciousness seems to slam into her. There are people shouting in what sounds like Japanese around her, but she's too disoriented to make out what they're saying.

Especially with the distraction of some woman pointing what looks like a gun at her, hateful terror in her eyes. She… seems a lot bigger than her though? It's only around that time that from the perspective of everything around her and a glimpse of her own hand which she'd brought up habitually that she realizes she's in the body of a baby.

Without hesitation, she throws up a physical shield and sends out a wave of Patronus fire. It clashes with some sort of light that had started to come out after she pulled the trigger, burning it away as it passes on its way to her.

The way she turns to ash in moments makes it clear that despite the infantile form she currently had, there was plenty of harm aimed at her from the woman's heart. Not that there was really any question of that, given she was the sort of person capable of pointing something that looked like a gun at a baby. It couldn't have been a gun given the light, but given her Patronus fire ate whatever that was that came out as well, it was clearly harmful, so it didn't really matter that it wasn't something that fired bullets.

Heavy silence washes over the people around her as she lets her Patronus fire go, it's job done, and it subsequently dissipates.

She stares at the ashes of the terrible woman for a moment in thought before she realizes her consciousness is starting to fade. It's the weirdest feeling, as there isn't fatigue in her infantile body, but darkness is certainly closing in on her mind rapidly.

Her eyes narrow as she struggles to fight it off, but a male voice, loving and soft, echoes from the edges of her conscience, “Sleep Beloved. You will wake if necessary, but otherwise you should not wake properly until later.”

She doesn't know why, since she's not usually the sort of person to trust an unknown suspicious voice that had somehow managed to slip through her Occlumency, but something in her trusts it instinctively. Not that she has much choice, given despite her attempts to fight it off, darkness was closing in on her mind.

She makes the choice to follow her instinct and trust it, giving up her mental struggle and letting the black veil pull itself across her mind.

The last thing she hears is a man shouting, “Shiba Miya, what wa-?!”

She stops dead as she ‘wakes’ again, the memories and mind of Calanthe coming back to her once more. Under different circumstances that may be an issue, given she was in the middle of sparing with someone, but the habits drilled into this body by the Yotsuba's training and her instincts, training, and experience as Calanthe conspire to easily toss her much larger opponent to the ground as he charges at her even as her mind is a million miles away.

Shiba Toshiko.

That was the name of this body, of her now. The memories of Toshiko bubble up after the onslaught of Calanthe's memories, before they start to settle in with the memories of Calanthe in her mind.

From what her memories as Toshiko are telling her, there is magic here as well, but between the differences in the history of this world and the magic itself, she can only assume she's in a different universe.

How she got reborn in another universe, she doesn't know, and at the moment it honestly doesn't matter that much.

The body she was in was a magician, what the people here called a magical, but it's magic ability is actually incredibly limited, not dissimilar to a Contractor in her first life, though it was less that she was missing a key element to being a more generalized magical than it was that this ‘magic calculation area’ that the magicals here seem to have and need was already busy with something else.

She narrows her eyes. That wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. 

She seems to have retained her magical core from her first life, despite it being misplaced in this universe, but one should never throw away possible tools like magic. Especially since just from her memories, the magic this body's ‘magic calculation area’ is busy with are two stupid powerful abilities that let her destroy or restore anything she can ‘see’, so there's no telling how useful the magic of this universe is in general and it'd be foolish to dismiss it. She'd need to do some research to make sure she had a good picture of things before she attempts anything though.

Completely ignoring the people around, the trainers and other ‘Guardians’ from this Yotsuba family she seems to have been born to, she turns towards the door and starts to walk away, eyes unfocused and gazing at nothing in particular as she thinks.

Behind her, an older male voice calls out, “Shiba! Where are you going?! Practice isn't done and you haven't been released for the day yet!”

She mostly tunes him out and ignores him and the others, barring absently keeping an eye on them with the ‘Elemental Sight’ -an ability that lets her view the information of the world in a fairly large range around her- this body was kind enough to provide and defending herself after the man in charge of their training looks over at some of the others and jerks his head towards her in a silent order to restrain her.

As they start to come at her, she throws up a wall using her magic from her life as Calanthe, one that repels physical things. They run right into it, but quickly gather themselves and seem to try to throw magic at her. That one is even easier to deal with, since this ‘Decomposition’ power of hers lets her destroy the ‘magic sequence’ of their spells before they're even done building it, much less cast it. As an additional measure, just in case, she calls up Patronus fire and wraps her body in it as a final line of defense.

She leaves a stunned silence as well as her magical wall in her wake, though she lets the magic of the latter go after she gets a few hallways away, heading off towards the library.

This world she's been born in is high tech enough that places like that with physical media are very rare, but the Yotsuba have one as something of a backup in case anything ever happens to their servers where their digital library on magic is stored. Also, there were computers- or rather terminals, as they call them here, for accessing the digital library there, which makes it a pretty easy choice of destination for starting her research.

The thought of whether she was Toshiko that just inherited Calanthe's memories somehow, or if she was Calanthe and she'd pushed whoever this body originally belonged to out occurs to her, but she does have a way to look at the history of herself up to twenty-four hours in the past via Elemental Sight. Almost hesitantly, she looks at her Psion body in the information dimension, her Eidos as individual Psion information bodies are called, but that swiftly reveals that there wasn't any need for her anxiety.

There had been something in a state similar to the physical body sleeping right up until her memories as Calanthe woke up which was the exact same moment that aforementioned something in her Eidos snapped awake. Given it was sleeping inside of her already, she doesn't think she just got Calanthe's memories somehow, and them waking up didn't alter the Eidos beyond the expected alterations from said memories awakening, so it wasn't like she pushed the ‘real’ Toshiko out of her body either. She has no way of guaranteeing she's correct, especially if she doesn't even know how or why it happened, but it at least indicates that if she is wrong about being both Calanthe and Toshiko then that indicates she's Toshiko and that she just… got Calanthe's memories somehow.

If that is the case, then it was honestly the best possibility. Calanthe lived her life and she didn't really regret anything in the end beyond things she can't really control like old age catching up with loved ones(1), but she'd loathe the idea of essentially stealing a child's life and body, even unwillingly, whereas Toshiko is more than happy with the things she's learned and gained from Calanthe's memories and isn't against the situation in general.

It doesn't take her long to get there, and she quickly settles in to start brushing up on certain aspects of this universe. She's not sure how long she's in there before her birth mother, Miya, comes gliding in, fury radiating from her even if she's too refined to stomp, “Toshiko.”

She looks up at her so-called mother lazily, and deeming there's no point in word games, decides to be blunt, “I'm in the middle of something, so please say whatever you came to quickly.”

Miya is good at controlling herself, she'll give her that, but she spent centuries as Calanthe seeing past what nobles allowed through on their faces, so she easily picks up on the micro twitch of irritation and the flicker of surprise and unease.

Credit where it's due, Miya doesn't let it slow her down, “Why did you leave training unauthorized? Do you even understand what sort of position that puts you in?”

She snorts, “Did you really come all the way here for something so miniscule in the long run, Miya?” Miya flinches ever so slightly, but she pushes on going with the excuse for the sudden change in behavior she'd already come up with, “Well, it doesn't really matter. I had more important things to deal with. There's some important research I need to do, so I decided to stop playing along with the Yotsuba's slavery indoctrination.”

Miya actually recoils at that, “Slavery indoctrination? The Yotsuba doesn't have slaves!”

She snorts, “Sure, if that's what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night without a guilty conscience. But slapping a pretty name like Guardian on it doesn't change what they are fundamentally.”

Miya stares at her in silence for a moment, seemingly coming to terms with what she said. She's still confused as to why it seems to bother Miya what her opinion on the Guardian program is, so she finally decides that if she's going to be here and bothering her from her research anyway, she may as well get some answers. To that end, she turns her gaze away from the terminal she was working at and meets Miya's gaze to toss a Legilimency probe at her.

She wasn't even sure if it would work given her memories as Toshiko tell her Miya is an incredibly skilled mind magic user, but she practically has no defenses to speak of. There's a little bit of the start of mental defenses, but it's all too easy to slip around them unnoticed. Which in and of itself tells her something. Namely that while this universe may be more advanced magically in certain aspects, it's behind her old universe in others and that mind magic seems to be one of them. That's more of an absent observation while she reads Miya's mind though. Time works differently in the mind, so she easily retrieves relevant memories and views them in less than ten seconds in the physical world.

There were more than a couple of surprises in there. The first being that she had been stripped of her position in the family and placed in the Guardian program purely because the Yotsuba were terrified of her. The second being that Miya isn't actually as cold and uncaring as her memories as Toshiko tells her she is towards her. It'd honestly be more accurate to say she's Miya's favorite beloved child between her and her brother Yuki, she just isn't allowed to show it, nor does she let it sway her decisions or behavior.

Surprisingly, she was only really mad about her leaving out of fear of how the Yotsuba would respond to her ‘rebellion’ and was mostly upset at the idea that she views being a Guardian as no different than being a slave because she never intended a fate like that to befall her, and it shook her significantly to think the ‘happiest’ life she could give her was still so miserable in her eyes.

Third, there's a minor revelation that Miya and her twin sister Maya have something of an ongoing argument between them as to who's child she is. Physically, Miya got pregnant and gave birth to her, but Maya seems to have some weird notion that she's spiritually her child or something.

The fourth is her brother Yuki himself. That one fills her with uneasy disgust. Miya had only had him because she was convinced no one would ever accept a ‘monster’ like Toshiko, so he was meant to be her loyal companion, and even her husband later. Miya had carefully gone out of her way to ensure that the Yotsuba's genetic manipulation of Yuki would allow them to safely have children without detrimental side effects for that very reason. It wasn't just for her sake in fairness, part of the intention to marry them together eventually was to ensure her loyalty to the Yotsuba via the mental manipulation to make her only really care about Yuki to the point of obsession.

She turns her mental gaze inwards after the fourth revelation. She'd vaguely noticed her mind drifting to Yuki more than once while she was trying to research, but she'd honestly thought it was just the part of her that was Toshiko being understandably and naturally curious about a younger brother she'd been kept separate from.

It doesn't take long -not even a second in real time given the time difference that can occur in the mind- for her to locate the manipulation in her mind and purge it. She hadn't even noticed just how prevalent Yuki was in the back of her mind until her mind suddenly stops obsessing over him.

She'd have to do something similar for Yuki, since the fact he was made to be her companion and husband and always love her meant that Miya had started using mind magic on him to bury it in his mind when he was a fetus. It'd probably complicate things, since using it on a developing brain probably embedded it similarly to a need, like for air, water, and food. Undoubtedly, it'd be harder to safely remove because of that, but she'd do it anyway.

Yuki may have been conceived for her, but the moment he was born, Miya and the rest of the Yotsuba lost the right to dictate his life and mind to him. He was his own person and had the right to his own feelings. Family can and should guide a child, but they do not get to dictate. If he hated her, that was fine, she didn't really care now that her own mental manipulation was gone.

Besides, the words on her ankle and chest along what will be the bottom of her breast when she develops indicates that she doesn't need Yuki to combat loneliness. She'd looked at them earlier after she'd sat down in front of the terminal, and given that everyone else only seemed to notice ‘weird word-like birthmarks’ she's pretty sure there's something keeping them from really registering them. Since for one, they weren't word-like, they were straight up words, and for another they fade in and out and change colors slowly like certain kinds of lights on a Christmas tree, just without the glowing.

Which backs up her original thought that she didn't just inherit Calanthe's memories somehow. Because at this point, she'd have had to inherit Calanthe's memories, magic, and even her soulmate bonds. Given she'd already ruled out the possibility of Calanthe unwillingly pushing Toshiko out of her way to inhabit her body, the only real explanation is reincarnation, regardless of the lack of answers on the how and why fronts.

The dark blue for Hei still reads the same, but now it fades out and into a decadent brown in Japanese that reads, “I kinda figured that was on purpose to get our attention.”

The words on her chest, on the other hand, fade from Misaki's old brown into a delightful green, also in Japanese which says, “You didn't. You did not. ”

What she did or didn't do, she obviously doesn't know yet, but the moment she'd laid eyes on it she'd felt a flicker of mischief anyway, all too able to imagine the sort of things she could've done to get that kind of response.

The point being though, that clearly whatever had happened, her soulmates had come with her, and as such she would never truly be alone anyway, even if everyone else in the world hated her. So she didn't need, appreciate, or approve of her own mother giving birth to someone she's supposed to have an arranged marriage with later, and certainly not to try to guarantee things would work out the way she's wanting by using mind magic on him as early as when he was a fetus to make him love her.

She's dragged back to the present by Miya breaking eye contact. She makes it seem like she was just looking away with a sigh as she brushes a hand through her bangs, but she can tell the woman was nervous, “What a Guardian is on a fundamental level aside, what do you mean you decided to stop playing along?”

She tilts her head in bemusement, “Mm? I should think that's obvious. I never actually bought into the Yotsuba's nonsense indoctrination. I was just pretending to, and now that something more important has come up, I decided to stop doing so.”

Miya gives her a disapproving look, “How do you think people will view this rebellion of yours? Do you think Maya will take it well? What about Yuki?”

Knowing what she does now, she knows Maya was mostly meant as a distraction to hide her bringing up Yuki by name to try to force her into compliance by taking advantage of the mental magic she's used on her previously. Though in fairness Maya was also a not-so-subtle threat.

She snorts, “Maya isn't very strong. It'd be all too easy to defeat her. Don't know why you bothered to bring up Yuki in the first place, but I don't really care what he thinks. You reap what you sow, and the Yotsuba has gone out of their way to keep us separate, so the only care I have for him is the same vague care I'd have for any stranger child. He's irrelevant to the conversation. Maya at least is the Head of the Yotsuba and a powerhouse compared to the rest of you, so I can understand her relevance to the conversation at least, since she ostensibly has command over me.”

Miya seems to stop breathing for a moment, her eyes actually going wide when she dismisses Yuki entirely. It takes a solid minute -during which she goes back to focusing on her terminal- for her to find her voice, and even then it's distant and almost absent, “Ostensibly? There's nothing ostensible about it. Maya does have absolute authority over you.”

She snorts again without looking away from her terminal, “The problem with authority is it has to be recognized. And I don't. She's the Head of the Yotsuba family, I acknowledge that, there's no arguing with facts, but I do not acknowledge that it gives her the ability to command me. For one thing, I have my own priorities and I don't really care if Maya or the Yotsuba want something else, I'll do what I decide to do regardless, including get in the way of or outright oppose the Yotsuba if necessary. For another, I'd like to remind you that the previous Head removed me from the family, and I'm also not an employee of the Yotsuba since I do not acknowledge your slave ownership of me, so by your own hands, I have notie beyond blood to the Yotsuba to begin with.”

Miya pauses, her hands shaking a little before she pulls herself together and pulls a mobile terminal(2) out of her pocket. The part of her that's Calanthe insists it's not a terminal, it's a smartphone, but the part of her that's Toshiko says otherwise, and it's undoubtedly better to stick to this universe's terminology anyway, if only to keep herself from verbally slipping up in the future. So terminal it is, same as what she'd call a computer with the only difference being the ‘mobile’ tacked onto the beginning of the phones.

Miya straightens up as she lifts her mobile terminal, saying crisply, “If you have no ties to the Yotsuba, you have no right to our library. Nor our food or anything like that for that matter.”

Then she finishes clicking at her terminal and Toshiko's own gives an ‘access denied’ pop-up. But contrary to what the victorious Miya likely expects, she just turns her head to give her an amused look and a grin then turns back to her own terminal, and blatantly in front of her, types in Maya's login information, then disables Miya's authority to grant and remove access, reinstates her own access then logs off of Maya's account and back on to her own. It hadn't been hard to do. Despite the commonality of bio-data log in these days, the Yotsuba mainframe didn't use them. Why, she couldn't say, but it didn't so it was all too easy to flick a look at the Eidos log for Maya's terminal of her signing into it this morning to get her login information.

When she's done, she flicks another amused look at Miya, “Technically, even if you cast me out of the family, you never gave me for adoption, so legally you're obligated to provide food, clothes, housing, and education, but I have no qualms about leaving. I'm more than capable of taking care of myself.”

It may be tricky without a convenient inheritance to fall back on, but in general this family was even worse than the Dursleys, so other than her vague worry for the innocent children being subject to their poison, she'd have no more issues with packing up and leaving them then she'd had with the Dursleys.

And besides, on second thought, it probably wouldn't even be particularly tricky since there was undoubtedly someone or another in the Ten Master Clans willing to trade her care or even just a nice chunk of money for the info on the Yotsuba she has, especially given the amount. Maybe the Juumonji? From what she's heard about them, they're a fairly decent family.

She'd genuinely thought about using Decomposition to delete the signal from Miya's terminal to the mainframe as well as the active programming flag telling it that it was still waiting for a response in said terminal, but that honestly seemed like too much of a hassle. Miya opens and closes her mouth, gaping like a fish then whirls away towards the door.

She smiles towards the door Miya had just left out of, “Mm. Run away to Sissy and cry and complain about it. Not that it'll really do much.”

Knowing she'd undoubtedly have the video recording of the incident pulled up to show Maya what happened, she turns to look dead at the camera and winks at it cheekily before going back to work on her terminal, even as she absently follows Miya's hurried progress over to and through the main house with her Elemental Sight.

She watches as Miya bursts into Maya's office without even knocking, drawing displeasure from Maya and her butler Hayama. Maya starts to scold Miya for it, but the latter of the twins are in far too much of a hurry to listen to it, immediately cutting her off, “There isn't time for that or manners.”

Maya gives Miya a faintly confused look, “What could be so important that even basic decency like knocking falls to the wayside?”

Miya gives Maya an irritated look, “How about the fact I just came back from a conversation with Toshiko and she had decided to stop ‘playing along’, as she put it, with her Guardian training, which she just straight up walked out of today amongst other things? Other things like that blue fire that incinerated Keiko(3) when she went nuts and tried to kill Toshiko as a baby making another appearance.”

Maya and Hayama both stare at Miya in utter surprise for a beat, then Maya sharply orders, “Pull up the footage.”

Without hesitation, Miya pulls up a video and has it play out on a large screen that is revealed by paneling on the wall sliding out of the way. That video is actually from her absently giving the trainers and the Guardians something of a beatdown on her way out, then Miya adds that she'd gone to the library from there as she pulls up the footage from their confrontation in the library.

Maya stares at the footage, paused at her winking cheekily at the camera so it wouldn't be playing in the background while they tried to talk. Maya takes a sip of her tea as she stares at her winking image, “Well… this is a problem. Hayama, forget about my sister barging in here. It was entirely warranted.”

Miya gives her an annoyed look, “You think?!”

Maya hums, “So what do we do about it? Toshiko had clearly shaken off your mental manipulation to favor Yuki, so he's not a bargaining chip, and… we really don't have anything else.”

Miya scoffs, “Entirely due to the previous Head. He shot the Yotsuba in the foot with his decisions.”

Maya nods, “That he did…”

From there, the conversation dissolves into them trying to figure out something and she does absently split her focus like she used to with her Patronus fire Dragon to keep an ear on the conversation, but otherwise she turns her attention back to her terminal. They don't really bother making a genuine attempt to deny her access again, given she's already demonstrated the fact she can get around it easily. The only thing they try to do to cut her off is Maya straight up deleting her account, but given the server is stored close enough for her to reach it with her power, it's easy to simply use the other ability she has -Regrowth- and restore it back to the state before her account was removed and continue her research.

Even as she continues looking into things, she's bothered by something that pops up more than once. Namely the belief that at their most basic level, Psions, one of the types of magic in this world, are essentially the mind and thoughts of an individual, whereas Pushions, another kind of magic, are the emotions and personality. Yet for some reason they seem to believe that there's a one way street of interaction between them? That is to say, Pushions can influence Psions, yet popular belief is that Psions can't affect Pushions.

It makes zero sense to her. If Psions and Pushions really are representations of the mind and thoughts or emotions and personality respectively, then the flow and ability to affect one another should go both ways. Personality and emotions affect the mind and thoughts certainly, but the reverse is also true.

It's something she'll have to look into later though, since that was not what she came to research. That being said, if those are the kinds of magic in this world, is there even such a thing as ‘ambient magic’ like there was in her old world?

When it starts getting later at night, she leaves the library to head to her room. From what her memories as Toshiko were telling her, normally these ‘Guardians’ would be in dormitories rather than single rooms, but her position was a little weird.

She'd been born to the Shiba, a branch of the Yotsuba, so she had the blood of the Yotsuba even if she'd been stripped of her place in the family and made to join the Guardian program the day she was born.

Before today, she honestly would've had no idea as to why and her first thought may have been that brief moment when she ‘woke up’ when she was a baby, but even then she would've quickly dismissed it. The very fact someone had been pointing a weapon at her infantile form would've told her that something was already going on, and therefore that it was highly unlikely it was a side effect of her using her Patronus fire.

In fairness, her next thought would've undoubtedly been about the fact that theoretically it could be something like an assassination attempt and her so called ‘family’ got freaked out by her response, but even then, she'd have found that being the reason hard to believe given the security her memory let her know exists around the Yotsuba household. Not to mention the fact there had been shouting instead of them trying to take the woman down.

Now though, due to reading her ‘mother's’ mind, she knows full well it's out of a mixture of fear, regret, and guilt over her very existence and the things related to her birth, like the fact she was basically a physical embodiment of all they'd hoped for leading up to her birth and what had happened after she was born which made them realize what her magic was and the threat of it.

She shakes the thought of their ridiculousness off as she approaches her room. She blinks mildly at the maid standing in front of her door, grinning lightly, then idly asking without a care, “Are you here to tell me that the Yotsuba are neglecting their legal obligations and I need to find different accommodations tonight?”

The maid bows, “No Shiba-sama. Quite the contrary actually. I was ordered by Yotsuba-sama to inform you that the Yotsuba acknowledge their legal obligation towards you, but as you are no longer in the Guardian program, it would be shameful for someone of Yotsuba blood to sleep in their dormitory building. As such, your belongings have been moved to the main house while Yotsuba-sama debates what to do on a more permanent basis since you have been stripped from the family. I'm supposed to lead you to your new room.”

Now that she mentions it, she vaguely recalls hearing something like that while she was eavesdropping on Maya's conversations, but on some level, her mind had dismissed it as unimportant and she hadn't really noted it consciously.

She hums idly even as she finds the relevant memory using her Occlumency and reviews the part of the conversation where that was decided. She feels a flicker of amusement at the tentative suggested from Honami, the Guardian of her ‘mother’, to try to slip something into her food and the way it was immediately shot down by Maya, Miya, and Hayama since she'd easily detect it with her Elemental Sight and not only could she easily decompose it down into its base atoms, but that it'd just cost them whatever trust they may or may not have left.

She nods at the maid, “Alright then, let's go.”

The maid bows, “Please follow me, Shiba-sama.”

Then she walks past her to lead her to her new room. She notes that the maid isn't from the Guardian program as she follows her, probably from them deciding not to potentially step into another mess of their making given she's already made her opinions on that clear.

She couldn't say for sure, since the only thing that had been mentioned in their meeting earlier was Maya and Miya stressing to Hayama to pick a maid that would be respectful, preferably because they genuinely respect her for her lineage if nothing else, but at worst are professional enough not to let their personal opinions influence their behavior.

The thought flickers by in a moment, but she quickly shakes it off and turns her attention towards her ‘mother’ now that she isn't researching. She's still not entirely sure if she actually deserves such a title. On one hand, she did actually love her and went to lengths to try to ensure that she wouldn't be completely hated and would have at least one person in her corner. On the other, her method of doing that was to have another child and manipulate both of their minds towards the end goal she was after.

It's a sticky mess, that's for sure.

She's pulled from her thoughts when the maid stops just past a door, turning and bowing again as her hand lifts palm facing up on the side with the door, “Your new room, Shiba-sama. Yotsuba-sama indicated that with everything going on, you may have missed dinner at the old building. Do you need me to bring you something?”

She tilts her head, “I didn't eat, no, so some food would be nice.”

The maid drops her head a little lower, “Understood Shiba-sama. Please make yourself comfortable in your room. I will be back with your dinner shortly.”

She nods, “Mm. Thanks.”

Then she opens the door to head in, knowing that it'd undoubtedly make things awkward and difficult for the maid if she tried to linger until she left, since her own training would tell her not to in case she needed anything else.

The room is notably larger than her one in the Guardian dormitory and training building, and it's fairly nice as well, rather than the more minimalistic plain room she'd had before. It wasn't super fancy or anything, but it was small things like the decorations on the bedframe and the like and the higher quality of the bedding on it. There was also both a table to sit at off to the side as well as a desk rather than just the latter.

She turns her attention back to Maya's office with Elemental Sight, becoming aware that she and Hayama, along with Miya and Honami who haven't left, are watching her via the camera in the room like a hawk, presumably taking in her reaction. She smiles in bemusement as she runs her first two fingers over the top of the nicer dresser, “Well. Certainly better accommodations than before. Though I guess if anything it's more surprising that they even give their slaves the basic courtesy that they do.”

Through Elemental Sight she sees Miya flinch slightly as Maya narrows her eyes, “Hayama.”

He bows his head slightly, “Yes, Madam?”

She continues as soon as she's sure she has his full attention, “Did the people in charge over there neglect Toshiko's accommodations? Guardian she may have been then, but she still has the blood of the Yotsuba in her veins after all. I ordered them to be respectful of that despite her position.”

Hayama bows fully even though she doesn't look over, “Not to my knowledge, Madam, but I will inspect her previous room to make sure everything was up to the standard Toshiko-sama was due even with her circumstances.”

Maya nods sharply, “See that you do.”

Silence falls in Maya's office, so she heads over to the bed to settle down and lean back the pillows as she waits for the maid to return with her dinner, thoughts turning to the purpose of her research today. Namely her born specializations and how much of this ‘magic calculation area’ they take up, since while she had a couple thoughts on how to deal with it, she didn't want to try anything until she had a firmer idea of what exactly a magic calculation area was.

Not that there had been a whole lot of information. It wasn't some sort of physical addition to the brain as she knew it, as had been her first thought when the phrase had crossed her mind as Toshiko and Calanthe's memories got on the same page, or to put it another way, that Calanthe's memories had reawakened but Toshiko's had reaffirmed themselves so they didn't get buried. She'd honestly only gone to research despite that just in case something the part of her that was Toshiko knew wasn't clear, was hazy, or that she just straight up didn't know to begin with. 

The term magic calculation area refers to a section of the subconscious rather than a physical area of the brain, which if there is one specifically for it, it hasn't been located. Though interesting, it doesn't really answer the questions she'd had.

Theoretically, she could use Elemental Sight on herself while she casts to try to determine what part of the brain was in charge of it, but she knows for a fact they've already done things to scan the brain activity during casting, so she doesn't know if that would reveal anything. She'd still do it, since it never hurts to try, but she genuinely doubts it'll tell her anything more.

She's snapped out of her contemplation by a knock on the door immediately followed by the voice of the maid from earlier, “Shiba-sama, I'm back with your dinner. May I come in or would you prefer I leave the cart out here?”

She straightens up and swings her legs over the bed as she responds, “You can come in.”

The door opens and the maid pushes a cart in and over towards the table and starts unloading her food as she herself makes her way over and sits down in one of the two chairs, the one in front of where the maid was setting things up specifically, though she's careful not to obstruct her work as she does. There's no need to impede the jobs of any of the service staff after all. That's just rude.

When she's done laying out her food, she steps back and bows again, gesturing towards a pull bell the same way she'd gestured to the room door earlier, “Please enjoy your meal and call when you're done so I can gather the dishes.”

She nods, “Thank you…” She pauses as she realizes she never introduced herself, “I don't believe you mentioned your name earlier, but it's polite to thank someone by name and neither of us knows whether Maya-sama will assign you to be the maid helping me until she figures something more permanent out, and if she does and it takes a little longer, it'd make things awkward if I didn't know your name.”

The maid's bow deepens slightly for a moment, “That's quite true, Shiba-sama. I wasn't thinking of the possibility of this arrangement lasting longer than just tonight, my apologies. My name is Suzuki Emi, Shiba-sama.”

She waves the apology off, “Don't worry about it, the orders undoubtedly came out of nowhere. It's understandable that you wouldn't be thinking about the possibility of it lasting more than tonight. Anyway, thank you Suzuki‐san. I'll ring the bell when I'm done, so don't let me hold you up from any other duties you have.”

Suzuki's bow re-deepens for another beat, then she turns and leaves. She turns her attention to her food, giving it what already was and would undoubtedly remain a habitual sweep(4) with Elemental Sight for anything slipped in despite what she'd heard earlier, or even just a vindictive service staff spitting in it, but she doesn't find either, so as soon as she's sure it's clean she starts to eat. As she does, she flicks her attention back to Maya and the others, but other than them commenting on how polite she was to service staff, and them correctly deducing the pause was her checking her food, they don't seem to be saying a whole lot, so she swiftly turns her attention back to thinking things over.

She doesn't get very far with said thinking throughout the course of her meal, of which while it wasn't surprising she definitely notices it's of higher quality than what she usually has. How it compares to the food she had as Lady Potter-Black still leaves it lacking on the other hand.

Nevertheless, when she uses the bell to let Suzuki know she's done, she doesn't say anything, since regardless of if it was intentional or not, saying anything would just complicate matters for the service staff.

If it was intentional, assuming it wasn't just spite, they were probably doing the best they could in the balancing act of respecting her lineage but not insulting recognized members of the Yotsuba by serving someone who was removed from the family food of the same quality.

If it was unintentional, there was even less to be done. It was edible, which her history from her childhood as Calanthe found sufficient, and even if it wasn't the best, it was still of high enough quality to be acceptable to the part of her that was Lady Potter-Black.

As Suzuki leaves with the cart, telling her to ring the bell again if she needs anything else and also in the morning to let them know she's ready for breakfast, she crosses her arms as she leans back in her chair thoughtfully and gets her mind back on track on what she was thinking about before she got distracted.

It complicates things a little if she doesn't have a better idea of how the magic calculation area and born specializations work. It also does bring up the thought of how her magic as Calanthe fits into the framework of this universe's understanding of magic. She'd never given it a whole lot of thought before, but the idea of this ‘magic calculation area’ makes her start to wonder if there's something specific in the mind that allows the manipulation of the magic from her universe when she was Calanthe.

Well, there's one way to potentially get more information. Her own magic calculation area had about ninety-four percent of it taken up by her born specializations, but it may as well be one hundred since there was no magic in the world that she knows of that would only require six percent of her magic calculation area, so she basically couldn't use any magic beyond her specializations. Or at least, she couldn't before with just her knowledge as Toshiko. As she'd unintentionally proven when she held back the people trying to detain her in the practice room earlier, if the magic of Calanthe uses the magic calculation area that all the magic in this world uses, it clearly uses less than six percent of it.

Honestly, that had been dangerous in retrospect, but she'd been very distracted by her memories as Calanthe coming back to her, so it hadn't even crossed her mind at the time that at best, it required so much more than what she had available that she couldn't really activate it, but at worst it was actually close to her limit so she possibly forced it and ‘overclocked’ her magic calculation area.

The effects of overclocking ranged drastically, sometimes it just wore you out and you'd have to take it easy for a bit to let your magic calculation area rest, much like a muscle you pushed too hard while working out, but it could also lead to the permanent loss of the ability to do magic and even death.

She shakes the thought off, since there's no point thinking about it. What's done is done after all. Holding her hand above the table, she splits her attention between reading its Eidos data and watching herself. There isn't anything to note about herself while she's just reading the data, but things get interesting when she uses Decomposition. Her physical brain doesn't really get any more active than usual, but her Eidos…

The activity in the ‘brain’ of her Eidos kicks into higher gear, or more accurately, a weird addition in it that's not in the physical brain that her attention is drawn to and she only notices as she starts to cast, then it passes the information to the region of her Eidos where the ‘Gate’ between the conscious and subconscious had been found by scanning brain activity during casting, and her physical brain's Gate also becomes active before passing the information to the lowest area of the consciousness, known as the ‘Root’ generally. It all happens in under a second, but it's only after this entire process has played out that Decomposition destroys the table.(5)

Tilting her head in curiosity, she activates Regrowth to restore the table, and just as she assumed, the process repeats. She leans back in her chair as a grin slowly stretches across her lips, “Interesting… Very interesting.” She can't help the laughter that bubbles up, “To think, I almost didn't use Elemental Sight to observe the process of casting magic since it has already been observed with brain scans that pinpointing the magic calculation area didn't really work!” She shakes her head, as she runs her fingers through her hair, “Not that I can blame them for not picking up on it, given…”

Suddenly remembering the fact the twins and the others had been observing her before, she flicks her Elemental Sight up to them. Finding them still watching her, kind of on the edges of their proverbial seats but more than a little chaos happening at the very notion that she's learned something as critical as that which has been eluding even the Yotsuba for years. She shuts her mouth there though, not willing to give people who kicked her out of the family just because of her condition when she was born such critical information.

She's not above taunting them though, even if it's unknowingly on their end, so she lets out a laugh, “My immediate thought was that maybe I should write a paper or something, but given the Yotsuba's treatment of me and the Guardians, I don't know if anyone would even read it or even if they deserve such answers to begin with…”

Then she shakes her head as the people in Maya's office collectively flinch at her withholding something so important from them due to their choices. The Yotsuba really weren't used to meeting the consequences of their actions, were they?

Regardless of whether they were used to something like that or not, it starts to answer her initial questions regarding the magic calculation area. Which brings her to question two, in what way, if any, does her Calanthe magic influence or use the magic calculation area?

That one should be equally easy to answer, especially now that she knows what she's looking for. Given they would've seen it both when she was a baby and when she used it as her last line of defense on her way out of training, she just uses Patronus fire while observing herself.

It was kind of weird, but maybe because they're two different systems of magic, while it turns out it absolutely uses her magic calculation area, it also overlaps and easily uses the area that's dedicated to her inborn abilities in this life. In fairness, from what she observes, while examining the magic of this world is akin to peeking into the operation of a computer and seeing the coding, the magic from her life as Calanthe is more akin to a building. Behind the scenes in her magic calculation area, it's the blueprint the architect or engineer or whatever drew up.

When it's passed off to the physical brain, that's when the construction begins, though much, much faster than actual building construction of course. It's just an analogy at the end of the day, it doesn't need to line up one to one. The point being though, they're two different things, and the magic calculation area is just the table they're resting on. Her Toshiko magic is akin to something stored on a holographic computer that spans the entire ‘table’ of her magic calculation area and the vast majority of its memory is eaten up by a few programs.

Her Calanthe magic on the other hand, are physical papers of building drafts laying on the table. It's not the table itself that projects the proverbial holographic computer, so it doesn't matter how much of the table they take up to said holographic computer, it doesn't interfere with it in any way. To continue the analogy, inborn skills like hers don't leave room on the ‘table’ of her magic calculation area because it isn't the table itself responsible for this universe's magic, which is run with the aforementioned holographic computer, and it doesn't have any more room within it to run anything else, like general casting.

Speaking of the holographic computer of her born specializations, there was one more ‘program’ on hers than she'd been led to believe she had. Born specializations came in two varieties, entirely unique skills or a natural ability with already existing magic. She was kind of in between.

The first inborn ability she had, Elemental Sight, was something that could be learned, though it was difficult and complicated, but it came to her as easily as breathing. Decomposition and Regrowth were technically unique, in the form of the fact that while there were spells to destroy or repair things, they were significantly more specific.

The difference was just in the specializations of the spells vs the generalization of her Decomposition and Regrowth as well as the fact the regular spells work on the physical world and any effect on the Eidos was just a reflection of that change, whereas hers did the opposite.

The unaccounted for one is just her Elemental Sight though, which her so-called family labeled a ‘supernatural power’ -which was a dumb name to her, since they already live in a world of magic which non-magicals would already label supernatural-, of which the only difference she can see between it and ‘magic’ was that one uses an Activation Sequence and the other doesn't. Hers had an Activation Sequence. Kinda. Might be better to call it a Magic Sequence, which is what an Activation Sequence became after it had been processed in the magic calculation area into a full spell.

Her Elemental Sight would count as a Magic Sequence because it was fully processed, or she's pretty sure it would anyway. The only reason she's hesitant is because it was a perpetually running background ‘program’. And that wasn't guesswork either. Magic Sequences needed a defined endpoint and hers had one, she can see it. She just… couldn't make sense of what the data was telling her to be honest. It brings up questions of its own of what sort of endpoint it could possibly be set to that she can't even guess from it. She's already not even sure she can turn it off if she wanted to.

Shaking the passing thought on the classification off, she starts to wonder after those observations if using some sort of expansion magic on the proverbial holographic computer on her magic calculation area would work to increase her capacity for the magic of this universe.

It wasn't something she could jump into willy-nilly of course. Even without there being some sort of representation of the magic calculation area that exists in her Eidos brain on her physical brain that could be negatively affected when it passes the data off and her physical brain tries to mirror it, there's still plenty of potential for it to harm her in unforeseen ways.

It's something she'll have to carefully look into and think over before she does anything.

Out of curiosity about actual differences, she turns her Elemental Sight attention to the service staff, quickly finding someone she knows doesn't have magic to look at their Eidos brain. To her surprise, they actually do seem to possess both magic and a magic calculation area, the latter just has way too little… storage space, as it were to continue the computer analogy, to ever actually cast magic. She turns her gaze to check over everyone within range to make sure it's not just random chance of picking someone who actually does technically possess the ability, even if it's not usable, she quickly realizes the same is true for every single one of them. They all have both magic and a magic calculation area. The only difference between people capable of casting magic and people who can't is the size of their magic calculation area.

She almost wants to laugh. It means that a non-magical is an entirely mythical being. In retrospect, the very fact that spells like the one that was on the Leaky Cauldron before magic was revealed sometimes making errors with particularly weak squibs, who despite having enough magic in their bodies that they very much were classed as squibs and not ‘muggles’, had so little magic in their bodies that the spells designed to work against only non-magicals triggered on them. It also means that not only was the purebloods ideology from her previous life even more bull than she originally thought since they couldn’t even have kids with mythical ‘non-magicals’ to begin, but the loss of power and ability they started to experience was entirely the degradation of genetics affecting the magic calculation area and the magic to power it their bloodline possessed. It also means that unless you slowly strengthen the genetics tied to both, it's entirely up to the genetic lottery.

She doesn't know if it's entirely the result of selective breeding from the Yotsuba or if she just won the aforementioned genetic lottery, but as she was examining people's magic calculation area, she also noticed that both hers and the raw power she possessed was substantial compared to practically everyone else's. The only person she sees in her range with anything remotely near their size is Yuki, but that's not surprising given the genetic modification he'd undergone.

Shaking the observation off, she turns her attention back to her own magic calculation area then lets the proverbial sleeping dogs lie, given that she can't mess with it right now anyway given she still needs to research more before she takes any drastic measures.

It does make her wonder why people with such small magic calculation areas exist. If it was just a matter of the proverbial genetic lottery, she can sort of get it though it's not good in any sense of the word. Unless this world's natural magic doesn't try to maintain balance between the active magicals and in active magicals, non-magicals in layman's not so accurate terms, there may be an incident similar to the Gates, Contractors, and Dolls in this world. Regardless, she can't do anything about it as things stand, but unless this universe doesn't care about the balance, it brings up the question of why it's let things get to this point without triggering a similar event to begin with. Why the statistical anomaly of so many of them not having magic is occurring as well.

If she had to take a stab in the dark and guess, it's an evolutionary quirk. Magicals approach problems from a magical perspective. Non-magicals approach the same problems from a non-magical perspective. A magical hastily calls up water and extinguishes a fire caused by a lightning strike then tries to come up with a ward to prevent it in the future. A non-magical pulls water from a well or something, then comes up with lightning rods as a preventative measure after. The magical walks away from it wondering what else they can make wards for. A non-magical walks away wondering what other uses the things he learned from the lightning rod can be applied to. Both benefit the greater whole with both their short term and long term findings in separate ways.

Hence the notion that it's an evolutionary trait, as possessing both people capable of magic and those who aren't helps with the survival of the species as a whole. But she'll fully admit, both to herself and anyone she shares those thoughts with that asks that it is very much a guess and nothing more.

She shakes the notion off, then heads to the bathroom, knowing both on principle and via Elemental Sight that there aren't any cameras in there. She has one more thing she wants to check and that one they've never seen from her nor is she willing to reveal it just yet.

Once she has the door firmly closed, she apparates from by the door to next to the tub while examining herself as well as doing her best to keep it as quiet as possible.

If she'd thought the revelation of the magic calculation area was surprising, it has next to nothing on that revelation. Namely that when one apparates, their Eidos body pulls their physical body into the information dimension and merges with it temporarily, seemingly to protect it from what she can see, and since distance doesn't really matter in the information dimension, it then unmerges from the physical body and shoves it back into the physical world at the intended destination.

It… definitely explains more than a couple things about the sensation that accompanies apparition. The darkness is easily explainable by the fact that while the information of light sources exists there, it doesn't illuminate anything as actual light. The tightness was the merge with the information body of the individual, the sensory data of what's technically two things, the Psion information body and the physical body, being forced together and occupying the same space as well as the information body enveloping and contracting around the physical body to protect it.

Which also explains why the symptoms are so much worse for someone with more power like her. Her information body, her magic form in other words, is significantly more powerful, more dense since power doesn't affect the size but rather the density, so her body is sorta occupying the same space with a not exactly physical entity such as said information body, and a much more dense entity at that. There's already more stuff in the space she's occupying than there is for the average magical. Also… they do envelop the physical body. And as an example, if they both put the same amount of effort in, there's always going to be a difference between a common garden snake and a boa constrictor wrapping around your arm.

With all that being said, while she wouldn't know for absolutely certainly without experiments that can't happen until she finds someone trustworthy, she'd make what she feels is a fairly educated guess that the reason side-along apparition is rougher for a passenger than regular apparition is probably the difference in the Eidos body willingly pulling the physical body into the information dimension, and merging with it with prior warning compared to someone else dragging their passenger into the information dimension and their Psion body being forced to hastily merge with it. Especially since there is a noticeable difference in how rough the ride is between when someone is warned they're going to be side-alonged and when they're not.

Which makes sense with her theory, since if they're warned, the Psion body, which could very well be the subconscious as a whole, itself has forewarning of what's about to happen and is prepared to attempt a merge that it may or may not have done before. If it has forewarning, either through the magical themselves making the decision to apparate or whoever is taking them side-along letting them know, then it has time to prepare rather than just hurriedly encasing the physical body when it's dragged to it in the information dimension and merged with it without notice.

It does bring up the question of why people of different power levels experience differences in how far they can go, but the thought has hardly crossed her mind before a potential answer chases after it. Namely, if she creates a magical shield in the physical world, regardless of whether anything impacts it, there's going to be a steady magic drain. The Psion body, being an entity of the person's magic itself, can only protect them for so long. If she's right that the Psion information body itselfis the subconscious, then it certainly explains why the distance in the physical world one can go is proportional to the amount of magic they possess.

Though, since distance doesn't matter in the information dimension, it's more the time it takes to take them in one place, locate the destination’s coordinates in the information dimension which undoubtedly takes longer the further away it is in the physical world from the starting point since it leaves one having to sort through more data, since distance not mattering is vastly different then not existing. When it does locate the coordinates, it then shoves them back out in the correct place. The time difference in protecting them is the variable relevant to one's magic power level, not the distance.

In any case, the limiter would essentially be the Psion body itself calculating how far it can take them while still being comfortably in the proverbial green of its safety margin, and only working with the conscious if it can pull off the distance they're wanting to go. The idea is even backed up by things like the fact that if someone is in a state not dissimilar to hysterical strength, then much like how the body can go beyond its normal limits in whatever emergency triggered it, even at the cost of its own health, magicals from her old universe have been known to be able to apparate further than usual. Even the existence of the ability for consecutive apparitions doesn't disprove it and rather also backs the theory up in her opinion.

The example for the subconscious limiting the conscious is often the fact that physically, humans have the bite strength to bite their own pinky off, but the brain doesn't allow it. What isn't really brought up is that while there may very well be outliers, most people can't even bite hard enough to make themselves bleed. 

Which means the subconscious isn't just stopping them from going the very last centimeter off a cliff. It stops them significantly further back. Using the same logic for apparition, the Psion information body undoubtedly keeps them from going anywhere near as far as they're actively capable of, and in the case of chaining apparitions, presumably examines itself and calculates how much more it has in it to be able to protect the physical body and only allows the consciousness to execute an apparition if it decides it still has enough in it to be able to pull it off. Which would also explain why the more magic you used prior to the attempt or something like how many apparitions you did before if you were chaining them together absolutely affects how far you can go.

Whether or not that theory is true will undoubtedly need to wait to be experimented on until she finds Hei and Misaki's reincarnations, since no one else in this world is capable of apparition and she herself has too much magic to get anywhere near her limit without jumping a stupidly long distance repeatedly, and if nothing else she has no way of checking what will be waiting for her on the other side.

She'd gotten rather distracted by the theory of it for a few moments, but having hit the point where she'd need Hei or Misaki's assistance for experiments and there isn't really anywhere else she can take the ideas at the moment, she shakes the thought away for the time being and starts stripping to bathe.

She cracks a smile as the ideas and the thoughts of her soulmates meet in her head and spawn a new thought. Namely, her recollection that more than once, she told them ‘I'll rest when I'm dead’ and yet, here she was, dead and reborn for unknown reasons and very much not resting. She'd woken up briefly back when she was a baby, but had only truly become conscious today, and she was already getting busy with research and other things, like taking on the Yotsuba. Which she supposes makes her a liar.

She lingers on the humorous thought of how her soulmates were going to react for a while, but even if it makes her a liar she really can't help herself. 

Especially since there's all sorts of other things to look into, what Occlumency and Legilimency look like with Elemental Sight for starters, given she's surrounded by Yotsuba with mental magic abilities of some sort or another. And also out of pure curiosity if she's being honest. It's a shame she doesn't have any potions from her old world there. She would love to see what they look like with Elemental Sight.

Even if she didn't have potions themselves, just having the Trunk of Requirements would be unbelievably helpful in her research. Not to mention that she'd honestly love to see what it looks like with Elemental Sight as well.

The thought barely finishes crossing her mind and the mental lament of never seeing it again has only just started when she feels a sharp pull from within her, deeper down then even her magic core, and a dull thudding sound reaches her a split second later, pulling her attention away from where she was gazing at the bathwater she was relaxing in thoughtfully after having cleaned off in the shower. There, a few feet away from the edge of the tub, was her beloved Trunk of Requirements.