Cecilia sat in the hospital lobby.

She truly looked every part like someone who had been dropped onto an alien planet and was trying very, very hard not to look like she was taking mental notes on everything she saw.

The chair beneath her was... sleek and strange. The floor was a marvel of seamless, pale tile, polished to a reflective sheen that caught the overhead lights and threw them back in soft, diffuse patterns.

The walls were painted a calming shade of blue-green, decorated with framed images that she now understood were not paintings.

And the signs.

The signs were everywhere. They were glowing, flickering and displaying words and arrows and numbers in a crisp, clean alphabet that was almost, but not quite, the script she had learned in the real world.

Some of them were stationary, their messages fixed and unchanging, like EMERGENCY, RADIOLOGY, CAFETERIA. Others were electronic, their letters shifting and scrolling in real time, announcing wait times and patient names and visiting hours in a ceaseless parade of information.

Cecilia had spent the first ten minutes of her lobby vigil simply staring at the electronic signs, watching the letters rearrange themselves, trying to work out the mechanism.

She had tentatively concluded that it involved some form of controlled lightning, though she could not imagine how anyone had managed to make lightning obedient.

Wait, Eastiel might. Eastiel could, with more training. Maybe.

The thing in front of her, the TV, as the nurse had called it, a term whose abbreviation remained mysterious but whose function was becoming clearer by the minute, was mounted high on the wall. Now, its screen was flickering with images and sounds.

She was, she realized, making a face.

Not a dignified face.

She had been piecing together what happened.

The nurse, a kind-eyed woman whose name tag read JESSICA and whose demeanor suggested she had seen far stranger things than a confused patient looking around like she didn’t know which way up and which way down, had filled in the blanks.

Cecilia had been brought to the hospital because she had fainted at a charity gala. The nurse assumed the gala had been some kind of high-society event and told her.

She said, Cecilia had simply... collapsed. One moment she had been standing, the next she had been on the floor, and someone had called an ambulance.

Arzhen had not been with her at the gala. Cecilia had guessed, since she already knew this man across multiple lifetimes, that he must have been with Ruby.

The nurse had confirmed that when the hospital called him, or, called the number listed as her emergency contact that would usually bring a husband rushing to his wife’s side, he had not come.

Not immediately... also, not for hours.

He had only arrived when he felt like arriving, and he had brought another woman and his mother with him.

When the doctors had delivered the diagnosis that his wife was pregnant, they had gone off on her. Loudly. Publicly. In the middle of the hospital room, with the door open and the nurses pretending not to hear.

Well, she wasn’t surprised.

But more importantly, she had married Arzhen in this world. Why, though?

In the real world, the answer had been simple. Cecilia was the Saintess. Or the Saintess’s replacement, the warm body on the holy throne while Ruby Vaiva was missing.

Marrying Arzhen Vasiliev had been a political necessity that benefited both parties. She had been useful to him then, a means to an end.

In the school romance world the answer had been different. Arzhen’s father, Anton Vasiliev, had been fond of her. He had seen something in her, perhaps some quality he wanted in a daughter-in-law, and had pushed for the marriage. Arzhen had been unwilling, of course.

In this world, though, who was she? What was the reason? Was there a reason Arzhen had been forced to marry her? And what was the reason he was forcing her to divorce him?

Hmmmmmmm.

She did not have enough information yet, but she could find out later.

The nurse had said she was going to be discharged soon. Apparently she was fine, or fine enough, and hospitals in this world did not keep patients longer than necessary.

She had been given a small handbag. Inside were items she recognized. A small comb, a small tube with a red lipstick instide and a small mirror. And... also items she did not recognize. A flat, thin and smooth black rectangle.

She had also been given a plastic bag containing the dress she had worn to the gala. It was the dress she had apparently fainted in, the dress that had been stripped off her when she was admitted.

She had changed back into it in the hospital bathroom, which had been its own adventure.

The dress was beautiful, a floor-length gown of deep emerald silk, cut in a style that was both elegant and unfamiliarly too simple.

It had taken her several minutes to work out the fastenings, which involved a tiny metal mechanism called a zipper (she found out the name at the Athenaeum, a similar thing but less sophisticated) that was rather ingenious.

Now she sat in the lobby, dressed in her gala gown like she had wandered out of a ballroom, observing everything before she left.

Ohh, she had experienced too many things in just a short period of time.

First, as we know, was the ultrasound machine, which used sound to see inside bodies and displayed the results on a glowing screen that was neither enchanted nor divine.

Next was the uniquely different alphabet of this world, whose letters were almost recognizable but just different enough to make her feel like she was reading through a fog.

She looked around and mapped the general organization of the hospital. Then the document formats, printed on pristine white paper by machines that whirred and clicked and spat out perfect copies without any human scribe touching a pen.

And, half an hour ago, she had ridden an elevator.

An elevator.

Yes. A small room that moved up and down. On its own. Without anything pulling it. Without magic levitating it. Just cables and counterweights and a motor she deduced.

She had riden it up and down. Up and down. She didn’t know how many times. She had felt the sensation of ascent and descent, and felt that it was a different sensation both times.

She then discovered that the buttons on the wall panel, when pressed, lit up with numbers, and she had wanted to understand the pattern and the turns.

She had been afraid to step out since she didn’t know when she should step out. The floor had been quite confusing. If not for a very patient orderly who gently guided her out of the elevator and suggested she might be more comfortable in the lobby, she might still be stuck inside.

After all, she was not sure why she should step out at all, when she was still trying to discover how an elevator worked. This was revolutionary!

And the architecture. Gods, the architecture. The walls? Again, the floor? The pillars? The overall style was clean and geometric and foreign, as though the entire building had been designed by a mind that had never seen a medieval cathedral or a beastman’s longhouse.

And the escalator.

She had spotted it from across the lobby. A moving staircase! They had invented a staircase that moved, carrying people up and down between floors without them having to lift a single—

She had stared at it for a full minute, her jaw threatening to unhinge itself again, watching as person after person stepped onto the shifting metal steps and were carried away like offerings on a conveyor belt.

Everything was crazy. Everything looked crazy! And she was trying her hardest not to look crazy while observing all these crazy things.

She had developed a strategy, of course. Especially when navigating unfamiliar things and foreign customs. Watch, learn, imitate.

She would stand around, her posture deliberately casual and her expression carefully neutral, while seeing how people interacted with the technology of this world.

She would observe the way they pressed buttons and slid cards through slots and spoke into small, flat rectangles they carried in their pockets. She would memorize their movements, their gestures, their expectations.

And then she would try it herself.

Voila.

Fucking voila.

So far, she had successfully operated a vending machine. She found out she could insert a paper currency she found in her small handbag, press the corresponding number, retrieve the item from the flap at the bottom and try not to weep at the sheer ingenuity of it all.

Also, she had successfully operated... well, triggered a door that opened automatically when she stepped in front of it.

So, in the end, she sat in the lobby, her emerald gown pooling around her, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes tracking everything, and tried to look like she belonged here.

"Breaking news!"

The voice came from the TV, and Cecilia’s attention snapped to the screen. Arzhen’s face appeared. The photograph beside the reporter was clearly professional.

He was wearing one of those immaculate suits, his tiger eyes staring out at the world with a cold gaze.

"Billionaire Arzhen Vasiliev has finalized a landmark agreement with a consortium of international governments, securing his position as the primary architect of next-generation defense infrastructure," the reporter announced, her voice smooth and practiced, each syllable polished to a professional gleam.

"The contract designates Vasiliev’s revolutionary portable barrier technology as the standard protective equipment for the International Hunter’s Association, with Vasiliev Industries named as the exclusive supplier for the foreseeable future."

"Market analysts are projecting this deal to be one of the most significant defense contracts of the decade, with ripple effects expected across multiple sectors."

Cecilia frowned.

Barrier design?

Hunter’s Association?