Just as she was remembering who she really was, her ruin was unfolding right in front of her.
There was a sense of panic in her, as she looked down at her beautiful dress, and her perfectly painted nails, and her purple hair as it pooled in her lap. All of it was suddenly so very foreign.
She wasn't like this. She hated dresses. She hated attention. She hated makeup and all things frilly and pretty.
This wasn't her.
She wasn't Livia Katrina Valentina.
She was...she was...who was she?
'Why can't I remember it!?'
She once lived on a planet called Earth. She once lived in modern society. She once played a game that is eerily similar to the world, she was reborn in.
She knew all of this, but suddenly, she could not remember her own name. Her real name.
She frantically searches her memories, but all she feels is a twinge of pain and white blankness.
'Maybe I just haven't recovered all of my memories, yet? There is no way they are just gone, right?'
She wasn't Livia, but at the same time, she was. The memories in her head still clashed with each other. She still felt a sense of distance and a strange coldness in her chest, but at the end of the day, this was her new reality. She had memories of her childhood, of her sister, the Crown Prince, and her own parents to prove it all true. As much as she would love to properly digest everything, to have a moment to panic and just cry a bit, she couldn't.
She was still in the middle of the event. The voices of the nobles still could be heard as the Crown Prince looked down on her in stony silence.
As everything threatened to overwhelm her, she had little choice but to force it down. The coldness in her heart grew. An odd calm fell over her.
Plus, there was something that bothered her greatly.
'Amelia only entered the Academy less than a month ago.'
The story had barely started.
'Why on Eart-Etheria, would she do this to herself? Who strives for their own ruin!?'
There had to be something more. Something that she was missing.
"Look, Miss Amelia is waking up!"
The mentioned girl was indeed sitting up in the Second Prince's arms. The Crown Prince Rodale was instantly by her side. He offered her his hand to help her stand up with an expression of great concern.
"Miss Amelia, are you alright?" The Second Prince asks.
Amelia blinks in a daze and stumbles a bit, right into Crown Prince Rodale arms which come up to steady her.
"Orin? Rodale? W-what happened?" She asks meekly.
As much as they were praising her earlier, the nobles can't hide their look of contempt and shock at Amelia using the Prince's first name without any honorifics. It was a show of great rudeness and even could be seen as an insult. Neither Prince seems to mind.
'The Crown Prince and the Second Prince were the first targets that you encounter if you enter the House of Light at the Academy. The Crown Prince was a part of the original four targets, the Second Prince was not.'
What an odd bit of information she abruptly knew. Livia wonders faintly if this was just going to continue to happen. Bits and pieces of her memory revealing itself to her as if she had always known even though she hadn't only seconds before. She could do without the twinge of pain the information brought, though. She had a feeling chronic headache will be in her future very soon.
"Milady, it seems you have been dosed with a poison," Second Prince Orin says.
A very mild one. Honestly, if she wasn't so scrawny maybe that small dose wouldn't have toppled her so quickly, Livia thinks, eyeing the three standing a few feet away from her with an odd mix of emotions.
Amelia's eyes go wide in fright, "A poison...?"
"Indeed, Milady. It seems one of your fellow classmates is the culprit," Prince Orin says with a scowl.
He shoots a look of utter disgust and hate at Livia.
Amelia bright blue eyes follow his gaze, and a look of shock passes over her face. Her small mouth falls open to gape at Livia.
"B-But why?" Amelia asks, very confused.
'Because I don't like you, you stupid girl,' Livia thinks with scorn.
"..." She doesn't voice her thoughts but she does return the scowl directed at her.
She wouldn't be cowed.