0730 HOURS
ALPHEIM
BIANCA ROSSWEISSE'S PENTHOUSE
3 MONTHS AFTER THE JOTUNHEIM INCIDENT.
"The time now is 0730 hours. Mistress Ilise, please wake up. My precepts dictate that a spray of cold water be discharged should you not end your current REM cycle. I repeat- Mistress Ilise, please wake-"
"All right, all right, I got it."
"REM cycle ended. Disengaging 'Rude Awakening' precept. Good morning, Mistress Ilise. Shall I recite your schedule?"
"Go ahead."
Ilise Rossweisse sat up in her bed and stretched luxuriously. She was going to miss her bed, after today. When Bianca - her adoptive sister - had first told her she'd been enrolled at Mistilteinn Academy, the first thing Ilise had asked about was her bed. Bianca, being the heiress to the Yggdrasil empire, obviously got her own perks. After all, Ilise was staying in Bianca's personal penthouse. But someone like herself would be relegated to a regular dorm room with a regular bed and none of the glitz and glamour that came with being a Rossweisse.
Tragic, really.
She shook her periwinkle-blue locks out of her face, rubbing her eyes blearily. She stopped to look down at her hands - they were covered in tiny, lightning-bolt shaped scars. She'd been told that they'd come from the accident that had killed her father in the first place. The very same accident that had turned Ilise Alexeyevna into Ilise Rossweisse.
The odd thing about the entire situation was that she didn't actually remember the accident. When Yggdrasil had used its experimental total recall technology on her, all Ilise had seen were bright, blue lights and a giant golden hand. The psychic mages they'd brought in had procured the same results.
In other words, Ilise's memories were sealed behind a big, blue wall. One that would take years for her to unravel and chip away at. Although she still wondered just what lay beyond the veil, she was happy with her current life. Yggdrasil must've owed her father if the Rossweisse family had decided to take her in instead of putting her out into the foster care system.
Ilise's train of thought was interrupted by MUTHR, her caretaker. One of the many Multi-Utility Task-Help Robots built by Yggdrasil, hers in particular was top of the line. Fresh off the conveyor belt. Like the furnishings of her room, Yggdrasil had spared no expense in making sure she lived in comfort, memory loss or not. It was too bad those comforts didn't extend to her tenure at Mistilteinn, but she'd get used to it sooner or later.
"At 0800 hours, you are to report to the dining room for breakfast. Mistress Bianca is waiting for you there. You will be served bagels, ham, cream cheese and croissants and either orange juice, coffee or tea. You have approximately one hour to finish your breakfast. At 0900 hours, a transport will arrive to take both you and Mistress Bianca to Mistilteinn Academy. A timetable of your school day will be handed to you upon arrival. I have taken the liberty of preparing your uniform and drawing a bath for you. Do note that you have half an hour to ready yourself."
"Right. Thank you, MUTHR."
"You are most welcome." With that, the automaton powered down. It wouldn't start up again unless Ilise willed it to, and she had no intention of doing so. She found the willpower to drag herself out of the cushiony hell that was her mattress and stumble across her bedroom. For someone who specialised in Kinetic-type magic, Ilise certainly wasn't very active.
Ilise briefly considered waking MUTHR just so she could have someone carry her all the way to the bathroom, but she decided the automaton's monotonous nagging wouldn't be worth it. Still half-asleep, Ilise felt her way into the bathroom, bumping into pottery and extremely expensive portraits as she went.
The opulence of Bianca's penthouse was such that you couldn't walk anywhere without stumbling into something that probably cost more money than what most people made in their entire lifetimes. Ilise was fairly sure one of the paintings she'd nearly knocked off the wall should've belonged somewhere in the vault of an art museum, kept under lock and key and protected by armed guards. Her penthouse was the result of the perfect union of modern Alpheim hard-light technology and traditional luxury, with its winding crystal pottery, perpetual motion sculptures and antiquated picture frames.
Even though Ilise had been living there for the better part of three months, the penthouse's interior still caught her off-guard. She must've spent a good fifteen minutes or so gawking at her surroundings. The bathroom wasn't much better. Like the rest of Bianca's home, it was elegant without being garish. It was a wonderful combination of beautiful, natural materials, and graceful shapes. The air in here smelled like rosewater, Ilise noted. Bianca had a thing for rosewater imported from the Levant.
Her Mistilteinn uniform was the only thing that was out of place. Just as MUTHR had said, her uniform had already been neatly laid out beside the bubbling bath. It consisted of an ivory peacoat, a golden aiguillette, a peaked cap and a whole bunch of other similarly shiny embellishments that denoted her status as a first year student and a member of the Rossweisse family. She'd recognise that white rose brooch anywhere, having spent so much time around it.
Ilise wasn't very particular about baths. Her magic seemed to keep her from getting dirty - dust, grime or dirt simply bounced off. What it didn't do was prevent her from getting the worst case of bedhead ever. Ilise's hair, which was usually teased into flowing locks like Bianca's, looked like a bird's nest in the morning. No amount of magic could fix that part of her - as a matter of fact, using magic only made it worse. Ilise figured that it was probably all that kinetic energy running through her veins that was causing her hair to stand on end.
She'd spent enough time looking at the paintings outside. She quickly dived into the bath, swimming around to make sure that any and all traces of the smell of her bed were washed off and replaced with the scent of roses. When Ilise finally surfaced, the clock showed 0755. She had five minutes to don her fancy new dress uniform with all of its embellishments, navigate the penthouse's spiralling stairways and find the dining room.
Under normal circumstances, she would've shrugged and went with it. Being late wasn't that much of a problem when you were a member of the Rossweisse family. But when it was Bianca Rossweisse who was waiting on you, you simply felt this odd pressure to be there on time and impress her. Ilise briefly considered tapping into her Kaiserforce to get things done - the boost of speed it provided allowed her to move much faster than any land vehicle.
A glance at the scars on her hands put an end to that thought.
Instead, she settled for a combination of a Speed-Augmenting and a Kinetic Clone spell. A blue glyph passed through Ilise, imbuing her with peak human speed for a short period of time. She'd have to figure out how to get the braided aiguillette on later - right now, all she needed to focus on was looking presentable. She threw on a crisp white dress shirt, slipped into her peacoat, fumbled with her buttons and fluffed her cap out all at the same time, thanks to her Kinetic Clones. It was fairly high-level magic - something most teenagers wouldn't be able to perform, but the Kaiser of Motion dwelling inside her made that a possibility.
Ilise's multiple blurry clones faded out of existence once they'd helped her get clothed. Two smaller glyphs manifested on her palms. Concussive Force spells - those would help her propel herself down the halls at breakneck speeds, and coupled with a standard Augment spell, she'd be able to make it for breakfast with time to spare.
She took off with a muffled 'boom' sound. Her arms were used to the recoil of her Concussive Force - learning to manage that was one of the first things every user of Kinetic magic learned. It was the magic type's most basic attack, and while simple in concept, it had plenty of other uses. Like Ilise blasting herself around the house, narrowly avoiding shattering the marble busts of all the Rossweisses that had come before her.
Ilise immediately slammed into the opposite wall, coming to the conclusion that moving like this simply wouldn't do. She came to a grinding halt outside one of the floor-to-ceiling hard-light windows that Bianca seemed to like so much and threw them wide open. It was dizzying, being this high up. From here, Ilise could overlook the entire city of Alpheim, with the exception of the Yggdrasil building and its immediate surroundings. It was, for miles and miles on end, made of spiralling light constructs and crystalline roads. It was as if the Sun had already come up - and it wasn't due to do so for another hour.
Setting a foot on the ledge, she poked her head outside. Her hair flew around her wildly, blown about by the cold morning wind. Ilise surveyed her surroundings. Bianca's pool was just below her - that meant the dining room had to be close. She evaluated her choices, and arrived at the conclusion that risking a wet landing in the pool was much better than getting one of Bianca's disappointed looks.
Taking a deep breath, she swung her shoulders back, lowered her body into an almost prone position and inhaled.
The glyphs on her palms expanded. Rotating wildly, the concentric circles seemed to reach a zenith as they released a blast of raw concussive force. Ilise winced as she heard the windowpanes shatter, but by then she was too far away to do anything. Ilise flailed about in midair, firing off concussive blasts on the soles of her feet and her palms in an attempt to correct her position.
Perhaps it was a small mercy that Bianca had been out on the patio, sipping on a glass of orange juice. She'd heard her precious hard-light windows shatter as Ilise had so brazenly launched herself out. Sighing, she summoned a large golden palm right below Ilise. She promptly landed on it in a bundle of now-crinkled clothes and dissipating blue sparks, Ilise groaned. Oh, well. At least she hadn't gotten wet.
"Good morning to you too, Ilise." Bianca said, the ghost of a smirk on her face.
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