It'd been around a week since I'd arrived at the Henry Mansion, and I was starting to get a better understanding of the situation I'd been dragged into.
After eating breakfast on my first day, Ludmila had led me upstairs to my room. It was a short visit, more to drop off the few possessions I'd brought with me and to grab a spare change of clothes to change into after a bath. Even if it was just a whistle-stop visit, I had to admit that it was probably the nicest children's room that I'd experienced in any of my lives. It was moderately large, well ventilated, and was furnished with some nice furniture. After picking out a spare change of clothes from a dresser, Ludmila took me away for my first proper bath of this life. During which, she asked me multiple times if I'd only ever bathed in a river, sounding less jovial and more concerned every time as she scrubbed more and more dirt off me.
For the record; I hadn't. But I just didn't have it in me to tell her that there wasn't much difference between the river water and the old well that we took our bathing water from.
By the time Ludmila was done, I felt extremely raw. As if she'd peeled off the top layer of my skin in the process of getting the grime off. But even a cursory glance told me just how much I needed it. And after a quick trim of my hair, I actually looked as if I belonged, rather than being some bum that had been swiped off the streets. Ludmila certainly seemed happy with the improvement, looking me up and down, and nodding appreciatively.
"I think you may be a diamond in the rough in more than one way, my dear." She suggested, and I had to stifle a dismissive snort at the idea. While I couldn't really recall how I'd looked at the prime of my last life, I doubted that I'd been particularly good looking. That, or Visha had done a good job at intercepting any offers before they reached my desk.
Oh Visha… what I wouldn't do to have some competent help around here.
Thankfully, Ludmila snapped me out of my momentary distraction, and spent almost the rest of the morning showing me around the mansion. The building itself was a U-shaped design, split over three floors, including the converted attic. According to Ludmila, the mansion was actually a fairly modern building, and it merely looked old due to being based on the work of the architect George Trevor. I'd never heard of him, as architecture wasn't really a thing that had interested me in any of my lives, but apparently he was fairly well renowned. I couldn't be sure if this was something new to this world, or a carry-over from my first life. But either way, Mr. Trevor had done a great job on making the place feel as if it'd been cut out of a turn-of-the-century dime novel. Hell, the only thing it was missing was a bunch of annoyingly complex puzzle locks, and it could fit into a cheap dime novel.
From the top, the third floor was where all of the accommodation could be found. The west wing was filled out with rooms for the children, while some of the adult staff would live in the east wing. The rooms were comparatively small, when compared to the rest of the rooms in the mansion, but that made sense. We were only expected to be in our rooms for rest, unless we were being grounded as punishment, while spending the rest of the day on the other two floors of the building. Each of the rooms had fairly basic furnishings; a window desk for private use, a pair of dressers for clothes, and two very nice beds. Though compared to what I'd had to put up with for the past few years, they didn't have to work too hard to impress me. After spending the past few years bouncing between mattresses that were older than me, and worn out to match, having something so soft to sleep on was an absolute luxury.
Progressing down to the second floor, the building was completely split by the expansive main hall. The west wing, with the vaulted ceiling of the dining room taking out maybe a quarter of the potential floor space on the wing, there was a mix of study rooms and a large library. Said library had been well stocked with books, and ones in English too. I didn't know if I could attribute that to the fact that I'd learned the language back in my first life, or if there was less linguistic drift between it and the Albish from my second life, which I'd ended up fluent in. Either way, I'd recognised some of the words in the book titles, and even fully understood some of them. But none of the titles really jumped out at me, if anything they struck me as academic titles. Useful for education and expanding my knowledge, but nothing to pass the time. Meanwhile, the east wing had been jammed full of classrooms, including one that looked like a basic lab of some sorts. According to Ludmila, once everyone was speaking the same language, we'd be lumped together into a single class group. I figured that we'd learn all of the basic stuff, like math, language, and science. But anything past that would be a mystery.
All that left was the ground floor, which was split half-and-half between catering and relaxation. The west wing, owing to the amount of space taken up by the main dining room, handled catering and food service. Past the main dining room, there was a large kitchen with an attached cold room, an infirmary with a nurse on duty, and a saloon with a few tables and a baby grand in the middle of the room. A set of large windows opening out onto the garden beyond, simultaneously allowing for a lot of light to come in, while also allowing anyone inside to watch any kids in the garden, and allowing you to look across into the eastern wing. Speaking of which, the eastern wing was divided up between a pair of small lounges, a game room with a pool table, and a large recreation room of some sort. And sandwiched between the two, in the center of the U-shaped mansion, was a fairly large garden.
And in that garden, I found the other kids.
At first, there were less than ten of us. Though that number would grow over the next few days as other children were brought to the mansion. That first group of eight was mostly male dominated, six boys and two girls, including myself. Most of them kept their distance, either because they were shy, or because they'd figured out that most of the kids didn't speak the same language and didn't want to make the effort for people they wouldn't be able to talk to. But a couple did make the effort, a boy and the other girl. The language barrier kept us from talking, but I was able to pick up on a few non-verbal cues. Like how the girl emphasized one word when introducing herself, and smiled when I repeated it. Or how the boy had shown us both how to play tic tac toe. Thankfully, the basic children's game had spread far and wide, though it took a bit of effort to get the Frenchie involved. And before long, those two formed my first… friendships, I guess you could call them. I didn't feel much companionship with them right now, but they were the only two who'd put in any effort into getting to know me, so they were the closest ones to the mark.
Still, putting all of us together gave me a good opportunity to assess my… Companions? Competition? Fellow prisoners? I wasn't exactly sure how best to characterize our little group, but I could pick up on some important details. Like how all of the kids, myself included, had blonde hair and blue eyes. It was something that was far too uniform to be a happy coincidence, but I couldn't see a reason for it other than making us more reliant on using facial features to identify each other. Past that, we all appeared to be the same age, or at least close enough to fit into the same school year group, and everyone seemed to be in good health. But outside their physical appearances, I couldn't figure anything else out during the first meeting.
But I had more opportunities to work with than just that one meeting. Over the next few days, we were always assembled to eat together, and we were allowed to play together at certain times of the day. And that gave me an opportunity to see how the other kids were settling in. Both the kids who'd been there before me, and the new arrivals who trickled in over nearly a week. And to put it bluntly, a lot of them weren't taking it well. Only a couple of kids appeared to share the same language, and they'd formed into little groups entirely on their own, excluding everyone else no matter how friendly they were. Other kids had tried to make friends nonverbally by sharing toys or trying to play games, like the boy who played tic tac toe with me. But most of the kids kept to themselves, and that only made things worse. Some were coiled like springs, barely containing their stress and anxiety. Others had clammed up completely, often hiding themselves away in corners of covered areas where they could feel safe, and only appearing to relax when they were in close proximity to their minders.
And yes, there were multiple women looking after the children, one motherly woman to one orphan. Ludmila hadn't been assigned to me by some fluke of necessity, it was standard for all of the kids. Which made me think that it was a specific ploy to create an emotional link that could be exploited. I could certainly see the angle that they were meant to play, however conscious they were of it or not. Find a foreign orphan, take them out of their comfort zone, drop them into a stressful situation in a foreign land, and then make possibly the only person who spoke their language a nearly perfect parental figure? It was emotional manipulation 101.
It struck me as overkill. The mansion was already ringed by a series of gardens and courtyards that provided very little cover to any potential escapees, a tall stone wall that none of us could scale, and a developing open killzone before you reached the "safety" of the forest. And then there were the guards, who I'd pegged as actual soldiers rather than mercenaries. They were too professional to be mercenaries, they wore modern combat gear, and they were armed with modern assault rifles. From what I could gauge, there was probably a squad or two of them on the compound, more than enough for routine patrols and to check every vehicle that entered and left the compound. With all the money that was floating around, there was a decent chance that some colonel had taken a bribe to have some of his men guard the manor. That, or there was an actual government interested in what was going on here.
They were one of the biggest reasons why I hadn't tried anything, and why I wasn't going to try anything in the near term. There were too many obstacles in the way. Sneaking out of my room at night wasn't easy, as the doors were locked after lights out. And finding an opportunity to slip away from Ludmila during the day was very difficult. Even if I had an opportunity, I'd then have to sneak through unfamiliar territory, scale the stone wall, and find my way through the forest beyond. And I'd have to do all of that without being seen. Calling the chances of escape "slim" would be charitable.
Even so, some of the kids hadn't taken the hint, and had either wandered off or had made pitifully bad attempts at escape. From what Ludmila had told me, they'd snuck off without their minders, but had been found within the mansion or the immediate area. And from what I could tell, they'd been given a stern talking too and had forfeited dessert after dinner. It wasn't much of a punishment, but the adults were probably trying to take a gentle hand with the kids for now. It wouldn't last, but I wasn't about to be the idiot that provoked the guys in charge into making an example. But given how nobody had done anything major just yet, I figured that there was at least some headroom to work with.
At least, that's what I hoped.
I shoved that thought out of my mind, and focused on the here-and-now. Right now, I was in the large recreation room on the far tip of the east wing. All of the kids had finished our lessons for the day, had dinner, and we were assembled together for a rest and relaxation period before bed. And a quick look around really illustrated just how divided the various children in this little program were, all thanks to the language barrier.
By my reckoning, there were three main 'groups' in the room, plus a handful of kids either sitting on their own, or having their minders read a story to them. One group was a selection of boys playing a game of jenga in the middle of the room. Another group had formed around my two earlier friends, either watching them play tic tac toe or having their own games nearby. And a third group sat in front of a television, watching some sort of children's puppet show about some secret agent guy in a red shirt. But that was about as much as I could understand about it. The show was in English, and that was where a lot of the differences between English and Albish lay, which stopped me from properly understanding what was going on.
Not that it mattered. I couldn't really focus on that right now. As my new roommate was doing her best to teach me something.
Valerie, a German girl about my age, had been brought to the mansion a couple of days ago, and had looked about ready to jump out of her own skin. Ludmila had introduced me to her, and I'd tried introducing myself in the empire's Germanian, though adding in a slow and uncertain tone that could easily be mistaken for the unsteady speech of someone who just barely knew a language. Even so, the effort was entirely wasted as the linguistic drift between the two languages had been so severe that she'd only really understood me saying hello. Likewise, when she spoke to me in German I could only make out a few words. I would have been content to leave things there, but when Ludmila told me that she was my new roommate I figured that putting in a bit of effort to make her feel welcome would be worth it in the long run.
Developing this little 'friend group' was certainly a different experience to my reclusive approach to life at the orphanage, both in my second life in the empire, and in the Russian one earlier in this life. But there was a very good reason for this new approach. Back in those places, I hadn't felt a need to really care about the other kids, as I alway sought a life elsewhere. But here? In a mansion where, like it or not, our fate would be decided for us? Making a few friends, if only to watch my back, would be well worth the investment.
And of the three thus-far, I'd invested in Valerie the most. Though that was more down to circumstance than a concentrated effort to treat her better than the other two. On her first night here she'd been so scared that instead of going to sleep, she'd curled up under her covers and cried. And unfortunately, she was so loud that I hadn't been able to get to sleep because of it. So in a desperate attempt to shut her up, I gave her my teddy bear, and hoped that it'd help her calm down. At the time it had been a pragmatic choice. I wasn't using it, and given how it spent the entire day in the room, I couldn't use it to sell my disguise. So I took a chance that it'd shut her up enough that I could get some sleep.
On the one hand, it had worked, and she'd gone to sleep soon after. But since then, she'd followed me around like a sick puppy every time we were together. Still, it wasn't without long-term benefits. She was trying to teach me German after all. Or at least, I assumed she was. She'd occasionally point at something, like a clock or something, and would say a word in German. And she'd either nod every time I repeated the word back to her properly, or would slowly repeat the word if I got the pronunciation wrong. It was crude, and didn't hold a candle to the English lessons we were receiving separately. But she was putting effort into teaching me the language, and I could use the refresher. Even if my prior knowledge of Germanian was doing most of the heavy lifting.
"Das. Ist." Valerie began, pointing to a picture of a car in my Russian-to-English language book. "Das. Auto"
"Das ist, das auto." I repeated, putting my finger next to hers on the page. It wasn't on the same level as an infant's picture-book, but it had more pictures than what I'd remembered from the various Germanian-to-other language phrase books that were issued out to the Empire's mages whenever we were deployed against a new enemy.
"Ja! Ja!" Valerie gave me a polite nod as she congratulated me, mimicking her wasn't exactly something I'd consider worthy of praise, but it made her happy so I nodded along with her. She quickly moved on to the next item on the page, a house. "Das ist, das haus."
"Das ist, das haus." I repeated after her, earning a few more excited "ja's" before continuing. She flipped a page, stopped for a few seconds to try and interpret the contents from the pictures, before skipping it. I didn't manage to make out what was on the page, but given the uncomfortable expression that settled on Val's face, it didn't take a genius to figure out that whatever the contents were, it was a soft spot for her. She flipped forwards a few pages, before settling on a section on playground items, and we continued from there. Mostly just pointing out various objects, and continuing to hammer home that "das ist" meant "that is."
"Das ist..." Valerie pointed to a picture, showing two girls playing together, and then pointed at me. A small and hopeful smile on her face as she finished. "Mein freund!"
Even if I'd been a complete novice, I would have understood exactly what she was saying. The meaning was obvious, and I smiled as I repeated the words back to her. "Das ist mein freund."
I can sometimes be called heartless, among other things. But the sight of that lost young girl finally smiling as she realized that she wasn't alone in the mansion truly warmed my heart. Even if I was a bit annoyed at her suddenly throwing her arms around me, and trying to crush me with a hug just a second or so later. I had to wiggle my arms a bit to get my pinned arms free enough to awkwardly return the hug, gently patting the German girl on the back as I searched in vain for someone to help me. Dealing with crying children is one thing that I've never been good at, especially not in a situation like this. But the only people who even appeared to notice what was going on were Ludmila and Valerie's minder, who simply chuckled at my plight.
With no help coming, I simply resigned myself to fate, and let Valerie feel safe for a few minutes. Humming a tune from my past life to pass the time and try to calm down the young girl, wondering just what I was going to do with her.