By the time 1980 had drawn to a close, and spring of '81 had rolled around, I'd been forced to reevaluate my situation at the mansion quite dramatically.
In the months between my summertime arrival at the mansion and Sir Henry's speech, I'd managed to settle in relatively well. There had been a few issues, sure, but usually, it was from one of the other kids having a breakdown or something else that I could avoid getting involved in. But if anything, the lack of problems only made me feel more uneasy. I'd spent those months blending in, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. To find out whatever dark secret was behind why so many children had been swiped from various parts of the world and placed under one roof.
As such, I hadn't really cared too much when we were told that Sir Henry was planning to visit the mansion. At the time, I had no idea if there was an ulterior motive behind the visit. And if I was looking at it from a practical perspective, it didn't really matter. Unless something had really gone wrong, he'd show up, say some words, loiter around for a bit, and leave. I doubted that anything significant would come from this visit, regardless of how I performed, or how well the other kids behaved. So while I had paid attention to what we were being told to do, I hadn't expected anything significant to happen that day.
But then Sir Henry gave us his little speech, and oh boy was that a bombshell.
'Best of your generation.'
'Superior Genes.'
'Only the smartest and purest.'
Understandably, my first thoughts on the speech could be easily summed up with a string of expletives and a general desire to get the hell away from the weirdo who thought that the biological equivalent of tea-reading had any provenance on a person's ability to function in society. But once the initial shock had worn off, and I'd given myself a few hours to calm down and centre myself, I found it far easier to reflect on the situation.
So I'd been right when I'd supposed that there was something weird about this whole situation. But eugenics? Really? I would have expected something like that back during my second life, where magical aptitude gave an appreciable X factor that made people innately more valuable than others. But here? In an entirely mundane world, with mundane people? It made zero sense. If there's one thing that has always rung true, across all three of my lives, it's that personal merit trumps birthright and breed in all cases. A person's motivation and skill are always more important factors in their success, rather than whatever some failed scientist says about the size of someone's head or the content of their blood. Sure, it was a motivation that I could exploit, but it was a very weird motivation for this whole program.
And things only got worse when you factored in the dreams of world domination.
"You are the chosen few, who will rise above everyone else, and lead humanity into a bright new future!" Is exactly what the loony old man had said, with a tone that told me that he believed every word of it. I mean, seriously, a single family holding a large enough stage in various fields -from government to the sciences and beyond- to guide the course of the world? It just screamed of a bad conspiracy theory, especially when you put even a second's worth of thought into it.
The Imperial Military in my old life may have seemed like a massive, monolithic structure. But the two original branches alone were only able to function thanks to the combined efforts of dozens of people, all of whom were busy jostling with each other for power and resources. And that had only gotten worse when the Air Force was split off from the Army and started fighting both it and the Navy for resources. And that was with something as relatively 'simple' as the military. Trying to condense something as incredibly complex as the world, or at least a controlling stake of it, into something simple enough that twenty people could manipulate was utterly delusional.
But no, that's not what had gotten to me the most. No, it was the fact that the other kids had lapped it up.
Nineteen children, all of who were apparently geniuses and should have had some ability to think critically, had been enthralled by the words of a man who probably wouldn't have gotten any awards for his oratory skill. But even now, months later, I couldn't put a finger on why they'd been so willing to listen to him. Maybe they hadn't figured things out to the same extent as I had? Maybe young children, without the mental pollution of two prior lives, are more likely to defer to authority? Maybe they'd been a lot lonelier than I'd initially assessed, and they'd been shocked into compliance by the offer of having a family? I simply couldn't explain it, and that had me concerned.
Hell, Valerie had been entirely taken by the offer of a new family. Since then, she only ever referred to me as "sister" and rarely by my actual name. Out of everyone, I would have thought that the post-war German girl would have been one of the first to identify the nazi-like qualities of the old man's speech. I mean, sure, there hadn't been any mention of race or reich in Henry's speech, but I'd have thought that she also would have picked up on all of the kids having Aryan features and drawn the obvious conclusion. I'd been meaning to ask her about it, but I got the distinct feeling that bringing up anything about her old life was just asking for trouble. Hell, when Henry had called Rostock an awful place, she'd looked like she was close to tears.
Maybe bringing up each kid's past had been a tactic to leave them mentally defenceless? He'd asked about my past in Russia, but that hadn't landed very well thanks to me not caring much about it in the first place. He'd tried the same tactic with the boy next to me, bringing up how this place was much nicer than Australia. Stripping someone of their mental defences was a perfectly valid strategy to leave people open to persuasion and manipulation. It was one that I'd used multiple times in my second life, and the fact that I'd learned it from a fascist dictator in my first life meant that it was possible that Henry had been drawing from a similar source.
It made a lot more sense than some MK-Ultra pheromone stuff.
Still, I couldn't reliably call him a fascist. From the sounds of it, he'd been more interested in our personal capabilities. There hadn't been any mention of race, and given the fact that I -a slav- had been brought into the program, I had enough evidence to discount race as a determining factor for our selection altogether. Or at least, I had more evidence to discount him being a Nazi than I did to count him as one. If anything, it struck me as something closer to how rich nobles in the Empire and other continental countries in my second life would try to justify themselves as being above the common rabble. Even if the commoner they were talking to was a mage, an officer, and a holder of the silver wing's assault badge.
Either way, if they were going to focus on our individual merits, then that gave me something to gain from this whole ordeal. Namely, an easy path to high-quality education and a safe job. If I had to act like eugenics mattered in order to get into university, then I'd sing like a songbird. And I'd preach the merits of whatever Sir Henry wanted if it kept me in a safe job. After all, you can't "change the world" if you're in a trench.
All I had to do was make sure that I kept on top of my education.
Easy enough, all things considered. I was already doing well compared to some of the other kids at the mansion, which probably meant that I was punching above my weight when compared to a normal 6-year-old. Though in fairness; I owed a lot of that to the simple fact that this was the third life I'd gone through. And while I didn't recall enough about my first life to definitively say if I'd been anything other than a normal child at this age, the experience I'd gained in that life had given me the leg-up that I'd required to ensure that my second one had seen a definite improvement. Not enough to rank as a genius, mind you, but enough that I could keep up with a mage training program intended for people over double my age. And now, that snowballing effect was helping me to keep up with the program without putting in a lot of effort.
"Assuming, of course, that you've actually retained that information. Given how much you've lost, can you really be sure of that?" I absently muttered to myself, before groaning and leaning back in my chair.
I was loitering in one of the many study rooms in the east wing of the mansion. These days, quiet moments like this were few and far between. Between Ludmila's near-constant supervision and Valerie clinging to me like a lost child, which she technically was now that I thought about it, finding a moment alone had been getting a lot more difficult than I would have otherwise liked. I'd gotten lucky today, as Ludmila had housework to cover and I'd been able to get Valerie engrossed in some games with my other friends. With both of them distracted, I'd been able to find an empty room, and simply spent the last half an hour or so silently looking back on everything that had happened since I got here.
Looking back on things, my situation right now wasn't what anyone would call 'good,' but I could still use the situation to my advantage. I just needed to remain aware of my surroundings and apply myself.
The clock mounted to the wall chimed, and I couldn't help but sigh. The chime sounded every fifteen minutes, gently reminding me that my finite time alone was coming to an end. Dinner would be in fifteen minutes, and everyone was expected to show up and be counted. If not, the staff would comb the mansion for the missing child, who'd then get told off and would receive some small punishment. While none of those punishments had been severe so far, I didn't want to stand out by being one of the handful of kids who'd caused the entire compound to go on lockdown.
I sighed, before getting up, making my way towards the door, and squeaking in surprise as I slipped and fell on my ass.
I sat there on the floor for a few seconds, marvelling at my own distracted stupidity, before the rational part of my mind reasserted itself, and started looking around to try and find what I'd slipped on. I didn't think that I'd been so distracted that I'd managed to trip over my own two feet, and the hardwood floor shouldn't have been slippery on its own…
And then I spotted it, a small black object, sitting on the floor just in front of the door.
I quickly made my way over and picked up the small teardrop-shaped object, holding it in both hands and carefully inspecting it. The thing I'd slipped on was some sort of polished black shard, though I couldn't tell if it was stone or glass. Either way, it was roughly a few inches high and a couple across, smooth and rounded on one face, and heavily faceted on the other side. Whatever it was, it was obviously tough. It had taken all of my weight, and the force of being launched into the door without scratching.
"Now what are you?" I muttered to myself as I flipped the object in my hand, and inspected its edges. Unfortunately, whoever had worked on the little shard had put some effort into rounding off the edges, eliminating the chance for anyone to be cut by it. Either accidentally, or as I'd hoped, intentionally. I sighed, before looking around the room to see if I could return the jet-black trip hazard to wherever it was supposed to go.
The study room was fairly small, and as such didn't have much in the way of furniture. There was a desk and a comfortable chair that I'd just been lounging in. And there were a couple of bookshelves with various boring books and studies. But the thing I was more interested in was the various decorative displays on the walls. If the small shard would have come from anything, it would have been one of those displays.
Eventually, I found what I was looking for, a three-piece display with a vaguely pear-shaped gap where the black object would probably go. I put the smooth shard on the shelf of a nearby bookcase, before dragging the chair over so that I could reach the display. It took a bit of effort to drag it into place, and a lot more balance than I would have liked to climb up on it, but eventually I managed it. And now that I was much closer to the display, I could finally figure out just what it was all about.
The display was for valuable high-silica materials, something that a geologist would probably get their rocks off to. Either way, the hunks of rock and glass were considered valuable for a variety of reasons. The three provided examples were red onyx, quartz, and obsidian. The latter of the three was the one I was holding in my hand. A small block of text under each piece in the display gave a short explanation of how the material had been formed, its common uses, and why it was valuable. And while I could have stayed to read them, I knew that I was on the clock. So I quickly put the obsidian back in its slot, only for the small shard of volcanic glass to ping right back out.
Frowning to myself, I tried a couple more times to properly reseat the obsidian, only for it to fall out again and again. At first, I thought that I'd simply mis-seated the shard, only to be proven wrong. A brief inspection of the slot revealed that while it was smooth, it was deeper than the smooth side of the obsidian. I flipped it around and put the facetted side in the slot, and while it did rest in the slot, it didn't sit snugly. A quick check showed that the other two pieces in the display were in the exact same state, both barely hanging in their slots.
"Who made this piece of junk, some kid in a sweatshop?" I muttered as I pulled out the red onyx shard, only to find that the bevelled back of the shard also didn't match its slot. But the slot was facetted, and after a brief comparison to confirm my theory, the facetted back of the obsidian shard fit snugly in the facetted slot. The shard of volcanic glass locking into place with a slight click.
"Figures that there'd be a latch to hold them in the correct spot. If only the guy who added the text had got the memo." I shook my head. Even though the individual display pieces had perfectly machined slots where they were supposed to fit, whoever had added the descriptive text and the labels had gotten it completely wrong. The obsidian shard sat perfectly in the facetted slot, but the label for the slot and the text below it corresponded with the red onyx.
I made a mental note to bring up that little mistake with Ludmila, before removing the hunk of quartz from its spot and checking the slot. Sure enough, the interior was bevelled, the smooth quartz could never have properly fit, but the red onyx would. I quickly put the hunk of onyx in, and I was once again rewarded with a slight click as some hidden latch engaged. With one hunk of high-silica material left, and one perfectly machined slot for it, I put the piece of quartz into the smooth slot that was supposed to be the home of the obsidian shard.
As soon as it clicked into place, the bottom of the display fell a couple of inches before locking into place, revealing a hidden compartment.
I took a few seconds to stare at the overly complex lockbox, before groaning and shaking my head. "Really? I thought the whole point behind a lockbox was that someone couldn't just blunder into opening it?"
The lockbox didn't answer my question, and I shook my head before reaching into the hidden compartment and pulling out a key.
Or at least, half of a key. The key was missing half of its shaft, leaving a semi-circular spine with two slots on the flat face. Each slot featured a larger diameter through-hole and a narrow slot with two overhanging pieces of metal, sort of like the slot for a door chain. Meanwhile, the key's bit, the part that actually engaged with a lock, was missing its entire upper half. The head seemed the most intact, but given how it was cut to be flush with the shaft and lacked any detailing on that side, I figured that it too had been trimmed down to mate with another part. On the reverse side, there was a logo depicting an old piece of armour.
"A secret key, huh?" I muttered as I stared at the key. Weird lock boxes housing bits of a key, a mansion that's one power cut away from being a horror movie set, and the guy behind it all carrying beliefs that your average layman would call fascist? It all came across like the beats to someone's idea of a James Bond book. I snorted and shook my head at the thought. "What's next, hidden rooms? Traps? A self-destruct button?"
For a moment nothing answered me, before the clock on the opposite wall let out a soft and melodic tune. I whipped around at the sound and felt the blood drain from my face as I read the time on its face. I was out of time. The clock had struck 5:30 pm, and it was dinner time. The staff had probably already noticed that I wasn't in the dining room with the other kids, and they'd start searching for me soon. I needed to get moving, and fast.
I quickly shoved the key into a pocket, before slamming the hidden compartment closed. As soon as it locked back into its hidden position, the three materials popped out of their slots. I cursed to myself, before putting them back into their "correct" positions according to the descriptions. The shards didn't fit properly into the mismatching slots, but I didn't care, they just needed to look like they belonged at a cursory glance.
I quickly jumped off the chair and darted out of the room. I didn't even notice the camera that had been watching me the entire time.