There's lots of people here who rub shoulders with royals and nobles and the scions of divine houses and the heirs of the wealthiest magnates.

And there is Prince Ceres. There he goes now. He is not wearing the school uniform but he is wearing something that looks like it had more layers on it when it was assembled for him this morning and has since lost them to carelessness. He is not actually bothering to wear any divinity symbols at all. Maybe he figures everyone will recognize him and know what he's about, or doesn't care if anyone does.

Ooooooooh.

Everyone knows what Prince Ceres's deal is. Everyone does not know what Prince Ceres's deal is like from the inside. Kareen wants to know. She consciously keeps her fingers from twitching with the greed of it. 

She's not going to approach him out of nowhere and ask him a lot of questions. It's...marginally less socially unacceptable with the weight of Inquiry heavy on your shoulders...but "marginally less socially unacceptable" is not the same thing as "likely to work." 

She will...find a way to end up in a totally normal social encounter with him. And then she will ask questions gently. 

Meanwhile she is in a SCHOOL and there is information to absorb like a sponge without any need for web-like tactics. 

Before she makes much more progress toward her first class of the day, Prince Ceres's affianced catches up with him, stomping slightly and carrying a princely jacket. "Hey!" she calls out.

"Oh hi El!"

"You left this," she says, flinging the jacket in his face.

"Oh. Thanks." He looks at it, decides not to put it on, and slings it over his shoulder instead, then leans over to peck his fiancée on the cheek.

She intercepts his face with the palm of her hand. "How do you even put one foot in front of the other, honestly. You've history, go learn something."

Ceres chuckles a little and disappears into the nearest school entrance.

Oh, man, what a classic anime tsundere. She doesn't remember the villainess being quite that endearing in her fake videogame memories. She remembers this specific scene, actually, it's weird, the villainess seemed so much more sincerely bitchy in videogame format. 

The villainess glances at the clocktower, catches a glimpse of Kareen and then abandons it, and trots into the school too.

Yeah Kareen also has to get to class. 

Her first class is History, which isn't her best because the subject matter isn't intrinsically fascinating like magic or something she has a leg up on like maths, but it does consist of information which can be inhaled, so she's not bad at it. 

She arrives well before the bell and neatly arranges her materials on her desk. 

The girl assigned the desk next to her has her pins on her shoulder: Courage Integrity Family Prudence. She looks at Kareen, appears to instantly memorize her face, and then resumes looking at her textbook, making small sharp notes in the margins.

It's so nice how literally none of those involve horrible suffering.

Kareen recognizes her, of course. Her backstory is sad, of course, and knowing things about how real life communist revolutions have gone she's kind of nervous about Zalor's home country's outcomes, but--probably the best thing to do is just avoid her attention. 

Unfortunately Kareen is an incorrigible show-off who raises her hand every time the teacher asks a question. 

Zalor isn't. She answers correctly when called upon with excellent protocol and only the very faintest foreign accent, but she doesn't tend to volunteer.

Kareen feels so awkward about Zalor. Like, ideally, she would try to befriend her! Subvert their projected enmity that way! Unfortunately her fake memories of playing this game do not actually give her a lot of levers with which to do that. There wasn't a route for it or anything. So instead she is feeling awkward and praying to her god that the awkwardness isn't coming off as a snub. It's really not the kind of thing Inquiry has any ability to affect but praying is a comforting mental action and in this life she has a god it isn't a terrible idea to pray to. 

Something about the way Kareen answered that question about the mass Nature conversion in the Coconut Peninsula did not sit right with Zalor.

OH COME ON.

You can't please everybody. You can't please everybody. Okay, maybe she could have been a little bit more serious about that particular topic instead of "ooh, information." But it is information!

There aren't a lot more chances in the class to favorably or unfavorably make an impression, for better or worse. The belltower sends down a tumbling clang and everyone gathers their school things.

Yaaaaaaay. 

Kareen really, really wishes the "game" had included more personal details on Zalor that she could use to ingratiate herself. Or that she didn't care about people's privacy, except that everyone knows about Inquiry, here, so if she "randomly" makes someone their perfect cuppa, they can ask her, "did you use your spooky eye powers on me," and if she had the information from the "game," then she could truthfully answer no. 

Sigh. 

Kareen has a foreign language class next, studying High Wisachian, and would you look at that she's just happened to test into the same level as the prince.

If Kareen had to read a document in High Wisachian, she could, trivially. But there's a difference between being able to operate a language because you have magic knowing things powers, and actually knowing it. 

She'll try to finagle a seat near the prince if he's seated somewhere she can do that without looking like she's trying to.

Conveniently the game designers worldbuilding team school faculty have placed her assigned seat right beside his! The game usually provided a view from the rear of the player character and whoever was seated to her left with the wall slate visible in between with filler content and/or Easter eggs, though of course now Wisachian is an entire natlang. Zalor sat on her left. Ceres sits on her left. He looks a little quizzical as a chart of conjugations gets written up on the board.

"Is something wrong?"

"I'm just not great at this stuff."

...Well, her recollection from the "game" is that he's an adorable himbo, so that's not shocking. 

She absolutely 0% can say that out loud. 

"Do you need some help? I used to tutor," small children, "other people, back at the temple."

"Probably wouldn't hurt... not sure it'd help either but it's maybe worth a try."

Blinkblink.

"Why wouldn't it help?"

"Well it doesn't help very much when the teacher explains it so I'm not sure why it would be different."

"The teacher is explaining things to the whole class. Personal tutoring is about figuring out what works for the individual, and doing that."

"There might just not be a thing that works for me? Or somebody would've maybe found it. El says I just need to buckle down and I can learn it if I study. - El's my fiancée."

"Well, El's probably right, but it's always better for learning to be a joy than a chore."

He does not look like he has heard that saying before.

She gives him a wry smile and turns her head, tapping her Inquiry sigils. 

"I'm not really rel- El says I should stop saying I'm not really religious because it'll give people the wrong idea but like, I don't know a lot of philosophy."

She giggles. "Well, Inquiry has a lot of stuff about pedagogy."

"I guess that makes sense!"

"If I ever get too deep into explaining something and it gets boring, please stop me, I can talk for hours about nearly anything."

"Wow! I don't think I can do that with even one thing."

"Different people have really different ways of engaging with the world!" she informs him earnestly. 

At this point the scene ends the teacher calls the class to order.

Elsewhere on campus, there is a very ugly old cat. 

It's clear he's seen worse days. He's missing an ear, his fur sticks out at odd angles due to scarring underneath, and his tail is broken in mulitple places. But his battered hide is round and well-fed, and his coat is glossy with tender care.

Right now he's examining a winged mouse. 

The winged mouse is not thrilled about this and seeks higher ground.

The cat peers up after her, then curls up and tucks his face in his tail to take a nap. 

Oh good. Could have been one of those leaping types of cat.

Leaping? He gets wet food every day, served with pets and scritches and no need to fight anything for it, and you think he's going to LEAP after a MOUSE? He has better things to do with his time and energy. 

Plus that mouse is another familiar so it would be a bad idea to eat anyway, he was actually just curious. 

Precious resumes what she was doing (collecting all these beads that fell in the grass somehow).

He covertly watches her without lifting his face from his tail or otherwise moving out of Not Hunting You pose. 

Good. She puts the beads on her tail and flies them a few at a time to her human's window.

Oh wow what an excellent thing to have chosen to watch. His human is going to coo about how adorable it is. And give him treats.

Eventually she is pretty sure she has found all the beads. Off she goes to find her human instead.

Nice. 

He closes his eyes and naps for real. 

The mouse is sitting on El's shoulder in Kareen's third class, arcanism.

In the game, El's skill level is one of the things controlled by the difficulty slider. By default she is good, best save the player character in this specific class though not best in the entire school (not that anyone in the school who lacks plot relevance ever matters or sits to the player character's immediate left), but not hard to outperform by applying non-computer-program talent to the applicable minigames. But you can turn it up so high that it's actually mathematically impossible to beat her without supernatural luck with the RNG; that doesn't make the romance route impossible to win, just debuffs you a bit for some relevant plot flags, and it unlocks a pretty cool cutscene where she casts eight spells at once. (The player character can kinda do that but only if they add additional controllers of some kind to their machine; no normal input system will allow it alone and the fact that Roses of Villarosa not only supports keyboard, mouse, Playstation, and dance pad spellcasting, but supports all of those things at once, is much memed upon. Normally you would only start eight spells at the same time to then immediately drop whichever four of them you got the worse RNG on and Ultra Punishing Difficulty El can just do it.)

This might or might not be Ultra Punishing Difficulty El. That one looks the same as Normal Difficulty El, when they're just petting Precious, sitting to Kareen's immediate left.

Precious is adorable. 

Kareen hopes this is Ultra Punishing Difficulty El. Kareen is better at magic than the game lets you be, although obviously that's less to her credit than it is to El's since Kareen literally customized the magic system for her to be good at it. Even if Kareen doesn't succeed at not making an enemy of El, she is just actually in favor of people being good at magic, once the magic isn't evil fearmurder stuff.

"Your familiar is so cute," Kareen whispers. 

El is not programmed destined to take a dislike to Kareen until Kareen moves in on her fiancé! "Her name is Precious," she murmurs back.

"That's a good name! My familiar is named Macula. Because I got him when I was a child."

"...ah, yes, Macula, right up there with Stripes and Doggie."

"You know, I bet Doggie would be a pretty funny name for a cat."

"It's been done, I'm sure."

"I'm sure everything's been done somewhere."

"She says she met a cat today."

"It could be mine! He's around here somewhere. He prefers to talk in person, most of the time, so I wouldn't expect to know yet." 

"Missing an ear?" El asks, tickling Precious under the chin.

"That's him! Unless someone else here has an equally-battered kitty, which I wouldn't expect. He was a stray for a while before I found him."

"Well, she appreciates that he didn't pounce."

"He can tell a familiar from a normal animal!"

"Huh, how?"

"...Inquiry powers leaking down the familiar bond, basically."

"Huh."

And then the teacher wants them to pay attention to their magic class. In the game this is about how to play the spellcasting minigame but here it's more interesting.

Oh, magic is wonderful. Kareen "remembers" being good at the spellcasting minigame but real magic is so much better. Kareen takes extremely dense notes. 

El takes a lot of notes too.

Her charms on her wrist become visible when she pushes up her sleeve to do so: diligence, integrity, magic.

That is pretty unsurprising considering what Kareen knows about her. Diligence avatar, daughter of a heavy-hitter Integrity avatar, really good at magic. Really Kareen could stand to wear a Magic charm more often herself, it's just. Eye Eye Eye.

If you're speaking formally, here it's Inquiry Inquiry Inquiry!

The game didn't want to spend too much time in school, so the classes were just history (for lore infodump), foreign language (content almost completely elided, teacher a huge softie about chattering with your love interest as long as you "say it in High Wisachian"), and magic (for minigame purposes), but of course now it's real life and Kareen also has grammar and composition, religion, music theory, rhetoric, and mathematics and logic to occupy her days, all the things a young lady moving in high places in Villarosa ought to know.

Kareen is not speaking formally inside her own head, and also is specifically emphasizing the fact that she is so Eye that she will deliberately throw herself down the Beholding pit if Inquiry is not available. 

Magic is the best class, obviously, but any chance to soak up knowledge is an excellent thing. She is having much much less trouble catching up than most of her peers and some of her teachers are expecting. Mostly because of autodidactic tendencies, but also because she was in college in her first life, even the advanced classes here haven't caught up with what she knows about math. 

Zalor is in religion class with her!

Good for her!

Religion is a class she has some edge in, on account of having, you know, designed the gods, but the worldbuilding team filled in a lot of details, so she's still learning things!

Actually she has more of an edge from having grown up in a temple than from having designed the gods. That does in fact help a lot. 

Fingers crossed that the teacher doesn't say anything insensitive about Fairness in front of Zalor. 

He doesn't today, at least. He does make some remarks about how ALL the gods are forces for good in the grand scheme of things and they will respect EVERY philosophy's adherents, but that doesn't even make Zalor twitch.

The thing is he isn't even wrong, communist revolutions not headed by fairness cultists go much, much worse. Not that Kareen can say that out loud. 

This class, like the others, assigns homework. They're supposed to pick their favorite Virtue and write up why it's "the best one".

...Wow, okay. She glances around to see if she's the only avatar in class, because if she isn't, this assignment is even more...interesting. 

Yup, it's just her, and everybody besides her is wearing at least two different charms; three is typical. One kid has six and is raising his hand.

"Before you ask," says the teacher, "I know most of you don't have a single favorite - that's an intentional part of the challenge of the assignment, to take on the mindset of someone who sees everything through one lens, including if you like your other frontrunners."

Kareen raises her hand. 

"Miss Magnus?"

"...Does it have to be your actual favorite, if you do have an actual favorite, it feels more in the spirit of the assignment if I didn't use Inquiry."

"...I'll allow it."

"I could do two," she offers. "One for Inquiry and one for something else." 

"That leads me to my extra credit policy!" Which is generous and will in fact let her get double credit if she does both.

Oh sweet. She wasn't even angling for extra credit she's just exactly the kind of nerd to voluntarily do the homework twice. Not that she's going to say that out loud, bragging isn't seemly. 

A few other kids make thoughtful noises about doing two essays. (Six charms kid is still kind of cranky.)

Six charms kid is valid. Which six charms is he wearing?

Compassion, Courage, Rest, Family, Harvest, and Comfort.

That's a pretty good set! She's picking Rest for her not-Inquiry one, on account of how there is a very real objective sense in which Inquiry is the most important and Rest the next most important, which is that that was the order of her priorities when she was designing the system. 

Does this count as a god complex? Whatever, it's a definition-of-terms question and those don't have objective answers. 

She has lunch next! Lunch doesn't get game time till later in the plot arc when there are some plot conversations staged there, but in real life it happens pretty much every day. The school is fancy enough that there's a kitchen serving nice meals instead of everyone bringing a roll and a boiled egg and an apple in a pail with them or just walking home for lunch and then back again, and Prince Ceres is helping himself to three chicken legs and some kind of bread with pear butter situation.

Oh wow. Like this is not objectively surprising but oh, wow. 

(Kareen's prior school did serve lunch, but this was because it was approximately the same institution as the orphanage and would be doing that anyway. And the food was really emphatically not this nice.)

Kareen is going to get small servings of as many things as she can, because: curiousity. 

El winds up in the queue behind her and gets beans and roasted carrots and some of the bread with pear butter. There's not that much variety, the medievalness may be faux but you don't even have the medieval aesthetic any more by the time you've got a buffet with thirty things unless you are literally at a royal feast table.

(The devs of "Roses of Villarosa" evinced complete surprise at fan comments that they seemed to have made the antagonist a vegetarian and gave no explanation for why they would do that which wasn't "by accident".)

Kareen is not assuming El is, in fact, a vegetarian, but it's a hypothesis that has been actively promoted to her attention. 

Okay, so not small small portions, but also not three chicken legs. Critically, while the food variety has nothing on London, Kareen has spent the last sixteen years subsisting on a strictly worse version of the same food sensibilities. This is still very nice. 

El goes and sits with Ceres, of course.

Kareen is so tempted to try to sit with them, but--probably best not. She picks a spot sufficiently uncrowded that probably nobody will scold her for presumptuousness, but not so isolated as to paint a sign on her back labeled "LOSER WHO SITS ALONE." 

She is rewarded with a tableful of NPCs kids who have a comparable tier of social notability, i.e. low level of directly high-powered background for the venue (nouveau riche, barons' grandchildren, dukes' bastards, offspring of the academy faculty, one kid who's the nephew of the Rest avatar) but socially pleasant enough not to be anathema. This particular subset of the tier elects to strike up a conversation about wrestling tournaments.

Kareen does not know a whole lot about wrestling tournaments but she's genuinely interested!

Apparently a big name is retiring earlier than expected and the title is anyone's game now! One prominent judge proposed barring chokeholds and this is very controversial! This duke's bastard has a lot of opinions about ideal diet and training regimes for a wrestler!

Why is banning chokeholds controversial?

They're dramatic and hardly ever kill anyone and it makes the sport Kinda Fake the more things you ban beyond, like, "knives"!