"Sister, what are you doing!?" Lieselita hissed as she went to walk up her Lady, only to find her sister underneath the blankets with her.
The sight of it gave the young attendant girl a heart attack.
Not that Angelica seemed to understand what the problem was, as she slowly woke up and gave her sister a warm smile. "Goodmorning, Lieselita."
"Don't give me that! You can't just sneak into Lady Tohsaka's bed!" Lieselita whispered loudly.
"Why not? You sneak into my bed all the time. You did it just last week." Angelica said, tilting her head in that way that she had which would usually make anyone immediately forgive her.
Lieselita flushed at such a secret being mentioned in the presence of her sleeping master.
The fact that Lieselita was deeply afraid of lightning and flee to her older sister side at the slightest rumble of thunder was not something very lady-like. She couldn't help it, whenever she was scared, she would run to her knightly sister for safety.
"That's different! Why would you be sleeping in Lady Tohsaka's bed?" Lieselita cried, trying to fight down her flushed face.
"...Because it's soft." Angelica answered honestly.
"That isn't a good enough reason! Now get out of there before you get into… Hey, what are you…!?" Lieselita was surprised as Angelica got out of the large bed, only to pick her up and drop her into the bed in her place.
Lieselita blinked in confusion before a dopey expression came over her face and she rubbed her cheek against one of the pillows. "So soft."
Beds in this world, even noble ones, were either way too hard, or way too soft, offering no support for the body and being all around not comfortable enough for Rin, to whom a restful night's sleep and a fresh cup of morning coffee, or at the very least tea, were imperative if you didn't want someone to die.
Even the spring mattresses she had introduced to sale to the other nobles, which had a back order a mile long, weren't nearly good enough.
Her own bed was the highest quality foam mattress her alchemy could produce, with a futon so soft you could lose yourself in it, enchanted in order to only reflect just the right amount of body heat to give you the sense that you were sleeping on a warm cloud.
Such a bed was too powerful for Lieselita and she smiled happily as she basked in the warmth.
"Now that is a silly smile." Rin teased as she rolled over to look at Lieselita's laughing baby face.
"M…Milady!" Lieselita squeaked, jumping from the bed and bowing deeply to Rin. "I am so sorry! Please forgive me for the intrusion! I promise you it won't happen again!"
"Calm down. I'm not even mad." Rin said as she slowly stretched out her arms in a very cat-like manner. "While it is important to keep up appearances in front of everyone else, you can feel free to lower your guard when it is just us. Actually, I'd prefer it if you did. I'd like to know exactly what you are thinking." Rin said before giving a teasing grin again. "Plus, that silly face of yours is super cute."
"Wha…?"
"Lieselita is really cute when she gets flustered." Angelica agreed, starting to pat her little sister's head.
"Sister!" Lieselita whined weakly as she tried and failed to bat away the hand of the young knight.
Rin smiled enviously at their sisterly affection before bringing it to a stop. "Alright you two. That's enough for now. What does the schedule look like for today?"
Lieselita nodded her head, recollecting herself before standing up straight and giving her report. "After breakfast, you have a meeting with Professor Moritz in order to organize the data gathered from…"
Veronica walked slowly through the halls, cursing under her breath.
After informing the members of Frenbeltag that a child of one of their Archnoble bloodlines was being forced by Ehrenfest to go to the Temple, she had found out about 'the project'.
Her spies, the ones she had keeping an eye on Ferdinand, were the first to draw her attention to it, as the man had to spend basically two weeks laying out the tracks for this 'railroad'. But after digging around and finding out that the money was all being invested from the Gilberta faction, who supported Tohsaka at the Temple, she started to understand just how big the introduction of the railroad was, and upon speaking to her son, she found out that the one who had near total control over the railroad was none other than Tohsaka herself.
The railroad was big, something bigger than she could have ever imagined, and she needed to make sure that it didn't just connect the different provinces of Ehrenfest, but also connected them to Ahrensbach as well.
Such an arrangement would secure them a good relationship with the Greater Duchy for generations to come, even without a marriage contract. Far more effective than the magic chalices that Veronica had been sneakily smuggling through her little brother and eldest daughter.
So with Tohsaka taking up residence in the castle once again, she was going to take the chance to meet with her, unannounced, so that Florencia couldn't get in her way.
So as Sylvester and Florencia busied themselves with the arrival of other nobles, Veronica headed to Tohsaka's room in order to meet with her, having been told she was meeting with the Archduke Family's official tutor, an Archnoble Scholar by the name of Moritz.
She had expected to interrupt the girl's lessons, and she did, but not in the way that she was expecting.
"As you can see, by charting sequences from further and further down on this triangle of numbers, we get a symmetric shape closely resembling a bell. Remember this shape, because it is going to be important once we move from dealing with discrete functions to continuous ones." Tohsaka said as she scratched a series of numbers up on a black board while seven of Ehrenfest's best scholars sat taking notes.
"Professor, what do you mean by 'discrete' and 'continuous'?" Moritz asked the six-year-old girl.
"Good question. You don't have the background to fully understand it yet, but you can think of discrete as there existing a function on the set so that for each entry, you can assign a 'next' entry, in a way that the entire set gets covered. While continuous can be visualized as drawing a single connected line to represent the function without there being any gaps." Tohsaka said, drawing the two pictures to indicate what she was talking about. "These will become important concepts later, but for now just know that…" Tohsaka stopped as she spotted Veronica and her anteroge in the doorway. "My apologies. It looks like I am going to have to cut today's lesson short."
The scholars were disappointed, but quickly shut up upon seeing Veronica standing there and rushed out of the room, leaving the very confused old woman to try to come to terms with what she had just witnessed.
"You're… teaching them?" Veronica said, utterly confused.
"Sadly, yes. I wasn't going to, but they lacked the basic understanding of probability needed to make the educated decisions necessary of a Scholar." Tohsaka said, shaking her head in disappointment. "Is there something I can help you with, Lady Veronica? Or, do you wish for me to call you grandmother?"
"...Whatever you are comfortable with." Veronica said, her mind still spinning. "I came to see how your studies were proceeding. I see that I should not have worried. Though I would also like to ask about a rumor I have been hearing about involving a 'railroad'."
"You're interested then? There are magic contracts involved, but I would gladly share any information that I am able to." Tohsaka said with a bright smile.
"...I was just wondering what motivated the path that they took." Veronica said. "Going through Kark, Haseney, Forst, Illgner and ending in Griebel. It is almost as if Leisengang was purposely avoided."
"It was." Tohsaka said bluntly, surprising Veronica. "While this first segment of the railroad has been paid for basically entirely out of my own pocket, I want the other provinces to invest into it in the future. Leisengang is quite wealthy, but it would have less motivation to invest if they already had part of the railroad in their territory. Meanwhile, the provinces who got it for free aren't very influential or wealthy, so they wouldn't have been able to assist much anyways."
"So it was a move made with only profit in mind." Veronica said, thinking that the girl and the Gilberta Company lacked vision if they were focusing on the money.
"Of course." Tohsaka replied. "I suppose if I was a member of the Leisengang Faction, I could have just built a short railroad between Ehrenfest, Leisengang and Groschel, and if I was part of the Florencia Faction, Haldenzel would be the politically correct choice. But in the end, I'm not part of either of those factions. So picking a route closer to Ahrensbach was the logical choice."
"Near Ahrensbach?" Veronica said, surprised by the girl already having her eyes on the Greater Duchy. She hadn't been expecting the girl to openly declare that she was not a part of either the Leisengang Faction or the Florencia Faction so easily. Not that she was trying to say she was part of the Veronica Faction either.
"Of course. At the moment, Fernbeltag is too weak to offer strong trade deals, and the difference in time between the time taken by a carraven and the time spent by the railroad would only be two days. As for across our northern borders, they offer us nothing, as Klassenburg has abandoned its eastern settlements and Zausengas doesn't even exist anymore after the purge." Tohsaka explained. "Meanwhile, a railroad going from our border with Ahrensbach to the central province would cut down on a valuable trade routes journey by almost two weeks, and allow them to avoid going through Leisengang, where Ahrensbach goods receive an unfair tax. So having a station near Ahrensbach gives us the most benefits."
"I see. You've thought this through." Veronica said. "But dear child, have you considered extending the railroad into Ahrensbach?"
"Ah… Hm…" Tohsaka said, adopting a troubled look. "I can't really make that call, since anything that goes through the gates between Duchy's is the business of the Archdukes, but I have my worries about allowing the railroad's carriage to pass through into another Duchy."
"And why is that?" Veronica asked.
"Because if the Duchy on the other side controls the railroad tracks, then they could easily prevent the carriage from coming back across." Tohsaka explained. "While the rails themselves are simple enough to make, the carriage is a very expensive piece of equipment, and if a Greater Duchy like Ahrensbach were to suddenly seize it, Ehrenfest would suffer a huge loss. I don't think that Ahrensbach values our friendship enough to not take advantage of us."
…Veronica knew that wasn't the case, but that wasn't common knowledge in Ehrenfest. Actually, since the noble's of Ehrenfest usually kept their heads down at the national level, none of them knew shit about anything that had been going on.
The truth was, Ahrensbach was in a terrible situation, despite its status as a Greater Duchy, and couldn't afford to risk losing friendly ties with Ehrenfest.
Despite being on the winning side of the civil war, Ahrensbach was probably hit twice as hard as any other Duchy, as not only did they lose a large number of nobles, they were also saddled with overseeing half of Werkestock, a former Greater Duchy which had all of its nobles purged out of existence.
While Klassenburg and Dunkelfelger also had to take on additional territories, they weren't made to send nearly as many nobles to the Sovereignty after the purge as Ahrensbach had. Nor had they lost as many Archducal Candidates during the war.
So they had half as many Nobles supplying mana to fifty percent more land.
This was a massive opportunity though for Ehrenfest, an opportunity that Sylvester refused to see, as if they supported Georgine in helping to stabilize Ahrensbach's mana crisis, then she would become the next new First Wife of Aub Ahrensbach, cementing their connection once the country recovered from the purge.
Then, Wilfried could marry Detlinde, and perhaps the pair could rule Ahrensbach together, assuming the pair of them didn't turn out to be idiots. Finally, Veronica would be able to leave with her grandson and live in the place where she should have been born.
And Tohsaka's railroads, cutting down on the number of scholars needed to transport goods around Ahrensbach through teleportation, would be a huge part of that.
"What if I arranged an agreement with Aub Ahrensbach in order to assure you that your rail carriages would be safe?" Veronica said.
"You can do that?" Tohsaka said, sounding impressed that Veronica could pull something with the Archduke of a Greater Duchy.
"Your aunt is one of Aub Ahrensbach's wives, and is rising in favor as of late. With her help, it is easily possible." Veronica promised.
"That would be great! Being able to trade so easily with a Greater Duchy would be a huge help for us!" Tohsaka said with a wide smile. "I'll need to talk to Father about preparing more golden dust in order to expand our railroad into Ahrensbach. Hopefully it will be ready in time to be used after the next Archduke's conference… assuming I am still in Ehrenfest at the time. Otherwise, the magic contracts surrounding the railroad might make it difficult to expand into other Duchies."
…Veronica froze, the implications of what the girl had just said slowly sinking in.
She didn't even notice Rin's small smile of victory.
"Wow, this is so good!" Charlotte squealed as she ate some of the cheesecake, with strawberry jam, that Rin had prepared for their little tea party.
"I'm glad you like it." Rin said as she sat opposite of her little sister with Taiga draped across her lap, giving her something to do to calm her nerves.
Ironically, she'd rather be back trying to manipulate a dangerous hag like Veronica, rather than sitting across from the sweet little Charlotte. Mostly because she didn't know what to talk about.
I mean, what did you say to a four-year-old noble girl? Her usual topics of discussion were magic, industry, economics and maybe food. Not exactly something that Charlotte could appreciate.
The fact that Charlotte had nearly two dozen adult attendants and knights standing around watching their every move as they sat there eating cheesecake also just weirded her out.
"I wonder where Wilfried is. Did he not receive the invitation to the tea party?" Rin said, attempting to fill the void.
Charlotte's happy face saddened a little. "Wilfried doesn't live in the castle with us. He lives with grandmother at her villa."
"Is that so? Even though he is the heir to the seat of Aub?" Rin said, puzzled.
"Mother says that Grandmother used her authority in order to claim guardianship of Wilfried before Father became Aub. Mother wants to now claim him back, but because Grandmother's faction is so large, it would cause discontent if she did it without cause." Charlotte said, surprisingly well informed about this situation for a four-year-old. "I rarely ever see Wilfried, and you were always in your secret room, so it has been pretty lonely here in the castle by myself."
…Rin wanted to question the girl's definition of 'by herself' as she looked around at all the noble attendants and guards standing around her, on top of the commoner servants who moved about in the background.
How in the world did this classify as being 'by herself'.
But she supposed that they showed the child more honor than affection. The highest seats of nobility were inherently lonely ones. Saber had sat at the end of a table populated by all of her oldest friends and family, people who were supposed to have shared her hopes and dreams, yet she had been so soul shatteringly alone that she wanted to erase herself from history.
"Well, I'm going to be here at the castle for the next few days. So… what would you like to do?" Rin said, crying a bit on the inside as she gave up some of her precious research time.
But Charlotte brightened up immediately, with a smile that seemed to be shooting off rainbows.
…Why did noble children have to be so damn cute?