Being reincarnated was indescribable.
From birth, to being a toddler, and finally reaching my eighth birthday. I knew something was strange about me, I knew words I had never learned, I looked at things through a tint far more mature for my age if still childish.
It was something secret and hidden in the very back of my mind. While simultaneously being something open, and known with every cell in my body.
Of course I'm only realizing this right now, as I stare at my own face. A toothbrush frozen mid motion in my mouth as I watch my own pupils dilate.
I slowly pull the tooth brush from my mouth, ignoring the toothpaste still present on it as I place it by the sink. In front of me was a face that was completely and utterly foreign.
It was also without a doubt my own, the soft childish cheeks, the teal blue eyes, and even the vibrant red hair that hung long past my shoulders.
I felt it in a strangely distant way as my hand ran through the impossibly red strands of hair in a nervous tick that felt incredibly familiar.
Then like the gears in my brain had finally started to work together, instead of grinding pointlessly against their purpose, it all linked together.
I stepped down from the stool I had been using to reach the sink, a daze spreading through my head as completely separate impulses bounced around in my mind. I absently noticed my hair suddenly turning white in my shock.
Some part of me wanted to stare at the lumps growing on my chest and scream about being a girl, another was confused on why that was such a big deal. After all, I had been a girl for eight years now.
Similar confused arguments burst through my brain like tiny supernovas, even as I walked near mindlessly leaving the bathroom as the floor shifted from cool tile to luxurious soft and fluffy carpet.
I stilled instantly as I entered my bedroom, a large room with a four poster bed of absurd size covered in stuffed animals. Random figures I vaguely remember as characters from anime decorated one of the shelfs in my room on the far wall, while another was filled with manga of all types.
Scattered across a long vertical dresser that took up an entire wall, were various things from my own clothes to a chessboard.
The small glance at the chessboard sent my brain even further into a knot as several images of a young girl my age with black hair and violet eyes burst like someone had set off a bouquet of flashbangs behind my eyes.
Sona, that was Sona. She's my friend, my best friend. Has been ever since I stole her teddy bear as an infant and she, in a fit of infantile rage, had managed to summon a blob of water to drop on me.
I blinked my eyes and shook my head in an effort to stop my brain from going on a tangent, once more taking in the room around me. My knees stung slightly against the carpet and I can't help but wonder when I had fallen?
My palms hurt too, pulling them up to my face. I noted the crescent shaped cuts in my skin, welling up with drops of bright red blood. Somewhere deep in my mind I noted that wasn't a good thing, but I failed to dredge up any panic or even mild worry.
The small plap of water hitting my palm, alerted my dazed mind that I'm crying. How incredibly odd that I hadn't noticed the searing hot tracks trailing down my face until just now.
Oh, I'm dissociating.
I pulled myself up to my feet, feeling almost like I was drunk as I moved like an uncoordinated squirrel, only just managing to roll myself onto my bed. Tumbling myself further on the bed, I bumped into the mountain of stuffed animals, causing said mountain to break apart as the stuffed animals fell onto me.
The silence of the room, of my room, grew suffocating hearing my own blood rushing through my head like thunder as I lost myself in a haze of confused melancholy.
The new information pulsed through my head as I relegated all of it to the back of my brain, only for my effort to prove useless when I stumbled upon the knowledge of an anime series called High school DXD.
An anime with me as one of its protagonists.
All of my efforts crumbled, and suddenly I was drowning in facts and odd little details.
It's to much, to much, to much, to much, make it stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop,-"Rias!-"
Suddenly it all went quiet, the information frozen as I was drawn from my own mind. My brother's face was staring down at me as he held my head in his hands. I could see his lips moving but I just couldn't hear what he was saying, like he was speaking underwater.
"Rias! Come on! You need to tell me what's wrong!-" I didn't even register what he was saying, but that didn't really matter as the sheer concern got through the haze of panic and suddenly a wave of fresh tears flooded down my face as I shoved my face into his stomach.
I couldn't hold the sobs back, as I cried and cried until I, at some unnoticed point, fell into a panicked sleep.
One that, had destiny not intervened, I would have never woken from.
Explosions rang out like bells, shaking the mansion as I stood silently. Glaring out at the mass of angels floating in the sky, the ceiling having long since been ripped off by one spell or another.
Pain, a chilling, blizzard like pain flowed through my body in the familiar sensation of Light poisoning, only amplified ten fold as it seemingly attempted to freeze my blood. The blindingly bright spear resting in my sizzling flesh made it hard to see the one who had stabbed me in the first place.
He was beautiful, his face a mix of handsome features hand sculpted by the biblical god and his golden wings just as blinding as the spear he was using to impale me.
I hated those wings, how dare he shine so very immaculate even when attacking a mansion full of children. How dare he be allowed to shine untarnished as he committed a sin he reviled himself. This glowing hypocrite, committing the very sins he was supposed to prevent.
Who cared if the children were devils! He was still leading a host of angels in order to kill a harmless group of children, most of whom hadn't even reached five. My eyes felt hot as I glared at the angel, anger and frustration making them feel as though my eyes had been set alight.
I hated him, I wanted him to suffer, I wanted him to die.
I wanted to rip out his wings with my teeth, one feather at a time.
The light spear inserted where my sternum was supposed to be, winked out like a broken lightbulb, my legs trembling as the thing that had been taking most of my weight disappeared. Something clicked in my mind as I stumbled forward, my arms as weak as they were just barely managing to grab the angel before he turned around.
I could see the confusion in his eyes even as a pressure built in my hands, demonic energy powering out like a faucet trying to complete a spell that doesn't exist. I took a ragged breath, words stumbling out in guttural growl.
"Butcher" I said, the word coming out as though it was the greatest curse I could think of. The Angel opened his mouth, probably to say something condescending, not that I would ever know. The power building in my palms crackled pleasantly even as it began to boil underneath my skin, before it all disappeared like a ghost.
I fell to the ground, debris shaking around me as a roar, great and terrible, shook the underworld.
I blinked awake with a jolt, a joyous feeling tugging at my heart as though I should be cheering someone on, in combination with the sensation of something snapping between my teeth.
Odd.
I shrugged it off as a remnant of whatever dream I was having before sitting up, peeling my face from a textbook in the process. Had I fallen asleep while reading again? Blinking the blur from my eyes I noted down the surrounding library, a couple stray beams of light boring down from a nearby stained window, probably what woke me up in the first place.
Pushing my chair out, I stretched out working out the kinks from sleeping in a chair all night. I also noticed my hair tie must have fallen out, seeing as my hair was no longer in the ponytail I'd been putting it in for more than eight months now.
Eight months, how much time flies.
Eight months since I bothered to finally remember that I had lived an entirely different life. It hadn't exactly been an easy adjustment, especially since I broke down into hysterical fits at the slightest nudge for almost a month.
Thankfully it had been written off quite easily all things together. Mostly because hysterical fits were a symptom of the sleeping disease, after a visit to a physician and a quick test showed that I had in fact contracted the sleeping sickness. Thankfully it was early enough that it was fairly easy to treat, just a simple injection and the disease would never progress to the point of eternal nap time.
Sadly it also had consequences, primarily in that devils were goddamn terrified by the very concept of the sleeping disease. As a result of this there were very strict rules on how to treat someone who had caught it, even if it was found early enough to cure it.
That's why I've spent the last eight months in quarantine.
It was more than a bit of an overreaction, especially because the disease was no longer viral and wasn't able to spread twenty four hours after it was contracted. As a result I had spent the last eight months with little to no interaction at all, and all of it with people covered in a barrier that functioned like a hazmat suit.
The only exception was my Brother, Sirzechs.
You see, my brother had, by pure accident, rendered himself completely immune to any disease.
No it wasn't because he was just that strong, or magically powerful. If anything that would have rendered him more susceptible to the sleeping disease.
No it was his whole destruction aura thing, turns out turning yourself into the very concept of destruction has consequences.
Who could have guessed, and even if I found my Brother's method stupid it was actually to my benefit at the moment so I can't really complain. After all, his visits every other day were a good break from my schedule.
Anyway, I've been essentially locked into a hastily prepared mansion owned by one ancestor or another for a period of a year and a half.
So ten more months to go.
On the other hand this situation, and even the sleeping disease had been a boon in other ways.
Mostly in that it wasn't strange that my personality had shifted around, it wasn't uncommon for people who had been infected to experience changes to their personality from minor quirks, to complete personality shifts regardless of how early it was treated.
It covered the minor shifts in my personality that were far less severe than I thought they would be. I honestly shouldn't be, I was reincarnated from birth not some body stealer. I was still me, still Rias Gremory little sister to Lucifer, I just had life experience from before I was Rias.
More frustrating is that I was fairly certain I had the memories of before that as well. Before, the Before if you will. Admittedly it was only a hunch, a small itch in the back of my brain, but it was a little distressing to think about.
Another result of the whole quarantine mess was that I, a small child, had been left with little supervision and a library full of things I wasn't supposed to know. If only because I wasn't old enough to be responsible about their use.
Also an internet connection, but that wasn't as interesting if only because it was the internet in 2002, and had far less content than the one I was used to. Youtube wasn't even a thing yet!
Anyway I was on the library Like white on Rice as soon as I realized how little supervision I was getting. It was honestly one of the most thorough Libraries I had ever seen, second only to the one in the Gremory Castle.
Just about any subject I could think of, had at least one book involving it. Something very good for me because while I did know a lot of things purely by osmosis, I was still a child.
A child whose tutors had been more focused on politics, etiquette, and other noble pursuits rather than things like historical context, or even magic beyond the basics.
So naturally I started with history, because even just the snippets I did understand were very confusing.
Turned out that the great war is still technically ongoing? In a way at least, see despite what the Script says the Great war wasn't just between the three biblical factions. It was actually the result of just about every pantheon, faction, or even just random humans, deciding to kill everyone else on a planetary scale.
All that power flying around ended up warping both space and time.
To go into depth, imagine the dimensional gap as a really big bubble, and earth as a much smaller bubble floating inside of it. Now imagine heaven, hell, and whatever other places like olympus as even smaller bubbles.
The great war formed it's own, very warped bubble, about twice the size of the earth bubble. Inside the Great war is still raging. You see the way the Bubble formed made time inside a bit wacky, the closest comparison I can think of is like a Dragon Break in the elder scrolls game series.
You never know what exactly the 'True' events are until the timeline settles, usually when say either a body washes up somewhere or someone no one has seen in more than a thousand years shows up very confused. Until then whichever happens it's all up in the air, but some of the events still bleed through into reality.
It's why you have so many variations to certain myths, yet all of them are true.
Fascinating stuff, but also explained a lot of the weird snippets I've managed to put together. It even helped me ignore the fact that I'd almost caught the sleeping sickness. Something I was ninety nine percent sure was an engineered bioweapon made by the great king faction. I think at least, it might have been fanon but it also made just enough sense that it was making me incredibly paranoid.
Mostly because, why the hell would Zekram infect his own granddaughter? If I remember correctly he was all about family, at least as long as they had the power of destruction. Something that I do in fact possess, I can feel it pulsing under my skin more than ready to burst free with only the smallest prompting.
Actually, My power of destruction was honestly the thing I found myself the best at. Normal magic, just didn't seem to like me very much. Sure I could do it, but I kinda sucked at it for the most part, and as a result I had been waiting until my Mother was viable to teach me more about my power of destruction. Not that she had, or seemed like she would anytime soon before this whole fiasco started.
But anyway Zekrom Bael folks, the source of my ever growing paranoia.
I grunted in annoyance, my hands coming up to my forehead as a spike of pain started to form behind my eyes. I sighed leaning back into my chair, before shoving it back and standing up, shoving a hand into my skirt pocket as I did so.
Eventually I managed to dig out a hair tie, one of many as I just seemed to lose the things like nobody's business. I idly gathered my hair up into a ponytail, while I tried to find just about anything other than my grandfather to think about. I'd been beating my head against that particular thought process since it first occurred to me about a week after I remembered.
I had yet to find anything to satisfy my burgeoning paranoia, and I doubted I ever would.
Settling my hair I gathered up the pile of books I'd been looking through, and began back tracking my original path as I put them back where I found them.
All except two of them, that is.
About halfway through my second week of Isolation I stumbled upon the first book, and only a couple of days later I'd found the second. Well more along the lines of stumbled upon the safe that held the second, not that said safe had given much of an issue.
Power of Destruction people, it's a hell of a drug.
Anyway, the first had caught my complete attention because it covered one subject that could help with my current goals in life. You see, once my emotions had reached a semblance of stability I'd made up my mind about what I needed to do in order to feel, not safe, but less paranoid? Yeah that works.
Goal one was get/make a sword that out sword-ed every other blade on the planet.
Goal two was learn how to use said sword
Goal three was to be at least competent with my Power of Destruction and if I had it, the Gremory bloodline.
Goal four? Was to become a fucking Dragon. Always be yourself, unless you can be a dragon after all.
In all seriousness, I had put some real thought behind it and what could guarantee my survival, what I came up with was to become a dragon.
Issei proved it was possible, with him literally giving up parts of himself to Ddraig in order to use his balance breaker. Not even counting the later series where Great Red made a body for him out of his own flesh.
The book entitled 'A Study Of All Things Draconic By Olivis Amon' had only proved my theory, because in DXD dragons were more of a category than a species.
They just had too many origins, too much variety.
Great Red for example, had dreamed himself into existence, Ophis was a mass of energy that decided being a person would be fun, Tamiat was the primordial Sea made flesh, and Tannin himself had been born by the meteor impact that Scientists thought killed the dinosaurs.
See what I mean? That's not even counting things like God deciding to turn Sameal into a dragon as punishment, or kiyohime who had become a dragon out of sheer rage fueled obsession.
Anything that was vaguely lizard shaped and was stubborn enough to warp reality was categorized as a dragon.
Being a true dragon came with a lot of benefits too. True dragons were near impossible to hurt without a dragonslaying weapon, were actually immortal as long as nothing happened to their souls they'd just reform themselves, and did I mention the fact they warp reality out of sheer stubbornness?
Things like Ddriag's Boosting ability weren't inborn abilities, they came from sheer will and the desire to do something, anything, Until reality calls uncle.
Albion and Ddraig were special not because of their odd abilities, but because they actually Ripped the concepts of Supremacy and Domination from the fabric of the universe in order to make their respective abilities.
There's a reason people are still wary of them, even in their current state.
Then there was the second book, I'd pried out of a safe hidden in a secret room, that entrance was in yet another secret room, behind a library shelf. Really I'd thought it was good fortune I'd stumbled upon it, but upon reading it I realized it was a bit more than just good luck.
I could feel my lips twitch upwards as I remembered just how stunned I'd been when I started reading the book, idly placing another book where it belonged.
You see, the book was more a journal, made by the Gremory family's progenitor Runeas Gremory. Inside was everything she had managed to discover about the Gremory bloodline. As far as anyone knew the Gremory had well, good luck, but in truth it was more along the way of straight up probability manipulation but different somehow.
However it came with risks, Everyone was apparently born with a certain amount of undefinable energy and using the Gremory Bloodline depleted it. That wouldn't be an issue except they had yet to find a way to refill it outside of straight up waiting for it to refill over several centuries, and depleting it entirely was a guaranteed death in the most unpleasant fashion.
Runeas had apparently lost two of her three children that way, and she had refused to write down exactly what had happened but the page had been covered in tear marks.
Otherwise however, the journal was incredibly helpful; it even told me how to tell if I had it myself. I never thought I would ever actually flip a quarter a hundred times, but by the end of it I had a tally of fifty one Heads against forty nine tails and proof I had the Gremory luck.
So yeah that was fun to find out, and it killed some of my overabundant time.
I shook my head as I put the final book back on the shelf, before turning to go to the rest of the house. My room in particular, as I made my way through the mansion, striding over lacquered hardwood floors and walls decorated with far too much gold for me to be comfortable with. Really there's enough gold here to make fort knox jealous and If I remember correctly this is one of the more modestly decorated houses.
Guess the family has been putting their 'luck' to work.
I much preferred the second floor, while the preparations had been rushed as they tried to get as much done as possible before shoving me in, they had managed to redo almost everything on the second floor with more modern amenities.
I was just glad the second story had functional plumbing, unlike the first floor that was still set up like it was the Victorian era. Only the kitchen had been finished on the first floor before time ran out.
Regardless I made my way to the room I'd claimed as my own. I had intentionally avoided taking the master bedroom, it was just ridiculously big and I would never be able to sleep there.
Instead I had taken one of the smaller rooms on the farther end of the hall, it was far more comfortable and it was emotionally calming as well, reminding me of my past life subtly in a way that made me relax.
Inside was much different than the room I had remembered my life in, for one there were less figurines, and the pile of stuffed animals was to the right of my much smaller bed. I still had a bookshelf filled with manga, however it also shared space with books such as Narnia and a couple other classic fantasy stories.
Admittedly the reason I didn't have more of my japanophile collection was because they were back at the main Gremory home and I simply hadn't been able to pack them.
That and all the models I'd been making, trying to pass the time, were in a different room.
Another new addition was a full length mirror in the corner of my room, I'd gotten it early on after remembering. It was positioned in a way that it was one of the first things I'd see in the morning. For the first month after I'd remembered I'd wake up confused and descend into a panic attack every morning. The mirror helped me anchor myself to this reality, instead of panicking until I passed out again.
Well more my reflection than the mirror, but that was just semantics.
However one thing that was the same, was the chess set placed on a coffee table. While I hadn't been able to see Sona in person, we had been able to talk with letters and even arrange the magical version of a video call once a week, maybe twice if we were lucky.
A quick glance up at the clock showed it would be five more hours until my scheduled game with Sona. So I sat down on the single lonely chair, made sure the pieces were set correctly, and settled in to read about my Bloodline.
There was nothing else to do after all, but count the time.
Just four hours and fifty nine minutes to go.
Sona Sitri made her way up the stairs with a steady gait, no sense of hurry could be found as she made her way. It didn't matter that inside she wanted nothing more than to burst into a run, to rush towards the room set aside specifically for her to be able to contact her best friend.
Rias Gremory, the heiress to the pillar of House Gremory, and Sona's best friends since before she could remember.
Rias who was currently Quarantined inside one of Gremory families many properties scattered over both earth and hell. Rias who was completely isolated, Sona wasn't sure how she'd react to such treatment.
Sure The Sleeping Disease was incredibly dangerous, but she'd never heard of anything even remotely like what they were doing with Rias. It just seemed like so much effort for an infection that had not only already been treated, but was no longer even able to spread.
Sona fought down a sigh before it could leave her lips as she noticed she'd increased her walking speed to more of a speed walk. Forcing herself back to her regular stride, she forcibly shoved away her own anxiety as the door approached.
Steeling herself Sona closed the last few feet between her and the door. Pushing it open the door swung wide with even the small pressure she'd applied. Inside wasn't much, just a small table with a chess set and not much else, outside of an absolutely ancient grandfather clock telling her she was two minutes early.
Sona Ignored it as she sat herself down into the single chair present and sent a pulse of demonic energy into the intricate pattern engraved on the table. There was a flicker of purplish light before the form of her best friend flickered into existence.
Her friend was different, had been since the first time they made one of these calls, She knew this yet every time it took her by surprise. Though some of the changes were more apparent than others.
Before Rias had absolutely hated having her hair anyway other than flying free and as long as it could go without hitting the floor. Now she wore it in a near constant ponytail, after chopping most of it off until it was only just past her shoulders, not even counting the occasional tuft of hair that had turned white only now fading back into it's usual red.
Those however were just the most apparent changes, not going into how Rias herself had become more subdued, not in a bad way either. More like she no longer felt the need to fill the air with needless rambling.
However, contrary to her worries, it was still Rias, unlike what some had warned her about.
Countless people from her mother to her sister had all tried to explain that the sleeping disease, even when caught as early as Rias's had, Changed people. Sometimes to the point they were completely unrecognizable.
The first call they'd had after Rias had been confined, had driven Sona near mad with a near constant anxiety that it wouldn't be her Rias that answered.
She'd worried for nothing, she'd known that the second Rias had answered with a smile so soft it had blinded her. Just as she did now, her teal eyes lit up with so many emotions they looked to be glowing the second they entered Sona's vision.
Sona found her entire body relaxing, anxiety slipping away as she was once again assured that this was her friend, her Rias.
Something her Red head seemed to agree with as the same soft smile twitched at her lips, and spoke in a longing voice filled with so many things Sona just wasn't able to parse.
"Sona." Her name was said evenly, and yet it felt like the red haired girl had shouted it in jubilation.
"Rias." Sona replied with a smile just as sweet forming on her face.
And really what else did they need to say?