Chapter 2
After becoming a baby, the first problem I ran into was language.
I couldn't understand a single thing the people around me were saying. Their pronunciation was stiff, and between words came sounds like they were scraping their throats.
At first, I thought it was Russian.
The room was excessively lavish, and the clothes people wore felt somehow very Russian Imperial. The photos of the Winter Palace I'd seen online had left a particularly strong impression on me.
But after listening for days—or rather, months by a baby's reckoning—I began to recognize familiar words one by one.
“Guten Morgen.”
“meine Prinzessin.”
‘German?’
I’d never studied German in middle or high school, or even as an undergrad. But while studying mechanical engineering, I’d looked up materials from German companies and firearm names, so I knew a few basic words.
Gewehr, Patrone, Maschinengewehr, and so on.
I was familiar with technical German, but everyday German was foreign to me. It was like an otaku who could say ‘Save this world!’ but couldn’t say ‘Could you close that window over there?’
Still, hearing it every day helped me pick it up quickly.
The first things I understood were words about food and sleep. I heard words like milk, sleep, and quiet dozens of times a day. After that, I started recognizing people's names.
My mother was called Augusta. More precisely, she was Augusta Victoria, but the people around her often called her Eure Kaiserliche Majestät.
I had no idea what it meant, but from the Kaiser part, she seemed like royalty. She was much calmer than the other nannies, and she was careful whenever she held us.
‘Maybe I’m a princess or something? She can’t be the empress, can she?’
Sometimes older boys came into the room. They looked at me and my twin brother like we were exotic animals, and fought over who got to hold us first. One of them squeezed my cheek so hard I burst into tears.
‘Are these brats my big brothers?’
Even after hearing their names, I couldn’t remember the order for a while. This family had way too many sons. Just trying to tell Wilhelm from Adalbert was enough to make my head feel like it would explode.
Studying German was already hard enough. Memorizing all those names was too much for me.
Still, there was a reason people said babies learned languages quickly. My mind was already that of an adult, while my baby brain was firing on all cylinders. Maybe because of that, after a few months I could understand the gist of sentences, and after my first birthday, I could understand pretty much everything people said.
The problem was my identity.
People called me Bessie.
My full name seemed to be Elisabeth. The nannies always addressed me as ‘Your Highness, the Princess,’ and the place was overflowing with attendants and maids.
‘At least a ducal family?’
I considered the possibility that I was part of the imperial family, too, but at first I stubbornly denied it. There were so many German nobles in the world—surely I hadn’t been born into a family from the history books.
From the way my mother was called Kaiser-whatever, I figured I was just a princess or something.
Actually, whether my mother was a princess or whatnot wasn’t the issue. My appearance was.
Whenever I caught sight of myself in a mirror, with my platinum-blond hair and blue eyes, I looked like someone straight out of a comic. The problem was that I was a princess, not a prince.
As a strapping Korean man who’d gone through engineering school and military service in my previous life, it was enough to drive me out of my mind.
At first I denied reality and got angry, but now I’d accepted it, telling myself that it was better to be alive—even if I had to roll around in a field of dog shit.
Anyway, there was always another baby beside me.
He was a boy born around the same time as me. Unlike me, with my platinum-blond hair, he had brownish hair and a slightly bigger body. He cried louder and ate more, too.
His name was Oskar.
‘Oskar?’
It seemed like a name that would be common among German nobles. I didn’t think much of it and tried to move on.
Then one day, the nannies started bustling around more than usual. They replaced the curtains in the room and checked several times to make sure there wasn’t any dust on the floor.
‘Is someone coming?’
A little while later, the door opened, and a man entered. With a mustache stretching out to either side, he walked toward us with one arm awkwardly held against his body.
‘Wait a second. Where have I seen that face before?’
German military uniform, Kaiser mustache. And the left arm, too.
‘Hold on, hold on, hold on.’
The man first picked up Oskar, who was beside me.
“Our Oskar is as lively as ever today.”
The nanny answered with a beaming smile.
“He has a voice as booming as His Majesty the Emperor’s.”
His Majesty the Emperor. The title was the same one they used for my mother, but considering who they were saying it to, this had to be the Emperor himself.
It was as if an alarm were going off in my head. The man set Oskar down and picked me up this time. I wondered if he’d manage with one arm impaired, but his hold was steadier than I expected.
“And our Bessie is as well-behaved as ever today.”
I stared intently at the man’s face. There was no doubt.
Wilhelm II, the third emperor of the German Empire, who would later wreck the country in the Great War and flee to the Netherlands.
‘Holy shit. His arm’s fucked up.’
Wilhelm must have thought I was staring because I recognized him; the corners of his mouth lifted.
“It seems you already recognize your father.”
‘Father?’
My mind stopped for a moment.
Come to think of it, I thought Wilhelm II had a son named Oskar. I couldn’t remember exactly which son he was, but I was sure he was one of several.
And as far as I knew, Wilhelm II had only one daughter, Victoria Louise.
But I was Elisabeth, not Victoria.
‘A daughter who never existed in history?’
I frantically searched my memory.
I never thought that staying up all night in grad school and looking up history videos and firearm references during breaks would come in handy like this. That useless trivia had been completely worthless in the job interviews that actually mattered.
I didn’t remember Prince Oskar very well, but I thought he’d been born a few years before Victoria Louise.
If so, I was an imperial princess who’d never existed in history—a twin born in the same year as Oskar.
‘This is insane.’
This was beyond being born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
I’d been born with a diamond spoon in my mouth: the German imperial family.
Wilhelm saw my expression stiffen and lightly poked my cheek with a finger.
“What’s wrong, Bessie?”
I couldn’t speak, so I just blinked.
“Pa…….”
I barely managed to move my lips.
Wilhelm’s expression brightened.
“Try saying Papa.”
‘My tongue still doesn’t work.’
Still, since this was the historic moment when I tried to say my first words to the Emperor, I gave it my best shot.
“Pa……pa.”
Actually, the pronunciation was closer to baba than papa. But people hear what they want to hear.
The room stirred.
Wilhelm smiled as if he’d gained the whole world.
“Did you hear that? Bessie called me!”
The nannies and attendants bowed as if they were deeply honored. Beside me, Oskar suddenly burst into tears, apparently wanting attention for himself, too.
“Waaaaah!”
“Yes, Oskar. Did you miss your father, too?”
Wilhelm tried to soothe Oskar while holding me, but with one arm impaired, he ended up in an awkward position, and a nanny hurriedly picked Oskar up.
Watching the scene, I thought,
‘When I read about him in history books, he was just an eccentric emperor.’
But at least the Wilhelm before me now seemed like an ordinary father beside himself with joy over one little word from me.
As time passed, all my guesses were confirmed.
My name was Elisabeth von Preußen. Considering that von Preußen became a surname after the war, I was Princess Elisabeth of Prussia.
My nickname was Bessie. I was the daughter of Wilhelm II and Augusta Victoria, and the fraternal twin of Prince Oskar.
An imperial princess who hadn’t existed in history. I checked several times, wondering if I might not be an imperial princess at all, but some outsider who’d been brought in. But I was a twin born on the same day as Oskar, and everyone thought I was a princess.
After that, I wondered if I might simply be an imperial princess I didn’t remember, and thought hard about it, but no matter how I looked at it, this person definitely didn’t exist in the history I knew.
At first, I was honestly a little scared. History had already changed just because I’d been born. Even if I did nothing from here on out, things might gradually diverge from the original course of history.
But soon, another thought occurred to me.
‘Wait.’
If I was the Emperor’s daughter, I’d have money, connections, and maybe even easy access to factories.
I might be able to see the firearms and machines I’d only seen in blueprints in my previous life, and if I wanted, I might even be able to summon engineers and workshops to the palace.
The heavy problems of the Great War and the fall of the German Empire were pushed to the back of my mind for a while.
I was still a baby, and all I could do right now was drink formula and sleep.
‘At least I won’t have to worry about finding a job in this family.’
I was genuinely relieved to have solved the problem that had tormented me right up to the end of my previous life.
Just then, Oskar tugged on my hair from beside me.
“Ah!”
I slapped the back of his hand on reflex.
Oskar burst into tears, and the nannies came running.
Before saving the German Empire, I had a feeling I needed to teach this obnoxious twin about the pecking order.