Chapter 3
Time flew by.
My vision, blurry at first, gradually cleared, and my body, which had refused to obey me, slowly began to respond. I learned to hold my head up, roll over, crawl, and finally walk on two feet.
The problem was that as my body started moving, my curiosity did, too.
The nanny came to assume that whenever I was quiet, I was up to something. She wasn't wrong. If the room grew too quiet, nine times out of ten I was rummaging through a drawer or cabinet.
Whenever that happened, the nanny would cover her face with her hands and say, ‘She’s not even a boy...’ But what did I care?
Anyway, there were more than enough things in this palace to take apart.
Pocket watches, music boxes, wind-up toys, little telescopes, alarm clocks, and so on...
In my previous life, I could only have admired these things behind the glass of a museum case, but here they were scattered from room to room. The mechanisms, each one fashioned by hand by a master craftsman, had a charm that modern products lacked.
The first victim was a silver pocket watch. In my three-year-old body, I couldn't get my hands on a screwdriver, so I used a hairpin and a table knife instead. While the maid was briefly away, I pried open the back cover and marveled at the gears and mainspring inside.
‘Wow, they made all of this by hand?’
Having encountered the true essence of mechanical engineering—not modern printed circuit boards—I tore into the watch with complete fascination.
And thirty minutes later, the watch was dead.
One spring flew off somewhere, and I forgot where two of the tiny gears had originally gone. I tried my best to put it back together, but I couldn't even close the cover properly.
“Your Highness.”
The nanny's voice came from behind me.
I slowly turned around like the protagonist in a horror movie. The nanny, looking troubled, glanced between the watch in my hand and the parts scattered across the floor.
“How did this happen?”
I racked my brain for an excuse.
“I think the watch was sick...”
“And you didn't make it sick, Your Highness?”
“Um... I don't think so?”
That day, I got lectured for an hour.
The second victim was a desk clock, the third a music box. The fourth was a little wind-up train my father had given me.
Wilhelm laughed it off at first. He found it amusing that his daughter was so interested in machines.
But he wasn't laughing when the fifth pocket watch stopped working.
“Bessie.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Before you take something apart, you have to think about whether you'll be able to put it back together.”
“I was going to put it back together.”
“But you didn't, did you?”
How unfair, using the results against me. I had no comeback.
Fortunately, my success rate began to improve from the sixth watch onward. I sketched the positions of the screws and parts on paper as I dismantled them, and set out several little bowls to keep the parts in order.
After I’d taken apart ten and managed to save two, I puffed out my chest and said to the nanny,
“See? I can fix them now, right?”
The second watch I managed to save was an old pocket watch Wilhelm had put away in a drawer instead of using. Its mainspring had unwound and one of the gears had slipped out of place, but after examining its mechanism for two days, I found where it belonged.
When the second hand started moving again, Wilhelm looked quite surprised.
“Did you really fix this?”
“Yes!”
“By yourself?”
“Of course!”
Wilhelm held the pocket watch to his ear to listen to it ticking, then patted my head.
“I thought all you did was break things, but it looks like you're useful for something, too.”
It was hard to tell whether that was praise or an insult.
Still, after that, I was officially given a small toolbox on the condition that I didn't take apart just anything.
“See? I can do it all by myself now.”
“Your Highness, haven't eight of them already broken?”
“Aw, that's just the initial development cost.”
Oskar watched me from beside us with a completely baffled look, as if he had at least three question marks floating over his head.
Even though Oskar was the one who watched my hobby up close, he didn't seem to understand me.
Still, seeing him sit beside me and watch my antics meant he was a lot more comfortable than before.
At first, he was wary that I might steal his toys and break them. He hardly ever came near me, and if I approached him, he would quietly slip away.
As his older sister by three minutes, that hurt my feelings, but I'd once taken apart his wind-up soldier and left its arm unable to turn, so I kept quiet.
“Bessie broke it!”
“Ahem...! I didn't break it. I'm making it better.”
“Its arm won't move!”
“When you fix one problem, another one is bound to crop up.”
“Put it back the way it was!”
“I can't. There are parts missing. Sorry!”
The missing part turned up in the hem of my skirt. When Oskar saw it, he cried even louder.
In the end, I had no choice but to fix the wind-up soldier until late that night. Its arm moved again, but a little more slowly than before.
“Why is it moving so slowly?”
“A gentleman has no dignity if he doesn't move with deliberation.”
“What are you talking about? It's just broken!”
“Now, now... You don't trust your big sister?”
Oskar ran off to our mother in tears.
Still, as time passed, he started sitting beside me more and more. Apparently, he found it interesting to watch the gears turn and the spring unwind.
“What's this?”
“A gear.”
“What's this?”
“A mainspring.”
“What's this?”
“That's a spring, but don't touch it. If it flies off, we'll never find it.”
But Oskar always touched the things I told him not to touch.
“Eeeek!! The spring!!!”
In the end, one spring flew across the room, and Oskar and I spent an hour crawling around on the floor looking for it.
We fought often, but we also spent a lot of time together.
But as we approached the age of five, our lives began to diverge.
Oskar began learning how to conduct himself as a prince, along with military discipline. Every morning, he put on a little outfit that looked like a military uniform and stood straight in front of his tutor.
“Keep your answers short and clear!”
“Yes!”
“Again!”
“Yes, sir!”
I watched Oskar with sympathy while I studied piano, French, and etiquette in the next room.
Of course, it wasn't easy. Etiquette lessons were especially painful.
I dropped the book on my head three times while practicing walking with it balanced there, and I even tripped over my skirt. The governess said it was the sort of grace a princess needed, but to me, it seemed like pointless nitpicking that had nothing to do with etiquette.
“Your Highness, you mustn't hike up your skirt like that.”
“It keeps getting caught on my legs.”
“You must walk gracefully so that it doesn't.”
“No, no! I want to wear pants.”
“Your Highness!”
Of course, there were good things about being born a princess.
I didn't have to get scolded every day for playing soldier like Oskar, and although Wilhelm was strict with his sons, he was exceptionally soft on me, his daughter.
But I didn't like that I wasn't allowed to take military lessons.
As a military buff in my previous life, I’d wanted to study the military of this era, too, so it was a huge disappointment.
So whenever my lessons ended, I snuck into Oskar's room and peeked at his textbooks. The map symbols, formations, and history of the Prussian army weren't all that different from what I knew in my previous life, but I was happy just to see books from this era.
One day, Oskar caught me.
“What are you doing? Why are you looking at my book?”
“Huh...?”
I spun around in surprise to find Oskar standing there with a solemn expression.
“Only princes get to learn this.”
“Then you must've learned all of it, right? Do you know all this?”
At my words, Oskar fell silent for a moment.
“……A little.”
I opened the book to a page and pointed at one of the symbols.
“What's this?”
“Infantry.”
“And next to it?”
“Cavalry.”
“Then what about this?”
Oskar's eyes wavered.
“......Big infantry.”
He'd said he knew it, but he didn't even know the basics. Tsk, tsk.
I clicked my tongue and told him the right answer.
“That's artillery.”
“I knew that!”
Oskar's face turned red as he shouted.
I laughed at how cute he looked, then Oskar bit my arm.
“Ow! That hurts!!”
After that day, whenever his lessons ended, Oskar tried to explain what he'd learned to me. Half of it was wrong, and the other half seemed like he'd simply memorized his tutor's words, but I pretended not to notice and listened.
“Infantry has to advance in formation.”
“Why?”
“Because it looks cool.”
“What if a shell lands?”
“The artillery can shoot it down first.”
“???”
Oskar's tactics were always brimming with confidence. In the sense that he never considered the possibility of the enemy firing first, he seemed a little like our father.
‘Did this little punk even learn anything properly?’
Still, thanks to him, I got to see firsthand how military education worked in the imperial family.
Then, one day, as our fifth birthday approached, Oskar said excitedly,
“Father says he'll give me a real gun for my birthday.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. A prince has to know how to handle weapons by the time he's five. What was it called? A revolver?”
That immediately caught my attention.
A revolver.
And one made in the German Empire in the nineteenth century, no less.
Considering the period, it was probably a Reichsrevolver M1879.
In my previous life, I’d taken apart several firearms while working with a defense contractor, but I’d never handled an actual Imperial-era revolver. It was the kind of thing I could only see behind the glass at a museum.
“I want one, too...! I want one!!”
Oskar shook his head.
“You're a princess. Father probably won't let you.”
I immediately got to my feet.
“That's not fair! I'm going to Papa.”
“He'll definitely say no.”
“Then I'll keep asking until he says yes.”
In my previous life, I’d persuaded professors and corporate representatives to secure research funding.
There was no way I couldn't persuade a father who was a pushover for his daughter.
That evening, I climbed onto Wilhelm's lap and spoke with the brightest, most innocent eyes I could manage.
“Papa.”
“Yes, Bessie?”
“I want a pistol for my birthday.”
Wilhelm's smile froze in place.
That was the moment my new research project began.