Okay, I Don’t Love Spreadsheets THAT Much

“Lady Greymoor, my goodness, are you alright? Lady Greymoor!”

There was a muffled voice in the distance. It was dull at first, as if smothered by pillows, but it echoed and grew stronger and clearer until it was joined by a chorus of other cries, all of them in a cacophonic timbre of distress.

"Vivian!"

"Emily, Emily move aside, let me take a look at her. How long has she been like this?"

"I don't know, I found her like this just moments ago."

"She's cold to the touch, fetch the doctor right away."

"Yes, Cyrus."

“Hold me, Vladdy.”

"Wait, she's waking up!"

Light, a sliver at first between the crevice of unopened eyelids, bleached my senses. Blurry distorted silhouettes became a blended crowd of unfamiliar faces. An old man with a silver monocle to match his well kept beard, a young maid bowing to a woman in a pristine sapphire dress, two handsome gentlemen with their hands on each others’ shoulders.

“Lady Greymoor, she’s awake! Lady Greymoor, how are you feeling?”

Of course.

I recognized this kind of scene, the revelatory moment when the soul of a young man of trivial stature finds himself transmigrated into the body of a gorgeous aristocrat. Was this really the goddess’s punishment, that I must live as a woman in the next life? What should I say? How should I behave?

Act confused, I decided. It was perhaps the only way to get proper context for where and who I was.

Then, I heard a low and involuntary groan. Involuntary because I didn’t feel particularly dazed. My perspective also turned from right to left, as if to register the line concerned faces before me, but I felt no contortion of muscles and tendons to swivel my face from side to side.

As a matter of fact, I felt no physical sensations at all. I could not tell if there were aches in my bones or if it was hot or if it was cold. More than feeling as if I had no control over my body, it would have been more accurate to say that it felt like I had no body.

“What happened? What are you all doing here?” came a voice, timid and unsure, displaced and vulnerable.

This was Vivian Greymoor’s voice?

“We were so worried about you,” the maid amongst the others rushed forward and threw her arms around Vivian, “We should be asking you the same questions. What happened? What do you remember?”

“Emily,” Vivian cooed. A pair of slender hands reached forward and brushed gently over the maid’s auburn hair. Her voice softened into serene whispers, tender as the tears on Emily’s face.

“Lady Greymoor,” the old man with the silver monocle, the family butler perhaps, stepped forward and bowed, “I’m glad to see you’ve returned to us.”

“Cyrus,” Vivian acknowledged with a stiff nod.

“Viv,” the two gentlemen holding each other by the shoulders approached, “You gave us quite the scare. The whole house was shuddering for a moment there.”

“Stefan. Vladimir,” Vivian addressed each one differently, the former with subtle adoration and the latter with a note of reticence, “My apologies.”

“Is that all you have to say, Vivian?” the last person in the crowd, the woman in the sapphire dress, stepped forward, “'My apologies?' Are you finished causing trouble for the rest of the family already?”

“My apologies mother,” Vivian’s voice chilled. Its sultry cadence evaporated and in its place lingered a barren monotonous echo, “I was merely feeling unwell after the soiree.”

“Yes, I imagine so, especially after that peasant girl stole the crown prince from under your nose,” Vivian’s mother sneered, “We’ve already spent the vast majority of your dowry on courting the royal family, and you have the gall to return from the party empty handed?”

“Mother,” Stefan said, “Let’s broach this subject at a different time.”

“When, Stefan?” the mother swiveled to face her son, “When your sister is feeling better? Oh, why couldn’t she have turned out like you? Married, in good standing with the court.”

“Mother, mother,” Stefan soothed, casting a wink towards Vivian as he slid behind their mother, “Let’s have some tea in the garden. The chamomile blossoms taste especially good at this time of year. The antioxidants, am I saying that right Vlad, are good for your beauty sleep.”

With hurried gestures, Stefan corralled the rest of the group out through a thick mahogany door, turning one final time to Vivian to motion to something behind her. Then the door closed, Vivian heaved a sigh and for the first time since I awoke in this new place I observed my immediate surroundings.

It was morning. I could tell that from sunlight filtering in from the open window. A set of white drapes wafted in the breeze, revealing a courtyard of red and orange flowers. Besides the window stood a diminutive dresser, topped with wrapped confectionery and a framed portrait. Frilly clothes and unbound corsets lay scattered across the dresser and the floor, leading all the way to the bed, where a giant mushroom pillow stood at its center.

Vivian turned and made for a nightstand beside the bed. From within an oak drawer she produced a simple turquoise bracelet. Its monochrome design suggested nothing out of the ordinary, so I was surprised this was the first thing she decided to fetch.

“Let’s see if it still works,” Vivian said to herself, strapping the bracelet around her wrist. It fit, loosely at first, but then tightened like an inflatable cuff. She tapped a spot on the accessory just beside her palm and the spot lit up and responded with an erratic series of beeps.

Then, everything about me changed.

A strong magnetic pull flung me out from Vivian’s perspective and into the open. My vision, which I assumed was tethered to her own field of view, had now become omnidirectional. My senses were barraged by a stream of foreign symbols; items that I shifted attention to acquired bright aquamarine highlights outlining their contours.

More importantly, I could now get a good look at Vivian Greymoor’s face.

I wasn’t sure what I imagined her to look like, but her appearance left me stunned. Right away, I noticed her sharply defined features and long scarlet hair. Through her soft modest expression and slender pose, her relaxed cheeks and tender gaze, there was a piercing, almost aggressive, quality to her appearance, as if her velvet lips were made for wicked smiles, as if her sharp viridian eyes hid a stare that could shatter your soul.

But as I stood (metaphorically, as I realized I had no legs to stand upon) in awe of her beauty, it slowly dawned upon me that she was equally transfixed at whatever she was currently staring at.

Which appeared to be…me.

I appeared as a tiny crystalline sphere hovering just inches from Vivian’s face. How I could see in every direction and also stare back into my own new body was a disorienting experience, not to mention my own personal shock behind my transformation. But there was a familiarity with the surface of this pulsating sphere that I just knew that this was what I had become.

Vivian raised her arms and pressed her fingers against me. A neon blue light flashed before her eyes and my crystal surface disintegrated and adopted the form of a square opalescent hologram. The same foreign symbols I saw hovering over other objects in the room bloomed into view on this hologram.

But the longer the symbols lingered, the more readable they seemed, the more swirls and incongruent angles turned into arithmetic numbers, the more hieroglyphs looked like words from the world I had left.

“Intelligence,” Vivian said, “Higher than average.”

Oh.

“Personality. Average. That’s rude.”

I see.

“Stamina. Low.”

So that’s how it was.

“Strength. Low.”

That’s when the goddess’s design made itself clear to me in all its malicious duplicity. She had deemed that I was to have no life of my own in this world, no opportunity for self-determination, to only live as a vessel for someone else.

I had been born again to be Vivian Greymoor’s stat menu.