Aware, Awake, Alive

Chapter 2

Penelope's strained smile stayed on her face while a vein appeared on her forehead. These functions really were aggravating. She wished that she could have stayed home.

It had been about eight years since she first appeared in this world. Penelope was what she was called now and she had a brand new family. It took her around two years to fully understand what happened to her and to comprehend the fact that this was her new reality. As well as there was another addition to her family, a little sister named Rosalia. Penelope had no idea what to do because she never had siblings before. So she mostly stayed out of her parents' way and she kind of avoided her sister.

Her parents took notice of her avoidance of her younger sister and they were not very surprised because Penelope wasn't very talkative. She wasn't really sociable either, but they decided when she was three to start to take her to places more often and to interact with more people. Because of this Penelope was more exposed to the language which was about the only redeeming feature of the whole situation.

Don't get her started on the language. It was very confusing. Most people were given English names which were super weird because no one actually spoke the language. Some people had Latin names, but only the heirs of the Royal Family had names that meant immortality. She guessed it was because that was signet, but it was still weird to hear those names. They also called Latin the sacred language here. They actually spoke it as language or at least spoke it which was super cool because this could be the actual pronunciation of the Latin language in her old world.

Now, to the second prince, the poor kid was given a humiliating name that meant limping. It was Latin-based, but it wasn't Latin like his brother's Anastasius. Claude's name meant limping. Apparently, the emperor didn't like Claude and the nobles mostly ignored him.

Now, the common language used was similar to either Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. She never studied those languages in her last life, so she couldn't really differentiate them. She strongly suspected it was closest to Korean because she heard back in her old world that there were hundreds of characters in Chinese and Japanese. While there were only around twenty-four in the common tongue.

It was very difficult for her to master this new language. Despite her brain being able to process things a lot faster because she was a baby and babies were practically sponges. They learned rather easily. However, her past life's memories and the confusion between her former language, English, and this new language, caused her to mix things up. Not only that, she had an accent at first. Her parents were puzzled and her nannies were baffled because where did Penelope get it from?

After a couple of years, it was basically non-existent, only when she was upset was when it came in with a thunderous roar. It was very hard to take her seriously with that accent and her parents ended up smiling at her. Not that the tantrums happened often. It was mostly when she was sad and tried to get comfort from her parents.

When she was about five years old, she was still a very bitter little girl. However, she was able to do something that she did when she was Annaliese. She got to learn piano! Her learning piano was able to smooth out the edges of that bitterness. After doing her scales and arpeggios, she finally practiced her pieces. It made her feel light and she momentarily forgot that she was in this new world. During that time she hardly acknowledged her surroundings. One time she was playing for what seemed to be a fleeting amount of time, but in reality, it was for hours.

Her piano teacher was impressed by her ability to pick up these things so fast, but it was mostly due to the fact that Penelope had done this before. Penelope never was truly proud of her achievements but was content that she still remembered it all. After all, her father once said that she would lose it all if she didn't practice-