Yet Another Isekai

Chapitre 1 : Reborn

When Lizzie woke up, she was not in her room.

Lizzie's room was tiny and she was a bit of a hoarder, so it was cramped as well, and not really clean to be honest. Its only window faced another building, as shabby as hers. Her window neighbour was an old man, who liked walking around his place naked. Therefore, in order not to be traumatized to life (and to respect her neighbour's privacy, probably), she kept her curtains closed at pretty much all times.

The room Lizzie woke up in was the opposite of her room. It was huge -probably bigger than her whole student apartment-, bright, and the furniture was definitely a better quality. It was all so... golden? Her bedframe, the window frames, the sofa, the wardrobe, the mouldings (who even had mouldings nowadays?!)... Everything was made of, or was covered with, gold. And her sheets very much felt like silk. She had touched silk once as a child, at a store. Then the sale lady told her to back off.

The room she was in really reminded her of a room at the Palace of Versailles. The question was: how did she, a middle-class British student living in London's suburbs, end up in a room similar to a Renaissance castle? That made no sense at all.

The only explanation, she thought, frozen in the silk sheets, too afraid to move, was that she had been kidnapped. But she was pretty sure she had locked her door before going to sleep. And why would the kidnappers take her to this kind of room? Had she been sold to a rich foreign king? And how did she not wake up? Had she been drugged? But when? That made no sense.

She finally decided to move; if she had indeed been kidnapped (and this was not a very realistic dream), she should try to escape. Looking around, escaping did not look very complicated : she had huge windows, and it appears the room was ground level, as she could see a very fancy garden. The kidnappers were definitely not very good kidnappers.

When she stood up, her body felt... different. She felt lighter, and her whole balance felt off. Probably the drugs, she thought -as only drugs could have make her not wake up during the whole kidnapping thing. She tiptoed towards the windows, when she saw someone on her right, moving along with her. She jumped with surprise, and fell off. The woman -as it turned out to be a woman-, fell as well, her eyes and her mouth wide open. She was obviously shocked -was this her room? Had she also been kidnapped?

Lizzie's initial shock over, she took the time to analyse her face a little bit more. Her beauty was devastating. She seemed tall, and thin; her long black hair was scattered all over the floor (had she been standing up, it would probably fall under her knees), every part of her face seemed finely chiselled, like a statue. And her eyes, very surprisingly, were purple. Lizzie had never seen such eyes. How on Earth...?

That woman was so gorgeous that Lizzie noticed only afterward that it was a reflection. Indeed, Lizzie was not looking at another woman; she was looking at a mirror. She was looking at her own reflection. She could have yelled out of surprise but she kept silent. She was too stunned to speak.

She had a doubt, at first, as this reflection did not look like her at all. She looked around to make sure the woman in the reflection was not here, somewhere else (she was not); she checked whether the mirror was not actually a sort of augmented reality technology device, like the filters on Instagram (it was not); she verified if she didn't have make up, and contact lenses (she did not).

She concluded that there were three possible explanations. First, that she was dreaming -although this felt very real. Second, that she had been kidnapped, and that someone had done plastic surgery on her, and therefore that she had been asleep for much, much longer than planned. And the last one was that somehow, one way or another, she ended up in another body.

That's about when she authorized herself to sit down on her bed, and cry.

Lizzie's cries attracted the maids (yes, the maids), who immediately rushed in to her side; they had probably been waiting outside for her to wake up. They were startled to see her crying and yelling that way.

"Your Highness, Your Highness! What is going on?", asked one of them.

"Are you hurt somewhere?", asked another.

But Lizzie kept on crying, as she became more and more desperate: they were either gaslighting her hard, or she was, indeed, in someone else's body. But deep down, she knew what was going on. She was starting to recognize the body she had seen in the mirror. Also, she was quite a webtoon connoisseuse.

She was in the body of Marchioness Serena Everspring, from an online novel she had just finished, Anything For Your Love.

She was living an Isekai.

And she was in the body of the villainess of the novel, Serena Everspring. 

Serena Everspring was going to be sentenced to death.

Fuck.

She started crying again.