“Well, that was a fantastic waste of time.”

Joe let out a long, disappointed sigh as she took a sip from her teacup. She was back in the Winsten estate, and was sullenly sitting in the southern terrace while drinking the ‘special’ honey-flavoured, herbal tea brewed by Mirian (The moment they’d returned to the manor, Lucia had practically dragged the older maid out of the kitchen to make something that ‘freshens up’ Lady Joanna, because the Lady looks miserable!). Joe felt partly grateful and partly guilty when she saw this, because for all the pomp she’d dragged Lucia and Nero out to the capital with, it all turned out to be wild goose chase.

Joe had borrowed some random books from the library for the nosy questioning about her sudden trip, but the real objective was not even close to fulfilled. It was humiliating how she’d returned empty handed after all that preparation.

Useless…. Lady Joanna muttered.

‘Oh shut up, you!’ Joe shot back angrily, ‘I was the one doing all the work!’

Which wasn’t true, because Joe was fairly certain that she’d be more useless without Lady Joanna this time around, but turns out that it was easier to blame someone when you’re angry at everything under the sun. Which was again, very childish of her, she thought.

‘Sorry.’ Joe mumbled guiltily. It had taken a huge effort to warm up to Lady Joanna, and she had to remind herself that the villainess was in the same boat as her.

You’re in a shitty mood, huh? Lady Joanna mused, and her steady voice sounded oddly comforting in the head. Joe let slip a smile despite herself. The noble lady was slowly but surely developing a potty mouth from her influence. It was sort of hilarious to hear her spit out cuss words in that uppity, elegant tone.

‘Yeah, no shit, my Lady.’

Joe sighed for the umpteenth number of time. What she needed was a way to break the cycle of deaths, and a way to return to her world, if possible. The problem was that she wouldn’t know how to look if she didn’t know what to look for. Joe had hoped for a clue in the long history of Triciella, of bizarre individuals who had apparently dropped in from another world, or some past incident related to repeated time loops, but all there was left to read was royal scandals, political intricacies, glorious battles and more royal scandals.

She privately wondered if the royalties were born to create scandals.

Joe was even more skeptical about the thing that they called ‘magic’. While she was in the library, Lady Joanna had force fed her everything there was to know about the basics of magic and charms. The noble Lady was surprisingly knowledgeable, and her meticulous teaching left Joanna questioning back on her first impression of the villainess.

But then again, living the same life over a billion (?) cycles would have meant that Lady Joanna had already got everything memorized down to the last detail; only Joe wondered if that was really the case. The massive holes in the memory of the villainess didn’t quite add up.

How come she’d remember the theory of magic but not something as important as events leading to her death?

The magic, Joe had learnt eventually, was bound by certain rules according to its nature. It wasn’t the ‘Oooh-look-I-can-pull-out-two-pigeons-from-fancy-hat!’ kind of magic, nor a ‘Wingardium-Leviosa’ kind either, but more of an ‘I-can-create-fire-with-my-hands-and-grow-trees-between-my-fingers’ kind of magic. There were four attributes to magic, related to the four fundamental elements, namely: Fire, water, wind and earth. They were arranged on a cross with opposing attributes on the opposite sides; fire against water and wind against earth.

Joe had privately thanked her lucky stars that there was no ‘fire nation’ to fight against this time, and no tattooed, bald kid to secretly look out for.

A fifth element was said to have existed once upon a time, some five hundred years ago, when a person who could supposedly control time and space had appeared out of the blue. This was a fantastic piece of hint as far as Joe was concerned, but Lady Joanna had gravely shaken her head concluded that there were no written records about that person found till date.

The hint went ‘poof’ before they could even act on it.

The magic and its attribute, Lady Joanna told her, were decided right at birth. However, the magic didn’t manifest until the kid entered his or her puberty. Hence it was pretty much impossible to predict the attribute beforehand. The prime period for learning to control it was said to be between the ages of fifteen to twenty years, which was why most academic institutions, including St. Clarence, would allow enrolment of students when they turned fifteen.

That still didn’t convince Joe how someone could light fire with their fingers like a live matchstick, so Lady Joanna had explained that it wasn’t really that simple. Different attributes needed different methods of initialization, without which it would be impossible to use the magic itself.

In all of my previous cycles, I had the water attribute. Lady Joanna reported. To use my magic, I had to make sure that my hands were wet with water. Well, I suppose you could call that an initial condition of sorts.

And that was not all. Sometimes, it was even possible for a person to have more than one attribute. When that happened, that person could wield a magic which represented a combination of the two given attributes. For example, air and water together produced ice, earth and fire came together to create metal, water and earth gave rise to wood, and fire and air attributes combined to form lightning.

“Aren’t there people out there who are born without this magic?” Joe had asked curiously. “How the hell do you even know if you’re blessed with magic or not?”

It was apparently possible to tell beforehand to some extent if a person was born with or without magic. There was a peculiar phenomenon that plagued the children of the kingdom who were below ten years of age. People called it the ‘Marking fever’. If a child contracted the fever before their tenth birthday, they had a potential of developing magic in the future. Red, wavy marks appeared on the body during this time, but it was not lethal. Contracting the ‘Marking fever’ meant that you may or may not develop magic powers later, but absence of the fever was an absolute indication that the child would forever remain magic less.

Parents from noble families would never admit it out loud, but a vast majority of them glorified the ‘Marking fever’, and considered it as a sort of rite of passage. Funnily enough, many of their children also shared the sentiment, despite being victims of the fever themselves. It was, Joe had thought disgustedly, a never-ending cycle of human stupidity.

And the funniest fact of them all: apparently, 90% of the magic users came from the noble families. The rest 10% from the so-called commoners, had magic in very small amounts, enough for the nobles and aristocrats to dub the ‘responsibility of wielding magical powers’ as yet another justified jewel on their crown.

Joe had had a short circuit for one solid minute after hearing the statement.

The nobles with their already inflated egos, apparently saw the magic as yet another sign of pure nobility. She was already beginning to have a headache just by imagining the consequences of such a ridiculous notion.

But after all that was said and done, Joe and Lady Joanna still hadn’t found a single clue about the crux of the matter. All those historical records and manuscripts were informative in the most useless kind of ways. It was inevitable, Joe thought as she downed her tea in one gulp; no one would bother writing about a weirdo who went around telling people that they had come from another world, or the whispers of a spirit of a person long dead (in this case, suffering from a long chain of deaths), killed by a royal prince, no less.

This was, above all, a land ruled by a King, and those kinds of rumors would bring about the worst kind of anarchy to the kingdom. Joe couldn’t believe that the nobility themselves would be happy with such rumors either, the truth be damned. The last thing that they would want was anything that could drastically change their established lifestyle for the worse.

So naturally, any idiot who would be an idiot enough to actually confess something like that (‘excuse me, but I think that I might have come from a world where you guys are just a bunch of fancy pixels….’), they would either get arrested or be dismissed as lunatics, on the top of being an idiot.

In other words, the people of the kingdom would just call them plain crazy.

Joe snapped open her eyes in a heartbeat. Wait a second……!

Lunatic? Crazy?

She sprang up from her seat like a Jack-in-the-box. “Lucia! Hey Lucia!”

“Heyyy!” Lucia cheerily called back, before remembering who she was talking to.

“He--- I- I mean my, lady Joanna! I apologize! I APOLOGIZE!!” The maid was horrified at her own slip up. What on earth was wrong with her today, hey?! Hey, hey hey! She didn’t want to be kicked by the Lady in public!

Lady Joanna ignored her words with a wave of hands. “Lucia, I’ve got a strange question to ask. Can you promise not to tell anyone about this?”

Lucia blinked, confusion blooming in her big, brown eyes. The lady was already being strange enough for over a week now, so there was no harm in indulging in a few more days of strangeness. In fact, Lucia would rather die than admit it, but she was quite enjoying the company of this new, carefree, strange Lady Joanna who didn’t seem to mind her ‘Hey’s at all. She didn’t know how long it would last, and suddenly realized she didn’t want to know either.

“Of course, my Lady! You have my word!” Lucia grinned back.

“Ahem, so.” Joe began seriously. “Do you happen to know anyone crazy?”

The maid paused and blinked. Again.

“Any madman? Madwoman? Y’know, someone known to be batshit insane?”

‘Ah, this is bad.’ Lucia thought serenely, as though she’d had no more fucks left to give. ‘My Lady’s strangeness suddenly got cranked up way higher…’

“My lady, what’s the occasion?”

Joe gave her a look that she reserved for all idiots with idiotic questions. “There’s no occasion. I have a --- Ah, a very important job to look into.”

‘An important job, related to a… madman?’ The maid scrunched up her face in confusion.

“Oh, surely there’d be someone!” Joe pressed on determinedly, “Haven’t there ever been any weird rumors around here? Or the mad ramblings of a lunatic who spews out impossible stuff?”

Lucia scratched her head. There weren’t many stories of that sort that she knew of. She loved gossip just as much as the next person in her small, quaint little village, and grew up listening to all kinds of bizarre tales of immortal magicians, valiant heroes and sparkling heroines. Sometimes, a rumor or two would float up in the hushed whispers of the old villagers, but then those rumors would vanish just as mysteriously as they’d first appeared.

The maid sighed. She would love to be of help of Lady Joanna, but she didn’t really know how many of those rumors had a grain of truth. But then again, the aristocracy of the kingdom was quick to squash down unsavoury rumors before they could snowball into something troublesome..

Joe turned hopefully to her self appointed bodyguard. “Nero, do you know anything like that?”

“A madman, huh?” Nero murmured thoughtfully. "Nero thinks that he can remember someone like that.... That would be the Witch of the West.”