The room is very quiet, and very opulent. The king-size bed is luxuriously soft, with a down duvet that's immensely snuggly. A basketball-sized plush toy of a white, ferret-like animal sits by her bedpost, smirking at her.

The curtains over the picture window in the western wall are closed, and there are no lights on, but she can see quite clearly despite the darkness.

... This is a really big bed.

...

She turns the plush toy to look at the wall, because creepy.

Also, holy crap. This is a really big bed. She - briefly wants to be opulent and take up as much space as possible just because she can.

But then she recalls that her brother's missing and how she just got forcibly kidnapped with weird magic shit and uses this to extract herself out of bed. This is a bit awkward. Apparently along with her sibling she lost her height. It makes her a bit clumsy, but she manages well enough. Out of bed she gets.

What's the rest of the room like?

Her quick survey of the room takes in the major furniture. A small table by the window, with a hand-sized block of silvery metal sitting atop it; a large desk against one wall, with another, larger block of metal atop it; a vanity, makeup products neatly organized on one side, jewellery stacked in boxes on the other. There's an inside door by the desk, and a set of closet doors by the vanity.

One whole wall is filled with books. Books and books and books. She can read the titles from here: some just seem like normal things she'd read, but then there are the ones like 'The Book of Thoth' and 'Applied Metaphysics.'

Well, clearly the first thing she should look at is that gorgeous wall of books. Does she own all of these? It looks like she does. She doesn't know what to do with this, but she has to repress the urge to dance because so many books look at them all.

She peers at them.

The organization scheme for them is by subject, and then after a brief perusal, from most well written to least well written. Subjects that are similar are grouped together, with books that have information on multiple subjects neatly between books that are more specific.

It is exactly how she would organize them if they were hers.

She turns on her heel, and checks the rest of the room.

The makeup: organized by type and flexibility. Whoever bought them probably put some thought into them, because repeats are carefully minimized and everything present definitely serves a purpose. From there it's organized by the body of the makeup and then what looks to be shade and when it doesn't hurt the overall organization things that would work well together are closer together and oh God this is exactly how she would organize this too.

It's the same with the jewelry. And the clothes.

She takes a minute to flop onto her bed and freak out.

And then she gets up and goes to tackle the books again. Are there books that look like - no, a diary isn't guaranteed, is it. Maybe a scheduling book with notes to herself - it wouldn't be with the other books, she'd want it easy to reach but not so easy that anyone that walked in could grab it so let's look in the drawer by the bed for it.

There is such a scheduling book.

It is very obviously in code. It looks like the kind of code she would come up with, if she had had fifteen years' practice and intensive training in cryptography.

...

Well, crap.

Are there books on cryptography?

There is a section on cryptography, right next to the section on how to influence people.

She peers at them, then frowns.

Okay, Yvette. Pretend you're paranoid enough to write in your not-quite-a-diary in code. What logic would you follow for the code itself? Most complicated possible, perhaps?

... No. No, that would be inefficient to write in, annoying, and not worth the trouble. But she bets she'd make it look like one of the ones that are more complicated, just to throw people off.

She picks books from the shelf with a mix of educated guesswork based on how she would organize this and actually reading the spines of the books. She notes the titles, narrows down the most likely to be used for this thing, and then puts them all back because there is no way in hell she's going to break this tonight. But she can note what will help to break it later.

Are there books on family lines? She thinks it would be bad to mess up family members' names.

There are!

... It's a bit of a large section. She'll have to thank herself for her filing habits.

Oh yes.

She briefly breaks down how she'd organize things if she had a large family, looks at the books present, and notes that the organization scheme present is much better than the one she thought of. Not that she's jealous. (She's totally jealous.)

Yvette picks out a book that should have her and her immediate family in it, and gets to reading. Who are her immediate family?

Apparently she's the second daughter of a minor Umber family. Of course, since they're Umber, they're still exceedingly rich. Apparently her father is Beleth, and her mother is Aosoth. Her older sister, Ishmerai, is listed as "Ex-Umber: Claimed the Gate." There are pictures - there's even a picture of her, with her new maroon hair and softer-looking face.

... She notes the picture of herself, and she can successfully recognize herself, so. Excellent job, self, your brother will be able to recognize you too.

Her new sister stands out from the others by hair color. Yvette - well, doesn't quite match, but the maroon doesn't look as weird against the typical purple hair as black hair does. Does that have something to do with 'Claimed the Gate'? ... Does she have the tome?

Yvette goes to look up terminology for claiming the gate and becoming ex-Umber.

The entry next to Ishmerai's smiling face says that she received the Tome of the Gateway on her thirteenth birthday, which was... two hundred and seventy-one years ago.

Cross-referencing with one of her magic books, it appears that claiming the tome's power requires one to give up the innate benefits and markings of their demonic blood. Those who have made the Gate pact become an entirely different kind of Lilim.

Oh.

Thanks, shadows, for mentioning that. Ugh.

Well, it's not a huge loss, she didn't really want to be able to turn into her true form anyway. And teleportation combined with her ethereal - thing? Yeah, no, she regrets nothing.

Also holy crap her sister is almost three centuries old! Aaa!

(It's interesting how quickly she's accepted this girl - woman, she corrects, even if she looks ten - as her sister.)

Right. Is there anything else that looks immediately useful, here?

Well, it does seem a bit odd that she has most of her desk space dedicated to an inert lump of sheet metal.

... Yes, quite.

She goes to investigate.

Upon closer inspection, the metal plate is intricately etched with thin, spiderwebbing lines. The front half is mostly taken up by five lines of thumb-size circles.

...

What happens if she presses a circle?

The entire grid of lines lights up at once, producing a faint humming noise: then little white characters flicker into view inside all the circles. A moment later, a three-dimensional image of a tree pops up from the metal, in crisp, lifelike resolution. An apple dangles from one branch of the tree: a small prompt to its right reads "Login."

Um.

This looks like a computer.

And it would be incredibly useful if she knew her login information at all. Or how to use it.

Operation: mess with the buttons! Let's see what they do.

As soon as she touches the buttons, it becomes quite clear that this is some form of touch-sensitive keyboard. The prompt now reads "Login: Xxxhahagsdgwgrhdnsbahdjekbvukbeuibcweihb."

Operation: find the backspace key!

She erases the line and attempts to turn off the computer. She doesn't have the login information, and it's not the sort of thing she can easily guess from knowing how she would work.

What else is in here for her to investigate?

Well, if this brick here is a computer, maybe the smaller one on the table by the window is as well?

Maybe! Let's look. Might be the weird magic world equivalent of a tablet. Wouldn't that be novel.

As soon as she touches it, it generates a new image of... Something. It looks like a half-assembled tree and a bunch of smoky bits. Examining it for buttons, it only seems to have two.

Well poking buttons seems to be the way to go. She picks one to enact this strategy upon. Poke!

The half-tree vanishes, replaced by an indistinct cloud of smoke.

.... Okay?

Maybe it's some kind of magic touchscreen. She attempts to poke the smoke.

A little bit of the smoke moves when she drags her finger past it, coming away in a small blob.

She has no idea what's going on.

Button press? Smoke poke? What is this how does it work.

Pressing the other button brings her back to the half-a-tree. Pressing it again brings up a rather intricate-looking flower arrangement, with no smoke in sight.

She pokes the tree?

A little bit of tree comes away from the end of the branch she poked, following her finger.

Yep. No idea what's going on.

She turns it off and puts it back.

Okay. So: how does she not scream 'I have exactly zero memory of the life you think I've been living for the past fifteen years'?

Well, she has to ask herself, what would she do if she were a rich, somewhat spoiled heiress in a magic demon family. ... Save the world, clearly, but besides that.

Devour all knowledge of magic; yeah, she'll get on that, but she can't just yet because she has no idea what's going on. Get a ton of books; obviously done. She suspects the non-existent version of her has read them all, but she has no such luck. Get a good idea of the political landscape? Keep her head down until she was more experienced or was pissed off?

... She looks at the set of makeups.

And she realizes abruptly that heiress-version-of-her probably enjoyed looking pretty very much, and that she has barely any idea how to use makeup.

Welp.

Time to figure that out. Heiress-her wouldn't settle for shoddy work on her face.

Are there books on cosmetics? Yes, there is a section next to the section on influencing people. And there is a convenient mirror. This shouldn't be too hard, right...?

Right! It shouldn't be too hard. Women do this all the time, she shouldn't have any trouble.

...

Okay, eyeliner is pain incarnate and she's lucky if she can walk away from it not looking like a racoon. Mascara is annoying and she keeps missing and getting it on her eyelids. She even has trouble with the basics; how does one use foundation without looking like plastic? And blush seems to be impossible to get right without overdoing it and making her into a clown. She has actually used eyeshadow before, but pulling off anything fancy and multicolored is just not happening. The blending is wrong. And various things-that-go-on-her-lips are easy, though she has to wipe off one set and redo it in order to work better with the color of eyeshadow she picked at near-random, and how does she keep it from rubbing off everywhere and she is so screwed.

Well. She's not letting that stop her. She retrieves a beginner's book on cosmetics, finds something simple and easy and 'classic' and copies the instructions obsessively until she has something that makes her look...

She peers at herself in the mirror. She blinks. Vaguely, she recalls that the physical Augmentation she picked enhances physical beauty.

No wonder heiress-her was a bit vain.

She deems this result good enough for the short term, has a brief debate over whether she should stave off sleep some more to get started on cracking her own encryption, and decides that if she stays up much longer someone might actually hear her and wonder just why she's teaching herself things she should already long know. Beginner's books go back to their places, makeup gets wiped off, and Yvette curls up in her gloriously-big too-soft bed.

And she sleeps.

When Yvette wakes up again, a vaguely familiar-looking girl is sitting at the small table by the window. She's turned on the metal device, and is absently arranging pieces of smoke into the shape of a topiary squirrel.

Even though she's near three hundred, Yvette's new sister doesn't look very threatening - especially with the warm glow of sunrise filtering through the curtains.

...

Yvette thinks that this is not at all normal behavior, heiress-her would not tolerate it.

She stirs, and then sits up, and peers at Ishmerai. It seems more and more likely that she also got a visit from some unwanted shadows...

"Good morning," she says, a little cautiously.

"Good morning!" Ishmerai smiles, and something in her hair smiles as well, and her shadow on the floor smiles, and something in her lap smiles.

Yvette doesn't react to the multitude of unsettling smiles with anything more than a blink.

She had a creepy shadow thing on her lap for a long while last night. This is creepy, but Yvette can handle it without screeching and fleeing the room.

Ishmerai blinks, and closes her extra mouths. "Oh, um, sorry. I forgot my shadow again, didn't I? Eye?" She smiles lopsidedly, and winks from somewhere near her feet.

"So, yes. Welcome to the family. I'm sure you have a lot of questions."

"Thank you," says Yvette, blinking. "It's okay. I had a shadow thing on my lap for at least two hours, it's really hard to freak me out now. Um. How common are - we? Did we even get the same options?"

"Not common, but not vanishingly rare, either. I've personally met about a dozen outworlders like us. You ending up in the same family as me... Well, that was lucky, but not amazingly so. There are only a few hundred demonic families in existence. As for the options... There's no way to know for sure. You'll have forgotten the other four options that weren't the ones you picked."

... She opens her mouth to protest that she definitely remembers them, they were -

And then she notes that she does not remember them. And she closes her mouth.

In a somewhat small voice, she says, "... I remember my brother picked something different than I did. And he got a - mystery box... thing, once he was done."

"I'm sorry about your brother: we'll have to look for him. As for a 'Mystery Box'... That's intriguing. I've heard of them as a rumour, but I wasn't sure if they really existed."

"It's okay. I can't imagine he would have accepted me getting dragged here without wanting to come with me, and I... remember he made the shadow list things and was very sure about whatever his choice was. ... And he said to match my eye color, that might help. He'll be running around with lilac eyes."

"A non-Lilim with lilac eyes? That should definitely stand out. It shouldn't be too hard to find him once we have the search underway."

Little smile. "Okay, good. Oh - the Augments I picked were the Tome of Gateway, the Tome of Life, the - ethereal one? The one that lets me pick cards, and the consensual body-changing one. I don't know how that fits into what you and assumingly other people have, but ethereal combines well with Gateway."

"I picked the Tome of the Gateway, which is what gave me all these lovely mouths and eyes. The shadows didn't tell me that I could have multiple things, so the rest was picked for me - I got the eyes of forgetting, the summoned armor and shields, the cards, and the aura-reading."

Nod. "I nearly got dinged for stalling when I lost my temper and started yelling at them for being so terrible at explaining anything."

Ishmerai nods back, a strange sort of resolution on her face. "The Shadows are not exactly the best of hosts."

"That," says Yvette, "is quite the understatement."

"Well yes, but I refuse to list their crimes since they delight so in their fear."

She taps her chin. "And on that point, I will state that I have personally killed over seven thousand of them."

Blink.

"... I'm totally okay with that! Can I help and steal their lifespans? I can steal their lifespans!"

"That would be wonderful! It would be poetic to put their lives to better use."

"It was a major reason as to why I took the Augment," says Yvette, pleased. "Since they seemed universally evil."

"To be frank, they only get worse as they become more powerful. I'll be glad of the extra help against them."

Nod. "Are they just - endlessly created somewhere, or...?"

"The greatest of their number are able to create more - they take bones from the people they kill, and turn them into the hearts of new shadows. But where the masters come from - I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the supposed 'dark tower' at the center of the city."

"Dark tower? ... I assume it is a tower that is dark and uncreatively named, but I mean. I barely know anything about this place yet."

"Supposedly there's a skyscraper in the city center that shows up only at midnight. I've never seen it, but others I've met have sworn that it's real and filled with Shadows. My current theory is that you need to have some ability - some kind of supernatural sight. If it was just random, I'd probably have gotten lucky by now."

Yvette nods, looking thoughtful.

Ishmerai lets the silence be for a moment.

"... Is there anything I need to know about my - er, our? - new parents?"

"They're decent enough people, and fortunately rather preoccupied with their own problems. Your bodyguard is likely to be a bigger issue."

"Ah. Yes. Good point. I picked the blood demon bodyguard. Any advice?"

"I can't help you much there, unfortunately. I've never met him before today."

"... Okay. I suppose I'll figure it out. Do you know anything about how to crack cryptography, or break into login accounts on this world's version of computers?"

"Unfortunately, that's not my area of expertise - but I could use my cards for it, if it's to unlock something of yours from your new past."

"Oh. Right. That is an option. ... How do I use the cards, I also have them, but I didn't spend any of last night trying to figure out how to use them."

"They're sort of... sideways from your right hand. If you concentrate, you should be able to feel them there and reach for them."

Yvette concentrates! Or attempts to. She reaches sideways from her right hand...

And a sudden weight drops squarely into her palm, cold and angular like a block of metal. It stings to hold.

She winces a bit, but inspects them.

"... Now what?"

"Think of what you need from your past, and lay them out on the table. The cards will do the rest. Whatever you do, don't stop halfway through: you won't be able to try again until next midnight."

"There's a cooldown?"

"Yes. The vast majority of the powers Lilim have only function for a limited amount of time or number of uses in a day. I take it the shadow neglected to mention this?"

"Not a word of it. I'd asked about the downsides - but not of the powers, I suppose. Ugh. Well, nothing to be done for it now."

She gets out of bed to go to her desk to draw cards.

Computer, or schedule book? Schedule book, or computer?

...

The computer could have anything on it, Yvette hasn't actually owned a computer before. She's used them, of course, and there was a family computer before - well, before, but it wasn't hers. So it's quite hard to figure out what she'd do if she just. Owned it, could do anything with it, could expect complete casual privacy.

She thinks of the past and of login information, and she draws cards.

The deck seems to guide her hands. She draws, and draws, and draws. The resulting diagram covers the table, then covers it again. The edges of the cards are sharp against her skin, and bitterly cold - but there are yet more left to draw.

Slowly, a pattern emerges. Across a hundred different card backs, letters and symbols appear.

"XgYZ.blm45token%"?

What a sensible password.

She retrieves a notepad and pen and writes this down in case the cards decide to disappear randomly, and then attempts to log in with this password.

The cards sit where they've been left, thrumming gently. Frost is forming on some of the denser concentrations of them.

With a cheerful chime, the computer confirms Yvette's password and allows her access.

Excellent! She smiles.

"And then I just clean up the cards and can use them again tomorrow?"

"Yep! If you touch them and mean to dismiss them, they'll disappear. You'll feel a faint nudge when they return to your right hand again at midnight."

Dismissal poke!

"Straightforward," she says, pleased. "Thank you."

"It's no problem. Do you have any other questions, or would you rather I left you alone to investigate your past self's filesystem?"

"I have lots of other questions, but um, I'd honestly prefer finding my brother be the priority, I just don't have any idea how to do that on my own."

Ishmerai steeples her hands. "Well, the first thing is probably to ask the family's network to look out for a lilac-eyed guy who's not an Umber Demon."

Nod.

"... Would they react badly to a lilac-eyed non-Umber demon in some way?"

"It's unlikely. They do occur occasionally. There might be a minor scandal in the Umber community over who's bastard son he is, but he should be old enough to be unambiguously not a Lilim, and therefore not worth really bothering too much over."

Nod. "All right. Then - how do we do that?"

"Someone will have to talk to the parents. Shall I go do that now? That would probably be the fastest way."

"If you don't mind?"

"Not at all."

Ishmerai leaves, giving a brief glimpse of the hallway outside as she goes.

Yvette smiles a little, and then goes to shake the computer down for its secrets.