There's lots of people here who rub shoulders with royals and nobles and the scions of divine houses and the heirs of the wealthiest magnates.

And there is Prince Ceres. There he goes now. He is not wearing the school uniform but he is wearing something that looks like it had more layers on it when it was assembled for him this morning and has since lost them to carelessness. He is not actually bothering to wear any divinity symbols at all. Maybe he figures everyone will recognize him and know what he's about, or doesn't care if anyone does.

Ooooooooh.

Everyone knows what Prince Ceres's deal is. Everyone does not know what Prince Ceres's deal is like from the inside. Kareen wants to know. She consciously keeps her fingers from twitching with the greed of it. 

She's not going to approach him out of nowhere and ask him a lot of questions. It's...marginally less socially unacceptable with the weight of Inquiry heavy on your shoulders...but "marginally less socially unacceptable" is not the same thing as "likely to work." 

She will...find a way to end up in a totally normal social encounter with him. And then she will ask questions gently. 

Meanwhile she is in a SCHOOL and there is information to absorb like a sponge without any need for web-like tactics. 

Before she makes much more progress toward her first class of the day, Prince Ceres's affianced catches up with him, stomping slightly and carrying a princely jacket. "Hey!" she calls out.

"Oh hi El!"

"You left this," she says, flinging the jacket in his face.

"Oh. Thanks." He looks at it, decides not to put it on, and slings it over his shoulder instead, then leans over to peck his fiancée on the cheek.

She intercepts his face with the palm of her hand. "How do you even put one foot in front of the other, honestly. You've history, go learn something."

Ceres chuckles a little and disappears into the nearest school entrance.

Oh, man, what a classic anime tsundere. She doesn't remember the villainess being quite that endearing in her fake videogame memories. She remembers this specific scene, actually, it's weird, the villainess seemed so much more sincerely bitchy in videogame format. 

The villainess glances at the clocktower, catches a glimpse of Kareen and then abandons it, and trots into the school too.

Yeah Kareen also has to get to class. 

Her first class is History, which isn't her best because the subject matter isn't intrinsically fascinating like magic or something she has a leg up on like maths, but it does consist of information which can be inhaled, so she's not bad at it. 

She arrives well before the bell and neatly arranges her materials on her desk. 

The girl assigned the desk next to her has her pins on her shoulder: Courage Integrity Family Prudence. She looks at Kareen, appears to instantly memorize her face, and then resumes looking at her textbook, making small sharp notes in the margins.

It's so nice how literally none of those involve horrible suffering.

Kareen recognizes her, of course. Her backstory is sad, of course, and knowing things about how real life communist revolutions have gone she's kind of nervous about Zalor's home country's outcomes, but--probably the best thing to do is just avoid her attention. 

Unfortunately Kareen is an incorrigible show-off who raises her hand every time the teacher asks a question. 

Zalor isn't. She answers correctly when called upon with excellent protocol and only the very faintest foreign accent, but she doesn't tend to volunteer.

Kareen feels so awkward about Zalor. Like, ideally, she would try to befriend her! Subvert their projected enmity that way! Unfortunately her fake memories of playing this game do not actually give her a lot of levers with which to do that. There wasn't a route for it or anything. So instead she is feeling awkward and praying to her god that the awkwardness isn't coming off as a snub. It's really not the kind of thing Inquiry has any ability to affect but praying is a comforting mental action and in this life she has a god it isn't a terrible idea to pray to. 

Something about the way Kareen answered that question about the mass Nature conversion in the Coconut Peninsula did not sit right with Zalor.

OH COME ON.

You can't please everybody. You can't please everybody. Okay, maybe she could have been a little bit more serious about that particular topic instead of "ooh, information." But it is information!

There aren't a lot more chances in the class to favorably or unfavorably make an impression, for better or worse. The belltower sends down a tumbling clang and everyone gathers their school things.

Yaaaaaaay. 

Kareen really, really wishes the "game" had included more personal details on Zalor that she could use to ingratiate herself. Or that she didn't care about people's privacy, except that everyone knows about Inquiry, here, so if she "randomly" makes someone their perfect cuppa, they can ask her, "did you use your spooky eye powers on me," and if she had the information from the "game," then she could truthfully answer no. 

Sigh. 

Kareen has a foreign language class next, studying High Wisachian, and would you look at that she's just happened to test into the same level as the prince.

If Kareen had to read a document in High Wisachian, she could, trivially. But there's a difference between being able to operate a language because you have magic knowing things powers, and actually knowing it. 

She'll try to finagle a seat near the prince if he's seated somewhere she can do that without looking like she's trying to.

Conveniently the game designers worldbuilding team school faculty have placed her assigned seat right beside his! The game usually provided a view from the rear of the player character and whoever was seated to her left with the wall slate visible in between with filler content and/or Easter eggs, though of course now Wisachian is an entire natlang. Zalor sat on her left. Ceres sits on her left. He looks a little quizzical as a chart of conjugations gets written up on the board.

"Is something wrong?"

"I'm just not great at this stuff."

...Well, her recollection from the "game" is that he's an adorable himbo, so that's not shocking. 

She absolutely 0% can say that out loud. 

"Do you need some help? I used to tutor," small children, "other people, back at the temple."