And yet, she does not die. Or at least, she continues to think and stand and see and generally engage in the processes which one traditionally associates with life and not death. 

A man stands before her, tall and grand and long-bearded, the sort of man who would be a shoe-in for any patriarch-god on the list (except, perhaps, in that he could not be Odin, as he has two eyes). 

"If the world really worked the way you thought it did, would you even be a person, I wonder? Or just a sack of meat imitating one." 

"See, that's the sort of question you're supposed to be able to answer, sky daddy.  The entire reason humans invent gods and spirits and souls.  Because really, does it matter if I'm a p-zombie?  It's definitionally impossible to tell without the ability to observe internal experience, which humans don't have!

"Of course, clearly I'm mostly-dead or hallucinating very vividly, so a truly material-reductionist frame is missing something, assuming you're real - but somehow I don't think my subconscious mind produces this flavor of pompous windbag.  Apparently I've amused a Q.  Joy."

"I would not say I am amused. Disappointed, perhaps. So much learning, and so much effort spend denying what's right in front of your face. I am that I am., and I do in fact have the ability to observe internal experience." 

"...Yeah, no, you are not He, unless Jesus wasn't real - and Yeshua ben Yosef was, by most estimations.  And you know I'm most definitely even less a Jew, doctrinally speaking, than I ever was a Catholic, so you certainly have some balls to claim that title like it means something to me qua groveling and repenting of hypothetical sins.  For one, you're not omnibenevolent.  I might give you credit on the omniscience, except you literally just admitted to wondering.  For three, if you're omnipotent and neither of those other things, I'm still standing here unsmote.  So what do you want?"

"I want your faith. My son, as you say, was quite effective at convincing you mortals of the true state of the world, for a while, but you've started to wander from the true path. So I have taken you aside here, in this space between life and death, to talk to you, and ask you what it would take to make you convert. You may believe or doubt my omniscience at your leisure; conversation is for the benefit of the mortal, not for the god." 

"My faith?  My faith in what?  My faith for what?"

"Your faith in me, the creator of the world, the most high, the lord of hosts. Perhaps it is the essence of my power, perhaps it is a game I play with myself to while away the eons. Suffice it to say, I want people like you to return to the fold." 

"...You are a shitty creator deity if you can't get your 'Beloved Children' to believe in you, and you don't even walk your damn talk.  Do your fucking job.  Honor your fucking Covenants, old and new; make miracles.  Maybe drop an angel in Times Square, for all I care.  That's how you get the children of Yisroel to believe - except you clearly messed even that up before you had a chance to start.  Really, buddy, you went and put a 'Do Not Touch' sign on your tree and expected curious monkeys to not touch it?  Your understanding of your own alleged creations is so flawed I could do better at raising them right than you ever did, given half a chance and the requisite tools!"

"There have been dozens of recognised miracles in the last year, even if you hold yourself to the church's exacting standard, and thousands more granted to the faithful throughout the world. Your eyes are blinkered shut; I could conjure all the world's wonders before you and you'd still think it was a trick. Your science is so committed to believing only in what your own hands make that anything which happens once only, never by your hubristic command, may as well have never happened to you." 

"And, what, providing an unmistakeable signal that God, Or External Intervention, Did This for science to find is somehow beyond you?  Sign your damn work."

"What exactly do you consider unmistakable? Is raising the dead not sufficient for you? Is turning wine to blood not sufficient? What powers must I grant to your reason before you will listen to the truth?" 

"Sirrah, if ever wine has turned to blood in my presence, I've not tasted any difference; if ever bread has turned to flesh, likewise.  Show me an actual revivified-from-the-rot corpse.  Maybe then."

"It seems to me, that what you want is drama, more than it is *evidence*. You said that I could not expect curious monkeys to not poke and pry; here I have one asking me to do all the work for them. If you were to live in a world with every wonder imaginable, every possible miracle on full display, would your rational mind submit? I suppose we shall have to find out."

"Remember, little curious monkey, that all good things come to those who keep the faith, in due time."

He gestures grandly and widely, at nothing in particular, and the world goes dark, her senses black out. Even her body fades and unravels.

"Hmph."  It is a profound irony, that someone holding themself out as a monotheistic omnipotent god understands nothing of the workings of their alleged creation.  He wants to show her wonders?  He can choke on them.

And then darkness takes her, be it death or sleep or a still-stranger state. 

Eventually, after god only knows how long, consciousness returns in a strange and blurry dreamlike way, the world strange and intolerable against senses, her body refusing to follow any orders. 

Grah.

...Of course he'd do this the most personally inconvenient way.  She's a child again, isn't she, someone's precious newborn babe.  ...she hopes that no-one was displaced over this...spat.

Well, she'll have to make the most of it.  Neuroplasticity is great for learning everything!

Indeed, she quickly learns of her parents and nurses, and as the first few years pass the nature of her situation as minor but significant nobility in some premodern town becomes clear. She learns what appear to be german and romanian from her nurses, and plans are made to teach her french, greek, arabic, russian, latin and english, when disaster strikes. At age three, when she is old enough to be reputed as a clever and uncanny child, but not old enough to do anything, her parents die, by means and for reasons noone will explain to her. 

"..."

She is legitimately grieving when she pleads to know...but she's hiding her desperate worry behind that, because she doesn't know what's happening and if she doesn't know what's happening she can't do anything about it.

Unfortunately, her nursemaids are definitely of the opinion that there is nothing she can do. So she learns nothing (except for the fact that the scars on her maids hands conceal wicked metal claws, revealed as they jump at shadows in her defence), until, three stressful weeks and a funeral later, she is taken to an execution.  

"...What is this, now?  Why are you taking me to this after I'm supposed to be incompetent to the point of not being allowed to know what happened to my --!"

She is having a bad time.  ...If she were less immature about her own present immaturity, she would lie and say she wasn't somewhat pitching a fit about having to go see a man's head be lopped off.  Or worse; someone killed a noble, after all.  That's heavily punished, for alleged deterrent effect.

(It doesn't actually deter anyone, the memories of a modern girl whisper in her brain.  Even if the concept of punishment dissuades someone in the abstract, its magnitude does not, in most cases.  Anyone who has decided to commit a murder most certainly doesn't care whether their head will be cleanly lopped off or they will be torn apart by horses.  They'd still be dead.)

Then she realizes something.

"-- No, I actually shall come to the execution.  Perhaps the situation will cause more evidence to be revealed to me than otherwise," she fires as a parting shot at whatever logic drives her minders' behavior.  They're clearly Sparkwork.  "You cannot both shelter me and make me see blood."

"All in due time" says the maid. She also gives her a hug, and strokes her hair. Because it has been a very trying time. 

The execution,  it seems, will be a hanging, it having been determined, the announcer says, that the prisoner's blood chemistry would make a tradditional burning dangerous to those present. Said announcer will also list the prisoner's crimes, which mainly consist of hiding explosives under a carriage as a political assassination. 

The prisoner goes to the gibbet ranting about unsound agricultural policy and how if only he was in charge, the fields would be overflowing with wheat and apples would be the size of pumpkins. 

And then, he is dead. 

...It really has been a trying time, and even also for those reasons the maids think.  That, she does not disagree with.

At the execution, though...

"Excuse me.  Before anything," her nose wrinkles, "irrevocable, is done," she hauls herself onto the stage, and addresses the condemned man, from a probable safe distance, armored parasol held ready with which to deflect an explosion.

"To speak plainly, you killed my parents, so a part of me, the part of me that deals with justice and appropriate retribution for ills done, most definitively desires to see you dead, or kept in a cell for the rest of your unnatural life.

"But if the agricultural policy is as unsound as you say it is, and that I cannot be as sure of as I could by testing the residue of a fertilizer bomb, I would have your research, for the part of me that knows I bear the burden of thousands of souls upon my back, small as it may be, knows that knowledge is power; the power to help, and to harm - and I wish, if I can accomplish naught else with my tenure, to help those who have been placed into my care.

"Consider it a mercy, if you'd like.  Your legacy need not only be your ignominious death after a very stupid assassination plot.

"Really, did you even consider what would happen in the wake," she adds, a chill in her voice, "of your callous scheme?

"I will have a decade and odd of a regent," the word is filled with bile, "'managing' my lands, if not actively mismanaging them, and you will have accomplished absolutely NOTHING YOU SET OUT TO DO!

"You had no plan with which to rebuild after your artificially induced disaster, no backing for a hypothetical coup that I can tell from simply the few minutes of knowing you even exist that you hadn't even thought of executing, no hope that the next ruler would even bother listening to you if you got away with it - really, if you did not even consider that sometimes talking to people works, if that is what drove you to violence, I am disappointed that you did not even think to ask -

"But truthfully, I'm finding myself surprisingly bereft of care for someone who bit the hand that could have fed them."

She turns away, and steps down from the stage.

What the absolute fuck did she just do?

"...Make it quick.  I may desire vengeance, but that is no reason to be sadistic about it."

Apparently her new voice has a surprising volume to it, even by the standards of the average three year old. Her dramatic strides away from stage are impaired somewhat by the recency with which she aquired thr faculty of walking.

Her head is also filled with six different plans, based on half-remembered chemistry, for bypassing whatever he had done to his blood, if only she had tools and a reference book and hands suited to manual dexterity. But he faces the noose long before such a thing is needed. Still, something lingers. A spark, you might say. 

Gentle hands will carry her away as she plans such, and her maids will express that they are very proud of her.

...That was exhausting.  Now that she is...awake...

Thank you, maids.  She is honored by your continued service.  ...Given that she has Broken Through, she would like to see her family's notes; she might be able to do something about those claw scars, if they wish something to be done.  (If nothing else, it would give them an additional element of surprise in battle, should their opponents never be able to know from whence the claws and blades might come...)

Her maids will tell her they are perfectly capable of doing thier own maintainence, and also that on no uncertain terms is she to go into either of her parents' workshops before she is old enough. 

That you are capable does not mean that it could be easier with help.  She values helping others.

...Somehow she believes that had her parents lived to see today, they might have considered allowing her supervised workshop access.  If there are specific dangers to worry about, she'd like to know; this is, unfortunately, her house now, as much as she wishes her parents were still around to keep it.

Speaking of which, she would like to begin construction on a laboratory of her own.  She's almost certain that the Spark in question was a lone actor, but there are indubitably conspiracies afoot to so many ends, for the mass noun of nobles is 'conspiracy' - when it's not peerage - and the mass noun of Sparks is 'chaos', and she will not meet either unprepared if she can remotely help it.

The first step is to ensure that she survives to meet them, the self-propagating pattern of her thoughts, hopes, and dreams, perhaps what one might call her utility function or even her soul; she believes that that alleged god wants her to come to him of 'her own free will', but even a cursory thought about the way Sparks catch others in their wake, let alone the malicious potential of Spark-powered mesmerism and memetics or the 'Madness Place' itself...

She would be a poor Spark indeed, to let herself succumb to someone else's reality distortion field, or, even worse, her own.

That, and there's simply too much she knows about WMDs.

Unfortunately, her parents are dead, and while the maids think what is within their workshops is well-contained, they nonetheless also don't think it will be good for her. So her father's renovated chapel (one of four on the manor grounds), and her mother's basement complex, will remain out of her reach for the moment. 

She will be allowed a small selection of tools and a space in which to work, while supervised, if she is good and dutiful at all of her studies - she might have broken through but that's no substitute for actual learning. Self-modification is also strictly forbidden, until she's more grown - both due to her current skill level and also because the ways you can break a young child's body are many and varied. 

Fortunately, tuning out the more passive memetic effects doesn't seem that hard - she has it down, in the form of a hastily modified pocket-watch's ticking, before she has to leave the town for her investiture and coronation, by the ash pope and the emperor of Germany. The madness place, on the other hand ... she'd sooner be able to remove her own capacity for love and compassion, than that strange mood's ability to take a hold of her. (The maids forbid attempting both).

Don't they know better than to forbid things?  It gives them too much allure.

Regardless...She is not attempting to cut off the influence; she merely wishes to quarantine it from her core processes and their goal prioritization algorithms; to give it only an outsider's vote, to make it have to argue its position, rather than let it puppet her frame.  To know where and how it is warping her thinking, and seek to compensate in the moment; to cushion her thoughts within a shock-absorbing cradle as she rafts down the river Dyne.  If she attempted to remove its voice altogether...that would likely reduce her to a mere devicier once more, rather than the Spark of Prometheus she finds herself to be.

Not that she'd let that stop her, mind you, for she is consuming her lessons at breakneck pace already...but she would prefer to continue to be able to bend reality by thinking at it hard enough.

(She hardly planned to begin doing invasive surgeries at her present age, anyway.  Only non-invasive self-hypnosis, which, with the advantage of her novel perspective, she can finally accomplish.)

...A coronation.  Her coronation.  She is going to have such a time.

Unfortunately, she is three feet tall and has four people employed full-time to look after her; doing forbidden things will remain logistically unsound for a little longer. 

Purely mental self-modification is just as forbidden as physical self-modification! It's not like it's not just as bad, if not worse, for you to fuck up your mind than your body doing careless self-modification. At least doctors can be trusted to fix the body (baring certain legal restrictions on life-extension in nobility). 

That's not how the madness place works - it's not an external influence! It is in fact just part of how her brain works now. It's not her being puppeted, it's just ... how she is, when in that state. That doesn't make it impossible to modify it, but doing do involves touching on her core processes in a way which is extremely non-trivial - her capacity for focus, her capacity for creativity, her capacity for rational thought, all of these are tied up in her hyperfocus. Some simple modifications might be *possible*, but they're on the level of "taking stimulants makes managing focus easier" rather than "siloing off distinct fundamental impulses and cognitive/personality traits into alters whose input and foregrounding can be made explicitly" - the latter would be time-consuming and risky at best, and is maybe entirely impossible. 

...Siloing things off into alters, you say?

Ohhh, that prompts a cackle, once it's thought.

She has that function, right out of the box.

Now, wherever did Ophelia get to...

Why, she's right here, of course!  Lurking.  Sinisterly~

As one does, when one is the maddening Spark of inspiration around which the world itself bends, leaning over her ~sister's shoulders to guide her hands and touch the world...

There we go.

Begin the treatise.

"On the Identification and Personification of Aspects of Self, and Practical Methods of Utilizing The Resulting Perspectives."

It's right there, and you've not anything better to do on the ride to the coronation anyway...

But, she really oughtn't get the maids pissed off at her yet.  She'll wait until she can write it in code.  Security is important.

Then perhaps she ought to start developing her ciphers, hm?  If she is to be the professional paranoid, forever worried about threats.

There are, after all, so many threats.  Waiting.  Lurking in the shadows...

She thinks her little sister ought to have a death ray.

No self-respecting Spark doesn't.

And a noble must see to her subjects' defenses against such threats...

...Fine, fine, she'll give you one death ray.  What does she think of an electrolaser?

...Passable.

For now.

Or apparently sometimes brains just do this by default. Who knew?

Her guardians, in their wisdom, will permit her to start work on a death-ray, but she doesn't have time to finish it (she doesn't even have *tools*, let alone the tools she needs to make with the tools) before she needs to leave. 

The ride from her home outside the city of Worms to the coronation is indeed a time of great boredom. Looking out the window of her carriage provides some entertainment; while it is mostly endless farms and the depths of the black forest, but there are wonders to be found - strange machines aiding the farmer's labour, ancient colossi standing moss-covered in the forest, strange monsters hiding in shadows, great banners advertising various local cuisines and attractions. Her maids will also regale her with stories of the Heterodyne Boys, those famous heroes and derring-doers, defeaters of evils throughout the world, the stuff of every child's dreams.

Eventually, they will arrive at the imperial capital, where there will be two ceremonies - one where the emperor acknowledges her as prince of her realm, and one where the ash pope will acknowledge her as it's rightful bishop. The powers of both titles will be held by suitable regents until she comes of age at 17 (or later, if she choses not to assume her title immediately in order to complete her expected studies). Between that and the various other goings-ons (she is, at least, not invited to parties), she will be here for at least two weeks. 

The imperial capital is a glory of electrical artifice - the streets are lit with arc-lamps, and in every home the power of electricity is used to provide heat and light without needing wood as a fuel. Well, in every well-off home; there are, unavoidably slums, though she can only derive their existence from the areas of the city she is not permitted to go near, which are many and various. 

A wonder, to be sure...but it could be better.

She knows.  She knows all too well what could be.

But she hasn't yet the power in her own right to make it so.

And a noble does not just start entire civic works projects in places that are not her own, she agrees.  (No matter how much her fingers itch to do so.)  Still...It would be appropriate to admire the wonders of the capital.

And, of course, take notes (and buy some parts)~

A small part of her pays attention to the Heterodyne Boys' tales, and wonders how real they are...

But the rest of her attention is consumed in the city's workings.

...And, she must admit, plotting to manipulate her eventual regent.

She's tired of waiting.  Years were long enough.