***

I, Felicia Schwarose, hold two things as points of pride. The first is my acting prowess, which I owe mostly to the second thing, so I’ll refrain from going into detail just yet. Suffice to say that there aren’t many people who can pull one over on folks every day like I do, and I’m only sixteen.

The second is that I’ve retained memories of my past life. I know that sounds crazy, but just wait. It gets crazier. The world I call home now is the world of an otome game I played in my past life. Several people in my current life, myself included, were characters in the game. What’s more, I was theprotagonist.

Now, some among you might be wondering what anotome game is in the first place; allow me to illuminate the matter. An otome game is a dating sim in which you, the player, direct a female protagonist through the game’s story and try to win the affection of several potential male love interests.

The name of this game—one of my old favorite pastimes—wasSavior of Nations: Lady Rose (orLady Rose, for short). Of course, when I was first reincarnated, I’d had no idea which game I’d been reborn into, much less that I was now its protagonist. After all,Lady Rose is the kind of game where you choose the protagonist’s name yourself. There isn’t even a default placeholder name that’s automatically prefilled for you to erase and overwrite with your own.

That being said, there were several things that struck me as strange about this world. It was weird enough that I’d been born into a foreign and incredibly wealthy family, but my surname, “Schwarose,” stood out as particularly unusual. My home country’s name was oddly familiar, but I wasn’t exactly a fan of the game for itsworld-building. Everyone around me had Western facial features and a wide variety of skin, hair, and eye colors...but they all spoke and wrote in Japanese.

Even the technology and fashions of my current world felt as if they were based on my old world’s recent history, but they were all just a little bitoff in a way that seemed intentional. For instance, France didn’t exist here, and yet French bread was still a thing. I found myself wondering if this world was connected in some way to my previous world and the life I lived