Ragweed Princess of the Livitium Imperial Kingdom - CH 14.1

Even as I tried to resist, the general store owner was a battle-hardened kid handler, what with her raising four unruly children herself. It shocked me to my core how easily she nullified all of my techniques and stripped me naked.

“HIIEEEEKKK!!”

“Oh dear, what lovely skin you have~ What product do you use? Oh, you don’t? Wow!”

She made me wear embroidered knickers.

“KYAAAAAHHH!!”

“Yup, good butt you have there. You’ll have an easy time giving birth.”

She forcibly put panniers on me to make the dress expand more.

“NNYYOOOOO?!!”

“Thank goodness, I still have my old panniers.”

She fitted a three-tiered flurry petticoat under my skirt.

“BYYUUUUU!!!”

“Wow, you have high hips. How enviable.”

She draped a sky-blue one-piece dress over my head.

And, as though she had been waiting for it, she put me in a dress decorated with snow-white laces and ribbons.

“HWEEEEEHHH!!??”

“Oh dear, there’s room on your waist. Well, I guess we’ll tighten the ribbon there.”

She took off the ribbon on my hair, applied some kind of perfumed oil, and combed my hair through.

“HOGEEEEHH!?!?!”

“Your hair is so smooth and tangle-free. Make sure to take care of it!”

And finally, she put on a thin layer of makeup on me.

“NDDOOOOH?!?!?!”

“I think you don’t need the makeup itself, but girls have manners, you see~ …That said, you sure have a wide variation of screams.”

And thus, three hours passed… Just, why would girls take so much time and effort just to get ready? I don’t understand. I had completely transformed into a different person altogether, and the one who stared back at me from the other side of the mirror had her face as pale as a ghost and her eyes just as dead.

“Cheer up! You’re ruining all the glow-up if you look that grim.”

“…well, my face has been dull since birth, so…”

“Well, I guess we do need to put on the veil then, as wasteful as it is. By the lord, covering your face with something like this is plain weird. Well, my own sons also liked to say nonsense like “ooh the darkness within me” or “the seal in my left hand is throbbing” when they were your age, so I guess it’s just a phase.”

Huh? Did my backstory just get the chuunibyou treatment…?

“Well, you’re all fixed. I’ll keep your clothes here, so go have your fill!” And finally, she handed me a see-through veil and a pair of boots decorated with flowers before she haphazardly threw me out from the back room.

“…W-, will this actually hide my face?” It’s pretty transparent, you know…

I put the veil as close to my face as possible, hoping that would obscure my face more, and sneaked back towards the store with a hunched back. In my mind, I saw myself as a certain covert operative soldier who fell to the allure of cardboard boxes to infiltrate enemy territory. Well, truthfully speaking, I too would love to hide in a cardboard box if cardboard boxes existed in this world.

After all, unlike my usual drab, this fluffy, frilly dress made me painfully aware of my gender. Syltianna’s basic thoughts were that of a girl, so I usually wasn’t very conscious of what I wore, but since my values as a boy were carried over and overwrote hers, I got really embarrassed as if I was crossdressing.

No… well… I guess I really was a girl, so perhaps calling it a crossdress wasn’t exactly correct, but, even then, I was the notorious Ragweed Princess of Livitium Imperial Kingdom. Me putting on a dress and going into public was practically a new dark history in the making.

“B-, but, then again, the store owner didn’t give me a bad impression back when she dressed me up, did she? By chance, have I perhaps graduated from being a ragweed…?”

Come to think of it, back then, Syltianna was nicknamed Ragweed because people liked to associate her with her mother Clara who was titled the Cattleya of Livitium Imperial Kingdom—so perhaps there was a mix of envy and misdirected fury for my titling (well, apparently I was 3 years old when she died, so even Syltianna didn’t have clear memories of her). So far fetched from her brilliant and graceful mother, a girl as ugly as used rags. That was why I was Ragweed, because I was a weed, so far from beautiful flowers… Huh?1

“—aren’t the premises already broken, then? I’m no longer the dolt I had been before since I got the smarts I brought from my previous life, and while I’m still chubby, I’m not so flabby like a wet rag that my own figure is hard to look at… So, there’s really no reason for me to be so harsh on myself?”

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Perhaps I should raise my self-esteem a bit. Well, it’s not like I’m so outstandingly beautiful that everyone I meet falls for me, but I’m not so ugly that people would throw their face away at my mere sight either. In fact, the store owner lady stayed in the same room as me for three hours straight, and she was just fine.

“Yup, let’s have some confidence after all. All my daily efforts paid off and now I’m as average looking as the next person, that’s all!”

With that in mind, I straightened my back and brazenly walked into the general store’s storefront where Eren and Vier should be.

“Eren—oh?” There was no one there. Seeing that Vier wasn’t here either… it didn’t seem like she was in the restroom. Are they tired of waiting and gone to play?

“Hmm…” Well, I could try locating them with mana detection, but… Yeah, it’s no good. There were too many people, it was hard to single out Eren and Vier with how many pings I received back.

Well, this is a pickle. As I stood there in the middle of the road, looking troubled, suddenly a boy’s startled voice “—Ah!!” came from the other side of the road. The voice turned out to belong to the boy who pulled my veil away the other day, this time with younger children in tow.

While indeed I had my face hidden, my veil was semi-transparent and my waist-length cherry blonde hair was down my back, so it seemed he could recognize me at a glance (well, he did unfortunately see my bare face the last time we met). Although, he was less recognizing and more frozen rigid like a frog meeting a snake.

(…I knew it, this veil really doesn’t do its job, does it?)

Not to mention, his overtly erratic reaction was enough to make me once again question if there really was a problem with my face.

On the other hand, the little kids the boy (forgot his name) was ferrying around didn’t seem to know me as the witch’s apprentice, their gazes were colored with curiosity and interest as they whispered to each other.

“Who’s that?” “A princess…?” “Wow, a princess~” “She a guest?” “Woow~”

I couldn’t hear them that well, but they didn’t give the same bad vibes as the last batch of kids who saw me. If anything, it was as if they just saw a rare animal. As I was starting to get uncomfortable, the boy’s brain finally rebooted, before he intently marched at me—face beet red as if he was furious.

“Oi, you!”

“Jill.”

“—Huh?”

“My name. It’s not ‘You’.”

“O-, oh. Jill… Jill, huh.”

“So, what do you want? Erm…”

“It’s Bruno.”

Bruno, for some reason, introduced himself heartily, half-proud, half-relieved.

“Ah, I am Ian!” “I’m Carter!” “Kenta here!” “Will!”

“I’m Charlie!”

“Oi you skanks, I’m talking here. Tone it down!”

When the little boys eagerly leaned forward and introduced themselves, Bruno held them back with his hand. That sight of them made a chuckle escape my mouth.

“Ah! She laughed!”

“Princess, you here for the festival?”

“Are you friends with Bruno?”

Their innocence washed away the ill feelings that had nestled in my heart. That being said, even though I dressed the same way as before, one-piece attire with a veil, I was a ‘Witch’ if I wore black but a ‘Princess’ if I wore white, huh? How very childlike.

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“Just shut up, you kids! Also, this guy…er, Jill is not a princess.”

“Eeh, she’s a princess!”

“Right!!”

“Aah, you’re all so noisy. Oi, Jill! Eren’s calling you to the field in the east.”

So he informed me crudely, but—obviously, I could only twist my neck in confusion.

“Where is that?”

“It’s uhh… Dangit, this stinks. Come!”

Bruno, scratching his mussed brown hair, walked away without waiting for my reply. I hesitated for a moment, but the kids surrounded me, so I followed his lead.

In the draft, I planned to have the general store lady, the silver-haired receptionist, and the flower goddess run into each other so that Jill would go “Wow, they’re all so pretty. I can never be like them. After all, I’m so…” but I scrapped that.

Author’s previous works. Ragweed Extended Universe? insert wojak here