So there I was.
Grounded.
At eight years old. In a castle. In a medieval fantasy world. With a smoking flintlock in my hand and a servant dangling from a ripped curtain somewhere behind me.
Genuinely not my fault.
Well. Mostly not my fault.
Okay it was completely my fault but hear me out.
I set the flintlock down on my desk — carefully, I'm not an animal — and looked around my room. Four walls, a canopy bed, a desk covered in blueprints that mother kept mistaking for "creative drawings" and father kept proudly showing to guests. A window overlooking the castle courtyard. And a door that was very much locked from the outside.
Classic.
I dropped onto my bed, stared at the ceiling and did what any reasonable person does when they've got nothing but time and a head full of thoughts.
I started from the beginning.
My name — my real name, the one that matters — was David Keller.
Born in Chicago. 1991. Grew up in a small house that always smelled like gun oil and black coffee because of one man — my grandfather, Raymond Keller. Retired Staff Sergeant, United States Army. Two tours in Vietnam, one in the Gulf. Hands like catcher's mitts and a voice like gravel in a tin can.
He was the one who put a disassembled M1911 in front of me when I was six and said "put it back together."
I did it in four minutes.
He didn't say anything for a long time. Just nodded once, slow, like something had been confirmed that he'd already suspected.
That was the beginning.
"Weapons," he told me once, sitting on the porch with his coffee, watching the sun go down, "aren't evil, Davey. They're just math. Force, velocity, material, design. The evil is always in the hand that holds it. You remember that."
I remembered that.
I remembered everything about him.
By twenty I was in MIT. Mechanical engineering, materials science, a minor in chemistry that my advisor called "concerningly focused." By twenty-six I had my own firm. Small, private, defense contracts. We didn't make the big stuff — no missiles, no jets. We made precise stuff. Mechanisms. Components. The kind of engineering that made the big stuff actually work.
I loved every second of it.
I also had no friends, no girlfriend, a refrigerator containing three energy drinks and some leftover Thai food, and the social life of a particularly antisocial monk.
Grandpa Raymond died when I was thirty-one. Heart attack. Went quietly in his sleep which was — honestly the most peaceful exit a man like him could have gotten. I was grateful for that even while I was falling apart.
After that it was just me and the work.
For five years, just me and the work.
And then one Tuesday afternoon, mid-prototype, coffee going cold on the desk, I felt this sharp, crushing pressure in my chest and thought — oh. Oh that's not good —
And then nothing.
And then —
crying?
Loud, inconvenient, completely undignified crying. From me apparently. Which was strange because I hadn't cried since grandpa's funeral and even then I'd kept it brief.
Except it wasn't me crying. It was a baby.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand I was the baby.
I stared at the ceiling of a room I didn't recognize, in a body roughly the size of a football, and ran a full internal diagnostic.
Okay, I thought, with the calm of a man who had clearly already used up all his panic. Okay. New situation. Assess.
New body. Check.
Different world — the ceiling architecture alone confirmed that, way too medieval for Chicago. Check.
Full memories intact. Check. Every blueprint, every formula, every lecture, every late night with grandpa in the garage — all of it, perfectly preserved, sitting in my head like a library nobody else could access.
Well, I thought. At least I kept the important stuff.
It took me about two years of being an infant — humiliating years, we don't talk about those — to fully understand my situation.
I was Nicholas Braveheart. Prince of Braveheart. Second born — wait, no, just the one for now, Lily wouldn't show up for another three years and immediately ruin my reputation as a lone wolf. Son of King George, who was the most genuinely decent man I'd ever met in two lifetimes, and Queen Elena, who I was fairly certain could end a war with a single look.
Small kingdom. Medieval fantasy setting. Magic existed but showed up about as reliably as a WiFi signal in a basement.
And we were under the thumb of something called the Varantum Empire, which, the first time I heard that name in court, made me think —
First level boss. Got it.
By age five I could read and write in this world's language fluently. Nobody found this alarming because I was very careful about how I showed it. Lesson one from a lifetime of being the smartest guy in the room — never let them see the ceiling.
By age six I was doing the math in my head. Iron deposits to the east. River trade route nobody was properly monetizing. A military that was — and I say this with love — absolutely embarrassingly equipped. I'd seen farmers with better tools than these soldiers.
We have bones, I remember thinking, looking out the window at our little kingdom like I was reviewing a Civilization starting position. Good bones. Just needs work.
By age seven I started getting restless.
And a restless David Keller — Nicholas Braveheart — whatever, a restless me is a dangerous thing.
So I started acquiring materials.
Nothing crazy. Some iron. Sulfur — which took some creative explaining to the market vendor. Charcoal. A metal tube I had Ren — more on him in a second — smuggle in from the blacksmith under the pretense of it being a "gift for father."
Ren had looked at the shopping list and then looked at me with the expression of a man twice his age.
"What is this for?" he'd asked.
"Science," I told him.
"That's not reassuring."
"It's not meant to be. Go."
He went. Because that's what Ren does. He sighs, he worries, and then he goes.
The flintlock took me three months.
Three months of working at night, hiding blueprints inside my math homework, bribing the kitchen staff with compliments about their cooking in exchange for their silence. Craftsmanship in this world was surprisingly decent — the blacksmith knew his metallurgy even if he'd never in his life imagined the application I had in mind.
When it was done I held it up in the candlelight and felt the exact same feeling I felt at six years old putting grandpa's M1911 back together.
Yes. That. Exactly that.
"Is that a weapon?" Ren had whispered from behind me.
"It's a flintlock pistol," I said. "Single shot, smoothbore, effective range about fifty meters in ideal conditions. It fires a lead ball using a controlled chemical reaction between—"
"Why."
"Because swords are inefficient."
"We're eight."
"Weapons don't care how old you are, Ren."
He sat down on the floor and put his face in his hands. I took that as acceptance.
Now here's where I need to be honest about this morning's incident.
I was testing the flintlock. Responsibly. Near the window, aimed at a target I'd set up in the courtyard below. Very professional. Very controlled.
Thomas the servant chose that exact moment to come in and change the curtains.
I want to be clear — I did not shoot Thomas.
I shot the ladder.
Well. The base of the ladder. Which made it wobble. Which made Thomas grab the curtain for balance. Which made the curtain rod come loose. Which made the curtain tear. Which made Thomas fall — slowly, almost gracefully, if I'm being honest — into a cart of decorative vases that had absolutely no business being there.
The sound was — look, if you've never heard seventeen ceramic vases and one curtain rod and one very surprised servant hit a marble floor simultaneously, I don't have the words.
Ren had looked at the carnage. Then at me. Then at the flintlock.
"You said probably not," he said.
"I said probably. I was sixty percent right."
Mother had appeared in the doorway approximately four seconds later. I don't know how she got there that fast. I choose not to investigate.
She looked at Thomas. At the vases. At the curtain. At me. At the flintlock.
The Blue Screen activated.
Total system silence.
Then — "Nicholas."
One word. My full name. The way she said it had the same energy as that scene in every movie where the calm mentor finally snaps and you realize oh no he was the most dangerous one all along.
"Room," she said. "Now."
I went.
So. That's how I ended up here. Ceiling. Grounded. Eight years old with a weapons blueprint under my pillow and a kingdom to build.
I folded my arms behind my head and smiled at the ceiling.
Outside I could hear the courtyard being cleaned up. Faintly, through the floor, I could hear father asking what happened in that very careful voice he used when he already knew the answer and was hoping someone would give him a version he could work with.
Lily would be toddling around somewhere looking for me, confused about why I wasn't at lunch.
Ren was probably sitting outside my door. Not because he was told to. Just because that's what he did.
I've got a locked room, full memories of thirty-six years of weapons engineering, a kingdom sitting on untapped resources, and a decaying empire that doesn't know I exist yet.
I reached under my pillow and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper.
Started sketching.
Phase one, I wrote at the top.
Then I paused, looked around my very comfortable, very locked royal bedroom, and added —
Step one: get ungrounded.