After the family dinner, Augustus excused himself, saying he needed to turn in early, and returned to his room.
The Mengsk Family's estate villa, built on a cliffside, contained hundreds of lavishly decorated rooms. Mahogany-floored corridors and staircases covered in expensive carpets connected the halls and floors, all maintained daily by more male servants, maids, and gardeners than there were rooms.
Following the memories he had recalled, Augustus made his way through corridors lined with gold-framed portraits of Mengsk ancestors. He climbed a cherrywood staircase to the floor with the bedrooms and paper library, then stopped in front of a room whose door bore a brass plaque engraved with the letters "Au" and fixed in place with gold rivets.
Below the plaque was a Terran Confederacy Marine Corps recruitment poster. The background showed the crater-pocked surface of a moon, with the pitch-black void of space above. Several strikingly handsome and beautiful Confederacy officers stood together on a high dune, wearing formulaic, radiant smiles as they each reached out to grasp a flag waving in the wind.
What a fake, laughable stunt. Even a composite image would be ten thousand times more convincing than this.
--That was the original Augustus's opinion of the poster. Even so, he had put it up by his door, solely to prove to his father how determined he was to enlist.
Right beside Augustus's room were the bedrooms of Arcturus and Dorothy. The former's door bore only an identical brass plaque, engraved with the letters "AR," while the latter had painted an abstract purple pony on hers. None of the doors had handles or keyholes. In the place where a handle should have been was a square recess, about two inches wide and one inch deep.
Standing at the door, Augustus thought for a moment. Then he slipped his right index finger into the recess. The plaque with the engraved letters immediately flipped over, and a small, circular camera emerged from the door, projecting a holographic screen with a glowing blue background in front of him.
The screen flashed the following words: Facial recognition complete. Fingerprint recognition complete. Iris recognition complete. Genetic identification complete. Record uploaded. Genetic database refreshes in twenty-four hours. Unlocking. Date: March 25, 2488. Time: 22:37.
This was the world of StarCraft, a future world in the twenty-fifth century. A modern person who came here might have no advantages at all.
Augustus pushed open the automatically unlocked door and entered the bedroom. He switched on the ceiling light, and soft white light shone through the openwork ceiling carved with white patterns, immediately illuminating the entire room. The bedroom wasn't particularly luxurious. Opposite the door, a window with a bronze frame and lattice panes offered a view of the holiday villa's vast grounds. Beyond the glass, the garden and flowerbeds were lush and green beneath the lights.
The evergreens thrived in every season, filling the air with the fragrance of flowers. Narrow paths of broken stone cut through the verdant grounds, leading to the buildings where the servants and guards lived. Beyond the hedges, wider, straighter asphalt roads led to the landing pad, where cold-gray shuttles were parked, and the underground garage, filled with all sorts of hover cars and armored vehicles.
The other two walls each held a single bed and a bookcase filled with books. Several firearms hung beside the bookcase, including a decorative muzzle-loading gun, semi-automatic weapons from the Colonial Era, and the latest electromagnetic rifles.
The original Augustus had loved guns. He didn't just collect them; he could also use them with skill. That was one of the reasons Augustus wanted to join the military. If his older brother Arcturus wanted to become an explorer, Augustus dreamed of becoming a general who roamed the galaxy.
Augustus lay on the bed and began to think about everything that lay ahead.
"Augustus Mengsk" didn't exist in the original story. Angus's family had only one son and one daughter, not a second son. Rather than saying he had replaced Augustus, it was more accurate to say this character existed because of his transmigration.
At least his aristocratic status could give Augustus some advantages. And in StarCraft's brutal world, transmigrating at this point in time and with this identity wasn't the worst outcome.
Since Arcturus, the eldest son of the Mengsk Family, had joined the Federal Marine Corps and hadn't returned to Korhal in over eight years, Augustus's parents had plenty of disagreements about how to educate the only son still at home.
Angus didn't want both his sons to enlist, so Augustus had ultimately been unable to finish his studies at Stirling Military Academy and had to transfer to a university funded by the family. After secretly enlisting without his parents' knowledge, he would have to start out as a recruit.
The Terran Confederacy used a volunteer system and didn't forcibly conscript people from every stratum of society. But once someone signed up and passed a series of enlistment tests, refusing to serve was considered desertion. With enlistment numbers declining, this regulation had only been added to Confederacy law in the past two years.
The good news was that it was now 2488. First contact between humanity and the other two alien races in the StarCraft universe, the Protoss and the Zerg, was still more than a decade away. For now, Augustus wouldn't run into any unimaginable monsters.
Unless the butterfly effect caused by the Transmigrator brought humanity's first contact with the alien races forward, Augustus wouldn't encounter the Zerg or the Protoss before completing his service contract and being discharged. Besides, his older brother Arcturus was currently a colonel in the Confederacy military. In an email he had sent last week, he'd said Augustus would be transferred to his unit after recruit training.
Augustus sighed, rose, and walked over to a full-length mirror, seeing his post-transmigration appearance for the first time.
The mirror reflected Augustus's handsome face, one of the signs of his descent from the noblest and most ancient Terran bloodlines.
Like all the men in the Mengsk Family, Augustus was very handsome. He had high cheekbones, a nose with an almost hawkish profile, a pair of bright, sharp, cold-gray eyes, and a head of thick, dark-gray hair, neatly trimmed and combed.
Average. Ordinary. Not bad.
"Mengsk." Augustus murmured the ancient, noble surname. In the factories, satellite cities, and towns the Mengsk Family had built on Korhal, they were practically royalty.
But Augustus remembered all too clearly that, in the game's backstory, his father Angus had plotted a rebellion to lead Korhal in overthrowing the Terran Confederacy. Later, everyone in the Mengsk Family except the eldest son, Arcturus, would be assassinated by three Terran Confederacy Ghost operatives.
As for exactly when it would happen, Augustus didn't know.
Would he be able to prevent that tragedy when the time came?
Of course, as a Transmigrator, Augustus also had every reason to stay out of it and keep well away.
"Knock, knock--"
Just then, Augustus heard the doorbell ring. The information processor beside the door showed that the visitor was his younger sister, Dorothy. After hesitating for a moment, Augustus went over and unlocked the door with his fingerprint.
A girl with a silver-gray ponytail stepped inside. She wore a pale-purple house dress, and her bright, cold-gray eyes fluttered. Her expression was so helpless that the sadness in her eyes seized Augustus's heart in an instant.
In that moment, memories flashed through Augustus's mind like an electric current. Unlike the eldest child, Arcturus, who was already twenty-eight, he wasn't much older than his sister. Augustus and Dorothy had shared a happy childhood. He had watched her grow from a little girl who dragged a pony plushie around to a graceful young woman.
"Augustus..." Dorothy lowered her head as she walked toward him, then suddenly rammed her forehead into his stomach.
"They said you might die."
"I promise you, I won't die," Augustus said.
"From now on, you have to write me a letter every week." Dorothy looked up. A misty sheen clouded her beautiful, cold-gray eyes.
Augustus couldn't find any reason to refuse his sister.
"All right."
He said.
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