Private Finished History Assessment

Elementary school. The idea of it bothered Jude more than he'd ever admit out loud, but he was going to attend anyway. Learning was important. Understanding was important. He had huge, massive gaps in his understanding of world history. His own cursory investigations had confirmed only that everything from world war one and before was mostly the same, but everything else? Alright, that was different.

Jude had spent a fair bit of time mentally preparing himself for an elementary school classroom, and when he finally stepped in, shortly after normal classes wrapped up, Jude wasn't bothered by the classroom.

No, he was bothered by the... teacher? She looked like a student, to the point where that was absolutely Jude's initial assumption. They looked Charlotte's age, with only the grey of her skin giving any sort of hint that the girl at the front of the room was anything but an average fourteen year old human.

But that didn't necessarily mean that was his teacher, and Jude hesitated in the doorway, quickly scanning the classroom as if hoping a slightly more traditional teacher would pop out of the woodwork.

"Are you..." Jude said, pausing even though he certainly didn't need time to remember, "Are you Miss Willshire?"

He couldn't decide if he'd prefer a no or a yes.

Angelo. Angelo was his name, but Angelo felt a lot like wearing someone else's clothing. Angelo was Officer Genovese to everyone else, and calling himself Angelo was really confusing.

"Jude is probably better," he said, slipping into the room and grabbing a seat. Only, unfortunately, the desks were a little bit too small, so he ended up having to just sit on the desk instead.

"I did," Jude said. "But I got a bit, uh, lost. I think the big point of deviation was at.. uh, the Great War. Which was apparently the first of two, only my world didn't have, uh, two. We just had the one."

"It's all kind of weird," Jude said. "We didn't have the veil. Everything was out in the open, more or less, and we didn't have demons and all that."

That had been a pretty big difference. A really big difference.

"In our world, the Great War started in 1914 when--to super oversimplify--Franz Ferdinand of Austria got killed. And then there was a big war between the Central Powers and the Allied powers. Allied Powers sent in Flying Freedom, and the Central Powers collapsed in 1917, after the Russian government went down."

More or less.

"There's a lot of details to it, but those are the broad strokes."

Jude had a very different opinion on the veil than most people. His world hadn't had it, and things had turned out more or less better than things were in the wider world. Manta Carlos might have been a paradise, but its existence meant leaving a lot of people in the lurch.

Jude was a fast reader, and he'd already read a little bit. He had a very, very general idea of who Hitler was--some kind of bad guy from a World War that hadn't existed in his timeline--but he was a good student just the same, even if it was literally elementary school level stuff. He listened carefully, asked relevant questions, and kept his extremely skeptical squinting to a minimum.

"Okay so..." Jude said after a little bit. "What about supernaturals though? Like, the veil was just... why didn't people do stuff."

Jude considered the answer for a moment, and in that moment regretted all the knowledge and history lost to time. How much of human history would only ever be best guesses because no one had thought to write it down? How much was just gone? He supposed in theory, people might still know--immortals walked the island, gods and monsters--but that wasn't going to solve anything unless they actually shared that knowledge.

"That makes sense," Jude said. "If supernaturals predate the major deviation point around world war two, it's likely there are things in history that are different, but just in such a small or subtle way that it was lost in time. Like, if a vampire helped invent gas lighting, but let a human take the credit for it in this world, but in our world he came up with it a few months later on his own, would we even notice? Or..."

Jude paused. "I don't know. Something about convergent timelines. Things are really similar in places. Like, having two versions of the same person, one from each world."