Evelyn stood by the mirror in a daze until Rosanna's excited voice snapped her out.
"Come on, Ver! Marvis is here. Let's get on with the second sheet."
"Ver..." Evelyn mumbled softly as she made her way to their music room.
On arriving, she noticed Rosanna seated beside Marvis, as the two peered into a large sheet of paper.
"What's that?" Evelyn asked curiously, and was met with Rosanna's excited explanation.
"Oh, it's that portable record player thingy you asked Marvis for! He's done with the sketch design."
Evelyn's eyes widened in shock.
"So fast?"
Marvis lightly blushed. He was a tanned man with deep grey eyes but extremely thin-skinned, turning red at the slightest compliment. Evelyn found him rather fun to tease.
"Your idea excited me, so I may have spent sleepless nights to capture it better," Marvis said while handing over the paper to Evelyn to review.
Only when the girl studied it with intense concentration did something dawn on him.
This child, Verity, truly was a bit too mature for her age—not in an intelligent-child kinda way, but in an adult-in-child form kind of way.
Not to mention her strange inventions and ideas. He had once suspected a malevolent case of shapeshifting and had secretly probed with magic tools that detected such fraud cases, but came up with nothing.
Possession was simply too absurd. He was no believer in such things, and no other magic he could think of could create such an effect.
Eventually, he gave up and accepted that the child was just that unique.
'I do find it odd that the Castellans are that unbothered by everything so far. Maybe they know something?'
If Evelyn could hear his thoughts, she would laugh at the hilarity of them.
The Castellans knew nothing. They simply did not care as long as Rosanna wasn't roped into anything troublesome.
But Evelyn didn't know Marvis' thoughts, and all her concentration was placed on the design, which she couldn't help but feel immensely pleased with.
Since she needed something portable, she randomly sketched a couple of ideas for Marvis, including the cassette-like body, which Marvis had chosen.
The record player, drawn and labelled with descriptions all over, had all the functions she suggested and even additional convenient ones she hadn't thought of.
It was cassette-shaped but completely different from a cassette.
Instead, it was a portable sound player because she truly found the orb player very inconvenient with its clunky nature.
The recorder had six crystal slots—three to the left and three to the right—arranged in three size types: small, medium, and large.
It had four switches: one a play/pause button, the second a rotary knob for volume adjustment, the third also a rotary knob for forward/backward motion; a clicking knob that allowed the playlist function, which Marvis preferred to call "sequential play," as "playlist" was too strange a word for him.
And lastly, the repeat function.
Evelyn studied it for a long while before nodding in acknowledgement.
"I especially like the battery function. Are the batteries going to be rechargeable or one-time use?"
"Rechargeable should be doable," Marvis pondered while overlooking the design, which had a large crystal-shaped space at its back for the crystal batteries.
"However, it can only hold up for so long before it eventually dies. Maybe about 8 to 10 charges... Hmm... I'll see what I can do."
Evelyn nodded, then grinned at Marvis. "You really are a genius. I was half-blabbing nonsense, and you managed to make such a masterpiece."
"Also, you will sell these blueprints and any other future improvements of them to Rosanna? Yes? Yes?"
Marvis rolled his eyes.
Had he not seen the young girl delicately wrap the blueprints of his other creation—which she named a "Vinyl Gramophone"—into a magically fortified box only accessible with hers and the young Rosanna's palm prints, he may have believed the request was really from Rosanna.
"Of course, but why are you so eager to hide it all away? Even having me sign a contract to avoid its distribution?"
He never wanted to, but this child, Verity, was truly too smart for her age, knowing how to rally the young Rosanna to have the Duke fulfill whatever she wanted.
"Oh, it's just..." Evelyn paused, then grinned, "Guess I'm possessive."
She smiled. "Rosa has since been waiting for us! See, she's pouting! Let's quickly start."
Rosanna pouted even harder.
"Took you guys long enough!"
No fair—they were having so much fun without her.
Marvis merely shook his head and left while Evelyn followed.
It wasn't that Evelyn wasn't into making money with such new inventions that would quite literally revolutionize this world's music industry.
It was that she wasn't into making money *for* the Castellans.
If her inventions really did experience huge profits, with how much the Castellans despised her, not even a penny would roll to her side.
Luckily, despite paying all expenses involved with this little project of theirs, the Duke never really oversaw it, seeing it as some kiddies' games his little girl really loved.
In addition to his rooted belief in what Verity was, he would sooner pledge eternal loyalty to the royals than actually believe anything smart could come out of such a dirty brat.
This worked perfectly for Evelyn, though she remained unsure of the future. If one day she was finally her own individual, free from the ownership of the Castellans, she would proceed with its creation and sales.
However, if she was unfortunate enough to be forever tied to them, she would rather it rot in her box than ever profit the Castellans.