AN: This is a silly little experiment. I'd call this a quasi-self insert story, because it uses a self-insert concept and character type, but the character itself is not at all a self-insert. Physically, her appearance is based off of the female Ritsuka Fujimaru from Fate/Grand Order, because...there's no reason, honestly, I just wanted to play with this concept. I've tried the 'self insert fanfic' concept a few times to see how they are but generally give up due to a lack of interest.

In this case though, I kind of like the idea of playing with butterflies here, and honestly Cardia's not the kind of MC that most otome games have that would allow for playing around as easily. She's just too central to the plot to mess around with too much.

Plus it's a gosh darn crime how few Code: Realize fanfics there are. Consider this fandom's punishment for it. An isekai AU pseudo-self insert character. More accurately, this character is a self insert for a reader, rather than the writer. Y'all welcome.

I have no pairings set down in stone, because I want to see what happens, but fair warning, it's theoretically possible that the protagonist may end up in a romance with someone. Cardia will also probably end up in one, because she pretty much always does no matter what.

No, it won't be with each other.

Code: Realize ~Tangled Web~

Chapter 1

All it took were two heartbeats.

The heartbeats felt unfairly spaced out, but she counted them all the same.

one

her foot slipped, her balance shifted and the armful of supplies she held scattered in the air as her arms pinwheeled in an attempt to grasp onto anything at all to keep from falling along with them.

two

Her fingers gripped on the very ledge she'd fallen from. Cement scraped her fingertips and for almost a moment she was sure she'd stopped herself from falling. There's no way the fingertips of one hand could hold up her entire weight even for a moment.

Falling felt like floating at first, as a hand swept through the air and just barely missed her.

Blue eyes widened above her as floating turned into just...falling.

Ah...

so then this is the way that I-

Something solid slammed into her, hard enough to knock her breath away. Not from behind, but from the side. She stumbled, nearly fell to her knees, and then did just that, hand clasping to her mouth to force down the sudden wrenching sensation that came from the impossible, jarring sensation of changing her balance.

"Ugh-! Out of the way!" An unfamiliar voice called out to her from above - but not the 'above' of a bridge she'd slipped off of. Like someone just standing above her, because she happened to be kneeling. On a street.

She blinked, gasped, shook her head quickly. Nothing made sense, though, not when she closed and opened her eyes. Not when she shook her head again. Not when she touched the ground with both open palms or stumbled to her feet.

It's not like she'd had some realistic dream or a terrible fantasy of some sort. She didn't just misjudge. No, because she's not standing anywhere she recognizes, nor even anywhere that makes any kind of sense. All around her looked like the set of some Oliver Twist movie. Around her people poured along the streets in an endless stream, parting only barely for the strange orange haired weirdo that stumbled around like a drunken fool. The streets and brick walls of the buildings in the area looked dingy, a kind of ground-in filth that came from ever refreshing soot settling on them, and the sky clouded with the steam and smoke of active factories that in no way adhered to usual environmental standards.

Complete with the horse drawn carriages busily trotting down the main street and the unnecessarily floofy dresses underneath ornate umbrellas on the passing women, her apparent afterlife looked exactly like Victorian England. Except for the cars.

So...not...Victorian England?

A shadow fell across the street from above, and she lifted her face to squint. That...

"Is that a zeppelin?"

If she knew one thing, it was that zeppelins were dead giveaways of parallel timelines and universes, basically without question. What she wasn't super sure about was the actual difference between a blimp and a zeppelin, other than that one was more metallic, maybe.

It looked like one, though. And considering she'd just been falling off of a bridge to her doom in a very rural area, and this was like some weird steampunk movie set...she was inclined to think somehow I died so hard I ended up in a parallel steampunk England-y place.

"I don't even like steampunk."

Someone bumped into the back of her shoulder, evidently not happy with just avoiding the strange person in the street. She stumbled a few steps, and to keep from just...falling over and ending up trampled in this place before she even figured out where she'd been isekai'd into, kept walking.

The steampunk guess seemed accurate as she walked onward. Pointless but gigantic gears peeked out of tight alleyways against the walls of buildings, and when a car blew past her the white puff of smoke that spit from the back of it lacked the usual smell of exhaust.

"Alright then...let's consider." She nods as she walks, mumbling to herself. She looked as strange and out of place as she possibly could already, short khakis revealing enough of her thighs to earn plenty of withering looks, and her...midriff cut shirt did her no favors either. She'd dressed to work in heat, not to take a walk in the Victorian era. Obviously her cash would do nothing for her, either, so getting appropriate clothes would have to wait. At this point, talking to herself couldn't make her look any more crazy than she did just walking around. "I definitely fell far enough to die. I could be hallucinating on the edge of death, but I don't like steampunk, so that'd be pretty weird. But if I've been conveniently isekai'd to another world, then...I probably have some kind of powers, right?"

Surreptitiously, she gestures in front of herself, just to see if a game menu would appear. Worth checking, right?

Nada.

There was also a noted lack of flashy powers and people flying around or something, so...if she had those kind of powers, she couldn't just try practicing them in the streets without causing a panic and probably dying again, right? Of course...sometimes those sorts of powers were only activated on death, so was there a point in looking? What were the rules? She didn't get the divine loading screen, so she was just...grasping at straws and looking for answers still.

At some point she'd drifted closer to the shops and buildings than the middle of the crowd, so she just...stepped out of it to avoid walking off...who knew where. She couldn't get any more lost than she already was, but she definitely could wander into trouble. The people spoke English, and not just that they spoke in a dialect she could grasp. Non-authentic ye olde England, then. Or something translated for her.

The best way to test that was to look for something to read. Looking up and around, she sought out something written down that...she'd be able to understand even if she could read. A noticeboard. Several yellowed and crumpled papers were tacked to a board outside of...whatever building she'd decided to stop in front of.

It took a moment or two of squinting, but the swirled letters on the papers swam into coherence once she stared at them. Which meant...translation. Definitely translation.

She would have dwelt on the meaning behind that longer, if not for the page that she'd decided to focus on.

Wanted:

"...No."

She shook her head quickly and looked around the area in confusion. Now...now this. Sure, she fell to her likely death and woke up in another world right out of some kind of isekai, but this...this strained credulity even then. She grabbed the nearest passerby, a scraggly looking woman, and gestured at the wanted poster. Or...well..okay, the whole board. "Is-is this stuff real?"

The woman recoiled, but her grip was firm enough to keep the scrawny woman from slipping away so easily. Thus, after a flash of consideration - likely a weighing of options - she nodded quickly, yanking at her arm. "Of course they are. The Queen would never put up an empty bounty."

With a bit more effort, the woman managed to wrench free, and those who witnessed the assault kept a wider berth from her as they passed. Well...what the hell else was she going to say, huh?

She shook her head quickly, ruffling fingers through fiery red hair, and approached the board. The paper felt heavy, more expensive than one would usually waste on a weird little prank - if even this kind of thing could possibly be a prank. "...This is insane. This is...insane."

Yet.

In her hands was definitely what looked like a wanted picture for a bespectacled scientist named 'Victor Frankenstein', a violent terrorist wanted by the crown for a terrible bombing incident. And she sure seemed to be standing in a steampunk Victorian England. A Steel London, if she would.

Her hand gripped her hair once more, and she let out an incredulous, almost mad laugh. Before she even realized it.

Half a turn to the left.

A full turn to the right.

People weren't looking at her expecting a reaction, if anything they were trying their best to pretend she didn't exist at all.

If she didn't calm down she'd hyperventilate and collapse, and she wasn't even laughing anymore.

This isn't

this can't be

She tugged at her hair and stumbled backward until she collided with the wall, watching the milling crowds. The lazy...not a zeppelin. A lazy flying airship up above. What she'd thought were some kind of mountainside in the distance was a wall.

Calm down.

Calm down

"Come...c-come on now..." She breathed, barely audible even to herself. "You just took a random isekai in stride, you checked for a mmo menu, but a visual novel? That's just too far?!" She forced herself to laugh again, but the cracks in her voice, the raw edge pushed just that close to collapse, was recognizable even to herself.

Her hands clenched, crumpling the poster. She closed her eyes and forced herself to draw a breath.

Face it.

If you're here, it's no more or less likely than any other weird isekai, right?

She still felt like she teetered on an edge she could fall off of just as easily as the one she'd fallen from a few minutes before, but...yes. She could do this. She straightened. Forced herself to uncrumple the poster and look down at it.

Yep. Victor Frankenstein. Looked different than in an anime, but...recognizably him in a way she had trouble discerning. Same wanted notice. Same reason. She knew this. She'd redone this part so many times due to the sheer incompetence of not knowing how to use a skip function that she'd never be able to forget.

She pushed off of the wall, and quickly re-merged with the crowd, walking as briskly as possible. She couldn't meld with it in her crazy getup, but the further she got away from where she had an outburst, the less likely any information a frazzled citizen gave the city guards would lead to her immediate arrest.

So let's think this through.

First. Victor was still wanted by the crown. No mention was made of rescinding protection orders, so this was the first time he was wanted. How 'early' was it, though? Dates weren't really given, and she wouldn't be privy to..

No, no. Victor got blamed for the train thing, too. None of the street hawkers she passed mentioned an attack, and the poster in her hands didn't have it, either. So it's before the train kidnapping. Alright. That's something. What else...? Before that was...

Ah, yes. The black market auction. No way she'd be able to figure out about that. Newspapers wouldn't report on the scuffle in that mafia festival place either. So there could be months to go until the train robbery, or days. Cardia (she's here, right?!) might still be in Wales. For the most part, it wasn't her business, but...

If this is really that world, and we're on that timeline... everything would work out, probably, but...there were like twenty different ways it could go - including the most likely way, if the 'official version' was any indication - that would result in mass destruction in Steel London. If she didn't know which path it was taking, she couldn't even be sure where to go to make sure she'd be safe. Isekai'ing into another world to avoid one death just so she could die even worse in the new one didn't sound good at all.

"Well...I could leave London..." but...what even was the world like out there? Apparently there were air pirates out there still, and that Avido mafia. Becoming a sex slave was also not on her bucket list of this new world.

Plus...if things really go wild...what if Queen Victoria does her plan? Then everywhere in this city will die, and all of Europe won't be safe.

"Or Isaac..." It's possible. Not probable, but...the possibility made her nervous.

Alright. So the safest place to be is the nearest to danger. If Cardia existed in the world and things were going to play out like she expected, then the most reliable place to be that wouldn't blow up or otherwise die was Saint Germain's mansion. It's also the only way she'd keep track of what path the world was going on, and know how to react - or in the absolute worst case, maybe make sure it didn't go off into 'Isaac wins'-land.

hoo.

None of that.

First problem: the game never made it very clear where that mansion was. She had a general idea she could point at in a map if she saw one. 'Greater London', the forested area where nobles lived. But...she suspected there was no getting to it just by happening across it. Unless one knew right where it was, anyway.

Second: she couldn't just waltz into the mansion by hopping a fence and hope to be welcomed in.

She'd die.

She'd just die. There's no question.

So I need to find it, and I need an excuse to get in there. Details about how to stay there...pending.

So the question was...how did she get invited in? Any one of the members of the mansion could invite her and it work out. But...realistically, the only one who would do that would be Cardia. And...finding Cardia...even with her knowledge, would just be luck.

Worse than that...tracking Cardia meant doing exactly the same thing Twilight was. Which increased the chances of someone like her, who stood out so badly, running into Twilight herself. It's not like she was of any interest to them, but someone else tracking Cardia would probably stand out. Finis wasn't an issue...but realistically, if Moriarty took even a passing curiosity in her, she was as good as dead.

So...no. That's a dead end, too.

"...I never realized how deadly this place was..." She sighed and shook her head. Really. Psychopathic mass murderers were everywhere in this place. Including the palace.

No...no...but. But!

She smacked her fist into her hand as she walked. "That's it." The answer. How to find the mansion, the most reliable person to work alongside to avoid dying, the best person to get information from - who didn't die in any timeline (almost!) - and who was the safest place away from Moriarty. Who else but Sherlock himself?

And fortunately, while she didn't have a map, she did have a location. "Yeah...yeah. Right." She nodded quickly to herself, picking up her pace. She'd need to get a map or convince someone to tell her where Bakerstreet was, but that was better than any hair-brained scheme of trying to track down Cardia and intersect with that hot mess.

So...simple. Find Sherlock- Herlock Sholmes - and get information from him. He could find the mansion easily enough to get some intel there, and he was reasonable enough she could probably trust him with a good chunk of information, too. If they worked together, she could all but assure she knew what part of the city to avoid...and make sure not to get any Nightmare Timelines, with a bit of guidance.

She just needed to hire him. Of course she didn't have any money...but she had better than that.

She had the exact location and fake identity of James Moriarty.

She...just...needed to...ask...

Her footsteps slowed to a stop. The crowd of people milling around her, spilling through the streets nonstop were...missing. The city felt deadly silent. No horses. No cars. No airship.

...oh.

She shivered, forcing down the useless urge to run.

How...did I forget about her?

Behind her, the soft squeaking of wheels broke the preternatural silence of the city. Her hands clenched just to keep them from shaking, and she turned toward the sound.

"That...was pretty quick."