Confirmation. I think that's a good thing. It sets a place for me to start from. Now nobody's going to turn me out of these rooms or take back the other things they've given me.It's funny; I seem less perturbed by this whole thing than Sophie or Jared. I suppose that's one advantage about having no clues about my past. I can accept that anything might be true. Royalty seems no more or less absurd to me than parents. I also don't have any reason to want to go back to Evara, at least not right now. I'd like to destroy the people and system that made me this way, but I don't know enough yet.
That's another weird thing. Everybody but me wants to go "home." I don't have a home, so Amber seems quite good enough from my point of view. It's certainly better than my cubicle or whatever quarters they'd give me when they called on me for service. I spent a lot of time hoping that all they'd ask of me was to draw trumps, and I could never be sure that that would be all.
Sophie seems far more approachable and comprehensible than any of the other newcomers. We have enough of a vocabulary in common to be able to talk, and she isn't quite as calculating as Fayne or Mythos. Sophie seems more like a normal person out of her depth than the others do, something that I suppose she and Jared have in common. I think I'll have to seek her out to talk more. She may not know this world, but she has ideas about how things can work that are beyond what I've been able to think up on my own. (In a way, that's an argument for bringing Russell here. It's a selfish one, but I do think he's got more knowledge of how things are put together, at least in a generic sense, than I do.)
Fayne's used to getting his own way and I suspect could be quite ruthless if he felt he had to be. Maybe I'm being unfair to him, but that's how he feels to me. He's been relatively generous in helping me without guarantee of return, but I think things will work better if there's a possibility of a return, that trump, for instance, or my father's assistance, I'll feel more comfortable. Mutual assistance is much firmer than pity.
I felt rather inadequate talking to Mariah. I kept feeling that there were things I ought to ask. If I only knew what they were... It's not Amber that I need to learn to fit in with, at least not as the first step. I need to learn how people treat each other when there aren't slaves. I understand the money concept intellectually. Having some real experience of the process would help, though, and I don't think that what Merlin showed me was the way it normally works in most places.
At least the trump is done now. I'll pass it to Russell so that he can call me if anything goes wrong. I want to be sure he has an escape route. I am going to have to talk to him when he's awake, though. I need him to understand that visiting may be a one way trip. He'll have to decide if it's worthwhile and think about all of the repercussions for his family. I'll also have to tell him about Anna. I suspect that I really messed up when I only took his trump. I should have taken all of them.
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