I'll be damned, that actually seems to have worked!  Amazing. 
It's funny how these things just come to you, sometimes.  I wasn't even
really thinking about the Alastair problem, when suddenly it hit me: the
bastard always seems to be spying on people anyway, so why not have him do
it in an official capacity?  I guess he liked the idea, since he proposed
a truce between us after I gave him his new job.  Not that I trust him any
more than I did before, but, for the moment, we seem to have agreed that
we are working towards the same goals.  And Amber is better of than when
we were working against each other.  Especially since he should be able to
convince the other members of his cabal to follow his lead in this.  The
hard part was convincing Colin to lay off of him.  They have some
testosterone-driven feud going on, as near as I can tell, and it's been
getting out of hand.  Colin isn't happy about it, but he'll just have to
wait.  At least until Alastair decides our goals have diverged again, as
I'm sure he will, sooner or later.

	Poor Rasa.  It's kind of cute to watch her chasing after Gabriel. 
I wonder what she sees in him, anyway?  She's not exactly his type, nor
would I have thought that he was hers.  Still, I've seen stranger things. 
I wish her luck.  Maybe Gabriel would relax more if he had a good lay.

	I'm getting really sick of having to close these fucking holes in
Shadow.  It's so damn tiring.  I wish we'd managed to get the Chaos
artifact away from that bitch.  I think it might be as powerful as the
Jewel, in it's own right.  I wonder what would have happened if I'd used
the Jewel against it?  Well, it's pointless to speculate, seeing as how I
don't currently have the Jewel.

	Farad needs to do some serious study of how to win friends and
influence people, because he's going about it all wrong.  Now Alastair
wants to kill him.  I was tempted to tell him to take a number.  Instead I
told him to go for it, if he could pull it off.  I've often excused
Farad's actions in the past by telling myself that we need his power. 
Problem is, he almost never uses that power to help Amber anyway.  He's
just a loose canon, waiting to go off at any second, and I don't have the
luxury of trying to disarm him anymore.