In many respects this is promising for her sake, even if he doesn't seem to be as reassured by the structure of the situation.
Aya doesn't want to break things, but she does move them a little, exploring the contents of the room.
She finds, mercy of mercies, a fully equipped secretary's desk, with ink and pens and paper, and sets about drawing, as fast as she can while leaving the lines "legible" to her and plausibly part of a doodle to Hal if he wants to look at it later. The last thing she needs is to drop a privacy measure that has worked for her only to find out that her new owner will look at a pidgin of Ancient Sudre, modern Esevi, and idiosyncratic symbology and hit her until she translates her inner thoughts. So embroidered animal doodle it is, some unfortunate lizard that fell into a magic and came out with extra legs and horns and spines, patches of feathers with patterns hidden in their barbs and patches of fur with information encoded in the placement of hairs. She has the thing composed to give her a place to draw smaller thoughts in a few minutes, and the basic sketch of those thoughts embedded in the drawing a little later. She adds detail at smaller and smaller levels of granularity while she waits for his attention to swing back to her.
This place will be hard to get out of. She will keep an eye out, just in case, but there are worse trajectories for the next few years than having an opportunity to ingratiate herself with the heir to Viore, so she might not even try.
She's a birthday present for a seventeen-year-old boy. She may have made a mistake, but she might not have, and she might have wound up here regardless of her behavior at the market. So that's not worth dwelling on.
The seventeen-year-old boy in question comes with a vouch from Berete, who seems nice and has no obvious motivation to lie to Aya, but you never know with freeborns. (The old lady seemed like she meant it when she talked about manumission.) Aya tentatively trusts Berete, which means she shouldn't be too jumpy around Hal, though she suspects enough jumpiness to remind him who he's dealing with and what her situation is might not be amiss.
The room is nice enough. It has paper. If he's giving her a room with a secretary's desk she might continue to have access to it. That's just about the most important thing, after avoiding punishments, and she's pretty good at that - although that might only be because the old lady and her relatives were not, actually, sadists.
She draws self-soothing circles of thought into the scales of one of the lizard's tails. Wait and see, wait and see, wait and see.
no subject
In many respects this is promising for her sake, even if he doesn't seem to be as reassured by the structure of the situation.
Aya doesn't want to break things, but she does move them a little, exploring the contents of the room.
She finds, mercy of mercies, a fully equipped secretary's desk, with ink and pens and paper, and sets about drawing, as fast as she can while leaving the lines "legible" to her and plausibly part of a doodle to Hal if he wants to look at it later. The last thing she needs is to drop a privacy measure that has worked for her only to find out that her new owner will look at a pidgin of Ancient Sudre, modern Esevi, and idiosyncratic symbology and hit her until she translates her inner thoughts. So embroidered animal doodle it is, some unfortunate lizard that fell into a magic and came out with extra legs and horns and spines, patches of feathers with patterns hidden in their barbs and patches of fur with information encoded in the placement of hairs. She has the thing composed to give her a place to draw smaller thoughts in a few minutes, and the basic sketch of those thoughts embedded in the drawing a little later. She adds detail at smaller and smaller levels of granularity while she waits for his attention to swing back to her.
This place will be hard to get out of. She will keep an eye out, just in case, but there are worse trajectories for the next few years than having an opportunity to ingratiate herself with the heir to Viore, so she might not even try.
She's a birthday present for a seventeen-year-old boy. She may have made a mistake, but she might not have, and she might have wound up here regardless of her behavior at the market. So that's not worth dwelling on.
The seventeen-year-old boy in question comes with a vouch from Berete, who seems nice and has no obvious motivation to lie to Aya, but you never know with freeborns. (The old lady seemed like she meant it when she talked about manumission.) Aya tentatively trusts Berete, which means she shouldn't be too jumpy around Hal, though she suspects enough jumpiness to remind him who he's dealing with and what her situation is might not be amiss.
The room is nice enough. It has paper. If he's giving her a room with a secretary's desk she might continue to have access to it. That's just about the most important thing, after avoiding punishments, and she's pretty good at that - although that might only be because the old lady and her relatives were not, actually, sadists.
She draws self-soothing circles of thought into the scales of one of the lizard's tails. Wait and see, wait and see, wait and see.