Touchstone 1 - Stray

went and had a shower.
    I keep telling myself that I need to be more responsible about my schoolwork, and then five minutes of basic maths leaves me gritting my teeth with anger. I. Just. Finished. High. School. I know addition. I’m hoping to convince someone to tailor this stupid course to me sooner rather than later.
    It’s clear that the Lents are giving me some settling-in time before starting to push, but soon Sa Lents will want to work on his study of Earth, and of course I can’t live with the Lents forever. From what little my ineffectual interface searches have shown me, strays don’t have a lot of career options open to them even after they’ve learned the language. And I can’t figure out how long the Taren government will pay for me to try.
    Nenna’s thinking about careers right now too: she has to do some aptitude tests tomorrow, and is pretending not to be worried about it. She says she’s going to be a song star, and doesn’t need to excel at this aptitude chain. Song stars are almost as popular as the Setari are, and Nenna’s favourite show in the world is one where this girl is a song star and a Setari. Lots of cute guys, as you can imagine.
    There are practically no images of real Setari. The blacksuits don’t do publicity, apparently. They’re taken to the KOTIS island when they’re really little, and are raised to be paranormal soldiers, with limited visits to see their families. I couldn’t work out if they can choose not to go.
    Saturday, January 5
    Fall apart
    Just got my diary back. A lot of not-great stuff happened, and I won’t be staying with the Lents any more.
    Nenna did well on her test, and the next day she was allowed to take me out on her own to celebrate. Of course she decided to show me off to her friends.
    We went to a place which was a cross between a café and one of those video game arcades where people have Dance Dance Revolution competitions, except this was a psychic powers show-off arena. There was a table of girls waiting, and a couple of guys, and it wasn’t fun being exotic curiosity of the month. It’s not that they weren’t nice, or sneered at me or anything. They got a big kick of listening to me talk in English and even though my attempts to speak Taren are insanely confusing, they hung on my every word as I told them my ‘survival’ adventures: they were just as interested in what I’d done on Muina as what Earth is like, which is something the KOTIS people didn’t really care about. Being outside, finding your own food, sleeping under the stars: that’s all incredibly foreign and scary to Tarens.
    They also wanted to know everything about the Setari I’d met. The Setari have some kind of security level which means that you can’t film them (using the interface – I expect an ordinary camera would work on them). They show up as outlines on interface recordings unless you have permission to capture their image.
    My mobile was a useful way to avoid having to keep talking, though it’s running low on batteries again. Nenna’s friends recorded all the song ring tones, and made me promise to translate the lyrics, which I guess would be a good language exercise. They seemed to like the two Gwen Stefani songs, and Mr Brightside . Sweet Dreams by Marilyn Manson weirded them out, but the one they liked best was that closing theme to the Portal game – Still Alive – and so I guess they have a thing about syrupy-sweet sounding music. That it’s a psychotic, murderous computer totally contradicting itself is not something that’s going to translate.
    After a while the two guys had a match on the Psychic Showdown thing and that’s where it stopped just being embarrassing and got messed up.
    By this time, thanks to Nenna’s patient and devoted explanations of all things Setari, I knew a bit more about psychic powers. Everyone has a connection to the Ena, which seems to be some kind of psychic dimension (or world of dreams, or something). The connection manifests as telekinesis or pyrokinesis, etcetera: there’s a couple of dozen known psychic talents. The original Muinans were really strong in their connection to the Ena, more so than most of the people on Tare are now. Tairo players are strong, but the most powerful psychics are in the Setari, where gifted children are pushed to extremes to increase their abilities.
    However, with the interface and ‘circuitry’ in certain rooms, even weak psychics can be boosted to use whatever talents they