The Touchstone Trilogy by Andrea K. Höst Page A

by city, but it sounds like they're mostly wind-blasted nature reserves.  They farm fish in ocean 'arrays', and red meat is an incredibly expensive delicacy.
    Today was spent mainly on interface training while Nenna was at school.  Well, it's not really interface training any more, just kiddie school.  Lessons designed for six year-olds are still hard for me for follow, and very dull.  At times I'm just tempted to watch the entertainment channels instead, but after stumbling into a show which I afterwards discovered was labelled "in-skin", I decided I needed more language skills before randomly sampling the entertainment here.  "In-skin" isn't a euphemism for porn, though I bet it's used for that.  It means that every sense that the interface is able to record is transmitted to the audience.  Sight, hearing, smell, and touch.  I never entirely lost track of me, sitting on a couch, but someone else's experience was layered over the top of that and I could only cope with a few minutes of that before I had to stop.  Then I 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