"Forgive me, nishani. Another day," Talal said. "Are you well?"
"Fine. But I'm not going to training," Kiera answered. Talal gave one of her small bows and stayed where she was as Kiera walked away again.
The scene would repeat itself several days in a row, whenever one of the sisters tracked her down. They were quick to backtrack when they saw she was upset, but their persistence annoyed her. She could think of only one thing that would turn her into one of the cookie-cutter women of this world, and she refused to be brainwashed. Kiera liked her mind the way it was, liked roaming through the hallways and spending the mornings in training with the little boys out back.
It was toward the end of her first week in the sprawling mansion that was her new home that she wandered down a hall previously unexplored. She opened the only door in the dead-end hallway with a wave of her armband.
The conference room behind it was large and open, its ceiling cathedral and one wall twice the height of the others. Unlike the cheerful white walls of the house, the tall wall was the unwelcome shade of dark grey that she'd begun to despise after days in the spaceships surrounded by it. There were rows of grey chairs and several white benches in the rear, a handful of tables next to yawning windows, and a wall of what looked like constellation maps.
From the layout, she expected it was A'Ran's conference room for meeting with his advisors. She wandered through the room, trailing her fingers across the tables. A round table in the center had an access pad attached to the top, so she passed her armband over it.
To her surprise, what appeared to be a video game popped into 3D life in the center of the table. It reminded her of one of her favorite space empire-building games, Homeworld.The table top lit up with a blank grey screen and four dozen multi-hued buttons, with geometric symbols she assumed was writing. The video game showed two holograms at once, a space battle and a land battle.
Excited to see that even this world had video games, she sat in the chair behind the buttons and screen, studying all three in an attempt to figure out how the game worked. The tiny specs indicating crafts or personnel in the 3D image moved and changed; the image itself spun slowly, as if to present her with all sides of the battle at once.
Until that moment, she hadn't realized how much she missed passing away her nights playing her games! She sat and began playing with the buttons to see how they affected the holograms. As the afternoon wore on, she puzzled through what buttons controlled what, which were oriented toward the space battle and which toward the ground. The displays on the table ran through dozens of scenarios based on what she told it, most of them disastrous as she learned what the buttons did. The game consisted almost entirely of strategy, and it was dark outside before she realized how long she'd been at it.