Life at the center wasn’t easy, but it was life. The only life she knew. Besides, the libraries allowed her to live beyond the rigid schedule and harsh controls. Through books she felt like she was already a citizen of Oldenburg. She almost felt as if she’d walked down it’s streets and seen its sights, lived it’s history. Deep down a part of her grasped that everything she read was carefully selected to paint the picture the center wanted portrayed, but her ravenous desire to understand things didn’t really care as long as she was learning something.
She excelled at her studies. Not that she was the perfect student. The trouble started around the time that her talents for understanding how devices worked kicked in. Discovering that she could take apart or disable any lock and circumvent the built in controls placed on many of the children, she facilitated quite a few violations of authorized area access, yet the punishment was less severe that it should have been partially due to her instructors being suitably impressed with her understanding of engineering. Her ability to grasp the world around her wasn't just limited to taking things apart. It seemed that her gift for looking at things as a sum of their parts aided her in understanding the basics of even the most complex systems. While she never displayed a quantifiable aptitude for magic, she could somehow garner enough of an idea to "make" magical devices work, even when that shouldn't have been possible.
As intellectual as she was, she still possessed a modicum of social skill and a decent amount of physical ability, learning diplomacy, the use of basic weaponry and even a skill for that most romantic of weapons, the rapier.
Yet she longed for the day when she would be put on a train, to find her place in the world. She wondered if those in charge truly understood the possible consequences of all the restraints enforced at the center being released all at once. It would be interesting to say the least.
