Amelia seemed like a rather informal way to address the other woman, but each to their own, Susan supposed. There was no way of telling what sort of manners a person had been raised to follow, not on such short acquaintance. Etiquette could be taught, ignored, and occasionally faked, but ingrained habits always rose to the fore eventually, and perhaps the informality was more comfortable for Mrs. Emerson.
“I see. Or rather, I do not see but I comprehend what you are attempting to explain even if I don't understand the situation as a whole.” She would. She needed to find more information first, however. “For myself, I went to sleep last night in my own bed, and awoke in a room I had never seen before this morning. There were clothes that looked like mine, but made of much lighter materials, I would assume to accommodate the warmer temperature here. And there was a basket of fruit with some of my books tucked inside. So the room was obviously meant for me. So I would think that others who do not know how they arrived in this place have had similar experiences. Which would suggest that our arrivals were expected, therefore they were planned, which leads me to conclude that we have been chosen, for some reason.”
Even as she laid out her logical thought progression, her brow furrowed in concentration and confusion. She did not recognized any of the places that Mrs. Emerson mentioned, and she was obviously not from some little corner of the world where they poked one another with sticks and ate rocks. She was well educated and well spoken, but Susan had no idea where England or Egypt were. And that was worrying, as she did teach her students geography. However, that was not what worried her the most.
Susan gave her new acquaintance a sidelong glance as they walked. “You have spoken to the locals, I take it, but you mentioned 'the management.' Have you met any of them? If so, have you noticed anything mildly out of sync about them? They seem to need to concentrate to perform mundane tasks like walking? They never seem to eat or drink? Or perhaps they have an obsessive compulsion about following rules?”
Management set off warning bells in Susan's mind. Little ones, like those played by those very annoying “bell choirs” near Hogswatch, not the gigantic bells of doom that were run to put an entire town on alert. Susan wasn't on alert, she was just going to pay a little more attention. Because there was the very small possibility that the “management” were actually the Auditors. They had tried before to get a better understanding of human nature in order to better squelch it. It would be like them to try it again in a more controlled environment.
“I really need to find my grandfather,” she muttered.