"Imagine you're completely alone," he says softly. "If anyone you meet finds out anything true about who you are or where you came from, and gets to the authorities with it, you'll probably be killed. But you have to get money from somewhere, because nothing's free, and you're not sure if you can starve to death but you don't want to find out by trying it. You speak a dozen languages and you're familiar with thousands of years of cultural and political and military history from all over the planet, but nobody ever taught you how to get a job, cook, wash the dishes, do laundry, buy something from a store... you have to figure all that out by yourself, and hope nobody gets suspicious if you do it wrong. That's the world I grew up in. With crime rates hundreds of times what you're used to. 'I avoid situations where I might have to kill somebody' is the kind of thing you only say when you've never had to choose between the street where you'll probably get mugged and the street where you'll probably get arrested."
no subject
Date: 2013-05-29 10:01 pm (UTC)