The room is very quiet, and very opulent. The king-size bed is luxuriously soft, with a down duvet that's immensely snuggly. A basketball-sized plush toy of a white, ferret-like animal sits by her bedpost, smirking at her.

The curtains over the picture window in the western wall are closed, and there are no lights on, but she can see quite clearly despite the darkness.

... This is a really big bed.

...

She turns the plush toy to look at the wall, because creepy.

Also, holy crap. This is a really big bed. She - briefly wants to be opulent and take up as much space as possible just because she can.

But then she recalls that her brother's missing and how she just got forcibly kidnapped with weird magic shit and uses this to extract herself out of bed. This is a bit awkward. Apparently along with her sibling she lost her height. It makes her a bit clumsy, but she manages well enough. Out of bed she gets.

What's the rest of the room like?

Her quick survey of the room takes in the major furniture. A small table by the window, with a hand-sized block of silvery metal sitting atop it; a large desk against one wall, with another, larger block of metal atop it; a vanity, makeup products neatly organized on one side, jewellery stacked in boxes on the other. There's an inside door by the desk, and a set of closet doors by the vanity.

One whole wall is filled with books. Books and books and books. She can read the titles from here: some just seem like normal things she'd read, but then there are the ones like 'The Book of Thoth' and 'Applied Metaphysics.'

Well, clearly the first thing she should look at is that gorgeous wall of books. Does she own all of these? It looks like she does. She doesn't know what to do with this, but she has to repress the urge to dance because so many books look at them all.

She peers at them.

The organization scheme for them is by subject, and then after a brief perusal, from most well written to least well written. Subjects that are similar are grouped together, with books that have information on multiple subjects neatly between books that are more specific.

It is exactly how she would organize them if they were hers.

She turns on her heel, and checks the rest of the room.

The makeup: organized by type and flexibility. Whoever bought them probably put some thought into them, because repeats are carefully minimized and everything present definitely serves a purpose. From there it's organized by the body of the makeup and then what looks to be shade and when it doesn't hurt the overall organization things that would work well together are closer together and oh God this is exactly how she would organize this too.

It's the same with the jewelry. And the clothes.

She takes a minute to flop onto her bed and freak out.

And then she gets up and goes to tackle the books again. Are there books that look like - no, a diary isn't guaranteed, is it. Maybe a scheduling book with notes to herself - it wouldn't be with the other books, she'd want it easy to reach but not so easy that anyone that walked in could grab it so let's look in the drawer by the bed for it.

There is such a scheduling book.

It is very obviously in code. It looks like the kind of code she would come up with, if she had had fifteen years' practice and intensive training in cryptography.

...

Well, crap.

Are there books on cryptography?

There is a section on cryptography, right next to the section on how to influence people.

She peers at them, then frowns.

Okay, Yvette. Pretend you're paranoid enough to write in your not-quite-a-diary in code. What logic would you follow for the code itself? Most complicated possible, perhaps?

... No. No, that would be inefficient to write in, annoying, and not worth the trouble. But she bets she'd make it look like one of the ones that are more complicated, just to throw people off.

She picks books from the shelf with a mix of educated guesswork based on how she would organize this and actually reading the spines of the books. She notes the titles, narrows down the most likely to be used for this thing, and then puts them all back because there is no way in hell she's going to break this tonight. But she can note what will help to break it later.

Are there books on family lines? She thinks it would be bad to mess up family members' names.

There are!

... It's a bit of a large section. She'll have to thank herself for her filing habits.

Oh yes.

She briefly breaks down how she'd organize things if she had a large family, looks at the books present, and notes that the organization scheme present is much better than the one she thought of. Not that she's jealous. (She's totally jealous.)

Yvette picks out a book that should have her and her immediate family in it, and gets to reading. Who are her immediate family?

Apparently she's the second daughter of a minor Umber family. Of course, since they're Umber, they're still exceedingly rich. Apparently her father is Beleth, and her mother is Aosoth. Her older sister, Ishmerai, is listed as "Ex-Umber: Claimed the Gate." There are pictures - there's even a picture of her, with her new maroon hair and softer-looking face.

... She notes the picture of herself, and she can successfully recognize herself, so. Excellent job, self, your brother will be able to recognize you too.

Her new sister stands out from the others by hair color. Yvette - well, doesn't quite match, but the maroon doesn't look as weird against the typical purple hair as black hair does. Does that have something to do with 'Claimed the Gate'? ... Does she have the tome?

Yvette goes to look up terminology for claiming the gate and becoming ex-Umber.

The entry next to Ishmerai's smiling face says that she received the Tome of the Gateway on her thirteenth birthday, which was... two hundred and seventy-one years ago.

Cross-referencing with one of her magic books, it appears that claiming the tome's power requires one to give up the innate benefits and markings of their demonic blood. Those who have made the Gate pact become an entirely different kind of Lilim.

Oh.

Thanks, shadows, for mentioning that. Ugh.

Well, it's not a huge loss, she didn't really want to be able to turn into her true form anyway. And teleportation combined with her ethereal - thing? Yeah, no, she regrets nothing.

Also holy crap her sister is almost three centuries old! Aaa!

(It's interesting how quickly she's accepted this girl - woman, she corrects, even if she looks ten - as her sister.)

Right. Is there anything else that looks immediately useful, here?

Well, it does seem a bit odd that she has most of her desk space dedicated to an inert lump of sheet metal.

... Yes, quite.

She goes to investigate.

Upon closer inspection, the metal plate is intricately etched with thin, spiderwebbing lines. The front half is mostly taken up by five lines of thumb-size circles.

...

What happens if she presses a circle?

The entire grid of lines lights up at once, producing a faint humming noise: then little white characters flicker into view inside all the circles. A moment later, a three-dimensional image of a tree pops up from the metal, in crisp, lifelike resolution. An apple dangles from one branch of the tree: a small prompt to its right reads "Login."

Um.

This looks like a computer.

And it would be incredibly useful if she knew her login information at all. Or how to use it.

Operation: mess with the buttons! Let's see what they do.

As soon as she touches the buttons, it becomes quite clear that this is some form of touch-sensitive keyboard. The prompt now reads "Login: Xxxhahagsdgwgrhdnsbahdjekbvukbeuibcweihb."

Operation: find the backspace key!

She erases the line and attempts to turn off the computer. She doesn't have the login information, and it's not the sort of thing she can easily guess from knowing how she would work.

What else is in here for her to investigate?

Well, if this brick here is a computer, maybe the smaller one on the table by the window is as well?

Maybe! Let's look. Might be the weird magic world equivalent of a tablet. Wouldn't that be novel.

As soon as she touches it, it generates a new image of... Something. It looks like a half-assembled tree and a bunch of smoky bits. Examining it for buttons, it only seems to have two.