You've hit on one of my writing weaknesses: I have a ton of trouble writing people who are just plain not very bright or not very mature. I have a number of characters through whom I work on this weakness in (unpublished portions of) Elcenia, but I decided to let Key be as smart I'm inclined to write normally for someone of eir age - my top priority here was finishing the darn thing, since this is only the third short story I can actually claim to have completed and I consider that a bigger problem.