You're just nice.

Because I have been meaning to do this for awhile, and it came up in some threads.

Manners
Helen is a very polite girl. However, her definition of polite tends to deviate highly from that of people not from her world.

Basic rules
1. You do not imply you have authority over those you do not
2. To your superiors (or to be formal), show that you have no means of causing harm.
3. In general you have to realize Helen is from a world that is very dangerous, and from a society that is very focused on learning. This influences a lot of the manners.

Superiority
1. Primarily based on age
2. Also on position: a young full-fisted Hand is superior to an old warrior; however, acolytes are subordinate to all but those who provide basic services (cleaning, etc.). There is very little difference in hierarchy between acolytes, though some put on airs.
3. Helen is generally treated as a hybrid between an acolyte and a Hand. She is not offended when treated as an acolyte because technically that is what she is, however many Hands treat her with more respect because she is the Haras-uquara.

Examples
1. Helen can walk very quietly, however in a group setting or when approaching a superior she does not. When approaching other acolytes she usually does. She also tries to be within their line of sight: it is very rude to sneak up on someone. Backstabbing is a fairly common practice outside of the House.
2. Helen will (unless she finally succumbs to the customs of a place) never invite you to sit at her table. If you are her age and have not she might question why you are not sitting, but she will never imply she has the authority over if you stand or sit. She will be mostly unoffended if people invite her to: they are older than her, and from different worlds, so she can excuse some impoliteness.
3. In greeting someone Helen tucks her hands below her elbows, so that she has in theory no access to a weapon. As a magic user she technically does, but her offensive magic really sucks right now.
4. Helen will ask you extensive questions, without preamble. She is naturally intently curious, and has been raised in an environment where her questions were answered precisely by experts in the field or she was directed to the library. Also, to gain and spread knowledge are considered holy acts, and she is a priestess.
5. She is unlikely to say thank you unless she thinks you have given her an outstanding piece of information, and are quite a bit older than her. If she thinks you are about her age, it is almost impossible. It implies she needed your help, and to admit weakness is pretty damning.

More to be added!

Religion

With a tug, the room full of Them snaps away, and Helen is left short of breath in darkness, back to a cold wall.

She puts out a hand, and breathes, straightening. She’s alone.

It takes her another moment to realize where she’s alone; to realize that she’s in one of the back hallways of the House, to realize she’s Home.

Helen chokes back emotion, and stiffens her shoulders. She parts her hair, stiffly, and walks along the hall.

Everything is sparsely lit, and from the lack of sound, empty. It must be night. Helen stops when the hallway splits, one side veering sharply left and the other gradually turning right.

Helen knows where she is. If she turns right, she will be heading upwards, she will find the eating hall and the rooms of the most senior Hands. If she turns left, she could find her rooms. She could pack her protective clothing and her knives, the things she had to leave behind when she was exiled. She could leave; she could gain honor by not showing her face until she’s made Them pay.

Helen hesitates. She turns right.

--

The most senior Hand was very tired; but when he saw who it was he spluttered for a good minute before bidding her to sit.

He was even more scared of her than before, Helen thought, but he filled her in on the doings of her world while preparing coffee for them. It was not as early as she thought it was, only an hour before the servants usually woke.

Helen drank her coffee, and said very little during that meeting. She was thinking.

--
Helen decides she will eat breakfast with the rest of the Hands. She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t.

She stiffens her jaw, and straightens her shoulders. Her hair is still firmly behind her ears. When she walks in, the already quiet room goes silent.

"Haras-uquara," says Hand Raqen after a moment, standing and rushing forward, stopping short of her. "You’re safe, thank Uquar."

Helen stiffens for a moment, almost taking a step back, and then relaxes. The rest of the Hands come forward to greet her, quiet but genuinely glad, and a small part of her is warmly pleased.

--

Helen has the burnished key from the librarian; Pani often wakes up before everyone and grabs food from the kitchen, going to the archives before anyone in their right minds. She walks through the stone archway, and carefully unlocks the sturdy metal door. She turns to relock it behind her.

She walks down the turning staircase, and at the bottom lays a hand against another doorway, speaking a quiet word to it and unlocking it; relocking it and speaking another word to it. It has the ease of long practice, the door opens to her like it’s heard her voice hundreds of times.

She reaches the drop door and calls "Is there a Hand below?" through the small barred window.

"Give me a moment!" comes the frantic reply, "Just a second, just a second; sorry, I was just—hmm," the voice breaks off into muttering, and Helen hears the crank spin easily.

As the drop door lifts, Helen ducks through and climbs down the ladder.

"Haras-uquara!" Pani exclaims, and Helen turns to see him leaning on a crutch, blinking at her through his glasses. "I—hello," he tells her, after a moment, smiling in a way that might be called slightly dazed.

"Hello," Helen says, suddenly uncomfortable. "You may call me Helen, if you wish."

There’s a pause, and he nods to her. "Helen, then; would you like some coffee?" He’s swinging himself back over to his chair.

After a moment, Helen follows him, surprised to find herself almost smiling.

(Later, she goes into the deep archives, and finds a door, just in case.

It doesn’t open.)

Where, one might ask, has Helen (once) of the House of Uquar been?

That’s a stupid question. Where would any scholar-cum-priestess, tasked with saving the world and getting Home go? The library, of course.

She is sitting at a desk towards the back, near a window. She has a notebook full of writing in a flowing alphabet set to one side, three stacks of books in front, hiding her, and another notebook about a quarter full. Her left hand is getting stained with ink, as she pages through the books with her right.

She’s been in the library for weeks, leaving for a few hours during the night—at the waitrats’ insistence—to sleep and eat and take care of herself. (It has not all been studying. She has done her daily stretches and meditations. But those do not take long.)

Helen is learning--that's the best weapon she has here, now.

When Helen wakes up she feels the faint tug in her stomach saying that they're going today. It's only faint, but she sits up and grabs Jamie by the shoulder, shaking him awake.

Helen has been sitting in the room she and Jamie have been living in, collecting bugs from the straw-stuffed mattress (she's not particularly impressed by their level of technology, but it does make a good habitat).

Jamie left, awhile ago, to--well, it's not like she cares, is it? Something about supplies, and self-important looks, and she ignored him as best she could.

She can't wait for the tug again, when she can get away from this ridiculous mess. Jamie seems to have a particular talent of making her feel stupid and frustrated.

Helen would not admit it, but she has spent most of the night—except for a few fitful hours of sleep—in the dark of her room, staring through her hair at the ceiling, at her books and at her few possessions. Mostly they are gifts the Hands and the workers of the House gave her on Holy Days as she grew up. Very few are outside of the small chest she has locked in the corner — it is mostly full of children’s toys, and a few other things of which she has no need.

She considers, briefly, going out into the desert in the night—the last time she’ll be able to absorb it, to see it. But she will see enough of it in the morning, and many dinosaurs prefer the night to the day. She stays inside.

Helen drifts off again at the end of the day, and wakes to a knock on her door and the sound of rain, feet above her - where the ground is.

She rises and dresses in her most practical clothes for the weather and circumstances, wedging on her shoes. She does not pull her hair back from her face with the hair bands that are on her desk.

She opens the door and Pani, silent, meets her gaze before he looks away, a furrow of worry in his brow. She’d forgotten about the laws of silence, and feels a momentary hurt before she raises her chin and nods to him. She is not bound by them but if they will not talk, neither will she.

Pani walks her to a far off room close to where the youngest acolytes train, an empty classroom, where she is joined by Hand Fesa-Maraq. They leave Pani outside.

Helen walks to the center of the room, where several female Hands gather around, putting her arms up for them to pull off her big, bulky sweater. They undress her down to her black underpants and breastband (the latter of which makes Hand Fesa-Maraq look up at Helen, startled - she had not realized Helen was old enough to need one - , while Helen holds her chin out as defiantly as possible. Her teacher moves on) to make sure she has carried no weapons for self-protection.

They redress her, except for her long-sleeved skinshirt and skinpants which they fold and leave on a chair. Helen got them as a gift three years before to insulate and deflect low intensity blows — not much help against the dinosaurs, but she’d hoped they’d help with the stones. She still says nothing, though.

Hand Fesa-Maraq is almost crying when she opens the door, and Pani touches Helen’s shoulder for her to follow him. Helen tries to ignore it, though — honorable exiles do not include tears. And the Hand will be throwing stones, as well.

The women follow them outside, and Helen sees the assembled Hands in the rain and mud, rocks gathered around them. Touching Pani’s sleeve so he knows she’s stopped, she bends down and tightens the laces of her shoes. It wouldn't do to slip.

She has seen someone cast out, before. Once, when she was seven years old. Then everyone’s face was full of a sad anger, and the silence was almost intolerable as the man screamed with pain and ran, tripping over himself in the sand and bleeding from where the rocks had gashed him—nothing very dangerous, but enough that the dinosaurs would be able to find him come nightfall. The faces here are just sad, and scared.

Helen swallows, and stands, and walks ahead of Pani to the assembled masses. Pani remains behind her, as if he is a wall blocking her exit to the desert in case she bolts before they are ready.

The head Hand opens his mouth and breaks the silence. “For blaspheming against Uquar, you are cast out. You will not be recognized or your name spoken in this House except in the Records until your sin has been expiated and you return.”

He nods to Pani, who does not move for a long moment, and squeezes Helen’s shoulder apologetically when he does, walking across her field of vision to join the crowd, head bent down so his spectacles are in danger of sliding off the end of his nose.

Helen lifts hers up and says “I gladly accept exile, instead of imprisonment. May the punishment that has been dealt onto me — for merely seeing the truth of a matter darker than any of you wish to acknowledge — be dealt.”

And she turns, as they heft their stones, and runs—following that faint tug in her stomach that leads across the desert as the stones fall around (and into) her.

She falls twice, blood soaking through her black sweater. She doesn’t scream at all.

It has been days since the door closed, and Helen is still thinking over it. She is very upset, because she left books in her room, but she doesn’t know what to do about that — and they were books that there were extra copies of, so no one has noticed (yet).

She is sitting, and glowering at her notebook, hair half-hanging over her face, when there is a knocking on the door to her room and she stands from her chair to get it.

“Ah, hello, Haras-uquara,” Pani says, “I hope I’ve not interrupted your studies. Hand Corat asks that you would come see him in his office.”

Helen has started to dread when Pani comes to give her messages. Usually the Hand who wanted to speak to her would, themselves, come to see her — or send one of their acolytes. If Pani is sent instead it usually means they think she will be angry (which makes her angrier. What do they expect her to have done now?), because they’ve realized that she probably won’t actually verbally abuse Pani (usually).

So it is very grouchily that Helen nods, and thanks him, and walks with a fast pace to the Honored Hand Corat’s office. She arrives, instead, to find him having a late lunch with Hand Raqen. They are laughing and eating, and she cannot stop her fists clenching as she turns away outside. To think so little of her time as that! To call for her when he is still busy!

Helen has time now, though, and she wanders into one of the hallways near Hand Corat’s office — this is a part of the House she does not go to so often, a very old part, but everywhere in the House there are these seemingly random tunnels.

There are old rooms of worship and secret knowledge scattered throughout the House — you know the feel of them, if you’ve lived there as long as Helen. It goes from a quiet to a warm silence, where the walls are purposefully smoothed out, and the niches are spaced for books and torches so that study can be carried out.

As she walks along the hallways she finds what appears to be a large white portion of the wall, except it’s all covered over like a misty mirror. As the mist parts, here and there, she can see beyond it into a room of tall black-robed figures and — machines?

She parts her hair and tucks it behind her ears, pressing her nose against the cold surface of the wall (though it doesn’t smudge like glass), watching Them. After several minutes They seem to catch sight of her, and turn to look at her through the window—but she doesn’t care. She can see what They’re working on—a big playing board with her whole world spread on it. Some of the seven or eight were considering the board, some where considering her in the deep blackness of Their hoods, and some were entering numbers into Their machines.

And Helen suddenly realizes what They are doing. They have people out as counters over the whole of the board, and They are playing a game with them. She is very, very angry. How dare They do this to her world? How dare They dare to interfere? And she realizes, suddenly, that They must be the root of the dinosaurs and the weather, that They must be those who put away Uquar--

--but They would not dare live in the House of Their enemy, if he truly existed. And how would her god be brought down by these creatures?

And she is very, very angry. And she curls up her Hand as her hair falls in her face, and she points at Them and tells Them exactly what she thinks of Their duplicity. Of convincing her people to believe in a god that never, ever existed.

Helen doesn't know what's hurried everyone, everything, up on her world these past few weeks and it irritates her immensely. After the original politenesses got underway she is allowed to attend the meetings as an assistant (though Pani still escorts her through the corridors, and that upsets her. As if she were a helpess child!) and, in nervous silences after the warlords had left, is asked her opinion on matters.

Helen gives it: she would have, anyways, so why stop because she's been asked?

It is a problem, a big problem, here. The two warlords have been building weapons they should not have the technology, the knowledge (the patience, the insight) to build--and if they go through with their idiocy it is just likely the whole world will feel the effects instead of only their idiot selves. But they are not that far along in the making--the House caught on right in the middle, and now that a treaty has been settled with threats and concessions and--well, honestly, more threats encased in politeness because the Hands are scared and not willing to drag this into years of negotiations.

There are two groups leaving tomorrow to make sure the weapons are dismantled and destroyed, and Helen is going with one of them.

Things are moving too fast: the senior Hands are acting too nervous around her as much as about the situation. Helen is resigned to the fact that there's probably another prophecy fast approaching its fulfilment, and is upset that the Hands aren't doing their jobs well enough to hide it.

But she made a promise over a month ago, so one day she goads Pani into letting her back down into the treasure stores while he gets some notes from his desk, and goes to bring a book into a bar.

(from here)

It is morning, and Helen is pulled awake in the cushion room by the twisting-tugging of the traverse pulling at her. The light says it is early, but she and Jamie are already flinging themselves at the door.