[I wrote this as a reply to a comment elsewhere on Cynthia's Brain; I thought it might be of some interest here.]

As I've explored her, I've found Cynthia Broadmoore to be an unexpectedly optimistic character. As many of my characters do, she started off as a simple concept and a description, and was intended for an erotic roleplay venue; but she became so much more, as I played her, as I wrote about her. And I've been pleasantly surprised by her optimism. She's troubled, she has difficulties, terrible things have happened to her, but she resolves to focus upon the friends and the positive circumstances she has now, and looks forward to what the future holds. She has a tremendous ego, but she also is uncertain of her place in things. She's like the other fork in the road compared to Wednesday, who was broken by her experiences and reformed into a person who despises herself and many of the things she does, but feels helpless to extract herself from her resentment and her destructive behavior. Of course both of these characters are refractions or distillations of myself; there are times when I'm consumed by self-loathing, and others when I'm optimistic about what the future holds, including how I relate to myself.

This story started with me asking myself, 'why did Broadmoore's makers give her such tremendous intelligence if they didn't want her use it?' It occurred to me that maybe the design of her mind was contracted out to someone else, who didn't understand the mindset of her makers. And then what if Broadmoore tracked this person down, in the hope of better understanding herself?

The story started to become more personal. It covers a lot of territory, and I'm trying to do a number of things with it, but as it developed, one of the main themes became this: the situation of being so different from your parents that they don't understand you, they don't quite know what to do with you, and perhaps consequently they don't treat you all that well. And coping with that, resolving your feelings about it and having a life beyond it. Because I really wasn't much like my parents; I was always weird and imaginative, and I think they were blindsided by my actual potential, such that they didn't account for it and left me to sink or swim on my own. I was kind of a complicated inconvenience at times; as I suggest, they didn't quite know what to do with me.

Liza is kind of a surrogate mother to Cynthia, and one of the facts of surrogate motherhood, in my limited understanding of it, is that at some point you have to let go and take it on faith that the adoptive parents will treat the child well. It is necessarily out of your hands. I didn't come from a surrogate, but my parents did break up when I was young, and I've wondered why my father was comfortable leaving me with my mother when he knew she was quick to anger and fly into rages; and I could only conclude that he believed her love for me would prevail over her spiteful temper. And I suppose that was mostly true, but not always. So if he were alive for me to ask him about it, I think Liza's answer is close to what he would say.

Anyway. :) I didn't quite know how to respond directly to your reply, but I hope giving you some insight into what I tried to put into the story is satisfying.