%title Forest of Ghosts

"You go first."

Motes stared at Warmth In Fire with a wary look on her face. Too many dares start out this way, too many ill-fated adventures.

Warmth grinned brightly.

"You know, when you show that many teeth, you are not helping your case any."

It held up eir paws. "I promise it is safe! I have vetted it myself, Serene has vetted it — as far as she was able, at least, she could not actually make it work — and your ma did not yell at me *too* much."

Motes stared, agog. "Wait, so she *yelled at you?*"

The grin returned.

"Oh for Pete's sake!" Motes growled, stamping her foot. "What the heck am I supposed to do with that? Ma is mad at you– 'a little bit' is still a little bit mad! Ma is mad at you, Serene cannot tell quite what you have done, and you are...here, which, what does that even mean? Is there some fork of you lost, wandering who knows where, with whiskers all bent out of shape and tail stuck out at a weird angle?!"

"Motes Motes Motes!" Warmth giggled, plopping down on its backside and grinning up to her. "You in the fifth are always *so* dramatic!"

"We all work in a theatre company," she snapped back, rolling her eyes. "Well, look. I will go down, but what is even supposed to happen? Here we are, standing at the top of a frickin' slide, arguing about whatever it is you did to it, because you will not frickin' tell me!"

"Nope~"

Motes groaned, paws tugging at her cheeks in exasperation. "Skunks are the worst," she grumbled, her own mephit nature notwithstanding. "Well, fine. I will go down the stupid slide."

Warmth clapped their paws, grinning brightly. "Good girl!"

Sticking her tongue out at her cocladist, the little skunk sat herself at the top of the slide, took a deep breath, and pushed...

...and landed at the bottom of the slide, unchanged. The world was as it ever had been, La Rêve, the neighborhood in which Motes and her family resided, was the same small community that it had been when she had sat at the top of the slide.

And at the top of the slide now, Warmth In Fire peered down to her, chin resting in eir palms as it lay on its front, gazing down to her in serene amusement.

Motes squinted up to it. "Well?"

"Silly," ey said, a simple, solitary word, before pushing themself forward to slip down the slide on its belly.

Motes shouted and leapt to the side as the other little skunk hurtled toward her.

She need not have worried, apparently, as, starting halfway down the ramp of the slide, Warmth's form started to blur, growing translucent and looking for all the world like it was made out of mist. By the time it reached the bottom of the slide, there was nothing, just the barest hint of a laugh on the late summer's breeze.

"W-Warmth?" she called.

No response.

"Heyyy come on! This is not funny! What did you do?"

"Mooote," came a whisper from beside her.

She whipped around, encountering nothing.

"OoooOOOooOoo..."

"Oh, for Pete's sake!" Motes cried, sitting on the edge of the slide. "What did you even do?"

The sound of Warmth's voice was faint, even though it seemed like the other skunk was speaking quite loud. It sounded as though it came from another room, a mutter obfuscated by soft fabrics and insulation. "Try again, my dear," ey said. "This time, just *want* to join me."

"'Want to join you'?" She furrowed her brow. "What does that mean? Like use intent? Like with constructs?"

"Aw, come on! Do not take the fun out of it!" Warmth laughed from nowhere and everywhere. "Think of it this way: go to the top of the slide again, and give yourself a little push, *believing* you will pop up at the end of the slide right next to me. You have to believe it, Mote!"

Now *this* was interesting. Motes dashed around the playground equipment to start the process of jumping up from platform to platform to get to the top — no simple stairs to a slide for her; the entire contraption was a set of jauntily offset platforms with ropes, ladders, and even some nylon webbing leading from one level to another.

*Okay,* she thought when once more she plopped herself down on her butt at the top of the slide. *I want to be with Warmth! I believe I will slide to wherever it is.*

Three...two...one...

With a push, Motes once more went sailing down the primary yellow plastic of the slide, holding that belief within her mind.

This time, however, as the world sailed past her in turn, there was a sudden shift, as the though the sun had gone behind some bruised stormcloud in an otherwise cloudless sky. Around her, mists built, trees sprouted from the plain and tended grass, the lake beyond grew into a bog.

So taken was she by the transformation that she nearly forgot to brace for the landing. She stumbled to her feet at the bottom of the slide, and would have fallen were it not for Warmth's arms to catch her and straighten her up.

"Jeez! Motes! Such a fatty!"

Laughing breathlessly, she clutched at her cocladist and looked around with wide-eyed wonder. "What did you do? This is so *cool!*"

Warmth smirked, snoot stuck haughtily up in the air. "*We* made a secondary world. Serene duplicated some of La Rêve, I built the slide, and we worked with a few systechs on some tricks."

"What sorts of tricks? Like disappearing on the slide?"

"Oh, it is more than that!" Warmth was positively radiating pride by now, guiding Motes away from the playground and toward the houses. "You see, this is *technically* a separate sim, in that we are not fully in La Rêve now."

"'Technically'? What the heck does that mean?" Motes bent down to pick up a gnarled twig, shaggy with Spanish moss — something that had never grown in the neighborhood before. "It feels like a ghost version of the neighborhood."

"It is!" Warmth chivvied Motes along further until they passed between a few houses.

Rather than the usual rolling prairie that lived outside the bounds of the neighborhood, there was a densely wooded forest. Even if the sun were not obscured by the clouds that now hung above them in this hidden world, it would surely never penetrate so thick a canopy.

"The real trick that we worked out with the systechs is that, since this is a one-to-one mapping of the two sims, we project everything that does *not* map from La Rêve to here as a ghost."

Motes's eyes widened as she understood. "So we can see people and stuff moving around in La Rêve as ghosts here...does that mean they can see us as ghosts there?"

"Only out there," Warmth said, gesturing to the forest. "Back in the neighborhood, they cannot see us, or even hear us all that well."

"So we can haunt the prairie?"

"Mmhm!"

"Oh *heck* yeah!" Motes said, then darted toward the trees, other skunklet in tow. "What is this place called?"

"Le Cauchemar!"

Motes laughed breathlessly. "The nightmare? God, you are a nerd."

"Am not!" Warmth cried, bouncing around behind Motes with a few different forks, each chatting parts of the sentence that followed. "Or, well, am! But *you* are the nerds who named your neighborhood 'the dream'."

As they dashed around between the trunks of the trees, calling their halloos and crashing heedless through the underbrush, Motes began to fork out of sheer excitement, sheer joy at this thing that her cocladists built together, each new instance of her finding their own tree to climb. She could not help but overflow with giddiness, just as each new fork could not help the same.

It was some time later before they were both calm enough to settle down at the base of a tree near the edge of the forest of ghosts, slouched half against its coarse bark, half against each other.

"So if Serene made the sim and you made the slide, and you had systechs work on on both La Rêve and Le Cauchemar," Motes said, "why did Ma yell at you?"

"Oh!" Warmth lolled its head over to give her a silly smile. "She did not, I just thought that made it all sound more exciting."

She laughed and elbowed her friend in the side. "Rude."

They sat and chatted for a while longer. At one point, Beholden went out on one of her many walks, leading the two little skunks to watch her ghostly form stomp down along the trail out toward one of the ravines. She looked too frustrated to want to bother, so they simply marveled at the way her half-distinct, wispy form moved along the trail, Warmth telling her about how Bee would not be able to see the trees, and, except at the heart of the forest, would not be able to see them, but she would be able to hear if they called out.

"Alright," Motes said, pushing herself to her feet and dusting off the seat of her overalls. "How do we get back out?"

Warmth hopped up to join her, head tilted curiously. "Just step back to La Rêve, duh."

"It cannot be *that* easy," she countered.

"It can!"

"Well, sure, but it should not be. It was a little adventure to get here, should it not be an adventure to get back?"

The other skunk frowned thoughtfully, plucking a twig out of Motes's tail. "Well, okay, that is a good point. I was so excited I got the slide to work that I kind of showed you before it was fully done."

As they started moseying back toward the neighborhood, toward the playground at the center, Motes said, "Wait, so I was not supposed to see this yet?"

"It was supposed to be for Halloween," it said. "That is why it is extra spooky now."

"But it is not even September. You really showed it to me two months early?"

"Well, yeah," ey said, giving her a funny look. "I wanted to keep it a surprise, but I got all excited."

Motes laughed and hugged around their shoulders. "Well, thank you. Maybe we can work together on some bits of it! That would be fun, right?"

"Yeah, I would like that."

"Good. That way it can be a surprise for anyone who comes out here trick-or-treating."

They discussed options for the return journey along their walk — perhaps they could have an exit point from the bushes beside this house, or a little cave leading out from the base of that hill, or maybe one had to climb back up the slide, but what if there were a lot of them? — and, when they reached the dull, rather ramshackle looking playground again, they stepped back to the equivalent spot in La Rêve, back into the sunlight before the shiny and sturdy real thing.

The time for play had come and gone, and Motes could already feel hunger coming on, so they instead sat atop the playground structure, legs dangling off a platform with some lime popsicles that Warmth dreamed up.

"This seems like a really neat project," Motes said, once she had finished her popsicle. "What got you thinking about it? You have been doing a lot with food, not so much with slides."

The other skunk shrugged. "I do not know. I just wanted to do some more stuff with the clade."

"You already do plenty with us, and you have My, right? And Rye and Serene."

"Yeah..."

Motes waited it out.

"Fine," Warmth said, smirking at her. "Yes, I do have My and Rye and Serene, and I have you and Pointillist and everyone here, but also, it has been almost a year since Launch. I have you all, but I do not have Dear and Codrin and █████."


