The rest of the day was largely spent hunting for friends and tallying losses. The Marshans and a few of their assorted partners --- minus Dry Grass --- set up camp in Marsh's study, widened slightly by Pierre, who also held ownership permissions over the sim.

It raised a question that dogged me for a few minutes, cropping up now and again as I got in touch with more of our friends. What happened to objects and sims owned by individuals who had disappeared? If what Serene had said about her up-tree instance held true, the sim that she'd been working on remained. "When an instance quits, all of their items disappear," she explained. "But should an instance crash, that is not considered quitting. They remain in a core dump somewhere. That the sim remains indicates that she did not quit, but the ownership record is now invalid. I will need to file to have it revert to me."

It was sheer luck, then, that Marsh had shared ownership privileges with their partner.

This new study was expanded to include a few more desks and tables. Hanne and I worked at a table, for instance, compiling a list of friends, both mutual and individual. We rolled down over the list friend by friend, getting in touch with them and having small conversations where we were able, trusting in the cone of silence to keep from disturbing others.

For each person we managed to contact, we asked them a set of questions that Sedge and Dry Grass had come up with. Finding out how many of their cocladists had gone missing, as well as any friends or loved ones that were now unreachable. We collected some of that information for ourselves, building a better picture of how our friends group had been impacted, but all were directed to the official survey that had been set up by the Odists.

Truly official, as well. Dry Grass had had her systech privileges restored, as was evidenced by a floppy, felt witch hat she would occasionally summon, a physical token of her official capacity. She had pulled some strings to leave their post pinned to the top of several of the largest central feeds. Responses were already pouring in as more and more people woke to the realization that missing friends and family. While Dry Grass assured us that such had been done in the past, none of us had ever seen such a thing before.

"It is a part of the long peace that your lives are so boring," she had said with a sigh. "Or was, at least were."

While our data gathering was productive when it came to learning about our own circle of friends, it was a drop in the bucket compared to what the others were accomplishing. Sedge and Dry Grass in particular seemed to be on a roll of information gathering. They had set up their own little side room of other instances just collating data, running them through various perisystem tools, and just generally trying to get a better picture of what had happened.

The picture, as it began to grow, was grim.

While our 14% loss rate was far too high, the fact that the System was on track for a loss rate of 1% was still an enormous amount. On the surface, the number felt quite small, but on a System with 2.3 trillion instances, that meant 23 billion people suddenly wiped from existence. 23 billion people with friends and lovers, or down-tree instances waiting for updates. 23 billion regardless of how early or late they had uploaded.

"23 billion souls," Dry Grass corrected firmly after I kept speaking only of instances. "They are souls, Reed. I do not care as to your belief of the existence of a soul or not, they are souls. They are people who lived. They are people who died."

"Uh, sorry," I said, shying away from her.

Her shoulders slumped as she wilted. After a moment spent mastering her emotions, she reached out and squeezed my upper arm. "I am sorry, my dear. In The Wind is gone. A Finger Curled is gone. No Longer Myself and Should We Forget are gone, two lines from the Ode itself wiped out entirely. It is difficult for me to not see them missing as anything other than a death."

"Right, I guess I'm just struggling to square that with Marsh being, uh..."

"Gone?"

I nodded.

"I make no assumptions as to them, but for me, if I do not start internalizing the losses within my clade as deaths, I will run the risk of minimizing this loss across the System. Perhaps Marsh is not dead, but if I do not think of In The Wind as dead, then I will be hiding from myself a potential truth."

I winced at the import of her words. I couldn't seem to help it. They bore too much weight, too much force coming from her mouth, from the one who was working the hardest out of all of us.

"Again, I am sorry."

"It's okay. Maybe I'll get there one day. I don't know."

She nodded, squeezed my arm once more, and then backed away. "I am going to return to counting. Anything to keep my mind busy."

And so our lives became a world of numbers for a few short hours. Hanne and I fell back into tallying up the losses in our circle of friends, counting lost forks and (thankfully very few) lost clades. Shu was indeed gone, as was one of my friends from way back in those heady days right after I'd been forked from Marsh. Benjamin had been unfailingly polite so long as he was sober. One drink, though, and he picked up a wickedly funny streak, and could string together far more curses than I had imagined possible.

Hanne and I weren't quite as adept at forking as Sedge and Dry Grass, though, or perhaps since they were working on tallying up the losses on all of Lagrange rather than just those within their own group of close friends, they were inured to the intimate reality of all of those losses. What was the loss of a hundred thousand nameless souls to them in the face of one of Hanne's closest friends?

We wound up stepping away from Marsh's sim before long. Even just being there in that emotionally charged room felt like too much.

"I'm sorry, Reed," Hanne said once we returned home. Her voice was raw. It was painful to hear the pain within it. "I just..."

I nodded and roped her into a hug, letting her rest her head on my shoulder as I did the same on hers. "I know. I'm going through the same with Marsh. Or similar, at least. Hearing the way Dry Grass talked about it, it's hard not to just assume that they're just gone. 'Dead', she said, and as much as I hate it, she was right that not assuming that will just lead to more pain."

I felt her hands tighten against my back, clutching at the fabric there. "Warmth In Fire said similar, both of Shu and Should We Forget," she mumbled hoarsely. "Ey's having a harder time than I am, but in a different way."

((Warmth 1))
"How do you mean?"

I felt her shrug slightly against my cheek as she spoke. "I guess ey was particularly close Should We Forget, one of the Odists that disappeared. It said that she'd never forked, that she was from a part of the clade that struggled with mental health and something about trouble holding one shape. They're particularly upset at how hard Should We Forget worked to overcome all of those problems, and said how proud ey was that she had overcome a ton of losses and then disappeared without ceremony."

I nodded, quiet.

"Anyway, I don't know. I don't know that I've ever seen it that emotional before. Ey was just...crushed." She sighed. "And I am too, I guess, but maybe I'm just not old enough to have gotten that close to Shu. I guess I can't say much more other than it hurt to listen to them talk like that."

"Well, alright," I said after a moment's silence, gently disentangling myself from the embrace. "Let's at least focus on something else for a bit. What sorts of things can we take care of from start to finish that have nothing to do with...all this."

She laughed. "'All this' is a hell of a way to put it." She shook her head as though to dislodge the thought. "But you're right. Uh...well, I've had too much coffee, I think. It's a bit early, but maybe we can make a drink or something? I also wouldn't mind inviting some others over just for some noise, otherwise I'm going to sit and stew up in my head."

"What, am I not enough to distract you from that?"

She snorted. "No. I love you, but you'll just wind up reminding me of it. Any friends you want to bring over? Or cocladists, I'm starting to remember that I love all of your clade, not just you."

"Good to hear," I said, smiling. "After last night, I was afraid you were about to write us all off."

"I may yet," she said, grinning tiredly. "But yeah, sure, feel free to invite them, too. I'll ask around, as well."

We both spent a few minutes puttering about, getting ourselves some water and poking through the exchange for a bottle of wine to have ready for when others arrived.

*If* others arrived, it turned out. There were a few maybes, with Sedge saying that she wanted to focus just on the work and not split her attention any. Both Pierre and Vos declined, saying they would rather stay together and focus on their own problems — certainly understandable. Few of my friends sounded appealing to have over, which also held true for Hanne, who wound up only pinging Jess and Warmth In Fire out of her circle of construct artistry friends. Both gave a definite maybe.

Of those I pinged who surprised me by saying yes, Lily was at the top of the list.

*"I'm struggling with all of this, and starting to feel kind of lonely or...I don't know, left out, maybe,"* she said over a sensorium message. *"I don't like it, Reed. I don't like having to just process all of this on my own."*

*"I mean, you're more than welcome over, of course,"* I replied. *"Though I'd be surprised if Cress and Tule didn't also bring along an instance of Dry Grass."*

There was a long pause, followed by the sense of a sigh. *"Okay. I'll probably still come along. Maybe I'll find some way to get over my shit, at least enough to be around her."*

*"Well, okay. I trust you, but still, hopefully no snippiness, okay? I think we're all frazzled, but the goal is just to not deal with difficult stuff for a bit,"* I said. *"At least, as best we can."*

I could hear the smirk in her voice. *"Right. I'll keep my mouth shut if I start to feel like biting her head off."*

So it was that we cycled the weather outside to a comfortable spring-time evening, set up a table with various small foods and a few different bottles of wine, and waited for everyone to trickle in.

Cress and Tule were the first to arrive, Dry Grass appearing between them a few seconds later, still wearing her witch's hat, which she quickly waved away. All three of them looked exhausted, but brightened visibly at the spread laid out for all to snack on, quickly loading up plates of bruschetta and glasses of icy rosé.

The next to arrive were Warmth In Fire and Jess, both of whom launched themselves at Hanne to wrap her up in a hug. Hold My Name, Warmth In Fire's partner, arrived a few seconds later.

((Warmth stuff here))
I'd met Jess a few times before at dinner parties or the like, and she definitely shared Hanne and I's habit of snarky banter, and was just as prone to falling into witty repartee as we were.

For some reason, though, I'd yet to actually meet Warmth In Fire. Despite Dry Grass's average height and soft build, Warmth in fire was short and wiry. Where Dry Grass was comfortable to move through life at a steady pace with measured speech, the skunk was spunky and energetic, speaking quickly and smiling readily, quick to hug — I received my own after Hanne — and quicker still to fork to accomplish such affection. They seemed to live in a pleasant sort of transgression, from the constantly shifting pronouns to the almost childlike performance that nonetheless seemed to be performed with a wink and a nudge, as though ey knew just how subversive such kid-like vibes could be.

Hold My Name, in contrast, stood tall and confident. She leaned more on Dry Grass's steady nature, though seemed perfectly content to keep up with Warmth In Fire's speedy intensity, at one point scruffing an instance of the skunk to pull it into a bearhug. She was also visibly and effortlessly transfeminine in a way that I attempted to live into in my own trans identity. I liked her immediately.

Last of all, nearly an hour after we started, most of us a few drinks in, Lily stepped in. She moved stiffly, awkwardly, and only nodded a greeting, wordlessly picking out a few of the *hors d'oeuvres* and pouring herself an over-full glass of a sweet wine.

Her silence put a damper on the rest of the conversations, all of us speaking quieter, eventually falling into silence as she sat down at the table.

A few seconds passed before she smirked and shook her head. "Well? Come on, entertain me."

I breathed a pent-up sigh of relief at the chuckles from around the table.

"I will tell you a joke, as a way to break the ice," Dry Grass said.

Lily laughed, though it sounded somewhat forced. "Alright. I want to hear what counts as a joke to your clade."

Dry Grass bowed. "I assure you, it is appropriately atrocious. It comes straight from Waking World, who has set himself up as a father figure, complete with dad jokes."

Lily rolled her eyes, nodded.

"Alright. A horse walks into a bar, flumps down onto a stool, says to the bartender, "Whiskey and a beer.""

"A bar joke? Really, love?" Cress asked.

"I told you it was awful," she said, laughing. "Anyway, the bartender sighs, pours a shot, and sets that and a shitty beer down in front of the horse.

""Might as well leave the bottle," the horse says.

"The bartender reluctantly sets the bottle down as well, saying, "Hey man, you are in here every day. Every day you mow through a few beers and a few shots. You alright?"

""Of course I am fucking alright," the horse grumbles, downing his shot and chasing it with a glug of beer.

""I dunno, man. You think you might be an alcoholic?"

"The horse says, "I do not think I am," and then disappears with a *poof!*"

There was a pause, during which a few of us smiled, vaguely confused at the apparent punchline.

"You know, because "I think therefore I am"? And he did not think he...oh, never mind."

At this, there were a few dry chuckles. "You're right, that is atrocious," Lily said.

"Well," Dry Grass countered primly, "I would have said that last bit first, but I did not want to put Descartes before the horse."

At that delayed punchline, the rest of us laughed in earnest. Warmth In Fire, halfway through a sip of wine, snorted into its drink and started to cough, which set Hold My Name to laughing in turn, rubbing the skunk's back.

"Okay, okay, I'll give you that one," Lily said, still grinning. "That was pretty good. Still atrocious, but at least the good kind of atrocious. I'm sorry for the other night."

"That was only last night, my dear, though we do seem to be living at a high skew, do we not?" Dry Grass bowed to her. "I appreciate it, Lily. I cannot apologize for my clade, but I will all the same do my best to live as a counterexample to the elements within it that rankle."

"Yeah, thanks," Lily said, more down to her glass of wine than to Dry Grass. "I was thinking, actually, and part of the reason I wanted to come over and see you on...uh, neutral ground, I guess, is that I had a question about your clade."

Dry Grass nodded for her to continue.

"What was it like to get used to being a clade without a root instance?"

All three of the Odists present stiffened, sitting up straighter.

"Well," Dry Grass said after receiving subtle nods from both Warmth In Fire and Hold My Name. "It was different for all of us, I think. Michelle Hadje quit nearly a century ago, now, and at first, I was crushed. My whole stanza was crushed, and although we had long since diverged, many of us going our separate ways, we moved back into the old set of townhouses that we used to inhabit as a stanza for nearly a year. Some of us brought partners, some not, but we needed that company, that familiar association with *us,* with that commonality that came from her.

"Memory Is A Mirror Of Hammered Silver, the first line of the stanza, was hit perhaps hardest of all of us. She was the closest to Michelle, after all. Michelle struggled so much over the years, and lived largely in solitude but for a few close friends, many of whom were among the first lines. Hammered Silver was a sort of mother to her, and so to her, it was akin to losing a child. While the rest of us, her up-tree instances, were also saddened to varying degrees, she was a fucking mess."

She sighed, taking a sip of wine before continuing. "I was still a systech back then, and I spent nearly a month in my house, most of that either baking or in my room, constantly kicking myself for not doing more to help Michelle. She was...she was so broken, those last few years, and a good chunk of that was based on her engagement with the System itself, so it was difficult for me to hold both that fact and my role in working with the System together in my mind. I kept falling back to those how-could-I questions, to all of those suppositions that I ought to be doing something."

I tightened my grip on my fork, leaving it stabbed into a pile of salad. "I've been dealing with a lot of that," I said, voice cracking. "I keep thinking there has to be something more I can do, or wondering how I can do something like this." I gestured at the table with a forkful of greens. "Having a dinner party while Marsh is gone."

Dry Grass nodded. "Precisely that, yes."

"I got super angry," Hold My Name said, her comfortable alto dipping back into a tenor, as though the mood demanded less of her transfemininity. "Like, *really* angry. I had to move back into my own place for a while after, I was so mad. How could she do that? We were already unmoored by Qoheleth's assassination, and now Michelle had quit, too. It stranded all the stanzas, leaving behind ten brand new clades."

The Marshans winced, suddenly understanding the same of ourselves.

She shrugged, turning her glass of water between fingers. "I slowly calmed down, but that anger hit again after I learned about all of the shit the eighth stanza did, all of that controlling. There were even hints that Michelle had been nudged to quit by True Name, who I'd already suspected of being behind Qoheleth's assassination. Now I had a target for that anger."

I glanced surreptitiously at Lily, who was keeping herself still, tightly under control.

Another glance at Dry Grass showed her watching Lily warily in turn.

((Warmth stuff))
Then the moment of tension passed uneasily, as Warmth In Fire spoke up next. "I will say as I always do, my dear: your anger is based around a memory that does not fit the reality of the situation. I have met Sasha through my friendship with Motes, through that association with A Finger Pointing, who ever stood up for Sasha, even when she was True Name. I have eaten dinner with her. I have watched the way she smiles. I have watched the distance at which she holds herself from time to time. I have seen the flashes of regret-tinted understanding when topics of the past crop up. She is not who she was, but neither was she who you say she must have been. I cannot even linger in discomfort around her."

Hold My Name sighed, tired gaze level on her partner. This carried the cadence of an old argument, one had dozens or hundreds of times before.

Lily only gripped her glass tighter.

"She is no murderer. Not of Qoheleth, and certainly not of Michelle," Warmth In Fire continued confidently, the gravity of their words held in tension with the ineffably childlike openness of her expression. "Yes, you may hate her, and yet I cannot. Yes, my down-tree, Dear, loathes her, and yet I do not. Yes, Dear's down-tree, Rye, holds her own distaste, but on one thing we agree: she is no longer who she was. We are both suckers for character development. I am Dear. I am Rye. I am Praiseworthy, and Michelle too, but I am also my own person."

"I know, Bean," Hold My Name said, voice tired. "You have said this countless times before, and I appreciate the balance that brings, but I am also my own person separate from you. I hate her, you do not. We are allowed to not be alike."

The skunk nodded, waiting for her cocladist and partner to continue.

"I did not even like Qoheleth all that much. I thought he was a putz who had lost his marbles," she said, smirking. "But Michelle–"

Warmth In Fire waved its paw jerkily, a flash of despair washing over eir features. "Michelle was murdered, yes, but the act of violence took place at the root of her trauma. Of *our* trauma, My." The skunk was crying now, quietly and bitterly. "The act of violence that led to us being so fucked up — beautifully, wonderfully fucked up — and which led to the creation of the System also destroyed someone centuries later because she was never given help. It was her right to quit as she did, leaving us ten clades and not one, but her murderers were all of us who did not help, not some wicked machinations of only one of us."

At the sudden force of their words, Hold My Name's expression shifted to one of alarm, and she reached out to take up one of her partner's paws. Dry Grass did much the same.

"I know that it is quite soon, and that there may yet be some solution as you have said," Dry Grass said gently, nodding to Lily. "But on that note, what are your feelings on potentially being without a root instance?"

Lily shrugged awkwardly. "I don't know yet. I'm still dealing with the stress of everything. That's a big part of why I wanted to come here in the first place. I was feeling left out and lonely."

We all nodded, and I reached out to pat the back of her hand.

She smiled gratefully at me before continuing. "Actually, I was starting to get paranoid that maybe this wasn't over. I guess there's no guarantee that it is. Who knows, maybe more people will start disappearing? I was getting worried that more of the clade would go missing, or that I'd just disappear without a trace, too."

Sniffling, Cress nodded. "I've been worried about the same. All of my friends, Dry Grass, all of you...I don't know, I was worried that maybe there was some ongoing problem with the System or that whatever this fighting phys-side was hinting at wasn't done."

"That's a big part of what I was thinking about," Tule said. "That this was some sort of war or something. I've never lived through a war."

"Few have," Dry Grass said. "We almost did, back before the founding of the System, but the whole lost saga interrupted that."

Jess, who had been fairly quiet up until that point, asked, "'Lost saga'? Like, all that stuff about people being disappeared? Didn't they all die?"

"Oh, heavens no," she said, chuckling. "We were among the lost. *Michelle* was lost. That is the trauma Warmth In Fire spoke about. That is part of why she was so fucked up."

"And, like it said, why we are so fucking weird," Hold My Name said. "*You* certainly are," she added ruffling Warmth In Fire's perpetually mussed up mane.

It snapped eir teeth at her, grinning wickedly.

Hold My Name barely flinched, instead rolling her eyes. "You see the shit I put up with?"

"Yes, yes," Warmth In Fire said. "You are so put upon. We never hear the end of it."

Laughter around the table.

"But no," Dry Grass said, picking up the conversational thread once more. "Of the lost who did not kill themselves, they all uploaded. There are several still alive today."

"Jesus," Jess said, shaking her head. "How old *are* you?"

"Three hundred fourteen years," Hold My Name said.

"Fifteen," Dry Grass corrected. "The date jumped, remember?"

Her cocladist frowned, but nodded all the same.

"Either way, I do not believe there shall be any more major losses. Phys-side seemed fairly confident of that. They have even promised that they will be ungating news and AVEC transmission back to Earth. We shall learn more before long."

"I hope so," I said. "I'm getting pretty tired of being in the dark."

-----
