She stopped playing because she had been out with some friends, some of the others who had decided to give up on grown-up life now that they were here, now that they were decades or centuries old, now that they were functionally immortal. She stopped playing because, as she sprinted a handful of friends, dodging around benches and trees, seesaws and swings, a bolt of panic struck down her spine with an electric intensity and made her tumble into the gravel, made her skid through the pebbles until she crunched up against a jungle gym, left her nose, paws, and elbows bloodied. She stopped playing because for a long minute, she could not breathe, though whether from the adrenaline pulling her nerves taut or the pain in her snout or from the air being knocked out of her, she could not tell.
She stopped playing because, as she slowly pushed herself upright to a sitting position, tears already springing from her eyes, an envelope slid nonsensically from the air and fluttered to the ground before her. She stopped playing because her name — her full name, And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights of the Ode clade — was printed on the front of the envelope in a handwriting that was painfully familiar because it was her own. It was her own and it was A Finger Pointing's and it was Beholden's, it was Slow Hours's and Warmth's and Dry Grass's, and it was the handwriting that flowed from the hand of every Odist even after hundreds of years.
She stopped playing because she had a guess as to who this was from, and that only led to a second spike in anxiety, for while the first had been from a top-priority sensorium ping, this came from fear, from terror. She stopped playing as Alex hollered, "Motes!" and started to run back to her. She stopped playing as she rolled to the side out of the sim and into her studio.
So, when Motes stopped playing, she promised herself that she would not do that. She promised herself that, as best she could, she would do anything but that. She promised herself that she would keep going because she did not want to be seen like this. She did not want to be caught like this, with a letter in her hand, with shame on her face, with guilt all matted in her fur.
Instead, she stood up, committed the contents of the letter to an exocortex, a hidden and compartmentalized part of her memory that rendered it inaccessible until she went looking, and then destroyed the original. There was a part of her that wanted to rip it up, to rip it into confetti and stomp on the shredded paper, to burn those shreds in a small pyre, to put the fire out with her crying, to grind ash and tears together until she had a paint with which to spell out her anger and despair.
But no, she should not do that, either, and so she waved away the letter, forked into Big Motes, and then sat to plan.
