update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/marsh/006.md

@@ -88,7 +88,7 @@ There was a long pause, followed by the sense of a sigh. *"Okay. I'll probably s
 
 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.
+So it was that we cycled the weather outside to a comfortable springtime 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.
 
@@ -164,23 +164,23 @@ I tightened my grip on my fork, leaving it stabbed into a pile of salad. "I've b
 
 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 — the rest of the second stanza — were already unmoored by Qoheleth's assassination, and now Michelle had quit, too. It stranded all the stanzas, leaving behind ten brand new clades."
+"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 — the rest of the second stanza — were already unmoored by Qoheleth's assassination only a year before, 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."
+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 had 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.
 
-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 the fifth stanza, 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."
+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 the fifth stanza, who ever stood up for her, 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."
+"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 she and I 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."
 
@@ -210,17 +210,19 @@ Sniffling, Cress nodded. "I've been worried about the same. All of my friends, D
 
 "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?"
+Jess, who had been fairly quiet up until that point, asked, "'Lost saga'? Like, all that stuff about people being disappeared by the government? 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."
 
+At this ey looked quite proud.
+
 "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. I was pleased to see their mood improved.
 
 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."
+"Yes, yes," Warmth In Fire said. "You are *so* put upon. We never hear the end of it."
 
 Laughter around the table.
 

writing/post-self/marsh/007.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-The day that followed that wine-soaked afternoon and evening was...well, I couldn't say it was calm, *per se,* as we were all still coming to terms with the reality of what had happened, but it was certainly more level. The mood was low and Hanne and I were both laid low by crying jags at one point or another, but we doggedly stuck to our pre-catastrophe routine in an attempt to remain calm.
+The day that followed that wine-soaked afternoon and evening was...well, I couldn't say it was calm, *per se,* as we were all still coming to terms with the reality of what had happened, but it was certainly more level. The mood was low and Hanne and I were both laid low by crying jags at one point or another, but we doggedly stuck to our pre-catastrophe routine in an attempt to remain calm. It felt like we had few alternatives. We both felt powerless.
 
 Hanne holed up in her office for a while, working on some of her latest constructs. While the house had been littered with little *objets d'art* from her explorations, I'd requested that she stick to her office for working on this current trend of oneiro-impressionism. Something about the in-progress constructs hurt my eyes, and a few had led to migraines, even for her. Objects that brought the dream basis of the System into stark reality presented their own challenges.
 
@@ -14,9 +14,9 @@ Twenty-three billion dead.
 
 "Billion. With a 'B'," they wrote.
 
-The numbers boggled the mind. The percentage of my friends that had disappeared overnight remained well below: of the more than two hundred I checked in with, Benjamin was the only one missing. Even if I counted Marsh, the total number was less than that. Hanne tallied up similar results: Shu and one other, To Aquifer dos Riãos, could not be reached. They, like so many other, were unavailable to ping and listed as 'no longer extant' on the perisystem directory.
+The numbers boggled the mind. The percentage of my friends that had disappeared overnight remained well below: of the more than two hundred I checked in with, Benjamin was the only one missing. Even if I counted Marsh, the total number was less than that. Hanne tallied up similar results: Shu and one other, To Aquifer dos Riãos, could not be reached. They, like so many others, were unavailable to ping and listed as 'no longer extant' on the perisystem directory.
 
-The directory was a deliberately vague bit of software. It couldn't provide a listing of all instances, couldn't run aggregates on all of the data, wouldn't provide a running tally on the number of instances living within Lagrange.
+The directory was a deliberately vague bit of software. It couldn't provide a listing of all instances, couldn't run aggregates on all of the data, wouldn't provide a running tally on the number of instances living within Lagrange. One even needed permission to see more than a name, and that only if they were in the same sim.
 
 "It is both a technological and a social problem," Dry Grass explained when asked. "The technology to provide that list would not be insignificant to implement, given some of the core mechanics of the System. We do not live in a database that can be queried so broadly. The social aspect is that we decided early on that we simply did not want that to be the case. We did not want that one would be able to discover random individuals, to hunt for old enmities on which to act. Privacy concerns here are of a different breed."
 
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ Unsatisfying, but at least understandable.
 
 So we sat and did what we had done nearly every day for years and years now. Hanne tooled around with impossible shapes and colors that appeared different for every person, objects that couldn't be discussed, while I read trashy novels and took notes in an exocortex.
 
-It wasn't until well into the evening, dinner now simply crumbs on plates, that I decided to reengage with the overwhelming topic at hand.
+It wasn't until well into the evening, dinner now simply crumbs on plates, that I decided to reengage with the overwhelming topic at hand. One half of me felt bad for having so thoroughly disengaged, while the rest felt blessedly refreshed, so maybe it hadn't been in vain.
 
 While Hanne headed out for drinks, I stepped once more into Marsh's study. 
 
@@ -44,13 +44,13 @@ Her shoulders sagged and her expression flattened to one of sheer exhaustion. "A
 
 "Sounds nice."
 
-I laughed. "It kind of does, but I've had my fill of drinking these last few days. How goes the number crunching?"
+I chuckled. "It kind of does, but I've had my fill of drinking these last few days. How goes the number crunching?"
 
 "It goes," she said, shrugging. "The picture hasn't changed much, which means we're probably zeroing in on a final percentage. We'll keep digging of course, compiling that list of names so that we can post it somewhere, but I'm starting to lose steam."
 
 "You look exhausted."
 
-She nodded. "I am, but also I'm starting to feel numb by all of this data, and it's getting to me that that's all I'm feeling. You and Dry Grass have talked about "Oh, I should be feeling X or doing Y!" and I'm starting to get that. I *am* doing Y, and it's making me unable to feel X, if X is...I don't know. Grief? Fear?"
+She nodded. "I am, but also I'm starting to feel numbed by all of this data, and it's getting to me that that's all I'm feeling. You and Dry Grass have talked about "Oh, I should be feeling X or doing Y!" and I'm starting to get that. I *am* doing Y, and it's making me unable to feel X, if X is...I don't know. Grief? Fear?"
 
 I frowned.
 
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ I furrowed my brow.
 
 "And do you think you'll ever have a good enough idea to let go?" I asked gently. "I know how we are when it comes to hyperfixations like this."
 
-She waved her hand to bring into existence her own chair, falling back into it heavily. "Feeling seen, here, Reed. Feeling *perceived.*"
+She waved her hand to bring her own chair into existence, falling back into it heavily. "Feeling seen, here, Reed. Feeling *perceived.*"
 
 I laughed. "Sorry, Sedge."