Every time Codrin thought hey, this is almost like–, ey was brought up short by all of the ways it wasn’t. It was organized and guided, but without the careful precision that ey now knew to be the case for the History. It was hectic and ad hoc but without the spur-of-the-moment surprises that came with Perils.
Consequently, ey kept felt emself stumbling when presented with a pattern that fit one project and then failed to fit completely.
At last, though, they had dotted all of the ‘i’s and crossed all the ‘t’s that they could think of and gathered — forks of them gathered, at least — to begin the final preparations.
-“Alright,” a Jonas said, standing before the group of five. He held a clipboard with a checklist he appeared to be reading from. “Greetings. True Name?”
+The five of them trickled into the boardroom. They’d been told to dress ‘nice, but comfortable’, which didn’t change anything for True Name. Why Ask Questions had dressed in a matching outfit. Tycho had swapped out a plaid flannel shirt for a very plain white one, but remained in his jeans. Sarah had opted for a blouse and slacks that fit well with her middle-aged, mid-career psychologist aesthetic.
+It left Codrin feeling somewhat overdressed for the occasion, but ey shook it off as best ey could. A few years prior, ey’d written a short paper on traditional clothing styles that had been ported into the System, many of which had seen a resurgence, up where cost was no longer a barrier. Ever since, ey’d taken to dressing in various levels of traditional Romanian clothing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for this project, that meant an embroidered, wide-sleeved blouse and a simple, ankle-length wrap-around skirt, over which was layered a fotă, looking rather like an apron in rich, embroidered red, with a simpler panel of fabric hanging from the back.
+Ey had even braided eir hair. Ah well.
+“Alright,” a Jonas said. He held a clipboard with a checklist he appeared to be reading from. “Greetings. True Name?”
“Rehasiër munachla achles eslosam.“
An instance of Answers Will Not Help standing by Jonas nodded approvingly at statement.
They proceeded down the line, each reciting their version of the greeting.
@@ -54,7 +57,7 @@Codrin was startled at the lack of fanfare that their departure received. The Jonas who had been running the debriefing waved, and none of the others in the room did more than look over their shoulders as they were shunted over to the DMZ and ey was left blinking in the dappled sunlight of the meeting area.