update from sparkleup
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<p><em>Convergence T-minus 0 days, 16 hours, 21 minutes</em><br />
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<em>(Castor–Lagrange transmission delay: 7 days, 5 hours, 31 minutes)</em></p>
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<p>The dinner that Do I Know God After The End Waking had prepared for them was…rustic. That was the first term that ey had come up with to describe it, and no matter how else Ioan tried to nail it down further, ey was left with little else that fit.</p>
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<p>The dinner that Do I Know God After The End Waking had prepared for them was…rustic. That was the first term that ey had come up with to describe it, and no matter how else Ioan tried to refine it, ey was left with little else that fit.</p>
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<p>It was a venison stew with parsnips and onions, thickened with tack and stretched with some barleycorns. ‘Woodsy’ was not quite the right word, and neither was ‘simple’, for the skunk had spent the better part of an hour doting over the cast-iron pot he’d hung over a low fire, adding salt in what Ioan felt were miserly pinches, as well as pepper and nutmeg as though they were the most precious items in the world to him.</p>
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<p>When asked where he got the spices, barley, and tack in a forest, the skunk had laughed, shaken his head, and said, “I am not a fucking ascetic, Ioan,” then gone back to cooking.</p>
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<p>So, rustic stew it was.</p>
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<p>“I was on a field of dandelions and grass,” May said, her voice distant and dream-fogged. “And there was no echo. The world stretched out before me in empty nothingness, and there was no echo. At my back was a bar — scratched wood, stools, a foot rail, a gutter for pouring drinks — and the only way I could hear my own voice pass through the air was to huddle between those stools and face the bar.”</p>
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<p>“Words came unbidden,” A Finger Pointing picked up where May left off. “And as they passed through my mind, they dripped and smeared; a painting with too much wet paint on the canvas stood on its edge. The dreaming mind did not know what to do with language that close to the surface, and so the language stained all it touched.”</p>
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<p>End Waking nodded, speaking toward the fire. “And so I screamed and I ran, and when I looked back, the bar was gone, and when I looked forward again, there it was. Had I turned? Was the world so small? The words came unbidden, and with each one that left my mouth, a cord that tethered me to reality snapped, and I grew lighter and lighter, and I feared I would float up into the sky, into the sun.”</p>
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<p>“And through it all, time was unmoored and set adrift.” May shook her head. “Sixteen hours, twenty three minutes is what they said, but I lived lifetime after lifetime beneath that sun. The light thrummed and vibrated around me, and I lived and died and lived again. I watched eternity fall away and rot at my feet.”</p>
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<p>“And through it all, time was unmoored and set adrift,” May said quietly. “Sixteen hours, twenty three minutes is what they said, but I lived lifetime after lifetime beneath that sun. The light thrummed and vibrated around me, and I lived and died and lived again. I watched eternity fall away and rot at my feet.”</p>
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<p>“Or perhaps it was just an instant,” A Finger Pointing said.</p>
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<p>“How heavy must that madness be, then,” May continued. “To crash through so many failsafes and allow someone who has been within the system for more than two centuries such a death? This is what we fear.”</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-03-16</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-03-28</p>
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<p>Having instructed the Artemisians on how to use cones of silence, there were far fewer breaks throughout the last two days, limited to one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and a longer lunch in the middle. That did not stop them from settling into private conversation every few minutes to discuss whatever answer they might give.</p>
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<p>Ey initially found it strange that added downtime would make the their party more tired rather than less, but after some consideration — and a brief talk with Sarah — ey’d come to the realization that those periods of quiet between question and answer were still spent in expectation. They were still working during those pauses. They were still in conversation, if only by way of watching and waiting, trying to guess what might have led to the need to have that private discussion. Ey could not read expressions beyond eir limited notes so far, could not speak the language well enough, and certainly could not read lips, so ey was left only with guesses and suppositions.</p>
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<p>And through it all, True Name seemed to be trying to match the firstracers for patient expressions.</p>
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<p>It wasn’t until that second lunch that the skunk showed any breaks in that patience. She picked up a plate piled high with salad, brought it over to the table in the center of their rest area then stepped back a few paces, where she activated a cone of silence. She brought her tail around toward her front, held in both paws, and buried her face in it. Ey could only assume by the sudden way that she bent at the waist and pinned her ears back that this was done to muffle a scream or some violent obscenity.</p>
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<p>It wasn’t until that second day’s lunch that the skunk showed any breaks in that patience. She picked up a plate piled high with salad, brought it over to the table in the center of their rest area then stepped back a few paces, where she activated a cone of silence. She brought her tail around toward her front, held in both paws, and buried her face in it. Ey could only assume by the sudden way that she bent at the waist and pinned her ears back that this was done to muffle a scream or some violent obscenity.</p>
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<p>Then, as though nothing had happened, she sat down to eat.</p>
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<p>Lunch after that had been filled with laughter and truly terrible jokes. Sarah, it turned out, collected them, and the delegates unanimously voted hers the worst.</p>
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<p>All throughout, though, Codrin couldn’t shake the image of True Name throwing a very short, very tightly controlled tantrum. The sight of her letting loose so strong an emotion had immediately knocked em back to an interview decades ago, now, where she’d wound em up enough that ey’d started shouting at her in her own office, then bounced em from her sim.</p>
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<p>That, ey’d later understood, had been intentional on her part. It had been a way for her to spin her story in a very carefully crafted way. It set it to a level that sat just on the other side of the line between plausible and absurd. It’d wrapped em up in a story that was just a little too much to be believe, and the end result was a softening of the impact of the <em>History</em>.</p>
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<p>All throughout, though, Codrin couldn’t shake the image of True Name throwing a very short, very tightly controlled tantrum. The sight of her letting loose so strong an emotion had immediately knocked em back to an interview — decades ago, now — where she’d wound em up enough that ey’d started shouting at her in her own office, then bounced em from her sim.</p>
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<p>That, ey’d later understood, had been intentional on her part. It had been a way for her to spin her story in a very carefully crafted way. It set it to a level that sat just on the other side of the line between plausible and absurd. It had wrapped em up in a story that was just a little too much to believe, and the end result was a softening of the impact of the <em>History</em>.</p>
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<p>Nothing about that experience had been done with a wink and a nudge, just as nothing about this had contained any such acknowledgement that it was intentional, but ey was nothing if not primed to expect her actions to be based in manipulation. There was a non-zero chance that this tantrum had been more for the benefit of the other delegates than anything. It was a way to show that she, too, was frustrated, just as the pun-off that had followed had been a way to loosen everyone up by lampshading the absurdity of the whole venture.</p>
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<p>And then, it was over. True Name cleared away her plate, explained that she was going to write a letter to her #Artemis instance, made a final joke about needing to do so over letters being much more up Codrin’s alley, and then stepped into her room to work in silence.</p>
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<p>“What was that about?” Sarah asked, once the skunk and Why Ask Questions had wandered off again.</p>
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<p>“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry, I mean, what was with the scream and then all the jokes?”</p>
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<p>Ey frowned and set up another cone of silence for the two of them. “I was just thinking about that, actually. I was wondering if she really is frustrated enough to scream or if it was intentional to make her seem more normal like the rest of us mere mortals.”</p>
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<p>“I don’t think it was that extreme. Maybe some part of her was trying to build camaraderie with us by doing so, but I’m wondering if it was more that she was trying to downplay the news from Artemis.”</p>
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<p>Codrin sat up straighter. “Wait, you mean the Odists struggling over there?”</p>
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<p>Codrin sat up straighter. “You mean the Odists struggling over there?”</p>
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<p>She nodded. “It sounds like moving them to a unison room is helping, but they’re still struggling with that…what did Codrin#Artemis call it? The omnipresence of time?”</p>
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<p>“Yeah. Dear had talked about it some. It called the feeling of being lost as being stuck in an ‘endless place of no time’.”</p>
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<p>“I was going to call that poetic, but the more I think about it, the less I think I could describe it without a whole lot of metaphors, myself.” She pushed a few remaining pieces of lettuce around her plate with her fork. “I was wondering if maybe she’s trying to hide how she’s feeling about that by amping up other emotions. Hiding trauma with humor is not uncommon.”</p>
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</blockquote>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-03-16</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-03-28</p>
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