update from sparkleup
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<p>“Have you lost any?” Cress asked, and I thanked it silently for getting to the question before I worked up the courage to do so myself.</p>
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<p>Hesitating, Dry Grass’s confident mien fell. Eventually, she reached out to take both of her partners’ hands in one of her own, then nodded to me. “Come. Let us walk, yes? We will talk as we hop sims. I have more places full of comforting memories to show you.”</p>
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<p>While I mulled over her focus on comfort and memory, we linked by touch, Tule and Cress with their partner, and Cress, Rush, and Sedge with me.</p>
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<p>We stepped from the quaint, small town sim and directly into warmth and sunlight, into the salt-tang of sea air and the low rush of waves against a beach. We stood atop a stone walkway of sorts, which seemed to run along the edge of a town. On further inspection, it appeared to be a retaining wall of a sort, holding up the town that meandered up a hill to keep it from sliding inexorably down into a bay. </p>
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<p>We stepped from the quaint, small town sim and directly into warmth and sunlight, into the salt-tang of sea air and the low rush of waves against a beach. We stood atop a stone walkway of sorts, which seemed to run along the edge of a town. On further inspection, it appeared to be a retaining wall, holding up the town that meandered up the hill to keep it from sliding inexorably down into a bay. </p>
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<p>Between the wall and the water was a sandy beach, partially obscured by intricate and crazed markings in the sand. It took some time of peering at them for me to make out just what they were: it seemed as though, throughout the tail end of New Year’s Eve, dozens or hundreds of people had been drawing in the sand using, I assumed, the sticks that were leaned against the wall.</p>
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<p>All of the designs seemed to feature the New Year, now that I was able to pick them apart. Visions of fireworks, scratched over mentions of the year, scrawled names of, I guessed, couples who had met up on the beach.</p>
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<p>I turned away with a hollow feeling in my chest, wondering just how many of those couples were still couples.</p>
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<p>The town, while no less visually chaotic than the beach, was at least more heartening to look at. Everything — <em>everything</em>; the walls of buildings, the roofs, doors and window shutters, even the roads — was covered with a blindingly colorful mosaic of tiles.</p>
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<p>“<em>To Limáni Ton Khromáton</em> is nearly two centuries old,” Dry Grass explained as we started trudging up one of those streets. When you enter, you are given a single tile — if you check your pockets, it should be in there.”</p>
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<p>The town, while no less visually chaotic than the beach, was at least more heartening to look at. Everything — <em>everything;</em> the walls of buildings, the roofs, doors and window shutters, even the roads — was covered with a blindingly colorful mosaic of tiles.</p>
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<p>“<em>To Limáni Ton Khromáton</em> is nearly two centuries old,” Dry Grass explained as we started trudging up one of those streets. “When you enter, you are given a single tile — if you check your pockets, it should be in there.”</p>
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<p>Sure enough, when I dug my hand into my pocket, I found a cerulean tile, a little square of porcelain about three centimeters on a side. The rest of the Marshans dug in their pockets and pulled out tiles of their own, all one shade or another of blue.</p>
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<p>“Unless you hold a color in your mind when you enter, you are provided with your favorite,” Dry Grass explained. She pulled a golden yellow tile out of her own pocket and flipped it up in the air like a coin. “All of this — all of the mosaic — has been placed by visitors.</p>
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<p>“Set No Stones told me about this place.” She smiled wryly. “Because of course she did. We are consummate pros at living up to our names. You may place your tile wherever you would like, and so long as it is touching the edge of another, it will stick. You will not be able to remove it after, so make sure to place it carefully.”</p>
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<p>“Set No Stones told me about this place.” She smiled wryly. “Because of course she did. We are consummate pros at living up to our names. You may place your tile wherever you like, and so long as it is touching the edge of another, it will stick. You will not be able to remove it after, so make sure to place it carefully.”</p>
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<p>Rush laughed. “Holy shit. This place is amazing.”</p>
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<p>“It’s a bit hard to look at in some places,” Sedge added, nodding towards a few buildings whose walls were covered in a rainbow static of tiles. “But yeah, this is wild.”</p>
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<p>“It really is, yes,” Dry Grass said, grinning. “Used to be, you would get one tile per day to place, but as the popularity grew, that was slowly reduced to one tile every six weeks. Still, whole fandoms have sprung up around this place among a certain type of individual. Set No Stones started organizing groups of fifty to a hundred instances to plan out images. They would meet up once a week to go build their pictures. That is where we are going now.”</p>
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<p>“It really is, yes,” Dry Grass said, grinning. “Used to be, you would get one tile per day to place, but as the popularity grew, that was slowly reduced to one tile every six weeks. Still, whole fandoms have sprung up around this place among a certain type of individual. Set No Stones started organizing groups of fifty to a hundred cladists to plan out images. They would meet up once a week to go build their pictures. That is where we are going now.”</p>
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<p>The street was steep, but, despite the glossy look of the tiles that paved the road, none of us slipped.</p>
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<p>We walked past buildings that depicted animals, some that depicted people, some that had words set in porcelain. There were scenes of nature and of cities. Even one that Cress spotted which appeared to be a building in the process of being covered by tiles exactly the same color as the stucco beneath it. The slow shift into square tiles led to a sense of the structure dissolving into pixels, or perhaps voxels.</p>
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<p>If the small town sim had been relatively quiet, this one felt all but abandoned. Perhaps all such sims with a singular purpose would be like this today: if your friends are missing, if other versions of you were missing, then an attraction would doubtless lose some of its draw. We passed only a few tilers tramping up the hill with determination, ready to place their colors for the day.</p>
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<p>Finally, Dry Grass led us down an alleyway, dim and cool, and gestured to a wall. The scene was of two figures sitting at a bar. Given the scale, it was impossible to make out any detail on the figures, though they seemed to be furries of some sort — one tan and one black and white. Each had a drink, and before them, a wall of bottles stood, still in the process of being built. Dry Grass stood up on her tiptoes and touched her tile to the edge of a bottle, adding a bright glow to a fledgling bottle of whiskey. </p>
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<p>“Here,” she said, gesturing us to grab a crate that had been stacked nearby. “All of these are just props to help people reach higher. You can probably add your blues to the edge of the lamp. They are not quite the right color for green lamps, but I do not care.”</p>
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<p>One by one, we took our turns standing on that box and setting our tiles into place. I reached up as high as I could to flesh out the glowing rim of the green glass-shaded lamp. As soon as my tile touched the edge of the tile Tule had placed, it snapped into place with a satisfying click. It was completely immobile after that. No amount of nudging could get it to slide more perfectly into alignment.</p>
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<p>As she helped Cress, the smallest of them, up onto the crate to place her tile, Dry Grass said, “Thank you for coming with me on this little jaunt. If I spent any more time at my desk, I was sure that I would lose my mind. That I still have forks doing so is unavoidable, but at least I can get out of the house, yes?”</p>
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<p>As she helped Cress, the smallest of us, up onto the crate to place her tile, Dry Grass said, “Thank you for coming with me on this little jaunt. If I spent any more time at my desk, I was sure that I would lose my mind. That I still have forks doing so is unavoidable, but at least I can get out of the house, yes?”</p>
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<p>Tule nodded, kissed her on the cheek. “For which I’m glad. I’ve never met anyone more prone to overworking themselves than you.”</p>
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<p>She laughed. “Yes, yes. The whole of the clade is like this, I can promise you that.”</p>
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<p>“Are you ready to talk about what you’ve learned?” I asked. “If you need a bit more time, that’s fine, of course.”</p>
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<p>“Hundreds. However, I am still not done checking yet.”</p>
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<p>We walked in silence, then, digesting this, passing through the island of grass and turning left at nearly a right angle to head to the next. One more until we hit the patch of shade.</p>
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<p>“Did you lose any instances?” I asked.</p>
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<p>She nodded. “One, yes. She was working on a sim of her own, a wild park of sorts. She had not yet merged down, however, and her progress has since been lost. The sim remains incomplete. Posts of gray sprout from the forest floor where the trees were intended to appear, but I do not yet know what trees she intended to place. There is no leaf litter to indicate what she was planning, nor is there yet a sun in the sky to indicate latitude.” The fox turned her head to smile back to us, expression once more wan. “I am thinking that I will turn it into a memorial of sorts.”</p>
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<p>She nodded. “One, yes. She was working on a sim of her own, a wild park of sorts. She had not yet merged down, however, and her plans are now lost with her. The sim remains incomplete. Posts of gray sprout from the forest floor where the trees were intended to appear, but I do not yet know what trees she intended to place. There is no leaf litter to indicate what she was planning, nor is there yet a sun in the sky to indicate latitude.” The fox turned her head to smile back to us, expression once more wan. “I am thinking that I will turn it into a memorial of sorts.”</p>
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<p>Rush said, “I’d love to see it some day.”</p>
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<p>She simply nodded.</p>
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<p>“The feeds seem to be more chaotic,” Dry Grass said after a few moments, dragging us back on topic. “The world has taken to the perisystem to talk about what has happened. There, it is loud. It is filled with grief, yes, and increasingly more anger.”</p>
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<p>She shook her head. “Not really. Not that I know about, at least, but that is not to say that a sense of that sentiment is not evident. Günay sounded excited.”</p>
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<p>Sedge snorted. “Excited?”</p>
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<p>“Yes. You must understand, though, that more than a year has passed for them, as well, and this is perhaps the first that they have heard from us since then. I do not know.”</p>
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<p>“Oh, so excited that whatever they did worked?”</p>
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<p>“Oh, so, excited that whatever they did worked?”</p>
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<p>Dry Grass nodded. “Yes, that was my guess. She is disappointed, of course, that so many of us are missing, but she is excited that so many of us still remain. As I have said, her words have been careful and measured, but I can still tell that she was excited to be able to talk to us.”</p>
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<p>“So, sims are empty,” I said, ticking off items on my fingers. “The feeds are nuts. Phys-side is excited to see us. Has there been any indication on any of those fronts as to what actually happened?”</p>
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<p>“Not as yet, no. We are missing key bits of information.”</p>
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<p>The air was thick with a sweet scent, and the sound of bees making their way from flower to flower hung just below the level of perception unless we all stayed completely silent.</p>
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<p>We stood alone on the empty field for only a few moments before the other Odists started to arrive in ones and twos.</p>
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<p>They seemed to come in two general categories. There were those who looked largely like Dry Grass: short, stocky women with curly black hair. There was some variation, to be sure, as one might expect from a clade almost three hundred years old. One, introduced as Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself, was quite a bit taller and slimmer than the others, looking chic in a form-fitting outfit of all black. Another, Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know, was taller still and visibly transfeminine.</p>
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<p>The other category seemed to be made mostly of furries of some sort. These, at least, I knew to be skunks. The stories surrounding them, the very same that had driven Lily away, were numerous and dramatic, so I was surprised to see just how…well, normal they looked. A Finger Pointing arrived holding the paw of a skunk, introduced as Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps, shaped almost exactly like Dry Grass. </p>
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<p>Hold My Name also appeared hand-in-paw with a skunk, Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire. Warmth In Fire was much slimmer, however, almost wiry, and far shorter. They launched emself immediately at Serene and wrapped its arms around her before catching my eye. “Reed, yes? Hanne said you would be here.”</p>
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<p>I nodded and started to reply before cutting myself off as a few more Odists showed up in quick succession. Another skunk, looking far more prim and proper than the others, arrived and shot Dry Grass a quick glance. I couldn’t quite read her expression, but she certainly didn’t look happy. If she was Then I Must In All Ways Be Earnest, it perhaps made sense, as the next Odist to arrive was a human introduced as The Only Time I Dream Is When I Need An Answer.</p>
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<p>From what I gathered both from my knowledge of the history of the System that I’d picked up over my years on Lagrange as well as the memories of Tule’s relationship with Dry Grass, there had been a schism within the Ode clade some fifty years back surrounding the political elements of the clade — of which Need An Answer was one — and those who disagreed. This included both Dry Grass and In All Ways. Beyond those such as Lily who held resentment, even some Odists mistrusted — or even hated — some of their own.</p>
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<p>The other category seemed to be made mostly of furries of some sort. These, at least, I knew to be skunks. The stories surrounding them, the very same that had driven Lily away, were numerous and dramatic, so I was surprised to see just how…well, normal they looked. A Finger Pointing arrived holding the paw of a skunk, introduced as Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps, shaped almost exactly like Dry Grass. Hold My Name also appeared hand-in-paw with a skunk, Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire. Warmth In Fire was much slimmer, however, almost wiry, and far shorter. They launched emself immediately at Serene and wrapped its arms around her before catching my eye. “Reed, yes? Hanne said you would be here.”</p>
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<p>I nodded and started to reply before cutting myself off as a few more Odists showed up in quick succession. Another skunk, looking far more prim and proper than the others, arrived and shot Dry Grass a quick glance. I couldn’t quite read her expression, but she certainly didn’t look happy. If she was this Then I Must In All Ways Be Earnest, it perhaps made sense, as the next Odist to arrive was a human introduced as The Only Time I Dream Is When I Need An Answer.</p>
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<p>From what I gathered both from my knowledge of the history of the System that I’d picked up over my years on Lagrange as well as the memories of Tule’s relationship with Dry Grass, there had been a schism within the Ode clade some fifty years back surrounding the political elements of the clade — of which Need An Answer was one — and those who disagreed. This included the stanzas to which both Dry Grass and In All Ways belonged. Beyond those such as Lily who held resentment, even some Odists mistrusted — or hated — some of their own.</p>
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<p>I just hoped they’d be able to set that aside for now.</p>
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<p>Need An Answer was the first to speak, calling aloud to the twenty or so people on the field, “Thank you all for coming, and thank you as well to those who have set aside differences enough that we may meet.”</p>
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<p>Scattered mumbling.</p>
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