Motes played.
+She played in the dark. She played crawling on hands and knees. She played hide and seek. She played stealth missions. She played silently, muffling the sound of her passage and keeping her breathing quiet; it was against the rules to turn it off. She played base commander, repelling invisible foes, hollering out orders to her friends. She played noisily, her voice echoing off the rocky walls with laughter and shouts bouncing around seemingly endlessly.
+She played in Rock Park, a hulking mound of salmon, pink, gold, and buff flagstone that had been stacked in such a way as to create a series of twisty, narrow tunnels throughout. The tunnels turned sharply, or required her to climb up vague suggestions of ladders made by protruding slabs of rock, or dumped her down into a central cavern, the ground covered in a layer of velvety soft mulch to cushion any falls. The cavern that opened out on one end into a broader playground, all of the equipment themed to be related to a quarry: dump trucks and bucket hoists and front end loaders and excavators.
+She played throughout the rest of the park, hauling that mulch or digging into it with the equipment or her paws, putting those digger claws of hers to use. She played in the grass, played in the little stands of pine trees that dotted the field beyond, the two whitewashed gazebos. Sometimes there were roller-blades or bikes or skateboards. Sometimes there were self-propelled levitation boots that let you putter along at a few miles per hour a hand’s breadth above the ground and which would do all they could to keep you from falling over.
+She played with her friends. She played with strangers she had seen before yet never talked to. She played with those she saw once and then never saw again.
+She played until she got tired, until enough of her friends got bored and wandered off, until the long, breezy afternoon in this sim sighed its way into evening. She played until the obvious thing to do was to climb up to the top of the tunnel-ridden pile of flagstone to sit at the summit, enjoying the golden hour with Alexei.
+The park was only one part of a small town, only one part of a sizeable sim, but it was a popular destination for those who leaned into childhood on Lagrange for its permissive attitudes and curious inhabitants, most of whom seemed to be families — found or blood — and many of whom were the kids who played here. Alexei lived here with the family he had built: three guardians, one of whom was his great-grandfather by blood, and a sister.
+((Talk about where she was, etc))
+((Home, big dinner in the neighborhood, movie night))
+((Talk with Dry Grass))
+And then, when the movie was over and many of those in the community center had started to doze on their beanbags and couches, when Dry Grass fell asleep one too many times and begged off to go back home — not without yet another tight hug from Motes and a promise to be back — when Motes herself started to get sleepy, she disentangled herself from the rest of that dozy comfort and slipped out into the cool of the night.
+Rather than turning left off toward home, she turned right to the other arm of the ‘U’ that made up the neighborhood and started wandering through the grass until she hit the sidewalk. There, vines in chalk blossomed lazily behind her footsteps, and in the night, in the light of the stars and the moon and the streetlamps, they seemed to glow in pale oranges and whites and blues. She played with them by taking wobbling, drunken steps, crossing one leg in front of the other, pirouetting clumsily to make them tie themselves into knots.
+Even so, she continued down around the slow curve of the neighborhood’s main street, not bothering to venture into any of the cul-de-sacs. The chalk lines were fun, a little trail describing where the little skunk had wandered, but she was tired. It had been a long first day back as Little Motes, and she had successfully packed it to the brim with all that she had wanted to do, and that success gave to her a sense of rightness.
+It was a rightness of form — of species, of size, of appearance.
+It was a rightness of mindset — of play, of childlike wonder, of a recognition of who she was and who she had been and who she could become.
+She made it halfway around the bend, down to the very base of the ‘U’, and, following some whim, some spark of desire, darted back into the grass to race up the ladder of the jungle gym and launch herself down the slide with a shout. She tumbled off the end and into the gravel in an undignified, giggling heap.
+Motes played, because why should she not?