“It is, is it not?”
“Is she talking your ear off, Reed?” came a familiar voice from behind us.
“Oh, absolutely,” Dry Grass replied, turning and leaning up to give Cress a kiss on its cheek. “How are you feeling, loves?”
-“Terrible,” Tule said cheerfully. “All my emotions are wrong. I’m jittery and tired and I want to get another few hours of sleep but feel guilty every time I lay down.”
+“Terrible,” Tule said cheerfully. They had apparently collected Rush and Sedge before arriving, as all four of stood in almost identical postures, each holding their coffees in their right hand — just, I realized, as I was doing. “All my emotions are wrong. I’m jittery and tired and I want to get another few hours of sleep but feel guilty every time I lay down.”
I laughed. “Yeah, that sounds about right. I keep feeling like I’m having the wrong sort of reaction to all of this.”
“When was the last true trauma that befell the Marshans?” Dry Grass asked, smiling gently. “I imagine it was before you uploaded, yes?”
A moment of silence followed.
@@ -137,11 +137,14 @@ Meanwhile, on the walls and roads and roofs and floors of the village, a mosaic Something about the ephemerality of the sand and the permanence of the tile speaks to me, and both the food and company are a delight. I have been dipping in and out for about 70 years now, and it is always a pleasure to see old faces, and new ones come to draw in the sand, or maybe place their first tile, or simply looking for a place to relax and sip some wine. I cannot recommend it enough! --> -While I mulled over her focus on comfort and memory, we linked up hands, Tule and Cress with their partner, and me with Cress.
+While I mulled over her focus on comfort and memory, we linked up hands, Tule and Cress with their partner, and me with Cress, Rush, and Sedge.
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.
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, dozens or hundreds of people had been drawing in the sand using, I assumed, the sticks that were leaned against the wall.
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.
I turned away with a hollow feeling in my chest, wondering just how many of those couples were still couples.
+The town, while no less visually chaotic than the beach, was at least more heartening to look at. Everything — everything; the walls of buildings, the roofs, doors and window shutters, even the roads — was covered with a blindingly colorful mosaic of tiles.
+“It 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.”
+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. Both Tule and
(tile sim - talking about current status of the numbers)
(Serene’s swamp - talking about the current response out in the world)
(dandelion field - talking about the Odists, one loss, End Of Endings, though still checking on those who have left the clade, of which there are now a few, no word on E.W.)
@@ -149,7 +152,7 @@ Something about the ephemerality of the sand and the permanence of the tile spea((After Dry Grass leaves, Reed goes to talk with Lily))