Ioan couldn’t guess why the two skunks had felt it was necessary, but ey needed something to try and blunt the edges of that anger that still spun within em. Ey wasn’t sure ey’d ever truly felt fury before, but it turned out that watching eir partner get struck across the face was a really, really good way to bring out the emotion.
Ey didn’t like it at all.
Once ey’d reached the bottom of eir glass, ey sighed and said, “Alright. What the hell was that about?”
-“Jonas felt the need to show a bit of muscle,” True Name said, voice flat. “He wanted to rub it in my face that he still has Zacharias in his pocket, that he knows where I am. I do not think he actually cared about asking me when we would meet, he was just making his leverage felt. I suspect he was planning on you two showing up, as well, now that I think about it.”
+“Jonas felt the need to show a bit of muscle,” True Name said, voice flat and dull. “He wanted to rub it in my face that he still has Zacharias in his pocket, that he knows where I am. I do not think he actually cared about asking me when we would meet, he was just making his leverage felt. I suspect he was planning on you two showing up, as well, now that I think about it.”
“Why?”
“To ensure that you also saw that power. If you two are to come to the meeting — as I think you must — then he wants you both to know that he will be there with a stacked deck.” She rubbed a paw up over her snout, adding, “I am sorry that you had to meet him.”
Ioan shook eir head. “Was he always such an asshole?”
@@ -127,7 +127,7 @@“It is at least partly my fault,” True Name said quietly. “One of the earliest individuals I pointed May Then My Name towards was, without either of us realizing, one of Jonas’s instances. He looked and spoke nothing like Jonas Prime, but was starting to get loud on the feeds. May Then My Name forked into a human form that we hoped would be appealing and became quite good friends with him, but I lost track of them both for several years. He stopped posting so much on the feeds, so I had little reason to worry about him, I thought.”
“You must understand, I was a very different person back then,” May mumbled. “This was systime 5. Back before I was…me.”
Ey frowned, but nodded for them to continue.
-“So, a few decades later,” True Name said. “Secession is done, the council is heading towards dissolution, and I am starting to relax. More friends from phys-side uploaded, more furries figured out how to exist within the System as they would like, and I started to meet more people outside work. One of them just happened to be this fantastically well-dressed fox who was just as witty as I felt. We became friends, then we became a bit more.” She shrugged. “That instance of Jonas had…well…”
+“So, a few decades later,” True Name said. “Secession is in the past, the council is heading towards dissolution, and I am starting to relax. More friends from phys-side uploaded, more furries figured out how to exist within the System as they would like, and I started to meet more people outside work. One of them just happened to be this fantastically well-dressed fox who was just as witty as I felt. We became friends, then we became a bit more.” She shrugged. “That instance of Jonas had…well…”
“Twisted. He twisted my fork into something that neither the me of today nor the me back then would have agreed to.” May said bitterly and wiped at her face. “He turned that version of me into a way of influencing True Name.”
“Yes. It was a long game. He drifted in and out of my life, over the centuries, and then, shortly before Launch, he showed up again and we began to get close. A few years after Launch, they took me out to dinner and dropped the whole thing on me all at once. I am told they did the same on each of the LVs as well, just with different framing.”
Eir head was swimming at the flood of information, and when rubbing eir face didn’t work to clear it, ey willed the drunkenness away and waved a glass of ice water into being. “Which I don’t get. Why are you so overwhelmed here and not on the LVs?”
@@ -147,7 +147,7 @@Still grinning, True Name nodded. “That is quite enough of the topic, yes. I am going to go outside for a bit and then I am going to go to bed.”