Cover Ideas

Front

• True Name tackling Answers Will Not Help while others jolt away

  During the conference, True Name tackles Answers Will Not Help, who is slowly losing her mind and has said the Name. Obviously, everyone is kind of freaked out by this, so they all jolt away from the action, meaning Codrin, Tycho, and Sarah jolting to the side and the Artemisians, if shown, jolting back.

• Ioan, May, End Waking, A Finger Pointing, and Douglas camping out

  Ioan and May visit End Waking’s forest along with A Finger Pointing and Douglas Hadje, where they eat a very good stew cooked over a campfire and share stories, guessing what the Artemisians are like and talking about why time skew sucks for Odists.

• Tycho and Stolon chatting in the sunny window

  Tycho and Stolon, as astronomers and fucking nerds, have a lot to talk about, so they take every chance they can get to steal some time away from the meetings and chat about stars. As a lizardy type, Stolon is fond of sunning themself, so they’ve found an alcove where they can do so on a windowsill.

• Emissaries’ dinner in Tycho’s sim

  Shortly after the list of emissaries are picked, they all gather along with Dear in Tycho’s sim for dinner. His sim is a mossy meadow in the midst of a ring of forest in the pacific northwest. It acts as a dark-sky sight for naked-eye astronomy, so it’s basically a forest at night. They have dinner in the field at a table with a single candle lighting them. It’d be pretty dark, but who knows, maybe it could work.

• Tycho and True Name talking in his sim — first time, second time

  Twice during the book, Tycho and True Name have a conversation in his sim, that same dark field. They use red-tinted flashlights to watch what they’re doing. During the first meeting, they keep them nearby and pointed towards them so that they can see each others’ expressions. During the second, they share champagne after the successful talks, though they do so mostly in the dark without the flashlights.

• Tycho watches news disseminate

  The Odists control when and how the news of the Artemisians arrival disseminates through they system. They do so by posting five articles to the equivalent of the ‘net, which are represented by five sheets of paper on a whiteboard. As the responses come in and more articles by others are posted, they are added below the first five and the relationships between articles tracked with marker on the whiteboard. A ton of articles come in, so the whiteboard grows upwards, and the Odists and Jonases watching the dissemination stand on air in front of the stuff they’re working on if it’s too high for them to reach.

• Tycho showing up at Dear/Codrin’s the first night

  After giving the go-ahead for the Artemisians to board, Tycho goes the first place he can think of to try and figure out what to do, which happens to be Dear’s house on the prairie.

• Codrin watching Sorina leave during sunrise

  Despite the fact that it would mean leaving behind eir partners, Codrin decides to send a fork to Artemis before it leaves, too. In order to try and leave the past behind without being too sad, the new instance decides to change as much as they can, winding up a shorter woman named Sorina wearing traditional Romanian garb (a white blouse with wide sleeves, embroidered at the cuffs and neckline, a plain white skirt, and a heavily embroidered fotă, a half-apron that covers the front and back of the skirt ref1 ref2). Codrin does this at sunrise in the prairie away from the house to keep from waking eir partners, and does it before they wake so that Sorina can leave before they learn of her, knowing that if she sticks around to say goodbye, she won’t be able to leave.

Back

Would like to keep the door imagery, preferring instances where someone is leaving rather than arriving

• Tycho leaving for Artemis through the Customs Office (This would involve Tycho leaving through a door, obviously, which I enjoy)

  At the end of the book, Tycho decides to join the Artemisians without leaving a fork of himself behind. Due to standard Odist bullshittery, the way to upload to Artemis is in a small building labeled ‘Customs’ that has clearly seen better days. Sticking out from the roof is an old radio antenna, one of those trapezoidal ones made with angle irons and painted red and white stripes with a blinking helicopter light on top. It is on a stone plaza in the Italian style, but just beyond it is a desert in the style of the Sahara.

• Ioan and May stepping to abandoned hike sim to talk about the Name (Doesn’t involve leaving through a door, but they are stepping into a sim)

  To avoid possible prying eyes, Ioan and May step away from home to an abandoned sim containing a mountain lake.

Descriptions

Dear

No change

Ioan Bălan

No change

Codrin Bălan

Similar to Ioan, more feminine features, longer hair kept in a braid, often wears a tunic and a sarong as a skirt, warm colors.

May Then My Name/True Name/skunk-type Odists

No change - ref

Tycho Brahe

Tall (6‘4” to Codrin’s 5‘10”), white, graying hair kept short, salt-and-pepper beard, well groomed, ~50s, wears flannel shirts and jeans

Sarah Genet

Tall (6’), straight gray hair kept no more than shoulder length, ~50s, dignified features, professional bearing, blouse and slacks

Iska

Basically a short (4’) anthro weasel, described as being the splitting image of Debarre

Stolon

very colorful lizard with scales that shine like an oil slick and a frill of feathers or elongated scales around the crown of their head

Turun Ko/Turun Ka

appear to be synthetic constructions that are equally comfortable on two or four legs with six-fingered hands and feet with two opposable thumbs and a thick tail for balance, analogous to a kangaroo

Artante Diria

appears almost human, though with their features much smoothed, epicanthic folds, pale skin, straight black hair