114 lines
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114 lines
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<title>Zk | 018</title>
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<h1>Zk | 018</h1>
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<p>A dull clang rang out from the dim light of the stage, followed by a sickening thump. The girl, looking no older than fifteen, sprawled, limp and bloodied, unconscious on parquet. A person stood over her, breathing heavily, spittle flecking their lips and madness in their eyes. They let out a feral scream and leapt high in the air, a length of pipe held over their head and brought it down with all of their might.</p>
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<p>Right as it was about to land, the lights went out, leaving the entire auditorium from stage to doors in pitch black. In the darkness, the last of the shout was punctuated with another clang, a horrible crunch.</p>
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<p>The play continued from there. The police showed up. The investigation was swift and decisive. The arrest was made. All of this in utter darkness.</p>
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<p>Even at the scene change, though, as the lights came back up, as the foyer disappeared and was replaced with a courtroom done up all in wood, the scene for the rest of the performance, the puddle of blood remained on the floor, untouched and glinting in the stage-lights.</p>
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<p>At first, I thought it must have been a mistake, some stagehand forgetting to clean up the mess. As the play continued, though, it became increasingly clear that this was intentional. The attorneys deftly avoided stepping in the puddle, never looking at it. The judge never looked at it. The jury never looked at it. Neither did the bailiff or any of the witnesses.</p>
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<p>The perpetrator, however, couldn’t seem to keep their eyes off it. Even as they were brought to the stand, even as they rambled, nigh-incoherently, in response to the whys and hows that the prosecutors threw at them, their gaze never left the blood, still untouched, unsmeared except for where the victim’s body had pushed it. Even as flashbacks played in reverse chronological order, from the police’s investigation to the murder, to the point at which the perpetrator had first met the victim early in their childhood, all taking place in a feathered spotlight behind the prowling lawyers with the rest courtroom dimmed, they stared, eyes wide. Their expression was at times hungry, at times mournful, but always keenly focused.</p>
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<p>As the play drew up to the climax, as the attacker was convicted and condemned to live forever, mouldering in some dark cell, they at last darted around the defense’s table, hands still cuffed before them, and collapsed, laughing and sobbing in equal measure, above the pool of blood, smearing it on their hands, over their face and clothes. “I did it!” they howled. “I fucking did it <em>and it didn’t mean a fucking thing!</em>“</p>
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<p>We were once more dropped into utter blackness, treated to nearly five minutes more of wails and screeches, giggles and sobs, laughter and half-words, all slowly fading to silence.</p>
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<p>The analogy was clear — almost ham fisted — and it left my stomach churning. It left a lump in my throat and a hotness on my face. It left me sobbing. Me and so many others in the audience, from what I saw when the lights came back up. Each seat had a cone of silence above it, preventing me from hearing anyone else. Beside me, Dry Grass had started crying from the beginning and hadn’t lifted her head from her arms folded on the small table before us throughout the entire performance.</p>
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<p>The auditorium, full at the start, was half-empty by the end, so many of the audience members having left in disgust or pain. Günay, who had uploaded not two weeks prior, left before the stage went dark.</p>
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<p>But now it was over and the house lights were coming back up, illuminating the two score crescent moon tables scattered through the room, the remaining audience sitting behind them in comfortable chairs. I stayed beside Dry Grass, rubbing her back gently as she worked to get her emotions under control. The audience filed out slowly while a few techs tore down the stage, gesturing at various props and the like, which either blipped out of existence or floated back into storage on their own. The blood on the stage was, thankfully, in the former category.</p>
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<p>Dry Grass, now leaning back in her chair and breathing in deliberate calm, and I watched as as a bundle of black and white fur sprinted across the stage and hurled itself out into the audience, making as much of a bee-line for us as was possible with the tables in the way.</p>
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<p>Swivelling her chair toward the hurtling skunk, Dry Grass threw her arms wide, letting Motes leap into them.</p>
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<p>“Dry Grass Dry Grass Dry Grass!”</p>
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<p>“Motes!” She pushed the skunk — who looked to be no more than ten, despite being the same three hundred odd years old as Dry Grass — away from her enough to meet her gaze. “You stupid…awful…” She fell to crying, clutching Motes to her front once again.</p>
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<p><em>“That means I did a good job!”</em> the skunk sent via a sensorium message as she rested her head over her cocladist’s shoulder, grinning at me.</p>
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<p>I shook my head in disbelief and leaned forward to pat her gently between the ears.</p>
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<p>After another minute or so, Dry Grass carefully swiveled around to face me, looking over Motes’s shoulder in turn. “This little asshole <em>knows</em> I hate it when she does those scenes.”</p>
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<p>The skunk squirmed about in her arms until she was sitting sideways in her lap. “I did not know you were here!” she countered. “That would not have changed the show, but I still did not know, or I would have warned you to arrive late.”</p>
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<p>Dry Grass took the chance to wipe her face with a napkin swiped from the table. “I would have appreciated that, yes.”</p>
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<p>“You would have hated the original all the more! Ioan wrote it so that my body was supposed to stay on the stage instead of just the blood. When I said I wanted the part, ey changed it to be just the blood, even though it took some creative work with gravity.”</p>
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<p>I glanced back to the stage, realizing that it was actually canted toward the audience by a few degrees. Enough that we could clearly see the surface of the stage — back to a matte black instead of the parquet that had been there before — without it being so unnerving as to make us feel like we were going to fall towards it, or that the actors were going to fall into the audience.</p>
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<p>“You are right,” Dry Grass was saying, straightening out Motes’s shirt and overalls, both of which were thoroughly stained with paint. “I would have hated that even more. I did not even see the rest of the play, skunklet. I put my head down and turned down my hearing.”</p>
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<p>“Aw!”</p>
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<p>“It was pretty good,” I admitted. “I can tell you about it later.”</p>
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<p>“No, I will read it on my own at some point when I am calmer.” Dry Grass nodded toward the stage. “But look, A Finger Pointing and Beholden.”</p>
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<p>The two Odists — one tall, slender, and human, the other a shorter, softer skunk — made their way far more sedately toward our table. They walked arm in arm, leaning affectionately against each other, each carrying a drink in their free hand and paw.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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<p><em>A Finger Pointing greets the group. She knows Motes and Dry Grass, of course, but has been slowly getting to know Reed, who she had met once or twice through Sedge, but who she has seen several times since the attack, now that Reed is palling around with Dry Grass. We can play with how they interact.</em></p>
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<p><em>Meanwhile Beholden beckons some chairs over from the adjacent table so they can all have a seat and chat in comfort, and asks what Reed has been up to.</em></p>
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</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I sighed, leaning forward to grab my drink off the bar before settling back in my chair. I was glad I’d gone for a wine rather than anything fizzy. My throat still felt raw from the crying. “I’m doing okay, I think. The play was…a lot.”</p>
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<blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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<p><em>Some banter about the play. Motes is proud, Beholden asks about the sound design while in the dark. How does Pointillist feel?</em></p>
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</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
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<p>“I guess part of why it hit me so hard was because I heard back from Marsh#Castor today.”</p>
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<p>“Oh, Reed,” Dry Grass said, leaning over to squeeze my hand. “Do you want to talk about it?”</p>
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<p>“Actually, I was hoping I could get your opinion on some of it, if you don’t mind,” I said, looking to the others.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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<p><em>They all say yes. Doesn’t have to be in depth, but it’s an opportunity to show personality differences.</em></p>
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<p>“Alright, thanks. I’ll just read it to you, it’s fairly short.” Feeling a little silly just staring off into space to read, I summoned up the letter on a sheet of paper and began to read.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Reed,</p>
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<p>Words cannot express how glad I am to hear from you! Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard that they were finally on track to start bringing Lagrange back online, and then we finally got the notice that the System had finally come back up and that they’d gotten the non-recoverable losses down to 1%. We had a small party here with all the Marshans here — there’s a new one, by the way, Hyacinth. They’ll write you their own letter.</p>
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<p>We weren’t the only ones, either. Every one of us was invited to no less than three other parties celebrating the news. You may be out of reach for those of us on the launches, but we do still love you all, and deeply. Thinking we’d lost you for good was one hell of a way to prove that to ourselves.</p>
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<p>Over the next week, we started to hear from more and more people as news of their clades back on Lagrange began to trickle in. Most of those we talked to spoke of losses of tracking or tasked instances. No small pain, of course, as some of those tracking instances were tracking things like relationships, but a few days later, we heard an instance of first one missing cladist, then another. A friend we made after Launch was inconsolable after learning that he just no longer existed on Lagrange in any form. He had had a clade of two, and both were wiped out, plus all three of their tasked instances. The Arondight clade on Lagrange is no more.</p>
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<p>Our anxiety began to grow without hearing from you. We knew you were busy, at least: news of Sedge working as hard as she was reached even us in those first days. Still, I wish you’d written sooner.</p>
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<p>To finally get a letter that said that I was dead, however, made me feel in a way I can’t even begin to describe. I was sad, because of course I was — someone I knew and talked with with some regularity was now dead. I was stunned, because of course I was — the disaster was now very immediate and real, affecting my own clade.</p>
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<p>But what am I to do with the knowledge that it was specifically me that was dead? You live on, as do Lily and Cress, Rush and Sedge and Tule, but the root of your clade is now gone. You’re now six instead of seven. You’re now a clade without a root instance. <em>We’re</em> a clade without a root instance. I exist, sure, as does Marsh#Pollux,but our down-tree does not. We came from them, didn’t we?</p>
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<p>Here I went on for some length about what it must mean for a clade to be without a root, about how you’re now three completely separate clades, unrelated. That’s still true, in a way. It’s true in the clade sense, in the <em>tree</em> sense, but apparently no longer in the mechanical sense. This cross-tree merging! It sounds like it’s going to change everything. No more merging down only. ‘Cross-tree’ means less now; sure, there’s the lack of shared memory, but no longer are they out of reach of merging.</p>
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<p>I don’t blame you at all for what you all did to create Anubias. I know that it hurt Vos and Pierre, and I hope that, some time in the future, they can bring themselves to forgive you. But honestly, I would have done the same. I would’ve done everything in my power to reach for some bit of the old to bring back to life. I know that Anubias is <em>not</em> me, that they can never be the root of the clade, but you did what you felt you had to to try and make your lives more complete.</p>
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<p>I hope there are more letters on the way, but please write me as soon as you get this. You’ll have had eight months of getting used to life without our root instance. You’ll have had eight months without Marsh, and I want to know how it feels. I want to know how to get over this very real, but very strange grief.</p>
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<p>Until then, you all have all our love. I’m glad to hear that, even in the midst of this, that love is still a thing and that you and Dry Grass are getting closer. Keep yourselves safe, and stay in touch. We’ll do the same.</p>
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<p>Marsh#Castor</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>When I finished reading, our little crowd sat in silence, each thinking their own thoughts.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<blockquote>
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<p><em>What do the others think of this? We can write plenty here, but it will likely be boiled down to one descriptive sentence per person.</em></p>
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</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I, for my part, mostly just looked down at the paper, just as I had done for much of the day already.</p>
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<p>“Well, first, I would like to hear how you feel, my dear,” Dry Grass said. “We all have our thoughts on the matter, I am sure, but before we taint yours, tell us how you feel.”</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p><em>Here, we get to go wild. Points to tackle:</em></p>
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<ul>
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<li><em>How are the Odists grieving? Beckoning and Muse are eight months gone, In The Wind is gone, No Longer Myself and Should We Forget are gone. How is the clade feeling?</em></li>
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<li><em>How do they relate to the Marshans, being two clades without root instances? How did they move forward after Michelle’s death? What anxieties came up that are the same or different from the Marshans’ anxieties?</em></li>
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<li><em>How are they dealing with the advent of cross-tree merges? Has Pointillist come up with her Michelle plan yet? Have they started resolving conflicts through merges? I imagine the Odists are likely to be at the forefront of changes.</em></li>
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</ul>
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<p><em>These can be tackled in any order, but this point should be last:</em></p>
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<ul>
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<li><em>What hopes do they have for Lagrange going forward? What’s exciting to them about this return to life?</em></li>
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</ul>
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</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-12-28</p>
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