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<title>Zk | 007</title>
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<h1>Zk | 007</h1>
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<h1 id="a-finger-pointing-2362">A Finger Pointing — 2362</h1>
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<p>A Finger Pointing was not playing.</p>
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<p>She was not fucking around. She was not putting up with this. She would never put up with this, never should have put up with this. Seven years of silence, five decades of barely concealed spying, a century of awkward attempts to maintain a friendship, a cohesion, a sense of community with someone who clearly loathed some integral part of her life.</p>
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<p>She was not going to play around, here. She was not going to play soft. She was not going to play hard. She was not going to play at all, not with Hammered Silver, not anymore.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p><strong>To:</strong> Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself of the Ode clade <strong>(EYES-ONLY)</strong> <br />
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<strong>From:</strong> Memory Is A Mirror Of Hammered Silver of the Ode clade<br />
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<strong>On:</strong> systime 238+291</p>
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<p>Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself,</p>
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<p>I am breaking my communication embargo to write you regarding some concerns that I have on the current state of the clade, the fifth stanza, and And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights.</p>
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<p>Upon learning that I Remember The Rattle Of The Dry Grass has continued in her association with you, And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights, and the one who has named herself Sasha, I have instituted a no-contact order between her and the rest of the sixth stanza for her perfidy. It was my hope that my previous directive regarding the fifth stanza would have been clear enough to require no further clarification, and yet this is the situation that we have found ourselves in.</p>
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<p>This letter serves as a means to reinforce that this no-contact order still stands. That I even need to send such a reminder is upsetting and insulting. I have sent a letter to And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights explaining my reasoning more clearly for someone who seems obstinately opposed to staying grounded to reality. I will reiterate the status of this request here for clarity:</p>
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<ol>
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<li>There is to be no contact between the fifth stanza and either the sixth or seventh stanzas.</li>
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<li>There is to be no contact between the one who has named herself Sasha and either the sixth or seventh stanzas.</li>
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<li>There is to be no contact between I Remember The Rattle Of Dry Grass and the rest of the sixth stanza until further notice.</li>
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</ol>
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<p>I expect better from Odists. Perhaps my expectations are misguided.</p>
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<p>— Memory Is A Mirror Of Hammered Silver of the Ode clade.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<hr />
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<p>Some treacherously sunny afternoon some centuries back, Sasha/Michelle Hadje sat tiredly on the edge of a fountain in the middle of a brick-paved pedestrian mall. Just a woman or a skunk or perhaps both sitting on the rough stone in classical white, head bowed in concentration as the sun warmed the back of her neck. Beside her sat a man, a politician, watching as she drained her reserves of reputation to bring into being ten more instances of herself, each blissfully unafflicted by the restlessness-of-shape and in many ways less affected by the restlessness-of-mind that plagued her.</p>
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<p>“So, what next?” the man asked.</p>
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<p>“What is next is that I get assignments from the Council and then take a fucking vacation,” she replied. “I plan on sleeping for at least three days straight.”</p>
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<p>He laughed. “I wholeheartedly endorse this course of action. One of you want to take on an assignment today?”</p>
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<p>They — this gaggle of skunks and women who were still in some way skunks — put their heads together to discuss, and even then, even so few minutes after they had come into being, taken for their names the first lines of the ten stanzas of a poem each held close to their heart, it became clear that they differed in some fundamental way that went beyond simple individuation.</p>
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<p>Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself, the woman who bore the first line of the fifth stanza for a name, had lived through this four times, enough times to know just what had been done, for had she not been Michelle/Sasha for the first four first lines coming into being?</p>
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<p>Sasha/Michelle had sat on the rim of the fountain and looked out on the world with tired eyes and wondered at the simple beauty of Old Town Square, the brick pavers and the gas lamps and the twee shops, and forked her first long-lived instance, I Am At A Loss For Images In This End Of Days of the Ode clade.</p>
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<p>Michelle/Sasha had remembered a day two decades back when she had sat on the rim of a fountain not so different from this one, sat beside an erstwhile partner who made such a better friend than lover that they remained in love in friendship in their own gentle way until ey had given emself to the act of creation, and forked into her second long-lived instance, Life Breeds Life But Death Must Now Be Chosen.</p>
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<p>Sasha/Michelle had thought of their conversation together, those two better-friends-than-lovers, about some musical her grandparents had taken her to for her birthday, how she had sung out of key, <em>“Oh, my Rivkah, where have you gone?”</em> and then hid her face behind her coffee cup, and forked off her third long-lived instance, Oh, But To Whom Do I Speak These Words.</p>
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<p>Michelle/Sasha had smiled at the memories of how she had, despite her poor attempt at expressing the joy of that song, gushed about nearly every aspect of the production, the use of projectors to add a visual dreaminess to the stage, the subtle use of props as percussion instruments, and forked again into her fourth long-lived instance, Among Those Who Create Are Those Who Forge.</p>
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<p>And at last, Sasha/Michelle remembered how, even after she fell silent, she and her friend had sat in the glow of the sun, thinking about just how wonderful a time she had had — her directly, her friend in compersion — seeing so complete an experience of a well-produced musical, and forked into her, into Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself.</p>
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<p>She was forked smiling.</p>
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<p>And so when this man, this politician, this Jonas asked who wanted an assignment, she had decided instead to linger in that joy, to remember that lovely day instead of searching for some way to reengage with politics. That was left to The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream, the first line of the eighth stanza. She did not know what compelled True Name to lean into politics as she had been forked after A Finger Pointing, but she wished her all the best.</p>
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<p>When Michelle/Sasha stood at last, swaying, and tottered towards the remainder of her newly-formed clade, each bearing in their heart some secret, individual joy bestowed upon them by their tired creator, they had all welcomed her into their presence as a first-among-equals and bore her away to home, to her field of grass and dandelions.</p>
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<p>What followed was a conversation that lasted until dusk. Each of them minus True Name, already at work, talked about the experience of coming into being, the experience of being settled firmly into one shape unlike their root instance, about the things that they loved and what they might do with that love.</p>
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<p>They had not existed for a day and yet A Finger Pointing still loved them each and loved them all together.</p>
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<p>She learned of all of their different focuses and kept them straight in her head that she might know them better later, but also she watched how each of them moved, how each of them acted. She kept in mind all that they talked about so that she might share it with True Name.</p>
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<p>Hammered Silver was, there. She was the one who, after Sasha/Michelle had tired of walking and requested to sit down, had offered her lap as a pillow that she might dote on her down-tree. There was such love in her eyes, such maternal love, for this woman who was at once herself and not. She did not smile, but cooed in concern as a mother might to some crying child. A Finger Pointing made note of this, too, for, yes, she also felt that concern, but also to see such in someone so like herself was a joy in its own right.</p>
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<p>From that point on, A Finger Pointing made herself the glue of this growing clade. She would share weekly or monthly lunches and dinners with each, keeping up with them via letters and, once they were implemented, sensorium messages. Even as her smile remained or veered towards a smirk or wily grin, even as her opinions on each of her cocladists grew more complicated, watching burgeoning loves and animosities, she kept in touch.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>Yes, there were steps that she needed to take. There were ways that she needed to keep herself safe. There were ways that those who above all else she loved might come to harm and she need to keep them safe as well. She needed to ensure their safety even above her own.</p>
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<p>((Sasha and Dry Grass))</p>
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<hr />
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<p>To fall in love with a cocladist is to engage in a radical form of self-love. To fall in love with a cocladist is to find a way that perhaps you <em>are</em> your type. To fall in love with a cocladist is to accept that you are large; you contain multitudes. To fall in love with your cocladist is to recognize that your hyperfixations define, in part, your sense of self, and that if you expand beyond one, then perhaps you are more than just one self.</p>
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<p>A Finger Pointing forked all nine of her up-tree instances in systime 3, back in the early days when it still cost to fork. She had plans, though, and she had a way around those costs. She forked once, leaving her and her new instance with half of her original reputation, less than it would cost to fork again, and then her new instance simply granted the reputation back to her, enough to fork once more. She had a way around those costs, for in those days, back before the reputation market had patched out that particular glitch, her up-tree instances did not need reputation beyond hers. She had plans. She had ideas for her particular joy. She would lean into theatre, build up a troupe made up of just herself, for surely there were ten roles that needed to be filled in running a theatre.</p>
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<p>There was her, the executive director and administrator.</p>
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<p>There was That It Might Give The World Orders, the director.</p>
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<p>There was The World Is An Audience Before A Stage, the educator within and without.</p>
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<p>There was Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress, the script manager and librarian.</p>
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<p>There was And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights, the set and prop designer.</p>
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<p>There was Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps, the sound and music director.</p>
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<p>There was If I Walk Backward, Time Moves Forward, who explored interactivity in art.</p>
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<p>There was If I Walk Forward, Time Rushes On, the dancer and choreographer. </p>
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<p>There was If I Stand Still, The World Moves Around Me, the stage manager who dabbled in lights.</p>
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<p>There was And The Only Constant Was Change, an actor with a penchant for death scenes and just plain strange bird.</p>
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<p>And they all acted, and they all promoted, and they all taught and helped as techs and loved each other. They were all hedonists, to the last, because A Finger Pointing was a hedonist, one who wanted to enjoy life to the fullest and to be everybody’s friend.</p>
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<p>She spent time with them all, yes, but the benefit of diving deep into music is that Beholden began to seek out live shows and concerts, and so when A Finger Pointing spent time with her, they became events. They started to veer perilously close to dates.</p>
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<p>At some point, though they disagreed on when — was it five years later? Ten? Each argued passionately for one, and then the other — they <em>became</em> dates.</p>
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<p>There was sense of aromancy in A Finger Pointing that grew after she forked. <!-- Discuss --> She never could say where from; perhaps it was simply that she would rather have been friends with anyone than foster a particular friendship with one person. And yet there was something about Beholden. Something fulfilling, perhaps, or complementary, or a self-love that rose above others.</p>
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<p>And so they fell in love, each in their own way. They fell in love and, for the most part, reveled. Yes, they had their spats. Yes, they had their flings besides, and the occasional relationship, all negotiated and cherished and bound up in compersion. But yes, they had each other.</p>
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<p>There was, of course, the social implications to consider, the taboo around intraclade relationships, the implications of narcissism and other, far more crass terms. Suggestions were made from on high, such as it were, from across the clade.</p>
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<p>True Name suggested. She suggested that, as pleased as she was for them, their relationship remain something for behind closed doors. Something where they kept their I-love-yous and kisses for a shared bed rather than out on the town or at however many gatherings they might wish to go to. Politics was, as ever, politics, and here are the political reasons laid bare.</p>
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<p>Hers were the kind suggestions. The comprehensible suggestions. The ones based in logic and explained clearly: maintaining a sense of taboo in what was quickly becoming a queer-normative society added to the desire for change. Comprehensible, yes; the logic was sound, internally consistent. Wrong, of course, but if such was to be the way of things, then so be it.</p>
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<p>Other suggestions: not so kind.</p>
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<p>For there was Hammered Silver, strangely quiet during one of A Finger Pointing’s many lunch dates with her. Quiet and distant, all conversation polite and full of nothing comments about the sim, the salad, the coffee, all gazes cast upon everything but her.</p>
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<p>When pressed, she had simply shrugged and offered some plainly false words about being distracted. </p>
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<p>A Finger Pointing hardly needed to wait for some explanation more true, for when she arrived home — home to that apartment building, home to the simple and cozy unit that Beholden had only moved into a few weeks prior — there was an envelope waiting for her, taped unceremoniously to her door. In it were words of scorn, a sense of a nose pointed snootily up into the air as though to escape some rancid smell.</p>
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<p>Did she not know what she was doing? Did she — A Finger Pointing! One of the first lines! — not consider the optics of an intraclade relationship for the rest of her stanza? The rest of the clade? Really, <em>the</em> A Finger Pointing ought to know better.</p>
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<p>It was the first letter of several. It was the first time of many that she stood stock still, seethed, and counted to ten before opening her door to greet Beholden — her partner regardless of Hammered Silver’s haughty implications — with her usual smile once more firmly in place.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>((Waking World and Dry Grass))</p>
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<hr />
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<p>Letter after letter, topic after topic. They became rote. They became routine. They became a signature of Hammered Silver after every little decision that A Finger Pointing made which did not meet her standards. Every little decision that <em>anyone</em> made, if what True Name and Praiseworthy had to say was true.</p>
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<p>And it was not just her, after all, was it?</p>
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<p>For better or worse, she was the representative of her stanza. She was a synecdoche for it: she <em>was</em> the fifth stanza. Anything that the stanza did, whether as a whole or individually, she would hear about through those tetchy letters, those little missives Hammered Silver saw fit to send her. </p>
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<p>A note here: <em>Surely The Only Constant can find some less dramatic way to depict death on stage; has ey no thought for how that might reflect on the rest of us as so public a clade?</em></p>
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<p>A message there: <em>Beholden To The Flow Of The Crowds was seen punching someone at The Party. I would ask that you inform her of our standards of behavior.</em></p>
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<p>It became something of a joke — granted, mostly to herself, for she rarely shared any of these messages with others. Even True Name thought less of optics than Hammered Silver. Even the politician! These notes began to feel like letters to the editor for some small-town newspaper: semi-public complaints about propriety that left a sour whiff of entitlement in the air behind them.</p>
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<p>And yet their apparent friendship continued. Somehow, against all odds, they continued to meet weekly for years, for decades. They would find some dainty cafe in an equally dainty neighborhood in the middle of some enormous city serving wine and sandwiches on baguettes. They would find some twee farm stand in the middle of millions of acres of carefully curated land serving the best fucking salad either of them had ever tasted. They would stand in the middle of nowhere, some flat plane of an unfinished sim with a single, incredibly detailed tree right in the ‘middle’ of all that nothing, with lunches they packed for the occasion.</p>
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<p>They would meet up and they would talk, and A Finger Pointing would swallow enough of her frustration with the letters to maintain this friendship without compromising her morals.</p>
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<p>But at some point, even the closest of friendships find a point of irreconcilable difference. There is a point at which there is now way to agree upon a topic, and one must choose: do we agree to disagree? Do we argue forever and hate it? Do we argue forever and turn it into a cherished pastime? Do we simply part ways? Even the closest of friendships must make this decision.</p>
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<p>Theirs was not the closest of friendships.</p>
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<p>One day, sometime late in the 2100s or early 2200s, sometime systime 100, there was a point where the tenor of these meetings once more changed. Once more, there was a distance, a stiffness, and when pressed, once more nothing came from it.</p>
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<p>No letter came.</p>
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<p>The next meeting was much the same.</p>
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<p>No letter came.</p>
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<p>The next meeting was canceled: “I am not feeling well.” </p>
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<p>Fair enough, there were days when A Finger Pointing did not feel well, were there not? Sickness, a thing of the past, nonetheless still appeared psychosomatically, or perhaps Hammered silver was going through one of the spells each of the Odists had been left with, those little bits of overflowing when being oneself became too much and overrode whatever it meant to exist and the world was too noisy to see and too bright to hear. Perhaps Hammered Silver was overflowing.</p>
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<p>The next meeting was canceled: “I am still unwell.” Well, okay. At times The Only Constant would be taken out for weeks at a time, desperately clinging to life despite death a thing of the past. A Finger Pointing sent a get-well-soon note and a dichroic rose to her home sim.</p>
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<p>The next meeting was canceled, and this time, the note was: “I have a prior engagement.”
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This was bullshit, patented and trademarked, registered as a copyright and service mark. A prior engagement, indeed! Did she think that A Finger Pointing was a brand new upload? Did she think that her cocladist was really so stupid? The Odists! The Odists not forking! Were Hammered Silver a member of the tenth stanza — were Hammered Silver actually Death Itself, that most lovely of people — perhaps she could understand, but she was not. She was not! Hammered Silver had laughed countless times before over the sudden disappearance of the need to worry about ‘prior engagements’.</p>
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<p>A Finger Pointing knew this was bullshit, and she also knew that Hammered Silver knew this, knew that she knew it was bullshit.</p>
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<p><em>“Hammered Silver, my dear, I would rest much easier if I knew what was happening,”</em> she sent over a sensorium message.</p>
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<p>The reply: <em>“Oh, you know how it goes. One simply overbooks oneself. Let us meet next week at the usual time, yes?”</em></p>
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<p>And so she agreed, and so at last they met, and once more there was a stiffness and closed off nature about Hammered Silver.</p>
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<p>“Okay, Hammered Silver,” she said, sitting back with her tiny (and frankly far too bitter) espresso in hand. “I really would like to know what it is that is happening. Often, there have been chilly moments between us, but rarely one so enduring or one that includes avoiding each other.”</p>
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<p>“Really, my dear, it is nothing,” Hammered Silver said. “I was feeling unwell, and then I had a prior engagement.”</p>
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<p>“And the meetings before?”</p>
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<p>Hammered Silver only looked out the window, expression blank, unreadable.</p>
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<p>“Hammered Silver,” A Finger Pointing said gently, putting every ounce of gentle earnestness, soft coaxing, heartfelt concern into her voice that she could manage. “If you were feeling unwell, I wish that I had been able to in some way help.”</p>
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<p>No answers were forthcoming.</p>
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<p>She ran through recent events in her mind and, finding nothing, began to run through events from months past, the last year.</p>
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<p>Ah.</p>
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<p>“This is about Motes, then?”</p>
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<p>The wrinkle that appeared dead center between Hammered Silver’s eyebrows made a rather efficient reply.</p>
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<p>A Finger Pointing sighed. “Please, my dear. I would love to be able to address your concerns about Motes, but I cannot do so unless you tell me what they are.”</p>
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<p>And so she did. She laid out several points about what she felt described Motes’s behavior as inappropriate. The lack of children on the System. The existence of pedophilia. The accusations that Lagrange had been a haven for pedophiles. The reception that others who presented themselves as children had received. Point after point after point.</p>
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<p>They all boiled down to yet more of the same. Optics and optics and optics. Even True Name thought less about optics than Hammered Silver.</p>
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<p>The lunch date ran long and A Finger Pointing grew weary of discussing point after point after point, talking about optics and optics and optics. Even refuting these claims about the optics of the problem led to Hammered Silver admitting in essence that the core of the problem was that she did not like it. Simply did not enjoy it.</p>
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<p>In the end, Hammered Silver let out a frustrated sigh and said, “We may continue to meet, my friend, but only on the condition that we do not speak further of Motes.”</p>
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<p>She blinked, taken aback. They had ever spoken of any and all things without holding aught back. At least, so far as she knew. “At all?” she asked.</p>
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<p>“At all,” Hammered Silver confirmed. “For now.”</p>
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<p>A Finger Pointing nodded stiffly, agreed, and scheduled the next lunch date.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>((bitterness and compromises with Dry Grass))</p>
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<hr />
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<p>((the past: family))</p>
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<hr />
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<p>((Contacting Hammered Silver))</p>
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<hr />
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<p>((The present))</p>
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<hr />
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<p>((fallout, or move to next chapter in conversation))</p>
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