Motes minor edits

motes-played/content/009.tex

@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@ Motes wilted.
 
 The answer was a long time coming, the silence filled with the gentle tink of glasses as Beholden mixed their late lunch cocktails, carrying them carefully back to the couch and handing them out so that she could rejoin.
 
-``Yeah,'' Motes said at last. ``At least, I think so. It was something that I did almost on a whim. I knew I wanted to be Big Motes, or at least that I was not ready to be Little Motes yet. Been thinking about that all morning.''
+``Yeah,'' Motes said at last. ``At least, I think so. It was something that I did almost on instinct. I knew I wanted to be Big Motes, or at least that I was not ready to be Little Motes yet. Been thinking about that all morning.''
 
 Beholden tasted her drink, nodded appreciatively, then asked, ``Have you come to any conclusions?''
 
@@ -114,9 +114,11 @@ Despite the already warm feeling in her belly from the first mimosa, Motes quick
 
 Beholden punched her gently on the shoulder before taking her empty glass and setting it on the table in front of them.
 
-The full story of what had happened over the last few days between A Finger Pointing and Hammered Silver was laid bare over the next hour. Not just that, but much of their story going back into the past as well. Both Beholden and Motes were left with more than a few questions. Over the last few years, their down-tree instance had opened up more and more about how much she had shielded the stanza from the political machinations of the rest of the clade around them, all of the ways in which she had strived to protect them, and yet more of this became clear as she spoke about all of the fuss that Hammered Silver had made over the years.
+The full story of what had happened over the last few days between A Finger Pointing and Hammered Silver was laid bare over the next hour. Not just that, but much of their story going back into the past as well; she even, at one point, dreamed up a stack of all 98 letters she had received over the years, totaling nearly 300 pages.
 
-When she finished and all questions had been answered or deferred, they fell into silence for a long few minutes, the three of them just digesting the last few days each in their own way.
+Both Beholden and Motes were left with more than a few questions. Over the last few years, their down-tree instance had opened up more and more about how much she had shielded the stanza from the political machinations of the rest of the clade around them, all of the ways in which she had strived to protect them, for better or for worse, and yet more of this became clear as she spoke about all of the fuss that Hammered Silver had made over the years.
+
+When she finished and all questions had been answered or\pagebreak\ deferred, they fell into silence for a long few minutes, the three of them just digesting the last few days each in their own way.
 
 Finally, Motes huffed and flopped back against the couch. ``What a fucking bitch.''
 
@@ -140,17 +142,17 @@ She shrugged. ``Well, I pinged Miss Genet, so we are going to meet later.''
 
 She sat up straight, staring at her partner like she was some alien creature, some queer thing too dense to understand the importance of kettle corn. ``Yes. Busy.''
 
-As A Finger Pointing and Beholden finally got around to whipping up lunch for themselves, the conversation once more fell into comfortable chatter, the sort of banter that so often filed the house, and while, by the time her appointment arrived, Motes had not yet felt comfortable enough to refer to them as `Ma' and `Bee', that welcoming sense of family had returned in force, and she felt once more in her comfortable role as their Dot, their \emph{dóttir}.
+As A Finger Pointing and Beholden finally got around to whipping up lunch for themselves, the conversation once more fell into comfortable chatter, the sort of banter that so often filed the house, and while, by the time her appointment arrived, Motes had not yet felt comfortable enough to refer to them as\pagebreak\ `Ma' and `Bee', that welcoming sense of family had returned in force, and she felt once more in her comfortable role as their Dot, their \emph{dóttir}.
 
 As the afternoon threatened to slide right into evening, Motes took her leave and left A Finger Pointing and Beholden on the couch, canoodling. Clearly that had taken precedence over whatever they had had planned at the auditorium for the rest of the day. That they had come home for her, for Motes, was the base of that warmth that had grown within her.
 
 She made her way out of the house and wandered to the center of the neighborhood. She left the automatic chalk lines going, letting them be the fuel that propelled her forward, let their flowering shapes fit into this perception of herself as a flower child rather than simply a child, a careful reframing that allowed her to have this thing, this gentle goodness.
 
-The neighborhood formed a lazy semicircle, a `U' that butted up against an avenue that petered out into the nature of the sim in either direction. Across the street—inaccessible to anyone who was unwelcome—sat the back entrance of the theatre Au Lieu Du Rêve kept for its own community. Just homes and a beloved workplace dropped together into an endless landscape like sugar into so much tea.
+The neighborhood formed a lazy semicircle, a `U' that butted up against an avenue that petered out into the nature of the sim in either direction. Across the street sat the back entrance of the theatre Au Lieu Du Rêve kept for its own community. Just homes and a beloved workplace dropped together into an endless landscape like sugar into so much tea.
 
 In the bowl of the `U' sat all of the common areas. A pool—one with seats and jets, one that could be a hot tub seating a hundred as easily as it could be an Olympic pool—a few tennis courts for the few—who?—who actually enjoyed the game, a liberal dotting of grills—everyone had a favorite—for cook outs, a lake with a paddle boat, a ``community center'' which had long ago turned into a movie-theater-\emph{cum}-cuddlepit\ldots{}
 
-And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the `U' sat the playground. What was initially intended to be Motes's haunt, hers and her friends, had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one's face beyond even the Moon, even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.
+And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the `U' sat the playground. What was initially intended to be Motes's haunt, hers and her friends', had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one's face beyond even the Moon, even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.
 
 It was not dark now.
 
@@ -184,7 +186,7 @@ She caught herself in the act of merely shrugging, then shook her head to clear
 
 ``That's sweet of them.''
 
-``It is. I\ldots uh,'' she trailed off. ``The overflow started when I got a letter from within the clade. It really fucked me up. Like, \emph{really} bad.''
+``It is. I\ldots uh,'' she trailed off. ``The overflow started when I got\pagebreak\ a letter from within the clade. It really fucked me up. Like, \emph{really} bad.''
 
 ``And that's why you're Big Motes? Why you didn't say `Ma'?''
 
@@ -266,7 +268,7 @@ She laughed, feeling earnest joy at the memory. ``Dot! Speck! Mote! Kiddo and sk
 
 ``I said she should have been in charge of lights,'' Motes said, still grinning. ``\,`Beholden to the heat of the lamps'? That has nothing to do with music or sound.''
 
-Still smiling, herself, Sarah countered, ``And then I pointed out Loss For Images and That It Might Give. `That it might give the world orders' being primarily a director is pretty on the nose.''
+Sarah countered, ``And then I pointed out Loss For Images and That It Might Give. `That it might give the world orders' being primarily a director is pretty on the nose.''
 
 ``Yeah,'' she said, sighing as the grin started to fade. ``Yeah. There is a mix of both. It does not matter whether or not the name or the nature came first, not in this case. What matters is that it got stuck in my craw, right? I got stuck thinking about it, and then Hammered Silver sent me her stupid letter and it all came to a head.''