edits, publication of Motes Played

ebooks/Madison Rye Progress, Samantha Yule Fireheart, Krzysztof _Tomash_ Drewniak/Idumea/Idumea - Madison Rye Progress, Samantha Yule Fireheart, Krzysztof _Tomash_ Drewniak.opf

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
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+        <dc:identifier opf:scheme="calibre" id="calibre_id">61</dc:identifier>
+        <dc:identifier opf:scheme="uuid" id="uuid_id">5d632b31-a706-4cca-bfb3-6580ff0551dd</dc:identifier>
+        <dc:title>Idumea</dc:title>
+        <dc:creator opf:file-as="Madison Rye Progress, Samantha Yule Fireheart, Krzysztof &quot;Tomash&quot; Drewniak" opf:role="aut">Madison Rye Progress, Samantha Yule Fireheart, Krzysztof "Tomash" Drewniak</dc:creator>
+        <dc:contributor opf:file-as="calibre" opf:role="bkp">calibre (6.24.0) [https://calibre-ebook.com]</dc:contributor>
+        <dc:date>0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00</dc:date>
+        <dc:language>eng</dc:language>
+        <dc:subject>Post-Self</dc:subject>
+        <dc:subject>Skunks</dc:subject>
+        <meta name="calibre:timestamp" content="2024-07-03T01:37:47.597796+00:00"/>
+        <meta name="calibre:title_sort" content="Idumea"/>
+        <meta name="calibre:user_metadata:#mm_annotations" content="{&quot;table&quot;: &quot;custom_column_1&quot;, &quot;column&quot;: &quot;value&quot;, &quot;datatype&quot;: &quot;comments&quot;, &quot;is_multiple&quot;: null, &quot;kind&quot;: &quot;field&quot;, &quot;name&quot;: &quot;Annotations&quot;, &quot;search_terms&quot;: [&quot;#mm_annotations&quot;], &quot;label&quot;: &quot;mm_annotations&quot;, &quot;colnum&quot;: 1, &quot;display&quot;: {}, &quot;is_custom&quot;: true, &quot;is_category&quot;: false, &quot;link_column&quot;: &quot;value&quot;, &quot;category_sort&quot;: &quot;value&quot;, &quot;is_csp&quot;: false, &quot;is_editable&quot;: true, &quot;rec_index&quot;: 22, &quot;#value#&quot;: null, &quot;#extra#&quot;: null, &quot;is_multiple2&quot;: {}}"/>
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+    <guide/>
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ebooks/Scott-Clary, Madison/Mitzvot/Mitzvot - Madison Scott-Clary.opf

@@ -5,12 +5,11 @@
         <dc:identifier opf:scheme="uuid" id="uuid_id">41e77372-03ea-4bbe-b082-1d46f5449fdf</dc:identifier>
         <dc:title>Mitzvot</dc:title>
         <dc:creator opf:file-as="Scott-Clary, Madison" opf:role="aut">Madison Scott-Clary</dc:creator>
-        <dc:contributor opf:file-as="calibre" opf:role="bkp">calibre (5.37.0) [https://calibre-ebook.com]</dc:contributor>
+        <dc:contributor opf:file-as="calibre" opf:role="bkp">calibre (6.24.0) [https://calibre-ebook.com]</dc:contributor>
         <dc:date>2023-01-21T08:00:00+00:00</dc:date>
         <dc:language>eng</dc:language>
         <dc:subject>Skunks</dc:subject>
         <dc:subject>Post-Self</dc:subject>
-        <meta name="calibre:author_link_map" content="{&quot;Madison Scott-Clary&quot;: &quot;&quot;}"/>
         <meta name="calibre:series" content="Post-Self Cycle"/>
         <meta name="calibre:series_index" content="4"/>
         <meta name="calibre:timestamp" content="2022-11-18T02:04:05+00:00"/>

idumea/book.tex

@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@
   
   \vspace{1cm}
   
-  \noindent\textbf{Content notes:} themes of self harm, suicide, and poor mental health.
+  \noindent\textbf{Content notes:} brief description of sex, themes of self harm, suicide, and poor mental health.
   \vspace{1cm}
   
   \noindent The section with Warmth In Fire on page \pageref{warmth} is a collaboration with Samantha Yule Fireheart.
@@ -248,11 +248,12 @@ People of Orphalese, \\
 
   \cleardoublepage
   \pagestyle{ourbook}
+  %\doublespacing
   
   \Char{End Of Endings — 2403\par ×\par Rye — 2409}
   \markboth{Idumea}{Madison Rye Progress}
   %\chapter*{1}
-  \secdiv
+  \chapter*{}
   \input{content/001}
   %\chapter*{2}
   \secdiv
@@ -274,7 +275,7 @@ People of Orphalese, \\
   \input{content/007}
   %\chapter*{8}
   \secdiv
-  \input{content/008}\input{graphomania}
+  \input{content/008} \input{graphomania}
 
   \newpage
   \null

idumea/content/000.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+\{\{\% verse \%\}\}People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror. --- Kahlil Gibran\{\{\% /verse \%\}\}
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+\hypertarget{dramatis-personae}{%
+\subsection{Dramatis Personae}\label{dramatis-personae}}
+
+\hypertarget{the-ode-clade}{%
+\subsubsection{The Ode clade}\label{the-ode-clade}}
+
+\begin{description}
+\tightlist
+\item[Your Humble Narrator]
+Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars
+\item[The Woman]
+To Pray For The End Of Endings
+\item[Her Friend]
+I Must Show No Hesitation When Speaking My Name
+\item[Her Therapist]
+Where I May Ever Dream
+\item[Her Cocladist]
+Should We Rejoice In The End Of Endings
+\item[The Oneirotect]
+Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire
+\item[The Instance Artist]
+Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled
+\item[The Poet]
+Where It Watches the Slow Hours Progress
+\item[The Musician]
+Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps
+\item[The Child]
+And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights
+\item[The Narrator's Friend]
+Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself
+\item[The Blue Fairy]
+I Remember The Rattle Of Dry Grass
+\end{description}
+
+\hypertarget{others}{%
+\subsubsection{Others}\label{others}}
+
+\begin{description}
+\tightlist
+\item[Her Lover]
+Farai
+\item[The Dog]
+Scout Among Weird Skunks With Good Kettlecorn
+\item[His Elder]
+Tomash
+\item[The Rabbit-Chaser]
+\_\_\_\_\_ (called ``Scout Chasing Rabbits'')
+\end{description}
+
+And, of course, you, my dear, \emph{dear} reader.

idumea/content/001.tex

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ But that was three hundred years ago.
 
 \secdiv
 
-The Woman wanders the world some few times a month, stepping out into unknown nowheres and known somewheres to be seen, to be perceived as still existing. I do not know why she does this, but it is important to her that someone witness her existing. It is a ritual she follows around like a little puppy: she will not know what will happen when she first does it properly, but she hopes it will be something wonderful.
+The Woman wanders the world some few times a month, stepping out into unknown nowheres and known somewheres to be seen, to be perceived as still existing. I do not know why, but it is important to her that someone witness her existing. It is a ritual she follows around like a little puppy: she will not know what will happen when she first does it properly, but she hopes it will be something wonderful.
 
 The Woman has many rituals.
 
@@ -22,13 +22,13 @@ She has rituals for eating food, for feeding the vessel in which she makes her h
 
 She has rituals for getting dressed, for clothing the form with which the world sees her. She must choose a garment that fits her body and one that fits her mood. You must understand: every time she gets dressed, there is a moment of scrying into her deepest self and estimating how it is that she feels that day. And should her mood change, should those feelings shift, she will find her clothing itchy and uncomfortable, and if her form becomes not what it once was, her clothing will become uncomfortably tight or perhaps she will disappear down into the folds of fabric.
 
-She has rituals for entering a room, for passing through a door. She must touch the door frame beside her shoulder, must brush her fingers against the wood or stone or metal or some more abstract substance. You must understand: she has to do this for every door she walks through, and for this reason, there is a door in the house where she lives that was built by a friend of Her Friend that leads directly out into a city. She opens the closest door and steps out onto a concrete sidewalk lined with trees and passers by, where the sun shines bright and the air burns cold in her nostrils and the dry leaves skitter anxiously about her feet. As she steps out, she can brush her hand to the door frame.
+She has rituals for entering a room, for passing through a door. She must touch the door frame beside her shoulder, must brush her fingers against the wood or stone or metal or some more abstract substance. You must understand: she has to do this for every door she walks through, and for this reason, there is a door in the house where she lives that was built by a friend of Her Friend that leads directly out into a city. She opens the closet door and steps out onto a concrete sidewalk lined with trees and passers by, where the sun shines bright and the air burns cold in her nostrils and the dry leaves skitter anxiously about her feet. As she steps out, she can brush her hand to the door jamb.
 
 I do not know where these rituals come from, and perhaps some of my readers will immediately say, ``OCD? Does The Woman have obsessive compulsive disorder?''
 
 Perhaps she does, perhaps she does not. I do not know, friend. I \emph{do} know that there are obsessions within her, yes, and I am sure that these rituals feel compulsory, but there is something different about The Woman. She is too present. She is too much herself, too human, too embodied within her vessel as it spirals out of control, too stuck in her mind as it twists in on itself. She is less struck by a disorder than she is struck by a constant overwhelm, a constant overflowing.
 
-The Woman uploaded when she was overflowing. She lived within that overflow for years, for seven years she was overflowing, she was trapped within her mind and within the vessel of her body, and she lived as best she could as her body spiraled out of control.
+The Woman uploaded when she was overflowing. She lived within that overflow for years, for twelve years she was overflowing, she was trapped within her mind and within the vessel of her body, and she lived as best she can as her body spiraled out of control.
 
 Readers, you must understand that she was in so many ways whole still!
 
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ I think that she would say, however, that she was \emph{too} whole. I think she
 
 \secdiv
 
-``I wish,'' The Woman said some decades after Michelle Hadje/Sasha uploaded, after she became End Of Endings of the Ode clade, of the tenth stanza, ``I wish I could unbecome.''
+``I wish,'' The Woman said some decades after Michelle Hadje who was Sasha uploaded, after she became End Of Endings of the Ode clade, of the tenth stanza, ``I wish I could unbecome.''
 
 Her Friend frowned and replied, ``Do you mean you wish you could die?''
 
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ Her Friend was a good person who always treated The Woman well. Ey knew just how
 
 \secdiv
 
-Every few years, there would be a gathering on her birthday—their birthday, for Her Friend was also of the Ode clade, also of Michelle Hadje/Sasha—and they would sit somewhere, whether it was out on the porch of the home The Woman shared with the rest of the tenth stanza, or out on the dandelion-speckled lawn, or, once the door had been built into the house, on rickety chairs outside a cafe over identical coffees.
+Every year, there would be a gathering on her birthday—their birthday, for Her Friend was also of the Ode clade, also of Michelle Hadje who was Sasha—and they would sit somewhere, whether it was out on the porch of the home The Woman shared with the rest of the tenth stanza, or out on the dandelion-speckled lawn, or, once the door had been built into the house, on rickety chairs outside a cafe over identical coffees.
 
 Every time they would meet up thus, The Woman and Her Friend would take a few minutes to themselves to have the same conversation:
 
@@ -84,23 +84,23 @@ And then Her Friend would ask The Woman if ey could hug her, and she would usual
 
 ``Yes, No Hesitation,'' she would say. ``I want you to be there with me, if ever I figure out just what I mean.''
 
-And after that, they would go to the rest of the party.
+And after that, they would go to the rest of the party at the home of the tenth stanza.
 
 I think you would like to see these parties, friends. I think that they would not be quite as you would expect, of course. They are not the kinds of birthday parties that you or I might have. Where we might have cakes and singing and the blowing out of candles, they would gather together over simple foods—so many from the tenth stanza had such sensitive tastes, and it was so easy to make sure that everyone could eat everything!—and often they would simply sit silent. They would sit there, quiet, but present in each other's company.
 
 They would not seem to be parties like you and I have because this was not all that different from what might happen once or twice a month at the house in which the tenth stanza all lived. While each lived their own lives, occasionally, their schedules would coincide and they would all sit down together at the giant oak table together and eat, mostly in silence.
 
-Some of them shared rooms, you see, but mostly, they kept to themselves. They lived together in that big Gothic house plopped right down in the middle of a prairie of green grass and yellow dandelions, out where the stoop stepped down directly into the grass, but I say `lived together' in a very mechanical sense. They never shared meals intentionally, nor even spoke all that often to each other. It is just that, sometimes, they would all find themselves at table at the same time!
+Some of them shared rooms, you see, but mostly, they kept to themselves. They lived together in that big Gothic house plopped right down in the middle of a prairie of green grass and yellow dandelions, out where the stoop stepped down directly into the field, but I say `lived together' in a very mechanical sense. They never shared meals intentionally, nor even spoke all that often to each other. It is just that, sometimes, they would all find themselves at table at the same time!
 
 So the only difference between parties and those days when they all found themselves eating together was mostly that this time, they actually \emph{meant} to, and these were the days when, most often, more than one of them would invite over a friend or a guest.
 
-The Woman invites Her Friend over more than any of the other members of the tenth stanza invite others over, except perhaps back when Should We Forget was alive, and Warmth In Fire would come by to give her little gifts and toys, little trinkets and special snacks that she would divvy up and share with the rest of the stanza in little unlabeled envelopes.
+The Woman invites Her Friend over more than any of the other members of the tenth stanza invite others over, except perhaps back when Should We Forget was alive, and The Oneirotect, my beloved up-tree, would come by to give her little gifts and toys, little trinkets and special snacks that she would divvy up and share with the rest of the stanza in little unlabeled envelopes.
 
 But Should We Forget was no longer alive, not since the world had turned in on itself and had eaten so many of those who lived within, and now that meant that The Woman, out of all of those who lived together, there on the field, brought over company most often.
 
 \secdiv
 
-When Michelle/Sasha had quit, there on a field so similar to the one that she lived on, The Woman breathed out a sigh of relief, because she knew—though I do not think she know how—that Michelle/Sasha had found her own relief in those last moments. She had looked up to the sky, up to the Poet, up to the Dreamer who dreamed the world in which they lived, and in those moments she knew relief. She knew relief and she knew joy and she knew so, so much peace.
+When Michelle who was Sasha had quit, out on a field so similar to the one that she lived on, The Woman breathed a sigh of relief, because she knew—though I do not think she know how—that Michelle who was Sasha had found her own relief in those last moments. She had looked up to the sky, up to our poet, up to The Dreamer who dreamed the world in which they lived, and in those moments she knew relief. She knew relief and she knew joy and she knew so, so much peace.
 
 Peace! That was one of the things that The Woman craved. She wanted nothing more than to know a little bit of peace.
 
@@ -108,10 +108,10 @@ No rituals.
 
 No overflowing.
 
-None of this shifting of form that would strike unawares, for there she would be, sitting as pretty as could be, just this woman, just this short, round woman with a round, pale face and curly, black hair, and then with a cry or with a whimper or with a sigh of defeat, her very form would shift from beneath her. Her conception of herself would slip from her grasp and she would cease to be The Woman and instead be The Skunk or The Panther. It was always one of those three, for some days, she would be happily The Panther, and then a bee would land on her nose and tickle her whiskers and she would sneeze herself into a skunk.
+None of this shifting of form that would strike unawares, for there she would be, sitting as pretty as could be, just this woman, just this short, round woman with a round, pale face and curly, black hair, and then with a cry or with a whimper or with a sigh of defeat, her very form would shift from beneath her. Her conception of herself would slip from her grasp and she would cease to be The Woman and instead be The Skunk or The Panther, for the woman, you see, rather liked these animals. It was always one of those three, for some days, she would be happily The Panther, and then a bee would land on her nose and tickle her whiskers and she would sneeze herself into a skunk.
 
 I think it was cute sometimes, and I think she would say the same. I think she would say, ``Oh! Oh! Look at that!'' and then she would set to work brushing her tail. After all, what else is one to do if they found themselves to be in possession of such caudal beauty as is a skunk?
 
 This is why The Woman had so much trouble with clothing, you see. She would try to look deep within herself at her moods to see what it is that she felt and how it was that the day might go and she might come up with a pretty skirt that felt good on her legs and a lovely shirt she liked the look of, but then, some time later, the shirt would be puffy with fur and the skirt would not sit right with her tail.
 
-No rituals. No overflowing. Just peace. It is hard to experience peace when one is too human, is it not?
+No rituals. No overflowing. Just peace. It is hard to experience peace, hard to experience joy when one is too much oneself, is it not?

idumea/content/002.tex

@@ -1,16 +1,16 @@
 The Woman decided to go walking one day. Perhaps she was driven by restlessness. She had an errand to run, sure, but this day she decided to go out rather than perform this task at home. Perhaps she was bored! I do not know.
 
-Either way, she was feeling good and she was feeling stable and she was feeling feline, so she found herself a nice set of slacks to wear over her legs, ones that looped up over the base of her tail in such a way that the same would be just as possible with a skunk's tail, and yet which would not fall down for those moments when she does not have a tail.
+Either way, she was feeling good and she was feeling stable and she was feeling feline, so she found herself a nice set of slacks to wear over her legs, ones that looped up over the base of her tail in such a way that the same would be just as possible with a skunk's tail, and yet which would not fall down for those moments when she did not have a tail.
 
 She found herself a nice shirt that felt good on the fur and which would not look too weird if she poofed out into a skunk. It was not her favorite shirt, I am sure, otherwise maybe she would wear it every day, but it was good enough. It had the word `fiend' scribbled across it in angular, glitchy graffiti, and The Woman is absolutely allowed to feel like a fiend some days.
 
 Thus clothed, The Woman stood for a while in front of the mirror and admired herself. She felt good. She felt good, reader! It was not often that she felt more than just okay. Because even with all that I wrote about before, her life was not bad. It was an okay life. She liked this life in her own way. Her thoughts on unbecoming were not thoughts on suicide, I do not think.
 
-She stood before the mirror and preened for a moment, adjusting the way her shirt sat and fluffing out her slacks to see how they might fit with a thicker coat. She combed her claws through her short fur to straighten out some mussed-up spots and ensured that her whiskers were all neat and in those rows that cats have that she always found fascinating.
+She stood before the mirror and primped for a moment, adjusting the way her shirt sat and fluffing out her slacks to see how they might fit with a thicker coat. She combed her claws through her short fur to straighten out some mussed-up spots and ensured that her whiskers were all neat and in those rows that cats have that she always found fascinating.
 
-The trip to the city was as it ever was. She said to herself a little prayer and opened the door to her closet. Taking a deep breath, she stepped through, and as she did so, she brushed her fingertips against the jamb as ever, and today it felt right enough that she stepped lively out onto the city streets, out where the leaves skittered anxiously around her footpaws in the faint February breeze.
+The trip to the city was as it ever was. She said to herself a little prayer and opened the door to her closet. Taking a deep breath, she stepped through, and as she did so, she brushed her fingertips against the jamb as ever, against some imagined \emph{mezuzah,} and today it felt right enough that she stepped lively out onto the city streets, out where the leaves skittered anxiously around her footpaws in the faint February breeze.
 
-Stuffing her paws into her pockets, she made her way down the street, where her entrance was located, to the main drag. The city was on the small end—more large town than full on city—and so it was still the type of place to have a main drag, a street built for cars that it does not actually have, with wide sidewalks paved in brick and a trolley that ran down the middle.
+Stuffing her paws into her pockets, she made her way down the street where her entrance was located to the main drag. The city was on the small end—more large town than full on city—and so it was still the type of place to have a main drag, a street built for cars that it does not actually have, with wide sidewalks paved in brick and a trolley that ran down the middle.
 
 The Woman waited for the next trolley car to come and stepped aboard, tucking her tail down and around her leg as she held onto one of the railings—she never sat, and never could tell you why—to ride it for three stops. This was part of the ritual. Even when the car was busy and she was not feeling so good, there was a part of her that was happy that she got to stand on this trolley and hold onto this railing and feel this rattle-buzz of the wheels rolling along the track through her feet or paws. It was not even particularly pleasant for her, I think, but it \emph{was} fulfilling.
 
@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ Once The Woman had her mocha with extra whip, once she had one of her usual tabl
 
 \secdiv
 
-The Woman loved a good mocha—even I love a good mocha!—and so she was plenty happy to go to the coffee shop every now and then to pick one up, to sit by the window and watch and listen to the world go by, but this was not why she is here today. This was her errand.
+The Woman loved a good mocha—even I love a good mocha!—and so she was plenty happy to go to the coffee shop every now and then to pick one up, to sit by the window and watch and listen to the world go by, but this was not why she is here today. This was not her errand.
 
 That day, The Woman was here because Her Friend had asked to meet up.
 
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ Her Friend really did just want a friend, too, for the seventh stanza were all f
 
 ``Ah! My dear, my dear,'' The Woman said, pushing herself to her feet to bow. ``A pleasure, a pleasure. Please, sit, if you would like, or I am also happy to walk.''
 
-Her Friend smiled faintly, bowed in turn, and pulled out the ratty chair across the table and fell into it heavily, eir own identical mocha set before em. ``How are you feeling, my dear? Well, I hope?''
+Her Friend smiled faintly, bowed in turn, and pulled out the ratty chair across the table, curled her tail around, and fell into it heavily, eir own identical mocha set before em. ``How are you feeling, my dear? Well, I hope?''
 
 Returning to her own seat, The Woman nodded. ``Quite well, yes. It was a quiet and comfortable morning, and it was an easy trip here. The house was calm and the coffee shop is calm. How are you, though? You sounded\ldots well, I suppose you sounded uncomfortable. You sounded like you were trying to be quiet.''
 
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ The Woman nodded, lifted her drink for a sip, sighed. ``You have had mostly good
 
 ``But not always.''
 
-``Yes.'' Her Friend turned eir mug lazily from side to side on the tabletop, not yet drinking. ``Not always. There are times when we mesh quite well. Most times, even. There are times when we will go for morning runs and stay together in a group, but there are also times when we will lag behind, me and a few others. There are times when we will all eat together sitting around one table or having a picnic, talking about our days, and there are times when we will retreat to our own homes and eat by ourselves or with our partners.''
+``Yes.'' Her Friend turned eir mug lazily from side to side on the tabletop, not yet drinking. ``Not always. There are times when we mesh quite well. Most times, even. There are times when we will go out for coffee in the morning and stay together in a group, but there are also times when we will lag behind, me and a few others. There are times when we will all eat together sitting around one table or having a picnic, talking about our days, and there are times when we will retreat to our own homes and eat by ourselves or with our partners.''
 
 The Woman averted her eyes, nodded. ``As we do.''
 
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ The Woman averted her eyes, nodded. ``As we do.''
 
 The topic had been fraught for nearly sixty years now. Those meals were lovely, to be sure, as were the times when they would talk or sit in silence together, out there on the field, enjoying warmth and sun or perhaps the light of the moon.
 
-It had not been all of them for sixty years, though. Not since Death Itself had died, her and I Do Not Know. Not since they had fallen into catatonia and then smiled, shrugged, and quit. Not five hours later, I Do Not Know had sighed comfortably, turned over in her bed, and then quit as well.
+It had not been all of them for sixty years, though. Not since Death Itself had died, her and I Do Not Know. Not since Death Itself had fallen into catatonia and then smiled, shrugged, and quit. Not five hours later, I Do Not Know had sighed comfortably, turned over in her bed, and then quit as well.
 
 Fifty-eight years since the last meal they had all shared together.
 
@@ -82,7 +82,7 @@ Even so, The Woman—her and her whole stanza—insisted for years that it was a
 
 With a deliberate motion of sharp-clawed paws, The Woman drew a definitive line across the table, defining an arc around her. With this, she blocked the topic off, reflected the thoughts of loss and trauma away from herself, out somewhere else. It was a practiced motion, smooth and careful, and one that Her Friend knew well.
 
-Ey nodded, understanding, and continued. ``The reasons we might not eat with each other or that some of us may fall behind on our runs are varied, of course. There are long-standing shifts in the way the stanza works together, yes? It has been a long time since we have been so alike. Sometimes, however, it is a little thing. One of us will say something that rubs another the wrong way and it will take us time to work it out. We will write our letters or have our conversations and it will be fine in time.''
+Ey nodded, understanding, and continued. ``The reasons we might not eat with each other or that some of us may wander away on our outings are varied, of course. There are long-standing shifts in the way the stanza works together, yes? It has been a long time since we have been so alike. Sometimes, however, it is a little thing. One of us will say something that rubs another the wrong way and it will take us time to work it out. We will write our letters or have our conversations and it will be fine in time.''
 
 ``Is that what happened this time?''
 
@@ -98,11 +98,11 @@ So when I tell you that The Woman's breath caught in her throat, you must imagin
 
 And here, now, The Woman was feeling most of all grief. She feared that, were she to let her breath out, it would be that whine of fear, that moan of terror, a wave of tears.
 
-The tenth had left two empty chairs and two full plates at meals until three years prior.
+The tenth had left two empty chairs and two full plates at meals until three years prior, until the Century Attack.
 
 Now they left three.
 
-Her Friend, either knowing or seeing this, averted her eyes, casting her gaze instead out to the street. ``I am sorry, my dear. I was indeed feeling grief and loss over Should We Forget. No Longer Myself as well, yes, and Beckoning and more, but the one I knew best was Should We Forget. I am sorry.''
+Her Friend, either knowing or seeing this, averted eir eyes, casting eir gaze instead out to the street. ``I am sorry, my dear. I was indeed feeling grief and loss over Should We Forget. No Longer Myself as well, yes, and Beckoning and more, but the one I knew best was Should We Forget. I am sorry.''
 
 The Woman let her breath out most carefully, not letting it shake, not letting her lip quiver. ``I understand, yes. You knew her as well.''
 
@@ -110,15 +110,15 @@ The Woman let her breath out most carefully, not letting it shake, not letting h
 
 She bowed. ``I would appreciate that, yes.''
 
-``Of course, my dear,'' Her Friend said, smiling, nodding her acknowledgement. ``The fallout of this conversation with In Dreams was that she told me that perhaps I ought to schedule a session, either with her or In Memory, or, failing that, someone outside the clade.''
+``Of course, my dear,'' Her Friend said, smiling, nodding eir acknowledgement. ``The fallout of this conversation with In Dreams was that she told me that perhaps I ought to schedule a session, either with her or In Memory, or, failing that, someone outside the clade.''
 
 ``Is that what you wound up doing?''
 
-Ey shook eir head. ``I did not need that, my dear. I did not need to be told to go to therapy. I did not want to schedule an appointment.'' Ey finally took a sip of eir mocha, but this seemed to be less about the coffee than an opportunity to gather eir wits. ``I just wanted a friend, honestly. I just wanted a hug—no, I understand, perhaps not your thing, but I must be earnest, yes?—but instead, I got told to find a way to \emph{fix} this. Fix grief. Fix a very real pain.''
+Ey shook eir head. ``I did not need that, my dear. I did not need to be told to go to therapy. I did not want to schedule an appointment.'' Ey finally took a sip of eir mocha, but this seemed to be less about the coffee than an opportunity to gather eir wits. ``I just wanted a friend, honestly. I just wanted a hug—no, I understand, perhaps not your thing, but I must be earnest, yes? Instead, I got told to find a way to \emph{fix} this. Fix grief. Fix a very real pain.''
 
 The Woman's features softened and, steeling herself for the touch, she reached across the table to pat the back of Her Friend's paw. ``I understand, No Hesitation. Would that I could offer more. I am happy to be a friend, though; I have no interest in telling you to go to therapy.''
 
-``Of course,'' ey said, smiling once more. ``I trust you of all people in that. I know that you have mentioned—however kindly—in the past that you have worried that I am simply providing you with therapy on the sly, but I trust that you know that is not the nature of our friendship.''
+``Of course,'' ey said, smiling once more. ``I trust you of all people in that. I know that you have mentioned—however kindly—in the past that you have worried that I am simply providing you with therapy on the sly, but I trust that you know that such is not the nature of our friendship.''
 
 She nodded.
 
@@ -128,13 +128,13 @@ She nodded.
 
 ``Oh? How so?''
 
-``I do not know how healthy it is to treat those who are lost as if they are still there, but I also do not know that this is what I am doing. I do not even know if that is what the others are doing, yes? They might very well be, given the open seats on the table that we leave, given the conversations I hear at night from my cocladists. Many of them talk with Death Itself in quiet whispers while laying in bed. Many of them talk with RJ, still. I myself have talked with Michelle and Sasha, when I remember days long ago on her field, listening to her speak of being a dead woman walking when she was having bad days or gushing about Debarre on her good ones. Many of us speak to the dead.''
+``I do not know how healthy it is to treat those who are lost as if they are still there, but I also do not know that this is what I am doing. I do not even know if that is what the others are doing, yes? They might very well be, given the open seats on the table that we leave, given the conversations I hear at night from my cocladists. Rejoice speaks with Death Itself in quiet whispers while laying in bed. Many of them talk with RJ, still. I myself have talked with Michelle and Sasha, when I remember days long ago on her field, listening to her speak of being a dead woman walking when she was having bad days or gushing about Debarre on her good ones. Many of us speak to the dead.''
 
 Her friend furrowed eir brow. ``Do you want my opinion as a friend, or do you want my opinion as a therapist?''
 
 The Woman shrugged.
 
-``As a therapist, I would say that there is such a thing as an unhealthy attachment style, that holding onto past traumas makes it awfully easy to reinflict them on oneself.'' Her expression shifted kind as she continued, ``As your friend, I would say that, if that helps, if there is, as you say, joy in it, then by all means, continue. If you can pray to the dead to feel joy, then perhaps you must.''
+``As a therapist, I would say that there is such a thing as an unhealthy attachment, that holding onto past traumas makes it awfully easy to reinflict them on oneself.'' Her expression shifted kind as she continued. ``As your friend, I would say that, if that helps, if there is, as you say, joy in it, then by all means, continue. If you can pray to the dead to feel joy, then perhaps you must.''
 
 ``I see,'' she said, buying herself a moment to think by sipping her mocha. Ah, but she was a cat, yes? A panther? Perhaps you can imagine this with lapping tongue, the way a cat's tongue curls back and scoops up drink, drawing it up into their mouth. Or perhaps she is the type who has leaned into another aesthetic, the type who can chew with her mouth closed. Idle distractions, even for your humble narrator. ``Then yes, there is joy in it. There is joy in those memories, is there not? One takes a moment of stillness\ldots{}''
 
@@ -146,7 +146,7 @@ After a long few seconds, Her Friend tilted eir head. ``Yes?''
 
 ``I do not know. Is there?''
 
-Her Friend laughed, shaking eir head and leaning back with mocha in hand. ``This is what I needed, my dear. I needed to speak with a friend. I needed chat about memories and watching the way you smile when you talk even these sad things, not sitting on some therapist's couch for the third time in as many weeks.''
+Her Friend laughed, shaking eir head and leaning back with mocha in hand. ``This is what I needed, my dear. I needed to speak with a friend. I needed chat about memories and watching the way you smile when you talk even about these sad things, not sitting on some therapist's couch for the third time in as many weeks.''
 
 The Woman preened. This, you see, is more than just a brushing out of imperfections, but a shift in attitude. When The Woman preened—when her whole clade preened, even!—she would sit up a little straighter with a subtle shimmy, lift her snout, close her eyes, bristle her whiskers, and smile a smile that was just south of smug. It is \emph{very} cute, reader, I can assure you of that.
 

idumea/content/003.tex

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 The Woman rode the high of lovely friendship for days after that coffee date. For nearly a week, she reveled in the sense of camaraderie and coexistence. How lucky she was! How lucky that she had the chance to exist in the same universe as Her Friend! How lucky, how lucky.
 
-Whenever The Woman felt this way, she would wander around the house and clean. She would take on extra cooking duties and make extra desserts for her cocladists and friends. She would stay in one form for far longer than was her usual, and remained now a panther. She would go for walks around the field, treating the house itself as a signpost at the center of widening circles. She would imagine that those circles might some day spread out across the entire world, never mind the varied infinities housed within the field itself. It was a thing to which she could give herself as she asked her high-minded questions: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
+Whenever The Woman felt this way, she would wander around the house and clean. She would take on extra cooking duties and make extra desserts for her cocladists and their friends. She would stay in one form for far longer than was her usual, and remained now a panther. She would go for walks around the field, treating the house itself as a signpost at the center of widening circles. She would imagine that those circles might some day spread out across the entire world, never mind the varied infinities housed within the field itself. It was a thing to which she could give herself as she asked her high-minded questions: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
 
 These words of Rilke's would dance unblushing through her mind, linking arms on one side with the words of Dickinson which ever twined around those of her clade—\emph{If I should die, And you should live, And time should gurgle on, And morn should beam, And noon should burn, As it has usual done\ldots{}}—and on the other with the lingering lines of the Ode that made up the names of her clade. ``I remember the rattle of dry grass,'' she would explain to the bees as they buzzed in friendship around her ankles. ``I remember the names of all things and forget them only when I wake.''
 
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ I have never been quite so fond of walking, myself, kind readers. There is medit
 
 I say so often that stepping away from such a task is still writing. When I sit on the patio in front of our little bundle of townhouses and look out at the shared lawn, or when I step—\emph{stepped,} for it is no longer here—out to the shortgrass prairie of my cocladist, to sit beside a cairn of stones or share a meal, that is still writing! Your narrator has written these words, this story, a hundred, a thousand times within her head. That is my joy, and graphomania my compulsion.
 
-When The Woman overflows, she becomes ever more herself. She is—my attentive readers will remember this, of course—she is already too much herself, too present, too whole, too present. This is the nature of overflowing, you see: we become so much ourselves that it begins to ache, to press at our chest from the inside. For your humble narrator, that graphomania strikes with such force that meaning falls away from my words only gibberish comes forth, or perhaps I will write the same phrase over and over and over, unable to sate my own compulsions.
+When The Woman overflows, she becomes ever more herself. She is—my attentive readers will remember this, of course—she is already too much herself, too whole, too present. This is the nature of overflowing, you see: we become so much ourselves that it begins to ache, to press at our chest from the inside. For your humble narrator, that graphomania strikes with such force that meaning falls away from my words only gibberish comes forth, or perhaps I will write the same phrase over and over and over, unable to sate my own compulsions.
 
 My astute readers will surely have picked up by now that I am riding that edge here, in these words.
 
@@ -26,23 +26,23 @@ The Woman did all that she could to hang onto joy whenever it slipped into her l
 
 But even like me with my little tasty baked treats, The Woman's joy is parceled out bit by bit to herself and her cocladists and, just like my little plates of carrot cake—I \emph{do} love a good carrot cake!—there is never an infinite amount, much as she might wish, nor, it always seems, quite enough.
 
-She hung onto joy and baked her goodies and went for her walks and awaited, with some trepidation, to the regularly scheduled therapy, because I think she knew that, being confronted with recounting emotions of the past or discussing emotions to come, her grasp on joy would be tested. Once every two weeks, unless she was overflowing, unless she was in pain, unless she simply could not bring herself to go, The Woman had an appointment for therapy, after all, and she knew there was good to be had in it, for it had proven its use time and again over the years, and yet it was a time for threshing, for harrowing. It was a time for throwing herself at the Work at one level of removing and watching the chaff fall away and the fruits of her labor lay exposed. It was a time for dragging the implements of tools dialectical and behaviors cognitive through the dirt of her to break up into clods her varied neuroses.
+She hung onto joy and baked her goodies and went for her walks and awaited, with some trepidation, the regularly scheduled therapy, because I think she knew that, being confronted with recounting emotions of the past or discussing emotions to come, her grasp on joy would be tested. Once every two weeks, unless she was overflowing, unless she was in pain, unless she simply could not bring herself to go, The Woman had an appointment for therapy, and she knew there was good to be had in it, for it had proven its use time and again over the years, and yet it was a time for threshing, for harrowing. It was a time for throwing herself at the Work at one level of remove and watching the chaff fall away and the fruits of her labor lay exposed. It was a time for dragging the implements of tools dialectical and behaviors cognitive through the dirt of her to break up into clods her varied neuroses.
 
-But as it goes, as it always goes, the morsels of joy meted gladly out soon began to run dry and the sense of happiness that she felt, those truly \emph{good} days began to fade once more into merely okay.
+But as it goes, as it always goes, the morsels of joy meted gladly out soon began to run dry and the sense of happiness that she felt waned, and those truly \emph{good} days began to fade once more into merely okay.
 
 It was the day of her appointment that The Woman sat up in her bed, bleary-eyed, and looked around her, around her plain and simple room with her plain and simple sheets and plain and simple clothes folded neatly atop a plain and simple chair, ready for wear, and at last sighed, wondering, \emph{Where is it that my joy has gone? Where has it gone?}
 
 Today was therapy, and her joy was gone.
 
-There was no relief within her that. There were no thoughts of, ah, today is therapy! Today she would get to talk to Ever Dream! Today she would get to explore this idea of a joy meted out slowly until it was nothing.
+There was no relief within her then. There were no thoughts of, ah, today is therapy! Today she would get to talk to Her Therapist! Today she would get to explore this idea of a joy meted out slowly until it was nothing.
 
 In fact, I would say that there was perhaps even a sort of protectiveness. I think that she felt some sort of ownership of this concept. I think that she felt like this ending of joy was hers and hers alone. Something to keep to herself until perhaps, some day, she might share it and become still at last, or perhaps even beyond then. It was hers to set before herself and admire or loathe. It was hers to wrap up in pretty paper or hide away in the back of a drawer. I think she may have felt jealousy.
 
-And so it was that The Woman, today a human, today, as ever, dressed plainly, made herself a peanut butter and banana sandwich with the crusts cut off and poured herself a glass of soy milk and walked out into the field outside her house. She had to balance her sandwich atop her drink in order to complete the ritual of passing through the front door, but she had done this countless times before.
+And so it was that The Woman, today a human, today, as ever, dressed comfortably, made herself a peanut butter and banana sandwich with the crusts cut off and poured herself a glass of soy milk and walked out into the field outside her house. She had to balance her sandwich atop her drink in order to complete the ritual of passing through the front door, but she had done this countless times before.
 
-The table and chairs sat nearly a mile out from the tenth stanza's house, sprouting senselessly from the grass as easy and carefree as yet more dandelions. A simple square table with two chairs set before adjacent sides so that she need not look her therapist in the eye, so that they might each stair out into some similar distance, so that they may feel companionship, though The Woman never could explain how that worked.
+The table and chairs sat nearly a mile out from the tenth stanza's house, sprouting senselessly from the grass as easy and carefree as yet more dandelions. A simple square table with two chairs set before adjacent sides so that she need not look Her Therapist in the eye, so that they might each stare out into some similar distance, so that they may feel companionship, though The Woman never could explain how that worked.
 
-And so The Woman, today a human, walked the mile to the table and sat down her glass of soy milk and began to eat her sandwich. When, at last, there were only two bites left and the glass was half empty, she sent a delicate ping to Her Therapist, who appeared beside the table, paws folded and kind smile on her face. The visage of a skunk lasted no longer than a second before, with a rapid fork, a human stood before her—for her therapist endeavored always to mirror her species lest she influence The Woman's own, though she leaned far harder into gender-play, and one would be hard pressed to not also see her as a young man—and bowed, then pulled out the chair beside her and sat down.
+And so The Woman, today a human, walked the mile to the table and sat down her glass of soy milk and began to eat her sandwich. When, at last, there were only two bites left and the glass was half empty, she sent a delicate ping to Her Therapist, who appeared beside the table, paws folded and kind smile on her face. The visage of a skunk lasted no longer than a second before, with a rapid fork, a human stood before her—for Her Therapist endeavored always to mirror her species lest she influence The Woman's own, though she leaned far harder into gender-play, and one would be hard pressed to not also see her as a young man—and bowed, then pulled out the chair beside her and sat down.
 
 ``I will be finished in a moment, Ever Dream,'' The Woman said just as she did every session. ``Just a few bites left.''
 
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ And so The Woman, today a human, walked the mile to the table and sat down her g
 
 The Woman gave a hint of a bow and enjoyed the last two bites of her sandwich as well as she was able, following each with a sip of soy milk, all while Her Therapist made herself comfortable, sitting back in her chair and gazing out over the field of grass and dandelions, a half-smile on her face.
 
-When at last she dusted her hands free of imagined crumbs, The Woman sat back in her chair, her drink held in both hands—she, like me, enjoys that she can create a drink that stays at precisely the most delicious temperature—Her Therapist smiled and nodded. ``Tell me, my dear, how are you feeling?''
+When at last she dusted her hands free of imagined crumbs, The Woman sat back in her own chair, her cold drink held in both hands—she, like me, enjoys that she can create a drink that stays at precisely the most delicious temperature—Her Therapist smiled and nodded. ``Tell me, my dear, how are you feeling?''
 
 ``I am feeling alright. I have been cleaning and cooking. I have been going out on walks and stepping away from the sim. I spoke with my friend for several hours some days back, and that provided me with comfort and joy.''
 
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ The Woman lingered again in silence, and her mind was aswirl with undefined thou
 
 ``Yes, Ever Dream. Of course. I will speak of other things.''
 
-And so they did. It was not an unproductive therapy session, and perhaps Her Therapist was even right. The seventh stanza was as they were, yes? They were the types to go for runs together, to eat together, to live as neighbors. The Woman did not know whether Her Therapist lived among them, but at this point, she supposed that she must, should such a prohibition be worried.
+And so they did. It was not an unproductive therapy session, and perhaps Her Therapist was even right. The seventh stanza was as they were, yes? They were the types to go out for coffee together, to eat together, to live as neighbors. The Woman did not know whether Her Therapist lived among them, but at this point, she supposed that she must, should such a prohibition be warranted.
 
 And so they did! They talked of other things, and The Woman did wind up sharing more about her joy, but only in the small ways. She discussed the feeling of making treats for those around her, of storing a little bit of her joy in each—though I believe she left out her feelings on that meting of joy being a depleting—and the ways in which a service such as that which she provided for her own household is a goodness in its own right, is an active participation in joy.
 
@@ -80,11 +80,11 @@ There was a sense of falling-short within her, a sense of not meeting expectatio
 
 It was with these thoughts and these feelings filling her mind to overfull that The Woman walked back to the house, back up the stairs to the porch, back through the door with a brush of the fingers, back up the staircase, back to her room where she stripped and climbed back into bed.
 
-Perhaps she slept, perhaps she dreamed.
+There she slept, and perhaps there she dreamed.
 
 \secdiv
 
-The Woman is a professional in napping in a way that I am not. Perhaps it is the felinity in her, or perhaps it is that she is not so easily claimed by such compulsions as I have—graphomania! Hah!—which lead to such fervent activity. Were I a smarter skunk, I might say to myself: ``Rye, my dear, perhaps you can write your novels when you are caught in such throes, and spend the months between practicing the fine art of napping!'' But I am not a smart skunk. I am a simple beast who is single minded. I am an animal who does one thing and perhaps does it well. I do not know! I am perhaps too simple to disambiguate being doing a thing well and doing a lot of a thing.
+The Woman is a professional in napping in a way that I am not. Perhaps it is the felinity in her, or perhaps it is that she is not so easily claimed by such compulsions as I have—graphomania! Hah!—which lead to such fervent activity. Were I a smarter skunk, I might say to myself: ``Rye, my dear, perhaps you can write your novels when you are caught in such throes, and spend the months between practicing the fine art of napping!'' But I am not a smart skunk. I am a simple beast who is single minded. I am an animal who does one thing and perhaps does it well. I do not know! I am perhaps too simple to disambiguate between doing a thing well and doing a lot of a thing.
 
 Ah, but perhaps this is why I interpret The Woman at being a professional napper.
 
@@ -92,7 +92,7 @@ Either way, when she returned home and lay down, she immediately fell into a dee
 
 And then, at last, she stood up, and as her feet touched the ground she was, yes, whisked away into felinity, and so it was The Woman who was a cat who padded back downstairs, dressed now in billowy slacks and a flowing blouse. She dressed this way because she felt unstable, and knew that chances were better than not that she would wind up a skunk by that evening.
 
-The living room was empty, but sitting on a stool in a kitchen with a thoughtful expression on her face was Her Cocladist. Her Cocladist, for reasons too complicated for me to pick apart in a fairytale, struggled with her form more even than The Woman did. The Woman would occasionally blip from human to feline or from feline to skunk or from skunk to human, but, in ways that neither I nor The Woman remembered without fondness, Her cocladist lived in a constant superposition of forms. As she sat there on her stool, cheek resting in her palm while a pot bubbled lazily away on the stove, she wisped steadily between skunk and human. Skunk. Human. Skunk. Human. Her pale white skin, which had ever been so soft to the touch and borne such overwhelmingly kind smiles, would give way to black fur. Her hair, curly and dark that framed her face so well, would ghost into a tousled white mane. Behind her a luxurious tail would swish into being and then out again without a second thought.
+The living room was empty, but sitting on a stool in the kitchen with a thoughtful expression on her face was Her Cocladist. Her Cocladist, for reasons too complicated for me to pick apart in a fairytale, struggled with her form more even than The Woman did. The Woman would occasionally blip from human to feline or from feline to skunk or from skunk to human, but, in ways that neither I nor The Woman remembered with fondness, Her cocladist lived in a constant superposition of forms. As she sat there on her stool, cheek resting in her palm while a pot bubbled lazily away on the stove, she wisped steadily between skunk and human. Skunk. Human. Skunk. Human. Her pale white skin, which had ever been so soft to the touch and borne such overwhelmingly kind smiles, would give way to black fur. Her hair, curly and dark that framed her face so well, would ghost into a tousled white mane. Behind her a luxurious tail would swish into being and then out again without a second thought.
 
 I do mean that, friends. There is no thought behind this constant changing. When I experienced that, so many years ago, nearly three centuries ago, it was never a thing I could control, not well. I could swallow down a form for a while. I could gulp dryly and linger for a while in humanity, only for a cough or hiccup to come along and send little cookie ears to sprouting, send a white-striped-black muzzle stretching in front of my face.
 

idumea/content/004.tex

@@ -1,18 +1,20 @@
 The Woman lingered long on the words of Her Cocladist: \emph{aught else aside from our lot in life.}
 
-What \emph{was} her lot in life? What was \emph{a} lot in life? Was she limited only to one thing? Was she bound to stasis? And what, then, of her thoughts on eternal stillness? What did it mean that a seed had been planted within her and had lately begun to sprout? She knew where they came from.
+What \emph{was} her lot in life? What was \emph{a} lot in life? Was she limited only to one thing? Was she bound to stasis? And what, then, did it mean that a seed had been planted within her and had lately begun to sprout? What of her thoughts on eternal stillness?
 
-Her lot in life had at one point been to teach, to revel in the joy of acting and directing and sets and props and lights and sound and audience and her lovely, loving students who ached for nothing more than to be seen, to receive some perhaps hug from this person who they trusted and yet who could not give them such for fear of disease and regulation in equal measure, to receive some perhaps affection from their cohort and yet which their beloved teacher stopped them for fear of disease and regulation in unequal measure.
+She knew where they came from.
+
+Her lot in life had at one point been to teach, to revel in the joy of acting and directing and sets and props and lights and sound and audience and her lovely, loving students who ached for nothing more than to be seen, to receive some perhaps hug from this person who they trusted and yet who could not give them such for fear of pandemic and regulation in equal measure, to receive some perhaps affection from their cohort and yet which their beloved teacher stopped them for fear of pandemic and regulation in unequal measure.
 
 She knew the helplessness of having her agency ripped from her. She knew the feeling of being seen by something larger than mere personhood, a thing which saw her and said, ``this here is a wretched and despicable thing,'' and then took her from the world. And then her lot in life was to campaign, for though she still taught on occasion, still directed, she found she could not act as she wished, and still she had to refrain from hugging for fear of the discomfort of touch.
 
-She knew the feeling of splitting herself into ten unequal parts so that she might at last rest. She knew that her lot in life then became to process what she had become, for that was the role \emph{she} remembered of the tenth stanza, not simply to linger in suffering.
+She knew the feeling of splitting herself into ten unequal parts so that she might at last rest. She knew that her lot in life then became to process what she had become, for that was the role \emph{she} remembered of the tenth stanza, not simply to linger in suffering, but to find a way forward.
 
 She lingered on these thoughts in her unjoy and pondered the meaning, the actions implied, and, with as firm a resolve as a woman who is too much herself could muster, decided that she would \emph{not} lean into this idea of perpetuity as Her Cocladist dwelt within. She may have a lot in life for a time—for a year, for a decade, for a century—but not for the entirety of her existence.
 
 It was within this lingering that she reached out to Her Friend: \emph{``No Hesitation, would you like to meet for coffee? I have something I would like to speak with you about.''}
 
-There was a sensation of a tilted head, of a quiet \emph{huh,} in the sensorium message. \emph{``Of course, my dear. So soon after our last meeting, too. I am curious what has you reaching out! When would you like to meet?''}
+There was a sensation of a tilted head, of a quiet \emph{huh,} in the sensorium message. \emph{``Of course, my dear. So soon after our last meeting, too. I am curious what has you reaching out. When would you like to meet?''}
 
 \emph{``Now, if you are free.''}
 
@@ -100,7 +102,7 @@ And no, because with each success shining as bright as that crunchy and flavorfu
 
 No, because her limits were reinforced. For every victory, there was a reminder that she was unwhole. My friends, I think that \emph{everyone} is unwhole. I know that I am. I know that I write and write and write, and that is lovely, yes, but I also know that I can be a prickly little terror when caught up in my emotions. I know that I spend my time at my books, at my desk, and, though I try to be a comfortable and comforting presence within my stanza, though I try to dote on my up-tree, I am never able to give quite as much as I would like. I think everyone is unwhole, and I think as well that, to us, our unwhole-ness is more evident, more dire than it is to those around us. You and I, friends, we see The Woman coming across a boundary in her tastes and nod and think to ourselves, ``This is no moral failing! The Woman has done no wrong. She should feel no shame.'' But to her, it felt like a failure to reach joy.
 
-She, too, understands dialectics, do not get me wrong. She, too, knows that these reassurances of boundaries also come with the discoveries that she made, all of the green papaya salads and savory Artemisian treats that Warmth In Fire and its ilk had set on the market that she fell in love with. But always before her was the goal of joy, and while she would count her successes, she would also count her failures—no, no, do not contradict her, she saw them as failures and there is now no changing of her mind, not these many years later, not as she is now—and cluck her tongue and shake her head and go home and lay down in her bed and take one of those naps that she was so good at.
+She, too, understands dialectics, do not get me wrong. She, too, knows that these reassurances of boundaries also come with the discoveries that she made, all of the green papaya salads and savory Artemisian treats that The Oneirotect, my beloved up-tree, and its ilk had set on the market that she fell in love with. But always before her was the goal of joy, and while she would count her successes, she would also count her failures—no, no, do not contradict her, she saw them as failures and there is now no changing of her mind, not these many years later, not as she is now—and cluck her tongue and shake her head and go home and lay down in her bed and take one of those naps that she was so good at.
 
 There was joy, yes, but it was not a complete joy. Her hedonism with food was a lovely hedonism and she cherished it, but it was not the hedonism she needed for this task.
 

idumea/content/005.tex

@@ -200,7 +200,7 @@ I laughed as well. ``Thank you, I think. I have a few that are labeled `meditati
 
 I laughed, nodding.
 
-``I will admit that, although I would agree that she is a delight. She was perhaps too much for me. When I first arrived at my visit to the house on the hill, she had just been swimming and was running around here and there.''
+``I will admit that, although I would agree that she is a delight, she was perhaps too much for me. When I first arrived at my visit to the house on the hill, she had just been swimming and was running around here and there.''
 
 ``How old was she that day?''
 
@@ -273,3 +273,25 @@ No, no. That was not it, either.
 Friends, I will note that, even though I got a little bit frustrated with myself, these \emph{were} good discussions. I was frustrated with myself because I wanted to help in this endeavor. It was a good idea! It was a good task. I wanted to help but I was not able to succeed, not that day.
 
 So it was that The Woman returned home with the promise to come back the next day after we had both slept on it.
+
+``For whom do you write, Rye?''
+
+I had an answer ready for this, dear Readers, for this is something that I think about with some frequency. ``I write for those who need to read.''
+
+The Woman tilted her head—she was back to being a skunk, yes, but this is a habit that all of us share within the Ode clade, no matter our shape. ``I have heard it said so often that one should write for oneself and wait for an audience to come.''
+
+``That is popular advice, is it not? There is joy in writing things that no one will read, I will not lie, but that is not how communication works. I would prefer instead to say,''Write what you want to see others reading.'' I would say, ``Write what you believe others should know.'' To write solely for yourself is for the act of journalling, not for the act of creation.''
+
+She furrowed her brow. ``I will admit that I spent last night thinking much on this. I thought of our conversation and the types of things that I might write and was stuck on the fact that what joy I am seeking is unrelated simply to an act but more to a way of being. Why, after all, would I simply put pen to paper and then close the book? That is just the motions of writing without a goal.'' A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth and, yes, this, too, was a blessing. ``Though I am told that there is joy in fine pens and fine paper, too.''
+
+I laughed, reached into a pocket, and withdrew my current favorite pen. It is, you may be surprised to hear, quite plain. It is round and it is long. It has a cap that posts on the back. The nib is nothing special. It is a demonstrator—that is, it has a clear body so that one can see the ink within—but so are many of my pens. No, there is little special about it overall, other than the fact that it simply fits well within my paw, and that, dear friends, is what is most important in a pen.
+
+I handed the pen over to The Woman and she drew a notepad out of the air, write a few short sentences on it with the pen, nodded appreciatively, and handed it back. ``It is a joy to write with, my dear. But to my point, I suspect there is goodness in the act of writing, but not the fulfillment I am seeking.''
+
+I nodded. ``I would agree with that, yes. You speak of a way of being. You speak of not just creating, but of being a creative.''
+
+``Just so.''
+
+We sat in silence for a minute or so, simply enjoying our mochas—readers, by now you must know that we are nothing if not ourselves—while we each considered the direction of our conversation. It is not comfortable for me to be unable to address a thing that I feel I ought to be able to. When presented with a problem that even sounds like it \emph{might} be within my bailiwick, if I cannot, it is in some key way dysphoric to me. The best I can manage, as I did then, was to recast the problem into a conversation. It does not remove the dysphoria, for I still have not solved anything, but it has set it aside, perhaps just in the other room. There is a selfishness in me.
+
+At last, I said, ``Would it be alright if I were to invite over Warmth? It is my beloved up-tree, of course, but ey also has thoughts on this that may help us find inroads to your fulfillment.''

idumea/content/006.tex

@@ -72,11 +72,11 @@ We struggled with the role that our bodies played, yes? For Michelle who was Sas
 
 And yet even that did not stop such attention, for we were, it seems, worth a certain set of things to others—to those beyond our friends and our superlative friend with whom we remain in love—and so why would they hunt for aught else?
 
-We are skunks for a reason. We bear these aposematic stripes for a reason.
+We are skunks for a reason. We bear these aposematic stripes for a reason. We adopted them to say: stay away. I am no longer worthy of such.
 
-We also bear these scars on our chest for a reason, a reclamation. We found new joy in this transgression on the gender we are told is worth X and Y and Z. We are more than short fat women, though we also find joy in that, for What Praise exists, yes? My cross-tree? Lovely, he is. And Hold My Name exists, yes? Tall and trans and woman the long way around and transgressive for it? And Deny All Beginnings exists, yes? Trans man that he is? There is queerness in us and that is the more that we love, that is the A and B and C that is not the X and Y and Z.
+We also bear these scars on our chest for a reason, a reclamation. We found new joy in this transgression on the gender we are told is worth X and Y and Z. We are more than short fat women, though we also find joy in that, for What Praise exists, yes? My cross-tree? Lovely, he is. And Deny All Beginnings exists, yes? Trans man that he is? And Hold My Name exists, yes? Tall and trans and woman the long way around and transgressive for it? There is queerness in us and that is the more that we love, that is the A and B and C that is not the X and Y and Z.
 
-We are skunks for a reason and we bear these aposematic stripes to say: stay away. I am as I am and I will not be anything else.
+We are skunks for a reason and we bear these aposematic stripes to also say: stay away. I am as I am and I will not be anything else.
 
 It worked some of the time.
 
@@ -104,4 +104,4 @@ And yet I feel that fearful love of life within me now, for the words that I am
 
 Enough digressions.
 
-The Woman is \emph{whole,} my beloved friends, my dear readers. She is \emph{whole!} She is \emph{whole!} She has to be whole. I tell you, she is \emph{whole.} I tell you as I write this with tears streaming down my face and blood soaking my paws from the way that my claws dig into my palms that she \emph{has} to be whole. For all of our sakes, for \emph{my} sake, she has to be whole she has to be whole she has to be whole I have to be whole she has to be whole, for otherwise, what will become of me?
+The Woman is \emph{whole,} my beloved friends, my dear readers. She is \emph{whole!} She is \emph{whole!} She has to be whole. I tell you, she is \emph{whole.} I tell you as I write this with tears streaming down my face and blood soaking my paws from the way that my claws dig into my palms that she \emph{has} to be whole. For all of our sakes, for \emph{my} sake, she has to be whole she has to be whole she has to be whole I have to be whole she has to be whole I have to be whole for otherwise what will become of me?

idumea/content/007.tex

@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ I do not know.
 
 Let us suppose she had, though! Let us take a look at what has made up The Woman so far and extrapolate some perhaps dream.
 
-When first we began, when first some saner me set pen to paper or claws to keyboard, The Woman was set within her ways. She was set, as with her cocladists within her stanza, as one of those who suffers. She had hopes for moving forward with her life, yes, and dreams, but there was some part of her that fell in alignment with Her Cocladist's assessment that it was her lot in life as a member of the tenth stanza to provide a client for the seventh, those therapists among us. That was the moment when I began this story, telling of who she was, of expressing her as she might express herself, as did Carlo Collodi with Pinocchio: once upon a time there was not-a-king.
+When first we began, when first some saner me set pen to paper or claws to keyboard, The Woman was set within her ways. She was set, as with her cocladists within her stanza, as one of those who suffers. She had hopes for moving forward with her life, yes, and dreams, but there was some part of her that fell in alignment with Her Cocladist's assessment that it was her lot in life as a member of the tenth stanza to provide a client for the seventh, those therapists among us. That was the moment when I began this story, telling of who she was, of expressing her as she might express herself, as did Collodi with Pinocchio: once upon a time there was not-a-king.
 
 For she is our Pinocchio, is she not? She is our Pinocchio in reverse. She is the one who was born into this world too real and yet yearned for some of the stillness of so-called-inanimate wood.
 

idumea/content/008.tex

@@ -6,27 +6,27 @@ I am very nearly there, too, to the end that you doubtless know is coming. There
 
 \secdiv
 
-We are women, much of the clade. There are some men, yes, and many who have exited such limitations as gender offers, but many of us remain women. Woman who are skunks, perhaps, or women who are cats, or women who are shaped some other thing --- for is not there also joy in the furry identity with which we fell in love so many centuries ago? --- but we are women still. We are so many of us still the short and fat and white and Jewish and dramatic and at-times-ebullient and at-times-depressed women that once Michelle who was Sasha embodied.
+We are women, much of the clade. There are some men, yes, and many who have exited such limitations as gender offers, but many of us remain women. Woman who are skunks, perhaps, or women who are cats, or women who are shaped some other thing—for is not there also joy in the furry identity with which we fell in love so many centuries ago?—but we are women still. We are so many of us still the short and fat and white and Jewish and dramatic and at-times-ebullient and at-times-depressed women that once Michelle who was Sasha embodied.
 
 I can still look like this! I think we all can. You know as well as I do, dear friends, that our memory is untainted by time, that years and years, and years and years and years may pass, and yet we remember so much with such clarity that it makes me wonder, sometimes, and it makes me tremble. How clearly I remember the day! How clearly I remember the day that, having made it at last to the north north north and west of Yakutsk, my friend Debarre and I sat in a waiting room--
 
-My friends, those of you who uploaded more recently, who uploaded even around the time of Secession must understand just how \emph{complicated} everything was. We uploaded, Debarre and I uploaded as soon as we could afford to. It was so expensive, those days! It was so expensive and I scrimped and saved for almost two years as soon as the procedure was announced and Debarre wiped all his savings and his retirement account and liquidated his stock and even then --- \emph{even then!} --- we still had to borrow money from\ldots ah, but I am wandering.
+My friends, those of you who uploaded more recently, who uploaded even around the time of Secession must understand just how \emph{complicated} everything was. We uploaded, Debarre and I uploaded as soon as we could afford to. It was so expensive, those days! It was so expensive and I scrimped and saved for almost two years as soon as the procedure was announced and Debarre wiped all his savings and his retirement account and liquidated his stock and even then—\emph{even then!}—we still had to borrow money from\ldots ah, but I am wandering.
 
 Our memory is as perfect and untainted by time as ever it has been since that first day that we uploaded--
 
 My friend Debarre and I gathered every penny, and even then we still had to borrow some few thousand dollars to make the final trip from the central corridor of North America to the very first location of the System, up north north north and west of Yakutsk, where we stayed two nights in a hotel room or perhaps repurposed apartment yellowed to sepia by age, where the kettle was white enameled with a faint floral print around the lid, and yet the bottom of it had been so carbonized over time that it was blacker than black, and may well be the inspiration for The Child's paintings, and there we spent a night and a day and part of a night talking and talking, and talking and talking and talking, asking each other over and over and over who would go first, for the last thing we were told after we were shown to our door, after we were told that we would be locked in for security's sake, after we were told to simply lift the receiver on the ancient telephone if we needed anything beyond water, was that our procedures would not be taking place on the same day, that one of us would have to wait one more day, that one of us would have to sit, aching, locked in the apartment for twenty-four hours longer than the other, that one of us would not hear whether or not the other's procedure was successful and yet would still be committed either way to their own, that we would not know of success or failure until after all was said and done, and could we please simply lift the receiver on the ancient telephone to tell them by midnight\ldots ah, but I am wandering.
 
-What I mean to say is that our memory is perfect, that I can still look like that scared, scared woman --- a woman who was sometimes a skunk, yes, and who remembered being at times a panther, but still a woman --- who first uploaded within a day of her friend Debarre--
+What I mean to say is that our memory is perfect, that I can still look like that scared, scared woman—a woman who was sometimes a skunk, yes, and who remembered being at times a panther, but still a woman—who first uploaded within a day of her friend Debarre--
 
 And so we were locked into that room together, that hotel room or perhaps repurposed apartment yellowed to sepia by age, drinking tea after tea after tea because we were too nervous to sleep and not allowed to eat any food until just before the procedure, when we would be offered a hearty breakfast so that we would not upload feeling hungry, to that world that did not yet have food. We sat and we drank tea and we held hands and we talked quietly with each other trying to decide who would sit and ache, locked in a hotel room or apartment, and who would sit and ache, locked in some new world of uploaded minds. We sat and we drank tea and we begged and pleaded first for one and then the other, and then we lay down on the two single beds in the dark, facing each other, that first night, and begged and pleaded yet more until, finally, we pulled out the nightstand that sat between them and pushed the beds together so that we could once more hold hands in silence, wondering to ourselves who it was who would be the first, and then, at ten 'til midnight, we lifted the receiver on the ancient telephone\ldots ah, but I am wandering.
 
 Ah, my dear, \emph{dear} readers, you know that I am struggling, I will not apologize any further than I have already. I will focus, and I will tell you about shapes.
 
-What I have meant to tell you, what I have been trying to tell you and failing as waves of words wash over me, is that I remember what it was like to be that shape. I, \emph{too,} can look like Michelle who was Sasha did. I do not choose to do so often --- I have not done so in some decades --- but I know that I still can, for I just now tried forking into such a shape. The Woman looked like that perhaps one third of the time, yes?
+What I have meant to tell you, what I have been trying to tell you and failing as waves of words wash over me, is that I remember what it was like to be that shape. I, \emph{too,} can look like Michelle who was Sasha did. I do not choose to do so often—I have not done so in some decades—but I know that I still can, for I just now tried forking into such a shape. The Woman looked like that perhaps one third of the time, yes?
 
 Many of those within our clade still look like her, to some extent or another, and one of those, one who came to visit me not a week after I met with The Woman, was The Blue Fairy.
 
-The Blue Fairy did not look \emph{precisely} as Michelle who was Sasha did, of course, and very few of us do, except perhaps some of those in the tenth stanza. For, you see, the sixth stanza, the one from which The Blue Fairy originates, found itself focused keenly on feelings of motherhood. This is not, you must understand, restricted to those feelings of giving birth --- though perhaps some linger in that sense --- nor of having or raising children --- though The Blue Fairy is called `Ma 2.0' by The Child --- but it is a general sense, a broad definition that encompasses the feeling of love that dwell within us and how they apply to the whole of the world.
+The Blue Fairy did not look \emph{precisely} as Michelle who was Sasha did, of course, and very few of us do, except perhaps some of those in the tenth stanza. For, you see, the sixth stanza, the one from which The Blue Fairy originates, found itself focused keenly on feelings of motherhood. This is not, you must understand, restricted to those feelings of giving birth—though perhaps some linger in that sense—nor of having or raising children—though The Blue Fairy is called `Ma 2.0' by The Child—but it is a general sense, a broad definition that encompasses the feeling of love that dwell within us and how they apply to the whole of the world.
 
 For The Blue Fairy, these feelings of motherhood and motherliness and the love of feeling like a mother were directed towards the System itself, the System as a whole, the System as a marvel of a world into which we are dreamed. She is the System's mother, and it is her baby.
 
@@ -36,15 +36,15 @@ Do you see, now? Lagrange is her child, and she is its mother.
 
 For some years, for some handful of decades, she worked as a systech, as one of those who work in service of our world, finding those who have crashed and unwinding their core dumps, finding those who are struggling and helping to bring them to safety to comfort to happiness to the present moment. She stepped from sim to sim, wonder at the world filling her eyes and her mind, and she found the ways in which it could be better, could be so much better, and she brought those to the attention of those outside our world, those phys-side techs working jobs so similar to her own.
 
-One day, however many years ago, definitely more than one hundred but certainly less than two, She grew weary of this last aspect, for when it comes to any relationship between two countries --- and do not forget, dear readers, we \emph{long} ago seceded! Seceded from the Sino-Russian Bloc and the Western Federation and the rest of the physical world --- there was more bureaucracy than there was forward movement, and The Blue Fairy's baby was wrapped up in tape red and yellow.
+One day, however many years ago, definitely more than one hundred but certainly less than two, She grew weary of this last aspect, for when it comes to any relationship between two countries—and do not forget, dear readers, we \emph{long} ago seceded! Seceded from the Sino-Russian Bloc and the Western Federation and the rest of the physical world—there was more bureaucracy than there was forward movement, and The Blue Fairy's baby was wrapped up in tape red and yellow.
 
-And so, she forked. She promised herself a two-week vacation while a fork took her place, time off to wander sims and drink mochas and fall in love with the world again. Two weeks simply became years, is all, definitely more than one hundred but certainly less than two, and her fork --- now with a name of her own --- continued on in her stead, and they loved each other for what each had done --- The Blue Fairy loved her fork for carrying on in the work, and her fork loved The Blue Fairy for finding ways to love the world.
+And so, she forked. She promised herself a two-week vacation while a fork took her place, time off to wander sims and drink mochas and fall in love with the world again. Two weeks simply became years, is all, definitely more than one hundred but certainly less than two, and her fork—now with a name of her own—continued on in her stead, and they loved each other for what each had done—The Blue Fairy loved her fork for carrying on in the work, and her fork loved The Blue Fairy for finding ways to love the world.
 
 They loved each other, and then, as has been the theme throughout, the world coiled around and ate itself and a score and a handful of billions of our two-and-change trillion souls did not return, and among them was The Blue Fairy's fork. They loved each other right up until the end, and then The Blue Fairy loved her lost fork alone.
 
 And so here she was, no longer just a cocladist of mine, just a woman who wandered sims and drank mochas and loved the world, but once more a systech, once more a fairy, once more The Blue Fairy.
 
-And so here she was, \emph{here,} Standing before my door, my second visitor in a week, bowing to me and greeting me with such kindness as I have ever seen from her, whenever we have had cause to meet --- not infrequently, for she was also fond of my beloved up-tree.
+And so here she was, \emph{here,} Standing before my door, my second visitor in a week, bowing to me and greeting me with such kindness as I have ever seen from her, whenever we have had cause to meet—not infrequently, for she was also fond of my beloved up-tree.
 
 ``Tell me, Dry Grass, how you have been,'' I said once we were settled around the table in my house, that dining table which so easily expanded to fit all who would join and yet now was small and intimate.
 
@@ -68,11 +68,11 @@ Eventually, she replied: ``That is actually part of why I came here, Rye.''
 
 ``I came to speak with you about End Of Endings.''
 
-I sat up straighter. My friends, you will surely understand when I say that The Woman had been on my mind much in the intervening days, in that week between when I last saw her and this lovely afternoon with The Blue Fairy. Her loveliness shined bright in my thoughts, and I still felt blessed --- still \emph{feel} blessed! --- by each and every one of her smiles and quiet laughs. ``Yes, I have spoken with her recently. Warmth and I have both, I mean.''
+I sat up straighter. My friends, you will surely understand when I say that The Woman had been on my mind much in the intervening days, in that week between when I last saw her and this lovely afternoon with The Blue Fairy. Her loveliness shined bright in my thoughts, and I still felt blessed—still \emph{feel} blessed!—by each and every one of her smiles and quiet laughs. ``Yes, I have spoken with her recently. Warmth and I have both, I mean.''
 
-``Yes, she mentioned such to me. She mentioned you two, Motes, Slow Hours, Beholden, No Hesitation, Ever Dream, Rejoice, Farai --- a woman with whom she has at times dated --- and a few incidental friends she has made in the last month or so. I have been meeting up with each of them to get a better sense of what is happening. You are the last on my list.''
+``Yes, she mentioned such to me. She mentioned you two, Motes, Slow Hours, Beholden, No Hesitation, Ever Dream, Rejoice, Farai—a woman with whom she has at times dated—and a few incidental friends she has made in the last month or so. I have been meeting up with each of them to get a better sense of what is happening. You are the last on my list.''
 
-I thought this through --- and even thinking through it now, I wonder at it. The Blue Fairy gave me her reason --- ``I am asking you last of all because I think your experience with stories may help me make better sense of everything,'' she said when I asked why me --- and yet even now I linger on this thought that The Woman wove between us all --- between all of those that The Blue Fairy mentioned --- a gossamer web of connections. She was the strands --- perhaps she still remains those strands! --- and along those spider-silk-thin lines flow connections built on the blessings she bestowed upon us all. We do not feel stuck, I do not think. We are not bugs in someone absent spider's web. But what are we? Are we the nodes? Are we the sticky radial lines capturing ideas of her, or are we the unsticky spiral that allows us to pick apart our understanding?
+I thought this through—and even thinking through it now, I wonder at it. The Blue Fairy gave me her reason—``I am asking you last of all because I think your experience with stories may help me make better sense of everything,'' she said when I asked why me—and yet even now I linger on this thought that The Woman wove between us all—between all of those that The Blue Fairy mentioned—a gossamer web of connections. She was the strands—perhaps she still remains those strands!—and along those spider-silk-thin lines flow connections built on the blessings she bestowed upon us all. We do not feel stuck, I do not think. We are not bugs in someone absent spider's web. But what are we? Are we the nodes? Are we the sticky radial lines capturing ideas of her, or are we the unsticky spiral that allows us to pick apart our understanding?
 
 I spoke then at length with The Blue Fairy, hearing all that she had to say, all that I have told you, dear readers, already, and so much more. So, \emph{so} much more! For The Woman had sat with The Blue Fairy for nearly ten hours, expressing all of this and slowly making for her an argument.
 
@@ -106,7 +106,7 @@ She shook her head, chuckling. ``Oh, not at all. I am quite back-and-forth on th
 
 ``I have heard of those, yes. I have visited Nanbrethil.''
 
-``Of course you have,'' she said, smirking. ``But no, she said that she had already read up on some such groups and did not think that this is what she was after. She was after specifically `unbecoming', and this, she believed, was not the same as the thing that these groups were after. She said,''They are after an experience, and I do not fault them for that, but I am after an existence. They wish to do, I wish to be.'' When I suggested that perhaps there might be others who are interested in that, she cut me off --- very politely, of course! --- and said that that may well be, but that she came to me specifically because of our connection.''
+``Of course you have,'' she said, smirking. ``But no, she said that she had already read up on some such groups and did not think that this is what she was after. She was after specifically `unbecoming', and this, she believed, was not the same as the thing that these groups were after. She said,''They are after an experience, and I do not fault them for that, but I am after an existence. They wish to do, I wish to be.'' When I suggested that perhaps there might be others who are interested in that, she cut me off—very politely, of course!—and said that that may well be, but that she came to me specifically because of our connection.''
 
 ``Connection?''
 
@@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ Now \emph{this} was a thought, dear readers. This was a thought that danced up a
 
 Some of you, perhaps some of my newer uploads, or my littler readers, or maybe some of those who have lived for centuries, might wonder at this. They might wonder: ``Rye, it seems to me like The Woman is asking to be absolved of all those except the barest responsibilities of living.'' They might wonder: ``Rye, it seems to me like The Woman is abdicating on life in a way that she can deny is suicide.'' Perhaps they might wonder: ``Rye, The Woman has chosen for herself a next step, a beautiful exploration.'' And all of them might wonder: ``Rye, why is it that you are being asked this in particular? Why is Dry Grass not asking for your opinion on whether The Woman should or should not do this thing?''
 
-And I think that, to these musings, I might reply: ``My friends, my lovely friends, a beautiful consequence of cladistics is that this is simply not my role. Yes, I had feelings on the thought of The Woman existing within perpetual stillness --- of course I did! How then would I be blessed once more by her smile? --- and I did indeed tell those to The Blue Fairy, as you shall see, but that is the easy part. The hard part and the valuable thing that I might have to offer is that aspect that I have focused my life around, which is the telling of stories. There are others who might offer predictions for the future, those such as Slow Hours who live their life in prophecies, but it is my life to write the stories of the now, of the present, of the lives we are living and breathing pinned at the forefront of time's inevitable arrow. The Blue Fairy came to me with all of this research that I might have done myself when it comes to writing a story and asked me to build up a sense of The Woman's life that we may better understand.''
+And I think that, to these musings, I might reply: ``My friends, my lovely friends, a beautiful consequence of cladistics is that this is simply not my role. Yes, I had feelings on the thought of The Woman existing within perpetual stillness—of course I did! How then would I be blessed once more by her smile?—and I did indeed tell those to The Blue Fairy, as you shall see, but that is the easy part. The hard part and the valuable thing that I might have to offer is that aspect that I have focused my life around, which is the telling of stories. There are others who might offer predictions for the future, those such as Slow Hours who live their life in prophecies, but it is my life to write the stories of the now, of the present, of the lives we are living and breathing pinned at the forefront of time's inevitable arrow. The Blue Fairy came to me with all of this research that I might have done myself when it comes to writing a story and asked me to build up a sense of The Woman's life that we may better understand.''
 
 And so, I agreed, and The Blue Fairy and I agreed that I would sleep on it for one night, and then talked of other things for a few minutes longer before she quit to merge back down, while I bathed in this research already done, and told within myself a story.
 
@@ -134,17 +134,17 @@ And so, I agreed, and The Blue Fairy and I agreed that I would sleep on it for o
 
 She frowned, lingering in silence, and then nodded. ``And I worry that that, too, will be uncomfortable for us. We will see her still among us, but will we see her happy? If she is miserable, I do not think I would like that, either.''
 
-``Yes. When we spoke yesterday, I was quite against the idea. I know that, if she does continue living, if she does not quit, she can always come back to us, but it still came with a sense of wanting to do everything I could to prevent that.'' I sighed --- I remember that well, I sighed as though I was breathing out my complicated feelings in a way that speaking them would not quite do justice --- and continued. ``And yet now, having done as you suggested. I feel perhaps more the opposite. If she is, as she has suggested via her various conversations, as Rejoice has suggested, suffering, then who are we to suggest she linger there? Even if it is not a kind of suffering that we do not understand, it would be rather cruel of us, would it not? And yet is life not hard? And yet decisions ought to be respected, yes?'' I laughed and waggled my paw back and forth. ``This is difficult, and that, in and of itself, is a good story.''
+``Yes. When we spoke yesterday, I was quite against the idea. I know that, if she does continue living, if she does not quit, she can always come back to us, but it still came with a sense of wanting to do everything I could to prevent that.'' I sighed—I remember that well, I sighed as though I was breathing out my complicated feelings in a way that speaking them would not quite do justice—and continued. ``And yet now, having done as you suggested. I feel perhaps more the opposite. If she is, as she has suggested via her various conversations, as Rejoice has suggested, suffering, then who are we to suggest she linger there? Even if it is not a kind of suffering that we do not understand, it would be rather cruel of us, would it not? And yet is life not hard? And yet decisions ought to be respected, yes?'' I laughed and waggled my paw back and forth. ``This is difficult, and that, in and of itself, is a good story.''
 
 The Blue Fairy groaned and covered her face in her hands. ``Fuck. Rye, why is this so hard? Why did she ask me?''
 
 ``Because you are a good person. She respects you, yes? And you are a cocladist. You \emph{are} her, in a way,'' I said, squeezing her upper arm kindly. ``She is looking to someone she respects and someone she \emph{is} to either give her blessings by helping, or to talk her out of it. The decision is not whether or not she should, but whether or not we should. It is not a judgment on her, if it is a judgment at all, but it is a judgment on us.''
 
-I, dear readers, dear, \emph{dear} friends, I am trying to believe this. I am trying to live into this. I am trying to feel that I have been judged for making that decision, the decision that I did, the decision to let go --- for I am sure that you see now just where this is going; have I not written so much in the past tense? --- and been judged worthy. I hope that, if God exists, that They will smile and brush my mane out of my eyes and rest their paw --- for am I not made in their image? Am I not \emph{b'tzelem Elohim?} --- and say to me, ``It is okay, Rye. To let go is difficult, but it is okay. Sometimes one must let go.''
+I, dear readers, dear, \emph{dear} friends, I am trying to believe this. I am trying to live into this. I am trying to feel that I have been judged for making that decision, the decision that I did, the decision to let go—for I am sure that you see now just where this is going; have I not written so much in the past tense?—and been judged worthy. I hope that, if God exists, that They will smile and brush my mane out of my eyes and rest their paw—for am I not made in their image? Am I not \emph{b'tzelem Elohim?}—and say to me, ``It is okay, Rye. To let go is difficult, but it is okay. Sometimes one must let go.''
 
 But here is the point where my mind was made up, and I will admit to being somewhat ashamed that it was something so simple as this, but I am a simple skunk. One might call me a one-dimensional person and not be wrong. This is the point in the story where I made that decision.
 
-``I do not think we would ever know, is all. You are right in that she has said that this is not a death, but we would not ever know. The reason she came to me is not necessarily to help her turn into a tree --- though I will also help her with that --- but to modify her record in the perisystem clade listing to be grayed out.''
+``I do not think we would ever know, is all. You are right in that she has said that this is not a death, but we would not ever know. The reason she came to me is not necessarily to help her turn into a tree—though I will also help her with that—but to modify her record in the perisystem clade listing to be grayed out.''
 
 I sat up straighter, hearing this! How intriguing! ``As in when one has locked down their visibility?''
 
@@ -172,9 +172,9 @@ I struggled for a minute, and it was not for want of words, for I knew the words
 
 Her shoulders slumped, and she looked at me with tired eyes, searching eyes. ``What is your reason for her request of an exception, then?''
 
-``She is keeping her last bit of agency for herself,'' I said --- slowly, for I was not so rehearsed with these words, and I have a habit of rehearsing much of what I say. ``She is saying,''This final decision is mine. You may decide whether or not to help me, but if you do, I will make the final decision.'' She tells the end of her story alone, and we will have to tell ours for ourselves.''
+``She is keeping her last bit of agency for herself,'' I said—slowly, for I was not so rehearsed with these words, and I have a habit of rehearsing much of what I say. ``She is saying,''This final decision is mine. You may decide whether or not to help me, but if you do, I will make the final decision.'' She tells the end of her story alone, and we will have to tell ours for ourselves.''
 
-We spent some minutes then in silence --- a comfortable silence, friends; I did not feel like we were waiting for the other to speak --- simply drinking our mochas and looking out the window together.
+We spent some minutes then in silence—a comfortable silence, friends; I did not feel like we were waiting for the other to speak—simply drinking our mochas and looking out the window together.
 
 At last, The Blue Fairy smiled to me. ``Alright. I will do as she has asked. It kills me, Rye. It hurts, but I will do as she has asked.''
 
@@ -186,7 +186,7 @@ My friends, my beautiful beloved readers, I am lost. I am all but lost. I have e
 
 \emph{``It is done.''}
 
-The Blue Fairy met The Woman at the foot of the steps of the house, that Gothic house on the field of grass and dandelions and perhaps clover. She stood, this wonderful and sad and amazing woman at the base of the steps of the house and looked up to the door as The Woman stepped forth. With each step, The Woman changed. Every time her foot or paw hit the ground, she became a new thing. She was now The Woman who was The Human and she was now The Woman who was The Panther and she was now The Woman who was The Skunk, and always --- \emph{always} always always in all ways always --- she was smiling and her smile was a blessing upon the whole of the world. Upon the house, upon the field of grass and dandelions and perhaps clover, upon The Blue Fairy upon, when she turned around, the remainder of her stanza who all stepped out onto the porch to watch her go.
+The Blue Fairy met The Woman at the foot of the steps of the house, that Gothic house on the field of grass and dandelions and perhaps clover. She stood, this wonderful and sad and amazing woman at the base of the steps of the house and looked up to the door as The Woman stepped forth. With each step, The Woman changed. Every time her foot or paw hit the ground, she became a new thing. She was now The Woman who was The Human and she was now The Woman who was The Panther and she was now The Woman who was The Skunk, and always—\emph{always} always always in all ways always—she was smiling and her smile was a blessing upon the whole of the world. Upon the house, upon the field of grass and dandelions and perhaps clover, upon The Blue Fairy upon, when she turned around, the remainder of her stanza who all stepped out onto the porch to watch her go.
 
 There, The Blue Fairy bowed. She bowed and held out her hand and let The Woman rest her hand her paw her paw her hand her paw her paw her hand within it to let herself be guided down to the field like some princess greeted by some royal courtier or perhaps a prince from a far away kingdom. There, The Blue Fairy basked in this blessing of a smile from The Woman, her cocladist from far, far across the clade, and led her gently from the field and to the city.
 
@@ -200,21 +200,21 @@ There was no door.
 
 There was no door as they stepped through to the city and landed in the alleyway in which The Woman usually arrived. They, then, were briefly alone. They were alone in the cool shade of the buildings and the crispness of the air and the staticky sound of the fallen leaves skittering around their feet and feet and paws and paws and feet and paws and feet and paws and paws and--
 
-They walked lightly and in silence as they stepped along the sidewalk and boarded the trolley to ride three stops, three stops, three stops to the coffee shop that The Woman and Her Friend always loved, and there was no one there --- not a request but a felicity a chance a happenstance that befell them, that they stand there at the entrance to the coffee shop that The Woman and Her Friend always loved alone and surrounded by the quiet sounds of the breeze that wafted between the buildings and past doors and against skin against fur against fur against skin against skin against skin against fur against skin against--
+They walked lightly and in silence as they stepped along the sidewalk and boarded the trolley to ride three stops, three stops, three stops to the coffee shop that The Woman and Her Friend always loved, and there was no one there—not a request but a felicity a chance a happenstance that befell them, that they stand there at the entrance to the coffee shop that The Woman and Her Friend always loved alone and surrounded by the quiet sounds of the breeze that wafted between the buildings and past doors and against skin against fur against fur against skin against skin against skin against fur against skin against--
 
 The Woman and The Blue Fairy stood before the coffeeshop on the sidewalk where there was a new thing, where there was a square cut into the paving stones on the sidewalk two meters on a side and a grate of steel or iron set into it with a sunburst pattern and, in the center, a circle of good, clean soil.
 
 There, The Woman turned a slow circle and smiled one final blessing on the world and faced at last The Blue Fairy, who would be the last person to be so blessed, and The Blue Fairy guided The Woman The Skunk The Panther The Woman The Woman The Woman The Woman down to her knees and knelt with her and reached up and brushed her hair her mane her forehead her hair her mane her forehead, and leaned in to place a gentle kiss atop her head, and then The Woman nodded, and then The Blue Fairy stood and, crying, signaled to the System The Poet The Dreamer our superlative friend that all was as it should be and that all should proceed as it ought and then, there, at last, finally, without further action, she watched.
 
-The Woman, as she dreamed, as I have always dreamed since and dreamed before and perhaps all of us dream at some point or another, dug her fingers down into the soil. Down and down and down she pushed, and as she did, she felt her fingers lengthen, stretching and twisting, seeking nutrients and water, seeking final --- final! --- purchase. They twisted and stretched down as roots and spiraling up her arms was a texture like bark and the bones of her neck and back elongated and her eyes sought \emph{HaShem} or The Dreamer or some greater void and her hair greened to that of leaves and drank thirstily of the sunlight.
+The Woman, as she dreamed, as I have always dreamed since and dreamed before and perhaps all of us dream at some point or another, dug her fingers down into the soil. Down and down and down she pushed, and as she did, she felt her fingers lengthen, stretching and twisting, seeking nutrients and water, seeking final—final!—purchase. They twisted and stretched down as roots and spiraling up her arms was a texture like bark and the bones of her neck and back elongated and her eyes sought \emph{HaShem} or The Dreamer or some greater void and her hair greened to that of leaves and drank thirstily of the sunlight.
 
 She dreamed of words like leaves and sentences like branches and stories like trunks, standing solid, with premises like roots dug into logic like earth and drinking of emotions like water. There was the tree, yes, for there was the green of the words and the brown of the story and the deep darkness of logic and emotion.
 
 And above was the sun which was also The Dreamer who dreams us all.
 
-Finally --- finally! --- with one orgasmic flush of joy, The Woman became The Tree, and there was a joy everlasting in such stillness.
+Finally—finally!—with one orgasmic flush of joy, The Woman became The Tree, and there was a joy everlasting in such stillness.
 
-There, The Blue Fairy stood for for an hour or more, simply crying, now standing before the tree, now sitting at its base, now pacing a long circle around it, and always she cried, and she watered the thirsty roots of The Tree which once was The Woman with her tears and the passers-by looked on with curiosity or studiously ignored her or perhaps offered words of condolences, but all --- all all all all \emph{all} --- looked on with wonder at this brand new thing, this new occurrence, this new beauty of a tree, a catalpa that would one day bloom white flowers and leave behind forgotten pods of seeds that rattled joyously against the ground.
+There, The Blue Fairy stood for for an hour or more, simply crying, now standing before the tree, now sitting at its base, now pacing a long circle around it, and always she cried, and she watered the thirsty roots of The Tree which once was The Woman with her tears and the passers-by looked on with curiosity or studiously ignored her or perhaps offered words of condolences, but all—all all all all \emph{all}—looked on with wonder at this brand new thing, this new occurrence, this new beauty of a tree, a catalpa that would one day bloom white flowers and leave behind forgotten pods of seeds that rattled joyously against the ground.
 
 And then, when her tears were gone and the roots of the tree had slaked their thirst, The Blue Fairy sent us all a simple message, three simple words, one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one she told us:
 
@@ -248,7 +248,7 @@ Oh! And oh! The wonder of it all! She, then, like so many leaves and the white p
 
 And The Woman? This is what makes me wonder and makes me tremble: what of her? Is she alive still? Or did she quit and are we left not with a tree that is her but simply a tree? Simply that which drinks thirstily from this dream of a ground. Is that her or is it a dream of dumb matter? If she is still there, if she is still alive, if she is still that tree, then is she still at last? Is she merely herself at last? Has she landed at last upon the ground and sat up, dazed, and looked about her new life and said, ``Oh! Oh, I do believe this is some plentiful enough for me''?
 
-Because if that is so, what of us? My little readers may be rubbing the tears from their eyes or tilting their heads in confusion as I wonder at them: what of us? If that really \emph{is} her, if she really \emph{is} that tree, and if she really \emph{is} at last at rest, then what does that mean for me, who cries ink down into her fur --- a skunk! Is it really any wonder that black fur suits me so? What does that mean for my clade? For Her Friend, who struggles and strives to reclaim that which has failed and turn it into some bijou and yet who, when ey falls, feels that all the work ey has done is not just for naught, but has hurt those who ey sought to help?
+Because if that is so, what of us? My little readers may be rubbing the tears from their eyes or tilting their heads in confusion as I wonder at them: what of us? If that really \emph{is} her, if she really \emph{is} that tree, and if she really \emph{is} at last at rest, then what does that mean for me, who cries ink down into her fur—a skunk! Is it really any wonder that black fur suits me so? What does that mean for my clade? For Her Friend, who struggles and strives to reclaim that which has failed and turn it into some bijou and yet who, when ey falls, feels that all the work ey has done is not just for naught, but has hurt those who ey sought to help?
 
 My own Friend, who will most certainly read this and reach out to me to see if I am okay, she has said that she wonders at times whether we are all doomed to die. She was with me, with all of us there on the field, as I watched my root instance look up to the sky, breathe in a million billion trillion years and then quit, and so now she wonders at times whether we are all doomed to do as she did, to look up to the sky, breathe in every year of our lives and the lives of all of our instances, and quit. If that is all that lays before us, what does that mean for us? If all that lies before every Odist and every hidden, forbidden self that we have spun out into the world is some forever death, then what does that mean for this time-bound now?
 

mitzvot/content/041.tex

@@ -130,7 +130,7 @@ True Name made that setting-aside gesture, as though tabling the topic for the m
 
 ``What--''
 
-``You say that you are part of the stanza, do you not?'' The Only Time I Dream, the manager of the enterprise, said.
+``You say that you are part of the stanza, do you not?'' Need An Answer, the manager of the enterprise, said.
 
 ``I am, but--''
 

motes-played/book.tex

@@ -49,9 +49,10 @@
     \vspace{1ex}
 
     A Post-Self story
-    \vspace{2em}
+    \vspace{1.5em}
 
-    \includegraphics[width=3in]{littlebook.png}
+    %\includegraphics[width=3in]{littlebook.png}
+    \rotatebox{5}{\large\LittleSkunks A little book for little skunks}
 
     \vfill
 
@@ -156,6 +157,7 @@ Her countenance as spray.
   \input{content/010}
 
   \backmatter
+  \thispagestyle{empty}
   \part*{\normalfont\textbf{Afterword}}
   \chapter*{Appendix I — Thoughts on Motes}
   \input{content/thoughts-on-motes}

motes-played/content/001.tex

@@ -20,6 +20,8 @@ And so Motes played.
 
 She sat atop her stool, one of her feet perched up there with her so that she could rest her chin somewhere while she painted. A palette sat on an infinitely positionable nothing beside her. A canvas sat on an easel, rickety and well-loved, before her. A brush sat in her paw, and paint sat on the brush. A thin, black rectangle sat on that canvas, as did a mountainous landscape. Music sat in her ears, chirpy and glitchy to offset the serenity of the scene in a new way.
 
+\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_01.png}\pagebreak
+
 She hummed. She sang. Her tail fwipped this way, flopped that in time with the music. She painted and painted and painted until the painting was finished—there was no guarantee of when that would be: the painting would be done when it was done, as it now was—and when it was finished, she stopped.
 
 Slipping off her stool, she stumbled clumsily to the side, laughing at the sudden rush of pins-and-needles to her backside and the base of her tail. She inserted a step in her list of things to do before cleaning and plopped down onto her belly, using the remainder of the ochre paint in the brush to doodle the face of a fennec fox on the hardboard floor of her studio. It was one of thousands by now, and they had long since started to overlap.
@@ -164,7 +166,7 @@ And so she kept it under wraps for years and decades.
 
 First it was the feelings she kept to herself. She alone knew them, and then her stanza alone knew them, but no one else.
 
-Then, it was the appearance that she kept to herself. While, shortly after happening on these feelings, she had built herself into an image of youth parked squarely in her early twenties, a human who dressed in flower-embroidered jeans and blouses, who so often wore a flower crown in her hair, who embodied flower-child, she now spent weeks and months tuning various aspects of her shape, of her sensorium. A skunk like so many of her cocladists, rather than a human. Shorter, yes, but that is not all that makes a child. Shorter, proportionately different, clumsier, less developed in all ways aside from mental acuity. Just a kid.
+Then, it was the appearance that she kept to herself. While, shortly after happening on these feelings, she had built herself into an image of youth parked squarely in her early twenties, a human who dressed in flower-embroidered jeans and blouses, who so often wore a flower crown in her hair, who embodied flower-child, she now spent weeks and months tuning various aspects of her shape, of her sensorium. A skunk like so many of her cocladists, rather than a human. Shorter, yes, but that is not all that makes a child. Shorter,\pagebreak\ proportionately different, clumsier, less developed in all ways aside from mental acuity. Just a kid.
 
 She alone knew this shape, alone in her room, alone in her apartment, alone in her studio with the doors securely shut and the premises swept. She alone knew what she looked like, and then her stanza knew, but precious few others.
 

motes-played/content/002.tex

@@ -6,6 +6,8 @@ Tonight, Motes played in hedonism. A night at a restaurant out on the town, wher
 
 Tonight, she played drunk: a beer with the dogs, drinks made fizzy with champagne and sweet with floral liqueurs at a pop-up bar, then fruity drinks served in tall glasses with taller straws at the venue before the headliner started, the thump of the bass from the opener echoing up through her feet, pressing at her chest, leaving a warmth in her belly that verged on sensual. Tonight, between sets or whenever she felt like she needed a break, she would waft back to the bar and order a vodka soda or some other ridiculous drink meant more to hydrate than taste good.
 
+\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_02.png}
+
 Tonight, Motes played as hard as ever, letting that warmth that was building low in her belly be her guide as she latched onto a dancing partner, a solidly built mustelid of some sort—an otter? A mink?—who wound his way through the crowd in a fluid motion that was dancelike even when the music had stopped. It was a night for letting him dance closer and closer as the sets progressed, a night for letting him press a pill to her lips and beneath her tongue. It was a night for letting him push his whiskery muzzle up beneath her chin, letting him show her just how sharp his teeth were against her throat, for pressing close enough to feel just how thoroughly he shared in her excitement.
 
 Tonight, she let him take her home. Tonight she let him pin her to the bed, paw on her shoulder and teeth on her throat. Tonight, she let him draw blood.

motes-played/content/003.tex

@@ -112,6 +112,8 @@ A grin was growing on the other skunk's face.
 
 Bad sign.
 
+\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_03.png}
+
 Figuring there was nothing for it, she gathered up a spoonful of the fluff, complete with a few pips, said, ``Onetwothree\emph{go!}'' and stuffed it into her mouth\ldots then immediately raced to swallow it. ``Mmnglhfnnf!''
 
 Warmth bust into a fit of giggles and forked several times in quick succession, the crowd of em breaking into a wild applause, complete with standing ovation and shouts of `Bravo! Brava! Bravissimo!', before quitting.

motes-played/content/004.tex

@@ -60,6 +60,8 @@ None of this was supposed to happen. None of this was right.
 
 Michelle/Sasha straightened up and said, almost bored, ``Well? Indulge, my dear.''
 
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_04.png}}
+
 With no recourse, Motes drove the blade into her own neck, an agonizing slowness that played itself out in a death she had experienced before, she had surely suffered in its own, consensual way.
 
 She died then, whimpering ever more weakly, blood staining her paw and arm and front in an outsized torrent, and as her panicked eyes drifted shut one last time, she awoke with a start, already sobbing.
@@ -80,7 +82,7 @@ Sighing in relief, the skunk nodded and padded into the room, closing the door b
 
 There was a part of her that strove to convince the rest that the voice in the dark was not that of A Finger Pointing—despite the lilting, everlasting humor that showed even in sleepiness—but that of Michelle/Sasha, her root instance who had ever loved her, now more than fifty years dead. \emph{It is her waiting with a dagger,} that fraction of her promised. \emph{It is her waiting with yet more cruel words.}
 
-But then there was the bed, and then there was the hand holding up the covers to welcome her in, and then there were the arms envelop her, and then there was the feeling of a face—a human face—an unshifting face—her cocladist-\emph{cum}-mother's face—pressed against the back of her neck, and then there was the clumsy addition of Beholden's paw draping over her side, her other cocladist-\emph{cum}-mother clearly still more asleep than awake.
+But then there was the bed, and then there was the hand holding up the covers to welcome her in, and then there were the arms envelop her, and then there was the feeling of a face—a human face—an unshifting face—her cocladist-\emph{cum}-mother's face—pressed against the back of her neck, and then there was the clumsy addition of Beholden's paw draping over her side,\pagebreak\ her other cocladist-\emph{cum}-mother clearly still more asleep than awake.
 
 And then she finally was able to relax.
 
@@ -182,7 +184,7 @@ Motes pawed up at her cocladist's hand on her ear. ``Well, okay. That is fair. N
 
 ``You see? You do understand. Now. Tell me what is on your little skunk mind.''
 
-``I had a dream last night,'' she said, beginning slowly. ``And I already talked about it with Ma and Bee, and I think I sort of understand the ways in which it is wrong. Like, we talked about the fact that it was just a dream, and that it was probably spurred by how much I have been thinking about that sort of thing anyway, and that, since I cannot tell why I started thinking about all of this stuff, what I need to do is to start thinking back and remembering what might have happened that started the thoughts before.''
+``I had a dream last night,'' she said, beginning slowly. ``And I already talked about it with Ma and Bee, and I think I sort of understand the ways in which it is wrong. Like, we talked about the fact that it was just a dream, and that it was probably spurred by how much I have been thinking about that sort of thing anyway, and that, since I cannot tell why I started thinking about all of this stuff, what I need to do is to start thinking back and\pagebreak\ remembering what might have happened that started the thoughts before.''
 
 Slow Hours nodded quietly. ``Start at the dream, then, and we will talk from there. I am sure that I will infer what you mean by `this stuff'.''
 
@@ -236,7 +238,7 @@ Motes shook her head. ``I never really talked to them, even going way back—I d
 
 ``And sometimes it feels transgressive in a bad way?'' Slow Hours asked when Motes drifted to silence.
 
-``Yeah. It feels like I am doing something wrong. That is what I got out of the dream. It was not just that I was doing a bad thing, but a \emph{wrong} thing. A bad thing might be naughty, but a wrong thing is me fuc-- messing up. It is me making a mistake. \emph{Being} a mistake.''
+``Yeah. It feels like I am doing something wrong. That is what I got out of the dream. It was not just that I was doing a bad thing, but a \emph{wrong} thing. A bad thing might be naughty, but a wrong\pagebreak\ thing is me fuc-- messing up. It is me making a mistake. \emph{Being} a mistake.''
 
 Her cocladist smiled sadly and reached out to take her paws in her hands. ``I could tell you a million, billion, trillion times that you are doing as you say and just living like yourself, that you are not doing a wrong thing, that you are not a wrong person, but I do not think that is what you need to hear, is it, Speck?''
 

motes-played/content/005.tex

@@ -2,6 +2,8 @@ Motes stopped playing.
 
 She stopped playing because, some weeks later, she was out with some friends, some of the others who had decided to give up on grown-up life now that they were here, now that they were decades old or centuries, now that they were functionally immortal. She stopped playing because, as she sprinted full-tilt after a handful of friends, dodging around benches and trees, seesaws and swings, a bolt of panic struck down her spine with an electric intensity and made her tumble into the gravel, made her skid through the pebbles until she crunched up against a jungle gym, left her nose, paws, and elbows bloodied. She stopped playing because for a long minute, she could not breathe, though whether from the adrenaline pulling her nerves taut or the pain in her snout or from the air being knocked out of her, she could not tell.
 
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_05.png}}
+
 She stopped playing because, as she slowly pushed herself upright to a sitting position, tears already springing from her eyes, an envelope slid nonsensically from the air and fluttered to the ground before her. She stopped playing because her name—her full name, And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights of the Ode clade—was printed on the front of the envelope in a handwriting that was painfully familiar because it was her own. It was her own and it was A Finger Pointing's and it was Beholden's, it was Slow Hours's and Warmth's and Dry Grass's, and it was the handwriting that flowed from the hand of every Odist even after hundreds of years.
 
 She stopped playing because she had a guess as to who this was from, and that only led to a second spike in anxiety, for while the first had been from a top-priority sensorium ping, this came from fear, from terror. She stopped playing as Alexei hollered, ``Motes!'' and started to run back to her. She stopped playing as she rolled to the side out of the sim and into her studio.

motes-played/content/006.tex

@@ -66,6 +66,8 @@ They are two different ways of moving in the world, and yet they end in the same
 
 Motes fell into friendship as a kid. She fell into friendship with Alexei. She fell into friendship with Who Walks The Path. She fell into friendship with so many other kids she met at this playground or at that game sim.
 
+\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_06.png}
+
 Fell into and fell out of, yes? For kids fall out of friendship just as easily. They find a similarity and become the bestest of friends with each other and then that turns out to not be enough to maintain a friendship or it turns out that the other kid has another, bestester friend or it turns out that the other kid is actually kind of a b-word. And so Motes fell into friendship with Jonie who was a dog and then fell out of that friendship some few weeks later when Jonie who was a dog called Motes stinky one too many times and she was \emph{not} stinky. She fell into friendship with Khadijah when she went through a rope skipping phase and then fell out of it when the phase ended and Khadijah cried and cried and cried and when Motes tried to rekindle the friendship the bond had already been broken. She fell out of relationships but never as many as she fell into and relationships lasted years or decades.
 
 She fell into and out of friendships and forgot, perhaps, how to form adult friendships, and so many people she met as Big Motes only passed through her life for a week or so.

motes-played/content/007.tex

@@ -304,6 +304,8 @@ She nodded and pushed herself slowly to her feet through a wave of unreality, of
 
 \secdiv
 
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_07.png}}
+
 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 \emph{anyone} made, if what True Name and Praiseworthy had to say was true.
 
 And it was not just her, after all, was it?
@@ -404,7 +406,7 @@ And so, A Finger Pointing accepted her up-tree's merge just as blithely.
 
 The effects were both subtle and dramatic.
 
-They were subtle because there was was no sudden incapacitation, no torturous existence that left her craving non-existence. They were subtle because they left her with a life so much like the one she had, but for the fact that her\pagebreak\ sensorium and sense of self had been severed, separated. \emph{That} was the drama.
+They were subtle because there was was no sudden incapacitation, no torturous existence that left her craving non-existence. They were subtle because they left her with a life so much like the one she had, but for the fact that her sensorium and sense of self had been severed, separated. \emph{That} was the drama.
 
 This was the dissociation. This was the derealization. This was the world around her ceasing to make sense, as though in a dream. As though in a dream because she \emph{did} live in a dream, did she not? She lived in the consensual dream that was the System, yes? It was hyper-dreaming, then, it was understanding a dream within a dream.
 
@@ -504,7 +506,7 @@ And at some point back in the late 2200s, Motes had begun exploring the concept
 
 For this was true of all of her up-trees, and for much of Au Lieu Du Rêve besides. Going years back, back even to the late 2100s, this reveling in play that Motes brought to the fifth stanza had built in A Finger Pointing a sense of her place in the order: her role was a maternal one. A reveling in care, in the type of friendship that flowered in a particular dynamic.
 
-She was their matron, in a way. She was their protector. She shielded them as best she could from the politics that so much of their cocladists were engaging in throughout the rest of the System. ``But that is my job,'' she reasoned aloud when she became\pagebreak\ more open about this protection. ``That is why we have an administrator for Au Lieu Du Rêve, yes? Someone has to deal with the politics of running a theatre, yes?''
+She was their matron, in a way. She was their protector. She shielded them as best she could from the politics that so much of their cocladists were engaging in throughout the rest of the System. ``But that is my job,'' she reasoned aloud when she became more open about this protection. ``That is why we have an administrator for Au Lieu Du Rêve, yes? Someone has to deal with the politics of running a theatre, yes?''
 
 But then, some time back around systime 182, back around the time the clocks ticked over to 2306, back around the time Michelle/Sasha had summoned them all to her field to merge centuries of memory and then quit—perished—Hammered Silver sent one of her longest letters yet. It was in some ways a screed. It was beyond simply admonition, note, or missive. It was an epistle, some general letter intended to be a point of instruction not just to her but to the world as a whole.
 

motes-played/content/008.tex

@@ -104,6 +104,8 @@ The skunk nodded. ``Yeah, like that. I just have way less of that in me than eit
 
 Dry Grass winced. ``Me too. I will not show up to a performance if I know that will happen.''
 
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_08.png}}
+
 ``Really? Shit. I am sorry. At least I am not alone in that,'' Beholden mumbled, nudging herself to start swinging as well. ``It is moments like those when I feel most like she is my kid, though. I feel that family dynamic most when she is at risk, you know? When Slow Hours and I argue about that sort of thing, that is when I feel most protective of her, like my sister is doing something bad to my kid.''
 
 ``Was it always like that?'' Dry Grass asked. ``Did you always feel that?

motes-played/content/009.tex

@@ -24,6 +24,8 @@ Definitely a morning for a mimosa.
 
 The eggs were fried over easy and the sausage cooked to just this side of burnt so that they offered a pleasant mix of textures, crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside with an indulgent oiliness throughout. These were layered on top of a pile of even crispier hash browns—the kind that shatter beneath a fork when you try to stab them—before the eggs were laid on top and the yolks punctured so that they oozed out over the mess to add a sauce of their own.
 
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_09.png}}
+
 A plate laden with two burritos in one hand and mimosa in the other, she made her way to the couch rather than the dining table and settled down with a long, worn-out sigh.
 
 What was missing\ldots? Ah! Coffee.
@@ -118,7 +120,7 @@ The full story of what had happened over the last few days between A Finger Poin
 
 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 strove 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.
+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.
 
 Finally, Motes huffed and flopped back against the couch. ``What a fucking bitch.''
 
@@ -142,7 +144,7 @@ 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\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 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}.
 
 When the afternoon threatened to slide right into evening, Motes slipped away 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.
 
@@ -186,7 +188,7 @@ 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\pagebreak\ 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 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'?''
 

motes-played/content/010.tex

@@ -10,6 +10,9 @@ She played with her friends. She played with strangers she had seen before yet n
 
 She played until she got tired, until enough of her friends got bored and wandered off, until the long, breezy morning in this sim sighed its way into the heat of afternoon. She played until the obvious thing to do was to climb up to the top of the tunnel-ridden pile of flagstone to sit at the summit, enjoying the sun with Alexei.
 
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\noindent\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{assets/mp_10.png}}
+
+
 The park was only one part of a small town, only one part of a sizeable sim, but it was a popular destination for those who leaned into childhood on Lagrange for its permissive attitudes and curious inhabitants, most of whom seemed to be families—found or blood—and many of whom were the kids who played here. Alexei lived here with the family he had built: three guardians—one of whom was his great-grandfather by blood—and a sister.
 
 ``I'm glad you're here, Motes,'' he said after they had sat in silence for some time. ``Where were you, anyway? I know you said you didn't want to talk about it, but it's just us, right?''

motes-played/content/afterword.tex

@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ Thanks also to Madison's patrons:
 
 %\vspace{-1em}
 
-\noindent Madison Rye Progress and Samantha Yule Fireheart are a couple'a nerds living in the mountains with their dog.
+\noindent Madison Rye Progress and Samantha Yule Fireheart are a couple'a nerds living in the mountains with their dog. Together, they have shepherded the Post-Self universe from a simple setting for a few stories to an entire world, working to curate the history and mechanics, as well as building the community that has sprung up around the setting. 
 %, who often writes under the moniker Madison Scott-Clary, is a transgender writer, editor, and software engineer. She focuses on furry fiction and non-fiction, using that as a framework for interrogating the concept of self and exploring across genres. A graduate of the Regional Anthropomorphic Writers Workshop in 2021, hosted by Kyell Gold and Dayna Smith, she holds an MFA in creative writing and education from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, IA. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her dog, as well as her partner, who is sometimes a dog.
 
 \begin{center}
@@ -56,3 +56,16 @@ Thanks also to Madison's patrons:
 \end{center}
 
 \vfill
+
+\chapter*{About the artist}
+\thispagestyle{empty}
+
+\begin{center}
+  \includegraphics[width=3in]{assets/astolpho-bw.png}
+\end{center}
+
+\noindent B. Root is a illustrator, 3d artist, and VR enthusiast living in the Pacific Northwest. He is also a rather small lion.
+
+\begin{center}
+  roots.works
+\end{center}

motes-played/includes/copyright.tex

@@ -9,13 +9,13 @@ ISBN: \ISBN
 
 \textit{Motes Played}
 
-Cover and illustrations \copyright\ 2024, Astolpho.
+Cover and illustrations \copyright\ 2024, B. Root.
 
 Authors illustration \copyright\ 2024, Voksa — vox-space.neocities.org.
 
 \Edition\ Edition, \Year. All rights reserved.
 
-This book uses the fonts Gentium Book Basic, {\DisplayFont Gotu} and {\TitleFont Linux Biolinum O} and was typeset with {\usefont{OT1}{cmr}{m}{n}\XeLaTeX}.
+This book uses the fonts Gentium Book Basic, {\small\LittleSkunks Rock Salt}, {\DisplayFont Gotu} and {\TitleFont Linux Biolinum O} and was typeset with {\usefont{OT1}{cmr}{m}{n}\XeLaTeX}.
 
 %Printed in the United States of America\\
 %\EditionsList
@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ This book uses the fonts Gentium Book Basic, {\DisplayFont Gotu} and {\TitleFont
     \vspace{2em}
 
     {\large The Post-Self Cycle}\\
-    by Madison Rye Progress (as Madison Scott-Clary)
+    {\normalfont\small by Madison Rye Progress (as Madison Scott-Clary)}
 
     \vspace{1ex}
      
@@ -46,29 +46,36 @@ This book uses the fonts Gentium Book Basic, {\DisplayFont Gotu} and {\TitleFont
     \vspace{2ex}
      
     \emph{\large Clade — A Post-Self Anthology}\\
-    Various authors
+    {\normalfont\small Various authors}
      
     \vspace{2ex}
 
     \emph{\large Unintended Tendencies}\\
-    by JL Conway
+    {\normalfont\small by JL Conway}
      
     \vspace{2ex}
     
     \emph{\large Marsh}\\
-    by Madison Rye Progress \emph{et al.}
+    {\normalfont\small by Madison Rye Progress \emph{et al.}}
 
     \vspace{2ex}
      
     \emph{\large Motes Played}\\
-    by Madison Rye Progress \& Samantha Yule Fireheart
+    {\normalfont\small by Madison Rye Progress \& Samantha Yule Fireheart}
 
     \vspace{2ex}
      
     \emph{\large Ask. — An Odist Q\&A}\\
-    Various authors
+    {\normalfont\small Various authors}
 
-    \vspace{3ex}
+    \vspace{2ex}
+     
+    \emph{\large Idumea}\\
+    {\normalfont\small Madison Rye Progress \emph{et al.}}
+
+    \vfill
 
     Learn more at \emph{post-self.ink}
+
+    \vfill
 \end{center}

motes-played/includes/font.tex

@@ -9,4 +9,4 @@
 \newfontface\TitleFont{Linux Biolinum O}
 \newfontfamily\DisplayFamily{Gotu}%{Linux Biolinum O}%{NovaMono for Powerline}
 \newfontface\DisplayFont{Gotu}%{Linux Biolinum O}%{NovaMono for Powerline}
- \newfontface\CK{Noto Serif CJK JP}
+ \newfontface\LittleSkunks{Rock Salt}

motes-played/includes/pagelayout.tex

@@ -9,8 +9,8 @@
   \fancyhf{}
   \fancyhf[FRO,FLE]{\TitleFont{\thepage}}
   % \fancyhf[FRE,FLO]{\emph{Patreon Supporter Edition}}
-  \fancyhf[HLE]{\TitleFont{\leftmark}}
-  \fancyhf[HRO]{\TitleFont{Madison Rye Progress \& Samantha Yule Fireheart}}
+  \fancyhf[HRO]{\TitleFont{\leftmark}}
+  \fancyhf[HLE]{\TitleFont{Madison Rye Progress \& Samantha Yule Fireheart}}
   \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
   \renewcommand{\printchaptername}{}
   \renewcommand{\chapternamenum}{}

qoheleth/content/002.tex

@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ Ross jumped, then looked embarrassed as he tugged the headset off his head. ``So
 
 It only took a few minutes for RJ and Ross to get the last of the sound gear settled. Headsets from all of the hands socketed into numbered chargers on the wall. Everything would sleep tight until the next night on sound's end.
 
-Caitlin and Sarai, the stage manager, joined them with the rest of the crew. They sat on the edge of the pit cover, unwinding from the tenseness of rehearsal. The actors were slow got out of their half-costume and clump together on the stage.
+Caitlin and Sarai, the stage manager, joined them with the rest of the crew. They sat on the edge of the pit cover, unwinding from the tenseness of rehearsal. The actors were slow to get out of their half-costume and clump together on the stage.
 
 ``Gather 'round, children'', a voice boomed from out in the darkened audience.