Marsh, minor edits

marsh/content/003.tex

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-As expected, sleep did not come. Exhaustion pulled at me, exerting its own gravity, but too many emotions crowded it out. Too many emotions and too many thoughts. I spent a few minutes chiding myself — shouldn't I sleep, if only to be more refreshed for the next day? — before giving in and letting my mind circle around each of those emotions, each of those thoughts.
+As expected, sleep did not come. Exhaustion pulled at me, exerting its own gravity, but too many emotions crowded it out. Too many emotions and too many thoughts. I spent a few minutes chiding myself --- shouldn't I sleep, if only to be more refreshed for the next day? --- before giving in and letting my mind circle around each of those emotions, each of those thoughts. I don't know for how long I cycled.
 
 There was the faintest brush against my sensorium. Vos.
 
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ Her reply was gentle. \emph{``So are we, Reed. Just laying in bed, staring at no
 
 \emph{``Not well.''}
 
-\emph{He seemed like it hit him really hard, yeah.}
+\emph{``He seemed like it hit him really hard, yeah.''}
 
 A pause, and then she sent, quieter than before, \emph{``I don't want to say this is hitting any one of us harder than the other, but\ldots well, we care for him. That was our dynamic, I mean. He's young and full of emotions, so we occasionally fall into that guardian role. It hit him hard, and so he needs care, but\ldots{}''}
 
@@ -58,15 +58,15 @@ It was both our arms, too, I know that. They kept their life separate from mine,
 
 They'd laugh whenever it came up, saying, ``So I'm greedy. Sue me.''
 
-We'd all laugh, too. It wasn't really greed, that desire for our memories in a way that we could never get in return. It was just the dynamic that we held to ever since I'd been forked. Of course it was mutual: I \emph{was} them when I'd been forked. An exact copy that only slowly diverged over the years. It had been my idea as much as theirs.
+We'd all laugh, too. It wasn't really greed, that desire for our memories in a way that we could never get in return. It was just the dynamic that we held to ever since I'd been forked. Of course it was mutual: I \emph{was} them when I'd been forked. An exact copy that only slowly diverged over the years. It had been my idea as much as theirs. That Lily had been talking to them some hours ago was an aberration, a new thing.
 
 I thought of Marsh, their laugh, their words, their open expression, the way their tousled, brown hair always fell in front of their eyes, the way the loose and soft clothing they wore hung off their frame, the bright colors of silk and cotton.
 
 Hanne rolled away from me and I took that as my chance to at least no longer be laying down. I forked a new instance standing beside the bed and then quit, just in case the motion of me getting out of bed might wake her.
 
-I needed out of the house. Nowhere public — I don't want to see what others in the System are dealing with right now. There would be time for that later, but for now I needed out and away from everyone.
+I needed out of the house. Nowhere public --- I don't want to see what others in the System are dealing with right now. There would be time for that later, but for now I needed out and away from everyone.
 
-The sim I wound up in was simple and bucolic. There was a pagoda. There was a field, grass cut — or eaten, I suppose, given the sheep in the distance — short, stretching from stone wall to stone wall. It was day — it didn't even seem like the owners included a day/night cycle — and foggy. Cool but not cold. Damp but not wet.
+The sim I wound up in was simple and bucolic. There was a pagoda. There was a field, grass cut --- or eaten, I suppose, given the sheep in the distance --- short, stretching from stone wall to stone wall. It was day --- it didn't even seem like the owners included a day/night cycle --- and foggy. Cool but not cold. Damp but not wet.
 
 There was a bench in the pagoda, at least, so I made my way there, trudging tiredly up the whitewashed wood of the steps to sit on the well-worn seats. Whoever made this place seemed to have put more effort into the pagoda than the field. Fog like that was usually the sign of a border of a sim of limited size, so it was clearly just this single paddock, the grass and sheep and stone walls likely purchases from the exchange.
 
@@ -78,6 +78,6 @@ The seat of the bench had been worn smooth by who knows how many butts over the
 
 I sighed and slouched against the back of the bench. Exhaustion was warring against the drive to do \emph{something}, and both of those were striving against the need to be alone and away from this whole spectacle. All of those ``how can I'' questions were clattering up against equal-sized armies of ``too tired''s and ``it doesn't need to happen now''s.
 
-I spent an hour out there, all told. I picked at the bench. I called out to the sheep. I walked circles around the pagoda in the gray day. I bent down, pluck a blade of grass with the intent to\ldots I don't know, chew on it like I've seen in films, but it smelled so strongly of sheep manure that I dropped it instead and headed home to finally lay down beside Hanne and sleep.
+I spent an hour out there, all told. I picked at the bench. I called out to the sheep. I walked circles around the pagoda in the gray day. I bent down, plucked a blade of grass with the intent to\ldots I don't know, chew on it like I've seen in films, but it smelled so strongly of sheep manure that I dropped it instead and headed home to finally lay down beside Hanne and sleep.
 
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