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\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{awdae-2112}}

AwDae stood in the sunlight, blinking.

Ey felt weak. Not from hunger. Not from lack of sleep. Just worn out. Exhausted.

This was starting to feel like grinding. An endless drudge to level up. Busywork. Idle hands and tired eyes.

But then, you could quit a game. Here ey was, clues and riddles. And for what?

There was even a fog of war.

``So much bullshit.'' Ey laughed bitterly. No sense in keeping quiet.

Ey stripped down to eir underwear, hesitated, then stripped that off as well and shook eir fur out.

`Comfort' was the wrong word to use in regards a sim. It was a matter of sensory inputs that the system was set up to provide. The musty smell of the auditorium seats had been one thing, but ey was starting to get the impression that, given the way this sim was constructed, there would be rather more than less input. Eir tux was decidedly uncomfortable, not made for fox-people, and so eir fur was decidedly mussed.

Ey folded eir clothes and set them on the sidewalk in front of the school. The cool grass provided a welcome change from the indoor-outdoor carpet and tile inside, the roughness of the concrete out here.

``Alright. So. Problems.'' Ey plucked viciously at a few close-mown blades of grass and held them pinched between eir pawpads. ``Cicero is lost. He was voting on a bunch of stuff as usual, leading the comment boards. He voted on something and it made it to the floor, but it doesn't show in the records.'' Ey plucked blades of grass with eir free paw, enumerating the facts. ``No vote cost, no bounty, no comment.''

Ey swished eir tail around to the side, hiked eir backside up enough to slip it beneath em, and rolled onto eir back. Blue sky. Cloudless. Too bright, even with the fog. Ey draped eir arm, fingers still clutching grass, over eir eyes. ``And now I'm lost. I was working, and then I was here. Before working, I was digging into Cicero\ldots{}''

Ey trailed off, spent a few moments thinking, then a few more just feeling the earth beneath em, the way the grass seemed to find a way through fur to tickle at em more directly.

``So had Sasha, though. And she was the one who got me the deck in the first place.'' Ey ran through the actions ey had taken on the deck. It was surprisingly easy to pull up the chain of events. \emph{Or perhaps not,} ey thought. \emph{Given the note.}

Eir first write to the deck had been on the note about the voting records. Prior to that, there was only the sorting and sharing of records. Filtering. Reading.

Ey lifted eir paw once more and stared at the torn blades of grass. Tossed them aside. ``Ah, hell. I'm talking to myself.''

Laughing, AwDae stood and gathered eir tux, heading back to the costume closet. Perhaps ey could find something that would fit em. Something to take into account that ey was more fox, less human.

Failing that, perhaps ey'd lay down again. Sleep, perchance to dream.

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AwDae wound up in a simple, pleated skirt and a loose cotton shirt, gathered at the wrists.

The skirt fit well with a tail, certainly far better than eir trousers sagging beneath its base awkwardly. It was a robin's egg blue. Nice enough. Undecorated. Any detail would be lost on the audience anyway. Might as well save both cost and effort.

The shirt was made for someone with broader shoulders. RJ might have filled it out, but on the fox's slender frame, it was baggy and loose. Again, just a plain white, but ey could hardly complain. It didn't compress eir fur, unlike the tux shirt, with its pleats sewn down the front.

Ey gave consideration as to what to do with the tux. On the one paw — and here, thinking in paws already! So soon — it was just an artifact. Just bits. Everything was. Eir own body was. Had to be. Choosing clothes that were `more comfortable' was only instructing the sim how best to treat eir body. Had to be. Clothes that were more comfortable were no different from clothes that weren't. It was just how the numbers added up. Just the math of simulated fashion. Had to be.

And yet, on the other, the tux was the only thing ey had\ldots had what? Brought with from reality? It might just be a set of bits in eir exocortex, but it was \emph{eir} set of bits and bytes.

Was it? Was there any point to the sense of ownership in so solipsisitic a world?

Something to tie em back to the world outside this sim.

A solution in between, then. Ey dug until ey found a rucksack that had probably gone with some war-themed production. Drab, dusty, made of thick canvas. It would do well to carry anything that would help, including the notes ey had made.

Ey laid eir tux out on the ratty sofa and rolled it into a tight cylinder. An empty sim would care little if eir tux got wrinkled, yes? Ey stuffed it down at the base of the pack and folded the notes into a small pocket on the side.

Thus equipped, ey padded back to the auditorium. Ey made sure the room was put to sleep, and, on a whim, grabbed the one live microphone ey'd found earlier. Ensuring that it was off to conserve batteries, ey added it to the notes. A small token of where ey'd come from.

``Not going to do much without the receiver or board,'' ey murmured. ``Do the batteries even matter? This is all so fucking silly.''

Ey tamped down despair, buttoned down the flap above the pocket. So many questions.

Should ey lay in rations? Food? Water bottles, perhaps? Ey dismissed the thought as even sillier. Ey didn't feel hungry or thirsty, even after so long in the school, so why worry? Obviously eir body had been taken care of. There was nothing ey could do about it from within the sim. All that food and water would do is make the sim tell eir body that the pack was heavier.

From there, ey made eir way back toward the front doors, pushing them open against the pressure differential. The breeze outside ruffled fur and skirt as ey stepped into sun once more.

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The grey mist turned out to be a render distance.

Had it been a barrier, AwDae could have walked up to the fog, but no further.

Had it been a barrier, ey was sure ey would have screamed.

As it was, ey was able to follow the same street ey would've taken on the walk back to the home ey grew up in and the fog simply receded before em. Ey could never approach it. There was nothing to investigate. It was just a bubble into which ey had been placed. A bubble that moved along with em.

The act of walking away from the school, wearing a backpack and heading towards home, was a dredge pulling up the silt of memories. School across the Atlantic in the '90s. Plays and productions ey still had memorized. Sasha. Dandelions in summer.

Even now, pacing the street as a fox, not much had changed. Ey had carried eir tablet and few books to and from school in a pack not dissimilar than the one ey was wearing. Even the skirt was not far off from a thrift-store find ey might have worn at the time.

Ey prowled through memories of Sasha, of dating, of becoming better friends than partners. Ey thought back to her staying the night, back to their shared anxiety, back to the movies, back to eir mom checking in on them at one in the morning just to make sure everything was okay (and, bless, to make sure clothes had stayed on).

Ey missed Sasha most of all, now. Together, the two of them would've been able to keep spirits up. Sasha would've been able to figure out the problem with Cicero's voting record faster then ey had, and ey would've been less alone, would've felt less hopeless.

AwDae trudged on toward home, reaching a paw up to pluck a handful of leaves from one of the trees as ey passed, feeling the reluctant snap as they pulled loose from the branch. For all the sim's complexity, school in spring was pretty far remote from London in the winter.

School. America. Hopelessness. Stasis.

\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}
