\cleardoublepage
\begin{quote}
\itshape\large
To any and all Odists, Do you have any unofficial long-running instances at some The Party? If so, what names have those instances taken (if they have)?
\end{quote}

\cleardoublepage

\subsection*{And The End Of Memory Lies Beneath The Roots}
% Seras

I constantly seek new experiences and feelings and emotions, so as to keep my life's work fresh and exciting. My forks range everywhere in disguise or openly, and I step out in their place, gathering and consolidating in me, constantly reviving the soil that is ``And Memory Lies Beneath the Roots''. 

 My cocladist I Must Set No Stones Between Me And My Actions constantly feeds me the hip and new around the System, and no gift parallels when he informed me of the party. 

Those kids know how to get deliciously fucked up. Few if any sources touch the amount The Party taught and teaches me. 

My delightful double, The Life of The Party Lies Beneath The Roots, sends me endless notes, the occasional fork-and-merge, and a dreadful new kind of hangover every few months or so to keep me on my toes. I hate the crashes and withdrawls. They delight me to no end. So intense, these new ones!

The Party costs me instances at a hilarious rate. The counter on my desk ticks up every time one of me wanders into it and celebrates themselves right out of existence. They crash or subconsciously quit, hitting new highs and lows constantly. Party Roots, as she calls herself, keeps tabs on these poor flies in the honey trap as they go through, and mails me ``highlight reels''. The one who stole top spot played a saxophone for three years straight without even taking a breath, then simply dissolved when she stopped. No one found a core dump. I would have killed for that merge, can you even imagine? Three fucking years! Apparently many cladists, including a number of my own instances, still try to break the record, but the two month mark breaks many a musician's back.

Party Roots does me great service, for I know if I myself ever go to The Party, I will not come back, and I am not cashing out yet. My queue of eager patrons, fans, patients and commissioners extend well into the next century, and I leave no one behind.

\subsection*{Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps}
% Skunks

The Party is as up my alley as any one thing might be, though for reasons different from Party Roots (although holy shit, the sheer number of samples I took from that sax solo before she escaped saxsara is nearly ten times that of any other source of samples in my library). 

I attended one of the first The Parties way back in the early days. I spent a few days there, counting that enough time to enjoy before returning home to my partner, exhausted and sated. I had had a good time, but we were busier back then, with so many of us working at Au Lieu Du Rêve full time, and forking was not quite so cheap. I came home with a rollicking headache more from the noise than the hangover (though \emph{also} from the hangover, of course) and fell back into work the next day after I recovered.

Cue me, three months later, figuring I would go and check if The Party was still going—after all, I had made good friends there!—only to find the sim mostly abandoned. A few stragglers were there, noodling around, drawing on the walls, but the sim was all but silent.

``Did The Party end?'' I asked one. ``I thought the goal was to run it for at least a year.''

They smiled to me dreamily, clearly caught up either in some internal music, the throes of some party drug, or both. ``Ohhh, nah, it just moved two stops over.''

``\,`Two stops'?''

``Yeah, yeah. Increment the tag by two and search the directory until you find a public sim that matches.''

I will admit to being caught off guard by this. It was such a delightfully stupid scheme. There were starting to be enough public sims by now that this was actually becoming possible. I checked the sim's name—Partybox\#1159aacd—and ticked up the tag by two.

There on the listing were five public sims with the tag \#1159aacf. The second one down made me laugh. The Dankest Dungeon\#1159aacf. Fuck yeah. This was going to be \emph{fantastic.} 

If this was going to be the way of things, a dedicated fork would be necessary. I renamed her Beholden To The Flow Of The Crowds and stepped back home, eagerly awaiting the first merge.

``Hey, thanks,'' Flow said.

``Yeah, yeah, no problem!'' Their smile widened to a grin. ``Heyyy, you look soft. Can I have a hug?''

Flow laughed, gave them their hug, and stepped back to The Party.

She sends me merges every few months, and will occasionally reconcile to pool our work on various bits of music, since we both learn plenty while she is away. Every few years, she will get tired and either go live with someone she has met along the way—she was even married once, I believe—or will simply merge back down, only to reappear down the line some years later to head back out, or perhaps she will get frustrated. She punched an attendee once, and while everyone else agreed that they were deserving of such, she took that as her cue to step away for a bit.

She performs at the various The Parties she has been to, sometimes set up on instruments (she played drums along with Party Roots\#Sax for a while), sometimes running an electronic music set for days on end, but most often, just keeping the music going in her head and letting anyone and everyone ride along on her sensorium to listen along with.

It has been one of my longest-running long-lived forks, even if her existence is not constant. The bad times are vanishingly small in the face of how much of that time is absolutely lovely.
