Motes had, at one point, started to play.

That is how time's inevitable arrow works, after all, is it not? There was a time when Motes was not, when she had not yet existed, and then there was a point at which she began, and from then on, she existed. Her presence was in the world, and it was undeniable. There were witnesses. There were knock-on effects. She inescapably \emph{was.}

And so, there was a time at which she did not play, did not surround herself with play, did not define herself by it, and then there was a point at which she began to play. It was a starting point. It was an inflection point, at which she collided with the idea of play and her trajectory was changed.

And yet, even before that, before Motes, before the System, before getting lost, Michelle had played, had she not? She had been a kid, yes? Michelle, even before getting her implants and becoming Sasha, had been five, had been six and seven and eight.

\secdiv

Michelle played as well. She painted, too, back then.

Roly-poly Michelle Hadje, 263 years ago, sitting in kindergarten, shitty paintbrush in her hand, shitty tempera paint in a dish set before a shitty piece of off-white construction paper. She sat there in her silly little corduroy pants and silly little flower-print blouse, a silly little smile on her face, painting a robin in primary red and deep-dark black.

Silly, roly-poly Michelle Hadje in her dirt-brown corduroys splotched with a patch of red from having sat down directly in a puddle of paint. It was not a drip so easily wiped away but well and truly ground into the ridged fabric of her trousers.

``Oh! Miss Hadje! Michelle, Michelle, Michelle!'' her teacher tutted. Miss Willard always looked as though she regretted that she was not able to scruff children, to lift them off the ground and give them a good shake, or perhaps to rub their noses in the messes they made like some naughty pooch. ``Your mother will be so upset, won't she?''

And Michelle cried. She cried because—people-pleaser her—she wanted nothing other than to be a good girl. She wanted her teacher to like her. She wanted her mother to love her. She wanted to be good and to never risk that love, and here she was, being told that she had done wrong, that her mother would be upset!

It was all so silly! She was a kid! She was five and a half! Of course she was going to get messy. Of course there would be paint on her hands, and so why should there not also be paint on her pants? She was a kid and she was clumsy, and a mess like that was just a part of her life.

Her mother picked her sobbing daughter up from school, and after much cajoling, much reassuring her that she would not abandon her, would not leave her by the side of the road to be picked up by\ldots who exactly? She reassured her that the paint stain was fine, and that she would have a chat with Miss Willard. When your daughter's neurodivergence presents itself in anxiety, perhaps you get used to reassuring her that you love her, and when you are a mother, perhaps you never tire of doing so.

\secdiv

A Motes who looks like she has stepped straight out of a kindergarten classroom and into the world—a world with a lower age limit, a world where one cannot upload before one turns eighteen—is a Motes who is going to draw attention. A Motes who acts five, or seven, or twelve is a Motes who is going to inspire big feelings. She is going to inspire feelings of confusion, of alarm, of anger.

She is going to be a Motes who gets kicked from sims, who gets barred from entry. She is going to be a Motes who gets her tail stepped on, she is going to get hip-bumped out of the way, and ever they will promise it is an accident, and many times they will even be telling the truth.

She will be a Motes who gets sneered at. She will be scolded for some vague infraction, impropriety, some sin against God, against man, against the sanctity of the System. Or perhaps she will be a Motes who is studiously ignored. She will be the one others cross the street to avoid, the one others stay away from lest they be tainted with transgression by association.

She is also going to be a Motes who inspires feelings of protection, of care, of \emph{joie de vivre.} She is going to be one who shows the hedonism in play, one whose \emph{raison d'être} is to have fun, and inspire in others a sense of compersion for that fun. She is going to be a Motes who makes one want to play in turn. She is going to be the one you want to hold in your lap, the one you want to call adorable, the one you want to hold close and protect from pain.

\begin{comment}
\secdiv

Sometime in the late 2100s, Motes was invited to a strange, hyper-formal event, one of Rye's book releases. She and her cocladists, her friends, all grumbled about it for their own reasons.

Warmth dressed in its best mixture of clothes, something that shifted slowly over time between masculine and feminine, and yet those in attendance addressed em as almost exclusively `she', and partway through, they pulled Motes aside to have a little grumbly bitch session. The bitch session quickly turned into into an emotional wave, a tide rolling inexorably in, and Motes burst into tears. She had dressed up in a fine black dress, hip-hugging and chic, and it was making her absolutely miserable.

As Warmth and her on-again-off-again partner, Hold My Name, comforted her, four or five Warmths surrounding her while Hold My Name brushed her hair, the three of them got to talking about identity and the ways in which appearance and social situations ground up against that. Warmth wanted-- no, \emph{needed} that recognition of fluidity that night.

Motes increasingly needed out of this strict adherence to form.
\end{comment}

\secdiv

The inflection point came when she, the Motes who had been forked not three years prior, the Motes who was still a human who looked much like A Finger Pointing, her immediate down-tree, sat in a paint tray while painting a stage-wide sunset on a scrim.

There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her sturdy work overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made—one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage—and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard's snippy admonition, of her mom's patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.

By the time That It Might Give The World Orders, the play's director, found her, she had added an idealized field of grass and dandelions, had painted in a frolicking fennec fox in blue, and still lay on her front, the seat of her pants colored in red from the paint she had sat in.

Rather than admonish her like Miss Willard of the past, That It Might Give had stood in silence for a long minute, looking down at her cocladist laying down on her belly and painting with a sheepish grin on her face, and then laughed. She laughed, leaned down, and ruffled Motes's hair and then sat with her, doodling bumblebees on the stage's surface, floating up above skunk and fennec, above grass and dandelions, and sharing in memories.

\secdiv

The process of making friends when one is a kid on a System where everyone is old and getting older is, it turns out, not the same as making friends when one is \emph{just} old and getting older. It is an act of making two sets of friends in two different ways.

Adults feel around the edges of friendship carefully. They ask questions, they get to know each other first. They talk. They chat. They watch and observe before they decide—even if subconsciously—that they might want to be friends with their interlocutor.

Kids fall into friendship easily. They need one thing to connect on, and then they simply become friends.

They are two different ways of moving in the world, and yet they end in the same goal: friendship. A friend is a friend is a friend.

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.

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.

\secdiv

Motes leaned hard into that memory. She leaned into the laughter and joy of painting with her fingers and, apparently, her pants, as well as the tears of fear of being abandoned for having messed up so badly.

It was not always a kid thing. She aged down her appearance, sure, falling into a comfortable vision of a twenty-something, but it was also not just an appearance thing. It was the way she acted. It was owning of playfulness as a form of hedonism, much as the rest of the fifth stanza owned hedonism as a core part of their identity.

She owned playfulness because life is play. She owned it because it was so easy to forget the role that play plays in one's life, with its carefully delineated fun times that one fits in around work and sleep and obligations. Life is play, and over time, Motes \emph{became} play.

It changed the way that her cocladists and friends treated her. They started ruffling her hair as That It Might Give had, trying to get her excited. They started playing with her in the auditorium, hiding to jump out and startle her or running up to tap her on the shoulder and shout ``You are it!'' before running off to the dressing rooms to change for their role. They started doing all of the good things that one does with kids and none of the bad things. After all, if they needed Serious Motes, they could still talk to her like the fifty year old woman that she was, right?

She liked that.

\secdiv

Slow Hours, Motes's big sister, had once had it said about her by Deny All Beginnings, town crier to her town scryer, ``It seems so often to me that you have the criss-cross pattern of a schoolyard tool imprinted on your face, no doubt hurled at at you by a god.'' She explained this to Motes that there was some contemporary interpretation of the Greek god Apollo hurling a dodgeball at the unwitting to bless them with the gift of prophecy.

And she had indeed become the prophet of the clade, the one checkered with predictions and who bore the heady scent of omens. She was the Delphic oracle to so many other prognosticators. She would get this dreamy, distant smile on her face and then she would speak. She would say, ``I will tell you two truths and one lie about the future'' and then she would say unnerving things that would almost certainly come to pass. Yes, they might take years to do so, but she was uncanny in her accuracy.

So Motes came to her, to the crowd of other crew, who always seemed to tolerate Slow Hours better than the cast, came to her and threw herself dramatically across her cocladist's lap, requesting some brushings to get the paint flecks out of her tail while she thought about how to say what she needed to say.

``Slow Hours, I made a friend,'' she said, relying on the comparatively formal name as opposed to Slow—and she was the only one from whom Slow Hours would accept that name—or Slowers to convey a bit of the gravity of the question.

``Tell me of your friend, my dear,'' Slow Hours replied, setting up a cone of silence.

``I met them at a dance,'' she said, looking down to her claws as they doodled on the stage. ``I went out with Beholden and Unbidden to some crazy biker bar that was also having a mathcore band performing, and I met them in the pit.''

``You were your big self, yes?''

She nodded. ``We danced for a bit in the pit and then got some drinks and talked outside, then danced some more.'' When Slow Hours remained attentively silent, she continued. ``And that was it. That is all I ever do, right? Go to a show, get wasted, maybe get laid, and then I go back to the stuff I really enjoy. I have my friends here. I have my work. I have you and Beholden and A Finger Pointing--'' This was before she had openly started referring to them by familial terms. ``--and Beckoning and Muse and that is all I need. I do not need much else to continue to from one day to the next. I do not \emph{do} love or deep friendships. Not like that.''

Slow Hours nodded. ``I sense a `but', Speck.''

``Wellll\ldots{}'' Motes said, pushing herself back up to sitting. ``I do not do love, but a lot of people do, including a lot of the people I wind up spending the night with in Big Motes mode. I am honest and up front, duh, and most understand that this is just for the fun of it. I am a healthy woman, right? I am, like, a century and a half old, but I am still thirty, right? I like sex as much as any hundred and fifty year old woman in her thirties.''

She nodded, laughing.

``One or two have gotten big feelings for me, but most get it. We negotiate boundaries and move on with our lives. There are so many people here! It is not a big deal if someone says no that early on.'' Motes laughed, adding, ``Once, one of them showed up here looking for me, and A Finger Pointing just about tore them in half.''

Slow Hours smiled, but said gently, ``You are stalling, my dear.''

She groaned and buried her face against her cocladist's shoulder. ``I knooow. Anyway, this person and I got started talking about what we like in lasting friendships that we do not really care about in one-night stands and\ldots and they just seem like a really good person.''

``And you think you might like to follow up on that?''

``They are just into all sorts of things I am. They paint—people, mostly, and some animals—and like a lot of the same music, and also\ldots also are into the whole little thing. They suggested we forget the sex part and maybe do a regular sort of get-together.'' She hesitated before adding, far more bashfully, ``You know. As kids.''

``Have you told A Finger Pointing about them?''

She shook her head. ``That was part of what I wanted to talk to you about.''

Slow Hours asked her several questions. She asked about the person. She asked about the day before. She asked about the morning after. She asked about Beholden and Unbidden and the crowd around her. She asked about how drunk she had been, how high. She asked like there was some thread being tugged, whether by her fingers or by Motes's or by Apollo himself. No one ever asked how this worked, not even Slow Hours—\emph{especially} not Slow Hours—lest the whole thing come tumbling down.

``Speck,'' she said, interrupting Motes at one point. ``Here are two truths and a lie.''

Motes frowned.

``One: they are a fucking creep.''

There was a moment's silence before she giggled nervously, a fawning laugh. The flow of prophecy had a rhythm, though, and so she remained silent to let Slow Hours continue.

``Two: you are lonely. You have us, yes. You have your stanza and the rest of the troupe. You have your family and your work, but what you do not have are the types of friends you describe. You are friendly with everyone here, everyone is your friend, but you do not \emph{have} many friends in this way.''

Still wrong-footed, Motes leaned away from her cocladist. ``And the third?''

``Three: much of this is our fault.''

``\,`Yours' as in the clade's?''

After a moment, Slow Hours spoke again, the knife-edge of prophecy letting off of her throat. ``There are as many reasons to keep someone for yourself as there are ways to do so. The whole of the fifth stanza—and, to a lesser extent, the whole of Au Lieu de Rêve—has closed around you. Not tight, of course, we are not keeping you trapped and hidden away, but we are all intensely, intensely protective of you. We have all endeavored to make your life here the best that it can be, as you have invited us to do. This was part of our conversations going all the way back, was it not? That you enjoyed leaning into being cared for, and we enjoyed having someone to collectively care for? We do not like creeps around our Motes, and so we see creeps everywhere.''

Once Motes saw what she was saying, saw through the everblue tint of prophecy and her own little game of two truths and a lie, the skunk's shoulders relaxed and she slumped against her, sniffling.

``We all love you, Speck. That is all.''

Motes understood after some days of consideration that it was not her prophecy. It was theirs. It was Slow Hours's and A Finger Pointing's and Beholden's and Unbidden's and the whole rest of Au Lieu Du Rêve's.

She was still good friends with Alexei, that kid who was not a creep, never had been a creep, years later. That person and so many more.

\secdiv

Motes should not, she is told, do many things.

She should not look too much like a child. She should not look like a kid because there are those with paraphilias surrounding children, and this would be both potentially harmful to her, as well as to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.

She should not act too much like a child. She should not act like a kid because, while a focus on play is all well and good, a sense of maturity would keep her grounded in the world around her while leaning into childhood would not, and would potentially be harmful to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.

She should not treat her stanza as family. She should not treat her down-tree as her mother, nor A Finger Pointing's partner, Beholden, as a parent, nor Slow Hours and Time Rushes as her sisters, the rest of the fifth stanza as siblings throughout, because family dynamics within one extended definition of a singular person create more room for potentially unhealthy modes of interaction, just as might intraclade romantic relationships, and this might also potentially be harmful to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.

Motes should not, she is told, do many things, and yet she does them anyway. She is careful. She is gradual. She has allies.

She is told these things via hints and intimations. She is told these things through A Finger Pointing and Slow Hours and countless others.

She is told gently. She is told to be careful. She is told out of a sense of protectiveness. She is told because, regardless of the implications of these warnings, the fifth stanza really does love her—they tell her and she believes them—and she is told because even she can see many ways that there are plenty and sufficient reasons that someone looking young in a world with a lower bound on age would be viewed with disdain, and yet she may not see \emph{all} of those ways.

\secdiv

Above all else, Motes enjoyed piggyback rides.

\secdiv

But always, Motes played.

She played because play was transgressive for one such as her, was it not? Oh, there were games sys-side. Within her own clade was a game designer and curator, What Gifts—and she often leaned on Motes for input and play-testing—and so of course play was okay, but as soon as one presents oneself as she did, as a child, then suddenly that play becomes something that works to define that very part of her and thus vice versa, her childishness casts that play in a childish light. It was transgressive because when Motes played, it cast the play that every adult around her engaged with as either defined by or contrasted against her very presence.

But she played in that transgression. She used it to push and press against those definitions and boundaries. She played as a twenty-something, letting her cocladists and coworkers ruffle her hair to rile her up or jump from behind a curtain to scare her.

She played as a child—even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home, and then within the stanza's neighborhood, and then within the troupe, before she ever did so in public.

She played in that familial identity, of A Finger Pointing as `Ma' and Beholden as `Bee' and Slow Hours as Sis Hours—even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home; even if, at first, it engendered awkward and cautious feelings.

Life is but a walking shadow, a player poor that struts and frets upon the stage, yes? All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, yes?

Motes played because life was a play.

But even as she tested those boundaries and always respected them when they were set, she would ever negotiate a way forward such that she could live this life that she had set for herself.

It was a bit, and she was committed to it. She was an actress, yes? She had a part to play, yes? The kid? The child? The daughter and sister, yes? It was method acting over the course of a lifetime. She committed to the bit and convinced herself as best she could to forget how to uncommit, and that, in itself was lovely.

\secdiv

Motes dreamed.

She dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, her mind wandering over her past, there in the dark, there alone, after A Finger Pointing left, there in her extra soft bed with her overstuffed duvet and all of her stuffed animals.

At some point, hours or days or minutes later, she slept and dreamed true. She dreamed that she was sitting in a field of well-tended grass that was nonetheless dotted liberally with dandelions, speckled with bumblebees. She dreamed that she had all the wonder of a child and that the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it, and just above, just in the distance, a hyperblack rectangle, a hole in the world that hungrily devoured all of the light that it could, lingered, and it was neither good nor bad, and even with its insatiable hunger, the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it.

And then she awoke.
