Merge branch 'main' into the-way-i-work

content/about/writing.md

@@ -53,13 +53,16 @@ Climate crisis
 The bittersweet
 :   Uploading is one-way and destructive. There is a loss behind every upload. The System itself is built on the backs of the lost. Climate grief remains a real issue. Finding ways to deal with grief and yet find the sweet in one's new life is part and parcel of the setting.
 
+Self-inserts
+:   Imagine yourself in a world you could come to love. An open universe invites you to imagine what you — yes, you! — might do with such a setting just as much as it invites you to create new characters of your own or use those of others (with permission!). The concept of a 'Mary Sue' is a toxic remnant of machismo in geek spaces and should not prevent you from exploring a lovely existence for yourself.
+
 ## Reconsider before writing this
 
 Violence
 :   While there is some violence in the System, and obviously things remain somewhat difficult back phys-side, the core of the conflict should not boil down to or result in wanton violence. The goal is not to write of wars — political, ideological, religious, or turf — nor of punchy shooty explosiony action as the guiding plot-point. There are plenty fine settings for this; Post-Self simply is not one of them.
 
 Bigotry
-:   There are some taboos that remain, such as the one surrounding intraclade relationships (until about 2355), but there is little need to overcome adversity over identity sys-side. Explore these identities, yes. Explore the lingering effects of bigotry experienced phys-side, but there are stories of personal fulfillment to be had without necessarily focusing on these particular struggles. Actual transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc. on behalf of the authors are unwelcome and will be denounced.
+:   There are some taboos that remain, such as the one surrounding intraclade relationships (until about 2355), but there is little need to overcome adversity over identity sys-side. Explore these identities, yes. Explore the lingering effects of bigotry experienced phys-side, but there are stories of personal fulfillment to be had without necessarily focusing on these particular struggles. Actual transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc. on behalf of the authors is unwelcome and will be denounced.
 
 Using other people's characters without asking
 :   Try not to use other people's characters — even open clades such as the Ode clade — without asking. While many will say yes, this will have the added benefit of you being able to write more closely to the author's vision, as they will often have paracanon to share. Additionally, in some cases, these characters feature in the noemata of several individuals' headmates or personalities, and it's worth avoiding trampling on identities!

content/extras/calls/marsh-anthology.md

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+title: Call for submissions — Marsh anthology stories
+---
+
+One of the stretch goals for [the *Marsh* Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/drabmakyo/marsh) is to fund additional short stories surrounding the events of [*Marsh*](https://marsh.post-self.ink) written by authors interested in the Post-Self setting. These stories will be included alongside *Marsh* — or in a separate volume, depending on the response — published in a separate volume.
+
+To that end, I am soliciting stories surrounding the sudden downtime and disappearance of cladists across Lagrange on New Year's Eve, 2399.
+
+### The Details
+
+Word count
+:   Approximately 2,000 (please ask if you are planning on writing more; I will likely say yes!)
+
+Payment
+:   Flat fee of $50 and a copy of the book if accepted for print. All stories, regardless of whether they are accepted, are eligible to be included on the site as canon so long as everyone agrees.
+
+Submission format
+:   MS Word, LibreOffice, or Google Docs — basically, anything I can comment on. If you want to submit LaTeX or Markdown, good on ya~
+
+Submission Deadline
+:   Soft deadline: April 30, 2023 / Hard deadline: May 31, 2024
+
+Estimated publication date
+:   August 1, 2024
+
+Please include
+:   Your story and a short author bio
+
+Please read
+:   The [writing guide](/about/writing), and at least [the synopsis of *Marsh*](/extras/summaries). I will also provide the current draft of the book if you get in touch.
+
+Consider joining
+:   Either the Post-Self [Telegram Group](https://makyo.io/ps-telegram) or [Discord](https://makyo.io/ps-discord)
+
+Submit by
+:   DMing on either of the above platforms or by emailing <madison@makyo.ink>
+

content/extras/summaries.md

@@ -0,0 +1,333 @@
+---
+title: Summaries of larger works
+---
+
+## The Post-Self Cycle
+
+The Post-Self Cycle were the four original large works that spawned the Post-Self setting in general.
+
+### Qoheleth (2019)
+
+> *“All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?”*
+
+With immersive technology at its peak, it’s all too easy to get lost. When RJ loses emself in that virtual world, not only must ey find eir way out, but find all the answers ey can along the way.
+
+And, nearly a century on, society still struggles with the ramifications of those answers.
+
+Features the bonus novella *Gallery Exhibition: A Love Story.*
+
+<details>
+<summary>Spoilers for <em>Qoheleth</em></summary>
+
+*RJ Brewster* is a sound technician for a theater and pioneer of a type of virtual reality that involves integration with a system in a non-human fashion - when ey works sound for the theater, ey is essentially the room. When not working, ey spends much of eir time online with friends, also in VR, where ey is a genderless fennec fox. Recently, *Cicero*, one of eir friend group has 'gotten lost': while he was interacting with the VR system, the system crashed and, even when removed from it, he was left still 'inside', with no way to remove him. RJ (AwDae when online, due to the limitations of a canine muzzle on pronouncing letters), eir best friend and ex *Sasha* (a skunk), and Cicero's partner *Debarre* (a weasel) have been trying to figure out what they can about Cicero's circumstances and how he can be rescued. After digging into the research, RJ emself gets lost during that night's rehearsal at the theater.
+
+*Dr Carter Ramirez* is a scientist at the University College of London working on studying the lost. She is head of the research team and focuses specifically on the statistical, psychological, and data science side of the research. Her coworker, *Dr Sanders*, leads up the neuroscience side of research. When RJ gets lost, Sanders mentions that 'another furry' has gotten lost, and Dr Ramirez gets a hunch that there might be some social vector to the lost. When she starts investigating along those lines, however, she meets strange amounts of pushback from both Sanders and the grantors funding the research. She pushes on with a reduced team of *Avery*, a nonbinary statistician, and *Prakash Das*, a neuroscientist. Avery discovers that RJ's case may be unique in that eir marketing trail has been influenced by eir nonbinary gender as well as eir aromanticism, meaning that ey is both easy to track and unique in eir social circles.
+
+Nearly two hundred years in the future, *Ioan Bălan*, an historian living as an upload in a computer system, is contacted by an enigmatic fennec fox named *Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled*, who is looking to hire em as an amanuensis, someone to help both investigate and to witness the investigation into a problem that its "clade", the Ode clade, is running into. A clade is the set of individuals in the system forked from a common ancestor, with "forking" meaning that the individual makes a copy of themselves who is unique from that point on. Some unknown person has allegedly spilled a secret of some importance to the Ode clade, namely the name of the author of the Ode to the End of Death after which they are named, someone who died before uploading. While Ioan is initially skeptical of being used as a private investigator, ey quickly becomes interested in the strange intricacies of the Ode clade and the mystery itself, which primarily takes place as a playful puzzle using various forms of encryption set forth by someone who will only identify himself as Qoheleth.
+
+When ey gets lost, RJ/AwDae awakes in eir old high school as a fox, rather than as eir human self. While there, ey struggles with the loneliness and maddening features of the 'sim' in which ey has found emself. Ey hunts around and eventually finds a set of clues related to Cicero's disappearance. After struggling with various aspects of the sim such as doors being locked, a 'fog of war' that keeps em from seeing more than a hundred or so feet while ey is outside, words in books refusing to stay still on the page, and nauseating 'skips' when ey travels through places ey has never seen before, ey deduces that ey is not actually in a sim as it exists in the waking world, but trapped in eir own mind with the VR technology (which takes the form of implants in eir hands, forehead, and a column along eir spine known as an 'exocortex') mirroring eir experiences back to em through the technology already in place. Notably, the information ey was exposed to before getting lost has been cached in eir exocortex, and ey has full access to it. Realising that ey are stuck in something more akin to a dream than a sim, ey begins treating it as such, molding the world to eir whim, all while eir sanity seems to erode from the effects of this setup.
+
+The pressure against Carter continues to mount, and she eventually gets in touch with *Johansson*, the director of the *Soho Theatre Troupe* where RJ worked. He agrees to help her and her to help him in turn. Meanwhile, Sasha gets in touch with Caitlin, the light tech with the STT, who provides her with some information, including the name and contact information for Carter. When she contacts Carter, however, Carter seems very spooked and will only meet up with a 'throwaway' account and location. Sasha questions why Carter is receiving so much push-back when her team has yet to publish any information on this new tack of investigation along the social vector, and Carter panics, deducing that there is a plant on the team, likely Sanders, who is passing information up to the grantors, who are mostly government types. 
+
+Carter, Sasha, and RJ independently deduce that there was an event in the recent past involving the Direct Democracy Representative (or DDR), a gamified system by which every citizen may vote and comment on legislation, a vote which has gone missing with many of those who did vote on it (and some who were investigating it such as RJ) getting lost. Carter and Avery are discussing the data showing this when, before their eyes, the data starts to change. Carter has Avery pull her from the system, an act which will cause the data that is cached in eir exo to be backed up as a 'core dump'. She goes for a walk to clear her head and gets several frantic messages from her team that security and the police have showed up and are looking for her. Prakash tells the police that he will go find Carter, and is revealed to be a spy for one of the other two superpowers in the world, the Sino-Russian Bloc (with much of Europe and the Americas being part of the Western Federation). He retrieves the core from Carter's exo and tells her to head to the University Medical Center where RJ is being kept, with the reasoning that if she were to run now, she would be seen as guilty of evasion, while if she goes to the UMC to see a patient who should be anonymous, she is merely guilty of an ethics violation.
+
+In the future, Ioan and Dear have tracked down Qoheleth, the one who spilled the Name and find, to their surprise, that he is *Life Breeds Life, But Death Must Now Be Chosen*, another member of the Ode clade. Qoheleth wants to bring together the entirety of the Ode clade, which Dear struggles to do. When they finally manage to gather together, Qoheleth explains that the inability for uploads to forget is slowly driving everyone mad and that something needs to be done to change it. When he gets cocky and mentions that he said the Name to get the clade's attention, an analyst that one of the members brought with them runs up and assassinates him. It turns out that part of the clade, known as the conservatives, simply wants to keep their secrets and does not care for any new information.
+
+Carter makes it to the UMC and, taking a risk, logs in to meet up with Sasha and Debarre to pass on what has happened at her work and what she knows of RJ. Part way through explaining what is happening, Sasha falls over in pain and then her system crashes, and Carter and Debarre deduce that she has gotten lost as well and both log out immediately. When Carter goes to visit RJ, she finds both the police and Johansson and Caitlin there already. Johansson distracts the police while Carter sets up a 'mirror rig' with RJ, a training device for those who are learning to use their implants which allows an instructor to help control RJ, acting on a hunch from seeing Sasha disappear. She logs into the mirror rig with RJ and finds herself in a confusing, dreamlike place with AwDae at the center of it all, spouting lines from a poem that we now recognize as the Ode. Carter struggles to convince em to come with her, and eventually succeeds. She immediately dives back in and publishes via the DDR what she has learned as well as how to free the lost.
+
+Debarre frees Sasha, finding that she is similarly affected by the mirroring experience, though to a lesser extent than RJ. All of those who were lost are forever changed, and few for the better. Cicero finds it to be too much and kills himself. Shortly after his funeral, Sasha receives a letter from RJ mentioning that ey must go back to that mirror world and has volunteered to be an early subject for uploading tech that will lead to the world Ioan and Dear inhabit, a process that will kill eir body and, unless everything goes right, ey will not be able to see her again. The letter includes the entirety of the Ode, and we learn that Sasha is *Michelle Hadje*, the basis for the common ancestor of the Ode clade. Sanders winds up in prison along with several who instigated the plot to remove that vote from the records. Prakash winds up back in the Sino-Russian Bloc (where, it is implied, RJ's procedure will take place). Ioan winds up eir job as amanuensis with Dear and begins to write up eir report/essay on the subject but, on a whim, contacts Dear and its partner to ask if ey might create a long-lived fork (eir first), Codrin Bălan, to work with them both on the project.
+</details>
+
+### Toledot (2022)
+
+> "I am saying that you trust me — really trust me — and that life in the System is more subtle than I think you know. You let me into your dreams, my dear, and your dreams influence this place as much as, if not more than, your waking mind."
+
+No longer bound to the physical, what lengths should one go to in a virtual world to ensure the continuity of one’s existence?
+
+Secession. Launch. Two separations from two societies, two hundred years apart. And through it all, so many parallels run on so many levels that it can be dizzying just keeping up. The more Ioan and Codrin Bălan learn, the more it calls into question the motivations of even those they hold most dear.
+
+<details>
+<summary>Spoilers for <em>Toledot</em></summary>
+
+#### Part 1 --- Departure
+
+In 2325, those who live on the System (sys-side) and those who still live back in the physical world (phys-side) complete a true collaboration for the first time in nearly two centuries. Scrounging together the lingering remnants of humanity's desire to explore outward, away from Earth, they launch two identical smaller versions of the System, Castor and Pollux, on a centuries or millennia long extrasolar voyage.
+
+After the success of their project surrounding Qoheleth and the problems of an infallible memory, the *Bălan clade*, made up of *Ioan Bălan* and *Codrin Bălan*, has decided to undertake the task of documenting the history of the launch project. In the intervening years, Codrin has found emself in a polyamorous relationship with *Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled* of the *Ode clade* and its partner, and they are all incredibly gay for each other. Dear has convinced Codrin and its partner to invest entirely in the launch vehicles, or LVs, tickled by the idea of irreversibility and the fact that it will not remain on the original system parked at the Earth-Moon L<sub>5</sub> point. When interviewed by one of the Codrins, it states that the other reasons for it investing entirely in the launch are that it wants to feel missed by someone, and that eventually, it wants to die a real death.
+
+Meanwhile, Ioan, working with one of Dear's cocladists, *May Then My Name Die With Me*, a very affectionate skunk, has decided to remain solely on the L<sub>5</sub> system, acting as a communication point, organizer, and editor of the history and mythology that ey and both Codrins are collecting.
+
+Working on the phys-side, Douglas Hadje, a distant descendant of Michelle Hadje, the progenitor of the Ode clade, acts as phys-side launch coordinator, with May Then My Name being his sys-side counterpart. He has long been fascinated by the System, often thinking of how his great-great-etc aunt must still be inside, often wishing to contact her but never feeling brave enough. Michelle/Sasha, as the root instance of the Ode clade, had quit in 2306, however, after two centuries of dealing with a broken mind. After the launch and the decline of his duties, May Then My Name begins interviewing him for the phys-side perspective of the events surrounding the launch.
+
+The night after the launch takes place, Ioan and May Then My Name decide that it might be worth tying the history of the launch with the early history of the secession of the System from the rest of human society, as the launch took place on the 200th anniversary of Secession Day.
+
+A second thread of the story follows *Yared Zerezghi* as a phys-side Direct Democracy Representative (DDR) junkie campaigning on the forums and debate sims for a referendum on the individual rights of those who have uploaded to the system. Many view the uploads as something other or less than human, and, grumbling about the costs of maintaining the System, wish to put them to work. Further complicating this is the fact that those who upload still retain citizenship to their countries of origin, meaning that all works that they create are technically done so under the jurisdiction of that country. He is tapped by *Councilor Yosef Demma* of the Northeast African Coalition to help guide the discussion toward the idea of independence of the System, stating that, because there are basic differences in the culture of the System and any other culture on Earth, there is no way that they can be governed the same way. Yared, he explains, will receive suggestions from Councilor Demma's political analysts telling him how to steer the conversation.
+
+#### Part 2 --- Progression
+
+Sys-side, *Michelle Hadje/Sasha* is a member of the Council of Eight, a group who seeks to guide but not govern the System, working primarily in the capacity of writing proposals for features and architecture changes. The rest of the council includes her friend *Debarre*, an Israeli Jew named *Zeke*, the son of a New Zealand politician named *user11824*, three interchangeable and unnamed political representatives from the Sino-Russian Bloc (who is currently hosting the System), and *Jonas Anderson*, an ex-politician from the Western Federation.
+
+Michelle/Sasha still suffers from the lingering effects of getting lost decades prior, which is expressed much as her experience was at that time, with waves of her two personalities changing her form between anthropomorphic skunk and human, a very uncomfortable and distressing sensation. She asks the Council if she might spend the reputation required to fork off ten instances of herself to begin the Ode clade --- a name and structure which worries Debarre --- so that she can let them take her workload and she can take a vacation. The council agrees, so she forks off ten instances of herself. As she does so during those waves of form and fluctuating personality, each winds up with a different appearance and personality. Jonas tasks one of them, *The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream*, to help him in his work corresponding with Yared on the topic of individual rights.
+
+Throughout the interviews that Ioan and Codrin conduct in 2325, they begin to learn about the structure and history of the launch project (now becoming the proper noun Launch to match the proper noun Secession). One instance of Dear tells Codrin that it will not tell em the entire story, and that if pressed, it will resent em and be too tempted to lie because the past is too complicated and bound up in shame. The Bălan clade's initial interview selections are scattershot, including a musician who is credited for finding a way to transmit sheet music back and forth between sys- and phys-side; an author (*Joseph Rankin*) who has invested entirely in the Launch with an outline for a book to write so that his editor back on the System can see how the two different versions of him begin to diverge, and an astronomer who calls himself *Tycho Brahe* who has invested entirely in the launch out of an impossible dream of seeing the stars: audio and visual transmissions between phys- and sys-side are impossible because they come through all garbled as they might in a dream, so he can't actually see the stars.
+
+Despite these initial starts, they begin to notice patterns surrounding the time at which the families of uploads who remain phys-side are compensated as well as the "Dreamer Module", an instrument and radio package attached to each of the launch vehicles, used to Do Science™ as well as broadcast a nested signal for extraterrestrial life to pick up, a topic which encountered unexpected friction sys-side from the Ode and Jonas clades.
+
+#### Part 3 --- Acceleration
+
+In 2124, picking up on the fact that he's being used by a NEAC politician to steer the System towards secession, Jonas and True Name discuss how they might use Yared to further their own ends, with it becoming increasingly clear that this particular Odist has wound up with much of Michelle/Sasha's political skills as well as more than a little cynicism and very little empathy. She meets with a few other Odists as she works with Jonas: *That Which Lives Is Forever Praiseworthy*, who begins to act as propagandist, helping True Name shape her image to be more effective; and *Life Breeds Life But Death Must Now Be Chosen* who is tasked with slowly modifying the collective unconscious's perception of both the Ode clade and the Council of Eight, which they plan to dissolve after Secession, so that the Odists and Jonases can continue their work of guiding the System toward increased stability and safety long into the future.
+
+True Name is pleased to see how smoothly the topic of secession goes over with the Council of Eight, thanks to Praiseworthy's propagandizing. She meets with Debarre, who was initially put off by the choice of the Ode as a naming scheme and the desire to hide the name of the poet, *RJ/AwDae*, but his nerves are soothed. Debarre also meets with Michelle for much the same reason, finding her much diminished and unable to continue working, now that her clade has taken over her job. She explains that she's still struggling with survivor's guilt after AwDae sacrificed emself during the creation of the System, and while she's trying not to just live in grief, she does want to memorialize em.
+
+After considering Rankin's plan to have each of his instances work independently, the Bălan clade decides to do the opposite and instead stay in touch for as long as they can (the further away the LVs get from the System, the longer the transmission times) to organize their interviewing effectively. To that end, one Codrin interviews Zeke, now calling himself Ezekiel and living much as his prophet namesake did, who explains more about how the Council of Eight was undermined by Jonas and True Name, guiding the Bălans to other Odists to interview.
+
+One Codrin interviews the intensely charismatic *Why Ask Questions Here At The End Of All Things* who describes some of the ways in which the Ode clade and specifically True Name's stanza worked to manipulate politics on a large scale during both Secession and Launch, though the reader starts to pick up on the fact that some of what ey learns is not wholly true. The other Codrin talks with Dear about the mood surrounding Secession. Ioan interviews *Do I Know God After The End Waking* who was tasked to meddle with finances phys-side to encourage the shift from needing to pay to upload to being compensated, particularly that the first child should upload to fund the future of the subsequent children, as Ioan did. He now feels deep shame about having done so, though there are similar half-truths here.
+
+Some of these grand-scale machinations are confirmed in interviews with others, such as when Douglas talks with Ioan and May Then My Name about various shifts that he's seen over the years and some of the sabotage attempts against the System as a whole and the Launch specifically. He and basically everyone else (including May Then My Name) can tell that Ioan has fallen in love with May Then My Name, and Douglas even asks them about it, but Ioan is too stuck up in his head to realize it, much less do anything about it. Ioan and Douglas hatch a plan for Douglas to finally upload, something that May Then My Name won't shut up about, on the one year anniversary of Launch so that he can surprise her. May Then My Name very carefully does not tell Douglas that she's a distant instance of Michelle/Sasha, wanting to keep that as her own surprise.
+
+Yared introduces an amendment allowing the System to secede to the referendum on individual rights. Despite the consensus swinging largely in favor of rights, this amendment becomes hotly debated, leaving Yared feeling much of the parasocial effects of that: those who are in favor of the bill start to be in favor of him, and those who are staunchly against it begin to hate him specifically. Demma, True Name, and Jonas all do their best to ensure him that the chances of this failing are low and that, even though he may always be associated with this topic moving forward, he should still be proud of his work. Sure enough, the referendum passes with both the secession amendment and an amendment moving the physical elements of the System to the L<sub>5</sub> station (which begins as a luxury hotel) intact, all taking effect on January 21, 2125.
+
+#### Part 4 --- Arrival
+
+Demma brings Yared to a New Years Eve party with the politicians and business executives who were working toward Secession. In the car ride back to his home, Demma laughs at Yared, calling him a starry-eyed dreamer and revealing that his entire plan was just to get the System out of the way and out of Earth's ongoing political schemes so that they wouldn't remain associated with each other, since the System is just a dumping ground for dreamers. He suggests that Yared upload, since that's where he belongs, and since any further attempts to interact with the DDR will be monitored and, should he diverge from the party line, there will be reprisals, Yared feels no other choice but to upload, the last before Secession, leaving him anxious around any form of politics. He is met by True Name and brought to the Secession Day celebration.
+
+Two hundred years later, Yared, along with Debarre and user11824, meet up with Dear, its partner, and Codrin for a dinner party. The three (four, if one counts Dear as being of Michelle/Sasha) former members of the Council of Eight talk about the dissolution of the Council and the ultimate cynicism of True Name and Jonas. Yared shares a story from the middle ages known as the "Toledot Yeshu" or Generations of Jesus which describes, in part, Paul as actually something of a tool of the Jewish leadership of the time, guiding the burgeoning new spirituality into a religion of its own rather than simply another sect of Judaism. Yared calls himself a tool of Paul, in the form of Demma, True Name, and Jonas.
+
+The Bălans begin to interview a few instances of Jonas as well as True Name, finding out just how deep the manipulation goes. The two clades have strived to do all they can to maintain the stability and continuity of the System, including ensuring that life on Earth never gets too good so that the System is always seen as a better life, but not so bad as to make phys-side humanity give up entirely. In order to keep the stability from getting too boring, they have also been introducing small amounts of chaos into the life of the System so that they remain stable but not apathetic. These manipulations have all been subtle, from nudging a young Douglas Hadje toward becoming interested in the System and eventually becoming phys-side launch director due to the story element involved.
+
+The launch itself, despite its public beginnings in 2306, has been in progress since 2290 as one of these ways of keeping life interesting. All of this has been run through a cost-benefit analysis, including even having the history/mythography written specifically by Ioan. Not only have all of their interviews been tracked and shaped, but in 2298, seven years before even getting involved in the Qoheleth affair, Ioan was tapped as the appropriate author for the project, with a suggestion that the Qoheleth affair might have been some form of test. The only thing that failed the cost-benefit analysis yet still made it into the launch project was the portion of the Dreamer Module which contains broadcast instructions to be read by extraterrestrial sources on how to build a human mind and sensorium, templated after Douglas Hadje, and upload it into the LV System. The concession there being that the uploads will be placed in a DMZ, cut off from the rest of the System.
+
+The manipulation even makes its way down to the individual scale. The last act of Michelle/Sasha was to give each of the first lines of the ten stanzas (second in the case of Qoheleth) one last vague suggestion. This, it turns out, was influenced by True Name, and she doesn't deny manipulating Michelle/Sasha towards quitting through the long years.
+
+After the final interview with True Name, Ioan confronts May Then My Name about her role in all of this, and she is revealed to be a failed experiment by True Name to influence individuals by being too likeable to resist. Where True Name was excessively cynical, however, May Then My Name became excessively empathetic and thus difficult to control, so all True Name could do is point her at someone and hope that the correct outcome occurred. Her most recent target was Ioan, and, given how ey feels about her now, True Name's mission was a success. Ioan says that ey believes May Then My Name is innocent of any conscious manipulation, stating that she simply as crazy in-laws. Ey finally realizes that, oh, yeah, they've actually kind of been dating for a few years now, ey was just too dense to realize it, so the relationship is formalized and May Then My Name makes fun of em for it. They are incredibly gay for each other.
+
+As planned, Douglas uploads on the eve of the one year anniversary of Launch and is met by Ioan, who instructs him on how to work within the System, then brings him to Michelle/Sasha's sim, where he has a good cry. The next day, Ioan and May Then My Name come to the sim for a picnic. May Then My Name is shocked to see him, so she reveals that she is of Michelle/Sasha, which leaves Douglas feeling mixed and overwhelmed, so they have their picnic instead. With essentially no loose ends in his life, and seeing how one can still be happy in the system by how Ioan and May Then My Name interact, he feels more complete than he's ever felt before.
+
+In an epilogue, the Dreamer Module on the Castor LV receives a transmission from an extraterrestrial craft of similar design confirming that they understand the instructions on how to upload, that they will be approaching relatively close, and await consent to upload. Tycho Brahe, the feels like he's the only one who seems to care about the Module, gives consent.
+</details>
+
+### Nevi'im (2022)
+
+> “Do you know how old I am, Dr. Brahe? I am 222 years old, a fork of an individual who is…who would be 259 years old. I am no longer the True Name of 2124. Even remembering her feels like remembering an old friend. I remember her perfectly, and yet I do not remember how to be earnest. I do not know how to simply be."
+
+The cracks are showing.
+
+Someone picked up on the broadcast from the Dreamer Module and as the powers that be rush to organize a meeting between races, Dr. Tycho Brahe is caught up in a whirlwind of activity. And as always, when the drama goes down, there is Codrin Bălan to witness it.
+
+When faced with eternity in a new kind of digital world, however, old traumas come to roost, and those who were once powerful are brought to their knees
+
+Growth is colliding with memory, and the cracks are showing.
+
+<details>
+<summary>Spoilers for <em>Nevi'im</em></summary>
+
+As a prologue in 2114, *RJ Brewster* meets with *Dr. Carter Ramirez* and *Prakash Das*, a spy for the Sino-Russian Bloc, for lunch. RJ has been having a very hard time re-acclimating to life after being lost. Ey has lost eir job due to fears around delving in, and eir cat has passed away. Ey considers Dr. Ramirez and Sasha eir only remaining friends. After lunch, Prakash catches up with RJ and offers to bring em in on a project to create a new embedded world with uploaded consciousnesses based around the information learned from the lost.
+
+#### Part 1 --- Anticipation
+
+In 2346, more than twenty years after the two smaller versions of the System, Castor and Pollux, were launched out of the solar system, someone has picked up on the signal transmitted by the "Dreamer Module", a part of the launch vehicles containing scientific instruments as well as some recordings as a way to possibly get in touch with extraterrestrial life on the journey.
+
+*Tycho Brahe,* the astronomer on call (and one of *Codrin Bălan's* interviewees for the *History*), has received a message from a passing vehicle claiming that they are nearby and understand the mechanism by which consciousnesses may be transferred between ships, stating that they have similar and would like to meet. Tycho, without thinking, grants them consent to do so, and promptly freaks the fuck out.
+
+Unsure of where to turn, ey contacts Codrin and visits em and eir partner, *Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled*, early in the morning, explaining what happened, that there will likely be alien visitors before long, and that it's all his fault. They talk him down from his panic and send him on his way back to his sim, an observatory of sorts.
+
+Back at his sim, he meets up with *The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream*, who has, in the past, helped steer the direction of both the System and life on Earth through subtle political manipulation. Despite his anxiety, she's really quite nice to him and invites him to fork (creating Tycho#Artemis) and come work with her and *Jonas Anderson* on the project of first contact.
+
+There, he meets one of True Name's cocladists, *Why Ask Questions When The Answers Will Not Help*. They share the next message that has arrived, offhandedly mentioning that they are now gating communication with the remote ship (which they have dubbed Artemis). The message contains a set of instructions for how better to align Castor to Artemis for transmission as well as for a space to create in order to have conversations in person. True Name explains that this will take place in the DMZ, an area that is inaccessible to the rest of the System except through a single, tightly controlled access point. The conversations will take place on both Castor and Artemis in similar spaces.
+
+The Artemisians request to meet with a party of five: someone in a leadership role, someone who can act as a recorder/amanuensis, a scientist, and two representatives. They have put forth *Turun Ka* of firstrace as leader, *Turun Ko* of firstrace as recorder, *Stolon* of thirdrace as scientist, and *Iska* of secondrace and *Artante Diria* of fourthrace as representatives, implying that there are at least four different uploaded races aboard their craft. In return, they will send True Name as leader, Codrin Bălan as recorder, Tycho as scientist, and another of True Name's cocladists, *Why Ask Questions Here At The End Of All Things* as a representative, leaving the final representative up to Codrin to choose. Until then, Tycho#Artemis works with *Sovanna Soun* and *Dr. Paolo Verda* on the technical side of setting up the meetings, as well as learning some of the Artemisian language that they have provided.
+
+Codrin, meanwhile, discusses some fears with Dear, stating that ey feels like ey's lacking agency, always getting dragged along into these enormous events. They're fun and all, but ey's starting to feel like ey isn't actually doing anything worthwhile. Ey is nothing if not a recorder, though, so ey visits with Tycho's root instance to describe what all will likely happen during this meeting. Back at home, ey discusses the request from True Name with eir partners, and Dear's partner suggests *Sarah Genet*, their therapist before they uploaded, as someone who is normal, curious, and a grounded.
+
+The team of emissaries (plus Dear) meet up at Tycho's dark-sky sim for dinner, where they discuss their hopes and fears surrounding this summit. They also learn just how under control the situation is by True Name and Jonas, with the announcement of the arrival of Artemis being tightly planned and shaped by the Odists. After, Tycho has a dream about meeting the Artemisians, which leads to sending them a series of questions surrounding their society and lives.
+
+They learn that the Artemisians do not have anything analogous to forking, but instead allow for fine-grained management of time; individuals or groups can move faster or slower than the rest of the world around them, allowing them to get more work done in fast-time or to wait out long periods in slow-time. The Odists (especially Dear) react poorly to this, explaining that it is similar to the experiences they had while lost.
+
+In the twenty years since launch, Castor has made it seven light-days away from Lagrange (the home System), so it isn't until seven days later that *Ioan Bălan* and *May Then My Name Die With Me* receive news of first contact, as well as Codrin's thoughts on eir lack of agency. In the interim, they have moved on from their lives as historian and launch coordinator to both start working in theatre under the direction of another Odist, *Time Is a Finger Pointing At Itself*, with Ioan now writing plays.
+
+They are contacted by the version of True Name that has remained on Lagrange. In the intervening years, May Then My Name has grown to truly hate her down-tree instance, feeling that the way she was manipulated was unfair, and the way she was used to manipulate others rather evil. There is a tense conversation about what knowledge they've received about the Artemisians versus what knowledge True Name has received, as well as all of the ways both True Name and May Then My Name have changed, with the former noticeably more cowed and anxious than she had been twenty years prior. She asks that they not share the information beyond a limited circle until a wider, more controlled announcement can be made. May Then My Name makes her cry and kicks her out of her and Ioan's house.
+
+Tycho watches the news disseminate and how it's being shaped by Odists such as True Name, Why Ask Questions, and Answers Will Not Help. They work out a date to begin the conversation once they are in effective Ansible range with Artemis and discuss what to expect, including the fact that they may not have enough in common with the Artemisians to actually understand them. It's decided between the two parties that the discussions on Castor will surround sharing scientific knowledge and those on Artemis will surround history, society, and psychology.
+
+#### Part 2 --- Experience
+
+The talks begin on both Artemis and Castor. On Artemis, Codrin arrives already 'skewed up' to fast-time, allowing em to see the Artemisians even as they others appear almost frozen at a much slower time scale. There are indeed four types of Artemisians: firstrace, which was described as post-biological, appear to be synthetic constructions that are equally comfortable on two or four legs with six-fingered hands and feet with two opposable thumbs and a thick tail for balance, analogous to a kangaroo. Secondrace is described as looking so close to a weasel that it would be easy to mistake them for Debarre, were it not for how short they are. Thirdrace looks something like a very colorful lizard with scales that shine like an oil slick and a frill of feathers or elongated scales around the crown of their heads. Fourthrace appears almost human, though with their features much smoothed.
+
+Turun Ko, the other recorder, skews up to fast-time to talk with Codrin, where they discuss how, most of the time, people live in 'common time' and shows em how to manipulate time to eir liking. The two Odists are indeed already suffering; Why Ask Questions has collapsed onto the pavement, shifting wildly between human and skunk forms just as *Michelle Hadje* had, and True Name is using all the energy she has to stay in one form. They are taken to a 'unison room' where time is pinned in place for all occupants while the other three emissaries are taken to their rest area. There, Tycho confides in Codrin that he doesn't think that that was Why Ask Questions but rather Answers Will Not Help.
+
+Back on Castor, greetings go much more smoothly, and the talks begin with a series of questions. Tycho and Stolon, the scientists, hit it off immediately and they have to be reminded several times that this is not simply an astronomy conference. Sarah and Artante also discover that they are both psychologists and share a lot in common.
+
+On Lagrange, May has wound up 'overwhelmed', an experience similar to that which is described as Dear having, where emotions get the best of her and she has to spend time alone in order to bring herself back to baseline. When she is able to do so, she meets up with Ioan and Douglas at Michelle's old field. There, she explains that this episode lasted longer than usual because, toward the end, she was contacted by *If I Am To Bathe In Dreams*, who has been acting as the Odists' therapist, to meet up with another stanza's worth of Odists, as the first line, *May One Day Death Itself Not Die* quits without leaving a fork, followed shortly by her up-tree instance, *I Do Not Know, I Do Not Know*. With Qoheleth gone, this leaves only 97 Odists left. Ioan and Douglas express their concerns that the cracks are starting to show in more of the clade as more of them go mad. Once back home, Ioan and May are intensely gay with each other and totally in love and it's really cute. Also, they discuss the option of the Odists leaning on Sarah Genet as a therapist to help them not all succumb to madness.
+
+Codrin#Castor and Codrin#Artemis exchange notes at the end of the first day, relying on another fork, Codrin#Assist, who ferries them between the DMZ and the rest of Castor where ey can transmit them to Artemis. They describe the first day and what they've learned, including the troubles that True Name and "Why Ask Questions" are experiencing on Artemis, though Codrin#Artemis hints at the fact that there might have been a swap with Answers Will Not Help.
+
+The discussions run into a few problems with mutual misunderstandings, and there is some frustration over the fact that the Artemisians often say "now is not the time to have this conversation" when certain topics are brought up. They power through it, though, and are able to learn some good information from each other, both directly from the conversations as well as from implications, such as the fact that, despite the Artemisians saying that there have been three of these 'convergences' before, they may have met more races than they are letting on, instances where there weren't convergences. True Name has a conversation with Turun Ka about how the Artemisians manage sentiment and steer politically, leading to some concern among the Artemisians. Tycho worries about her being so open about her own manipulations, suggesting that maybe she's losing it with the time skew.
+
+Ioan and May go camping with Douglas, A Finger Pointing, and *Do I Know God After The End Waking* in the latter's forest sim, where they discuss what it felt like to go lost and how it has left them all a little bit mad. May explains why this business with time skew might bring up those old feelings and why Odists aren't likely to spend much time on Artemis or join, should that be the direction things go in. End Waking says that he would probably try to join anyway, while Douglas says that he's upset that he won't get the chance.
+
+Ioan and Codrin#Pollux exchange letters --- since Pollux is seven days away from Lagrange, information from Castor arrives fourteen days late. Codrin#Pollux offers support to Codrin#Castor on taking control of eir life, explaining how ey took a position as a librarian at a university in the interim. Ey confides in Ioan, however, that ey is worried at how conservative Castor seems, with Dear, Codrin, and True Name all sounding much as they had twenty years prior, while Pollux has moved on: Dear has expanded the sim to include other terrain features, and its cocladist *Serene, Sustained And Sustaining* joined their polycule for a while, leading to two cocladists in a relationship with each other, something which is still considered taboo on Castor. They discuss how all three Systems have changed, with Lagrange being between Castor and Pollux in terms of conservative/liberal amounts of change.
+
+#### Part  3 --- Intensity
+
+True Name and Answers Will Not Help (as Codrin is now convinced she must be) are really struggling aboard Artemis now, with Answers Will Not Help the worse of the two. She often interrupts the meetings, spouting poetry and then apologizing that she cannot keep from speaking. Additionally, despite the talk taking place in a unison room, she is still somehow able to skew time a little (or unable to keep herself from doing so), which worries Iska, who is a time skew artist, analogous to Dear's instance artistry.
+
+This comes to a head when Answers Will Not Help interrupts with a long, rambling tirade, the end of which includes her saying the Name, more helpless in her crazed state than intentionally, and admitting that she is not Why Ask Questions. True Name confronts her angrily, and when she says it again, the skunk tackles her and, after a short fight, Answers Will Not Help quits. The emissaries should not have been able to skew in the unison room, nor should they have been able to quit, so Iska freaks out and runs off to find a system technician. True Name, now a total mess, admits to the deception, but Turun Ka says that they had expected such, but that conversations around the topic will remain for another time.
+
+While True Name rests, Codrin, Sarah, and Tycho meet up with Turun Ko, Artante Diria, and Stolon to discuss the fact that this whole time, the Artemisians have been following a checklist of steps that might occur during convergence with the goal of ensuring that everyone is safe and as happy as they can manage. The end steps would be either humanity joining them as fifthrace or parting on peaceable terms. Tycho admits that, given the chance, he'd join Artemis, given that he finally feels happy there.
+
+Ioan meets up with True Name on Lagrange to ensure that, even if they aren't fond of each other, there's no enmity in the air between them, that they can be polite to each other. Ey mentions discussions from Castor wherein Dear suggests that "even she must have emotions", which makes True Name cry because of course she does, but she's built a life where she can't show them and no one would believe her. Ioan asks if she's been in touch with Sarah, but she says that no, In Dreams never passed that on, showing that the rest of the clade has all but dropped her.
+
+May has kind of crashed after all these dramatic events going on, falling into a funk, though a more normal one. A trauma response in her is triggered when she starts an introductory session with Sarah and she has to step away, leaving Ioan to unintentionally have a therapy session with Sarah instead, which ey finds super useful. After, ey admits to her that ey's starting to feel a lot of sympathy for True Name, worrying about her.
+
+On Castor, True Name admits to the deception that took place on Artemis (Why Ask Questions having only been replaced for that side of the talks), leading her and Turun Ka to have several conversations separate from the rest of the delegates. During one of these lulls, Codrin discusses the checklist with Sarah, Turun Ko, and Artante.When they admit that there are conversations that they cannot have yet, Codrin gets frustrated and asks if ey can just *give* them information without necessarily having a conversation. When they say yes, ey gives them a copy of the *History* that ey wrote around the time of Launch, even if it shows True Name's political machinations. Ey also provides a copy of May's *Mythology*, saying that the Artemisians deserve more than just the sugar-coated synopses of their society that they've received so far. As its clear that ey shouldn't have done so without True Name's blessing, Sarah objects, but Turun Ko says that this is actually the penultimate step on the checklist: the fact that they still retain individual desire to better all races even in the face of leadership disagreeing, and that the talks between Turun Ka and True Name have been artificial, meant mostly to give the other emissaries the chance to go behind her back.
+
+On learning this on Artemis, the Artemisians wait for the final step in the checklist. When Tycho interrupts a talk to say that he wants to join them, and wants humanity to become fifthrace, the Artemisians welcome them as such, saying that the final step was simply a desire to join and an active decision to do so.
+
+#### Part  4 --- Integration
+
+After the talks and all of their instances have merged back down Tycho heads back to his sim to try and process what happened and is surprised when True Name joins him, saying that she doesn't know how to celebrate anymore, feeling that she isn't a whole person after two and a half centuries, much of that time spent focusing solely on politics. She suggests that eternal memory is clashing with the fact that she's still growing as a person, still changing.
+
+Back at the prairie, Codrin and Sarah catch Dear and its partner up on the happenings in a general way before Codrin invites Dear out on a walk. There, ey explains that Answers Will Not Help said the Name and kept saying "I cannot feel em" throughout the conference, so now ey knows about AwDae. Dear laughs about it, saying that it's the end of the era. It says not to tell any other Odists of course, but that it will become a game between their two clades, because turning it into one will make sure that any other Odists, namely True Name, looking in on them will simply see them goofing off and not actually sharing it. They pass this information on down to Lagrange, telling May about the game and Ioan about the fact that Codrin knows. May explains that this is a way for Codrin to not bear the knowledge alone as well as a way to reduce any culpability between the two clades.
+
+The DMZ is expanded and renamed Convergence, and the Ansible is turned on, allowing as many Artemisians who want to join them to do so, and any humans that want to join Artemis to do that as well. During a conversation with True Name, Tycho decides that he will invest totally in Artemis, leaving no forks behind.
+
+Codrin also decides to send a fork along to Artemis, even though it means that the fork will be alone, since neither of eir partners will be joining. Ey rushes to ensure that the fork is an individual in case that helps, so the fork becomes a woman named Sorina. She's unable to bring herself to say goodbye to her (former) partners, so she leaves without doing so. When ey returns home to eir partners, ey describes what happened, then says that ey actually wants to do something and be proactive, suggesting that they move to Convergence, taking the whole prairie sim with them. Ey also says that ey's getting out of the amanuensis business and going into therapy, since everyone kept saying ey was grounding and ey finds Sarah fascinating.
+
+In the end, Tycho invests fully after giving himself a eulogy at a small party of the emissaries and a few others who worked on the project. His last words are from a poem about his namesake: "Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." He transfers to Artemis where he meets Stolon and joyfully admits that it's finished.
+
+As an epilogue, AwDae is shown going through the process of uploading, wherein the S-R Bloc scientists are shown still trying to create the System. Ey would be the only one, if it's successful, though no previous attempts have been enough to emulate an entire person, except for one other of the lost they tried with, but they were a bit too crazy and self-destructed as soon as they uploaded. When ey finally goes through the procedure, ey gives emself entirely to it and, though ey doesn't survive to exist as a person uploaded, the process of em giving emself so fully to it winds up creating the self-sustaining world that becomes the System, showing that, yes, the Odists really were feeling eir presence throughout the system the whole time, that ey was the origin of the System, and that they originally had to keep eir name secret because at first (though it diminishes later), everyone could feel that presence but didn't know who it was.
+</details>
+
+### Mitzvot (2023)
+
+> “To be built to love is to be built to dissolve. It is to be built to unbecome. It is to have the sole purpose of falling apart all in the name of someone else."
+
+Even the grandest of stories can feel small and immediate when it’s just one person’s life.
+
+One of the most well-known names from one of the most well-known clades on the System, the avatar of political machinations and cool confidence, has been brought low. With help coming only from Ioan Bălan and the most grudging of support from her cocladists, all True Name has left to save herself is the ability to change.
+
+<details>
+<summary>Spoilers for <em>Mitzvot</em></summary>
+
+#### Part  1 --- Conversation
+
+It's late 2349, about about three and a half years since the fourth convergence, the meeting of the Artemesians with Castor. Life has taken a bit of a swing toward the adventuresome as news and new technology trickle their way back down to Lagrange, the original instance of the System in orbit around Earth. Technological changes include finer-grained ACLs that control permissions on various bits of the System, allowing for opaqued or visually secure cones of silence, limits on sensorium messages, etc.
+
+During those three years, *Ioan Bălan* wonders how this has become eir life: ey has been getting coffee with *The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream* of the Ode clade once a month. While the relationship between True Name and...well, everyone has been kind of strained, it was particularly tense between her and Ioan's partner *May Then My Name Die With Me* of the Ode clade, who, for years, struggled with feelings of hatred towards True Name. Although that hatred has softened towards resentment, these monthly coffee dates, where Ioan and True Name just chat and then work on their own projects, have been meant to keep avenues open between the two, since neither May nor True Name have given up hope on figuring out a path forward. They always seem to talk about each other to Ioan, and it kind of feels like they *want* to move forward, but they can't yet find a way.
+
+Oh, speaking of projects, Ioan is working on adapting eir book *On the Perils of Memory* (the story of Qoheleth) for the stage, True Name is prepping the System on the political side for the technological advancement that will allow audiovisual communication between the System and Earth instead of just text, and May is working on a monologue about being built to love.
+
+Ioan and May are just *incredibly* gay together, and it's painfully sweet, but I promise it's a legit plot element. They talk about how May forms and keeps relationships, that she only forms relationships as her root instance, and if a new one starts up while one is still going, only then will she fork to continue two relationships. Sorta like parallel monogamy. Ioan is her sixteenth relationship serious enough to warrant a fork (though, given the way she stepped back from True Name's guidance, she hasn't done so yet), and we learn that some of her forks are doubtless still in relationships, but that she lets them live their own private lives and never accepts merges when they quit, so she knows very little about them.
+
+Meanwhile, after a windstorm blew a tree over and crushed his tent and impaled his leg on a branch, *Do I Know God After The End Waking* has interrupted his months of solitude and called his boyfriend *Debarre* back to help him rebuild the tent in a new location. They're also pretty gay, but, like, in a super stoic way because E.W. can't emote and Debarre is a weasel and thus made of angst. May stops by their sim to visit and a) complain about the fact that True Name is in eir life, b) fret about why this still feels important, and c) flirt with Debarre (who is Very Gay™) to make him uncomfortable.
+
+Ioan heads out to Arrowhead Lake --- the abandoned mountain lake sim that ey discovered decades back --- for a walk to try and tease apart eir own feelings on being the bridge between May and True Name. Ey worries that ey has this urge to fix things in relationships, whether or not ey actually can (or whether or not those involved even want that). Ey's been fretting about this for a while, and even May has picked up on it, as she mentions when they go out to dinner afterwards. She suggests that this is maybe something that has always been the case for em, and that em uploading to provide eir brother Rareș with the subsidy funds was a way for em to 'fix' the situation as best ey could.
+
+True Name and Ioan have agreed that their next monthly meeting should be on Secession/Launch day, January 21 (yes I chose my birthday, no I am not sorry). This time, though, True Name arrives looking terrible, paranoid, like she hasn't slept in days, hasn't showered in a week, and hasn't changed her clothes in even longer. She says that she's been struggling, but that she and *Jonas Anderson*, the other behind-the-scenes leader of the System, have a 'gathering' later in the day. Weird choice of words, but that's what he said. As part of that, she's distracted with the fact that her instances are going to merge down before the gathering to reduce conflicts. Partway through this, one merge has learned that Jonas is looking for her, which is weird, because he knows she's with Ioan. The merges suddenly stop, though, along with all communication with her instances. She leaps to her feet, looks around the coffee shop, and sees the same assassin that killed Qoheleth walking toward them, so she grabs Ioan's hand and yells for em to take her 'somewhere, anywhere'. Ey tries taking her home, where they find the same assassin struggling with May, who forks, grabs the both of them, and yanks them to Arrowhead Lake. May is *furious*, and True Name caught in the middle of panic attack. She susses out that Jonas just tried to assassinate her.
+
+#### Part  2 --- Conflict
+
+Well, shit, okay. Now May and the person she dislikes the most are trapped in hiding together with no idea what's going on or how to move forward, and Ioan's position as bridge between them means ey's now trapped between them. True Name heads off to sit on the rock at the end of the lake to have a sulk and think about what to do next, leaving May to voice her frustrations and concerns to Ioan. She's pissed that no matter how hard she tries to get away from all of the things she dislikes about True Name (and, unspokenly, many of the things that she used to be), she just can't. She's also worried about the fact that their home has been invaded.
+
+Thankfully, this *is* a thing that Ioan can fix. Ey steps back home and sneaks around, investigating for anyone left over but only finding the mess from the struggle inside. Outside, however, ey finds Jonas sitting on a deck chair despite the snowy weather. Before ey can sweep him, Jonas says that he was just stopping by to make sure that ey and May were alright, which Ioan scoffs at. Jonas is an infuriating little snot, riling Ioan up with implications that ey's sweet on True Name before saying that he's hiring em as amanuensis once more, this time to witness and write about a formal discussion between him and True Name as they hash out the new status quo, to take place within one year's time. Ioan's baffled, given that he just tried to kill her, but Jonas says that was just plan A, and he has all the way down to plan M for ensuring that he gets his way and refuses to elaborate further, saying "Sometimes mommies and daddies fight, Ioan". He makes further implications about em an True Name, so Ioan bounces him from the sim. Ey sweeps the entire sim of everyone except emself and, while that action won't tell em who ey swept, it will tell em how many, and it says ey swept 17.
+
+Once ey makes eir way back to the lake, True Name finishes her sulk and rejoins them. She thanks them for getting her out of that alive and starts to say that she'll have to create a new sim for herself since home probably isn't safe, but May reluctantly suggests that she stay with them, instead, reasoning that it would be too easy for her to just disappear in a private sim and either get got as soon as she leaves or go crazy in her solitude. If she stays with them, though, not only is she around others, but those others are well enough known on the System that it'll dissuade Jonas from attacking her, lest May and Ioan, as trustworthy voices, catch him and make it public. It's awkward, but about the best they can do. Still, no one's comfortable going back just yet, so Ioan forks to meet up with End Waking and pick up camping gear so they can stay a night at the lake and have a night to regroup. End Waking and Debarre are supremely unhappy about the situation, and also kind of boggling at the fact that May is even putting up with True Name.
+
+While camping, True Name apologizes for the fact that she's been spying on them, as those seventeen that were swept were some of her spies, mostly others from the clade. Combined with a hunch ey had during one of their earlier coffee dates, this seems to imply that True Name on Castor never told True Name on Lagrange about the whole incident of Answers Will Not Help losing it and saying the Name in front of Codrin, showing that maybe Jonas's conspiracy includes the other instances of True Name as well, and it's only this one he's going after.
+
+Once they make it back home and get some coffee, Ioan expands eir house to include a second bedroom/bathroom for True Name to stay in. The next few days are very careful, though everyone's polite and there's no skunkfights. On the third day, though, True Name pulls May into a conversation in a visually secure cone of silence for about an hour. When it drops, True Name looks like she's been put through a wringer and May looks apoplectic. May leaves without a word, only sending Ioan a brief glimpse of the lake to show she's alright. True Name refuses to expand on what the conversation was about other than to make vague allusions to Jonas's quip about mommies and daddies fighting.
+
+May visits End Waking and Debarre after crying herself out. She explains more about the current situation and says that what True Name told her is too much to even talk about except that Jonas has played a long game with True Name and has been controlling her from the beginning, though we get the impression End Waking may know more than what she says aloud. She talks about how she's feeling torn, that she wishes TN was no more so that she wouldn't be in their lives, but also that she doesn't want her to die. Debarre echoes this sentiment. End Waking is stoic some more until May suggests he merge down with True Name, at which he gets kind of shouty. After she leaves, Debarre and End Waking talk, the latter saying he's not too keen on the idea of merging down because that means True Name will have his penance without having done any of the work herself. Debarre disagrees, saying that she'll also have the memories of the work of penance. He suggests that one reason May might want him to do this is to hurt True Name, and that she's even considering this means that she's a more complex individual than previously, since she used to just love everyone. End Waking gets upset because that would mean that, for him to be a more complex individual, he'd have to admit something other than his solitude and penance into his life. It's implied that they bone, after which End Waking jokes that, if he does merge down, True Name will have memories of that as well, to which Debarre says let her, at least she can have good things, too.
+
+With May out of the house, Ioan is anxious and True Name is mopey. They eventually pull themselves together enough to cook and eat dinner. May returns in the middle of it, acting a bit like a goofball, which she explains away as not wanting to fall back into just crying all the time as she had been around True Name. Over the next few days, May and True Name have a few more private conversations, and May heads out to visit End Waking a few more times. When she mentions to Ioan that they've been talking about the possibility of the merge, ey isn't so sure; ey thinks it might be a good idea overall just to help True Name live a more complete life now that the one singular aspect she focused on has been taken away, but that if she's to have a talk with Jonas, she probably needs to be in top shape to do so, not crushed under a century and a half of memories and all their conflicts. May reluctantly agrees, but when True Name goes on a bit of a rant about the position she's found herself in, May gets too frustrated and signals to End Waking to start the merge process anyway. True Name collapses under the weight of having to actually process those memories, and May breaks down on realizing what she's done.
+
+#### Part  3 --- Apprehension
+
+After a few hours, True Name is back up on her feet, but it's not until the next day that she's actually more with it. She requests that they head out to the lake, since she now has End Waking's desire for being outside (and hatred of being inside), where the three of them talk about what happened. She says she understands how May did this --- using all of her May powers to convince both End Waking to merge down and True Name to accept the merge --- and maybe even the why, but also says that May has essentially split her mind in two. It gets kind of tense, so Ioan asks what good memories she has now, rather than just all of the conflicting pride/penance. She lists a few things, but ends by thanking May for thinking of her. After all, now she has all these memories of her telling End Waking about not wanting her to die, too.
+
+True Name remains shaky and restless even after they return back home, reconciling memories of penance, but also of End Waking and Debarre's relationship. She was in her own on-again-off-again relationship with a red fox named Zacharias over the years --- they wound up more openly together (and more openly ruling) on Pollux, but on the home System, she kept the relationship at a distance ('lovers, yes, and perhaps even in love, but never partners').
+
+Through these discussions, Ioan begins to wonder at the fact that May has done just what ey was trying not to: taken a drastic step to fix someone else's problems for them. Ey starts to worry that, with this new problem of True Name being unhappy, she'll decide to merge down next. When ey asks, she admits that it had been on her mind until she'd seen just how poorly this merge had gone. Ey voices a worry that that'd mean that True Name would have May's memories of being with em.
+
+Eventually, though, everything builds up too much and she snaps at Ioan and May before stepping out to Arrowhead Lake. She returns a few hours later, looking dirty and scuffed up, stating that she's going to go camp there for a few days for the solitude. Ioan and May deduce that she's 'overflowing', and when ey asks, May admits that she's perilously close to doing the same. The next morning, she's not doing well at all, so ey goes to stay with *Douglas Hadje*, as ey usually does when she overflows with emotions. When ey arrives at Douglas's sim, ey breaks down with all of the emotion ey's been holding at bay throughout this crazy process.
+
+Douglas gets in contact with End Waking and Debarre to ask them to come visit, as Ioan isn't doing so well. The other three are a little surprised as Ioan talks through the story of May essentially manipulating End Waking into merging down and True Name into accepting. They talk through eir concerns about May potentially merging down, including True Name having memories of eir and May's relationship together, and the related worry that that might mean True Name would wind up feeling the same about em that May does. After wishing em the best, End Waking requests that Debarre step home with him for a few, where he requests some solitude now that the tent is done. Debarre figured this was coming and is already good to go. They're really cute. Debarre steps back to Douglas's to finish the conversation before heading home, where we learn that he was one of the 'reactive elements' that True Name thought might have been the one to try and assassinate her before she learned it was Jonas.
+
+Ioan sets up an appointment with eir therapist, *Sarah Genet* (who is also the therapist for all the Odists) to talk through much the same. A few days later, May shows up in the small hours of the morning and reunites with Ioan. She's not 'back to baseline' yet, but she's feeling well enough to have em around and doesn't want to be alone. True Name hasn't returned yet, but partway through eating dinner together, Ioan and May both get a sensorium message from her, just a brief glimpse of a well-dressed red fox sitting nearby out at the lake. They both hurry to the sim to find Zacharias taunting True Name for 'roughing it' out in the wilderness, calling her 'my little stink bug' and so on. He's a real shithead all around, and when May snarks back at him, he slaps her across the face. When Ioan tries to hit back, May gets them away from each other by forking so that her new instances overlap with theirs, the collision algorithms forcing them apart. He says he's out there to see if True Name is willing to talk now, but the subtext is that Jonas sent him specifically just to undermine her confidence.
+
+Back home, May and True Name finally explain what their huge conversation was: Zacharias is one of May's first relationship forks. Centuries ago, perhaps five years after Secession, back when she and True Name were almost exactly alike, May forked to form a friendship/relationship with someone who turned out to be a heavily modified fork of Jonas. This version of Jonas slowly won Zacharias over to his side, encouraged him to change, and then pushed him to get into a relationship with True Name. They kept this secret until a few years after Launch, when they dropped the news on her on all three Systems (Lagrange, Castor, and Pollux) at the same time. Jonas and Zacharias used that to set up different situations on each System: the previous status quo on Castor, the Guiding Council on Pollux, and this slow attempt to grind True Name down on Lagrange.
+
+Since Zacharias found True Name at Arrowhead Lake, that means that sim is no longer secure, so Ioan grabs a plains environment with a section of river off the reputation exchange and sets it up outside eir home so that True Name can retreat out there when feeling the need for solitude and no walls. This allows End Waking to visit a few times, talking with True Name and trying to understand where both she and May are coming from now that he's involved in this, too. In the process of talking, Ioan and May mention her vague thoughts on merging down, and True Name is oddly rather for it. She feels unbalanced, and if she were able to go into the merge knowing full well what to expect, what to keep or discard, and knowing that she could fork beforehand, she'd have a much easier time and might come out the other side far better. Eventually, the three of them say 'fuck it' and decide to go through with it so long as they approach it very carefully and respect Ioan and May's boundaries.
+
+#### Part  4 --- Reconciliation
+
+After a week of conversations determining what those boundaries are, including some discussions with End Waking about how this merge will differ from the previous one, May finally merges down. Despite what she said in *Toledot* --- a small lie to try and keep Ioan from digging too much --- May hasn't merged down since 2155, longer ago than the most recent of End Waking's merges, so it's a doozy. However, they're far more deliberate about it. True Name is kept cozy in bed rather than basically being dropped on the floor like before, she's allowed to fork beforehand, and May is there to keep her comfortable and talk her through anything that comes up. By that night, True Name is mostly stuck up in her head, but can speak haltingly. However, May doesn't want to leave her to fend for herself and is unwilling to sleep without Ioan, so they decide to expand the bed so that Ioan can sleep with May and True Name still be nearby. There's some gentle ribbing about keeping Ioan away from True Name, but basically everyone's awkward. Shortly before they fall asleep, True Name jolts upright shouting 'ey knows!', showing that True Name#Castor never passed on the fact that Codrin now knows AwDae's name. In the middle of the night, she rolls over and winds up curled with May, so Ioan wakes up hugging them both which is kind of awkward for everyone, and there's a lot of talk about that; True Name says that she can see what May sees in Ioan, can see a universe in which she loves em, but not how to get from this universe to that one, at which May requests that she call her 'May' instead of 'May Then My Name'.
+
+May visits End Waking, who calls Debarre back to talk through the merger and what it means, how it might help True Name escape from this lingering threat of Jonas. Debarre's pretty upset because now everyone's getting buddy-buddy with True Name and he still hates her. One upside, though, is that End Waking seems to be on the verge of moving on, dropping out of the clade and just becoming his own person, which would be more fulfilling for everyone.
+
+Back at Chez Bălan over the next few months, True Name has been calming down and processing well. She still needs silence and solitude as End Waking might out in the plains Ioan procured outside the house, and she still has that sharp political mind from True Name, but now she has all the emotions and need for constant touch from May. This plays out as her struggling to sleep alone, and while she gets some relief by sleeping curled up with her own fork as May taught her, she winds up crashing with Ioan and May once a week or so when the emotional need gets overwhelming. Still, it's well into April and they've all been cooped up since January, so they're all going stir-crazy. They finally talk Ioan into leaving, at least, since the chances of anyone being out to get em are low, so ey spends an afternoon at a library (because of course ey does) where, on a whim, ey contacts Serene to see if she can duplicate Arrowhead Lake for them, since the original isn't theirs and has been discovered by Jonas & co. She's mostly willing, but needs time to process. We get the sense that the clade is largely still wary of True Name.
+
+They talk May into getting out of the house for a bit to go get dinner with Debarre so that she can get away and Ioan can have some solitude while True Name ostensibly goes for a walk. However, True Name nods off on the couch and Ioan spaces out on the beanbag. After a bit, they get to talking and discuss how things have felt since the merge. They spent so long talking about eir boundaries that everything's felt super careful. True Name asks to sit by em on the beanbag (a cuddlesome prospect, if ever there was one) to test. If it's awkward, so be it, but at least they'll know. It *is* awkward, and neither of them are sure of what to make of it, but True Name explains more of how things feel from her end: she says she's of three minds, that she's True Name and she's May and she's End Waking, and that depending on the situation, one will feel closer to the surface than the others, so her being close to Ioan leads to her feeling more like May than True Name or End Waking. She catches herself getting despondent and decides that it's time to set a loose deadline of one month for that meeting with Jonas.
+
+Ioan sets up the meeting as a message, but Jonas requests to meet all the same, which is weird. He brings Zacharias along and, when the fox starts to get all snarky, stomps on his foot, making Ioan realize that it's all a show, using his power over the situation to try and shape how Ioan's story will look once he writes. Through eir discussions with the clade, though, Ioan guesses much of Jonas's plan ahead of time: his hypothesis is that societies that are different yet maintain the same system of governance are unstable when separated by space and time, so he's set up three different systems of government on the three Systems. True Name disagreed, so he decided to try and get rid of her. Jonas gets all frowny at em, but adapts smoothly and keeps winding Ioan up until ey gets frustrated and leaves. Back home, ey confirms the time and date of the meeting with May, True Name, and End Waking out on True Name's plain. Everyone's kinda stressed, but Ioan and May say goodnight and head inside, where they talk about whether True Name will keep living with them after this stupid meeting, deciding that she'll be welcome to as long as they can modify the sim to accommodate her need to be outside and give them more space apart if they need. May makes fun of Ioan for liking True Name, and ey admits ey's in the same boat as her, that she's so much like May that ey can imagine it, but has no idea what it would actually look like in practice.
+
+Jonas has requested that True Name's entire stanza be present, so May, True Name, and End Waking arrive with Ioan while the rest of the stanza --- including Zacharias --- arrive with Jonas. There is some weird chatter back and forth, that type of non-conversation that hides deeper political meanings before they get down to the talk. Jonas confirms that he's aiming for three political systems, and that he tried to get rid of True Name for disagreeing. Zacharias makes some quip and True Name dismisses him. He gets quite upset, so Jonas brings in the assassin that tried to get True Name to go after him, but May, of all people, intercedes, knocking the assassin out and telling Zacharias to leave. Jonas demands that True Name just disappear if she's to keep living, that she just curl up around her 'little Name thing' and not be seen again. It's hinted that he knows the name and has been using it to help keep the stanza in line. She says she's no longer True Name, that she's something else now, and he says it's not enough. Sigh. She changes as has been mentioned by others: forking repeatedly and using the mutation algorithms to change subtly with each fork, until she looks basically like Sasha (not Michelle) did before uploading, though she opts to shift species to spotted skunk, figuring that that'd be too recognizable. Jonas confirms that she needs to have a new name, and she chooses Sasha, which causes an uproar among the Odists and pisses Jonas off, and he kicks them out.
+
+At home, she explains that that set of events was the best they could have hoped for. The name Sasha, tied to the most sympathetic figure from the *History*, means that Jonas essentially can't touch her without being seen openly as the villain, even if it also means that she can't continue in politics. Instead, she's going to write a companion volume to the history of her account of things.
+
+Things settle down into a cycle of domesticity and visitors after that. Much of the clade visits, and the reactions are mixed. A Finger Pointing and her stanza are very happy for her, as is Serene, who builds their house into a copy of Arrowhead Lake, giving them plenty of wilderness and space for Sasha to build a tent similar to End Waking's. Zacharias pings, and they use the new ACLs to completely cut him off, which upsets Douglas, but May feels she can go no-contact with him in a way she couldn't with True Name. In Dreams (the psychologist of the clade) and Hammered Silver (the mother of the clade), however, both disown her, her entire old stanza (including May, who was very close to both of them), and the entire Bălan clade. This hits May really hard, and she has a brief stint of overflowing that night, pushing them out of the house to go stay in Sasha's tent, where they struggle with their own feelings on the matter.
+
+When May finally allows them back, Sasha requests some time to talk with just her about some lingering processing of Zacharias business, so Ioan and a fork of Sasha go for a walk out to the boulder at the end of the lake where they discuss the final outcome, Ioan's love for May, their complicated feelings for each other, and the book ends with Ioan once more wondering how this has become eir life.
+</details>
+
+## Other works
+
+### Marsh (2024)
+
+> “I am seeing quiet chaos. I am seeing most of my sims emptying out. The ones that are not empty, however, remain dreadfully quiet. Most of those who are out and about have set up over themselves cones of silence. Those who have not, though, are decidedly not quiet. More than one silence has been broken by weeping and wailing.”
+
+New Year's Eve, 2399, and Lagrange is celebrating almost three centuries of relative peace. Yes, there have been surprises, there has been drama and political intrigue, but life has, by and large, been quite good for those who have chosen to upload their consciousnesses. The celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. They fall in and out of love. They fork, creating copies of themselves to accomplish tasks or live out their own independent lives. Their memories build up and up forever within them.
+
+2.3 trillion souls gather in quiet homes, in bars and restaurants, in parks and along prosaic main streets, and count down seconds to the new century.
+
+And then, without warning, everything comes grinding to a halt. The internal clock of the System hits one second before midnight, December 31, 2399, and then it hits midnight, February 11, 2401. One year, one month, and eleven days have gone missing.
+
+And so has one percent of the population of Lagrange. 23 billion souls lost.
+
+Reed and the rest of his cocladists, fellow instances forked from the original uploaded mind of Marsh, to discover what has happened and where Marsh has gone, rendering them unmoored, five unconnected instances with no root to connect them.
+
+What happened, and why is Earth being so cagey?
+
+<details>
+<summary>Spoilers for <em>Marsh</em></summary>
+
+On New Year's Eve, systime 275 (2399), after a sudden wave of *déjà vu,* *Reed of the Marsh clade* and *Hanne Marie of her own clade* realize that something terrible has happened. Once a year, all of the Marshans merge down to their root instance, *Marsh,* who enjoys being an aggregate of all of their lives. Reed finds that he cannot. Marsh appears to no longer be a part of the System. It's impossible to merge down and impossible to ping them or send any sensorium messages. He calls a gathering of the rest of the clade — his cross-tree cocladists *Lily* and *Cress,* as well as his up-tree instances *Rush,* *Sedge,* and *Tule* — to try and figure out what's happening. There is the loss as well as one year, one month, and eleven days of downtime. Cress and Tule arrive with their partner, *I Remember The Dry Grass of the Ode clade,* and Marsh's partners, *Fenne Vos of her own clade* and *Pierre LaFontaine of his own clade* arrive as well.
+
+Lily greatly distrusts Dry Grass due to her association with the Ode clade and quickly leaves. She feels that the Odists are responsible for much that is wrong on the System, that they are manipulative and conniving political figures. Her feelings are spurred on by having read the Bălan clade's *An Expanded History of Our World* (which comprises the story told in [*Toledot*](https://toledot.post-self.ink)) and her frustration with the Odists' attempts to justify their actions as told in the Bălans' *Individuation and Reconciliation* and Sasha's (*née* True Name) *Ode.* Reed, on the other hand, having accidentally merged Tule's memories wholesale, is struck by the sense of intimate familiarity with Dry Grass: despite having only met her a handful of times at various functions, he now has all of Tule's memories of their relationship and love for each other.
+
+As they explore the System and meet up with others from the Ode clade, they discover that Marsh isn't the only cladist missing from Lagrange. On exploration, they begin the process of estimating the impact on the System. The Marshans have lost 14% of their clade, while the Odists have lost apparently 2%. Reading the feeds nets them yet more information, with many discussing suddenly missing friends, lovers, and instances of themselves, with impacts ranging from 99.983% to none.
+
+The Marshans and a few others — Dry Grass and her cocladists *Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire* its partner *Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know*, Reed's partner Hanne, and her friend Jess — meet up for dinner to try and regroup. Lily promises to do her best to reconcile with the fact that the Odists are part of the clade's life. With the Ode clade's prior experience of their root instance, *Michelle Hadje* quitting nearly a century prior, they begin to talk about what life without Marsh will look like.
+
+Given Reed and Sedge's interest in what happened, they are looped in with a loose coalition of individuals working on the investigation. This includes a portion of *the Jonas clade*, more Odists, *Debarre of his own clade*, and *Selena of her own clade*. They contact phys-side to discuss with *Jakub Strzepek*, an admin, and *Günay Sadık*, a technician, who confirm that there was downtime and an unrecoverable corruption of about 1% of the 2.3 trillion cladists on Lagrange due to a System-wide crash, though they are cagey as to why. The group chooses Günay as their point of contact rather than any of the admin team while Jonas Fa demands that Jakub confirm, even if only privately, whether or not this was due to some malicious act.
+
+Dry Grass takes Cress, Tule, and Reed out to dinner, where they discuss the fact that Reed has been left with these conflicting feelings about her. He admits that the memories from Tule's merge have influenced his feelings about her, and she suggests that it remain an open conversation rather than something he either push down and ignore or keep only to himself. Reed also discusses this with Hanne, who says that she'll trust him to keep talking to her as well, and with Lily, who admits some frustration but also a willingness to keep up with the clade.
+
+Several clades form a group to interface with phys-side, including the CERES clade (the ones who lost nearly 70k instances) and just Günay. The tech confirms that there was a widespread contraproprioceptive virus attack. CPV had been used in the past to kill single instances such as *Qoheleth* and several instances of True Name, as it was required that it be tailored to a specific cladist or their immediate instances. However, members of a fundamentalist collective — a group of individuals living as a hive mind of sorts — named the Our Brightest Lights Collective found a way to create a CPV bomb that crashed 100% of the cladists on Lagrange. This event is being called the Century Attack.
+
+During the downtime, the System was restarted several times as various recovery attempts were made. An initial loss of 15% was eventually reduced to 1% with the help of members of the System Emergency Response Group (SERG) on Lagrange as well as on the two launch vehicles, Castor and Pollux. During the attempts to bring Lagrange back online, it was discovered that the number of unrecoverable instances was slowly growing, and so it was determined that 1% would be the maximum acceptable loss, and it was finally brought up for good. There were several fixes applied at this time, including patching out CPV, various ACL improvements, and a laundry list of other updates. Notable among the changes was the ability to merge cross-tree within a clade rather than just down-tree. Jonas demands that this be kept quiet due to the social changes it will have on the System.
+
+Another meeting, this time with *en4,* a member of The System Consortium, the collection of organizations that manage the L<sub>5</sub> station, Lagrange, and the Ansibles used to upload individuals. They are also a member of a collective, the London Cohort of New Zealots, or LCNZ. They explain the history and reasoning behind the attack. The perpetrator, 8-stanza-1 (a reference to "The only time I know my true name is when I dream", the first line of the eighth stanza of the poem from which the Odists take their name) was recovered and quarantined. The OBLC has stated that they feel that, for every cladist, a life phys-side is denied entry to heaven. Given the 2.3 trillion population of Lagrange, the only solution was to destroy the whole System. *I Cannot Stop Myself From Speaking of the Ode clade* confirms this via her experiences interviewing 8-stanza-1.
+
+Dry Grass, the Marshans, and Marsh's partners visit the sim containing all of the collected core dumps — the remnants of a crashed cladist — of the unrecoverable losses. Dry Grass learns that her long-lived up-tree instance, *In The Wind,* a systech, was integral to the recovery efforts, but that she was unrecoverable in one of the final restarts. Lily angrily silences her so that the Marshans can have a funeral of sorts around Marsh's core. Lily, still angry, scorns Cress, Tule, and Reed for their association with Dry Grass and the other Odists. Vos, angry at the way she is interrupting the funeral of her dead partner, demands that Lily leave. Reed follows her and the two fight, with Reed striking Lily in the face. After they calm down, they return to the funeral where the remaining Marshans speak.
+
+As the others leave, Dry Grass asks Cress, Tule, and Reed to stay with her as she visits In The Wind's core, and then invites them home to peace and quiet. Reed is initially confused, but Dry Grass insists that she would like to be around those that enjoy her presence after spending time around Lily, who does not. While there, they process their respective losses, and Reed begins to process his growing, earnest feelings for Dry Grass. He also catches Cress and Tule up on the changes to the System, and they come up with the idea of possibly performing a clade-wide cross-tree merge in order to come up with someone who might be like Marsh.
+
+Reed returns home to Hanne and both speak about the ways in which they are beginning to grieve. He also brings up the idea of this reconstruction of Marsh, and Hanne expresses doubt that this will work, and if it does, that it might cause further grief. When he meets up with Dry Grass the next day on a date for lunch, the two discuss the sense of the world as it has become, Dry Grass's past as a systech — she had left due to the changing nature of the job, but her up-tree instance, In The Wind, remained to keep up on the work — and she also cautions him as to the potential for social pain as a result of this merger.
+
+A meeting with phys-side, happening concurrently, explores the ramifications of the Century Attack, keeping 8-stanza-1 locked in the DMZ, and the mechanism of the CPV device. Jonas and Answers Will Not Help goad Jakub to try and frustrate him into quitting as well as to make Günay feel better, and it's suggested that this is also to encourage her to upload where she can become a long-term asset. Discussions of potential memorials begin, as well as ceremonies both sys- and phys-side. After discussing information consolidation and control, Reed asks about the cross-tree merging and, after a demonstration between Jonas Fa and Jonas Ko, decides to disregard the warnings and go through with his plan to reconstruct Marsh.
+
+The process of the reconstruction is discussed, including the fact that this New Marsh will include all of the clade's memories *except* Marsh's concludes with each of the Marshans forking and merging into Lily's new instance. The merge itself (minus reconciling conflicts) takes several hours and is an immensely unpleasant process, but New Marsh comes out of it well enough. The clade invites Vos and Pierre over to meet them, but Vos, unnerved, asks the new cladist the last thing that Marsh had said to her. Without those memories, they can't say, so Vos, angered by what she sees as meddling and a shallow attempt at rebuilding her partner without her input, his Reed hard enough to knock him down and leaves, demanding no contact going forward. The Marshans leave to process what happened, and New Marsh renames themself Anubias and decides to continue on as they are, trying to live life as an amalgam.
+
+An epilogue follows (which is co-written by me and my partner) where, about eight months later, Reed has finally received word back from the instance of Marsh that lives on on Castor. He brings this letter along with him as he attends a play put on by Dry Grass's cocladists. The play is a metaphor for the Century Attack, and it leaves all distraught. After, he discusses the letter with Dry Grass and her cocladists *And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights,* *Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps,* and *Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself*. They discuss the different ways that they have learned to live as a clade without a root instance and the hopes they have for the future.
+</details>

content/gallery.md

@@ -7,7 +7,6 @@ type: page
 <style>
 figure, img {
     text-align: center;
-    font-size: 80%;
     display: inline-block;
     max-height: 200px;
 }
@@ -36,36 +35,36 @@ figure, img {
 }
 </style>
 
-Over the course of publication and as funded by the backers of the *Mitzvot* Kickstarter, much in the way of art surrounding the Post-Self universe and its character has accrued.
+Over the course of publication and as funded by the backers of the *Mitzvot* Kickstarter, much in the way of art surrounding the Post-Self universe and its character has accrued. Special thanks is due to [Iris Jay](https://irisjay.net) who drew the first bit of Post-Self art all the way back in 2017, and then all of the covers and some of the interior art of the Post-Self cycle. Thanks as well to [Jade](https://linktr.ee/cupsofjade), who provided the template upon which so many of the Odists are based.
 
 ## *Qoheleth and Gallery Exhibition*
 
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/qoheleth-front.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/qoheleth-front.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/awdae-1.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/awdae-1.png" alt="Art by Cadmium Tea"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Cadmium Tea</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://www.brushandtea.com/" target="blank">Julian Norwood</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/awdae-2.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/awdae-2.png" alt="Art by Cadmium Tea"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Cadmium Tea</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://www.brushandtea.com/" target="blank">Julian Norwood</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/dear.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/dear.png" alt="Art by johnny d."/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by johnny d.</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="http://dumpstercryptid.carrd.co/" target="blank">johnny d.</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/qoheleth-back.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/qoheleth-back.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 ## *Toledot*
 
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/toledot-front.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/toledot-front.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/shove.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/shove.png" alt="Art by Kris Weaver"/></a>
@@ -73,7 +72,7 @@ Over the course of publication and as funded by the backers of the *Mitzvot* Kic
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/cairns.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/cairns.png" alt="Art by JAIYANDT"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by JAIYANDT</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://linktr.ee/cupsofjade" target="blank">Jade</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/dandelions.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/dandelions.png" alt="Art by Kris Weaver"/></a>
@@ -81,7 +80,7 @@ Over the course of publication and as funded by the backers of the *Mitzvot* Kic
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/toledot-back.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/toledot-back.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/hadje.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/hadje.png"/></a>
@@ -92,74 +91,78 @@ Over the course of publication and as funded by the backers of the *Mitzvot* Kic
 
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/neviim-front.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/neviim-front.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/awnh.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/awnh.png" alt="Art by johnny d."/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by johnny d.</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="http://dumpstercryptid.carrd.co/" target="blank">johnny d.</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/stolon.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/stolon.png" alt="Art by JAIYANDT"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by JAIYANDT</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://linktr.ee/cupsofjade" target="blank">Jade</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/neviim-back.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/neviim-back.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 ## *Mitzvot and Selected Letters*
 
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/mitzvot-front.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/mitzvot-front.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/monologue.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/monologue.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a class="merge" href="/img/gallery/merge.png"><img alt="Art by Iris Jay" src="/img/gallery/thumbs/merge.png" /><span>Spoiler</span></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/mitzvot-back.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/mitzvot-back.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
+</figure>
+<figure>
+    <a href="/img/gallery/full-of-skunks.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/full-of-skunks.png"/></a>
+    <figcaption>Fan art by <a href="https://vulpine.club/@fudge_the_sphinx">Fudge</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 ## Additional art
 
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/dear-ref.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/dear-ref.png" alt="Art by Iris Jay"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Iris Jay</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://irisjay.net" target="blank">Iris Jay</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/writerskunk.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/writerskunk.png" alt="Art by JAIYANDT"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by JAIYANDT</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://linktr.ee/cupsofjade" target="blank">Jade</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/ref-3.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/ref-3.png" alt="Art by JAIYANDT"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by JAIYANDT</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://linktr.ee/cupsofjade" target="blank">Jade</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a class="merge" href="/img/gallery/ref.png"><img alt="Art by JAIYANDT" src="/img/gallery/thumbs/ref.png" /><span>Artistic<br>nudity</span></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by JAIYANDT</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="https://linktr.ee/cupsofjade" target="blank">Jade</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/lounge.png"><img alt="Art by Roxannarachnid" src="/img/gallery/thumbs/lounge.png"></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Roxannarachnid</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="http://cohost.org/roxannarachnid" target="blank">Roxanna</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/what_right_have_i.png"><img alt="Art by Roxannarachnid" src="/img/gallery/thumbs/what_right_have_i.png"></a>
-    <figcaption>Art by Roxannarachnid</figcaption>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="http://cohost.org/roxannarachnid" target="blank">Roxanna</a></figcaption>
+</figure>
+<figure>
+    <a href="/img/gallery/motes.png"><img alt="Art by Roxannarachnid" src="/img/gallery/thumbs/motes.png"></a>
+    <figcaption>Art by <a href="http://cohost.org/roxannarachnid" target="blank">Roxanna</a></figcaption>
 </figure>
 <!--<figure>
     <a href="/img/gallery/no_longer_myself.png"><img alt="Art by mischa" src="/img/gallery/thumbs/no_longer_myself.png"></a>
     <figcaption><a href="https://picrew.me/en/image_maker/644129">Picrew</a> by mischa</figcaption>
 </figure>-->
-<figure>
-    <a href="/img/gallery/full-of-skunks.png"><img src="/img/gallery/thumbs/full-of-skunks.png"/></a>
-    <figcaption>Fan art by <a href="https://vulpine.club/@fudge_the_sphinx">Fudge</a></figcaption>
-</figure>
         
 <script type="text/javascript">
 // There has to be a better way to do this with markdown :P

content/stories/_index.md

@@ -74,6 +74,13 @@ h2 {
 
     *CWs:* none.
 
+["Reading": <small>Rye — 2273</small>](/stories/reading)
+:   *Madison Scott-Clary*
+
+    All readings are the same, as Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars well knows...
+
+    *CWs:* none.
+
 [*Unintended Tendencies*](https://jessfluf.itch.io/unintended-tendencies) — <small><em>available on Itch.io</em></small>
 :   *JL Conway*
 

content/stories/a-well-trained-eye.md

@@ -0,0 +1,290 @@
+---
+title: A Well-Trained Eye
+author: Andréa C. Mason
+character: Lucia Marchetti — 2401
+cw: Plain discussions of death and murder
+spoiler: "*Marsh:* medium"
+type: story
+---
+
+The rain against old glass panes and the sways and bumps of the car on the rails ready the air for conjurations. Lucy sits on the bench 6th from the back, on the right side, a sketchbook open across her knees. Today she's trying charcoal. Feels right with what happened a week ago.
+
+This lonely train through the valley and the mountain is her chapel and now her hermitage in the wake of the bombing. There are plenty of churches and other religious retreats across the System if she wanted, but none of them have ever felt a fit for this work. She thought about skipping this week, and told herself if the train wasn't running, she'd pick up again later, but even with no passengers save her, the engine pulls its empty tail along the countryside. So, as she has done every week for the past 250 years, she has gone to her locker in the station, pulled out a fresh sketchbook, and boarded. 
+
+Lucy conjures in her memory their faces.
+
+She can only recall 63 of the 68. It is true that the System means she cannot forget anything now, but it merely preserves in amber what the memory held at the moment of upload. It cannot restore the faces she lost to time. Even a number of the faces she recalls are not complete memories. Those she has filled in over decades, extrapolating or iterating on them until they are whole enough for her to feel it completes them. Over 260 years, her hands have become capable of incredible art, both through endless repetition and boundless study. When she is not here in her railcar-sized confession booth, she enjoys a life as an artist, known for bittersweet paintings and sculptures, happy to teach and happier to learn, a lover of life and a bringer of joy.
+
+Of the five lost, two faces she cannot recall because they were unexpected complications on a job. One face was sent to kill her, but wasn't good enough. One face jumped her in an alley to rob her, or perhaps worse, but couldn't have picked a worse target. She doesn't recall her first kill's face, because there was a bag over his head and a gun loaded with both bullets and an irreversible choice was pushed into her hand.
+
+The 69th face is the most vivid to her, but Lucy has never felt the need to draw her. After all, she let that last one go, and every morning after she wakes, Lucia Marchetti hopes that poor girl listened to her and got far far away. She hopes that woman lived a full life and that the family never caught up.
+
+The clack-clack of the wheels on the track sets a rhythm for her vigil, her penance. The weather in the sim varies based on algorithms and set patterns both, stable enough to make maintenance easy, unpredictable enough to mimic weather phys-side. Today the rain is quite heavy. She welcomes it. The inside is dry, but the wood of the train car has a slight moist smell, a beautiful attention to detail. The lights in the car flicker a little more than usual, the train is a bit slower than usual but the ride is if anything less smooth. She likes the rougher rides, because it adds a challenge to her work, one she is well accustomed to after centuries but nonetheless welcomes. The rain fills in the silence where passengers would chat and shuffle and cough and rustle newspapers and make all those sounds living people make. She wonders how many of the usual riders died in the bomb, and how many are just afraid to go out, unsure, mourning, or just needing time alone.
+
+Some art critics and fans throughout the System have pointed out that the left eyes in many of her portraits have fantastical details, often drawn as flowers, or the root of vines, or sunsets woven into faces, or in her sculptures become caves, grottos, tidal pools, library alcoves, hidden urban alleys. Many speculate on the symbolism of that, and her favorite theory is the one that she lost an eye to cancer, and her obsession with art and color is due to the way cancer distorted her vision, and that her art was a reclamation of what it had taken from her, a final spite to the disease that forced her to upload. Even though it was wrong it was very romantic, and even now she did very little to fight it, and on occasion coyly encouraged it.
+
+A bullet through the left eye had been her professional calling card. Left hand on the top of the head, barrel of the silencer to the eyelid. She had taken so much from the world through left eyes, and she put back as much life and beauty through them now as she could. It would never be enough. More than a few of the faces she could only conjure with the bloody hole in a lifeless head, but she has never rendered it in sketches. She recreates and restores them as they were before, using decades of study to fill in what she destroyed. Even as styles and methods and tools change in her hands, she gives the dead that. Owes them that. The only real Liberty she takes is with the hair above the faces, refusing to give hair any semblance of being pushed or held down by anything.
+
+The piece of charcoal snaps in her hand, and she realizes there are tears staining the current sketch. She wipes her eyes, takes another piece of charcoal from her satchel.
+
+The bomb dwells on her mind. The Century Bomb, detonated at midnight, the start of the 25th century. 2400-01-01. 276+1 systime. In a digital world so removed from death, suddenly a toll on an incomprehensible level. Mechanically, it was a contraproprioceptive virus, launched at an astounding scale, wiping 1% of the System's current instance total by interrupting their code irreversibly. Functionally, it was a bomb that killed billions and scared shitless a trillion more. She wonders why they did it. She doesn't want to know, but she wonders. She wonders if it was just a job. She wonders if it wasn't. She wonders if they can remember all the faces of the people they killed. She wonders if they died in the bomb themselves. She hopes they did. She snaps another piece of charcoal, but if there were tears, they burned off on the heat in her face. It takes several breaths to unclench her fist, and she grabs another piece of charcoal.
+
+This is the longest stretch of the track. It's between the third and fourth stops, and it's where she starts sketching every time. Some weeks, depending on her mood or free time, she waits for the train to finish looping through the five stops and the station before picking up in her usual place. This time she doesn’t wait. The calm she needs comes as soon as the engine lurches into motion from the station, and she lets the sounds and motions balm her weary heart.
+
+Charcoal means no color, but it lets her play with shading techniques. The more recent the face, the more realistic it becomes on the page, whereas older faces come out impressionistic, sketchier, or strikingly simple. Once she did them in chronological order. Then by age, alphabetical by first name, then last, then by height or by estimated weight, by location, by time it took to complete that dirty work, until now she's run out of categories and just lets them queue their own order, double checking periodically who is left and who isn't.
+
+She feels a low impulse to include some of the regular passengers who are missing today, but cannot bring herself to break 250 years of rite and ritual. She decides tomorrow she will come back with separate sketchbooks or maybe some other medium, sit in a different place on the train, and sketch as many of the regulars as she can remember. Those she will not keep hidden away, and those she will let her sys-side self take care of.
+
+Most people would send a separate fork for this, she figures. She always leaves a fork at her home sim, and when she gets back to the studio that fork will merge down to her. It is important to her that this continuous (as much as one can be here) version of herself be the penitent one. She thinks other people would understand that, it's not something that really needs explaining, but she has never told anyone directly what she does, and those who know about her train rides know better than to ask.
+
+She wonders how many of them survived, and how many of them died or quit. She wonders how many will quit or crash from the grief. She chides herself for getting distracted. She sketches.
+
+She long ago learned the art of faking motions. She trained herself to glance up and stare at random points in the room, usually where other passengers are, to give the illusion she is not doing this from memory. It is a performance for the comfort of others, and the comfortable ask less questions. She almost always got left alone anyway. She wonders how she must look from the outside. Short, black hair, in a layered bob that tapers into her neck, pale skin, wispy and thin. Her outfit for the train is always the same, a plain, thin white blouse with short sleeves and dark blue buttons down the middle, a pair of dark blue slacks with a very high waist, a tasteful pair of flats, tented teal triangles for earrings. The train is based on its early middle twentieth century ancestors, and she commits fully to the part as well. She never asks anyone if she pulls it off, or asks for a picture.
+
+It takes her a while to notice there is someone else in the railcar with her.
+
+One of those upward glancing motions registers some bright color on her left, but it takes four more motions before it actually clicks that it's an arm in a jacket. She stops mid-sketch and turns to the other passenger.
+
+Across the aisle from her seat is a bench against the left wall of the train, and despite years of riding she cannot say for sure if the bench was always present or a new addition. Other than that it does not stand out, as all the upholstery, cushions, wood, metal, and design choices fit perfectly with the rest of the compartment. It might have been there the whole time. It might have appeared there seconds ago. It alarms her how little her memory has charted the left side of the aisle.
+
+The other passenger is a woman who is also a skunk. She is tall, broad-shouldered, portly, covered in earthy green fur, with a mess of curly hair that is swept to the side and bleached blond. She wears an orange canvas bomber jacket, a beat up white tank top, grayish cargo pants, and heavy boots. Her arms are spread out on the back of the bench. One of her legs is crossed over the other, bouncing on it. She is grinning. Something about the fur pattern near the skunk's left eye unsettles Lucy, but it is obscured by the dark round sunglasses the skunk is wearing. How the skunk's tail seems to be at an impossible angle to her body while sitting down Lucy chalks up to the benefits of the System.
+
+The skunk's grin widens when her presence is acknowledged. Lucy looks at her but lets the other woman make the first move. The skunk gladly obliges. "You know, it took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize you haven't been drawing other passengers."
+
+Lucy chews her tongue before responding, turning back to her work but not letting the stranger from her sight. "Who's to say I wasn't before?"
+
+The skunk shrugs. "It's possible, but I've seen you here every week for decades. It didn't click until about 6 years ago that the styles change but the faces don't."
+
+A regular, then. There are other cars, and Lucia only rides the train once a week. So many different bodies and species exist within the System, and with the weird prevalence of skunks among that, not recalling this one's face didn't feel too strange. Old instincts warn her that her visitor could be banking on that, but she dismisses it with a stroke on the page.
+
+Lucy sighs. "Well noticed. What else have you observed?"
+
+The skunk tilts her head and chews her tongue a little, tapping a claw. "More a hunch than an observation, but you don't draw the living."
+
+"Correct again. Not here, anyway. Elsewhere I do not restrain myself so." 
+
+The skunk gives a bobbing nod. "People you lost?"
+
+Lucia speaks plainly. "People I killed."
+
+The test is laid. How will the examinee respond? Fear? Nervous laughter? Anger?
+
+The skunk raises an eyebrow. "Appearances can be deceiving, but you don't strike me as a soldier."
+
+"Metaphorically, maybe, but never literally."
+
+The skunk's claws tighten into the wood of the bench at either end of her arms. "Not a cop, I hope?"
+
+Now there's a measure of character. Lucia genuinely laughs, and the skunk's grips relax. There's that bobbing nod again, and the mephit says, "So, ah, contract work."
+
+Lucy cannot decide if the animal's cavalier nature is charming or cause for alarm. Her heart wants to believe the former. A gut trained on a former life tells her the latter. Both are anxious to see how this plays out. "I would call it familial obligations, but they did pay me for it, and friends of the family would throw me work now and again as well." She pauses. "You know how family can be."
+
+The skunk gives a sad smirk. "Half of mine disowned me for being queer. Don't think it's quite the same but I can sympathize, at least." 
+
+Lucy stops sketching for a second, and makes eye contact with the skunk, or as best she can through the other's sunglasses. Even without the eyes, there's a topography of emotion in the snout and cheeks and brow. That pattern of fur around her left eye, it's rough. Aesthetically it interrupts the face. An interesting choice. Panic surges just a little again.
+
+Lucia blinks and shakes her head, turning back to her sketch. "Well, good thing we both got out."
+
+The skunk looks out the window behind her. "And yet the past never stops trailing behind us here. It's like this train, never moving forward, on an endless loop that carries us in circles. Even if we step off at a stop, it will be back around to pick us up again."
+
+Lucy sees no reason to add anything.
+
+The skunk turns back towards her. "These pieces you do fascinate me. They all lack your signature."
+
+"What need to autograph them? They are for me and the dead. Other than the prying eyes of those like you who see my process, they are never shared."
+
+"That is not the signature I mean."
+
+She tenses. "Ah, a stylistic one, then. Do you mean to say I am an artist beyond these sketches? Who do you think I might be?"
+
+"I know exactly who you are."
+
+Everything goes quiet and the light dims. Somewhere in the conversation Lucy missed the whistle for the tunnel, and as the trains slips into the darkness the driving rain no longer fills silence. Even the wheel-clacks sound quieter. The bulbs along either side of the car have dimmed, and the one on the skunk's right has gone out completely. The skunk has taken off her sunglasses, and is wiping the lenses in the cotton of her tank top. 
+
+It is not a pattern in her fur, Lucia realizes. It is a scar. A scar that starts north of the brow, runs most of the way down her cheek, and in the middle, crosses her eye. The left eye itself is clouded over, with only a hint of the pupil beneath. The other eye is a striking hazel, untouched.
+
+A million possibilities run through Lucia's head. This is someone here to blackmail her. The family finally sent an assassin. Somehow one of her targets survived and has found her for revenge. The System isn't real, and this is Purgatory, or worse, Hell, luring her into a false sense of security to strengthen her damnation. All of these could be true at once. She does not know. She finds she cannot quit, or leave the sim, or even move, paralyzed in pure fear, an emotion she has not felt in centuries. 
+
+Meanwhile, the skunk is saying, "You are Lucia Marchetti, renowned artist and sculptor. One of the most distinct in the System, in fact, and if I'm not mistaken, the unintentional pioneer of three major art movements of the last two centuries. Most intriguing is your lasting fixation on the left eye, present on almost every one of your pieces with a living thing in it. There's a lot of theories, but no one really knows why you do it. Except I think I do."
+
+Lucy resigns herself. 260 years was a good run. More than any of her targets got sometimes by a factor of ten. She should have trusted her gut and bailed. She should have run. She shouldn't have said so much. But she did, and she tries to make peace with having to face the music. It's not really working, but she still cannot bring herself to flee. They say that no one can force you to stay in a sim, that it is impossible to truly hold anyone anywhere in the System against their will, but none of them ever account for the pressure one can exert on oneself. So, if this is the end, she decides, even if she cannot accept it, she will not fight it. "You're here to kill me, aren't you?"
+
+The skunk laughs. "Kill you? Why would I want to kill you?" She holds her sunglasses up towards one of the light fixtures, checking the lens for smudges. "You might be the only person on the System who understands me."
+
+Lucia has the brief vivid image in her mind of an engraved lighter and a carousel tearing itself apart. The skunk across from her must be some sort of fanatic, perhaps another professional killer, or worse, unprofessional. Someone unmoored from reality, perhaps. Madness is more prevalent in the System than anyone admits. Lucy decides she would have preferred if this stranger was here to kill her, then chides herself for this self-destructiveness.
+
+Still the skunk speaks, and taps next to her damaged eye. "For most of my life phys-side, I would now and again come down with migraines that always started behind my eye. Most of them were mild, but some of them would put me down for a whole day. Once or twice I even had visual aberrations, and I couldn't even see out of it. It'd be like static, visual white noise. For some reason, after I forked off my root instance, I started having the migraines again sys-side. The pressure is there, and the hurt is sometimes there, but now I hallucinate. Vividly, and only through that eye. My right eye is locked on reality, and the left eye ranges from minor distortions to things that even our more adventurous chemical days never came close to. I've never met anyone else that gets migraines here like mine. But then, I see your work, and I finally think for a second that maybe I'm not alone."
+
+"I'm not totally convinced you are not here to kill me."
+
+The mephit shakes her head. "I swear I'm not. I mean, you've been here—the System, I should say—for a long time?"
+
+"Centuries." 
+
+"When did you upload?"
+
+"Why should I tell you?"
+
+"So I can prove I'm not sent by your 'family'. Just want to know the year."
+
+Lucia mulls it over before saying it. "2140."
+
+"Which was 31 years before my root instance was even born."
+
+"Doesn't mean that you aren't—"
+
+"You have to believe me! You have to, and you have to experience something like I do. It has to be the reason!" The skunk's face is a patchwork of frustration and desperate need.
+
+"I never in my life before this place or after had a single headache."
+
+The stranger is on the verge of tears. "Then why?"
+
+"It's where I put the bullets."
+
+The skunk's eyes go wide, and the rain slams against the rail car as the train leaves the tunnel again.
+
+For the first time in all her years of penance, Lucia wishes she could stop drawing these faces, and instead in this moment sketch the creature across from her. The surprise in the mephit's features decays, like a flashbulb in a camera after it's gone off in those ancient movies the Don loved to watch. Lucy wants to capture this moment as hope withers and understanding winds vines slowly into the visage of the woman. She can see her piece together what that means, why these faces must never bear that mark, a million questions banished to the aether with one simple, ugly, answer. It is Lucia's opinion that art is better left unexplained, and this is why. If it weren't for the storm outside she would have heard the poor thing's heart break. There is a biting of a lip, there are tears, there is a bobbing nod of understanding, and a single, deep sob. If she could raise a hand, a brush, a chisel, these minutes would turn into her finest work, she would capture the death of a hero as seen through a mirror. She mourns it as the emotions pass, as the traces of them evaporate off the skunk's muzzle like morning mist in the sun. To capture what she saw in the moment would be a blasphemous vanity. She tears herself away from staring, and continues her sketches.
+
+It is a while before either can speak. The skunk speaks first. "I think knowing that, somehow, makes your art…more beautiful to me?"
+
+Lucy snorts. "That's unfortunate."
+
+"Do you regret it?"
+
+She rolls her eyes at this. "No, I have sat on this train every week for 250 years drawing the dead because I have nothing better to do. What a stupid question."
+
+"Did you upload because you got tired of killing?"
+
+"I uploaded because I was tired of being a man." She looks up to see that the skunk has put back on her sunglasses, but they cannot hide her surprise again. Lucia sets down the notebook and the charcoal on the seat next to herself. "The family gave me an address and a man's name. They did not tell me what he had done, usually they did not, but they spoke with such vitriol I assumed his trespasses were high. The family back then overlooked my dalliances with other men, as men were easy to pay off, and I suspect I was not the only one in the family 'wandering from the path' in that way. Something about the venom in the request made me wonder if someone in the family had been spurned, and I was cleaning up loose ends. No matter. I had given up long ago on caring about my targets. A job is a job, and the family always found me work. 
+
+"I broke into the apartment, and in the dim light of the living room was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She was like polished stone, you could tell she was made more beautiful by the things she endured. It took me a moment to remember what I was even there for, and I wondered again if this wasn't business but personal affairs. She noticed me, and panicked, pulling a blanket to herself even though she was clothed. I did not yell, I did not shout, I did not strike in my work. I used a level voice, moved calmly and deliberately, and made no sudden movements. People feared that more than an angry man, and it meant there was a lot less cleanup involved. I did not hide that I had a gun. She asked me who I was, and I said I was strictly here on business, and she didn't need to know. She said she didn't trust me, and I told her very simply that if I intended to hurt I would not have waited for her to see me. I told her that all she needed to do was answer me a question, and then she could leave safely.  As a show of faith, I stepped out from between her and the door. She weighed her options. She was taller than me, a bit stockier, but I was a man with a gun in my hands. She relented, and with a sigh told me to ask. I told her all I needed to know was where I could find my target. I told her the name.
+
+"Perhaps you are smart enough to know where this is going, but I mistook her panic for loyalty. She became defensive, refusing to give any information and demanding of me explanations. I told her she need not be loyal to him again and again, that it was not worth her life to defend him, and that all I needed to know is where he was. She offered bribes. She offered violence. She offered a great many things I dare not say. I do not know how long our exchange went exactly. Easily 15 minutes, likely more. I grew impatient and finally asked her why his life was worth so much more than hers, and that regardless of what happened to her I had a job and that man had to die. 
+
+"She wailed, falling to the floor, and told me with absolute despair that she was the man I was looking for. Only then do I begin to inspect my surroundings carefully. I take notice of the decorations, the aesthetic choices, the recurring theme of rebirth. There was a jacket, hung on the back of a dining table chair, with a flag on the shoulder, a flag of stripes and three colors. Such a jacket was not uncommon among younger generations of my country, but the flag was not the flag of Italia of old, nor any of the new flags of the many states my homeland became under the Western Federation. No, this flag is the standard of a country with no land, abstract territory, yet one I—and, I highly suspect, you as well—reside within. Three colors, yes, but the stripes of the flag are horizontal, not vertical. Five stripes, not three. 
+
+"No doubt you have heard the tales of old about those Lost in the sims, in the days before the System. In that moment, like them, I became lost within myself. I was not old then, but I had lived a very long life. I tumbled down through memories, emotions, places, times, lovers, imaginations. This woman before me, born something else, but made beautiful by change, was she as me? Pulled unwilling into the affairs of the family? Forced into shapes preordained, melted down and poured into a mold, cracked upon the altar of tradition, to fit needs or to ornament the mansion walls? Did she break the mold, or melt again to make herself anew? Could I do the same? My lovers were all overlooked or bought off, but in the eyes of those who shaped me, I was property who could buy a place at the table in time but never my own freedom. This Angel before me was an epiphany, and to the gospel of my employers I fell apostate in a moment. In my head and only in my head I begged mercy and forgiveness from her, that I might forever fall to her feet and serve to atone for my trespasses. She was living proof that my resignation to my fate was an act of cowardice, that for years I had been lying to myself. A thousand versions of myself in my head ran to every corner of my mind and pulled together a new self, an eternity of hands falling over themselves to construct some possible way to let this woman go without getting both her and myself killed. No markers lay for how long I was lost in my head, and when I pulled back to the reality before me, I have no idea if I had been gone a second or an hour. The woman before me still wept. I made up my mind. It was made from the moment I saw her jacket.
+
+"I told her to look at me. She did. I told her the man I had come to kill was clearly already dead. She stared at me for a long time. I asked her if her identifications had her old name or her new one on them, and when she said new I cemented a plan. I told her I had no intention of killing her, but that I could not promise the same of my employers. I set my gun on the table. I sorted out for her an impressive sum of money that I kept on my person, as even as late as the 2130s hard currency opened far more doors than brute force.  I knelt down beside her on the floor. I pressed into her hands a marker, something that would grant her safe passage anywhere she showed it, an agreement of families and organizations that preceded us by centuries. I told her where to go, what places my family would never tread, and what she needed to say to get there. I told her to wait 20 minutes after I left, pack as little as she could, and leave immediately. She sat there stunned, and only as I got to the door did it grip her that this was real.
+
+"She asked me why I was helping her. I could not lie. I told her that killing her would make her a man again and I could not stand to take such beauty from the world. Manhood is not a problem if it is choice, but I was never given one, and I would not force anyone to reconsider their own decision. I do not know if she understood me, but she nodded. As I departed, she asked if she would see me again. I told her no, I was already as dead as the man I had been sent to kill, and left before she could delay me further.
+
+"I do not know what happened to her. I don't know what happened to the family. I do not know what happened to the cats  left in my apartment. I do not even know if the sun set the next night. I moved quickly, using the weight my name had gathered over the years to get me quick passage to Roma. Uploading was still new then, expensive and still a mystery to most, but Roma had an Ansible clinic. I arrived in the city just before dawn, and caught the staff as they arrived for the morning. I drained my accounts and gave them each enough to fund the clinic for a year, to upload me and to strike my name from any records. They asked me what to do with my body. I told them to burn it and toss the ashes into the Tiber. When they objected, I handed them even more money, and finally they gave way."
+
+Lucia looks up, and out over the countryside rolling by the windows of the train car. How far, she wonders, does it go? Does it end a small ways from the train? Are the mountains on the other side of this valley merely a trick of sensoria? Or has someone rendered them, crafting the walls of stone as they rise from low earth, etching little runs and outcroppings for a thousand meters upward? Does the sim stretch beyond the mountains, an uncanny mirror of the alps that she had traveled phys-side often enough, mostly for business, only very rarely for pleasure? She knows most of the stops are fleshed out, but she has no idea if all the land in between them is. She briefly sees the faint orange reflection of the skunk's jacket in the window, and tries not to think about how long she might have been silent.
+
+Still, as she speaks, it is a few moments before she turns back to the other passenger. "There is nothing more to tell. The killer for hire died on the Ansible table. I do not miss him. I mourn those whom he took from the world. I carry them on eternally here, as I have since the first day I ever rode this train."
+
+The skunk smirks. "I wonder if the riders know they're in your rolling mausoleum."
+
+Lucia frowns. "It is not a mausoleum!"
+
+The mephit's lip twitches. "Right, my mistake, if it doesn't contain any remains, it's called a cenotaph, isn't it?"
+
+The frown turns to a scowl. "That is not what I mean."
+
+The skunk leans forward, resting her forearms upon her thighs. "A confessional, then. Do you say your 'hail marys' as we ride along these chancel rails? Quite a trick to use a train to transit the stations of the cross, but with only 6 stops instead of 14, you may find us lacking."
+
+Lucia turns to her, meaning to scald the other woman with a glare. "Do not mock me. Those traditions were antiquated before I was born, much less you. I ask nothing of a god I do not believe in. So too the dead are the dead, they feel nothing. Hear nothing. Give nothing. I do this for myself, I grieve. I regret. From what authority do you speak? What right have you to judge?"
+
+The skunk raises her paws in defense. "I'm not judging."
+
+Lucia bares her teeth. "The hell you are not. You speak harshly, think me a sinner."
+
+The skunk crosses her arms before herself. "Listen, I am not in the business of *salvation* or *absolution*."
+
+"Then what, pray tell, are you in the business of?"
+
+The other woman furrows her brow, and leans back. Then, slowly, smugly, she grins. "*Joie de vivre*."
+
+Lucia finds herself genuinely unsure how to respond to that, so she doesn't. On she sketches, ignoring her spectator as best she can. A stop comes and goes, the fourth, and neither debark. No one gets on either. Riders. A thread lies untraced in Lucy's mind. She pulls it.
+
+To the skunk she says, "You asked earlier if the riders know what I do, as if you did not number among them."
+
+The skunk's face isn't just grinning, there's some anticipation around the edges of it. This stranger has been waiting for this question. "Not usually, no, not by a traditional count."
+
+Lucia squints. "Yet you said before the tunnel that you have observed me here for decades." 
+
+The skunk looks up, and taps a cheeky claw to her chin. "Yeah, weird, I wonder how that could be?"
+
+"Do you spy on the passengers?"
+
+The skunk tilts her head disappointedly, and lets the silence answer for her.
+
+"Neither then, some small animal, like a mouse or an insect living on the train."
+
+A shake of a head. "Construct or instance, I'd consider them passengers, too."
+
+"And you observed me directly, yes?"
+
+"This is a fun game! Yes, I have countless times."
+
+Lucy doesn't like this game. She hates the feeling of missing something simple. Perhaps it isn't simple. "You…you are the train we are riding in, and you have watched me all these years, and forked to something that could speak to me."
+
+The skunk laughs, and slaps her knees. Lucia turns red, scowling. Wiping humorous tears from her eyes, the skunk says, "I love artists so much. Creative! Very creative, but a few problems. One: I was born after you uploaded. Two: I only forked and individuated from my root instance in 2357, and Three: the System is capable of many incredible things, but that's a little too fantastic." The skunk gave a little head bob. " I guess in a metaphorical way you could say I speak for the train, but no, I'm afraid as long as I've been around in this sim, I've just been a skunk."
+
+Lucy looks out the window, and says aloud, "I do not like this game."
+
+The skunk laughs again. "I'm having a blast. Do you want me to tell you?"
+
+The artist glances back only briefly, and shakes her head. 
+
+"Do you want me to give you a hint?"
+
+Now Lucia turns to look at her, and when the skunk raises an eyebrow, she relents. "Fine. Fine! Yes!"
+
+The skunk slips her left paw into her jacket pocket. "Your hint is: rider and passenger are passive roles."
+
+Passive? If riding a train is a passive state, what would be an active—
+
+Lucy nearly throws her sketches to the floor, gesticulating angrily. "You are the engineer. You drive the train."
+
+"Correct!" The mephit holds up three clawed fingers on her right paw. "Beyond maintaining the sim, I wear three hats. One is engineer. The second is stationmaster. But neither of those explain seeing you in this car, do they?"
+
+Lucia's turn to raise an eyebrow. The skunk pulls her left paw from her jacket pocket, and holds up a ticket puncher. Lucia buries her face in her hands. "Conductor. And now I am the asshole for not even remembering you."
+
+The skunk scoffs. "I'm not hurt! Think of it this way, you and this sim have been here for 250 years. I've only been 'on board' for about 35. I dug through our personnel records recently, and there have been well over 100 conductors, never mind several active at the same time. You've been focused on your work, faces change, and at some point you stopped paying attention to who was coming around to check for fares. Hell, I've met other regulars in other sims who don't recognize me right away. Same goes for the 15 years I've been stationmaster, and have you ever actually been to the engine? Did you realize it has to be crewed? I'm proud of my work whether it gets seen or not, but often it isn't."
+
+Lucia finally finds the other end of the thread. "Do you own this sim?"
+
+The smile fades from the skunk's face. "As of a week ago, yes."
+
+"Was it the Century At—"
+
+"Mr. Nguyen had been planning to retire for some time. He'd given full access controls and permissions of the Sim to me a few months back, and after 275 years, he planned to retire at midnight, right as the century rolled over." The furred woman bit her lip and looked away. "I…I don't know if he died in the Attack. The way he was cleaning up his affairs by the end he might have quit the big one. Either way, he's gone."
+
+A grief settles into Lucia. She realizes she does not know the attendants of this sacred place. If it is half as intricate and complex as she thinks, this sim takes a great amount of work and dedication to keep running. The System's curse of eternal memory meant nothing if she did not bother to take notice of someone in the first place. Dozens of faces. Hundreds, likely. On top of this, layered like a dusting of ash or snow, is the suspicion that now this skunk and whatever forks of her there may be are the only ones left. Both the skunk and Lucia herself were lucky. How many sims now sit empty, with no owner? How many empty homes and shops and cities and wildernesses and worlds wait for occupants, like pets who do not yet know the loss of their caretakers, or worse, cannot understand it? Does the System reclaim them? Should it? Should they stand as cenotaphs, markers of a terrible loss few people can yet truly wrap their heads around? Or like a home in a vibrant neighborhood, should the next inhabitants move in, so that life can go on for the living? She doesn't know. Answers are beyond her, she is the rain that falls from the sky and her eyes in equal measure. She rolls off of resolution or closure, like droplets off the panes of the glass of the traincar. 
+
+Her tears soak into the paper of her sketchbook, and that tugs her to reality again. She cannot change the past, but she can change the present, the future. She wipes the water from her eyes hastily. "I did not know his name. Nor yours, though you clearly know mine."
+
+The skunk straightens up a little. "My name is Seras. Seras Frame."
+
+Lucia nods. "Seras. I will remember it."
+
+Seras shrugs. "You can't forget it."
+
+Lucia says, "language is an art, not a science. When we say forget and remember, they can mean many things. I will say your name, Seras. I will speak it aloud and address you and not take you for granted again."
+
+The train begins to slow as it reaches the fifth stop. Seras looks out the window, then back to Lucia. "I'll be getting off here, but before I do…" her voice trails off, and she holds up the ticket puncher, clacking it a few times. Lucia smiles. She pulls the ticket from her pocket, as she has every week for hundreds of years. 
+
+Seras stands up and takes it, looking it over. "Honestly, I was worried we'd lost all our riders. It's hard to say who's just too overwhelmed to show up, and who's gone. If you're here, I'm sure I'll see other old faces soon enough." She punches the ticket, and pauses. "Have you killed anyone since uploading?"
+
+The train comes to a stop, and something deep inside Lucia tenses. She snaps at the skunk. "Why? Worried I'm going to start up again?"
+
+Seras rolls her eyes, and hands Lucia back her ticket brusquely. "Just curious." 
+
+The skunk walks away swiftly, headed for the back of the car. She's just about to leave when Lucy finds her voice again. "I didn't even know you could kill someone here until the bomb went off."
+
+Seras stops dead in her tracks, but doesn't turn around. Lucy keeps talking.
+
+"I heard rumors of people being assassinated, but I never looked into it. How could you kill someone in a world like this? It all stunk of conspiracy, and you know how people are here. I thought I finally found a world without violence, and for a time I had such a world. Then the bomb devours billions, like an earthquake rending the ground into a maw of Hell. I am brought so close to the jaws of death I remember why I was glad to leave that world behind." Lucy feels like a child, small, afraid. Even after transitioning it is a feeling she has rarely felt, and her usual guard falls away. Words tumble from her before she can stop them. "And I do think this is confessional. I do my penance in this public place, an anonymous sinner, because it must not be done alone. I apologize for my hostility.  I do not like to be so plainly and nakedly seen by a stranger, and you frightened me like I haven't been since the Ansible table."
+
+Seras turns. The two women watch each other for a while. Lucia speaks first.
+
+"Do you think I've done enough? Held this Vigil for enough lifetimes? Should I keep going?"
+
+The train's whistle blows. Seras shakes her head. "I told you before. I'm not in the business of Absolution or Salvation." She walks to the back door. As the railcars start to lurch into motion, she adds, "I'm just happy to see someone's still riding the train."
+
+Then she's gone, and Lucia pushes herself over a few seats to the window. She sees the skunk laughing and pulling the back of her jacket over her head.  As the train pulls away, she's stomping her boots through the puddles on the platform as she runs for the shelter of an awning.
+
+

content/stories/assignment.md

@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 title: Assignment
 author: Madison Scott-Clary
 character: Ioan Bălan — 2273
+cw: Brief violence
 type: story
 ---
 

content/stories/coffee-leak.md

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ character: Tomash — 2299
 type: story
 ---
 
-There were places in the System that the newly-uploaded tended to wander into, thanks to the self-reinforcing nature of “X Best Sims To Check Out When You’re New” articles and the finite set of recommendations the default tutorial construct drew from. 
+There were places in the System that the newly-uploaded tended to wander into, thanks to the self-reinforcing nature of “X Best Sims To Check Out When You’re New” articles and the finite set of recommendations the default tutorial constructs drew from. 
 
 This led to the System Emergency Response Group doing their collective best to have someone hovering around the newbie hotspots. They weren’t necessarily full perisystem technicians, with all the rights and privileges etc etc, but could talk people through fixing “Help, I forked weird!” or “Help, everything’s black and white!” or the like, and someone really new might not know they could call SERG or think to do it.
 

content/stories/dreams-for-breakfast.md

@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 title: Dreams For Breakfast
 author: Alexandria Christina Leal
 character: In All Ways — 2383
+spoiler: "*Qoheleth:* major"
 type: story
 ---
 

content/stories/fever-dreams.html

@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 title: Fever Dreams
 author: 'Ember "Hieromech" Cloke'
 character: Heiromech — 2399
+cw: References to some of the grosser aspects of having a body
 type: story
 ---
 

content/stories/millwright.md

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+---
+title: Millwright
+author: Andréa C. Mason
+character: Andréa C. Mason#Millwright — 2401
+spoiler: "*Marsh:* medium"
+type: story
+---
+
+I need a break.
+
+Even before uploading, I was the face. The spokesperson. The rep. The primary fronter in a plural system of at least nine. The fursona everyone knew, the friend, the organizer, the closeted kid who burst out of the closet a social butterfly. It worked, then. Whether I wanted it or not, I was good at it, when we could manage our mental health.
+
+I was one of the headmates that pushed for uploading as our body failed and our loved ones dropped like flies. 
+
+Not being the front when we hit the System proper was a bit of a shock, but when we finally fanned out and forked into our separate headmate-y selves, I de facto became the Face of the Clade. Alex eventually ended up running everything, she was the part of us that likes keeping archives and all that, but I was expected to be head of social affairs. Even later, when my side gig became my main gig and I functionally became a clade unto myself, I was still expected to be diplomat and ambassador in turn.
+
+That side gig turned sys-side career was a flush of kinks and dreams made real. After about a decade of careful planning and testing, we started a company. We forked endless versions of ourselves and sent them out into the world. We found a way to replicate the "synths" of phys-side fiction, and embraced it so thoroughly that it now takes exceptional effort to act fully organic. Here, we could live out the fetish of being mass-produced, effectively engaging in sex work in the process, but also live out the fantasy of helping whoever needed it and being able to bow out if things got unsafe or unstable.    
+
+As we expanded rapidly, some part of me felt a pull towards authenticity, and we decided to have a "brick and mortar" headquarters. We worked with several sim artisans to create the now-famous High Falls Millworks#46b147c4. We chose the name, location, and design based on a district of the town our great-great-great grandmother lived in called Brown's Race in Rochester, New York. Hundreds of years before even she was born, the city had made a name for itself off the mills powered by the waterfall and river nearby. We even went as far as to commission a meticulously crafted fully functioning triphammer forge, like the area once had. Her name was Andréa as well, and I took her name out of admiration. We also named our company 9IN INDUSTRIES as a nod to her favorite band. 
+
+Building a factory, one that made our production model look more complicated than "gather client specs and fork to those in another room", one that featured a convincing "assembly line", exploded our company overnight. We had to restructure on the fly, and that is where I forked from my downtree instance. The most continuous version of me, Andréa C Mason#Foundry, remained head of the company, but she forked me, Andréa C Mason#Central, to be the heart of it all. Yet again I found myself a face, communal voice, a spokeswoman and figurehead for this clade-within-a-clade we'd become.
+
+My path from my downtree instance diverged quickly and wildly. I became less and less involved with any direct production or facsimile of such. I would fork for something, and then that fork would develop into an entire department. My forks spread out and I found myself not working with my hands all that much, really if at all. For our own safety and the safety of these so-called mass produced forks, we needed contracts, standards, and rules, inasmuch as those things are enforceable in a System largely without any governing body. We were up front that any version of us that was sent out had full rights to quit at any time for safety's sake, and having that in writing out up front prevented all sorts of headaches and worse. Thus one of the first departments we ever made was a Legal Department of sorts. We weren't in it for any sort of profit, by the nature of our project we were already swimming in rep, but we did want to get the message out there to more people. So, I forked a marketing version of myself, and they began a Sales and Outreach Department. We had a team for returning forks and merges down, specifically based around coping with loss, trauma, abuses that might have led them to leave, conflict resolution, contract disputes. We had an HR and Public Health Department. As our operation expanded, we needed sim artists, construct artists, experts in fields, professional engineers, so we made a Logisitics Department. We had an R&D team. Once we expanded far enough, we set up an Education and Training Department. When we'd flushed out the area around High Falls enough, we began to offer unused space up for development in the style of the buildings that had existed phys-side. We had a Real Estate and Zoning Department. #Foundry started out involved with a great deal of it, but she became more involved in the so-called "physical work", and even among the teams and departments that she founded, she trusted me to handle the ins and outs of people management.  We had a surge in the early 2300s, at some point tracking over 100,000 forks, but those numbers waned in time, and we stabilized around the end of the century with about 64,000 "units" in service and me in charge of a whopping 6,000-person staff.
+
+I tell people so often that I didn't like it, but the truth of it was, I was good at it, and for a while that was satisfying enough. We had built a company from the ground up, and I found myself at its peak. We had created an incredible corporation, one that had all the fantastic idealism of what a company could be, and because of the nature of the System, completely removed from the reality, brutalities, and consequences of what running an actual business phys-side caused. #Foundry and I were praisedlauded through parts of the System, conservatives lauding us as poster-children of capitalism, and liberals championed us as meritocracy in motion, proof that with ethics and smarts, businesses could treat both customers and employees with respect and kindness.
+
+The occasional leftist would praise our unions and sex-positivity, that a post-human trans woman being head of anything still felt like something worth celebrating, and a few more condemned us for recreating a corporation wholesale inside a place that should have been an anti-capitalist's paradise, but overwhelmingly there was silence from the people that once, a long time ago, we had called comrades and stood shoulder to shoulder with both phys- and sys-side. Now it is my greatest shame, but even at the height of 9IN INDUSTRIES's success, it left a sour taste in my mouth. Couldn't they be happy for what we'd accomplished, what *I* had built? #Foundry was lauded as a mechanical genius, but I was the face and name of the company. I joked that the C of our middle initial stood for Central, I appeared in interviews and magazines, I gave talks and attended conferences. #Foundry was the inventor, but I was the entrepreneur, and at my worst I basked in it. After all, I—and my thousands of forks, but really weren't they just extensions of me?— had worked so hard, I had *earned* my success.
+
+A few partners left me over it. A few more I only knew through it. #Foundry had become more and more elusive over time, and even in CERES clade affairs and meetings and gatherings I began to take her place, forking and sending a merge down to keep her updated. I was two faces but one, perhaps the most well-known member of my clade, and the subclade of me within it. I was the ace of myself and my self. When the clade became embroiled in our Authority Crisis in the 2360s, I was the most affected and part of the fixes and rescues that followed. I was Andréa C Mason, and the #Central after my name was more a job title than a signifier.
+
+We gathered, that night, as so many across the System did, to ring in the new century, to send the 2300s out with a bang and to ring in the brand new frontier of the 2400s. Our entire staff was on hand throughout the offices and facilities, and many who had outside the lives had brought Partners or friends, and it was a revelry for the ages! God, what a night!
+
+What a night.
+
+God, oh gods above and below, what a horrible night.
+
+To say that my subclade was hit hard by the century attack does not give any sense of scale. I have talked with many a pathologist, perisystem architect, and number of other experts about it, and still we lack answers. We were not the origin, but we were a minor epicenter, and for whatever reason, the contraproprioceptive virus was particularly effective at dismantling us in bulk. We kept in close communication and had very accurate numbers for how many forks of us existed at any given time, we used sensoria and a variety of other methods to keep an incredibly tight and informed network, and within .000001% margin of error, there were 69,760 Andréa C Masons throughout the system on the night of December 31st, 2399.
+
+By the time the dust settled, 12 of us remained, and of those 12, two quit within a week. 4 more crashed from grief in the next month. 
+
+I can't comprehend how to explain what it felt like to suddenly look at the clock approaching midnight again, to find myself alone in a room that had contained hundreds, almost alone in a sim that over 6,000 people had inhabited what felt like only moments before. To run panicked and slipping through streets laden with snow from accurate weather sims, with no pawprints or hoofprints but my own, to find #Foundry alive and sobbing, to find 2 other forks, bewildered and dissociating, to become inundated with thousands of requests for help, of anger, asking what they had done wrong or if they had violated the contract or what had happened, and having no answers for any of them. Finally, #Foundry sent a mass message to the feeds within a day, and 9IN INDUSTRIES shuttered, now likely never to reopen.
+
+#Foundry nearly quit when she found out that not only had we suffered impossible losses, but through some mechanism we did not and still do not understand, caused further ones. If you were in proximity to a fork of Andréa C Mason when the Century Attack happened, there was an 85% chance that you died as well. Of the hundreds of visitors and inhabitants of High Falls Millworks#46b147c4 that night, not a single one survived. We were a *vector*, somehow. One of us quit and three of us crashed over that fact. Where do we even start to recover from this?
+
+Partly, we just won't. We have our different reasons, but as the two leaders of our now defunct corporation, #Foundry and I have made the agonizing choice that we will not rebuild. We talked for days, sitting on our faithful reproduction of the Pont de Renne bridge, watching the falls roar and the sun rise and set, taking turns sobbing into each other's arms. Almost two centuries of work disappeared in what was to us an instant. We could not start again. It's over.
+
+#Foundry has now taken my place in clade affairs. She wants to reconnect with her cocladists which are her siblings and her former headmates, which are the closest thing she has ever had to a family here and now the only family she has left. She struggled even to fork, although I understand that after an incident with getting her head stuck in a pitcher of fruit punch she is relearning the trade. #Foundry is eschewing her reclusivity that marked so much of the back half of the 2300s, and trying to reconnect with her own "humanity" again, insomuch as a clade full of animals can have such a thing. I think it's good for her. She is, in the end, the most continuous version of me, and she should remember what it's like to be a person again. An individual. How to be Andréa instead of Director Mason.
+
+As for me?
+
+I'd like to pretend the change that I'm about to make is some Grand gesture of atonement and a reawakening of class consciousness. It's certainly in play, I'm not going to pretend it isn't. Look at me, the turncoat, the hypocrite, the working class anarchosyndicalist queer phys-side turned girl boss captain of industry sys-side, who cast aside her morals and consciences with the slightest bit of success. I'd been so hard before uploading on so many people for giving up everything they believed in for even a small amount of success, and more than a few cases nothing less than righteously so, but when I found myself in the same position I put them all to shame. I tell myself that again and again whenever The Dread or guilt or shame creep in, I tell myself that now is the chance to atone and to regain my class consciousness. And yeah, it is part of it.
+
+It's a bigger truth, the one I hate to admit but cannot deny, is that I was so fucking bored and no idea bores me more than going back to being the socialite.
+
+A simple concept that a lot of people seem to struggle with is that just because someone was really good at something, doesn't mean they like doing it. It is entirely possible to learn or understand innately the skills and necessities of a trade, to have a skillset or the tools to be really really good at something, and still get a little enjoyment out of performing that thing. My business may have vanished into the ether, but I still have all those social connections, I still have a reputation that precedes me hours in advance of me showing up anywhere, my fame and to some degree what you could call a fortune of social capital still exist, right there, waiting. If anything, if I chose to go back to that life and flourished again my legend and legacy would become even stronger, the determined woman who didn't let one of the greatest possible losses one could suffer slow her down, who pulled herself up by her bootstraps from nothing again, a phoenix, reborn in the mythology of good old protestant work ethic.
+
+Even that in itself should fill me with disgust, but it only furthers my apathy. I took pride in a product I claimed I produced, despite how little I had to do with it actually being made, and that brought me the satisfaction that all the social engineering and handshaking and baby kissing and photo posing and being a people person didn't. The pageantry of rich people, of successful people, of this upper class is largely that. Pageantry. Their parties are dull, their social mores and customs and activities lack substance, nothing really happens that makes anything. There was never any struggle, there was barely any conflict, and it produced only an ennui in me that I did not see the size of until someone all but ended the world.
+
+I want to work with my hands. I want to make things. I want to be alone, and I want to create. The people who made it what it was may be gone but High Falls Millworks#46b147c4 still exists. All its machines still function, and I'm going to take the time to learn to use every last lathe, forge, and press in here, and I'm going to *make* things. I want what I do to be tangible, to be meaningful, not words and nods and smiles and fuckings in the right place to keep things moving. I've hired a number of people to help me maintain the sim, but I have asked them largely to keep our relationship professional and distant , and when I finally feel satisfied that I am not just a voice and a face, maybe I'll even try seeing people again.
+
+Until then, I ask you keep any requests or comments to yourself. I'm not going to be in a place to take commissions anytime soon, I just need to forge for myself for a little while. Hone some real skills.
+
+Maybe this will go nowhere, and I'll just quit and merge down. More likely I'll individuate, but really, that's my business, not yours.
+
+Also, ditching the old tag. Figure it's obvious why. Turn off the spotlight. Close the curtains. My monologue's over. The show must go on, but it can do so damn well without me.
+
+Goodbye.
+
+Andréa C Mason#Millwright.
+

content/stories/reading.md

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: Reading
+character: "Rye — 2273"
+author: "Madison Scott-Clary"
+type: story
+---
+
+All readings are the same. They all begin the same way, with stepping off to some sim, known or unknown, where she would arrive a good hour early. There, she would wait or walk or drink her coffee or tea. Would it be a bookshop this time? Would it be a library? Would she run her fingerpads along the spines of books, counting known and unknown titles?
+
+Perhaps it was a cafe, and she would get herself a little pastry, some crumbly thing to eat while wandering lazily outside or inspecting the various pieces of art lining the walls within.
+
+She would get there an hour early and simply inhabit the space.
+
+As time drew closer, as her contact would come out to meet her, she would feel the excitement begin to prickle at the back of her neck, and she would have to restrain herself from letting her hackles raise or her tail bristle out. Some long-forgotten and perhaps-imagined reaction to danger tickling both human and skunk parts of her mind. She would feel her scalp tingle and her tail threaten to hike, and she would sit in that sensation. She would bathe in it. She would relish every shift of every strand of fur, and as she sat, legs crossed and coffee or water cradled in her lap, listening to her contact chatter, she would delight in the nervous anticipation of the reading to come.
+
+"Will you be reading from a physical copy or an exo?"
+
+"Oh, an exo," she said, smiling. "As much love as I hold for the physical tools of the trade, I hold yet more for all of the tools at our disposal. Especially when they let me be more dramatic."
+
+They laughed. "Right, you were an actor before, yeah?"
+
+She nodded. "Of a sort, yes."
+
+"And how long will your reading be?"
+
+"I have a variety of segments prepared, from five minutes to an hour."
+
+They blinked. "An hour? Holy shit."
+
+She shrugged gracefully, smile still lingering on her muzzle. "Perhaps another artifact of being an actor. I could talk the ears off a fox."
+
+Laughter.
+
+"Shall we aim for somewhere in the middle? Twenty minutes, perhaps?"
+
+"That'll work, yeah. You're the only slot, tonight, but that'll still give you at least forty minutes for Q&A." They smirked, adding, "Which I imagine you'll need. I read your book, by the way."
+
+It was her turn to laugh, musical and joyous. "I am pleased to hear! I trust that you have questions of your own?"
+
+"Oh, *plenty.*"
+
+"Delightful," she said, clapping her paws together. "I shall look forward to them, then."
+
+This conversation echoed a hundred times, a thousand, in her memories. This conversation and so many others like it set the stage. This conversation and so many others like it became one of the steps in that liminal space between the waking world and the dream of her stories.
+
+She would step away from home or from a meeting or from a cocladist's and at that moment, at the precise instant she ceased being *there* and started being *here,* she was in a place between. She was in a time between times and a world between worlds.
+
+She dwelt, then, in the world of the Ode. She knew where it was from, her name. Not just the Ode itself, but the place the line itself referenced. She had talked to the poet in her own way — perhaps it was closer to prayer, but she bothered not with distinctions such as these — and she knew the scene ey had been painting. She knew that ey had sat at the edge of the natural area some few blocks away from their high school, sat on the fencepost and looked out east, out beyond the natural area and wind farm to where the coarse shortgrass prairie dissolved into rectilinear fields. Tan, perhaps, or brown or gray, they would all shine the same beneath the moon, beneath the stars. They were all dear to em. They were all dear to *her.*
+
+So as soon as she would step away from home and before she would step up to the lectern, she would dwell there at the edge of the natural space. There is where she would feel her hackles threaten to rise and her tail threaten to bristle. She would look at the art and see nothing. She would drink her coffee or tea or eat her pastry and it would have a flavor she did not experience. She would have her conversations on autopilot, and her earnest smile would be no less earnest for her absence from the space. She would do all of these things and overlaid atop her vision would be fields silvered by starlight. She would do all of these things and her tongue would be coated with the taste of sweet night air, of dust and pollen and petrichor. She would strain to hear her contact through the soft noises of wind and crickets.
+
+And then, with all the suddenness of dawn, a chorus of birdsong crashing through her mind, the moment would come. Her contact would stand before the gathered crowd and introduce her —  her! Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars! She was published! She was an author! The realization would never not startle her — and she would brush out her tail one last time, run her fingers through her mane, and step out of the liminal space of the Ode and into the dream of her story. The nervous excitement would wash away and she would be *here.* She would be *now.*
+
+And then she would read.

layouts/partials/nav.html

@@ -12,12 +12,15 @@
                             <li><a href="https://mitzvot.post-self.ink" target="_blank"><em>Mitzvot</em></a></li>
                         </ul>
                     </li>
-                    <li><a href="https://marsh.post-self.ink" target="_blank"><em>Marsh</em></a></li>
                     <li><a href="https://clade.post-self.ink"><em>Clade</em></a></li>
+                    <li><a href="https://jessfluf.itch.io/unintended-tendencies" target="_blank"><em>Unintended Tendencies</em></a></li>
+                    <li><a href="https://marsh.post-self.ink" target="_blank"><em>Marsh</em></a></li>
+                    <li><a href="https://motes-played.post-self.ink" target="_blank"><em>Motes Played</em></a></li>
                     <li><a href="/stories">Additional stories...</a></li>
                 </ul>
             </details>
         </li>
+        <li><a href="/stories">Stories</a></li>
         <li><a href="https://rpg.post-self.ink">The TTRPG</a></li>
         <li><a href="/extras">Extras</a></li>
         <li><a href="/about">About</a></li>

layouts/story/single.html

@@ -5,6 +5,8 @@
     <h3 class="author">{{ .Params.author | markdownify }}</h3>
     <hr/>
     <h2 class="character">{{ .Params.character }}</h3>
+    {{ if .Params.cw }}<div class="cw">{{ .Params.cw }}</div>{{ end }}
+    {{ if .Params.spoiler }}<div class="spoiler-note">{{ .Params.spoiler | markdownify }}</div>{{ end }}
 
     {{ .Content }}
   </main>

static/css/toledot.css

@@ -107,6 +107,40 @@ main.story .author, main.story .character, main.story h3 {
     text-align: center !important;
 }
 
+.cw {
+    border: 2px dotted red;
+    font-size: 14pt;
+    width: 80%;
+    margin: 0 auto;
+    padding: 1rem;
+    color: darkred;
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-bottom: 2rem;
+}
+
+.cw:before {
+    display: block;
+    content: "⚠️ Content Warning";
+    font-weight: bold;
+}
+
+.spoiler-note {
+    border: 2px dotted blue;
+    font-size: 14pt;
+    width: 80%;
+    margin: 0 auto;
+    padding: 1rem;
+    color: darkblue;
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-bottom: 2rem;
+}
+
+.spoiler-note:before {
+    display: block;
+    content: "❗Spoiler Warning";
+    font-weight: bold;
+}
+    
 @media only screen and (max-width: 960px) {
     .carousel nav {
             display: none;