Madison Rye Progress

Post-Self visual novel......

Rye

Kitsooki

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.

Hold My Name

Forrest Gerke

Andréa,

It might be more accurate to call me a collector rather than an active mythologizer (for which you might seek out May Then My Name Die With Me; her An Expanded Mythology of Our World really is a work of art). However, given our place up in the skies, I will tell you one that I read originally in comic form — something ancient that was uploaded shortly after AVEC was introduced — and perhaps we can expand on it from there, yes?

Way in the beginning of time, back when the earth was young and not yet fully formed, back before even the small beasts of the trees awoke, the sky was all dark. There was some time spent on the sun and moon, yes, and those are stories of their own, and some day you will here the one about who took a bite out of the moon to sample its savor and found it wanting.

What I am going to tell you, though, is why the stars are such a godawful mess.

You see, one night, the great spirit was out placing stars in the sky one by one and in careful order, for placing the stars up in the heavens is important work. How else will the beasts of the land know where to go? How else will they tell the seasons?

It is important work, yes, but incredibly fucking boring.

Coyote came up to the spirit and said, "Ahoy up there, what are you doing?"

"I am placing the stars," the spirit said, "so that the beasts of the land will know where to go and will be able to tell the seasons."

"Oh," Coyote said. "Can I help?"

The great spirit heaved a huge sigh. This was trouble, they knew. After all, come on. Coyote? But all he'd need to do is place the stars up in the sky, and the work really was fucking boring, so... "Alright, you may help. Here. Take these stars and place them up in the sky. I was thinking if we had– hey, wait!"

"There is the buffalo!" Coyote cried, having placed the stars just so. "And there the crab! And look, see? There are the two sisters!"

Another huge sigh. "Well...okay, I guess. They have to go somewhere, and those will still show well enough at night. Keep up the goo– uh...well, keep up the work."

And so Coyote placed the stars, drawing all of the great beasts in beautiful points of light.

"God, this is fucking boring," he thought to himself. "I am too wise and too clever by far for such a menial task. Fuck it!"

With that last thought and an oversized shrug, he tossed the rest of the stars haphazardly up into the night and went about his business.

Poor Coyote, though, he got too impatient for his own good and forgot to make a drawing of himself in the sky, and that is why, to this day, he howls up to stars in sadness, yip yip yi yi yi yip yip yaroooo~

And there is where the legend ends, but it is not where our story ends, yes? What paw do you suppose Coyote had in the stars as we know them? What place does he have in the stories we have told ourselves about our lives up here in our System in the sky? And what of Castor and Pollux?

Perhaps we could tell the story, as our dear May Then My Name did, of how we yearned to see who lived around those campfires in the black of night, how we would build ourselves an ark to sail the seas of space to find out.

"Ah! The people! They are going up beyond the moon! How cold they will be!" Coyote might say, his usual helpful self. "I will stoke those fires and make them shine all the brighter when they are above the very air itself. Perhaps that will warm them and keep them cozy."

What might Coyote do when all that did was make us long for more?

All my best,

Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know of the Ode clade

Slow Hours

@cupsofjade

"The criss-cross pattern of a schoolyard tool imprinted on your face, no doubt hurled at you by a god"! Deny All Beginnings, you amaze, as ever. I will have you know that I showed this note to A Finger Pointing, who laughed, disappeared into the exchange for a bit, and then dreamed up precisely the schoolyard tool mentioned and hurled it at Motes. She was so startled that there were suddenly almost a dozen Moteses scattered around, and we had to make them all run around the outside of the building until she was able to stop giggling and merge down once more.

You ask after prophecy, and you ask after bests and worsts.

There are, I should note, a few different types of prophecy that I engage with. The least exciting of these is simply the result of having read a rather large chunk of System Central Library over the centuries. Our lives are not nearly so complicated as we might suppose, and we are not nearly so erratic as we might imagine. Many of these prophecies are simple predictions based on the shape of the story one is currently living in.

A step beyond that is a type of prophecy that boils down to a cold read. While these might be less accurate, all other statements about fortune telling apply here: it is less about being accurate than it is about being adaptable. I do not need to tell someone exactly what will happen to them so much as what it is that they need to hear for a situation that is already happening around them.

Between you and me, though, it is quite rare indeed that I am struck with an actual prophetic vision. I can count four such instances in my time as the clade's own prophetess. I will speak of none of them.

Take, instead, a 'prophecy' that I gave to Motes nearly a century ago. This is one of my worst, of which I am quite proud.

A large part of the crew were gathered on the stage after striking the set. For some reason, they tolerate me better than the actors, so I had joined them. Here we were on this flat plane of black painted wood, sitting or laying down and chatting about our days, when Motes crawled over to me and threw herself dramatically across my lap. She set up a cone of silence, and yet still was a long time in opening up, leaving me to pet over her ears and brush specks of paint out of her tail for several minutes before she started talking.

"Slow Hours, I made a friend," she said. Even if her voice was not serious enough to give it away, she often just calls me 'Slow' when addressing me directly — one of vanishingly few people I will allow to do so — so for her to call me 'Slow Hours' (not even 'Slowers'!) meant that something big was afoot.

"Tell me of your friend, my dear."

"I met them at a dance," she said, not looking up to me. "I went out with Beholden and Unbidden to some crazy biker bar that was also having a mathcore band performing, and I met them in the pit."

"You were your big self, yes?" I asked, referring to the form she assumed whenever she went out anywhere that it might cause a problem for her to be small, whether because she might get trampled or because people might assume untoward things about someone who could probably pass as a kid being there. A metal show at a biker bar fit both bills. She likely wound up looking like a 20-something hippie human, all flower crowns and sundresses.

She nodded. "We danced for a bit in the pit and then got some drinks and talked outside, and then danced some more."

"A good night, then?"

"Very!" She grinned, but it did not last. "Very. They took me back to their place, where we got high, fooled around, and then talked into the morning."

I nodded, waiting for her to continue.

"And that was it. That is all I ever do, right? Go to a show, get wasted, maybe get laid, and then I go back to the stuff I really enjoy. I have my friends here, I have my work, I have you and Bee and ma and Beckoning and Muse, and that is all I need to continue on from one day to the next. I do not do love." She sighed, sounding miserable. "Not like that."

"I sense a 'but', Speck."

"Well..." She pushed herself up to sitting instead, slouching against my side. "I do not do love, but a lot of people do, including a lot of the people I wind up spending the night with in big girl mode. I am honest and up front with them: this is just for the night, this is just for the fun of it. I am a healthy woman in her 30s, yes? I am three centuries old, yes? I like sex as much as any three hundred year old woman in her 30s.

"Most of them get it, too. They are usually after the same thing. I have occasionally had someone catch feelings for me, which is fine. We talk about it, negotiate boundaries, move on with our lives." She giggled, adding, "Once, one of them showed up here looking for me and ma just about tore him in half."

"You are stalling, my dear," I said.

She groaned and buried her face against my shoulder. "I knoooow. Anyway, this person and I got started talking about what we like in lasting friendships that we do not really care about in one night stands and they just...they just seem like a really good person."

"And you think you might like follow up on that?"

She shrugged. "They are just into all sorts of things that I am. They paint — people, mostly, and some animals — and also dig the whole small aesthetic and we like the same music, of course. They suggested we could do a regular sort of get together thing."

"Have you told A Finger Pointing about them?"

She shook her head. "I wanted to ask you what you thought."

I asked her several questions about this person after that, and as I did, I felt a nagging sensation at the corner of my mind, a thread was being tugged and it was causing a ripple in the fabric of my understanding of the situation. Being tugged by who or by what, I do not know. That is one of those questions where, were I to try to answer it, the whole thing may well come tumbling down.

"Speck," I said, interrupting her. She must have seen something on my face, for she went silent. "Here are two truths and a lie.

"One: they are a fucking creep."

There was a moment's shock before she giggled nervously. The flow of prophecy has a rhythm, though, if it is to be believed, and I had but to settle into that rhythm to let it land properly.

"Two: you are lonely. You have us, yes. You have your clade and the rest of the troupe. You have your family and your work, but what you do not have are friends. You are friendly with everyone here, everyone here is your friend, but you do not have friends."

She still looked wrong-footed, and had pulled away from me as though wary. "And the third?"

"Three: much of that is our fault."

"Yours as in the clade's?"

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

As she understood what I was saying, my own little game of two truths and a lie, her shoulders relaxed and she slumped against me once more, sniffling.

"We all love you, Speck, that is all."

It was not her prophecy, of course. It was ours. She is still good friends with that person to this day. That person and so many more.

I am proud of it because I am proud of who she became, and it is the worst because we had to learn how to watch this precious thing we had set at the center of our lives in so many ways go interact with those we did not trust. It is the worst not because we had to trust her judgment, but because we learned how little we had trusted it leading up to that point.

Tell Jack hi for me, and also "5-3". I will keep the teams to myself.

— Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress