Marsh/cover ideas
Here are some cover ideas in no particular order. Some will make better front or back covers, of course, but I am not really a designer, so, who knows! Here are the descriptions of the various characters listed below:
- The Marshans (all somewhat similar with a common down-tree):
- Reed: transmasc, white (French Canadian), shortish wavy brown hair, a bit stubbly, thin with little muscle mass, short sleeve button-up plaids and khakis type,
- Sedge: cis fem, white, strawberry blond hair in an undercut, freckles, very queer style, a bit more filled out than Reed
- Tule: rather like Reed but cis
- Rush: darker skin from a tan, like if Reed got super into gardening
- Cress: quite a bit smaller than the rest (~5ft to their 5'6"), aggressively androgynous, fashion forward, expressive features
- Lily: a bit taller (5'8"ish), a bit frumpy, strawberry blond, freckly, the type to earnestly get into hiking gear
- Dry Grass: human Odist, 5'4", pudgy, curly/tousled black hair, pasty white, round face, real mom-core vibes. (Picrew take here)
- Vos: tall (6'2") black woman, short/shaved natural hair, high cheekbones, very chic
- Pierre: short (5'4"), tousled dark brown hair, real French Artiste vibes, childlike to the point of appearing fragile
To Limáni Ton Khromáton
Once it becomes clear that something awful has happened, most of the Marshans meet up with Dry Grass, who catches them up on the current state of the world — billions have disappeared, more than a year of time has gone missing — as they walk along the streets in a costal town called To Limáni Ton Khromáton, The Bay of Colors. There is a boardwalk along the shore where people can walk, a sandy beach where people draw designs in the sand when the tide is out, only to have them washed away when it comes in, and then the town is covered on every flat surface in brightly-colored tiles which are placed by those who visit. They are placed in designs such as murals or mosaics on the ground, in abstract patterns, realistic images, or even just a static of random colors.
Dry Grass, Reed, Cress, Tule, Sedge, and Rush all meet up at the default entry point on the boardwalk and slowly make their way up into the town as Dry Grass explains the dire situation.
We stepped from the quaint, small town sim and directly into warmth and sunlight, into the salt-tang of sea air and the low rush of waves against a beach. We stood atop a stone walkway of sorts, which seemed to run along the edge of a town. On further inspection, it appeared to be a retaining wall of a sort, holding up the town that meandered up a hill to keep it from sliding inexorably down into a bay.
Between the wall and the water was a sandy beach, partially obscured by intricate and crazed markings in the sand. It took some time of peering at them for me to make out just what they were: it seemed as though, throughout the tail end of New Year’s Eve, dozens or hundreds of people had been drawing in the sand using, I assumed, the sticks that were leaned against the wall.
All of the designs seemed to feature the New Year, now that I was able to pick them apart. Visions of fireworks, scratched over mentions of the year, scrawled names of, I guessed, couples who had met up on the beach.
I turned away with a hollow feeling in my chest, wondering just how many of those couples were still couples.
The town, while no less visually chaotic than the beach, was at least more heartening to look at. Everything — everything; the walls of buildings, the roofs, doors and window shutters, even the roads — was covered with a blindingly colorful mosaic of tiles.
“To Limáni Ton Khromáton is nearly two centuries old,” Dry Grass explained as we started trudging up one of those streets. When you enter, you are given a single tile — if you check your pockets, it should be in there.”
Sure enough, when I dug my hand into my pocket, I found a cerulean tile, a little square of porcelain about three centimeters on a side. The rest of the Marshans dug in their pockets and pulled out tiles of their own, all one shade or another of blue.
“Unless you hold a color in your mind when you enter, you are provided with your favorite,” Dry Grass explained. She pulled a golden yellow tile out of her own pocket and flipped it up in the air like a coin. “All of this — all of the mosaic — has been placed by visitors.
“Set No Stones told me about this place.” She smiled wryly. “Because of course she did. We are consummate pros at living up to our names. You may place your tile wherever you would like, and so long as it is touching the edge of another, it will stick. You will not be able to remove it after, so make sure to place it carefully.”
Rush laughed. “Holy shit. This place is amazing.”
“It’s a bit hard to look at in some places,” Sedge added, nodding towards a few buildings whose walls were covered in a rainbow static of tiles. “But yeah, this is wild.”
“It really is, yes,” Dry Grass said, grinning. “Used to be, you would get one tile per day to place, but as the popularity grew, that was slowly reduced to one tile every six weeks. Still, whole fandoms have sprung up around this place among a certain type of individual. Set No Stones started organizing groups of fifty to a hundred instances to plan out images. They would meet up once a week to go build their pictures. That is where we are going now.”
The street was steep, but, despite the glossy look of the tiles that paved the road, none of us slipped.
We walked past buildings that depicted animals, some that depicted people, some that had words set in porcelain. There were scenes of nature and of cities. Even one that Cress spotted which appeared to be a building in the process of being covered by tiles exactly the same color as the stucco beneath it. The slow shift into square tiles led to a sense of the structure dissolving into pixels, or perhaps voxels.
If the small town sim had been relatively quiet, this one felt all but abandoned. Perhaps all such sims with a singular purpose would be like this today: if your friends are missing, if other versions of you were missing, then an attraction would doubtless lose some of its draw. We passed only a few tilers tramping up the hill with determination, ready to place their colors for the day.
Finally, Dry Grass led us down an alleyway, dim and cool, and gestured to a wall. The scene was of two figures sitting at a bar. Given the scale, it was impossible to make out any detail on the figures, though they seemed to be furries of some sort — one tan and one black and white. Each had a drink, and before them, a wall of bottles stood, still in the process of being built. Dry Grass stood up on her tiptoes and touched her tile to the edge of a bottle, adding a bright glow to a fledgling bottle of whiskey.
“Here,” she said, gesturing us to grab a crate that had been stacked nearby. “All of these are just props to help people reach higher. You can probably add your blues to the edge of the lamp. They are not quite the right color for green lamps, but I do not care.”
One by one, we took our turns standing on that box and setting our tiles into place. I reached up as high as I could to flesh out the glowing rim of the green glass-shaded lamp. As soon as my tile touched the edge of the tile Tule had placed, it snapped into place with a satisfying click. It was completely immobile after that. No amount of nudging could get it to slide more perfectly into alignment.
The morgue sim
All of the crashed instances lost in the attack, represented by a matte black sphere about a foot in diameter, are placed in a single sim, arranged in a three-dimensional grid with each spaced out by about a yard from its neighbors. When one is focused on a single core, the rest fade to translucent, leaving only one dark black sphere.
The Marshans, Vos, Pierre, and Dry Grass gather on a floating gray platform in a crescent moon shape around Marsh's sphere to have a funeral. Lily gets heated, yells at Dry Grass, and argues with Reed before Vos kicks them out.
The room in which the cores were stored was beyond vast. It was an unending space, a three dimensional grid With the cores stored at one meter intervals in all directions. The default spawn point was a floating platform in the middle of a vast sphere, devoid of cores, right in the center of it all.
“The room is set to dark; no one can see us or touch us, no matter how many instances were here,” Dry Grass said quietly, then smiled wryly. “We could scream bloody murder and no one would hear, and yet it has the feeling of a graveyard, does it not?”
None of us spoke.
“Right,” she whispered, expression falling.
“How do we get to their core?” I asked
Dry Grass gestured to a faint circle embossed in the floor, then stepped within its bounds. “Marsh of the Marsh clade,” she said. “Dry Grass of the Ode clade on behalf of the Marsh clade, systech ID #338d842.”
There was a quiet chime of acknowledgment and, in the direction that Dry Grass faced, a black ring formed opening out onto some other part of the sim, hundreds of the untold billions of cores filling the view. The platform drifted slowly towards the portal, and then through.
The cores were insubstantial spheres, ghostly, translucent. Little double handfuls of whispy lives cut short.
All except one.
Right before the platform sat one core more real than the rest, a matte Eigengrau with a faint blue haze around it. The platform drifted forward until it rested at the center before Dry Grass at chest level, us Marshans — along with Pierre and Vos who had also joined us — parting to make way for it.
As the platform came to a stop, the blue haze disappeared and one more chime of acknowledgement sounded. “Marsh of the Marsh clade,” an androgynous voice spoke. “Crashed via CPV January 1, 2400, 00:00:03. Core deemed corrupt and unrecoverable by automated process, confirmed by an instance of In The Wind of her own clade, systech ID #88aa6e8.”
“An instance of…” Dry Grass started, then blanched. “How many instances of In The Wind existed during this process of confirmation?”
“520,000,” the voice said. “A total of two billion instances have been marked as confirming corrupted cores.”
“And none of her were recovered?”
“There is one core for In The Wind of her own clade. The clade directory lists no up-tree instances.”
“Where is–”
“Dry Grass,” Lily growled through gritted teeth. “Shut the fuck up.”
She hesitated, some complex set of emotions crossing her face, bowed unsteadily, and then moved to stand by Cress, Tule, and I. Whether intentional or not, she stood so that Lily was blocked from sight by the three of us.
It had to be intentional, and that fact, seeing her cowed for the first time in my memory — mine and Tule’s — had me bristling. Both Tule and Cress appeared to be biting back responses of their own.
For her part, Lily remained tense, standing rigid and still. Even as she began to cry, she did so without moving, without making a sound, tears simply welling up and coursing down her cheeks. “Rush,” she croaked.
Looking anxiously between Lily and Dry Grass, ve nodded slowly. “Alright,” ve murmured, then stepped forward and tentatively touched the sphere. “I had some words prepared, but I’m not sure I can remember them all.”
Sedge sighed and stepped forward to join ver. “Hey, it’s alright,” she said, resting her hand on vis wrist. “Just talk to them if you want.”
Ve clutched at the sphere, though it remained stolidly immobile. “Uh…okay,” ve mumbled. “I guess I’m just sorry this happened. Sorry in a commiseration way. Sorry that we’re here at all, standing around like a bunch of jerks while you’re…uh, gone, or whatever.” Ve trailed off with a nervous laugh, shoulders sagging. “But I’ll miss you, Marsh. We all will. We’re all here, you know. All of your clade. Pierre and Vos are here, too, and Dry Grass, all wishing that you were here with us. I’m sorry you’re not, I’m sorry you didn’t get our merges first.”
Cress sniffled. Lily continued to stare blankly ahead through her tears. None of the three of us immediate up-tree instances had managed to merge down.
When Rush didn’t continue, Sedge leaned to hug awkwardly around vis shoulders. Ve stiffened, returned the hug, and then stepped away from the sphere again, rubbing vis hands against vis shirt.
Sedge took her turn resting her hands atop the core. She stood a while in silence, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Finally, she said, “Twenty-three billion dead, but you were ours.”
She opened her mouth to continue, shook her head, and then stepped back to join me, Tule, and Cress. Pierre moaned softly, slouching against Vos’s side.
Tule began to step forward, but Lily held up a hand. “Stop,” she whispered. “Not you. Not yet.”
“Lily, I–”
“Not yet,” she repeated, then stepped forward. Rather than rest her hands gently on the sphere of the core dump, she clutched it tightly. Her face contorted into a grimace, but she spoke through the tears, through whatever emotion it was that held her in its grip. “You died. You were killed. You were killed by those who thought we were less than them, who thought they could control the world to such an extent that our lives became nothing to them. Just so much garbage.”
I saw Dry Grass wince out of the corner of my eye. Whether Lily was talking about the collective that had seen fit to attack the System, this Our Brightest Lights Collective, or the Ode clade and all of their supposed machinations wasn’t clear to me, but Dry Grass certainly seemed to take the words to heart. I held out my hand to her, but she shook her head subtly.
“Our lives were nothing, so your life was nothing, too,” Lily continued. “Now here we are, like Rush said, standing whatever’s left of you like a bunch of jerks who get to live on. Who the fuck cares that some huge majority gets to live on while so many people are just fucking…gone?”
She looked as though she wanted to say more, but her words petered out and she simply stared, unseeing, at the core she held onto. Finally, she let go of the sphere and stumbled back to where she had been standing before.
I started to step forward next, eyes locked on Lily.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Vos first.”
“What the–”
“Shut up. Vos first.”
I glanced over to Vos, who was glaring at Lily. “What are you doing, Lily?”
“Go,” she said hoarsely.
“If you don’t want to be here,” Vos said, voice flat, dangerous. “You can leave.”
“I want you to fucking go,” Lily snapped. “I want to hear about Marsh from someone who knew them better than any of us, these last however many decades.”
“First Cress, now Reed?” She scoffed. “Do you think they don’t know about Marsh?”
“Certainly not as much as you did, if they’re all dating one of them!”
“Get out.”
“It’s not your–”
“Get out!” Vos shouted. “Get out get out get out!“
Serene's marsh
For something more abstract, there is the mock-up cover that was used for the Kickstarter, leaning on some trends that have taken off in the last decade or so: an image of plants or some stylized animal with the text partially obscured by the design:
Doesn't need to be this, of course, but there is a scene where the Marshans, Dry Grass, and Serene walk through an actual marsh on a raised boardwalk. Either that scene or something featuring reeds, rushes/tule, sedge, lilies, watercress, hyacinth, or a water plant like anubias might be neat.
The entry point — a platform of wood slats set upon stilts above stagnant water — was far smaller than I had anticipated, and my foot rocked against an uneven plank set along the rim of the platform, forcing me to lean against Sedge. One edge of the platform led into a narrow, somewhat rickety wooden walkway that headed out over the water in a straight line until it came upon a tall patch of grass, where it turned a few degrees to the right to make its way to another. It appeared to meander in this way from island of vegetation to island of vegetation in an uneven zigzag toward a copse of trees — the word ‘banyan’ floated to mind, though I wasn’t sure if that was actually the case — where it disappeared into shadow.
That shade looked delightfully appealing as the humid heat pressed in around us.
“What the hell is this place?” Tule asked, wrinkling his nose at the scent of rotting vegetation in the air.
“A swamp,” Dry Grass said simply, a lopsided smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “A marsh, perhaps.”
If it had been intended to be a joke, it fell flat. We remained in silence for a few awkward moments.
She sighed. “My apologies. It is still important to me, however. It is– Ah, there she is.” She raised an arm and waved to a figure crouched at the edge of the walkway just before the next platform. With the heat-haze and mugginess, their form was somewhat indistinct. They wore a frowzy white dress, along with some sort of hat — or perhaps a rather tall hairstyle. As we walked toward them in single file, she explained, “This sim was designed by Serene; Sustained And Sustaining, whom you shall meet in a moment. She is my cocladist from the ninth stanza, and one of my favorite people in the world. I asked her to meet us here.”
As we got closer, the strange hairstyle that I had noticed on the figure resolved into a pair of tall canine ears, and what I had assumed was a mask of some sort turned out to be a short, pointed muzzle. Serene stood up and stretched, smiling wanly to us before bowing in greeting.
Reed and Dry Grass on a date
They visit a Horn & Hardart's automat in NYC on a date to talk about how they wound up at this point.
Once we stepped off the train, still holding hands both out of affection and so as not to lose each other in the crowds, we walked the short distance to the replica Horn & Hardart’s, still talking of life on Lagrange. We talked of when we had uploaded, of the first things that we did sys-side, of the origins of the System that Dry Grass’s root instance still remembered.
“The 2110s were a horrible mess,” she said once we sat down with our cups of shitty coffee and small bowls of clam chowder. It was too thick, too grainy from the flour used to thicken it, and it needed copious amounts of pepper to make it in any way interesting. It was, as far as I could tell, a perfect reproduction. “Governments trying to disappear anyone who knew too much in the worst way possible, which accidentally led to the creation of the System. Turns out, it’s a pretty good place to store your undesirables, so most of the Founders were loud, opinionated, politically obnoxious people.”
I laughed. “You were loud, opinionated, and politically obnoxious?”
“Do not be silly, Reed. Of course I was,” she said primly. “It was our friend that made this place what it was, yes? Ey was the one who is the template for this world, yes? But all the same, it became a cherished place. We uploaded in the System’s second year, as soon as we could afford to, and even the System was a mess. Consensual sensoria had yet to be implemented, building and object creation had yet to progress to where it was today, the ability to eat was not added until the fifth year — this is all before systime was even a thing, remember, so this is very early — so those who uploaded hungry remained so for years at a time. I loved it all the same.”
“You still do, sounds like.”
She laughed. “Of course I do! It is more than just a love of life, the System is my baby. It is our baby, the Ode clade’s. We ushered into being and raised it up to be what it is today. All of this–” She gestured around at the automat, the tables crowded with lines of cladists before the windows bearing the more popular dishes. “–is our baby. The people, the automat, the city, all of those abandoned sims and all of those overcrowded hubs. It belongs to everyone and no one. It belongs to itself.”
I listened, rapt, as she grew more animated and eloquent; watched as she sent out an instance to fetch us some of our favorite plates of plain-yet-filling food.
“We all played our part. I dove into tech, Warmth coaxed the System into letting her make weirder and weirder objects and more and more delicious foods, True Name and her stanza guided it as any parent might. Even if her methods came off as unsavory, I believe her — believe Sasha, I mean, who she became — when she says that her goal was only ever the security of our existence.
“I feel like my baby has stumbled. The System stumbled and fell, knocked its head, forgotten some of what it knew. I feel like our existence stumbled, as some group or another got so frustrated as to trip it up. When I dump my energy into all of this work, I am doing my best to nurse it back to health. We all are. I am working the tech angle, the eighth is working the political angle — I think even Sasha has poked her nose in once or twice — even the third stanza is there with us, sitting shiva and praying as they will.”
We sat back as her ephemeral instance set down a few pot pies and a plate piled high with hash browns before us before quitting. Dry Grass sectioned off a large portion of the hash browns to start dousing it in hot sauce.
“All of this to say that we have stumbled, taken a blow that has left us dazed, but we will do our best to come back from it.”
“You’re sounding more hopeful than you were last night, at least.”
She laughed, fork of heavily spiced potato already on its way to her mouth. “Yes, well, I am not freshly back from a cemetery, am I?”
I nodded, getting a few bites of my own (less heavily spiced) share in. Horn & Hardart’s hash browns were quite good, but only while warm.
“You use a lot of family language when you talk,” I said once I’d washed the hash browns down with coffee. “Which makes sense from what you’ve said, of course, but it got me thinking last night about what Marsh was to us. Couldn’t decide whether they were a parent or a sibling of some sort.”
She nodded, already starting in on her pot pie, breaking open the lid to let the steam escape. “It is not a dynamic that works for everyone. Even within our own clade, it does not make sense in some cases. Motes and Warmth are my little ones, but while A Finger Pointing and Beholden — Motes’s guardians — feel like siblings to me, Dear, Rye, and Praiseworthy — Warmth’s down-trees — definitely do not. They are friends, Rye especially, perhaps, but little else.”
“Yeah, and I guess that’s been coloring my feelings on the whole idea of cross-tree merging.”
Dry Grass frowned but remained silent as she ate, gesturing for me to continue.
“We’ve been poking at the possibility of merging the whole clade to…I don’t know, actually. Reconstruct, I guess? It wouldn’t be Marsh, but if nothing else, maybe it’d be someone who could carry on in their stead.”
“Alright,” she said once she finished a few bites. “I am glad that you see that it would not be Marsh. What do you think this new person will do? What will you do?”
“We had this idea while laying in bed last night, it’s not exactly matured much beyond that,” I admitted, laughing. “I don’t know, though. Maybe we could at least talk and share memories. They’ll feel all the stuff we talked about at the funeral yesterday, right? Maybe they can work out some differences and such. Maybe they’ll join the clade. Maybe they’ll just quit.”
After a moment’s thought, she sighed. “Well, I have checked in with my down-tree, and Jonas is losing ground on a request to remove that functionality, so you may well have the chance to play around with this, but do be careful to manage your expectations, my dear. There is much that this offers, but also much at risk.”
“You don’t think it’s dangerous or anything, do you?”
“Much at risk socially, Reed. There is the potential for that friendship and love, yes, but also the potential for pain.”
What Right Have I's dream
From the short story "Prophecies", What Right Have I has a dream about the Century Attack:
The skunk nodded, paused to gather her thoughts, then spoke slowly. “I am disembodied, yes? I am floating and I see a figure, and they begin to weep, and they dissolve into a cloud of black specks, and these specks float away on a breeze, and each one enters the heart of a cladist, and they cry out in agony and dissolve into clouds of their own, and so it ramifies until all are dust. I see you, yes, and I see If I Dream, and I see Should We Forget and I see No Longer Myself.”
This figure refers to the attacker, 8-stanza-1, who set off a 'bomb' that ramified throughout the System, crashing each individual it came into contact with, but not before searching out everyone they know the clade details of:
“Regardless of our opinions of each other,” Speaking said, picking up the prior thread. “Speaking with 8-stanza-1 was a frustrating experience. I am told that I was the instance sent to discover their presence, relying on tools developed by my down-tree instance, I Have Sight But Cannot See. I have no memory of this, but it does sound like something that I would do.”
“What about it was frustrating?” Selena asked.
“They are…emotional. Very emotional. Understanding their voice through their sobs or wild laughter was difficult. All the same, they are a very grounded individual. They speak concisely and with no misdirection in their words.” She shrugged. “They just speak in coherent, well-formed sentences and paragraphs about untrue things. Their every word is part of a lie. Their very existence is built up around lies. They breathe lies out on every breath.”
Hotpot dinner
Dry Grass, Reed, Cress, and Tule go out for hotpot and talk about feelings. At this point. Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass are a triad, with Reed struggling with feelings left over from a merge. Cress has a hysterical laugh-cry, Tule laughs at Reed for catching feelings.
So it was that Cress, Tule, Dry Grass, and I sat around a table, hotpot bubbling away in the center, in a nearly deserted restaurant. We said nothing, each doubtless lost in our own thoughts, as we dredged veggies and tofu, thin strips of fish and surimi, and thinly sliced lamb through the spicy broth, carefully fishing them back out after the scant few seconds it took for them to cook so that we could eat them atop bowls of rice.
It was Tule who broke the silence. “This is all incredibly fucked, but at least the food is good.”
We all bust out laughing. Cress, most of all seemed caught up in the humor, laughing uncontrollably until tears streamed down its face. That laughter briefly veered into hysterical sobs as it hunched over in its seat. We had long since set up a cone of silence, and I think we were all glad for that now, as it made the space feel more intimate, more comforting as Tule and Dry Grass bookended Cress and rubbed their hands over its back.
“Sorry,” it said once it was able to sit back up. Its voice was round, stuffed up. “I don’t even know why it hit me like that.”
“Too many emotions at once?” I suggested.
It shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, that’s definitely true, but I don’t know if that’s why I fell apart.”
“You do not need to know why, love,” Dry Grass said gently. “You are allowed to be a confused mess in this confusing mess of a life.”
I nodded, dredging a skewer of fish through the bubbling hotpot and waiting for it to cool enough to eat. “I have no clue how to feel, myself. I keep alternating between tired and down on myself for not doing enough, and working frantically on what feels like a good idea until another comes up.”
Dry Grass tilted her head, a curious gesture I’d noticed in her cocladists as well. “Are you still feeling conflicting emotions from your merge?”
I stiffened in my seat.
“Only if you are comfortable discussing it, of course,” she continued, voice soft. “I just imagine that there is no more appropriate crowd than this.”
Both my cocladists had a blank look on their face before Tule fell once more into laughter. “Oh my god, Reed.”
“What?” Cress asked.
“I merged down before New Year’s.”
“Yeah? And? I don’t–” it began, then flushed red in its cheeks. It started to laugh as well, “Oh no, Reed. You kept the memories?”