Day Nineteen — On Both Sides of the Mirror
“Mom, why did you let Ael use my room? She never puts anything away!” Lelia complained to her somewhat distracted mother. Lily looked up.
“Oh, this whole house has turned into ceremony headquarters, your room was the only quiet place left, she needed to finish a project,” she explained.
“What’s wrong with her room?” Lelia protested.
“Sys commandeered it for manufacturing last minute items,” Lily explained.
“Why can’t she work at the Institute, she’s always there anyway,” Lelia didn’t give up.
“Never mind about your sister,” Lily remembered. “Did you practice your ceremony steps?”
“Yes! Dad made me go over them a million times!” Lelia frowned, annoyed.
“Did you try out your gown? We want to make sure it fits properly,” Lily went over the list in her hand.
“It’s OK,” Lelia said.
“Go put it on, I need to see,” Lily commanded.
“Mom! I told you I already tried it on!” Lelia objected.
“I said I needed to see it, didn’t I? Go!” Lily didn’t relent. Lelia went to her room to comply with her mother’s request, and spent a few minutes there, during which the silence was broken at odd intervals by the discoveries of all the items that had been disturbed by Ael’s presence.
“I told you I didn’t want her to go into my room! She always messes up my stuff!” Lelia appeared in the doorway, a heavenly vision in lavender gauze, albeit one with a bit of an attitude.
“I feel so stupid in this dress! Why can’t I wear my normal clothes?” she protested, ignoring the adoring look in her mother’s eyes.
“Because this is an embassy ball and we have to abide by the dress code!”
“Why do the clouds care at all? I’ll be divvied up and assigned to a number of different clusters anyway! Besides, don’t they think solid matter is of no consequence?” Lelia asked.
“Lavender is important. Wave length frequency and such,” Lily started to explain again.
“Yes, I know!” Lelia rolled her eyes. The ball gown fit as designed, so the girl was dispatched to her room to change.
“Are you nervous?” Lily asked.
“I would be, if Ael didn’t brag the entire week about being allowed to join the Simplex before she was of age,” Lelia expressed her displeasure. “Now I feel like I’m not doing enough!”
“It was a wonderful opportunity, you shouldn’t be jealous of your sister,” Lily admonished.
“I’m not jealous,” Lelia protested, “it’s just that she spoiled the surprise, now I know what it’s going to be like!”
“I thought your father already told you how the ceremony was going to unfold!” Lily jumped, shocked. “You didn’t expect to just join the Simplex and play it by ear, did you?!” she pinned Lelia with a sharp stare.
“No,” the girl softened up. That was exactly what she was thinking of doing, but between her parents and her baby sister, good luck with that!
“Do you know what coherence clusters you’ll be assigned to?” Lily asked.
“Dad told me, but I forgot,” Lelia said with a calm that put a chill down her mother’s spine. Lily was aghast that after all the times she and Humon tried to instill into their daughter's mind the absolute importance of being prepared for the ceremony, she still didn’t know all the details.
“I can’t believe this! You have four days left, Lelia! Why can’t you understand that you can’t leave this to chance? It’s like thinking you’re going to figure out the lines of your role on opening night while the curtain rises! Good grief, if you can’t take this seriously, why do we even bother!” Lily said.
“Why do you?!” Lelia snapped. “Nobody understands how much pressure I’m under! You’re all pestering me, and I have to go through the ceremony, and Ael is being so obnoxious! I can’t even have my room all to myself, there isn’t a moment’s peace in this house!”
Lily retreated, she didn’t want to stress out Lelia unnecessarily.
“I know, sweetheart, we’re all a little nervous. You’re going to look absolutely beautiful, darling!” she tried to mollify her daughter.
Lelia’s mood changed suddenly and she remembered she was starving, so she skipped out to the Prayer Hall to see if there was anybody in the kitchen, hopefully producing yummy treats.
She found a tray of warm chamomile cakes on the table, fresh out of the oven, ate a couple of them, asked sister Therese for a glass of milk and forgot about her problems.
She spent the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen, watching sister Therese prepare the communal meal, discussing recipes and techniques and suggesting items to be added to the menu. For a few hours the kitchen became her little peaceful haven, away from ceremony preparations, lavender gowns, nagging mothers and annoying little sisters.
Vlor Consular Mission in Airydew, Terra Two, July 21st, 3245
Sis,
This is so exciting, I can’t believe mom took my suggestion to write letters seriously, I really wanted to give you something very special for this one in a lifetime event!
I’ve been thinking about being half cloud for a while. Mom and Purple think I’m wasting my time pondering on what it means to be what we are, hybrids of sorts! I think quite the opposite: if yours is an extraordinary experience, why would you want to keep it to yourself instead of sharing it with the people you love so that they can understand you better and maybe benefit from it?
So, without further ado, a bit of trivia from the Simplex Cloud:
Last week I was invited to participate in the Cloud Simplex Resonance; we got the notification through the public address charge flows, which I learned pretty much means that attendance is mandatory. Dad was beaming with pride, of course, child prodigy, high hopes for the future and all.
Since I haven’t yet reached the age of Ascent, and therefore I don’t really have a permanent bonding covalent cloud selection, I was evenly distributed over several Simplex Clusters, which is a lot more exciting, because you don’t get stuck in a single cohesion and can switch to another activity when the clouds invariably get long winded.
I got to help out in the Multiverse Physics Library to overhaul the structure of the records. As you know, the clouds tend to get sloppy when it comes to restoring the time strands to the right order and/or backing up the records, and this tends to make a mess of paradoxes that the Permanent Library Cohesion abhors passionately. The temporary cloud cluster I was working with had to painstakingly untangle the space-time strands and loops, I didn’t even know the loops existed, live and learn, right? For all we know, Purple genes may have evolved in one, it gets so hard to make sense of what space-time you are following when they’re all knotted together like a skein the cat chewed up, no wonder the Library Cohesion is mad! This thankless work gets sooo boring after a few Rotations it can put you to sleep. After straightening out a few hundred multiverse strands I used a moment of confusion to skip out to the Radiance Amplification Cluster and worked on tectonic stabilization for a while, until a cloud made a request for some of my covalent components to complete the analysis cluster for a newly encountered sentient solid, class C.
It was a species from the Second Quadrant, a non-expiring manifold entity with unrestricted intelligence expansion. It got really great ratings for establishing contact: fair for communication aptitude, fair to high for benevolence, and high for multi-dimensional plasticity, right up the clouds’ alley, so to speak. They didn’t know whether to establish communication because the C class species coexisted with a symbiont host, class H, a non-expiring state locked animated solid, dimension constrained and charge inert.
I thought the combo looked eerily similar to our coexistence with Purple, and tried to make the point to the Sentient Life Coherence that their relationship with Terra Two turned out reasonably well, but I only managed to make everyone uncomfortable in the process. The Simplex loathes lapses in protocol and I think they are very eager to gloss over the haphazard start of our diplomatic relationship. The part that made them more uncomfortable than anything was me advocating for my human heritage. As far as they are concerned, I am simply a cloud who can switch to solid state at will, so my body is not something they usually tend to pay any attention to, since they consider solid state an inferior level of existence. It got awkward really fast, so I bid my adieu and skipped out to the closest assembly I could find, which happened to be involved in compiling lists for emergent clouds. If you think cleaning up time strands is boring, you haven’t tried distributing selections of bonding covalences to emergent clouds. Because I already skipped around too much and it was time for me to reassemble, I got stuck there for a while, until Dad, who is blessed with a permanent position in this exciting cluster decided it was time for me to go home.
Again “going home” created confusion among the present covalences who understood that I should go back to my established cluster and dispatched me to review a proposal for charting the Vega Constellation. I got sidetracked half way to that cluster and ended up designing progenitor group options for a new cloud assembly. You’ll be happy to know a proposal will be submitted to the First Circle Fusion Impetus, awaiting grace. The assembly’s tentative name is Mijr, and it has an anticipated cloud scale of 900,000,000 Lower Chorus and Power bonds, valent ranks 2 through 4; its projected outcome leads to the Second Circle, Council of the Powers, Valent Rank Four. The proposed baby cloud is expected to receive the First Circle’s blessing:)
This is when Dad, who had to put aside his work to figure out where I ended up, found me again, uttered a refining resonance and closed the reverberation loop, action that dumped me next to mom, just in time to sort about five hundred placement cards for your Bonding ceremony.
I don’t know how to describe being in the Simplex Cloud, but I keep getting this image of Alice going through the looking glass. I guess I can say that I went through my looking glass, it shattered, and in the process I left a million reflections on the eternal clouds of Vlor. If you asked me which Alice is the real me, I wouldn’t know, probably both.
I love you, sister, and can’t wait to collaborate with your cloud in the Simplex, it is very exciting work, you’ll see, at least part of it, anyway. I think your big ceremony calls for a little more formal salutation so I’m going to end my letter in traditional Vlor fashion.
Blessings of eternal wisdom,
The Ael Cloud, Custodians of the Powers, Germinals of the Lower Chorus, Vertical Valent Rank 2–3
