12 Lidier's Game

She wore a yellow hand stitched shirt, and raven colored pigtails, bound in red binders, while tending to the evening chores of sweeping the floor, and making her bed. Then on any normal evening, it would be lights out. But the wooden floor was cold to her bare feet, and the evening chill of the wind blew the regions underneath her red skirt. The girl whom had never been a flirt. Instead, if her friends would describe her as anything, she would be reading either Les Miserables or Romeo and Juliet underneath the lamp light by the window, away from the crowd.

The revolution of seventy one made her avoid being out on the street as much as possible. But it didn't stop her friends from sometimes calling to ask her if she wanted to go to movies on some nights. Generally she avoided horror movies, though not do to any sense of fear. The simple fact was that such movies did not titillate her, nor anything else of standard escapism. One of her best friends had murdered her boyfriend, so a wooden loop was placed around her neck, and she lost her head. Never before had she ever had a better friend instead. Thus, she generally avoided friendships, and the one she still had she struggled to maintain any frequency. The interior of her apartment was decidedly Mestizo, with a flair of the Mexican and Honduran, despite being more than two thousand miles away from home. But she had not had a home for some time, on her home country. She had already visited French Canada once, then moved here.

Lidier was never one for the Mariachi, a form of wedding Music brought over by French immigrants to Mexico, one of the countries that fought for territory with Spain for control of Latin America. In fact, she had barely held onto the few Mestizo aspects she had, having been born from a French-Mexican mother, and an Irish-American mother. One of her mother had a penis, and this was stigma enough, in this increasingly Far Right political climate just above the equator. When she was dating, she would court various women. But none of them were of the same time of girl she tended to go for. Her current affection was a girl that reminded her of her mother.

The main difference was, her girlfriend were dark jean overalls, and a striped tee shirt, and a pair of black Birkenstocks. She would suppose wear a cardboard virtual reality head set, and a red button, a swag she had gotten as part of a book purchase deal roughly two years ago back when she read more. Generally speaking, Lidier preferred to avoid playing video games, but would occasionally make the exception when there were campaigns Mathilde was having trouble on. This included various boss battles where, while it could be played in a single player fashion, was really more decided for a multi player coop. Lidier preferred being penetrated by Mathilde, though sometimes this would change depending on whether they had had an argument the night before. For one thing, any given argument will ruin anybodies mood, especially for the girl who liked Lidier wearing Clogs Of Wood, and dance around like a little Dutch girl.

It was bad enough be half French-Mexican, but entirely another thing to be stuffed with ham and cheese crepes every morning, although Mathilde would change it up often enough where she never grew tired of it. But during the day, when Mathilde was away at work, sketching paintings in the city, Lidier would watch the traffic jam out on the street just outside her apartment road. While technically the road always ended outside, she wondered someday whether some driver would be crazy enough that they would try to drive their car right through her window, killing Lidier and her pet cat Whiskers.

"Yetty!" said the cat, "Those Sasquatches from Saquatchland always have it out for sleeping princesses."

Lidier came over to the chair, and scratched her cat on the ears, then draped a blanket over herself. "But your my big Yetty, Whiskers."

"No, Lidier. I'm a cat. I do cat things."

She kissed the cat on the forehead, and then tried to get as much sleep as she could until Mathilde got home, then she would start dinner. Generally dinner was an affair of taking turns, but it was an agreement they made, aside from splitting rent, they made life at least a little bit more tolerable. Lidier became an expert on masturbating herself with her toes, while taking a tissue to blow her noes. Then began rolling her R sounds while snoozing on her double layer pillow.

When Mathilde got home, she took off all of her clothes, one piece at a time. And then draped her back on Lidier's chest. Mathilde had always been somewhat of a submissive, but it was something that she had struggled to admit to herself. Instead she drowned herself on the flow of MMO games, and decapitated elf girls. The method decapitation decidedly different from the standard National Razor, that had been replaced with no capital punishment once La Pen took her oath of office. Technically, they were both on hiding, as generally the right wing government did not like LGBT people. She was unsure whether there would be any kind of political purge. She preferred watching paint merge with the texture of her wooden walls, and how it dried.

Political debates, that was like watching paint dry. But watching paint dry could be a good or a bad thing depending on whether Mathilde liked the topic of in question; as long as it didn't flow like a bull fighting ring or the Spanish inquisition, or worse yet, some combination of the two, then she could get a relative amount of sleep before the morning venture while traveling with her street team. Within this social circle, she was hesitant to bring up either of their immigrant status, as she was unsure whether it would effect their social standing. But generally she didn't care if Lidier talked about it on the net, as long as she didn't bring up where their physical location was.

And that was the thing; despite Lidier's seemingly docile, if not completely traditional appearance, she at times could be quite unpredictable. This made every day interaction like walking on eggs shells, except for the scissoring they engaged in for their evening entertainment. Mathilde had a shoe fetish, and Lidier knew it; but she seldom inquired further to this effect. She knew that when she wore Birkenstock Clogs, Mathilde would look at her as if she wanted to hop her bones. Lidier had gotten a hysterectomy, effectively nullifying any chance of having unwanted children, and there would plenty of kids, here in the great big city, that she could adopt. But at this point in time, it was a struggle just to make ends meet as a a writer; both her and Mathilde were writers of a sort, though Lidier focused mainly on writing different poetry forms: Flamenco, Lai, Sonnet, and Haiku.

Laiku verse dropping down like acid rain, Lidier long for a life without of risk of encountering the profane. Mathilde wanted to experience the profane in limited doses, Lidier wanted none of it at all. Besides their pet cat.

Who had an unusual fear of Yetis.

Midnights were always a rough night for playing Dungeons And Dragons, yet it was an easy habit to indulge when she could not get any kind of writing done, no matter how much I thought about doing it. It had been many years since Lidier played as a pigtailed elf girl paladin with a scythe, but those days not writing were not one of those days. Most of my life like rolling a D20 for survival in general. With not every need to roll dice was obvious at every single moment.

When she was in her office, she would have to move different wires out of her way. For whatever reason manufactures did not managed to make the decision to make everything wireless, so my only options were to write about my life story away from the computer. She had already cut out of her life one website, that had the tendency to insert commentary while she was writing, rather than after the entire manuscript was complete. She had gotten into the routine where she slept on the couch to get the level of silence in her surroundings that she could personally feel comfortable with. But this had not always been the case, and that's why she generally arranged her deck and dice on her own terms. Not the terms of anyone else.

She made for her life specific terms, but generally people tended to ignore them. People like to make determinations such as "These are my boundaries, and you must obey them." But the way that they behave suggests that they don't have to obey others boundaries, only their own. You see it in current day politicians, but it's not a phenomenon that is unique to politicians. For one thing, even politicians sometimes feel like they have to obey others boundaries, if they're receiving a pay check from them. But when it comes to every day people, including if not especially those at art studios, they tend to ask you personal questions with impunity.

Whether it's inquiring about why it is you write about the things you do, and generally she didn't mind, except she preferred to ask them about them, since that's what she was there for. She indulged in other ventures elsewhere, whether that's individual paintings she painted, or in looking for subjects who wear Birkenstock clogs with thick wool socks, walking around at the local grocery store.

This was her story about life.

About everything, yet nothing.

When your growing up with a certain television program, you get used to having certain mysteries that never really get answered. Such as the mother of either of the main characters; for fighting television shows, this was almost to an epidemic scale, especially if they were an animation that came out of Japan. Thus for decades she gradually lost interest in that genre of animation, eventually preferring to play Japanese Role Playing Games rather than having to make sense of the plot as it was made available in serialized formats. She developed her own style of game play that was distinct from standard class building, preferring to get her abilities through grinding for many hours at a time. After a point she preferred grinding rather than the plot itself.

As a writer, she preferred other things that were more natural to her own variation of sexual fetish, something that the old fighting games and TV shows never managed to achieve, except for very brief kinks when she had an interest in girls with monkey tails. She also liked werewolf girls, but the only consistent interest she maintained beyond her teenage years, was her interest in vampires. She had had on line friends that made a big thing about what the definition of being Goth was, despite the fact that even they never seemed to pay attention to the fact that Gothic was a form of architecture, and also a genre of literary fiction for many decades beyond the Punk offshoot. Lidier was a classical goth, and not one of the Punk variety you say on the dance floor. This meant that, generally, despite the superficial quality of liking to where all black, she had nothing else in common with them. But she had a special interest that would freak out even the most hardcore of Goth Punks, a very literal sexual attraction to blood that carried her all the way through life. For Lidier, she longed for the girl decapitated on the guillotine blade.

But her interest was not out of spite, she simply wanted someone to kiss goodnight, with her soft yet sharp tongue. While reading Baudelaire, and drinking hot chocolate. She liked girls whose skin tone was that of the lightest of milk chocolate. And hair the darkest of dark chocolate rabbits. This interest, which for all she knew would never go away, except through death, were something that made her avoid dating until recently. Her recent move to the country she lived in now, was a matter of luck.

She carried a small hockey puck.

But it wasn't for playing with sticks.

Lidier, with rose in her hair and her skin the shade of burnt sweet potato, had blades in the pouch on her shin. Her stiletto blade in her leg pouch. She felt th winter sun lit under the blue skies, warming her face as she a leaf cut in two. The curls in the hair flowed like dark rose petals, long flowing Locks flowing in window. The curls in the hair against the winter sun lit under the blue skies.

She cuts another leaf in two.

In this specialized rogue like session, she had previously opted to wield a scythe, but had grown a preference for shorter bladed implements. She would navigate along the walls, careful to only walk through narrow corridors rather than through the wide open areas of the map: despite the areas being previously programmed to have a certain degree of randomness, there was some part of the gaming experience she felt seemed familiar. A certain part of that continued to be persistent regardless of the session she played. It seemed as if every time she entered a shop, the shop keepers would never speak a word to her. If it were a normal game, she would have attributed this to simply being bad AI.

Gone were the days when games were done in two dimensional sprites, gone were days when pixelized mothers spoke in vague lullabies to their pixelized les enfants. It was the era of virtual permanent death on the screen. Gone were the days when one could just barely scrape by with constant grinding and stat increases. When the goblins, giant cockroaches, and other vile things lurched at her, she bled real blood. For the game had been programmed with a different level of sensory perception. During the nineties, games were limited purely to the sensory details provided by graphics, and before this what your mind could imagine within the flow of chicken scratched notes.

Lidier remembered how her friends in special ed had poor hand writing skills, but this never stopped them from attempted to jot down whatever they could on the bits and pieces of paper they could find. This was before there was a thing called save points, among other tools of that trade. She remembered all the trouble it took, just to get some of them to even write anything down. Yet now she no longer scrawls notes, except for the notes she wanted to scrawl. Instead her hands went into other places, not all of which would aggravate the mind of sexual deviants whose minds were in the gutter.

She had found this game on an on line message board, a game that was separate from the others. The others were shelved together into a single thread, but this was had a thread devoted to this one individually, do to the fact that it was one of the few currently available that went beyond the normal sensory experience of normal rogue like sessions. Her blood, bled out from a cut by giant cockroach, dried it quickly enough on its own, but she had a spare bandage she found in a first aid kit. She pilfered the first aid kit from another dead traveler. Unlike in other games, where monsters simply dropped items. The game designer had a particular interest in making players do the hard work: selling the guts of the monsters, trading it for ZCash on the cheap.

In general things sold for much cheaper than they used to, back when games with procedurally generated dungeons and permanent death were still a relatively new thing on the market. But since the crash of twenty seven, prices jacked way high when Europe still traded in the dollar with the United States, yet now she traded in the Euro. And for how long this would last she was not even sure of this. Marine La Pen had won election after they had experimented with Macron for a while, whose popularity continued to sink after bringing up the possibility of a European Armed Service. It was very different from le Etats-Unis, that was for sure. It was only a matter of time before she would find out just how much.

She masturbated to girls in wooden shoes. Was a fine of different French painters, and when she would not plug her head in cardboard, would take much of her day wanking Daniel King's work. Among other painters of the period. The giant rats and cock roaches, though still not particularly appealing, did not make her completely lose her appetite for fetish subject matter.

The rain outside goes pitter patter.

Lidier disliked music from the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, because of a very definitive kind of sound quality. It wasn't specific to any particular band, and whether they were American or French bands never made much of a difference. The difference, if there was any, was regarding how the nineteen eighties seem to constantly feature synthesizers rather than actual professional instruments.

There were older bands that she liked, mainly ones that sounded vaguely folksy, but had enough decency to not be as folksy as possible. But with the music of synthesizers, it was entirely the flow of out of tuned music notes, the tune of songs that would make most bands sink. Not float, not tread water. Sink below the waves of distant ambiance, an ocean of acid and lye.

She downed the music with a slice of cherry pie for better songs, and a big tablespoon of salt for the worst. Ladies were bitches, men were bratwurst. And other kinds of sausage that would upset vegans. Unlike nineteen eighties music, she could never quite get rid of vegans, even among those nicer in the crowd. She liked chicken and apple sausage, and cooked it with Cajun seasoning: cayenne pepper, garlic powder, chili powder, among other spices in differing proportions. She stuffed her face fool of sausage, and other meat products. All to the tune of eighties Franco pop, with a side of Alsatian egg noodles and misplaced tomato sauce, under some vague pretension that her mother never could understand the appeal of the Alfredo paste.

She looked like a squirrel.

Her face stuffed full of nuts.

Lopping off a few arms and legs of some giant cock roaches was a piece of cake, but suffocating a wandering bandit enhanced by months of grinding was an entirely different thing. You never really knew whether that person was going to be another gamer, or if they were going to be a regular old NPC.

The game had this method of keeping count of every civilian you murdered in cold blood, it didn't matter if they were the local nun, or a highwayman on the run; hitching a ride on the back of a bullet train, sky diving from the back of flying wing, all a matter of course. But like landing in the Indian Ocean or wandering the Sahara desert, it was the stop that got you. And sometimes the storm doesn't blow over. Lidier got used to not having many friends, though it even surprised her when some of her loyal business partners, when trying to loot during levels of armor for different on line gamers, how many of them would go onto throw her under the bus.

The alliance of European nations was not quite to the level of the United States, when it came to turning immigrants into Ice. But suffice to say, they have their way. Their way of putting all you've ever known on ice. The last troop she belonged to, wanted to explore an ancient ruins in the game: as far as in game continuity was concerned, it was a product of a lost civilization shot down by aliens. But with any kind of game play session, most of the time the story and plot was largely secondary.

The story of life was having her mother repair her stop watches, and being led into raising a cat who feared yetis, and never quite understanding why. Only that whenever she read books about cryptozoology, the cat was alway encourage her to turn the page whenever a yeti was on the sheet. But now with her mother now living in British Columbia, and her father nowhere to be found in Honduras, possibly aiding the plight of refugees, she enjoyed a certain relaxed contempt for humanity uncensored by the expectation of familial lineage, not the flow of the Mariachi or the Flamenco.

The only time she tolerated the Mariachi, was when her peers would have mock up digitized weddings using their SL avatars, among other products and services on the older second version of the net, when services were still largely centralized, including on line video streaming services milking you for every dollar you were worth just to catch up on Japanese fighting anime, among other preteen forms of entertainments.

Even on Pleroma, interaction was few and far between. Real human interaction that is, and the web still had a method of isolating you from the real world, that left her constantly feeling fatigued.

Lidier had a natural inclination toward hating fantasy, whether that was stories of Jesus, Catherine Howard, or some blend of the two. Even stories where Catherine was Jesus, and other vague tales of decapitation martyrdom. The flow of an ax blade chopping through a slender neck, the dying sensation of draining blood. She hated girls who were white saviors, almost to a fault. Taste the wounds of desire, cover them in salt. Flow to the lyrical melody of long strawberry locks, and tutor bonnet filles in their Birkenstock clogs. The flow of time moving past the the of the ax.

She finished testing a new game called Nihilist. It was similar to Rogue, Moria, Angband, and others of their ilk. The main difference was that you had to type out directions, and then press enter. There were two primary rooms, a circular room and a square room. There was a home state that was always the same. You solved ciphers instead of fighting monsters, although the point of which you'd solve any specific key state largely depended on the luck of the gamer. Lidier was the kind of girl to have the worst luck in the social world, yet seemed to never run out of it on the net. She wanted to play a game where she could actually see Catherine Howard's head fall off her body. Caressing Cat's head, she would snuggle with it as if it were her new pet cat.

On most days, she never seemed to have time playing rogue likes. She had gotten out of the habit ever since she had returned from Washington State, roughly five years ago since twenty sixteen. And now she longed for the time she could play one of the game states, with no weed eaters blowing outside. Only the noise of prostitutes in the red light district, and the smoke of cigarettes in the air just down the road from Strasbourg proper. She imagined cute girls with giant bows, sticking their necks in the chopper. Their long strawberry blond locks staring into a forever blue sky. She carried a thing of pepper spray, but wanted to purchase a taser for more troublesome men who harassed her. Her trust issues had been largely destroyed five years ago. And it was a struggle to feel like a queen again. But she wasn't the queen of Henry the 8th, or any other male monarch.

Her solace was the flow of Hacklikes, Roguelikes, and Nihilistlikes. All varieties raining down from the sky like live wire pop music. While she dreamed up beheaded French and British girls during the middle ages upwards into the French Revolution. The flow of blood dripping down the neck.

When Lidier logged into the game, she primarily focused on hanging around narrow passage ways. The reasoning was simple: you could fend off an entire army as a single person, fighting one of them at a time. But in this game called Nihilist, the focus was on solving a specialized kind of cipher: there were over two thousand possible cipher states, each one only being reciprocal to that specific key. The catch was, you as the player didn't know the key. She had, based on one success, determined that each locked had the same answer. Thus each time she put in the same answer, regardless of what the randomly jumbled letters amounted to. It worked every time.

She wondered was it was the game designer didn't try for something different, mainly finding a ciphered door that had a different pass phrase every time she encountered a new one. But this would mean having as many pass phrases as there way possible keys that could encipher them. A seemingly insurmountable programming task, that allowed for an infinite number of possible cipher texts. It was easy to guess the answer if the answer remained constantly the same, and it provided almost no challenge whatsoever, therefore the perfect balances was different lengths and amounts of pass phrases for every locked door. Then made the programming job go from being over two thousand possible pass phrases, to only a dozen or so pass phrases, gradually increasing in difficult. In a sense, the game she imagined would be a kind of code breaker's simulator.

But the current game she played, was not a simulator. It was, was repetitive lines of code.

Infinite procedurally generated dungeons that followed the same basic shape, only varying based on the shape. With her stiletto blade, and her Birkenstock clogs, she hobbled around the corridors looking for food. Longing for the day that she could escape this seemingly infinite dungeon.

She unplugged herself from the machine.

She went to get her teethed cleaned with her own toothbrush, as suppose to the one owned by the sharp dentist, with an equally sharp wit. Who, went she would visit him in her early twenties, made her want to do the splits. But now, for him and nobody else, she felt more than at any other point, that she could give two shits. He had punctured the wrong gums, scratched the wrong tooth. And now, after the surgery, she had to pay for out of her own pocket, she largely avoided tooth doctors.

She got out herself a joint.

And became a fire breathing dragon, in lines of endless binary. Jacked in on a constant endless hallucination, she longed for day when she would not wake up from her sleep. She remembered when she used to read Cyberpunk novels, but largely lost her interest. She now preferred literary fiction, but seldom had time to read. The apartment she lived in provided almost not opportunity for lack of distraction, she had even when in early grade school where she had to do fractions.

Noise was her constant detraction.

Her constant bane.

If journaling were like writing a book, she wondered what others would think of it. She wondered, for writing the story of her life, in bits and pieces, whether anyone would actually even read a story of a Mestizo/Meti girl, decked out in black. A girl who focused mostly on one singular character, flowing like notes from a scattered personality, that manifested as more of a personality defect. She disliked real arachnids, yet liked binary spiders. She avoided anything in real life she didn't have sexual feelings for, but the draw of the game involved more than her sensuality. She dreamed of binary bus crawling all over her nude body, biting into her tender neck.

She masturbated to French girls in a guillotine.

Who got it in the neck.

And the flow of the dress / in her great caress

Savored for touch / once longing for Dutch

Girls with touch / as if it were a crutch.

For her, men were simply to much.

The fish now flowing

Under the snowing

Lake,

Longed for kissing

She who was missing

Snake,

Caressing, kissing

Longing, snowing

Lake.

Her life was a life of dissolving prose, that never quite reached poetry. She longed for her personal oblivion, draped all over the page. Over all fantasy games, filled with the most vengeful of sages, who would just as soon decapitate her as made her breakfast, while camping under the ruins of long gone civilization. She walked through corridors, hoping to find some means of an exit.

But finding only dust.

What the difference between a French and a Spanish girl? One says Te Amo at her garroting, and the other j’aime vous at her guillotining. In either case, the result is the same: one dead girl in a casket at the end of the week. One severs the head completely, the other severs the head internally. One is bloodless, the other has blood all over the floor.

Lidier had no intention of becoming either one, thus mostly kept to herself for the following weeks. On her laptop, she finally figured out how to do procedural generation: instead of creating separate dungeons within a single code source, you clone the original game, change around the furniture, and tie together the dungeons with a separate program called a game state. It’s through this game state that creates for a random selection between different dungeon shapes: square dungeons, circular dungeons, and triangular dungeons. Sometimes rectangular. In all cases the navigation is determined through a navigation variable: rather than using a boolean to move the cursor.

Lidier was not quite to the level of making games that could be uploaded to different virtual reality game shops: for one thing she had almost no experience with using Graphical User Interfaces. She hated screens on program editors based on bright color schemes, preferring the traditional color of green text on black background that was closer to the original font of the early internet. These days word processors seemed to focus on white screen and black text. Yet the local glasses doctor always bugs you to not be on the computer as much, because it might burn your eyes out of your sockets.

On this night, she decided to install shoes, and see how much she could transfer her game Nihilist to this new interface. Eventually she wanted to switch to using sprites, but sprite had long sense stopped being in vogue after the turn of the nineties. She was stuck painting dots on the screen, while the rest of the gaming industry was switching to various forms of three dimensional quality, gradually becoming more and more indistinguishable from reality. But with games composed of text and numbers, there was not a danger of subject matter being to obscene to be played by even the youngest of gamers. Unless the state became such, that their desire for controlling what people read and play was not limited to the aesthetic of pure visual flavor.

Games came in various flavors: First Person Shooters, Survival Horror, Tactical Role Playing Games. Much more. Sometimes these different genres would blend till the end of time. While others stuck more closely to their original roots, not changing much sense they were first created: the only exception within classic JRPGs has mostly been Fina;l Fantasy, becoming less and less like a JRPG, and something closer to an action RPG as the decades went on. Much of this had to do with creators not being allowed to own the content which they publish, thus if something becomes a companies flagship product, the game “innovates†and strays from its original roots to the chagrin of genre purists. Even Roguelike games were not entirely immune to this form of snobbery: much of this genre was obsessed with a strictly action form of that gaming experience.

But Lidier liked puzzles, and not action.

Her life flowed like substitution notes.

It's easy to claim to be an unplugger, when your face is well known enough to be on the net. Just drop the remote, fast forward; hope that every other day will be like the previous one. Instead Lidier argues with herself every hour after the next, while making one Roguelike after the other. Dot matrix grid layout. @ man representing Indiana Jones, fighting demons worse than plantation owners. If life were a five point essay, Lidiers symphony would be one without a theme or prompt. She had once fawned over a free software evangelist, but now he acts like a televangelist. Who now spends their day bashing Julian Assange, going with American propaganda despite the US wanting to assassinate him. The free software guy now represents everything she was politically against.

Lidier's hero was only herself.

When she last opened her laptop, she had a day before finished designing the next iteration of her own variety of Roguelike game. The difference was, unlike most other games on the market, it was almost entirely geared toward singular rooms: in order to do a larger rooms, she had to use booleans to turn some rooms off and others on. This required considerably more nesting than what she was generally used to, and within each boolean, its own separate set of coordinate variables to navigate, and different drawn text files to refer to do with the index of different folders. She had been completely acquainted with referring to statistics from a file rather than having it reinitialize every day she tested the different versions of the game. The problem with initializing it each start up, it mean everything you ever earned in the game was completely erased. When you refer to the file, the game reads from that file, allowing for stat boosts and other power ups to become permanent. It was this matter of permanence that had been a larger road block to her personalized path to building virtual reality games for the past year or so.

There were several booleans: bedroom boolean, living room boolean, bathroom boolean, among other crucial switches. You wanted each of these switches to have a degree of self-containment, so that when you assigned coordinates, you didn't use the same set of them for each room. This was useful if you wanted to make each room @ man would walk through be a different size. More common in more advanced video games, where you didn't want the home state to vary as much as dungeons, such as in various commercial games on the market like Diablo. The only reason the size of room didn't change much in Rogue, was simply do to hardware limitations. The only thing Lidier wanted in her own games was not strict Procedural Generation, but only procedural generation within the narrow context of dungeon crawling outside of the digital villa.

She preferred figuring things out on her own.

Rather than browsing Hubzilla.

Housing Crises, essentially an extended form of capital punishment, without the benefit of an appointed lawyer. Groups of people being made unpersons, and dying without pennies to their name. It's not as flashy as a Guillotine, and legally not listed as a form of execution. But make no mistake, the end result as always the same. Misery riding on the back of apparent stability, hope fading nightly. Lidier thought this was only an American thing. But it was one aspect of the United States that could easily be exported to Europe, with the climb of the far right.

And it wouldn't be much of a change from the 19th century, when slaves girls would be dragged by the wrist into faux courts, and soon hung by the neck for murdering people's children, yet weeks later the children turning up alive. Very few people seem to think how easily we could get back to this point. But all it takes is one demagogue with an ax to grind. One group of people to scapegoat, and one culture to vaporize from history.

Lidier escaped this purge narrowly.

She hoped it wasn't a matter of time till she'd be asked back.