Who Lurks In The Nook Where Your Garden Grows.

What is the word for ‘autumn’, in the Erefeti tongue?

What does it synonymize with- with which word is it rung?

Why, perhaps it stands for orange, a saturated brown?

For that color is an alien, standing in the round-

A bitter sweet, a heartless heart, a scalpel smeared with rime.

The smiling nurse and knife and doctor, Others decked in lies.

Yes, autumn stands for ‘orange’- it ‘cares’, not caring if you die.

Could it be stacked with glinting gold, as bright as gilded leaves,

Leaves that whisper to the clouds above, drifting in the breeze?

Or glimmer in the gasping gills, of yellow carp- who sigh-

At folders pressed and proper dress and never knowing why.

The duties of a daily task, and spreadsheets, digits, code,

From nine to five and dawn to dusk, fall hums a falt’ring ode.

Yes, autumn stands for ‘yellow’, for it is fading, dead, and cold.

Yet even in the sudden slush and swelt’ring, lingering heat,

Some verdancy remains, quite lush, and withers with the wheat.

A songbird's lilting singing sits astride a raven’s crow,

As Hunger glares at Reason, at the scales of weal and woe,

A vibrant glow and a fallen foe, applause and silent grip,

Sanity spiraling upward- oh fateful mental slip!-

Yes, autumn stands for ‘green’, my dear; it’s starving serendip.

And yet unmentioned goeth still, most august of the bunch,

The sky so heavy mountains cannot- scream- be- fore- they- crunch-

It murders hope with pleasant word, and kindles with a bite,

Flames of insufficient savvy, that burn past winter’s sight,

It lingers, lofty, in the sky, above the common fate,

Yet even denied sorrow, still itself it may debase.

Yes, autumn stands for ‘blue’, dear- it judges ‘retrobates’.

But the common year, so filled with cheer, is simple and is plain,

It passes with a shudder and it passes without name.

The grinding crush of daily tears which tear at heaven’s gate-

The blinding break for greatness, by the gardens, bars, and freight-

The nobility of paupers, and the common man’s one wish-

Autumn is made of moments, that are moments such as this.

Yes, autumn stands for ‘purple’, for it cannot be dismissed.

Autumn lacks in passion deep, and sorrows potent, strong,

It’s far from seasons of the weak; no, those are yet to come.

The world is filled with battle from the mouse to northern bear,

Those who do not save for winter, well, well they do not fair,

Cascades of leaves meander down, dancers in earthen throng,

And often war triumphant wields the sword of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

Yes, autumn stands for ‘grey’- don’t fear- it cannot stand for long.

There is yet a casteling still, that hasn’t been decided-

Decoded for the omen, that autumn has provided,

Of blood to dust and blossoms, of assorted hues and shades-

The cleansing of a century’s fine death-borne aulder stains-

The viper in the darkness- that shall never- again- hiss-

Autumn is made of moments, that are moments such as this.

Hello, Suthelit! That’s very flattering of you to say, and I’m glad that you received such a nice present!

And I don’t typically advise that you feed anything at all to it, as they’re generally capable of acquiring their own food, in their own time, unless you happen to live in a hospital- they’re like little cleaning helpers!- but, if you do, those beetles sound like they’d be a good choice; they’re one of the flytraps main food sources in the wild! Make sure that they’re not so small that the flytrap will feel like it’s wasting its time, and that it’s not so large that a leg sticks out!

Some modern flytraps can have lunch meat, but I didn’t develop those and I think that they’re a bad idea; even the flytraps that can manage it end up being sickly and small, because they aren’t getting the right nutrients. You don’t want your flytrap to be sickly and small, so feed it with beetles or don’t feed it at all! And try and make sure the beetles are alive; otherwise the trap won’t seal quite right. And even with modern trap sizes, I don’t think your big brother would quite fit!

> 2/2 the resemblance is caused by the object being the same object. For instance, a person touches something polluted, then decontaminates. The pollutant is removed as are some of the outermost layers of skin, but no change is made to anything deeper than the skin. For the Erefeti hypothesis to be the case, red cleaning would have to work unprecedentedly differently than all other cleaning processes. You imbecile.

Cleaning processes do, in fact, ‘have memories’.

The dirt that results from orange peels rotting is fundamentally distinct in its composition than the dirt that results from, say, apples, or dead animals, or the defecation of larger animals. It contains different nutrients, and it’s clearly distinct in character; the different types might even be different colors.

Red cleaning functions by replacing the polluted matter of a red’s body with clean matter, but it’s important to note that it happens to be a gradual process, and one that self-evidently does have traits carry over from red to person. It is *obvious* that ex-reds heavily resemble their other selves physically- to the point where they might be visually recognized as such- and it baffles me that anyone could think otherwise.

I assume that you’ve heard of the thought experiment of the patchwork quilt? Perhaps not, since it’s rather distinctly Erefeti in character.

Our military grays have something of a custom; each unit has a large, patchwork quilt, and whenever someone joins the unit they take off a section of one of their articles of clothing, and sews it on. Whenever someone leaves the unit- by retirement or circumstance or matters far less pleasant to contemplate- that bit of fabric is snipped off, and burned in a small, discrete pyre. The central question of the experiment is as follows; if, over the course of decades, a unit’s quilt comes to be composed of entirely new scraps, is it the same quilt?

The answer, as I’ve always considered it, is ‘no’.

In the same fashion, is someone unfortunately coming into existence as an ex-red, gradually transitioning over the course of the cleaning process from hateful monstrosity to living Amentan, the same as their past self? The answer remains ‘no’- but they’re still in roughly the same physical shape, and they’re still influenced by their unfortunate history, and by the mental shape of that history.