1 Title: Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
4 Tags: epistemic horror, deniably allegorical
7 In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers 9792 and 9794 in Umi's grand encyclopædia of Plain Speech creatures, but not necessarily respectively: I remember the numbers, but I can never remember which one is which.
9 Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squirrels were highly social animals. Much of their social lives
12 (well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech species 9792 and 9794.)
19 "I wish I had a special friend. Someone who understood me. Someone to share my secrets with."
21 And beside them, a friend or a mate
23 "But _I'm_ your friend. _I_ understand you. You can share your secrets with _me_."
25 "That's not what I meant."