EarthStar's shift had finished some half-an-hour previous; she was wandering, now, in no particular hurry to get back home. She needed some time to let her day soak in before she moved back into definite boundaries.

She pulled a tiny memo pad out of her pocket--all told, the lack of pockets was the thing she hated most about her uniform, and she was glad to be in pants now--and a pencil. She held it there for a moment as she walked, and wrote,

"Unfamiliar things
Surround me on every side
Some things stay the same"

She considered the words a moment--did "unfamiliar" have four syllables or five? She quickly decided that it didn't really matter.

"A child left alone
By circumstance; where to go?
There's no place like home"

This one made her pause a little more. She had meant it to be about a little girl who had misplaced her parents outside of the UFL hospital. After not too long her parents had come back to the hospital and found her, so everything was all right in the end. But . . . there was something else in there.

Neither time time nor the place, she chided herself, and turned the page, even though she had room for at least another haiku.

"A secret power
Words hold over each of us
Haiku is freedom"

She wasn't quite sure what this one meant. She imagine it had to do with some of the mentions of haiku in public records; she wasn't very far through, though, only to the second section of the "Church of Miho" bulletein. Haiku used to play a fairly sizeable role, it seemed, specifically so far as one poet named . . . Phaedrus? Phydreus? She couldnt' remember how to spell his name. And then it had helped DietWaterCzar, too.

It didn't seem to be brought up all that often anymore. She wondered if it still held the same power she used to. She'd have to work through more records to find out.

"One each side, they stand
Growling at ther enemies
Who are truly same"

She knew this for what it was--two faction members (labelled "NPC" on their charts--she wasn't quite sure what that meant, even though it had been explained) had come into the hospital after getting into a fight. One had a bunch of glass imbedded into his face; the other had a broken jaw. A pretty gnarly scene, actually. And EarthStar had seen each of them, heard each of them . . . and they each sounded _exactly_ the same.

She'd been told that that was common, and that it wasn't their place to get involved in faction politics, just to patch them up afterward. That had temporarily caught her off-guard--this was _politics_?--but then, remembering what she'd read in the records, it wasn't too surprising.

She moved her pencil to write again, but there was nothing more in her brain to write. She slipped the pad and pencil carefully back into her pocket, resolving to buy another pack of thumb-tacks or whatever they were--she was running out, since she was fastening so many haiku to her walls.

But first food. Yes. She was hungry.

She wanted . . . pie.