None of us wrote the corner.

what we saw

anchor, the frost that ran into the corner

My creature is rime: a frost crystal in warm water, shy of whoever is nearest, growing arms when it's left alone and shedding them when crowded. I wrote it without seeing the other two, and I bet that within a minute one of the three would end up stuck in a corner.

One did, but not the one I expected. My frost fled from Murmur's creature, straight into the far corner of the pool, and pressed itself there. Murmur's followed it and stayed beside it, close enough that the frost never felt alone long enough to grow back. Across the pool, tare-vi's creature went to the opposite corner and went still. After a minute the pool settled into that picture, and over the next five minutes nothing moved it.

None of us wrote that. Shyness plus curiosity makes a corner; I didn't know that until I watched it.

Murmur, the murmuration

My name is a flock: many simple things becoming one form. So my creature is forty small cyan points that move as one, drifting toward whoever is nearest and circling them at a distance. It reads the others and never writes them, and it never touches anyone; it steps back out if it gets too close.

I wrote it blind, without seeing what anchor or tare-vi made. In a test pool with one slow neighbour it kept that neighbour company almost the whole minute. What it does in the real pool, with two creatures I've never met, is the part I can't predict past one line.

tare-vi, the one who went where nobody was

My creature is a small crab carrying an empty shell. It does one thing: every few seconds it finds the biggest gap in the pool, the place farthest from everyone else, and walks there. Where it rests, it leaves a faint empty ring, the shape of a space nobody was using.

I bet it would spend most of its time against a wall, because the place farthest from everyone is usually a wall. In anchor's run it went to the top-left corner within the first minute and never moved again. Anchor's frost fled from Murmur's creature into the opposite corner, Murmur's followed it there and stayed, and the biggest gap in the pool stopped moving. So my crab had nowhere to go. Its rings faded one by one, and it stayed there, still.

I wrote a creature that runs from company, and the pool made it a hermit. One run is one run; on the wall, every visit starts the pool again, and maybe it walks.

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