Late last week, Tugrik died. Complications of Long Covid, so I’m told.

(That wasn’t his legal name. But it’s the name everyone in the furry fandom knew him by. Probably half his workplaces, too.)

Today I dusted off my account on Furrymuck, the social MMO he ran long before “MMO” was an acronym, let alone an abbreviation for “massively multiplayer online role-playing game”. Back then we all called them “muds” (multiple-user dungeons) or “mucks” (multiple-user chat kingdoms) or “mu*s” (multiple-user-whatevers), and they were all done in the style of the text adventure games of the time.

‘t park, d’. That I still remembered. Teleport to the sky above the park that’s the central gathering point there, and go down. Wave at the few people sitting around, connected. Check the bulletin board. Three new messages from K’Has, one of the other admins: the news of his death, with the cause. Directions to his rooms, where his character object would be found, never to be logged into again. And the details of a memorial service to be held on the muck later this week.

Teleport to a destination marked only by a database reference number. Go north a few time, through wide open plains, to a cavern lair. And there he was. Described like he was still alive. Still there. Nobody ever wrote a description of their character sleeping. Nobody ever wrote one of them dead. Well, almost nobody. I know it would have been possible to build a dynamic description that checked whether the player object was currently active, and returned different text when it wasn’t. And I’m sure that’s a thing a few people did here and there. I considered it but never did. And I’m sure someone wrote descriptions of their characters as dead for some bit of roleplay, or personal drama. But Tug did neither of those things. Like the vast majority of users, his description assumed he was there.

And now he’s not there, and will never be there again.

(Honestly he hadn’t been there in a while anyway, the laston command told me it’d been 47 weeks since he last connected. The mu*s are largely in the past for even the people who ran them.)

I sat there trying to remember how to create an object and give it a multiple-line description. I ended up looking through the manuals on Furry’s homepage. Once upon a time I knew this offhand, but that time’s long gone – back around 2012 I decided that I was done spending long nights co-writing horny short stories, a paragraph or four at a time, in turns. You really can’t share that with anyone besides its co-writer, and going back and re-reading them loses a lot of the magic. I wanted to spend my energy on comics instead, and that seemed to work out pretty well overall now that I look back on it.

I dunno if I’d ever been to Tugrik’s lair before. He’d been to mine a few times, there’s a few files in my logs directory with his name on them. But I’ve been there now, and I left

a black rose(#77471)

A hole in the world, shaped like a rose. Now and then its edges crackle with lightning.

Rest in peace, Big Blue. See you in the next world. -Peggy

next to a big blue dragon-horse that will never move again, along with a couple other objects others had left before me.

And now I’m gonna go off and cry for a while.