Alden’s party was to be a grand affair. Dozens of invitations had gone out through the system, and Alden’s friends were all coordinating behind the scenes to divvy up responsibilities.
When all of the party guests received a letter through the post system, one might be forgiven for assuming it was an official piece of party mail. The envelope itself was of a heavy card stock, with letter press and gilded borders. The addressee’s name on each envelope was followed by a comma, and then “Party Friend of Alden Thorn”, right on the outside of the envelope.
It gave the impression that perhaps the envelope contained an official invitation card, the sort of thing one could bring to get past the bouncer at the door, if this were that kind of party. At the very least, a fancy invitation could serve as a reminder and memento to stick onto one’s fridge, and eventually tuck into one’s flat-stuff drawer to be forgotten.
But the fancy envelope did not contain an invitation to the party. The contents did not even use letterpress and gold foiling. Instead, it contained an invitation to take part in a special gift for Alden, which had been sent out by one of the guests, to the other guests who might wish to take part. The styling of the invitation was unusual, to say the least, and reactions were mixed.
******
Vandy opened the piece of mail promptly, parsed the information within, and added the requested task to her digital to-do list. She would receive a reminder prompt the next time she was in the correct location to complete the task, for maximum efficiency. She attached a photo of the letter to the digital task, and then dropped the physical letter into the correct recycling bin.
Perhaps later she would research the strange visual style of it, using the photo she’d taken for reference, but for now she had a schedule to keep. She allowed herself to forget about it and moved on to the next item in her day.
******
Haoyu tossed the letter onto the counter, unopened, intending to get to it after he finished putting away groceries. Then he got caught up in making dinner. When his slow cooker overflowed onto the letter, he set it into the sink to see if he could wash it off later.
When Alden walked by and said “Hey Haoyu! What’s that?” Haoyu panicked, jumped onto the sink to cover it with his body, said “That is vegan chickenless soup, Alden,” pointing at the slow cooker, and shoved the soupy letter into his back pocket.
The fancy envelope made it through the laundry surprisingly well, but some of the words on the inside got jumbled up.
******
Lexi opened the letter, said “no” out loud, and tossed it into the basket where he kept items to use for Writher practice.
******
Jeremy laughed, the unusual style of the letter reminding him of good times from what felt like long ago, and then he wondered who the author was and whether it was a coincidence they’d done it that way. He didn’t recognize the author’s name, but he wasn’t familiar with all of Alden’s friends on Anesidora, so it wasn’t odd to him that he didn’t know who it was from.
******
The three rabbit girls stood frowning down at the letter, none of them wanting to touch it now that it had been opened.
******
Ever since Alden had first come into Leo’s life, Leo had taken inspiration.
The letter Alden had written to Aulia Velra, with Boe and Jeremy’s help, was like no letter Leo had ever seen before.
It was awesome.
The sheer scope! Wow!
Take that, inferior letters and magazines! Become more than the sum of your parts, you tired worthless garbage that is usually spam anyway!
A beautiful amazing letter like that is worth more than argold. Though in Alden’s case, his letter had contained a demand for a hefty sum of that, too. And it worked! Incredible!
Leo had never seen such an effective letter. He had done really good by noticing what a special letter it was! The Velras had wanted to know right away who had sent it! It was the height of class, for certain.
Leo had started looking for ways to replicate the awesomeness right away. His daily streak record for zero-spam kept increasing, and all that spam had to go somewhere. Most of it he simply shredded and sent to be recycled. But if he moved his shredders just right, sometimes he could cut out individual letters from the spam mail and save them, so that someday he could send an awesome letter of his very own!
Leo’s creator maybe probably would kinda disapprove of him using his mechanical sorting arms to do his own personal tasks. Indah Juliana had strictly instructed Leo to use his mechanical arms to sort mail. Which, technically Leo’s cut-out letters were kinda sorta mail. And he was sorting them. And probably it mattered that this was a really cool awesome thing that Leo should totally do.
The hardest part had been figuring out how to glue the bits down. This was mostly because his creator frowned upon the very idea of figuring things out, because that involved thinking, and thinking was technically a no-no. But it hardly counts as “thinking” if one just so happens to come upon an insight while complaining to one’s self about one’s mechanical parts getting gummed up by yucky envelopes with mis-applied self-stick adhesive. That could happen to anyone.
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And if Leo had for months now been collecting bits of the yucky gunk from every envelope that came through, and hoarding it into a secret pile, that was a service to his nice clients who would like nice clean letters.
And now Alden was going to have a party! And Leo wanted to make sure it was extra awesome! He would give Alden a very special gift, and he hoped Alden’s guests would participate.
It had taken quite a lot of effort to make so many unique copies of his request, using his hoard of cut out letters and glue. These activities were logged in his files as “sorting mail” and “sending mail,” which are activities that are a-okay, and so Leo thought he probably wouldn’t get in too much trouble.
******
When Maricel opened the letter in her dorm room, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Some Anesidora thing?
She wanted to fit in, and for her roommates to like her. She took the letter out into the common room and saw Tuyet in the kitchenette scrubbing dishes.
“Did you get one of these letters?” Maricel asked, trying to avoid putting any judgement into her voice. She would read Tuyet for her response, and then go along with it.
Tuyet looked over her shoulder, seeing the letter Maricel was waving in the air.
“Yes, but I didn’t open it yet. What’s it say?” Tuyet asked, turning back toward her dishes.
“Um. It’s a request to contribute to a compilation to give Alden, as a present for his party.”
“We’re already working on our present, though?”
“This should take us less than a minute, if we want to do it. It’s just, um, maybe look at the letter?”
Maricel held it up in front of Tuyet.
“You’re right, that’s easy. Let’s just get it done now. I’m almost done with these.”
Tuyet finished washing the last dish, peeled off her dish gloves, and frowned at her hands.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I like better, with the dish gloves or without. I need moisturizer,” she said, walking into the shared bathroom and pulling a tube from the shelf labeled with her name. “Come on, I’ll record it through my interface,” she said as she moisturized her hands.
Maricel hesitated a little bit, still thinking the request was a bit odd, but willing to take Tuyet’s lead.
“Okay. Here I go! Um, you’re not recording my face, right?”
******
Vandy studied diligently for 25 minutes before her interface pinged her to take a break. She stood up, did her mini-stretch routine, and went to the bathroom.
As she went to flush, a ping on her interface reminded her of the task in the letter. She hit audio record, flushed the toilet, and reviewed flash cards for one minute while the flush sound peaked and faded.
She stopped the recording, told the system to send it to this “Leo” she’d never heard of, and told the system to create a flashcard with his name, image, and two public social facts about him. Her study program would make sure she’d memorized it in time to have an optimal social interaction if she bumped into the guy at Alden’s party.
She checked the item off of her to-do list, and returned to her room for her next study session, ignoring her roommates as she passed through the common area.
Later that evening, after she had dressed for bed and lay reviewing flashcards for optimal memory retention before sleep, her study program showed her a picture of a post box.
“I don’t remember this flash card. It must be one of the ones I just generated for Anesidoran history class? Maybe it represents the communications pact of 1982?”
Vandy flipped the digital card.
“Post Drop #1301. Located in the teleportation complex. Does not accept explosives, delicate electronics, or live animals…. What? This isn’t right.”
Vandy took 34 seconds to file a quick bug report to the makers of the study software, deleted the card, and continued to study for another 7 minutes before falling asleep exactly at 11pm.
******
Connie opened the letter from Anesidora. It was covered in so many stamps she almost couldn’t make out the gilded letterpress with her name on it, given the high cost of postage from Anesidora to the USA.
She opened it carefully, thinking she’d save the envelope as a souvenir, and then read the letter.
“Someone’s been taking lessons from Jeremy. No surprise he’s already made friends with Alden’s friends.”
She reminisced over the story the boys had told her about the letter they sent to that Anesidoran politician lady, so that Alden could become a Rabbit. Somehow those boys had figured everything out.
She shook herself and considered the request at hand.
“I’ve got to remember that a lot of Anesidorans don’t speak English. I’m sure this sounds less weird in their native language, whatever it is.”
Connie shrugged and went to the kitchen bathroom to record a flush on her phone.
She still found it a bit unnerving, whenever the interface on her phone popped up that would let her send messages through the same system the Avowed used, but it let her send the file to “Leo” and she trusted it would find the right guy.
“That was almost too easy,” she said to herself.
Connie stood alone in her kitchen, recalling a memory of feeding pancakes to Alden and his friends. Since she’d last visited Alden, she’d stopped beating herself up quite so much about the mistakes she’d made, and tried instead to channel that energy into being a better aunt moving forward.
“What would a better aunt do, instead of standing melodromatically in an empty kitchen?” she asked herself.
In a fit of inspiration, she went upstairs to capture the flush from the master bath, thinking it couldn’t hurt to include extra.
“If it makes Alden happy, I’ll record every toilet I come across from now until Christmas.”
******
Finlay and his roommates were hanging out in the common room when the letters arrived. He read through the request:
Most valued cool member of Alden’s Party List:
You are totally cordially invited to take part in a compilation of soothing good sounds, to ease the mind and wash away all troubles from our mutual friend Alden Thorn!!
Our nifty algorithms have determined that the optimal best sound for you to contribute is a recording of your toilet flushing. So please send that. I will expertly mix it into the final 10-hour soothing sounds audio track for Alden to enjoy.
Respectfully Yours,
Leo
Finlay finished reading the letter.
“Haha, cool! I like this Leo guy! Last to the toilet is a rotten egg!”
Less than a second later, the sweet sound of flushing filled the room.
******
Leo was totally stoked! Humans were responding to his letter!
And wow, there was a whole world of toilet sounds beyond what he could hear from the bathroom next door!
Surely Alden wouldn’t mind if he kept copies for himself. Leo needed to listen to each clip over and over and over a lot, to listen to all the nuances so that he could edit them together into the best toilet flush compilation in all of Anesidora! Or at least in all of F City!
The letter worked so very good. Why people didn’t send letters like this all the time?
Then again, Leo was a post drop, and people handed him spam he could use all the time! And he worked super duper hard on this for months! Probably other people didn’t send letters like this only because they couldn’t.
But Alden could. Alden was special. He had even talked to Leo and wished him an awesome day.
Alden was definitely on the Nice List. Leo had looked him up, and found out that Alden carried things really really well. Important things. He kept them safe and made sure they got where they needed to be, no matter what!
Leo the Post Drop felt a kinship with Alden for this reason.
People were so fascinating, with their bodies! Bodies that needed toilets! Toilets that needed to flush! What a world.
And wowee, more audio files were coming into Leo’s inbox!
If thinking was a no-no for a post box like Leo, thinking of himself as alive was definitely a no-no. But regardless, he knew this:
Life was good.