With a gentle click, Notification Bell switched off the chronometer’s built-in DC motor that was connected to a hammer-like apparatus specifically designed to incite annoyance from the mare.
In other words, she turned off the alarm.
With a grunt, she took the now-silent clock and squinted, finding in the dark that it was, as usual, half-past three. Or maybe it was half-past four; her muddled mind couldn’t really tell the specific angle the hour hand was in and the darkness didn’t let her read what number it was pointing at. She remembered that she had set the alarm to half-past three, but then again, there was a slight chance that she had thrashed in her sleep and had accidentally set the alarm hand an hour later. That had happened once; it hadn’t been a pleasant experience.
Nevertheless, she flopped back to her pillow and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw that the minute clock was already pointing upward. As her eyes snapped open and her mind fully awoken, she scrambled from her bed and fell to the floor.
The floor was cold, she realized, and it was actually quite comfortable to lie upon. The fall didn’t even hurt as much as back then in Equestria where her bed had had an actual frame and not just a spring-bed mattress atop a carpet that looked more like a fashionista’s failed attempt at winter toga.
Time isn’t waiting, she thought, then willed herself to stand on all fours. Shaking her head, she took in the state that her room was in.
Notification Bell lived in a three-by-three meters room. With the bed behind her, she could see a rectangular table in front of her holding a table fan and a few stacks of papers. The wall to her left was lined with four shelves, two of which held her notebooks and quite a lot of fiction that she hadn’t gotten around to reading, one held a battered radio, and another holding brick-a-bracks with a thin layer of dust on top. To her right was a wardrobe that held some clothing, her laptop, safekeeping, and other knick-knacks. Right next to the wardrobe was a mini-fridge and a watercooler respectively, holding solids and fluids alike that would keep her metabolism going or, as many would call it, an acquired state of not dead.
With how small and full her room was, many would call it cramped and claustrophobic—or, if they’re her flatmates, the most orderly and spacious-looking room in the entire building. Some had speculated that her room was neat and tidy because it was in her job description, while others had argued that she had gotten the job because she was a neat and orderly mare. Bell herself wasn’t able to answer that, because she had gotten the job as a custos quick enough before her room got into any state of disarray, by which moment she had too much time in her hooves that she got bored often enough to clean her room every so often.
Not mentioned before, the door to her room was right next to the table, which was her destination. And so, she walked out of her room, took a plastic basket of toiletries and a towel from a rack outside her room, and walked to the pair of bathrooms she shared with one other mare and two other women in the building.
As we wait for Ms. Bell to bathe, let’s take a brief look at the arbitrary stories and histories of her flatmates that had absolutely no correlation to this story whatsoever:
Annabelle Harman was a 25-year-old white woman with short blonde hair and blue eyes that was in her third year of attempting to graduate from mechanical engineering. That is, her parents had been asking why she hadn’t graduated yet since three years ago and was now in her seventh year in college. She went to the same university as Jenifer Smith, another flatmate of Bell’s.
Jennifer Smith was a 21-year-old woman with long straight black hair, dark brown eyes, and chestnut-brown skin. She was in her third year in psychology and was doomed to fail from her lack of attendance. The reason for this was because she had followed her heart too often to skip classes and join Annabelle and Pines to either go camping in some random forest or climb some mountain somewhere.
Oakeshott Pines was a 22-year-old earth pony mare with light brown fur, dark brown mane and tail, and a pine tree for a cutie mark. She was in her fourth year in arts and was ‘doomed to a life of unemployment’, as her parents and even professors had said. She, Jennifer, and Annabelle were active members of a local nature lover community which had taken so much of their time and energy to the point that college felt more like a part-time job over their full-time nature adventures.
Little did the three knew that they were going to live a very fulfilling life in the future as forest rangers, politicians, and global warming activists. They would be having major newsletters speculating their net worths and go to TEDtalks and plant hundreds of trees with their own hands and hooves and thousands more with the hands and hooves of people and ponies that would join their campaign.
But now wasn’t the time for them to know that. Now was the time for them to sleep and wake up in three hours only to stress out for the upcoming finals they didn’t even know the exact date of. Notification Bell knew that they were about to have their finals not because she saw them panicking, but because Annabelle had inexplicably turned religious and was asking her how to become a Catholic just last week, while the week prior she had been laughing at the sight of Bell reading the Bible.
Bell’s religion was, as she had realized, remarkable in its own right. She was probably the first-ever pony that had taken a human religion—most likely the only pony to have one, even. And the fact that no media had covered about it was a blessing she was grateful for in every waking moment because she had absolutely no idea how to explain, with how well-versed she was in Catholicism, that she wasn’t even religious—it was simply a requirement for her job at the Church.
It would seem that Ms. Bell had finished her bath, so let’s take a look at her: Notification Bell was a 25-year-old off-yellow earth pony mare with mane and tail that was brown but nearing orange and a bell for a cutie mark. She had eye-long curly bangs that flowed to one side and a shoulder-length mane she always kept in a tight ponytail, while her tail was kept in a wavy and short trim. She was always the first one to wake up in the building at around 03:30 and 03:50 every day, even on weekends, and left for work at 04:15 on her Vespa. Unlike her fellow flatmates, she had gotten her job not a year after graduating high school and had never bothered to even think about going to college because her mother had enlightened her about the truth of student loan debts. That and her family hadn’t had enough money to pay for even the cheapest universities, but that she hadn’t known until she had gotten her job.
As Bell entered her room with slightly damp fur, she found out from her alarm clock that it was already 04:10 and hurried to her wardrobe, taking out a white shoulder cape with deep black linings and rope laces. She put it in her saddlebag along with her phone (that she had automatically found somewhere but wasn’t quite sure; it was always there every morning, even though she couldn’t quite tell where exactly ‘there’ was) and other stuff. Walking out of the building with her keys in tow, she hopped up on her Vespa and drove along the beautiful moonlit streets with the occasional hazard of those 24-hour LED billboards that didn’t quite understand the concept of lowering their brightnesses upon nightfall.
As her wristwatch told her, it was 04:22 when she reached the Church. The security officer, already familiar with her motorbike, opened the iron fence gates and gave her a mock salute. Bell honked her horn in return and parked her Vespa at a reserved spot next to the officer’s own.
As she took off her helmet and shook her mane, she looked up at the sky and noticed that it was already brightening up to the early morning. Trotting along the sides of the Church, she took a moment to admire the majestic architecture.
It was a Cathedral, the massive oaken front doors (the Basilica doors) facing westward with the walls around it making stepping arches that gave Bell an impression of a tunnel—a really huge and shallow tunnel. A few paces to the south of the giant double doors was a gateway adorned at the top with some sort of a circle with twelve holes around it (some said it symbolizes the Twelve Apostles, some said it symbolizes the hours, some said it was a quirk from the architect), leading toward the church’s courtyard, which was where Bell trotted toward.
As she passed through the gateway, her hooves made clopping noises as they hit the slate slabs that made up the decent-sized courtyard’s flooring. To each far sides to her left and right were beautiful mini-gardens, with vines climbing up the walls and an assortment of tulips painting the sides of the courtyard in a gradation of rainbow patterns, giving the early morning a lively and somewhat cheery atmosphere.
Bell kept trotting forward until, a few meters after she passed the church’s side double doors and just before the wall of greeneries separating the courtyard from a dedicated space for prayer to Virgin Mary, she met a single door, only slightly smaller than one of the side doors. There was a breaker panel as big as she was on the wall next to it, and opening it, she fished out a key to the door with her hooves.
As a testament to its age, the key was made of brass covered thoroughly with a thin layer of rust—or, at least, that’s what Bell had guessed from the metallic smell. Either way, she wouldn’t use her mouth to touch that thing. She inserted the key into the keyhole of the single door and unlocked it with a heavy and satisfying clonk.
The door to the sacristy was the most deceiving of all, she noticed, because, as thick and heavy as the Basilica doors were, they looked the part, and while the sacristy door was designed with similar ornamentation to the Basilica doors, it was smaller yet almost twice as thick. She had to get up on two legs and pull it with her body to get it open.
As she entered, she flipped the light switches next to the door and blinked to the sudden brightness.
The sacristy was a place for preparation, consisting of two rooms. The first one was smaller and full of wardrobes on every conceivable wall while the second, the one directly connected to the altar, held drawers of sacred vessels, vestments, and holy books and a small tabernacle to hold the bread and wine. In the sacristy, priests, acolytes, and lectors alike would dress up, pray, read excerpts, and pretty much prepare themselves before the masses began. Altar boys and girls would also do their final preparations there, with a separate room for their early preparations. Bell wondered if that was because the priests of old couldn’t stand their shenanigans and obnoxiousness.
Now, though, the sacristy was empty save for a single mare that worked there as the custos, a salaried assistant to the sacristan, which himself was sort of a priest-to-be in charge of the Church’s maintenance and the likes. Due to the ‘priest-to-be’ part, the sacristan would almost always be less experienced than the custos, which is also true for this case.
The custos’ name was Notification Bell, in case you somehow hadn’t caught on that already. She was not going to be a religious leader, only a Catholic by papers, and worked there because of the generous paychecks she had been living off from for the last six years.
After putting her saddlebag at the corner of the first room, Bell reopened the breaker panel from before and, with practiced flicks of her hooves, lit up the church in satisfying Flash!-es.
With her surroundings lit up, she finally noticed that a familiar man had already been sitting in front of the Virgin Mary. He was an old man with long, graying hair in a loose ponytail, occasionally found around the church carrying a weathered bag. No one knew who he was, why he was there, or even if he was an escaped mental patient or not. He certainly gave off an impression of a homeless drug addict, but the fact that he faithfully joined every morning mass and meditated every early morning in front of the Virgin Mary suggested that he should’ve been religious enough to not become addicted. Or maybe, seeing as he faithfully joined every morning mass and stared blankly every early morning at Virgin Mary was proof that he was a homeless drug addict hoping for salvation. Either way, no one ever minded his presence because he’s always in the background, not talking, an arbitrary addition to the liveliness of the Church that no one thought about but would surely give an affirmative if asked, “Do you know that old man from around the Cathedral?”
Bell shook her head and trotted back to the sacristy.
Alright, she thought as she entered, time to prepare for the morning mass.
It was a routine she could do mindlessly after years with exact timing:
(For purely educational purposes, the fancy thingamajigs will be called by their fancy names instead of their more recognizable terms. Descriptions for each item are given alongside.)
04:29. Unlock the door connecting the sacristy to the altar, light up the candles for the altar and the large tabernacle (golden holy cupboard)—don’t forget to bow to the tabernacle before and after entering the dias they were upon. Take out the ampules (glass vials of sorts—similar to those for soy sauce), fill one with wine and the other with holy water; only use the wine from the small tabernacle and not the shelves—again, bow before the tabernacle.
04.34. Take out the chalice, purificator (holy handkerchief), paten (golden/silver plate for bread), palla (square cloth thingy), and corporal (fancy holy tablecloth), then set them from bottom to top at that order. Put a large sacramental bread from the tabernacle on the paten—bow to tabernacle.
04:35. Put the ampules and chalice set on the credens (fancy word for table) alongside the lavabo (ceramic jug and basin for handwashing)—tabernacle; bow.
04:36. Ready the stole (some sort of holy scarf) and cloak with their colors matching the time of the calendar—it was just after Easter, which meant green.
04:38. Set the ribbon bookmarks of the Lectionarium (a Bible sorted by date to be read instead of chapters) and Evangeliarium (a Bible sorted by date to be read instead of chapters—different from the former that it contains only the four gospels) on the pages of the right liturgical dates. Put the Evangeliarium on the altar and the Lectionarium on the lectern. (Again, tabernacle. Bow. Always.)
04:42. Unlock the side doors to the courtyard, smile and greet the people already waiting. Enter the church and trot straight to the far west side of the church, where to the north of the Basilica doors, the entrance to the Angelus Tower (bell tower) was.
04:44. Close the doors behind her, ring the bell for the first mass of the day.
Notification Bell found that ringing the Angelus Bells—as it was called—was art in of itself. Upon the base of the tower where she was standing, right next to a flight of stairs, two thick ropes hung from far up the top of the tower. One of them was thinner, appropriately signifying the smaller bell it was tied to. Bell took the thinner one and, standing on two hooves, held it with her other two at belly-height.
“But sir, why not grab from the top and pull it down? Wouldn’t it be easier?”
“Well, yes, but then you’d be flung upward.”
“What?”
“This rope is standing by at its midpoint, you see. If you pull it down a distance, it will then pull you the other direction for twice that distance.”
“So, like a pendulum?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, the bell is a pendulum.”
Her first sacristan was quite a magnificent man, indeed.
Shaking her head, she pulled the rope down with her weight, then let it snap upward well above her head, but not too far that she got pulled away from the ground. Soon, all around the Cathedral, the first steady ‘Bong!'-s of the day could be heard, exactly at 04:45, every day, by the same mare. It wasn’t the melodious and sophisticated bell-ringing exercised in English churches with as many as sixteen different bells, but it was one that could be depended on to ring at 04:45 better than the speed of light in vacuum could be depended on to be 299,792,458 m/s (Equestria’s speed of light in vacuum was dependent on the ambient arcane field—it was only that exact number if the arcane flux was exactly at 0.0003707 Th/s. The bell’s ringing, however, would always be at exactly 04:45 even if you took the entire tower to the Equestrian Badlands.)
The ringing was in fact so dependable to sound at that time that nearby police stations used it as an official announcement to buy doughnuts, while the nearby doughnut store used it as a cue to open up*.
*A donut shop’s opening hours and a police station’s donut purchasing times were the only two of three constants that would stay constant in any world that, in many universes where this particular Cathedral didn’t exist, dimension-hoppers would use them to fine-tune their clocks and watches. To say the least, being depended on by those constants to remain constant was the highest honor among universal constants. The Avogadro number would be a peasant by comparison.
It was 04:52 by the time she reached the sacristy. As usual, the scheduled priest, lector, and pre-deacon were already there, waiting for her.
The lector was a plump middle-aged woman with one too many creases on her face for excessive smiling, while the pre-deacon was an old man that was more skin and bones than meat who had no right to be able to stand upright at all. The two were regular members of the Church that only got to serve a daily mass together every other Friday, and that was dependent on whether or not the old man remembered that world war 2 was over and that he was now a pre-deacon and not a soldier.
The priest was Father Marcus, a short old man with balding and small rectangular glasses who looked like he was in his 80s but sounded too clear with his deep voice one could easily mistake it as belonging to a middle-aged man that filled the baritone for a choir group. He greeted Bell with a smile.
Bell returned the smile. “Good morning, Father Marcus.”
Father Marcus silently turned around, facing away from her. On the table in front of him was the cloak that Bell had readied before, the stole already on his shoulders. As he picked the cloak up and draped it over him, Bell stood on two legs, caught the cloak, then neatly unrolled it, making sure there weren’t any creases or folds.
Father Marcus gestured to the team and led a prayer. Then he gestured to Bell, already standing on two legs and holding a rope to the bell right outside the door. Taking the cue, Bell whipped the rope and made a satisfying Cl-clank! that signaled for the mass to start.
“How do I ring this bell?”
“A whipping strike. So, the clapper hits the bell twice in quick succession: once when you pull it back, once when you whip it away.”
“No, I mean, what should I do to ring it?”
“Oh. Well, I’m not really sure myself. How do you ponies usually do it?”
“Well, usually, the bell is not so high up so we can ring it with our mouths.”
“Why don’t you try it like that, then? See if it works.”
She had found early on her career that, as dexterous as a pony’s mouth was, you should never rely on it to ring any kind of bell made for humans. Ever.
“That doesn’t sound like a bell at all.”
“Ngh...”
“It’s closer to joint dislocation than a chime if you ask me.”
“Ngh!”
“Uh-uh. Let’s get you to the hospital.”
As Father Marcus entered the dias and bowed, Bell closed the door, letting the mass to work itself into completion. With no one around to incite concerned voices out of, Bell snapped her lower jaw to the side with a sickening crack!
Even after a dozen visits to doctors and massage therapists, it never seemed to want to return to its original position. It made her neck feel annoyingly stiff at most times and agonizingly stiff at the other times. She had come to accept what the rest of her life would feel like when the X-ray showed nothing out of the ordinary but a negligible deviation in her nasal cavity. The worst it could do was raise concerns from people around her, anyway. That was a lot more sufferable than a medical bill.
She looked at her watch (05:01) and figured she had half an hour for herself. She took her phone from her saddlebag and, with the help of a mouth-stylus, buried herself under Twitter feeds.
It was 05:35 by the time Bell reopened the sacristy door and Father Marcus reentered. He then led the closing prayer for the team and dismissed them, took off his cloak and stole, and walked out to the courtyard to greet the people who wanted to talk to him, needed blessing, the like.
Bell grunted. Father Marcus was late as usual; the mass should’ve ended at 05:30. Now she had to hurry to catch up.
05:39. Take the ampules, lavabo, and chalice set. Clean the chalice in the sink—use the sink in the sacristy and nowhere else, it’s the only one to connect directly to the ground under all those concrete and not, conventionally, the sewer (because it’s holy, as her first sacristan had explained). Wipe the chalice with the purificator, put another large sacramental bread on the paten and refill the ampules (bow). Refill the lavabo with normal water.
05:44. Put the chalice, ampules, and lavabo back at the credens. Fold the stole and cloak like previously for the next priest. Greet the new lector and pre-deacon as needed; no need to waste time and concentration on casual conversation. They’d have a lot more of those after the mass.
05:46. Greet the next priest and help him into his cloak. The next priest was Father John. There’s nothing particularly distinguishable about him other than he looked like Bill Clinton with brown eyes.
05:50. Enter the bell tower, wait for the lector’s cue for the Angelus Prayer.
Ringing the bell for the Angelus was a different matter than simply pulling ropes like before—as she had said, it was art in of itself. She stood on two legs like before, but now her dominant hoof (right) grabbed the rope as high as she could reach.
“Three quick strokes after each Hail Mary, then peal for the rest of the prayer.”
“Three quick strokes? So you let the dangling thing hit one side, then the other side—”
“No. You pull the bell quickly three times. Don’t let the bell swing the other way.”
“So, one side three times?”
“Your way of visualizing things is a little weird, but yes. Let me show you.”
05:59. She could hear the lector leading the Angelus from the speakers. As she heard her say ‘Amen’, she snapped her wrist three times in quick succession, making the bell go BongBongBong! and, just as quickly, let go of the rope and halted it at her furthermost reach. The first few times she had tried ringing the triple chime, she hadn’t been strong enough to stop it, resulting in another, muffled chime that sent awkward vibes all across town, leading them to correctly deduce that the bell ringer was a trainee. The part of said trainee to be a pony, however, had come as a shock to a lot of people, human or otherwise.
An earth pony, appropriately. A pegasus wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the bell in place unless they trained hard enough—a royal guard might barely be able to—and a unicorn was out of the equation unless you factor in the telekinesis of a particularly powerful mage.
And so the Angelus continued with two more triple chimes and ending with the steady Bong!-s like before, quickly followed by the second daily mass.
It was 06:32 by the time the mass ended. It was 06:51 by the time Bell finished putting everything she had taken out back to whence they came. With the Church returned to her default state of rest, Bell only had one more task to do before continuing to her janitorial duties.
Inside one of the cupboards in the sacristy was a stack of a few dozen plastic bowls the size of her face covered thoroughly with cloth, letting only a single slit barely enough for a human hand to get through at the top for access. They were boxes for charity. Bell took one and trotted through the gateway to the Church’s parking lot.
The parking lot was twice as big as the courtyard. It was barely big enough to hold the vehicles should people were to completely fill up the inside of the Church, and therein lies the problem: the weekly masses were always attended by enough people to flood the courtyard, even if said people were to fill it while sitting down on individual chairs (which was always the case for Saturday nights and Sundays). This had once led the cars to park on the sides of the street and random nearby establishments. At one point in her history, the Church got attended with so many people that the resulting car parking got chaotic enough to gridlock the entire town for two days straight. This had led the police station next door and the donut store one block away to offer their parking lots for the Church every Sunday. While this hadn’t fixed the problem entirely, it made the three nearby schools let their parking lots be used by the Church every Sunday, which then fixed the problem entirely.
But, as small as the parking lot was, it was a heaven for the homeless. Every day except on weekends they would mill about and do stuff around the parking lot, then, at the evening, they’d enter the courtyard to sleep under the terrace to the gateway, side doors, and sacristy and in front of the Virgin Mary—or, if it’s Saturday, Sunday, or the first Friday of the month, set up tents under the boulevard of the parking lot. Then, by some rule they had set up themselves, they would leave before 04:00 so as to not bother the people that would come for the mass and return at around 07:00 to the parking lot to ‘pay’ for their ‘rent’—they’d expect the custos to come out carrying the charity bowl and pay five cents each.
And that was exactly what happened when Bell trotted out from the courtyard: carrying the bowl on her back, the homeless quickly congregated around her like internet people into controversial comments. Then, from each of their own pockets, they fished out a nickel and put it in the bowl. Bell saw that there were half a dozen or so today, two of which put in a dime and had their friends gave them the nickel instead.
“We’re begging from beggars?”
“No. We’re asking charity from people around the Church.”
“Which is begging. And the people around the Church at these times are always the beggars.”
“It started when the bishop asked us to collect charity from passersby after the daily masses. The homeless that had been around here for some time felt it was their chance to repay us for letting them sleep in. They insisted even after the bishop himself came out to explain that their stay would always be free, after which they paid with nickels instead of pennies.”
“Can we just… not come out?”
“Then they’d leave the money in front of the sacristy. Or they’d toss it to me. Or they’d attend the weekly mass and pay into the donation bin instead. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
And so Notification Bell didn’t question it further. There had been almost no conversation between them, but the first time she had come to them, the shocks on their faces were plain for her to see. She had also noted that the old man from before was never with the homeless, and when she had asked them about him they had answered with surprise:
“We thought he’s a janitor here, or something.”
“I’m the janitor.”
“But you said you’re the—what’s it called—costus?”
“Custos. That’s just a fancy word for a Catholic janitor with extra duties.”
With the homeless done, she trotted further away from the Church, asking random passersby for charity. Which isn’t much, just one or two even on the busiest days because everyone else was in their cars, and asking people through their windows while on sixty miles per hour didn’t sound intriguing enough for her to risk a hefty medical bill.
She wondered if it’s a good thing that she hadn’t taken her father’s advice to get an insurance plan. She had wondered about it for quite some time, actually, but the thought never crossed her mind more than once each day, so it remained in her metaphorical stack of Things to Think About and Inevitably Regret When It Was Too Late.
With charity duty done, she put the bowl back to the sacristy. The secretary would count the total along with the donation from the weekly masses on Sunday, so that’s not her problem anymore.
Then for the rest of the morning, she swept and mopped the entire Church. It was the most boring part of her everyday life, and so it is seen as wise to not narrate her every sweep and sashaying.
It was around afternoon when she finished floor duty. Taking her saddlebag along, she hopped on her Vespa and drove to a nearby diner, where the stallion behind the counter instantly recognized her and gave her a dozen boxes of complete meals. Bell in return paid from the secretary’s Daily Confusion on the Disappearance of Money That the Bishop Didn’t Mind About. Returning to the Church, she was greeted by the homeless again, and she gave them the food, saving one for herself.
“We’re feeding people who insisted on paying five cents per day. From the Church’s earnings.”
“Yes. And?”
“That was, like, five dollars for each box! Maybe. But still! No wonder they don’t mind paying rent. They get a lot more in return! From the money that will go to our wallets. That’s almost all of your daily allowance from the Church!”
“They’d still get it even if they stopped giving her nickels.”
“They’re beggars! You don’t give to beggars. They’re like raccoons, y’know? Give them once and more of their friends will come.”
“Well, beggars care for each other.”
“What?”
“The Church is basically just a giant organization of beggars with fancy buildings. It just so happens that she’s gigantic enough to distribute her begging money all over the world, especially to places of poverty.”
“Why not give all the money to places of poverty, then? Why bother with the homeless here?”
“Because it's not the area that matters, it's the people who get it. The homeless here are simply misplaced poverty.”
And that concluded Notification Bell’s daily routine on the Church. Sometimes she would check on the necessities and report to the secretary for any low supplies, but she had done that yesterday, and so she had the rest of the day for herself. The best thing about working for the Catholic Church, Notification Bell found, was that the only real requirement was punctuality and ability to withstand the same routine every day. She had mastered those abilities from her times at school with overbearing teachers.
That didn’t mean her job was that easy, however, because the real fun only began on Saturday. The fun would then end on Sunday due to handling a schedule so tight it almost made an event horizon inside Notification Bell's mind. For now, though, Bell enjoyed the rest of her day telling Annabelle how to be a Catholic, only to tell her way later on that the process would take months and wouldn't really help her on her finals anyway; that's not how prayers work, even in the Catholic teachings.