Re: Multiple System Mini-Questionnaire
What’s your collective name, if you have one?
...House Hesson.
If anyone was surprised (assuming we don't change names again in the future and thus make this outdated), I will be sad.
How many of you are in the system?
14 conscious, definite people plus 1 construct that we treat as a person to be sure and the feeling that there are more asleep in the back.
If you don’t mind, please state each individual’s name.
Are any of you opposite sexes?
Are any of you classified as Otherkin? (i.e. not of human origin)
If so, how many of you are classified that way and what are you?
Runtime: the aforementioned construct, agendered, no true form but has taken to appearing as an Arachnos Spiderling from City of Villains
Acanthe (aka Beast): gender slider (sometimes seems male, sometimes seems female, sometimes seems neither), human
Catherine (aka Cat): female, human
Val: female, elf/beetle
Cai: male (sometimes shifts female), elf/melanistic serval
Solundat: male, elf
S'aryn: female, elf/domestic cat
Shainin: female, elf/crab spider
Aspen: female, elf
Svanni: female, elf/fox
Rhun: third-gender but prefers to be treated as male, elf/owl
Sapphire: intersex but generally perceived as leaning female, hobbit-like Fae
Stephen Shang: male, human...ish (insourced introject/soulbond, cyborg in the fiction he originally came from and prone to getting mixed with non-human things in any fiction he gets used for, whether we planned it or not...)
Aletheia: female, celestial
Nihil: female, "retired" celestial
How did you come to be a Multiple System?
We believe that a number of the nonhumans were hitch-hiking, so to speak, with one side of our family via line reincarnation: attaching to the souls but, up to this point, not necessarily becoming conscious. (Of course, one family member on that side has joked about "multiple personalities", and sometimes that sort of joke really isn't...but we don't know of any others who are definitely multiple and aware in our family, on that side or not.)
The original human self also fractured, seemingly as a result of emotional abuse during childhood; Cat was previously three people who each performed a different role in getting us through that abuse, and Beast is also from that human core. They all agreed to integrate if possible, now that the situation is very different, but from what we've heard integration doesn't necessarily last so we're also prepared for the possibility that they will split again.
Shainin and the two celestials are walk-ins. Shang and Cai were intended by Val to be characters in a roleplaying game and developed autonomy. We consider Cai to be Val's son, as it seems she managed to attract a soul of her own kind to reincarnate here in the process of "creating" him. We consider Shang to be a plain old introject; there are no signs he had any life of his own before this.
How did you find out about being a Multiple System?
Val ran across Kinhost while researching her Otherkin nature (much of which later turned out to be Rhun's, actually) and ultimately kept coming back to it because of the shiny, shiny lure of creating a mask/construct to deal with the parts of "her" life that she didn't want to. She tried to make one and instead ended up waking up Beka, one of the three who later integrated to become Cat. An ugly mess ensued before we got things right and recognized the others as independent people who could also take control of the body, but that's another story.
Do each of you have your own set of memories?
Do you all share memories and thoughts?
Those of us with past lives have our own memories from those, and we can usually sort out whose is whose now that we can tell who's who in general. Our general memory is shared but flashes of those other lives don't get entered into general memory until one of us becomes conscious of their existence.
We automatically pick up the thoughts of the others who are conscious at the same time. One person's thoughts can also trigger another to become conscious - usually because it's greatly amusing to the person waking up or it's greatly distressing to the person waking up (Val often wakes up to stop arguments or warn Shang against behavior that could get him/us in trouble).
What are your most humorous moments?
1. We were in partial hospitalization and so out of it that we felt like one big, fuzzy ball of self, not a distinct person most of the time. When the happy pills started working and this feeling started lifting, Shang found himself standing in front of a toilet man-style, unbuckling his belt, and only belatedly realizing that he couldn't pee that way. Looking in the mirror as he washed our hands was also strange; he felt as if he was stuck in the body of Val's character in the 'verse he came from and couldn't help wondering when she was going to let him switch back into his own, Ghost-in-the-Shell style.
2. Couple weeks ago at WindyCon, our sweetie's sweetie was watching Rhun the ex-soldier swagger around in a suit and stiletto heels, and remarked that we looked like we needed a sword. XD
-Val
"All knowledge is worth having." -Phedre no Delaunay
"Everything has a price." -Jaenelle Angelline
"I think if you try, that's being your best." -Echo
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