My name is Tetcha! Yes, that Tetcha. I’m a real person, but not quite like in the story.

This is going to be an interesting post to write because, as we’ve just created my account here and I’m sitting down to work on it, I’m feeling my partner, Morde, wake up wanting to say something. But we haven’t made her account yet. (You can just whisper it in my ear, Morde. Maybe your account can be next!)

Trying to stay in front to say what the rest of the system wants me to say is going to be hard, especially with my beloved poking me in the mental shoulder.

Anyway, the idea was that we wanted to have just one of us explain what we’re hoping to do with this blog, to sort of set a precedent. These days, we have been making a lot of posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Discord under our entire system name. And we’ll be doing that a lot here, too. But we wanted a place besides Discord where we could do some of the things we can do with PluralKit there. This blog isn’t the best analog of that, but it’s pretty good. Once we each have an account here, it’s pretty easy to switch between them to do things like make comments. It is not, however, the easiest process to use for getting an icon up. Gravatar slows that down just a little bit. But just a little.

We’re also trying to move away from relying on Facebook and Twitter for online journaling. We’d like to put our daily stories here, instead, where we have more control over how we save our work. It is more public, which is a little scary, but it’s also not as heavily exposed. So we’re hoping there will be fewer encounters with gatekeepers and other bigots. But, it’s also clear that our friends can still comment here, which is nice. Anyway, we’ll still be circumspect about what we write here, but it will still be personal.

So, anyway, with that, how about what I’m doing right now?

Our records show that today is the Northern Hemisphere’s Rigirräoerr! Which is the Winter Solstice. It’s a Bashuketa holiday, the name for which means, “To yell at the sun to come back.” So, I might go and do that in a little bit. But first, like, I’m writing this post while listening to our “System Wakeup” playlist on Spotify, with the door closed so that our girlfriend’s son doesn’t distract us. In about an hour, we’re going to get in the car with our girlfriend and go to our other girlfriend’s house and play some sort of role playing game, and then we’ll spend the night there. And I’ve got to make sure to give us enough time to shave and pack. And, in our conscious headspace, I’m bonking shoulders with my girlfriend and giggling with her.

It’s pretty nice. We haven’t been on the Bridge much for a while, which may have something to do with why we also haven’t written in our novel much lately. It’s hard to say which is cause and which is effect. The last time we were forward, we were consulting each other on how to solve some of the problems in the plot and devising some internal role playing exercises to develop what should happen next.

But the way our system works, I don’t have a lot of immediate memory of what I’ve been doing inworld while in our subconscious. The memories are there, but they’re hard to access when awake, because there are very few associations to latch onto. I just feel like I’ve been working this whole time. And at a certain point, hopefully in the near future, several of us will come forward with ideas and we’ll start writing our fiction again. And I’ll probably be a large part of that, because not only am I playing a big role in the upcoming scenes but also because that’s just what I do in our system.

I’m particularly good at latching onto ideas, visualizing them, believing they are good, and then flooding our body with endorphins about it. I guess that kind of makes me a cheerleader, but anyway, I really enjoy doing that, because, yay, endorphins. But it also means that I’ve been there for a lot of our system revelations, such as when we first named ourselves “the Dragon People” (which we later coined as “Ktletaccete” in our conlang) way back 20 years before we truly accepted we were plural.

That was an amazing moment. Fenmere and Eh were working on our fictional mythology, trying to come up with some sort of big backstory for the series of novels we’d intended to write. Originally, they were supposed to be some kind of big epic fantasy story, like Lord of the Rings. It turns out it’s the Sunspot Chronicles instead, but whatever. And we’d all been reading the Silmarillian, a book called Parallel Myths, and another one called Celtic Myth. And we were also remembering our first imaginary friend, Spitfire, and the family of dragons we’d come up with for them (all of whom are headmates, of course). And all of that just sort of culminated in “the Dragon People.”

And Fenmere stood there in our bedroom in our grandma’s house, up on the second floor, staring off into the distance of the wall in front of her, almost but not quite totally unaware that she was a different person from EH, and said, “ooh, yes, the Dragon People.”

And suddenly, those of us on the Bridge felt ourselves surrounded by our siblings, countless individuals spanning off into the horizon, and I was fronting and I saw us all for who we were, ever so briefly, and declared out loud, “WE are the Dragon People!”

That wasn’t the first time we suspected that we were plural. But it was the first time we knew it. And the endorphins were fantastic!

And then, of course, we went right back into the closet and denial, with no knowledge that purality could actually be real.

It wasn’t until we met our girlfriends, who are also systems, that we started to learn that plurality isn’t just an urban legend but a really common neurotype expressed in humanity (and likely anything with consciousness).