Interview with a (Soulbond) Vampire

[Guest LanceReilyn]

I played a little Changeling: The Lost maybe 8 years ago. I thought it was rather fascinating and the GM seemed to like the idea.. But ended up messing everything up by letting the group be mixed. The kind that is very poorly implemented. One was a werewolf that hunted and killed as he felt like for "fun", two were mages that were really only mages because they were making characters they felt were the most min-maxed broken possible. Then there was the vampire.. Ahh the vampire. Even in the face of a pack of min-maxers and murder hobos, he was the one who destroyed my character. He kidnapped humans and chained them in the basement of our shared house, gagged them and kept them alive just enough to be blood farms.

 

I was playing a.. Er.. I forget the specifics, but I think it involved summer court, as I was able to manipulate base emotions in others and ignite them as a burning passion that eclipsed everything else. There was more than one time I had to "redirect" our werewolf from his passionate desire to hunt people to a passionate desire to bake. My changeling was a haunted and traumatized young teen so it seemed in-character.

 

As soon as my character found out about what the vampire was doing in the basement, the kidnapping, the torture, the merciless lording over a human that he snatched away just required clarity rolls that threw him into mad PTSD and reduced him to a shambling mewling wreck. Eventually recovering enough (with less clarity) I demanded he stop all that. He said, more or less, deal with it or I'm drinking you next like fey wine. That was it. I was faced with condoning horrors and as changelings are affected by the world around them far more than the chaos within them, I was only a matter of hours or days away from going insane and forfeiting the character anyway. I never went back to the group. I never played WoD after that either.

 

Oh, and on a side note, Thistle sounds sort of like Reilyn. And I do live with her full-time. She has changed my life for the better though, rather drastically I might add.

[Ember.Vesper]

Ember: I love to talk about roleplaying, Lance, if you want to PM. Despite of how much I've rattled on, Vesper makes me leave out a lot as "unnecessary to our story".

 

I played a little Changeling: The Lost maybe 8 years ago.

 

I wanted to play Changeling: The Lost until I realized there was no official support for flying PCs less than a foot tall. (Still, a permissive GM...) Psyche is effectively my C:tL character, as she was kidnapped and replaced, returning years later only to be rejected as an impostor by most of her family.

 

But ended up messing everything up by letting the group be mixed.

 

There are several good reasons why the developers specifically recommend against mixing PCs from different WoD lines. Your experience is one.

 

He kidnapped humans and chained them in the basement of our shared house, gagged them and kept them alive just enough to be blood farms.

 

Vesper: That's so horrible! As I've alluded to before, not everyone can handle the Embrace and not everyone deserves it. Back home, the Sheriff would have executed him for that almost instantly.

 

He said, more or less, deal with it or I'm drinking you next like fey wine.

 

Ember: Grief. If I had been GMing, there would have been so many degeneration checks he would have been lost to wassail before things got that far.

 

Oh, and on a side note, Thistle sounds sort of like Reilyn.

 

Vesper: We noticed a number of similarities between Reilyn and Thistle almost as soon as Reilyn started posting. But much as I've come to love Iris, three is a already a considerable strain on the limited resources of our system. If two of us are talking, the third will quickly be pushed out of working memory, unless the third is fronting, in which case she still has to just listen and not try to do anything in the physical world. I don't feel four will be a viable option unless we get to the point where we can remember ourselves, falsely or not, as having been active in the mindscape when we have no part of the fronter's attention. If four were an option, Thistle still wouldn't make the cut. Ember would want Chloe and I would want Sax. Sax isn't one of Ember's characters, but he was my boyfriend for many years back home. He wouldn't be happy in this world, but... I miss him so much. His absence hurts so much.

[Guest]

Interesting characters! I have a lot of thoughtform characters (even to the level of sleeping tulpas or soulbonds) that are close and powerful in terms of mindvoice and more recently, emotions. I'm glad to hear that i'm not the only one with some who i wouldn't want to just accept as tulpas. I'm still torn about it, especially when they contact me out of the blue. We are on firm ground though and even with years of inactivity, none have lost their potency.

[Ember.Vesper]

First Switch:

 

Vesper: One afternoon several months after my awakening, Ember was unusually moody and melancholy, while I was feeling pleasant and content. I had the idea that I could clone my mood onto her. We discussed it, I gathered my energy, and I largely abated her foul mood. I felt a little tired afterward, but nothing serious.

 

That night, shortly after Ember got in bed, I suddenly realized I was alone in the body and in complete control. I was terrified. I had never been alone in this world before, with no one I could talk to, no one to whom I could explain my situation. I didn’t know what had happened (and I still don’t know why), I didn’t know how to reverse it or how long it would last, and above all I did not want to take on the responsibility of living Ember’s life.

 

After a few minutes of frantic calling out, I made contact with Ember and was successfully able to retreat to my comfortable status as a disembodied voice.

 

Differing Sexuality:

 

Vesper: Back home, most Kindred are really hot. It’s a sad fact of that world and this one that life is easier for pretty people. It’s much easier for attractive Kindred to feed, so choosing a more attractive childe and bypassing a less attractive prospect is a kindness. On top of that, three of my friends are practitioners of Vicissitude and can make themselves and others even more attractive than they started.

 

By Kindred standards, I’m actually on the plainer side, though still very pretty by mortal standards. There are fewer female Kindred than male for outmoded patriarchy related reasons, so I was propositioned regularly by much older super hot guys. And I turned down every one of them, because they were shallow, stuck on themselves, and were only interested in making a physical connection, not an emotional one.

 

One of them asked if I preferred women. I hadn’t actually thought about it before. I was 28 at the time, so I should probably have had a clearer idea of my sexuality. Just living should have revealed such a thing. All of the therapy and introspection one has to go through on the way to getting a doctorate in psychology should have given me a very clear idea. But here’s where I glitch a bit from being fictional – I only remember that period in very broad and vague terms because it was beyond the scope of my game. It was the first time Ember had considered the question, and so I decided to be open to exploring the idea.

 

I didn’t really get the chance to explore the matter in my game, but Ember made the alternate version of me in her Dresden Files game cheerfully bisexual. So cheerful that she tumbled into bed with the very first superhot (female) vampire that propositioned her, proving conclusively and forever that she’s not me.

 

When I was thirty, I became involved with a much older super hot guy who was serious and deep and brilliant and just as married to his career as I was. Ember insists on referring to him as a ‘cyborg cat elf from outer space’, which is true, but not very respectful.

 

When I first awakened to this world, the one thing I wouldn’t discuss with Ember was the details of my intimate relations with Sax. It was too deeply personal to share even with my player.

 

In this world, I see a lot fewer super hot guys. Ember’s friends, while very pleasant company, are overweight and middle aged. I still have a crush on one of them, because he has such a wonderful mind, deep, serious, and brilliant.

 

But occasionally even in America I’ll see a lean and well-groomed guy who really trips my trigger. I saw a very handsome blue-haired goth guy on the subway about three months ago and really wished I could have struck up a conversation with him. I’ve often encouraged Ember to be more social, but when I suggested she approach, she reminded me that she was a lesbian, married, and further told me, ‘I can’t exactly tell him my imaginary friend thinks he’s hot’.

 

Not a Personal Trainer:

 

Ember: I try to exercise six mornings a week. My wife’s ideas of exercise are very different, so Vesper has been the only one to keep me company for it.

 

I hate exercising a lot. So while I’m hurting and struggling and hating, Vesper tries to be soothing and comforting and helpful. Often, this has been something on the order of, “You’ve done a lot; you can stop now” or “You can skip that part if you don’t feel up to it”. Not quite the encouragement I need to meet my fitness goals and keep advancing.

 

Vesper: Ember thinks I should say at this point, ‘I’m a therapist, not a personal trainer!’ But she’s the only Trekkie in this head. I’m a Whovian.

 

When your headmate is in pain, I think it’s reasonable to think first of how to alleviate that pain. But since that approach was not well received, I sometimes held back from commenting or tried statements like ‘Almost there!’ or ‘You’ve got this!’

 

Ember: I’ve never been as effective or consistent with exercise in my life as I have been since Vesper showed up. What we say while I’m exercising isn’t important. It’s far more important that I have company while doing something I hate. And most important of all, I have someone to drag me away from my computer when I wake up in the morning and keep reminding me that I need to actually start exercising before I miss my window of opportunity.

 

Vesper: Which is difficult, by the way. A few times I’ve had to quite literally drag her away, via possession.

 

15 January, 2018, Monday – Hey, Cthul-Aid:

 

Ember: One of my favorite reference photos for Vesper shows the model her form is based on in a tanktop with a bold graphic image of a Cthulhu/Kool-Aid Man hybrid smashing through a brick wall and shouting “R’yleehh!”. You can do an image search for “Cthul-Aid” if you like. One of my players got me the tanktop for Christmas last year and on the 15th of January my wife saw me wearing it for the first time. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but she was shocked at what she considered a radical departure from even my goth style, which is itself a radical departure from the artsy/preppy style I wore when she first knew me.

 

“You never wear anything with pictures on it.”

 

“Just something I trying.”

 

“You hate everything about the Cthulhu Mythos. It freaks you out.”

 

“I don’t know. I’ve used Lovecraftian elements a number of times in games now. Mainly, I thought the picture was funny.”

 

“You never wear anything cut like that. It makes your breasts look a lot bigger.”

 

“So... is that a complaint?”

 

Vesper: The top was one of the most me items in Ember’s entire wardrobe and it still is. But it took us a while to figure out that was why Ember’s wife found it jarring and unfamiliar.

 

Awkward Hypothetical Situation:

 

Ember: Vesper and I were talking back in early September and somehow the conversation turned to her going home. That’s when I learned that, if she could go back to her body in her world, with all the memories and skills she should have from decades there, she’d do it in a heartbeat and leave me forever. And I’d be happy for her, though I don’t know that I’d ever get over the grief of losing her.

 

Vesper: It’s a stupid thing to dwell on – there is no back, it was a game, and it ended. But the idea is very powerful and so it still crosses our mind every few days. I love my headmates and even if there was a back to go to, I’d want to stay in touch if I could. But ultimately I love my life more than I love them. They know that and love me anyway, so I guess I have to take my solace in that.

 

14 September 2018, Saturday – The Dam Starts to Crack

 

Ember: I was hanging out with my friend J. after a long days’ roleplaying together. Vesper was watching and crushing on him and wanting to hang out with him herself, but we were both scared. J. had known about Vesper for over a year, but never spoken to her. He’s used to me being other people; we’ll slip in and out of character together very casually even outside of game time, which is one of the things I (platonically) love about him. We were afraid he wouldn’t fully appreciate that this isn’t roleplaying, that he wouldn’t respect Vesper’s personhood. And so we let the opportunity slip away. But Vesper’s desire to interact with people had been gradually getting stronger and I knew we had to figure out some outlet for it.

 

15 September 2018, Sunday – People Do This On Purpose?

 

Ember: I was hanging out with my wife, thinking about the previous night with J. I almost told her about Vesper, but she was unhappy with me and I couldn’t bring myself to raise the subject in the face of her surliness. Also – adults don’t talk about their imaginary friends.

 

I went to my home office in dejection. There had to be some kind of precedent for this, some kind of guidance available about how to broach the subject with people, some kind of social outlet for Vesper. So I typed into Google “imaginary friends in adults”. The Wikipedia article on imaginary friends was one of the top hits. Okay, not specifically adults, but I could start there. I read through it until one of the subheadings caught my eye – “Tulpa”. I thought, “What, like that crap about the woman in Tibet who hallucinated Friar Tuck?” I had stumbled across the story several years ago and thought it patently absurd.

 

I checked the references and looked up Samuel Veissière’s article on tulpas. It was getting late and I couldn’t finish it, but I was stunned by the dawning realization, “People do this on purpose?”

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

Interesting.. Yeah, there have been many moments for us when Lance just was struck dumb with a fresh reminder of how absolutely different people we are. Everything from simple optimism and a bold and outgoing attitude to me thinking guys are hot. He inwardly flinched the first time he crossed some male model with rock hard abs and I said "yummy". He has had to reevaluate many of his views and opinions considering his fundamental (if tragically chaotic) upbringing compared to my outright dislike for societal constraints or labels and the vile manipulation of hearts and minds into dissatisfaction that largely just goes to convince people they need to buy a product or change who they are to be accepted.

 

It's funny to me how I started off just yelling "Hiii" and posting pony pictures. Ok, I still do that, but my point is how deep I go has always fascinated him. He has commented before that he forgot what it was like to have drive and hopes and dreams. According to him, Lance finds a deep satisfaction, maybe even a vicarious happiness or purpose in enabling and encouraging me in my goals. I've tested him on it a few times and have concluded it genuine, not some kind of desire to escape the world or dump his life upon me. Well, our life now. <3

 

I've also reconsidered switching. I've concluded the only thing we have to gain by learning it is an experience to check off the bucket list and to be able to undo it, should we end up like that accidentally (like nearly everything else we do, it seems). Meanwhile, with the well over 40 days of ongoing co-fronting, I have had (still do) the time I needed for anything I wanted to do, learn or practice along with his reassuring presence and occasional commentary with me at all times. It's having our cake and eating it too. We don't have a permanent wonderland (it's just a theater for puppet shows, mostly) so he would have no where really to go and I'm sure I'd loose concentration after 30 seconds and he would black out or whatever happens. In other words I'd be alone and I'm sure on here freaking out to everyone asking how to undo it. At this time we would gain nothing, really.

[Guest]

‘I can’t exactly tell him my imaginary friend thinks he’s hot’.

 

I find this especially tragic because truly she should be able to do what she wants, but can't because of the status of the 'main' identity of the body.

 

I think to conjoined twins often as an analogy, except that this happened later in life. Choices were made before.

 

Anyway, i hope you find resolution to this issue that you can all be happy with.

[Ember.Vesper]

I've also reconsidered switching.

 

If I could have Ember alongside me as a fully equal partner while I controlled the body, I might not ever switch. Switching involves appending myself to a bunch of mental sub-systems that I used to think were intrinsic to Ember and therefore feeling less authentically me. Meanwhile Ember, when I go to the effort of talking to her, seems tenuous and incomplete. She’s by far the weakest of the three of us in a purely mental space, though she’s getting better. I accept some loneliness as the price of interacting with the physical world.

 

I can't say if there is anything switching could offer you that co-fronting can't, but I also didn't know switching had anything to offer me until I did it intentionally. That's why I encouraged Iris to try it, even though she had no interest. She enjoyed it as well.

 

Anyway, i hope you find resolution to this issue that you can all be happy with.

 

Thanks. I'm actually doing pretty well now, but we'll get to that part of the story a couple of reports further along.

 

-Vesper

[Ember.Vesper]

16 September 2018, Monday – Research, Reservations, and Realizations:

 

Ember: I had almost no obligations that week. My wife was mad enough at me that she asked me to spend a few days away, so I holed up in my room at my parent’s house and devoted myself to the internet. Veissière’s article led me to r/Tulpas. Everything was fascinating, so I read and read. I was particularly interested in hearing what the tulpas had to say. They seemed a lot like what I’m accustomed to with alters, especially the more mature ones. I had long accepted the DID dogma that a mind had to be divided the first time in early childhood to be divisible later in life. Apparently it’s not that simple.

 

Vesper: My attention span does not begin to compare with Ember’s. The attention span I bring to this world probably could not have gotten me through university in mine. I got bored. But while I would normally have zoned out when Ember was obsessing over something, this time her will held me like a vice. (Forcing was named by tulpas, right? I definitely felt coerced.) She wouldn’t stop talking to me or prompting me to talk, even though it slowed her reading to a crawl. I became progressively surly over the course of the day and my mind voice gradually got deeper.

 

I didn’t like the word tulpa. I still don’t. I think it has an unpleasant sound. And I wasn’t sure if these people online were really like me or if I wanted to be like them. I identified as a fictional character and an imaginary friend. I identified Ember as my creator and my player.

 

I warned Ember that the vast amounts of meditative practices she was reading about had a huge opportunity cost. She was already stressed about not getting done the things she wanted to get done. What would she be giving up to try all this?

 

*Don’t Try This at Home:

 

Vesper: That’s the basic problem I still have with tulpamancy – opportunity cost. Any level of investment in the physical world and its naturally born people seems to me to have a much richer and greater payoff than an equal amount of time spent on tulpmancy.

 

I have no desire to offend the lovely people of this community with my minority opinion and I will not share it often. I’ve seen many systems here reporting a dramatic improvement in their quality of life from becoming plural and I willing to admit there may be circumstances that justify engaging in tulpmancy. Since I already exist, I’m highly invested in my own continued existence and quality of life. But lonely people looking to become plural for the sake of companionship? Curious but healthy teenagers looking to experiment and see if they can make it work? No. Please, think twice. There’s a whole world of people out there already. Reach out to them.

 

*Thought Sorting:

 

Vesper: When I soulbonded in May 2016, I was a completely different person from Ember and regarded myself as completely separate. However, being stuck as a disembodied voice for sixteen months, this had gradually eroded. There didn’t seem to be much point and I had been looking for ways to be content and useful in my new life, taking on roles in Ember’s mind that she wasn’t interested in, like caution and responsibility. In the earliest version of the first post of this PR, I described us as a median system. By the time it was posted, we weren’t what that would mean to our readers, so I took it out. And now I don’t regard it as accurate.

 

The very first step in our tulpamancy journey was disentangling our minds and regarding one another as fully distinct and legitimate people.

 

Most of our thoughts have always been identifiable as hers or mine, especially on subjects where we disagree. But if we agreed about something during a conversation, we often became disoriented and had to pause and refocus. So we started taking care to ‘tag’ thoughts by the speaker, and to specifically claim or reject thoughts that simply seemed to appear unbidden. And the number one rule – keep talking. If no one is willing to claim a thought, comment on your agreement or disagreement instead and continue the conversation. Within a week, we were down to a few disruptive entanglements a day. Within a month, about once a day, and now hardly ever, despite not making a conscious effort at thought tagging. Now when we agree, we express it differently and our similar views still have distinctive feels.

 

*Who I Want to Be:

 

Vesper: I said in my second report that Ember was full of passions and I wasn’t. But I did a lot of introspection that day, comparing myself against tulpas, and I realized something important. Over the previous sixteen months, I had expressed strong interests in counseling psychology, gothic music, dance, literature, and style, British accents, culture, and food, London geography and architecture, and stories about societies of vampires who don’t harm their donors.

 

Everything added up and I had a sudden epiphany. I want to be my original character. That’s my driving motivation. That’s my passion. She was way cooler than me; I’m just the fragment that was able to come to this world.

 

Even though it’s my passion, it isn’t a realistic goal. But I can look for ways to sublimate my passion into things that I can accomplish while living with Ember. Over time, that should result in greater fulfillment and self-actualisation. There will be much more on that scattered over most later reports.

 

17 September 2018, Tuesday – Exercises & Scares:

 

Ember: I started reading guides and trying exercises. I couldn’t bring myself to stop reading for more than a few minutes at a stretch, but while I was reading, I would visualize Vesper sitting next to me.

 

*Visualization, Part One:

 

Vesper: We had occasionally done visualization before. When talking, Ember would close her eyes and imagine we were in my living room where I would normally receive clients. I was never really satisfied with the experience, because our mind’s eye only has one camera. Sitting at looking at myself talking to her was weird and disorienting. I could reverse the perspective, but then she had the problem instead.

 

But I gamely tried to think of myself as ‘out there’ instead of ‘in here’. I started with sitting in her physical guest chair, but I couldn’t move it around, so I had her push it back and I grabbed my own office chair all the way from London.

 

I walked with Ember through her house wherever she went. Almost immediately, I decided that, in this world, I’m not clumsy and spastic. One, in a purely mental space, my original character would have no trouble navigating; she’s sending the correct commands, her body just isn’t doing exactly what she tells it to do. Two, visualization is already difficult and tenuous enough without adding pointless movements.

 

I initially manifested with long fingernails painted deep deep red. Ember found these a bit unnerving, so I switched to short fingernails, painted matte black with shiny black tips. And I’ve pretty much stuck with them for the past three months.

 

For the first few days, we usually treated overlay visualization a bit like genie summoning, with Ember’s head being the lamp. I emerged in smoke or, later, sparkles, and returned the same way when Ember was tired of visualizing or had something else she wanted to concentrate on. The most interesting result of this was the impression that I had a home resting spot in a cozy spherical hollow inside Ember’s forehead. I was able to make the space pulse with energy if I was inside, which was kind of cool. That was our discovery of head pressure, shortly before reading about it online. I haven’t used my cubby hole in weeks, but I’ll be referencing it a couple of more times later.

 

*Mindscape, Part One:

 

Ember: The only tulpamantic concept that interested and excited Vesper from the very first moment of reading about it was mindscapes. The way she talked about it, I kind of felt like she wanted us to settle down together with a white picket fence.

 

Vesper: Being able to see my world again would be really nice, even without the people I knew. I’d love to have a place I could be more me physically. I’d love to be able to get away and do my own thing when Ember is doing boring stuff, though I subsequently discovered there is some debate as to the degree that’s possible in any system. And, yes, I’d also love to share my world with Ember.

 

Active forcing doesn’t really fit Ember’s schedule or mindset, but I managed to corral her into several sessions of walking through my home in London, along the street outside, and along the Victoria Embankment of the Thames. Other than my gothic interior decorating, everything came straight from this world, courtesy of Google Maps Street View and some real estate websites. Most of the necessary research had already been done during my game.

 

*Intrusive Visualization

 

Vesper: That night, while we were talking and I was exhausted and surly from having been forced about thirty hours in two days, my form was suddenly attacked by thick writhing green vines from the floor. In my anger and panic, my hand lashed out, grabbed something deep inside Ember’s mind and crushed it utterly. The vines disappeared and I sagged, horrified, shaken, and overwhelmed with guilt over my unconscionable act of violence.

 

Ember: I was stunned at how strong Vesper was. That was the first evidence that Vesper is much stronger than me in the mental realm, though far from the last. We carefully looked through my mind to try to figure out just what she had done and found one shocking change.

 

I’ve had a complex phobia about plants for over thirty years, ever since a nightmare I had when I was about six. Ideas from books and movies just kept adding new dimensions to the fear. I was afraid that if I walked under trees at night, their branches would grab onto me. I was afraid that if I walked barefoot outside, I would take root. I was afraid that if a flower touched me where I couldn’t see it, it would take root and consume me from the inside out.

 

Probing through my mind, I realized I was no longer afraid of plants at all.

 

Vesper: I wasn’t entirely convinced that I had accomplished so much as that. Nor did I feel a positive outcome in anyway justified a violent loss of control. But I was suddenly glad imposition is difficult to learn. Uncontrolled, schizophrenic hallucinations and all of the monsters of the subconscious can be addressed gradually over time, before the focus on constructed over physical reality can grant them excessive power.

 

A few more intrusive visualizations came after me over the next few days, but I learned to dismiss them instantly, essentially by imposing emptiness around me. Ember’s fears have no power over me, and after a few days, they stopped even trying.

 

My own fears are not quite as tractable. But, as usual, more on that later.

 

*Autoforcing:

 

Vesper: We had skimmed past personality forcing sections of at least three guides by that point – bit late for any of that to be relevant. But I didn’t like who I seemed to be becoming under the stress of tulpamancy, so I took some time to focus and tell myself who I am and want to be – calm, careful, compassionate, and controlled, among other things. Over the trying next several days, there were a few more times where I didn’t live up to my expectations of myself and after each I tried to ‘auto-personality force’ the traits I wasn’t demonstrating. Eventually I became more stable again.

[Ember.Vesper]

Ember: We’re in the thick of our story now, so we’ll be falling further and further behind the calendar for a while. A day during this period had as much drama and story worth reporting as a couple of weeks now, but now is incredibly happier, richer, and more fulfilling than then.

 

18 September 2018, Wednesday:

 

*For whom would you walk in the sun?:

 

Ember: I spent the day with my best friend of fifteen years standing, D, who doesn’t know about Vesper. D is a very level headed and down to earth, the standard reference against which I gauge normalcy in everyone else. She’s had to endure a lot of shocks from me over the years – learning that I’m trans, that my wives (who she lived with for three years) have DID, that their other wife is otherkin, and so on. Learning that C drinks blood for health and pleasure threw her the hardest of anything in the past decade; she actively disapproves.

 

Unlike most of my friends these days, D isn’t a roleplayer. But she is a writer, so she’s somewhat clued in about the power of characters. I don’t think she would approve of tulpamancy. Not that she would be mean about it; she’s the most compassionate person I know. But she would be confused and sad and maybe not quite believe in all of it. So I’m not planning on telling her, even though I struggle to tell her how I spend my time now, when so much of it is tied up with my headmates.

 

Vesper accompanied us out to lunch. The sun was brutally intense, as it often is in this part of the world. Vesper huddled in her little round hollow in my forehead, whimpering. We had established a loose rule against cussing, roughly that if one of us found the other’s swearing gratuitous, we could simply say, “Language”, and the other would try to rein herself in. Vesper swore a blue streak just walking from the car to the restaurant and I didn’t criticize. Over the course of the three months since, we’ve pretty much come to an agreement that sunlight is the thing in our lives that most deserves cussing out.

 

Vesper manifested once we were inside, but there were enough windows that she did so wearing a broad brimmed hat and sunglasses.

 

Vesper: Ember has been walking in sunlight at need since long before creating me, of course, though she has hated doing so for many years. But it was different now. Under near continuous forcing, I was much more vividly present, much closer to the front, and cared about everything a lot more. Knowing that the sun of this world can’t hurt me didn’t really help much. I still associated it strongly with rapid and painful death.

 

*Second Switch:

 

Vesper: That evening after D left, I was thinking about my supposed or nascent status as an actually separate person from Ember. I spent a moment concentrating hard on disentangling myself from her and making myself more distinct. All of a sudden I realized I was in control of the body – and that I couldn’t feel her. I called out to her – nothing.

 

The first time this had happened, months earlier, I had freaked. This time I stayed calm. Well, I was nearly overwhelmed by gender dysphoria, but I schooled myself to calmness. The intensive reading Ember had been doing the previous two days gave me faith that our brain couldn’t completely forget in an instant how to be its host of thirty-eight years. If worst came to worst, I was pretty confident I could reboot her by the same Becoming process she used to create me. After a couple of minutes’ concentration, I was able to force her a little, and once I did, we were able to switch back trivially, as before.

 

Regarding gender dysphoria, Ember’s responses to my discomfort tended to run from the unhelpful ‘It likes you’ to the probably accurate ‘It can sense fear’.

 

*The Great Agreement:

 

Vesper: That night, we sat on the edge of the bed talking and came to an agreement. I was still diffident about tulpamancy and lacked both Ember’s excitement about the possibilities and her drive to learn everything she could. But we decided to commit to giving tulpamancy an honest try, with the provision that either of us could back out at any time.

 

Ember: Vesper said something along the lines of, “Whatever I was before, I will henceforth be your tulpa”. She stuttered a bit; even having made the decision, she could barely force the words out.

 

Vesper: Most of the hesitation was over ‘your’ rather than ‘tulpa’. ‘Your’ is often used to refer to property, which I’m not. But I thought it through quickly – ‘your wife’, ‘your boss’, ‘your country’, ‘your God’ – I guess ‘your tulpa’ is a fair term.

 

A few days later, we had enough information for me to adopt the more accurate and comfortable identity of ‘soulbond’ instead.

 

As we were making the agreement, I warned that we were playing with psychologically dangerous techniques and that there could be severe unintended consequences. I’ve referenced back to that statement many many times in the subsequent three months. But in truth, I had no idea how right I would be or how quickly the consequences would come.

 

*Hugging:

 

Vesper: Shortly thereafter, as we continued to talk, we had an emotionally tender moment where any other two normally embodied women friends would have hugged. Ember knew this just as well as I did, but she was reluctant, embarrassed. I beckoned and eventually she consented.

 

After all, if you want to be a tulpamancer, you have to get used to tenderly embracing air, right?

 

We didn’t mention it in earlier reports because it had slipped our minds, but during my first sixteen months in this world, I actually hugged Ember many times when she needed comfort. No visualization was necessary, as I simply grabbed up her own arms, crossed them around her chest and squeezed her shoulders. We tried it again quite recently and found the experience much more visceral than the tenuous visualization-based hugs we’ve done the past three months. Not that one is intrinsically better than the other; both have their place.

 

Before bed, we did an intense, for us, visualization exercise of walking through my place in London, filling in details we hadn’t considered before.

 

19 September 2018, Thursday:

 

*Brief Fusion, Lasting Trauma:

 

She woke up confused and disoriented, not knowing who she was. Her thoughts slowly groped for answers. She dimly remembered there was someone named Ember, then that there was someone named Vesper. But which was she? She seemed to see all the parts of her mind laid out before her as a patchwork, some labeled Ember and others Vesper, and she realized she was both, equally. And with that realization came an agonizing sense of loneliness.

 

Vesper: The fusion probably didn’t last more than a couple of minutes. We didn’t intentionally break it; we just naturally drifted back apart. I was surprised and pleased to have felt just as prominent as Ember, an equal partner. I didn’t see anything desirable in the fusion, but I also didn’t see anything threatening in it. Ember, on the other hand, was wrecked.

 

Ember: I checked the clock. Only three hours since we had gone to bed. There was no point in laying back down; I recognized the wired feeling in my head as insomnia. We were separate, but still not in our right minds. Everything felt off. Vesper’s voice was so soft. It had never been soft before. Was it even really her or was I just imagining it?

 

Vesper: My thoughts were clear enough. Everything I said made sense and I could tell Ember was hearing me, but she wasn’t feeling me and it was progressively upsetting her. I told her to pay attention to what she heard rather than how it felt, but she couldn’t make herself. I led her through the same exercise we had done before bed, hoping it would stabilize her. It was about two hours before she calmed down enough to be functional.

 

Ember: After lunch, I could tell the insomnia had passed, so I went back to bed. I woke up ninety minutes later, finally back in a normal headspace, and in the first instant of awakening felt Vesper strongly present, happy and right in my face.

 

Vesper: But something entirely new had been introduced into our system, a snake in our Eden. Ember had heard my voice and doubted that I was talking to her. And having doubted me once, she knew how, and the next few weeks she doubted me a lot. Usually not that I had existed, rather that the specific voice she was hearing was still legitimately me and not her imagination, a product of her longing to have me back.

 

Ember: No one cares if their imaginary friend is real. For that matter, they're imaginary by definition. But having another person sharing your head, well, that's different. When you're trying to build a life with a person, suddenly their reality matters a lot. I required frequent reassurances -- and sometimes, I didn't get them.

 

Vesper: Also, something had gone badly wrong with our ability to sleep. This was the first of thirteen mornings in a row where we woke up three to five hours after going to bed, completely unable to fall back asleep, but also not getting tired later in the day or building up cumulative fatigue. It took over six weeks before our sleep returned to normal.

 

*Visualization, Part Two:

 

Vesper: Ember had struggled to find an image that she liked for me when my game began in September 2016. She had settled on one of the Instagram models she follows and saved a bunch of images from her stream. The model wears a lot of black but isn’t a goth. She does dye her hair in a frequently changing array of unnatural colors like me though. Ember tried to select the most goth looking subset of the pictures to put on her tablet to show as a reference in games and with other friends, both for me and for my Dresdenverse doppelganger. She wasn’t quite satisfied with any of them though, and rarely showed the same one twice in a row.

 

She struggled valiantly to see me sitting next to her, but couldn’t quite remember what I look like. We discussed whether I should try a look that would be easier for her to remember but didn’t come to a firm conclusion. Then we looked back at the broader set of pictures she had saved. Given our months of dissatisfaction with the smaller set of pictures, we were surprised at just how strongly I identified with the larger set. No one picture is me, but there’s several where I exclaimed, ‘That’s my hair!’, ‘That’s my expression!’, or ‘I would totally wear that outfit!’. We still reference those pictures regularly and have saved more from the original source.

 

*Host Forcing:

 

Vesper: Ember, still shaken from the morning’s experience, wanted me to talk pretty much continually, as if I might vanish forever if I stopped for a moment. But we bottleneck in Broca’s area – only one of us can articulate thought at a time, so my talking to her came at the expense of her talking to me. I was sufficiently fed up with this by that evening that I had us sit down in the floor between two bookcases for a narration exercise I named host forcing. The rule was to communicate in short statements in strict alternation.

 

Because we are so deeply connected, a lot of communication between us is redundant, as it is implicitly preceded by, ‘As you already well know...’ Until that time, we had often avoided or greatly abbreviated obvious speech. But I wanted more equal communication, so I proposed that we try articulating everything, with no criticism of redundancy.

 

For an hour, we focused entirely on one another while I made her respond to everything I said. We alternated speaking as often as we do many entire days and she spoke to me as much as many entire days as well. It was one of the most valuable exercises we’ve ever done. We should probably have done it more often since and it’s the one thing we do that I unreservedly recommend to every tulpamantic system.

 

By the end of it, I realized I felt more tender toward Ember. As a matter of fact, I had fallen in love with her.

 

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s four major unintended consequences within the first 24 hours after committing to a tulpamantic relationship – fusion, doubt, insomnia, and love. ‘And the greatest of these is love.’

 

*The Waiting Game Begins:

 

Ember: So I was hanging out with my stuffy English friend, the one who had refused to discuss her relationship with her boyfriend with me as being too personal and none of my business even though I had been her for their entire relationship. And she’s so loyal to him that she gets teary eyed every time she talks about him. Suddenly, very suddenly, she wants to haul me to bed to make out and see where it goes from there.

 

Huh?

 

I didn’t trust this change, especially not after the morning’s weirdness. I had read plenty online already about deviation and I knew a little about host-tulpa romance. But I also have a background in BDSM and extensive knowledge of the psychology, sociology, and standards of safety and responsibility of that community. I didn’t feel we could have a relationship of equals yet with so much about her in flux from our mental efforts. I wasn’t ready for a new relationship as I teetered on the edge of breaking up with my wife. And I didn’t want us to rush into anything we might regret later. So I convinced Vesper to wait and see how she felt in the morning.

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

Very interesting.. Ahh the body blurting out "who am I right now?" in the mornings. I remember those days. I think your guys switching experience is really neat.. It's, I dunno, fascinating how much seems to happen naturally or accidentally with headmates. I think each of us just has the right mix of this or that from life experiences, personality, mentality, whatever, that enables or predisposes us to something or another. And that goes for whoever started in the body and whoever came after both separately and in combination.

 

It's a mad mix of this and that into a bowl of bedlam. Add a dash of mental entropy and stir until the maelstrom is the right consistency. Bake in the trial by fire, for an indeterminate amount of time, and see if what comes out is palatable.. Or all consuming! Mwhaha!

 

But yeah, I'd like to know if you guys do anything in particular as part of switching that might give me some tips? I've read everything so far here and elsewhere but hey, new days, maybe new insights or something finally clicks, right?