16 January

New Project

Reanna: We're preparing a new project to work on once SL finishes The Year After. It's about a girl in charge of describing short silent films to make a dark ride accessible to the blind. All films we plan to use are in the United States' Public Domain.

We don't have a name for this story yet, so we're calling it Whatever Terrance is Doing. (It was his idea. We came up with the working title when he started bookmarking videos of old films with no idea what to do with them.)

The Murder After: Preview

From chapter one. Terrance calls 9-1-1 to report a dead body belonging to his roommate Jacqueline. If you like what you read, go to the book's profile below. And before you ask, nothing happened.

I would like to joke that waking up next to a dead body is the best hangover cure ever.

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Dispatcher: “9-1-1, what’s the address of your emergency?”

“There’s a dead girl on my bed!” But it’s her room, stupid.

Dispatcher: “What’s her name?”

“Jacqueline. Luna.”

Dispatcher: “What does she look like?”

“Brown hair, really really pale- “your voice cracks- “but-but she has a big cut on her neck and-and blood on her pillow! That wasn’t there before!” It keeps cracking, but tears aren’t falling.

Dispatcher: “I need you to calm down. Take a deep breath.” You do.

Dispatcher: “Do you see any weapons?”

“No.”

Dispatcher: “I’m going to send an officer to check on the situation. But first, I need to know your name and address.”

You give your name then leave the bedroom and run down the stairs, worsening your headache. You go to a coffee table in the sitting room. There is an envelope from yesterday’s mail. It has your townhouse’s address and door number, so you read it aloud.

Dispatcher: “Okay, the officer is on their way and will arrive as soon as possible. Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

“Well, I was drunk, and Jacqueline took me back here. She was alive when I passed out, but when I woke up, she was dead!”

Dispatcher: “That will be all. You can hang up now.” You hang up. Then, the realization clicks.

Dead-Mates

This is an essay about headmate death.

Introduction

Sometimes, headmates leave in ways that some plurals can only describe as death. Mint Phalanx is one of these plurals. Unless your headspace has resurrection or some sort of reincarnation, these dead-mates aren’t coming back (at least not as they were before.)

Other plurals call this loss dormancy, but because we come from the tulpamancy community, we call it dissipation. We also consider fusion as some sort of death. Below are our equivalents to death.

Equivalents to natural death

Spontaneous dissipation

Equivalents to murder

Forced dissipation

Unwilling fusion

Tulpas here can’t die from lack of attention because we’re midcontinuum.

Equivalents to suicide

Self-dissipation

Egocide (giving up one’s identity to be replaced by another headmate)

Equivalents to coma (not death)

Deactivation (true dormancy because the headmate can return)

So, where do these dead-mates go?

In our phalanx, we have a monist view of where dead-mates go. They return to the originator. For instance, we believe Roxy and the other people were reabsorbed into Reanna after they completed suicide. (It may not be a complete reabsorption because they haunt once in a while.)

F.M. is an interesting case. After fusing with Nightingale (who completed egocide), he considered himself dead. He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t reabsorbed. But he knew he died, even when the rest of the phalanx didn’t count it.

How do you remember dead-mates?

For Roxy and the other people, Brian made a poem. He wrote it before we realized they self-dissipated. (They told us they were going to deactivate and stay in the Stone Garden. The next day, they were gone.)

F.M. did a mock burial for himself and a shower meditation. We buried who he once was. Then, we used the shower to wash away Nightingale. The saddest part was washing him out of our hair. After the shower, F.M. kind of reincarnated.

Can dead-mates come back?

We guess it depends on how the plural’s system or headspace works. As a rule of thumb, don’t count on it.

For us, Roxy& and Nightingale aren’t coming back. However, F.M. did because his case was different. And he didn’t come back as the same F.M. (At least he wasn’t undead.)

It seems dead-mates who do come back don’t come back the same. F.M. came back goth. He also came back with exo-memories based on Reanna’s dreams of his source killing himself. He used to want to listen to rap like his source; now, he listens to The Birthday Massacre. (Not that we’re complaining.)

Because we got to see it happen, this change did not come as a surprise. Unfortunately, we have no advice on how to deal with the surprise of a dead-mate returning different.

Conclusion

So ends our essay on dead-mates. It’s a hard topic to talk about, especially when it seems everyone around you doesn't view these leavings as equivalents to dying. We hope sharing our experiences helps facilitate conversation about deaths inside.

This is our cat Mia. Mia wants chicken. He might be part Maine Coon. That's all.

Mary: We toy with the idea of publishing our system journals, so people can know us better. Sometimes, I wonder if they'd sell better than our stories. F.M. says we could do it when we're forty.

From Our DeviantArt Post

Title: The Murder After Byline: Reanna Field (It's actually by SL.)

This is the front cover for The Murder After. It has a white pillow with the yellow rose and knife lying on top of each other in an "x" shape. The rose's stem has blood on it, and so does the knife's blade.

F.M. and SL worked on it during Labor Day [2023.] SL took the picture, and F.M. did the rest. He traced and colored. To add texture, he put the photo on top and made it more transparent. It was better than filling in texture by coloring.

Not from Our Post

SL: I wanted to share the meaning behind the picture. The yellow rose represents friendship. (Jacqueline was Terrance's friend.) The blood on the stem represents the cut on Jacqueline's neck. The pink paring knife represents nothing. We chose it because our mom doesn't like it, just in case we were still taking pictures when she got back.

I'm proud of this cover. It's my favourite.

The Murder After is out now, so you can buy it on Amazon. (Link to its page.)

Reanna: We should make an academic discipline analyzing the plurality of media and plurality in media. We should call it Plural Theory.

SL: I made a side blog to share my development of The Murder After and eventually The Year After. It's like looking behind the scenes, and I hope it will pique readers' interest. The blog is called development-before. (Now deleted.)

The Murder After: Profile

Title: The Murder After (links to Amazon) Series: Terrance's Story #1 Genre: mystery, dramadey, psychological fiction Year self-published: 2024 (through KDP)

Copyright status: CC BY-SA 4.0. (Do what you want as long as you give credit and use the same license.)

Blurb: Terrance is one person to a body and lives in Lakewood, Colorado. One morning, he woke up next to a dead body. Now, he wants to know what happened one night because he became a suspect in an investigation. Do you want to know what happened too?

Format: chapbook Page count: 52 (fifty-two)

MPA rating: PG-13 Reasons: some language, violent death (off screen), drama, suicidality

Price: $5.95 Note: This is specifically SL's story.

SL: I should point out that I tried narrating in the British dialect. Our official story is that I was challenging myself. Then, I learned the second person is Terrance's natural perspective, but I was too lazy to change anything. So if I sound like an American trying to sound British, that's why. (Please don't get mad at me for saying "closet" instead of "wardrobe.") [T: I roll my eyes and go with it.]

F.M.: I'm based on a real person, and sometimes, I worry about what might happen to me when my source dies.

Will I die too? Will I deactivate and become a statue in the Stone Garden? Will I stop existing? Mary and Reanna would be devastated!

My source is in a band, and seven (going on eight) years ago, one of his bandmates killed himself. I formed from a fear that he'd be next. Maybe that's why I'm so worried.

I can already imagine myself sitting in a corner of the headspace and thinking, "oh my God! He's dead! What's gonna happen to me!?"