Happy Valentine's Day From Mint Phalanx!

SL: Another thing about Terrance's second person perspective. He perceives his thoughts as commentary, so it's like The Murder After has a chorus. He doesn't have a name for it, but we call it Also Terrance.

Terrance is a plurallet. That's a singlet who is still plural (more than one) in some way. We think it's a midcontinuum experience. (That's the state of not being singular but also not multiple.)

Reanna: If we ever develop a fanbase, I wonder if it would primarily be fans with physical copies of our books or fans with digital copies we put in shadow libraries.

I wish we had a way of knowing if someone read our books. Let's try asking. If you have a question about our books, send it in the ask box.

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.)

Reanna: There is nothing more wholesome than introducing headmates to things.

I introduced SL to Friends two years ago. When he heard Phoebe say for the first time "I can't believe you're gonna ask Monica to marry you," he gasped. And it wasn't in the headspace; it was external.

I can't wait to go to New Mexico with my grandparents again. Jackie, SL, E.A., Terrance, Maria, and Chibz have never been there before. (F.M. vanished the last time we went in 2019 and only remembers the ride back. We went twice, so he doesn't know if he was actually there or not.) I think they would enjoy the trip, especially Jackie. She likes adventures.

Reanna: I wish my headmates had the luxury of thinking about their stories without possibly annoying others like I did. But they get to have collaboration and make suggestions. I didn't have that before the phalanx.

SL: The flowers we got our mum yesterday have roses, so F.M. and I plan to remake the cover of The Year After with one of them. We already took the picture.

The current cover has a white carnation with pink stripes. It represents love that wasn't shared. We only used it because we got the flower on our birthday.

But a red rose represents true love. The Year After is a romance after all. Plus, we used a rose for The Murder After (a yellow one representing friendship.) Here's a link to that cover.

I'm glad we can use roses for both books.

SL: Wouldn't it be funny if The Year After were 88 pages, double the first volume's page count? I'm already making it fourteen chapters, double the first volume's chapter count.

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.

Happy Thanksgiving from Mint Phalanx!

Reanna: Classwork is like doing dishes. You put off the easier one because it was hard last time.