✨🔔The Beahive🎙️🥊

✨ "is Eminem a plural system," the greatest thread in the history of Pluralpedia, closed by moderators after 31,561 pages of heated debate

✨ So... we were probably always plural and it just took us a really long time to figure it out due to repression, right?
🔔 That is our present working theory.
🎙️ Yep, pretty much how we think it went for us. We've all got memories that 'feel' like ours individually going back to childhood, so.
✨ I don't know, it just... feels like a lot of it came out of nowhere, though.
🎙️ ...uh. You sure about that, babe?
✨ What do you mean?
🎙️Oh, well, let's see. Your favorite comics character as a kid was Venom, because you thought the idea of being 'bonded' to an independently intelligent entity was really cool.
✨ ...uh...
🎙️ You always got REALLY MAD at storylines in stuff where someone having a split personality that went away was portrayed as a happy ending.
✨ O-oh yeah...
🎙️...aaaaaaaaaaaaand let's see, what's your favorite concept to explore from your own canon, Spinel?
✨ Well, I mean, fusion is the best, obviously! It's really rad to have someone inside your body and mind with yoooooooohhhhhhhh.
🔔 ...was it really necessary to blindside her that badly?
🎙️ Hey, I'm our honesty, YOU'RE our restraint.

✨ So, y'all may have noticed, our system's been doing a lot of... rebranding lately. Rime did the cow thing, Rex Anne became Alex, we've been having a lot of shakeups but have been coming through it a lot stronger.

Well. Except me. I've, um. Been having some minor issues. As Alex and Rime's identities have gotten more clearcut and distinct, mine has been feeling more unsteady. In particular I've been getting very... blendy. Like, the borders around my identity recently have felt incredibly blurred and uncertain. About... two or three mornings ago, I kind of had a mild identity collapse. We'd woken up early, and Alex was fronting when we woke up. She took some meds for our shoulder pain, and had a little weed to try and help us fall back asleep. And as we often do, when we're alone, the person up front will talk aloud to the others who are in the back of our head, because that's part of how we have conversations. And I realized that... I couldn't tell which of us was talking and kinda lost it for a moment until we got our bearings again.

Suddenly, my usual 'sona just... no longer felt like me. It wasn't like, bad, but it felt like a costume and not who I was. I restabilized after some talking with them, but I was kind of losing it with anxiety trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be. And in particular I was really scared of... blurring that badly again. It felt... weird. I was so scared of just getting stuck inside somebody else, of disappearing and Alex or Rime waking up with just the two of them having to explain what happened to me and why I wasn't there anymore.

It wasn't until Rime gave us her perspective last night that we figured out what happened. Namely, that we'd... um, fused briefly. She was more or less observing our thoughts while it happened and there was a moment where we both started talking at once but we were saying the same thing, with a blend of our usual patterns of inflection. And I realized I'd been feeling this, like... magnetic pull, like I was just sort of blurring at the edges until we were both overlaid on each other. And I realized I'd... gotten close to that feeling with Rime, too. Which was... um, weird. But at least now I had an... operating theory of what was going on, and the fact that for some reason, I subconsciously wanted to... be part of my headmates in a very non-figurative way.

And, well. I realized I had to do something about it.