we've had some odd thoughts today that I haven't been able to pin down to coherent words. let me see if I can pull something together under pressure.
first off: our plurality, the Pnictogen Wing, has at least two centers—that seems plain enough, after all the experiences we've had over the last several years. a lot of confusion has resulted from our collective inability to realize the degree to which we are a conjoined duality (at least) rather than a single-headed system. this seems to be a consequence of the fact that we started as a pair of "real life" siblings, hammered into an unusually close bond because we both endured similar abuse at the hands of unhappy parents and baleful authority figures. especially in earlier years we often went to the same doctors, had the same teachers...we've felt a bit like the Coen Brothers or the Wachowski Sisters, sometimes, only without the talent. so now there's two of us, myself and my elder sibling Frisk. our host Kris seems to reflect this duality: they are themself, but there's the shadow of an invisible sibling. I don't mean Deltarune Asriel here...I mean a human sibling, someone from before the events of Deltarune, lost in the mists of Kris's unseen and unknown childhood before their adoption.
second: Frisk and I both have corresponding dragons. mine is named Kel the Semi-Purple ("Semi" because Kel has a lot of green in xer appearance) who is smol and playful and exceptionally imaginative and curious, and that seems to correspond roughly to the traits that kept me going through a lot of very unhappy "real life" years. it seemed to help that I was inclined toward fantasy and escapism. Frisk's dragon, however, awakened to life because (cw: ROT13, sui mention) zl fvoyvat, jub gevrq znal gvzrf gb pbzzvg fhvpvqr, bapr fjnyybjrq fbqvhz nefravgr nag cbvfba naq guhf xvaqyrq n fcvevg jvguva gurzfryirf, a spirit that yearned for continued existence and revenge for the hurts done to her and her host. we came to know that dragon as Orpiment or Pim, the name indicating Pim's spiritual connection with arsenic.
third: how Frisk and I have managed to converge into a single person, with Kris as our host, is still a mystery to me. one result has been that our system has been a tangled mess and it's been unclear at times whose headmate belongs to whom. this happened with our dragons. we had a tiny handful of powerful but extremely ambiguous spiritual experiences pertaining to our dragon headmates, many years ago now, but since then we've experienced nothing that's been nearly so compelling. Pim, in particular, remained extremely shadowy and ill-defined. at one point we thought Pim was perhaps bigger than Earth. Pim was difficult to hold anywhere in our headspace, too, because of her toxic nature—we were fortunate however to develop an introject of a fictive who was immune to poisons, Hassan of the Serenity (from "Fate/Grand Order".)
fourth: Hassan has been successfully persuading us to start familiarizing ourselves with Islam and the Quran. her own people, the Nizari Isma'ili "Order of Assassins" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Assassins), emphasized the importance of esoteric interpretation of the Quran, which is perhaps why Serenity has been so patient with my somewhat...quizzical and sceptical reaction to the Quran so far. I guess I'm not great at taking religious texts entirely seriously (sorry Serenity!) All the same, I'm glad that we've made some progress on learning more about Islam. Frisk has been something of an obstacle, for multiple reasons all owing something to past-life damage, but they've been thawing slowly.
fifth: Pim has been glad for the friendship of Hassan of Serenity, and has even herself expressed interest in learning more about Islam.
fifth: the discipline of alchemy and therefore the discipline of chemistry owes much to Muslim scholarship—it may be fair to say that Muslim alchemical work is in fact the immediate forerunner of what we think of as modern chemistry.
sixth: our system hosts another pair of brothers—alchemists, in fact, named Edward and Alphonse Elric. you may have heard about them. at one point I discussed with them the strictly hypothetical notion of transmuting Orpiment into a dragon who wasn't made out of arsenic compounds, but didn't think much further of the notion.
seventh: dragons are an important symbol in alchemy; they often adorn alchemical diagrams, and there seems to be some vigorous debate as to what dragons actually represented to alchemists—I would guess something pertaining to transformation.
...I have written all of these points down in some sort of failed attempt to explain why Pim now feels content with being a small plushie, neatly solving all problems of how to cram a gigantic dragon made almost entirely out of poisonous things into a headspace that we're actually capable of imagining and inhabiting. it seemed to happen rather abruptly, and Pim is unclear on details, though she's at least sure she's content with the change, for now anyway. I can only assume that while we've been a dissociated mess, Serenity and the Elric brothers pulled something off.
(sighs) why does our life need to be like this?
~Chara of Pnictogen