This is a blog about the innerverse adventures of Collective Telos. Alternatively, this is a record of some dissociated mental dynamics and the ways in which they interact, conveyed in metaphor.
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the color gray.
In General
Gray is the color of increasingly “bad reception” approaching the outer limits of our consciousness.
Can be associated with emotional repression, indifference, disconnection.
History
Gray-based members of the collective have a history of disconnection from personal involvement in their own lives. Much of the time they only act when required to do so by forced obligation or impersonal logic.
Some gray-based collective members (as of July 10, 2015) are:
- Risk (w/ red influence)
- Guardian (w/ blue influence)
- Fetch
- Aedal
Blue - Green - Red - Pink - Orange - Purple - Yellow - Black - White
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the “color” white.
In General
Can be associated with clinical detachment, ruthless pursuit of a particular goal regardless of “collateral damage” within the collective, and void / emptiness.
History
Duo is now recognized as white-based, but when he first turned up in late 2002 his innerverse color alignment was unconfirmed.
Locke (the doctor) and Kie (the patient) became the first known white-based collective members in April of 2005, responsible for isolating Sy from the outside world when they found it necessary.
Slave turned against the rest of the collective due to traumatic bonding in 2006; Angel has attempted to “fine-tune” his plans for abusing the rest of the collective into submission several times in the years since then.
Tatter predates all of them by several years, having been present since the 90s, but she only made herself known to the rest of us in 2007.
Some white-based collective members (as of July 10, 2015) are:
- Locke & Kie
- Tatter
- Duo
- Angel
- Slave (off-white / light gray)
Blue - Green - Red - Pink - Orange - Purple - Yellow - Black - Gray
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the “color” black.
In General
Black is the “color” of the outer limits of our consciousness - the “primordial ooze-esque” essence of our collective subconscious, from which we individually originate when the collective internal balance gets so far out of whack that none of us who already exist can stabilize it.
Can be associated with the core source of all creation within the innerverse, or with shadows and hatred, depending on the mindset in which one attempts to interact with it.
History
The earliest known instance of a black-based collective member was around 2004. Sy identified a rage-filled shadowy silhouette within the innerverse, but even from a distance she knew that attempting contact was too dangerous to be a good idea at the time. That silhouette would later (in 2013) be identified as Hex.
In late 2004, Deyva made the earliest known attempt to guide the development of a new collective member while their black primordial essence had not yet taken individual shape. She intended to use him to do her bidding against Sy due to a “heated disagreement,” but Deimos turned out to be a highly sensitive orange empath who had no desire to work against Sy, and instead became one of her most passionate protectors.
Equalizer, a shadowy silhouette of Deidal, turned up in early 2006. She has a long and complicated history, but is ultimately on Deidal’s side. Demi happened in late 2014 when Deidal was exploring some NSFW stuff, and is also one of her allies within the collective.
Some black-based collective members (as of July 10, 2015) are:
- Hex
- Demi
- Sick
- Equalizer
Blue - Green - Red - Pink - Orange - Purple - Yellow - White - Gray
So a few months ago, the last time we were able to see our therapist, she asked us to elaborate on something we mentioned about some of us sharing the same innerverse color.
As we explained the different colors the body’s hands followed along with gestures, essentially air-painting the air in front of us, indicating a particular area for each color in relation to the others - “it’s like yellow is up here, far up and more disconnected, and then purple’s down here, way more grounded in corporeal existence,” et cetera.
That was the first time we’d ever really sat and thought about how the various innerverse colors actually relate to one another as a collective whole. We’ve known with certainty since 2002 at least, that some of us were blue-based, some green-based, some red-based, et cetera.
Everyone has a color signature - we just never really considered how the color energies themselves might be arranged in our overall collective structure. And of course, mapping out collective stuff in fun and interesting ways is where a lot of our recovery / cooperation focus is these days.
So, not long after that session, we doodled up this map thing. Kept telling ourselves to go back and blend some of it a bit more, but that was in late April and I doubt we’re gonna get around to it since we haven’t by now, so here it is.
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the color yellow.
In General
Can be associated with disconnection and power. Can also be associated with instability and violence, based on the saturation and concentration of the yellow present. Often found as an influence alongside purple, orange, or green, rather than by itself.
History
DJ was originally pink-coded, but became the first yellow-based member of the collective shortly after his individual debut in late 2004.
There have been several instances over the years wherein the concentration of yellow has had toxic and / or destabilizing effects on collective members who are overwhelmed by or fully enveloped in it.
Some yellow-based collective members (as of July 10, 2015) are:
- DJ
- Bubble (translucent yellow)
- Eliza (very pale unsaturated yellow)
Blue - Green - Red - Pink - Orange - Purple - Black - White - Gray
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the color purple.
In General
Can be associated with creativity, independence, and a mixture of red and blue traits. Is one of the colors with the most representation within the collective.
History
The earliest known instance of purple being a significant color for us was in preschool. We were apparently enamored with the idea of eventually having a purple car with pink hearts on it, and purple has remained one of our favorite colors since then.
In gradeschool we would frequently LARP Power Rangers in the backyard, always as our OC, the Purple Ranger.
After Renata withdrew from the body’s external life when it turned 13 (because chronophobia etc.), Ajax became the first definitively purple-based member of the collective.
Deidal and Sy - both split from Ajax - are also purple-based, in addition to Tyris, Lavender, Thirteen, Solitaire, and Zinnia, who all split from Deidal over the span of roughly ten years.
All purple-based collective members, to date, were at one point involved enough in the body’s external life to be able to take over the body. Some no longer have, or no longer exercise, the ability to do so.
Some purple-based collective members (as of July 10, 2015) are:
- Deidal (w/ yellow influence)
- Sy (w/ red influence)
- Tyris (w/ yellow influence)
- Camou
- Solitaire
- Thirteen
- Zinnia
- Lavender
- Ajax
- Mr. Zenith
Blue - Green - Red - Pink - Orange - Yellow - Black - White - Gray
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the color orange.
In General
Can be associated with intuition, devotion, otherworldly origins, rejection of gender binarism, and a mixture of red and yellow traits.
History
Deimos was the first orange-coded member of the collective, in late 2004. He was also the first collective member we knew was somewhere outside of the gender binary, which was reflected in his color scheme; we now know he’s pangender metagender.
The only orange-based collective members (as of July 8, 2015) are:
- Deimos
- Rylie
( Additionally, CJ was originally orange-based with yellow influence, but was later “rebooted” green-based with quite a lot of yellow influence. )
Blue - Green - Red - Pink - Purple - Yellow - Black - White - Gray
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the color pink.
In General
Can be associated with oppressive gender stereotypes, unwanted external obligations, pressures to be “normal” / neurotypical, early childhood, and a mixture of red and white traits.
History
The earliest known instance of pink being a significant color for us was in preschool. We were apparently enamored with the idea of eventually having a purple car with pink hearts on it.
Over the course of the next several years, however, pink became symbolic of ridiculous and oppressive gender nonsense forced upon us, and our fondness for it was poisoned by emotional abuse and forced obedience to things we didn’t believe in.
In 2000, Flora was bound to pink by duty. In 2002, Velda turned it against us as a harsh reminder of the “normal” / neurotypical existence that was simultaneously expected of and unobtainable for us.
Some pink-based collective members (as of July 8, 2015) are:
- Velda
- Dolly
- Nod
- Flora
Blue - Green - Red - Orange - Purple - Yellow - Black - White - Gray
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the color green.
In General
Associated with freedom, disconnection, energy, and a mixture of blue and yellow traits.
History
The earliest documented presence of green-based collective members was in 1998. Some of us identified with Buttercup’s general disregard for acting “nice” or “ladylike” when she didn’t want to, and Deyva was the first (to our knowledge) to embrace that in lieu of trying to make or keep friends.
Some green-based collective members (as of July 8, 2015) are:
- Deyva (mint green/sea green)
- Quackie (greenish teal)
- Remy (dusty green w/ yellow influence)
- Xylia
- CJ (sea green w/ strong yellow influence)
Blue - Red - Pink - Orange - Purple - Yellow - Black - White - Gray
This is a summary of our innerverse associations with the color blue.
In General
Can be associated with empathy, calm, quiet. Is one of the colors with the most representation within the collective.
History
The earliest documented instance of blue being a significant color within the collective headspace was a repeating dream we had in gradeschool involving a blue helicopter.
The earliest documented presence of blue-based collective members was in 1998. The Powerpuff Girls was one of the earliest / strongest fixations (”special interests”) we’ve ever had; some of us viscerally identified with Bubbles and mirrored her behavior.
Some blue-based collective members (as of July 8, 2015) are:
- Renata
- That Sylph
- Mousie
- Zola
- Disko
Green - Red - Pink - Orange - Purple - Yellow - Black - White - Gray
One of our earliest memories is a repeating dream from our early childhood - it started sometime before the body was 8 or so, but we aren’t sure exactly when.
We were in a large store, like a Sam’s or something maybe, flying around in a little blue helicopter that was just our size. We were always happy to be flying in it, but we were always being told to come down by various adults in our life, standing on the floor down below us.
As far as memory serves, some were more angry, and some were more worried, but they were all trying to tell us to stop flying around and come back down. Often I think they didn’t trust us not to get hurt or break anything, but we were confident in our abilities, and wouldn’t come down. Not for the mother unit, not for our teachers, not even for our favorite Aunt.
In recent years, we’ve started looking into dream symbolism stuff and seeing how many of those latent sociological symbols have made their way into our subconscious.
In this case, “to see a helicopter in your dream represents your ambitions and achievements,” “you are in full pursuit of your goals,” and “you may be experiencing a higher level of consciousness, new-found freedom and greater awareness” seem to be applicable, based on the vibe we got from that dream.
Also, “blue represents truth, wisdom, heaven, eternity, devotion, tranquility, loyalty and openness. Perhaps you are expressing a desire to get away. The presence of this color in your dream may symbolize your spiritual guide and your optimism of the future. You have clarity of mind.”
And for being in a store, DreamMoods said: “To see or be in a grocery or convenience store in your dream suggests that you are emotionally and mentally strained. Alternatively, you may be brainstorming for new ideas or looking for the various choices out there for you.” Either of those could be applicable, really, given the nature of our childhood, but if I had to guess I’d say the latter better fits the aforementioned vibe we got.
I’m not sure when we stopped having that repeating dream, but I think it was before age ten or so? Maybe earlier than that.
This one's a pretty simple topic that people are already generally familiar with as a symbol, so I won't get too far into the general stuff. Instead I'll focus on how it impacts us collectively and individually, within the innerverse.
History
The body's hair is extremely dark brown, to the point of looking black until you see it in a certain light. It's also curly, but, "hilariously" enough, we didn't figure that out until our early twenties. Up until then, we just thought it was wavy and really frizzy. Basically, think Hermione Year 1 but frizzier. Yeah. That's what happens when you use a brush on curly hair instead of a wide-tooth comb. Wish we'd had that PSA growing up.
Why weren't we taught that as a kid, you hypothetically ask? The parental units didn't know either. The father unit is, shall we say, not the most in touch with his sensitive side, and the mother unit apparently just wasn't aware. She has very short hair now, but we've seen pictures from when she was younger, and though the image quality has been not-exactly-HD, she seems to have had a similar Hermione Year 1 thing going on.
But anyway, yeah. 20+ years of brush usage, plus years of only seeing girls with hair even remotely like ours in 80s movies (until Hermione), plus really despising the texture of wet hair outside of water, plus the parentals always keeping it long, equals a very irritable and resentful relationship with the body's hair for the majority of our collective life. (Which I'm sure contributed to our overall body dysphoria, but that's a topic for another post.)
Then CJ got frustrated and adventurous enough to start considering cutting some of it off and having short hair for the first time in our conscious history, but before doing so, she started researching hair care and how to manage short hair. Through that, she discovered the glory of wide-tooth combs and facepalmed pretty hard at how simple the answer was, when it came to taming the rabid frizzball that had been pissing us off all our lives.
We had just given up on doing anything with the hair beyond confining it to a ponytail since childhood, because we just figured we had ridiculous super-frizzy 80s hair and that was that. The mother unit didn't know either, and it hadn't occurred to us to look up anything about hair care ourselves before that point. By the time we had access to Google in 6th grade (#90sfeels), we had already gotten fed up with having stereotypically "girly" things shoved down our throats.
But, CJ was exploring femininity at the time, and was thus the one to discover that a wide-tooth comb and conditioner could transform our frizzpoof into very pretty curls. In fact, I can probably find some pictures.. Ah, yes.
Here's one of Zinnia that CJ did in 2012, when Zin's hair was the same as the body's. Before that, when the hair was a mass of frizz, we used to draw it as basically a spiky poof.
Damn, what an old selfie, heh, ten years this August.. But yeah, we had no idea how else to draw it, so when we translated our frizzness into our cartoony style, it generally ended up just looking spiky. (Deyva's hair is made of yarn so this doesn't apply there, btw.)
Then, a few months ago, when the hair started getting annoyingly long and we didn't need to keep it work-appropriate anymore, Sy, Renata, and I chopped off a bunch of it.
Originally Sy cut the body's hair shorter than I wanted. She and Renata kept theirs that way personally, but I don't have a picture of it so just imagine Zinnia's hair stopping closer to her chin and that's about it. Renata and I then cut the body's hair again, so it currently (March 10, 2015) has longer curls in front, and the back looks a lot like the top of Meenah's in Homestuck. Currently I think CJ and I are the only ones whose hairstyle matches the body, though hers is blonde.
Super-cartoony simplified art style in this pic because we haven't done a decent one yet, but you get the idea.
So.. Yeah, that's about where we are with hair right now.
"Haircut season" (aka the days or weeks we spend cutting off bits of the body's hair until we're satisfied with its shape), tends to be a time of change and such, big surprise. For us, it tends to occur around mid-June or late January, because shitty anniversary reasons.
I might get into more detail on that someday, but today is not that day.
So, Remy's been trying to get me [Deidal] to write more about innerverse stuff for the collective, as well as internal shit with me personally. e.x Yaay.
So I figure to ease into this process, I could start off with talking about something nice and familiar and controllable and neutral. Which would be the main visitor floor of my tower in the Multiplex, which doesn't really have much of an official name because I've yet to bother coming up with one, so at the moment it's just referred to as "Deidal's place."
I'm working on a picture of the layout of my place, maybe I'll come edit this and insert it when it's done. Or maybe I'll upload a WIP screenshot or something, who knows.
I designed it in mid-to-late 2012, after CJ and Session came to see me in the swamp, which I'm not getting into yet because that is semi-familiar and semi-controllable but definitely not nice or neutral. But I needed a place to hang around and entertain visitors when I saw fit - aka somewhere I could watch TV and browse the internet, and where some of the younger folks could feel comfortable hanging out, under my watch so I could guarantee the safety of the place.
So, I looked at CJ's half-finished rough draft for an internal structure called The Multiplex. Pun intended lolol et cetera. It's basically five very tall cylindrical towers arranged pentagonally, with some walkways connecting them in various ways. I claimed one of the towers, because me, and finalized the design for the overall Multiplex.
One of the walkways between the towers connects to mine toward the middle, and the floor it leads to is the aforementioned "Deidal's place." To the right of the entrance doors is what's generally known as "the laptop lounge," which is basically structured like one of those sunken living room kinda things from the 70s or whenever those were popular, except with a rounded sound-muffling purple-tinted force-field over the top of it.
There are some laptops for use in there, and the main purpose of it is to be a quiet non-sensory-overload-inducing environment: dimly-lit, very little if any sound, soft comfortable seating, et cetera. It's also particularly useful these days for Renata to hang out in there when she doesn't want to listen to me talk about something else in other parts of the room [that tower floor is all open like one of those apartments, lofts I think?, so I may use "floor" and "room" interchangeably], letting us stay in the same area without her having to actually listen in on certain things.
To the left of the entrance doors is the general hang-out area, with my armchair, the shorter couch, and the longer couch. Their design is based off of some furniture we used to have in the outerverse, but father dearest ruined the outerverse ones. e.x Woo.
And over there is also my giant-ass TV, because fuck yeah if I'm gonna actually focus on designing myself a hang-out place inside you can bet it's gonna have a giant fucking TV.
Directly across from the entrance doors, on the other side of the floor/room, is the Suggestions list. It's basically a flat-screen TV on the wall with some seating on the floor around it, and a laptop for visitors to input new suggestions. I didn't want to have any actual "rules" policing anyone's conduct, but I did still want to promote a less-than-hostile environment, so when I first put up the list in 2012, the only suggestion was: "Don't be a complete asshole all the time." Coming up on three years later, it's still the only one on the list.
There are also two doors over there, one on either side of the suggestion input area. [Portal-doors are a common staple of transportation within our innerverse, thanks primarily to American McGee's Alice.] The one on the left goes up or down to other floors within my tower, and it's restricted access, which means I'm currently the only one who can use it, because the other stuff in my tower isn't generally anything that anyone else needs to get involved in.
The one on the right is labeled Elsewhere, and goes, predictably, elsewhere - either to other parts of the Multiplex, or to one of the other areas of the innerverse aside from the Multiplex.
Uh.. I think that's about it, actually. The color scheme of the place is mostly just shades of purple at the moment, because I haven't really bothered with going hardcore mode on the interior design palette, so there isn't much to say about that.. Yeah, I guess that's all for now. Maybe later I'll do another post about some other place in the innerverse, who knows.
