Mirror, Parallel, Paint Job
Generally speaking, our system’s fictives tend to align very, very closely with their sources - after all, we are directly involved in the making of them, so it becomes something of a two-way street. Some of our friends in similar situations have said that they less are their in-source counterpart and more guide that version of themself, but I don’t think we feel the same, generally; even that level of division feels wrong to us in most cases. For one thing, we develop new memories according to how things go in sessions; for another… I don’t know, just the instinctive layer of feels wrong.
There are, however, exceptions. We are, of course, affected by things in this world, and by being in a system, which inherently changes us. We have knowledge our in-world counterparts lack. In my case, I startled our host a bit by fairly abruptly shifting in behavior - for those familiar with the World of Darkness, going from a Survivor Demeanor to a Bon Vivant Demeanor. The reason, of course, is that I’ve only ever acted like a Survivor, focused on putting my head down and enduring whatever comes my way at any cost, because of the pressures I was under - Bon Vivant is much more natural to me. Coming here meant I was abruptly free of most of the things causing me stress and fear in-world - most notably, my old domitor, my old master and abuser, can no longer reach me here, can no longer hunt or hurt me. She is only a threat for as long as I choose to engage with the fiction she exists within. Without that pressure, I am free to engage with the side of myself that loves fun and sensual pleasures and light-hearted things again - and so I act markedly different than my in-world counterpart does, even though in many ways we are the same.
And yet… we have diverged in more notable ways than that. My scales have, realistically, changed.
You see, the scale colors of a dragon from my world tell you about them - their personality, their priorities. We come in seven colors - silver, red, azure, black, green, gold, and purple - and each of us displays two (with exceptions for the occasional tricolor, monocolor, or albino dragon, but I am none of these), a primary and a secondary. My colors are purple/gold - purple, perseverance, hunkering down and enduring when the going gets tough, stonewalling emotions in order to survive; and gold, curiosity, learning, intellect, chasing answers and knowledge even when it gets me into trouble.
Except they’re not. My colors in-world are purple/gold. My colors when I got here were purple/gold. But now… realistically, looking at myself, my colors have changed. My purple has faded. I know this about myself - I don’t have anything driving purple decisions, so it’s going to fade down to a secondary or even tertiary color. That’s how it works.
But herein lies what prompted me to write this essay: I’m not sure what colors I am, because visually I still display as purple/gold in headspace. My scales have not instinctively changed the way they’re supposed to, as they would have in-world. I seem to have been freed of that. I’m not sure I like being freed of it, because now my scales don’t match up with who I am, and I’m left trying to figure out what my dragon form should look like now and change it “manually” to match.
My guess is that this is happening because there’s no supernatural metaphysics making my scales change here, and because my scales haven’t yet changed in-world, there’s no memories from me to access from where those metaphysics do exist yet. We’ve drawn a couple of versions of me with different colors to try to sort it out, with limited success so far. I’m not sure if I’m just gold/purple now, with primary and secondary reversed, or if green (independence, flexibility, freedom) has overtaken purple for secondary as well - or maybe something else. I suspect my red (emotion, instinct, passion) is creeping higher than we ever expected, considering I don’t have a drop of red in-world. Either way, nothing’s stuck so far; I can temporarily change my colors, but the next time I shapeshift, it’s right back to purple/gold.
It’s… odd, to have such a direct measure of how different Loretta-out-here and Loretta-in-there are rapidly becoming. And yet I still feel like the same person - I am her, even though we’re different in these ways. I don’t feel the separation, even though it’s clearly there. Maybe saying she’s a part of me would be more accurate, I’m not sure. Maybe that’s part of why my scales haven’t changed, too - even though I know in my head I’m probably not purple/gold anymore, it’s hard for me to feel that way when she still is. So I still look like her, even though I probably “shouldn’t.” I’m stuck with her “paint job,” as it were - like I can only see myself in the mirror of the fiction, but that mirror has a delay before it changes.
Maybe someday I’ll divide from her enough that this won’t happen anymore, but today is not that day, I think. Strange as it is.
