Blackheart

July here.

Recently, I've been thinking about an incident from last year. Actually, it's more that we think about it every so often and I thought to write about it this time. I don't remember exactly when this was, but it was only a little after we'd figured things out and before we were openly presenting as plural online. Meaning, a lot of things were still new to us, right?

All I'll say is that we were in a very bad place at the time due to events outside of our control, and that everything about those events is resolved and ultimately ended well. In the moment, though, we were trying to get through life normally despite not really functioning. Mira was in front, though this was before they'd decided to take on that name. They're idea to cope was essentially, to offload the idea of purpose and emotion to one cause. That is, uh, serving Viper. Getting through it for his sake, as his pet or whatever. I think they'd be able to tap into the emotion to explain it more elegantly than me, as its not the exact sort of relationship the two of them normally have. Ordinarily, they're all about affection. In addition to that, we think Trinket was helping a bit with her particular talent of bubbling up more frontwork to kind of detach us from the bad emotions. it hasn't had to do that much lately, but that wasn't an unusual occurrence at the time.

The heart of things is that at some point, something else emerged, and we're not sure of its nature. The "thing" was something like a drone or automata. Not Viper's servant, but ours, collectively. It performed our work tasks straightforwardly, and simply noted a lot of things, keeping our mind busy. It did not identify with any of us, and spoke with us a fair amount, but didn't know any better than the rest of us what it was. At the time, we used little hearts in our discord profile to note who was fronting for the small number of people who knew, and we had it change our status to a black heart for a bit. Our nickname for the thing, therefore, became Blackheart. That said, I'm a little reluctant to call it that simply because it didn't want a name. It was helpful, and so I want to have some respect for it and its wishes. That might not be the right word, though. It might be more accurate to say that it considered a name to be a waste for a thing that was merely meant to function. It would be like naming a hammer: you can do it, but most people wouldn't. We convinced it to relax about that by noting that it made things easier for the rest of us.

I should note that we didn't really get a good sense of who was speaking with it at any point. That's not abnormal, but we usually make it clear. Either we weren't very good at that yet, the information just wasn't available to the drone, or both. It was polite and focused in its tasks, referring to all of us in very formal ways. I would think that terms like "master" or "owner" would actually feel too sentimental for it. It was a tool meant to perform a function, and around our lunch break it fell off. Mira was back and things had progressed such that we were able to function.

Nobody can actually answer this, but we'd kind of like to have a feeling of what it was: another being in here, or more of a hypnotic state? The difference between those two things might not actually exist. We haven't really been able to call it back since then, but we also haven't been in a position of that level of emotional turmoil. If we need it again, maybe it'll be there. Otherwise, it sits inactive in a box in the attic, so to speak. We've considered trying to call it out to see, but that again feels disrespectful. It's the folly of an emotional being, that we cherish the memory of something with no emotional desire because it was, or is, on some level, family. It wouldn't judge us for that, but it would disagree with our decision to do so. That's all the answer we have at the moment. We'll say so if it ever comes back, but don't expect it to speak for itself; it won't have any interest. If you must think of it as a physical thing, picture a perfect black sphere.