Plural Stories

"The time storm flooded around her. Violet energy chakra waves began to pulse about her head, her brain wave pattersn becoming visible to me. I cast back in the storm, searching, for 1119 B.C.E., finally locating the oracle at Delphi. The brain wave patters of its priestesses glowed and arched fantastically before me. I brought them forward with me through the still raging storm, ready to instill and replicate their complex patterns into her brain waves. [...] Neurons hissed into place, finding their structure, sparking like fireworks..."

Blurb: a Chaos witch travels through realities, has a conversation with a poet friend, and writes out some of her spells.

Why is it worth your time?: Trippy second wave feminist meta-cyberpunk story that I can safely say I have read nothing else similar.

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, creator speaks from experience, otherworld (uh... fractal realities?), copies, realitymashing, plural on purpose, setting-specific

Content Warnings: brief appearance of a woman tormented by medical machines

Access Notes: This story is in an out-of-print small press anthology, Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Susanna J. Sturgis. Used copies can still be scraped up; it is also available in bootleg screenreadable digital form on archive.org. The whole anthology contains many spirited, many-selved stories and is worth checking out! It was also printed in the December 1988 issue of EOTU.

Misc Notes: Schein's author's note includes: "all of her science fiction is based on her real life experience [...] she still hears the first line of [The Chaos Diaries] as a voice in her head sometimes, and wonders what that means," thus the creator tag.

Submitted by packbat. Thank you, packbat!

There wasn’t much to do now, so Syrus jumped off the bed to do some simple exercises.

Syrus asked, [So what are we supposed to do besides that plan?]

[The best we can do is not cause any trouble and have the ceremony pass without any issues.] (Luna)

[Fair enough.] Replied Syrus, in the middle of her first push-up. At the peak of the second, she asked, [Want me to accidentally burn the priest?]

[...] (Luna)

[Hello, Earth to the Moon?]

Lilly sighed, [She needs to say no, but wants to say yes…]

“Hehe, I know.” Laughed Syrus.

Blurb: It began with an accident, or maybe a miracle is a better term.
Three souls dying by different strokes. One died in glory and blood; One died, betrayed but glad it was over; One died poor and alone.

Then on the child’s fifth birthday, the three sleeping souls awakened. Three souls, one body, two desires, and containing all the powers each had in their last life.

Were they destined for greatness? No. But when the past comes to haunt them, their home taken away, they have to make a decision… May it be as simple as a majority vote.

“Let’s squash them!”

“...can we just run away?

“Were you never taught to aim for the eyes?”

Why is it worth your time?: Okay, so you know the fantasy stories where someone gets reincarnated and ends up powerful because they still have the knowledge and abilities from their past life? It's one of those, except three people get reincarnated in the same body and they have the power of all three working together. It's not, like, a deep exploration of plurality, just a cool body-sharing fantasy adventure story.

And also the protagonists' new parents figure out that their kid is a plural system and are super supportive and loving. Which is really sweet and heartwarming.

Plural/1+ Tags: closeting, cofronting, otherworld, the dead, teamwork, spiritual, setting-specific.

Content Warnings: violence, injury, poisoning, and death; murder, kidnapping, arson, child endangerment, and animal death; grief and trauma.

Accessibility Notes: online, screenreadable, free. Scribblehub link.

Misc. Notes (if any): The way dialogue is formatted for completed sentences, with both periods inside the quote and commas outside, is unusual, if pretty clear and comprehensible. The first part of the story goes up to Chapter 63, but it's ongoing and it sounds like there's a lot of plot still to go. (Cataloger note: Holy crap there are well over a hundred chapters, I don't think I want to manually back all that up.)

"'Have I the honour to address Ti?'

This answer did not seem to have quite the effect I hoped it would.

'You are addressing the Sole Companion of the King, the Overseer of All the Works of the King, the Overseer of the Scribes of the King's Book, the Director of the Palace, the Superintendent of the Canal-Banks, the Overseer of the Schools, the Director of the Court-Wigmakers, Overseer of the Pyramid of King Nefer-ir-ka-Ra, Overseer of the Pyramid of King Ni-user-Ra, the Honoured One Before His Lord, Ti.'

I stood corrected!"

Blurb: A green Egyptologist, upon falling asleep in Ti's tomb, gets taken on an educational journey of ancient Egyptian life, accompanied by (the somewhat pompous) Ti, along with illustrated carvings on the tomb depicting the events described.

Why is it worth your time?: It's a lighthearted, informative journey into ancient Egyptian life, made more meaningful by it representing in broad strokes Eady's own experiences of past-life memory. The illustrations are nice additions!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, creator speaks from experience, the dead, visions, voices, nonswitching

Content Warnings: None.

Access Notes: Reprinted in its entirety in Jonathan Cott's The Search for Omm Sety, which is available in paperback, hardback, and online at archive.org

Submitted by beepbird! Thanks, beepbird!

"“The formal definition of insanity,” I said, “is actually quite fluid. Two people can have the exact same condition, with the exact same severity, but one can be considered sane by the official standards while the other is considered insane.""

Blurb (taken from the back of my copy): Stephen Leeds, AKA 'Legion,' is a man whose unique mental condition allows him to generate a multitude of personae: hallucinatory entities with a wide variety of personal characteristics and a vast array of highly specialized skills. As the story begins, Leeds and his aspects are drawn into the search for the missing Balubal Razon, inventor of a camera whose astonishing properties could alter our understanding of human history and change the very structure of society.

Why is it worth your time?: Despite being framed as hallucinations, Leeds' aspects are treated as fully autonomous people who make their own decisions, sometimes surprising him. It's nice to see them treated as rounded characters of their own, let alone rounded characters with independent relationships with each other.

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, realitymashing, friendship, romantic, enmity, teamwork, nonswitching, visions, voices

Content Warnings: character death, gun violence, terrorism mentions, kidnapping(? Debatable about whether it counts, but they do get knocked out and wake up tied to a chair at one point), debate about wanting a "cure". This is also the first book of a series, which has a content warning in the comments.

Accessibility Notes: Physical book or ebook (legitimate or otherwise); audiobooks are available on audible, Amazon, Google Play, etc. I'd assume that it can be found at libraries given that I found it at a library sale. All text, so screen reading shouldn't be an issue for ebooks. This particular book of the series has also been translated into French and Spanish!

Zhonos interjected "It'll take time to adjust to the fact that you are still out there, yet also in here. And the other Time Lords… they won't treat you like they do now, we're all… an aberration to them".

"But we'll be here for you" Nistri added "And you'll be with us for whoever comes next. For number six".'

Blurb (from AO3): After sacrificing themselves to save the Doctor from an elder god, Yanistriterquyzhonosorkyquiana, a Time Lord agent with regenerative dissonance, barely manages to escape, at the cost of their fifth incarnation's life. Crashing onto Cretaceous Era Earth, they regenerate into a form best fit for survival, a Velociraptor.

Five months later, Yanis VI, aka Skyfallen, has become closely connected with a local pack of Velociraptors who have helped her to survive in her new form. However when the Doctor returns for her help, they uncover a conspiracy that could shake Gallifrey to its core.

Why is it worth your time?: First — the author takes a badly-realised, stereotypical 'alien DID equivalent' from somewhere down in the depths of canon, and hollows out and rebuilds the ethics of it, 'till the story doesn't doubt for a second that being many-in-one is, in fact, fine and awesome… and that you don't trust an ableist fictional society to be just this once correct about the danger somebody must supposedly inherently pose, even if the society's what's handing out your plot hooks. It actually goes through with applying what people say the occasional best things about Doctor Who ethics are… that you trust difference, and that you listen to people's perspectives, over traditions and impersonal systems that would like them to stop existing being inconvenient.

The collective at the center of things are vibrant, distinct characters, and they have a great teamwork dynamic, it's fun to read them solve disagreements! The author's also put quite some thought into the mechanics of how this plurality-equivalent's dealt with, and how other things are, the edges of what's possible and what's 'acceptable' and how that affects people living in these contexts.

Speaking of, beautiful, beautiful nonhuman societies worldbuilding… the plot mechanics're dizzying, but I love, too, the moment when it finally clicks into place. (The ending's a happy one, I believe, and the cleverness is one bit of how.) Fair warning, you might need a lot of lore and context to get the most possible out of this fic — I think I caught less than half — but if you can roll with unintroduced elements, or you do know that lore and context, this is the worthwhilest thing…

1+ Tags: abuse:low-focus (not connected to the existence of the plurality-equivalent), nonhumans ('Time Lord', velociraptor), median (sort of, they consider themselves 'the same person' in a way), serially singlet (sort of, people can all act through the body, but their body is always of the latest arrival), setting-specific, cofronting, teamwork

Content warnings: Adventure-story-typical violence, predatory animal behaviour, war mentions, death; ableism/pluralphobia, a lot; some mentions of ~abuse — there's nothing that's called abuse, but you could very easily interpret it anyway.

Access notes: Read it on AO3, here!

"He's here he's here two ends of the circuit he's here migod we're holding him between us!!!"

Blurb: After Spock's tragic death at the end of the Wrath of Khan, Bones and Kirk are left picking up the pieces... only to discover that their friend may not be truly gone.

Why is it worth your time?: A time capsule from slash fandom past! Delightful cheesy fun.

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, bodyhopping, cofronting, intimate and romantic relationships, on purpose, setting-specific, voices, the dead, nonhumans (Vulcan)

Content Warnings: Spock's dead, McCoy and Kirk are upset, and that's no spoiler.

Access Notes: Originally published in the Star Trek fanzine It Takes Time on Impulse, Vol. II, from 1983, it's also available on Archive of Our Own and LB Lee also textually transcribed it here as a back-up.

Submitted by acorn_squash! Thank you, acorn_squash!

“Jay wants there to have been consequences, he thinks. It nags at him: the senselessness of it. That Poor Kid, he keeps thinking; he's thought it so often it needs capitals. A proper title. Twenty-something years and a grave so shallow he imagines Barnes can feel it when the wind comes through the cherry trees in Arlington. Or around that rock in the mountains, under that frozen river—or spread thinly between one and the other, a stretched-out restless haunting five thousand miles long. He doesn't know which is worse to contemplate. That Poor Kid. And then there's Jay, turning his back when it's convenient and plumbing memories when he feels like it, pawing over the corpse and checking its pockets for spare change. They'd wrestled, somehow, and he'd won.

“He knows it wasn't like that, not really. Wilson'd implied as much, when he'd suggested that Jay had been born from the remnants of Barnes's healing brain, like the muck in a chrysalis reforming into another creature. But one time Jakob told Jay the story of Ya'akov, his namesake, wrestling the angel in the desert and coming out with a different name, a different identity; as a people—and Jay hasn't been able to stop thinking of it as a battle ever since. Jay wonders what Ya'akov's family thought, when he came limping back and said: my name is Yisrael. Whether he'd felt new. Whether he'd felt that he'd left something, back there in the sands, in the place where his hip had been twisted.”

Blurb: A series of Captain America and the Winter Soldier fanfics exploring the Soldier’s time in HYDRA, his escape, and his recovery, as he slowly decides who he is and who he wants to be. Only the second CatWS fic ever to be nominated to this comm!

Why is it worth your time?: This is really, really good fanfiction. (I think the excerpt above speaks for itself.)

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse: high-focus, cofronting (very rarely), memory work, people: the dead, type: setting-specific, type: switching (exactly once and never again)

I chose the setting-specific tag because Jay was born (as far as we know) because of brain damage that was only survivable at all because of sci-fi tech.

Content Warnings: Extremely graphic torture and murder, including of children and animals. (You can safely assume that everything in these content warnings is extremely graphic, unless noted otherwise.) Auto-amputation. Abusive medical experimentation that borders on body horror. Suicide attempts and self-harm. Vomit. Starvation. Memory erasure. Drug addiction. Forced chemical castration (off-page, but it’s a plot point; Jay isn’t especially upset about it, but he didn’t choose it either). Mentions of death in childbirth. Mentions of rape, including rape of children.

There’s also consensual sex in some of the sequels. (You can skip them if that isn’t your thing.) “I know the afterglow” has rimming and penetrative anal sex. “open your houses and let in the night” has outdoor blowjobs and anal fingering.

Accessibility Notes: Free, online, screenreadable. The main fic has been translated into Russian; the sequels are only available in English. Whole thing has been backed up on Wayback Machine.

Submitted by erinptah! Thank you, erinptah!

"As B, I felt very grateful to you for treating me as if I were a "real" person and allowing me to express my own personality. With every one else I had to pretend to be A, and my feeling of gratitude and the fact that you asked for my co-operation -- put me on my honor as it were -- was the underlying motive in telling you so much."

Blurb: An account of the various phases of dissociated personality, written by the patient, after recovery and restoration of memory for all the different phases. Such an account could only be given by a person who has had the experience, and who has the introspective and literary capacity to describe them.

Why is it worth your time?: Possibly the earliest medical-multi memoir! Clear and engaging writing, it makes for a quick, fun read. A reader from the 2020s can regularly recognize "hey, if they were around today they'd call that [term that hadn't been coined in 1909]." The first half is written by an integrated "C" who can remember the experiences of both "A" and "B", though those two struggled with severe amnesia barriers for a long time. The second half is by B, who recounts her own experiences, including co-consciousness (in that word!) with both A and C.

The first half is formatted as a series of letters to their psychiatrist, who requested that they write it all up for a scientific journal. The psychiatrist contributes some prefaces and footnotes, but he largely gets out of the way and lets the system tell their story. When he brings in his own perspective, it's usually to say "this is how my observations corroborate the experience my patient has described."

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, cofronting, creator speaks from experience, fusion/integration, relationships: teamwork, type: median, type: medical

Content Warnings: none. The authors talk about difficult experiences in very general terms (e.g. a "shock" of "an intensely emotional nature"), but say plainly that they aren't interested in going into detail.

Accessibility Notes: Digitized on archive.org. Text version was auto-generated from the scanned pages, so it has some errors, but is overall readable/searchable.

Misc. Notes (if any): Fusion/integration was a therapeutic goal for this system, and they were relieved and satisfied with the results. The "median" tag seems appropriate for both their early experiences (where they describe a "B complex", which was identifiably separate, but hadn't yet "flowered" into "a distinct personality"), and their post-integration ones (where B experiences herself as still existing, just fully co-conscious with C).

This submission comes from erinptah!

"I thought I had this down, you know. I would always be the aloof and inaccessible conjoined twin, the shadowy passenger to your outer life. But now I’m triggered. The revolution is on. More people are coming out and singing their songs. I want to belt out my part before we eddy into eternity."

Blurb (from Goodreads): Two identities struggle to coexist in Ronnie Gladden's body, brain, and soul. On the outside, they are Black and male. Inside, a repressed White female identity begs for release and is ready to break the status quo. Grappling with double-binary thinking, an abusive father, and childhood trauma, they imprison their inner self to stay safe from the world.

Why is it worth your time?: A plural memoir unlike any other I've ever read. A series of letters between Ronnie and his headmate (only identified as White Girl, or WG); although both of them identify Ronnie as the core/original, WG's perspective gets significantly more page time. They don't struggle with amnesia or time loss; it seems they've both been aware of each other since WG's appearance at age 4, the struggle is about validating each other and learning to coexist. Possibly the most in-depth reflection on "our physical body has one race, but this system member has a different one" in existence to date.

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse intermediate-focus, creator speaks from experience, people: imaginary friends, relationships: teamwork

Content Warnings: Contain spoilers; see comments!

Accessibility Notes: Print and digital/ebook versions available. Published in 2023, so new copies are easy to get (or have your library get).

Misc. Notes (if any): I didn't tag "type: medical" because Ronnie/WG don't use any psychiatric/DID-related terms in the memoir. (Not clear whether they've actively rejected the diagnosis, or whether they've never come across it in the first place, so they haven't had a chance to consider it.) But the experiences they describe are a typical DID origin story, of a child in an abusive household whose brain instinctively generates headmate(s) for coping and protection.

I'm not sure whether to tag dreamfolk/fictioneers, because none of those are described as full-fledged headmates the way WG is. But they write about internalizing fictional/TV characters pretty intensely ("you—we—brought these characters along in the same way most go and buy clothes"), and transcribe some "dream scene" conversations between them. Wouldn't be surprising if a future memoir said "we now realize those were from a roundtable of fictives having a chat."

Submitted by numinousdread! Thanks, numinousdread!

"I often imagine what my neighbors think as I am rushing huge catering trays into my car, and then the next day I have a full drag outfit made all of synthetic hair that I'm rushing to my car, and then the next day I'm covered completely in blue paint because I'm doing a Violet Beauregarde drag number. [Both laugh] You know, I think about it. I'm just kind of embracing. For me, it is about gender. It does relate to gender, because I just think of myself as a house for many different beings, and they all are employed. [Both laugh] They all have jobs. They have all different jobs, they have different outfits, they have different likes and dislikes, and they're all trying to make this human vessel their home. Sometimes chaos ensues. [Laughs] That's how they’re all tied together: they all live in the same house."

Blurb: A Nigerian-American trans artist and chef discusses his work, feelings about top surgery, and experiencing his body as a house for multiple beings.

Why is it worth your time?: An interesting discussion of drag as an outlet for plurality, and a very non-sensationalized/chill presentation of Amabebe's experiences (imho).

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, spiritual

Content Warnings: Discussion of the loss of Amabebe's father, as well as non-specific discussion of his difficult childhood and how he used dissociation as a coping mechanism. (Abuse is not specifically mentioned.) Brief mentions of angry family responses to his top surgery.

Accessibility Notes: Available for free in audio and transcript form.