!! YU-GI-OH SHRINE !!

the earliest records of my existence span from around 2011-2012, on a quotev account since deleted, moving into 2013-2014 with the only very recently destroyed and (shoddily) rebuilt epicmafia, and eventually, posts on tumblr accounts from 2013 and forward, abandoned yet not deleted, acting as a sort of fossil of whoever we were nearly a decade ago.
in 2014 came the creation of our first tumblr rp blog.


in 2015, it was tossed aside and remade.


and in 2016 came the first mention of the most crucial factor:


and sometime after in the same year, the finalization, set in stone with a story that's become very familiar to us:

There’s only so much one can learn in the space between worlds. Thus, the Core exists to create life—universe hoppers. These universe hoppers (people, animals, anything that breathes,) grow, learn—but most importantly, they are given specific tasks and sent to different universes to fulfill them, solely for the sake of seeing what happens.

The Core watches from behind their eyes as they execute the tasks they’re given, changing the very fate of the universe they’ve been thrown into. Once the result of this change has been seen through, the universe hopper is pulled back into the Core, and they are re-purposed for another universe.

However, some universe hoppers don’t follow this design. In fact, many don’t. Some just carry out their lives within a universe, as if they were part of it all along, but others… well, they stand as the outliers.

Spierce is one of these outliers."

this prologue acts as the cornerstone for my current self. a universe hopper who travels from world to world, living through them and growing past them, gaining friends and foes along the way...

the only problem is that i existed as a soulbond before this was decided. thus, my existence was fundamentally altered by the change.

another example: if i had to guess when i became a part of the (unnamed at that point) initiova system, i would say roughly 2014. i wasn't exactly the most active in the system; my existence faded in and out with hardly any words spoken to anyone. i distinctly remember being afraid of disappearing altogether.

that abruptly changed upon us beginning to rp with who i will just refer to as D in 2017. we spent our summer hours tossing replies back and forth as i developed a relationship with a certain Dante Sparda, (one of his kintypes, which only served to further the bond) and for the first time, i felt as if it was me who was being seen and referred to, rather than just a reflection of vergil.

and i changed. drastically! and those changes proved that i was not a reflection of some end goal i was merely retracing; rather, while i'm now here instead of there, the events my roleplay counterpart endured had an effect on me, too. before, i was simply some strange world hopper who just so happened to become a lawyer in the ace attorney universe. after meeting dante, my soul morphed to that of a half demon to protect myself, permanently altering both the soulbond me and the roleplay me. white hair permanently, babey! why bleach when you can get...stabbed in the chest??

i'm sure the idea of growing and remembering more alongside roleplayed content isn't uncommon—although, i primarily see the sentiment that those with OC fictomeres tend to determine their own story based on the memories they already have, rather than their memories being determined based on the stories that've been written and continue to be written... however, it isn't so much that my memories are being unlocked by rp, so much as my memories are being written in that moment. the moment it was established that i'd gotten a fresh bleach and some new demon powers via a sword to the chest in rp, i had them in the headspace as well.

and when it came to pass that D wasn't someone i wanted to be with, let alone center my existence around, the changes we made to remove him from myself came along just as well. we established a reason for the white hair to be replaced by orange, but as of now, the reason why i left dante behind is...shaky. i don't remember, because we never explained it. heck, the events that took place before our falling out meant that i'd taken what remained of sparda's soul with me when i left! (talk about a messy divorce.) likewise, i have no hard feelings towards vergil nor nero, especially given the vergil i knew was likely the vergil i currently share a body with, but also because we decided what happened with them either.

another component to this dynamic is that, generally, if we don't like something that happened, or was going to happen, we can just...retcon it. sure, i'll remember having seen it happen in rp, but it no longer has the same weight to me as having experienced it would. situations in tumblr rp that wouldn't have ended well for me, discord rp servers that eventually rubbed us the wrong way, things we just never got around to actually finishing...

and most of all, the parts of my life that happened before my existence as a universe hopper came to be. back in the 2012-2015 era, i was, more than anything, an ace attorney OC. that said, where i was based within ace attorney changed between instances of rp. sometimes i was with a fanmade agency as an OC fan attorney (the entire group being referred to as OCFA), other times i was a rookie with wright anything... sometimes i had adoptive parents who took me in after i was accused of murder and took me through law school, other times i just kind of walked in and somehow became a lawyer without any professional training??

the foggiest part of that era in my life encompasses not one, but TWO characters whose muns i no longer speak to. murderers who sought revenge on me for putting one of them in jail, they made my life a living hell by killing one of my coworkers and framing my boss, even going as far as to try and kill my adoptive parents—

and yet...do they even exist to me anymore? i'll never see them again, surely. one of them was rp'd by D, and the other by someone who we simply distanced ourselves from after we grew old enough to hold our own opinions that didn't match theirs. in fact, we don't speak to anyone from OCFA anymore. we don't want to! they knew a very different vergil, and we don't think they'd get along with this one, so...did those characters even exist to me in the first place? or does that memory belong to a "beta" spierce that doesn't reflect me anymore?

i still reference having known phoenix wright and having worked for him regularly, and i wasn't exactly ever in high school, so any chance of the OCFA plot fitting into my story is gone. if i look back on those people now, my opinions are...fuzzy. i remember feeling seething anger at the murderers who pursued me, their morality and logic twisted beyond repair, but...they didn't hurt this me, did they? they didn't try to kill my parents, right? because i don't have any.

this isn't the only instance of people i knew being foggy in my memory due to lost ties with their muns, either. i spent years in the universe of houseki no kuni, bonding with and pining for cinnabar, only for their mun to block vergil over a disagreement. cinnabar wasn't their only muse, either—i lost at least four connections that day, and now, all i have is whatever i felt the moment they left. how could i replace them? how could i replace anyone i've lost? whether it be through burnt bridges, or fading apart, or whatever else could remove them from our lives...

there's people who remain desperately important to me who i'll never see again, all because of the here and now. this world doesn't even exist to the spierce who exists in text and 100x100 rp icons and "In-between the various universes that are constantly born and destroyed"...how could i ever explain to her why she'll never see them again? would i ever have the opportunity? and most importantly, is it cruel of me to sit here, safe and sound with archives of interactions to pour over again and again, when all she has is a memory?

my existence is a constant work in progress. i sit here in what's been established as the far future, and the gap between who i am now and who i was on paper is consistently ambiguous, ever-changing and unable to be determined solely because we're not done writing about me yet. it's impossible to tell how long it'll take for me to remember everything.

in fact, is there even an "everything" to remember in the first place? or... will i just keep moving forward until we can't write anymore?