However it had lain dormant in our mind until it came up again in Dave’s RIFTS game (of all places, I say!); when we initially started with the game we were all random rolling for our character types, powers and abilities. Mine came up with “a gestalt”, which is a random collection of some thing, be it people, spirits, animals or trees/plants which comes together to make something greater than it’s individual parts.

If you make a person gestalt, you wind up with something like Captain Planet, where each of the kids energies and such comes together to create the Captain who is a super-being with their individual abilities and so much more. The character I had was known as Dryad. She was the soul of a soldier who had died that combined with various trees and plants to form an entity with the strength of the trees, and their hardiness (unless faced with squirrels, woodpeckers or fire) and the ability to grasp things with vines etc, as well as some of the skills of her former self, such as demolitions.

The character itself didn’t work. I had trouble grasping the whole she’s a tree, yet she’s not a tree, partially because it wasn’t until AFTER I stopped playing her that it was explained to me that yes, I should have still been able to use my skills etc. I mean, at first I thought she was basically an Ent with the vaguest of recollections that she’d been human, and no real ability to retain a human shape, and then it’s “Oh, no, wait, yeah, you could totally have taken human shape more clearly, with like, actual fingers and shit…” and then it’s “Okay where was this info when you’re going oh, no wait, your computer skill is useless now because you’re a TREE.”

Anyway, ramble aside it did give us a reminder of the nature of the word “gestalt” and the fact that it’s very appropriate for what we are. We are individuals, together in this one body, achieving greater things here than we could by ourselves, and the term has the added bonus of not making it seem as though there’s something wrong here that needs to be fixed. Multiple Personality Disorder…Dissociative Identity Disorder. Even when I just speak of “being multiple” or “dissociative” the extra “baggage” is still there, because you tell someone you’re a multiple and they go, “Oh! D.I.D!” and so meh. I hate labels. I really do, but I figure if I give myself a classification then at least it’s something I can own.

Then we get into the whole, labels are labels are labels no matter where they actually come from and so on and so forth; and if you have to sit here and explain to everyone what gestalt actually is…but meh.

We like the term, and it better explains what we are, because still with “multiple” there’s the inference that there’s discord and inability to communicate and work together, which is what we’re moving away from once more because we’re getting back to a point where we can flip at will, whenever, with no loss of memory and with constant back and forth communication. The psychiatric community calls it “co-consciousness” I say “gestalt”.

It’s a little bit more obnoxious than po-tay-toe po-tah-toe but it means I don’t have to call the “whole thing” off, just part of it.

It’s been a long time since there’s been a game where I’ve felt my character, and it’s also been a long time since I’ve been in a game where everyone consistently plays their character and isn’t just reading stats off a piece of paper, and that’s going on in this game all of the time, which is why things were SO great last night.

We had a very dramatic session, two of the players were involved in something which would awaken the spirit inside another players planet. It’s something that there’s been rumblings about for a few sessions, which added to the tension. At the previous session my character had a vision of it happening and we’d actually talked one of the guys into going back to our vessel instead of remaining on the surface so he didn’t accidentally trigger the Apocalypse. However his best friend, played by my husband, had come to be of the opinion that awakening the planet would help restore his people and also prevent a worse disaster, that if he agreed to graft himself to the planet he could act as it’s conscience, given the planet was actually an “ancient being” known as “the one who sleeps” and would basically once awoken go around eating other planets. He believed strongly, due to his character’s depth of faith, that it was his mission to help this planet and thus convince it that being good was better and thus he could prevent it from destroying the universe. He had a fairly convincing argument that it would wake up anyway at some point and without him as it’s conscience that would be worse.

Roomie who was playing the planet’s native made a heartfelt and heart-tugging appeal that had several of us nearly in tears, and coupled with that and the fact that one of the GMs non-player characters attacked my husband and hurt him making my character feel that he would have less chance of standing up against the alien intelligence of the planet she took a measure that someone had given her which said, “when all hope is lost use this”.

At a certain point the entire room went silent we were just so drawn into the story, as the end of the awakening “ritual” came about and everything went haywire. It was a very tense night but also a really great one too. We have to wait two weeks until we found out what’s going to happen next. Is hubbie’s faith justified? Do we have to take other measures we now have at our disposal to “undo a big mistake”? Are we even going to be able to get away from the planet to try anything?