#while al is like “well i could but void forbid i have ANY fun around here :/”

[andr0nap-wf]

another thing i cant stop thinking about is the crucible

albrecht, my buddy old pal, what was the thought process here? which part of your void-damaged neurons deemed that throwing glass canisters with volatile elements at another glass canister that mixes together Even More Volatile elements was a good idea?

how many times has this man nearly blown himself up?

[shadowfae]

**breathes in deeply**

(vent)

So I'm a soulbonder who's looking to make a new bond to a particular person and nothing is working.

I know a lot about this person, I know a good amount about their world, and I know what I need to do, but none of the things I've tried have worked. I've bonded people before in both intentional and unintentional ways. This is unusual for me. I don't quite know how to handle what's going on here.

I know what's probably causing it. My mental health kinda tanked between this and the last time I called a new bond. Like. I've started experiencing psychosis issues intra-headspace. Thankfully I've avoided anything that severe in meatspace, but I have had increased issues with my pre-existing executive function and emotional regulation issues. Every time I think I've gotten somewhere with bonding this character it's only been psychosis issues and discernment issues, and it's really, really disheartening.

But even aside from mental health issues, when I'm relatively lucid I'm not having luck.

I've tried summoning, I've tried inviting, I've tried direct "hey come here", I've tried indirect "hey we'd like to talk", I've tried yanking them, I've tried directly appearing to them in their own world, I've tried just trying to talk to them before. Most of these I've tried more than once. Nothing has worked. There may have been contact in the past (and seemed positive-to-neutral about learning more about this place and visiting), but at this point I really doubt even the more reliable incidents. Something should have worked here, and I can't shake the feeling something is going very wrong.

I know I should probably give up and move on at this point, as it's been literal months. Honestly I've asked a lot of places for help and I've looked into what resources I've been able to find on their source world and bonding in general, and my options are running dry. Nobody would blame me for giving up. But I have my reasons not to. I have a feeling about this, and they're in a situation I don't feel like leaving alone. Like, everyone they thought they could trust screws them over. I also DESPERATELY want to at least talk to this person. This entire situation is so fucking frustrating. I'm at the "try shaking cat treats at them" phase.

Also I can't talk to anyone about this because 1. dude's source is from my own AU, and is technically my oc, 2. the places I can talk about this shit are not open to sensitive parts of this, going assume I'm lying, or uh, were exposed to a few cringey false alarms on related things, 3. it's been long enough and constant enough that it's too much to talk about the full extent of this nonsense. 4. My SO can't tolerate this person's source world, so I won't make them endure my prattling.

Because I needed isolation added to this clusterfuck.

Anyway that was good to get off my chest, feel free to throw this into the tumblr void with the identities of anon asks if you want. Or post it, I have no investment in the fate of this.

Mmmm, it looks like there are several issues here that you're facing.

I want to ask: do you have any other bonds right now? Because maybe getting them to try will help, just because their methods will be different than yours, and sometimes you just need a second set of hands. (Or fins, as Albafica wants me to make sure you know.)

There could be a ton of things blocking it, and I would suggest dealing with your psychosis issues first. Not give up, but put this on hold until you know what's causing the psychosis and have dealt with it. You do not want to forge a bond on such a shaky foundation. I'm not saying 'psychotic people can't soulbond', flames forbid I am, I'm reading that this is a new and difficult thing, and you don't want unknown variables getting in your way, especially when they can induce things that look similar to soulbonding but really really aren't.

I have to account for my Devil powers every time I do a spell, ward, or fuck around with the headspace. Because I'm the host and the god in the room, and things answer to me when they won't to anyone else, and Albafica's commentary on that is "stop locking me in a room with your crazy sentient brambles that only speak static whenever you're majorly upset" and I think that's not fair to me, that only happened once and it was accidental, but you get the point. That's a variable you need to be predictable and accounted for.

Then yeah, past that it looks like they're just not willing, and if you want to bond, you need to see it from their side. Because to some random person in their world, you probably feel / appear like a particularly dangerous spirit that's trying to eat them. Al agrees that's how he'd take it if someone pulled that on him, and he's very untrusting on his best days. So it sounds, so far, like your approach is not the best for this.

If you rule out medical reasons for your psychosis - and that is not an easy thing to do, please check out medical things for that, you don't want to fuck around with it - it could also be them refusing you and using their own wards. (Or at least, I can see the line of thought between them trying to stop you and such backlash; but that's an option to consider after medical issues.)

If you can get in contact with them, you need to ask one question, and one question alone, and do not pass go or collect your 200$ until they've answered clearly: do they want you to stop?

You haven't said why you want to bond with them so badly, and motivation is a key factor here. With Goni, he showed up looking for Luco and serves partially as the adult to go to when shit gets bad and also as the resident prettyboy and slut. Al is logical and blunt and his remarks cut deep, but he gives a damn and functions as lieutenant where Goni's advisor and backup. South is uh, he's the demon commentating about how much we should just kill people and he's right, he is, but that's illegal. He also serves as the youngest and the most prone to extreme emotions, and when someone else is doing the extreme emotions, it makes it that much easier for the rest of us to keep our heads. He says what I'm thinking, and then I can deal with it rationally.

They're all people, and they aid each other as well in headspace, but the bond between host and bond is a bit different than bonds with each other. I pilot the body most of the time, I handle everything in meatspace, they help me do that. It's simple: keep the guy who pilots the body running, get body privileges.

And what you need to consider here is not only what they can do for you, but what you can do for them, and how exactly you're going to coexist. Because while my triad of fishmen help me, I also help them, largely because uh, /gestures at the fact they all died in a war in various gruesome ways and the journey they took to get there was actually worse/. It's all fun and games until they're here, away from the danger, and then there's the exotrauma.

Goni handles it by not handling it until he has to and right now we're working on actually acknowledging that he's got issues. South deals with it by being resentful as all hell and incredibly violent and yandere, but being allowed to not pull his punches is still so new to him that it's actually quite good for him to get to say what he's thinking and be respected for it. Al's grumpy about it but is trying to build something of his life now before he falls apart. He wants something to hold onto first, which is smart. Trust Al to figure out the most logical way with none of the words and then adamantly refuse to let that go wrong. He and I both understand bullying the universe into giving us what we want, and since he has full utter control over his own mental processes thanks to being able to make my Devil powers do what he wants, I don't think anyone's going to be able to interfere with his ability to do that.

So now I have to ask for you: what is this bond going to be doing for you, and just as important, what exactly do you expect to be able to do for them? Because they're also an OC, and they may have some goddamn feelings about that. They may see you as having coincidentally written down their life, they may see you as channeling it, or they may see you as the one who made it happen. All of which you'll also see in fictionkin spaces. If they fall into the last category, they're gonna be pissed you didn't give them a happy ending, and they're justified in that, and so are you for not doing that.

You have to be prepared - especially from reading between the lines of your ask here - that they're not going to be as functional as you want them to be. When we handle our exotrauma, we're a mess. Everything gets put on hold to deal with it, and even then, we rely a lot on our partner system (Faolan and the Nebulaic Collective) to keep the body from crashing so we can hold onto our life instead of falling apart utterly for a week straight. We don't do jack entirely with the four of us, and it's better that way.

The fact that you can't rely on anyone outside of yourself, especially considering 1) they don't seem to want this, 2) your attempts either very coincidentally happened alongside or caused serious mental issues that need urgent attention from you, and 3) you don't sound prepared to handle the severity of what you're implying it to be; all goes to show that this reads to me like a terrible fucking idea. I mean that honestly and gently and bluntly.

I don't mean 'give up and don't do this', I mean 'seriously dude either you're not giving me context or you haven't thought nearly hard enough about the realistic way this is going to go', and if it's the latter, no wonder you're having issues.

I already know who my next bond will be, and I know what needs to happen for him to show up. Right now, the four of us are functional, and we have a good Thing going on, sleeping arrangements and all. If we're getting another, a Space needs to open up for him, job to keep us functional that he can do as well as a part to play in our dynamic that is currently not being met. We got Adult (Goni), we got Logic (Al), we got Emotional Teenager (South), we got Has Context And Admin Access (me).

(Side note, South is vaguely 17-19, but he's been treated like he was five for most of his life and has been forced to rapidly oscillate between genuinely horrifying scenarios and being incredibly sheltered, so trying to put any sort of 'he's an average X year old' is downright impossible. He's on the upper end of teens and we call it a day there, and if he hears a word of "you're not old enough to do X activity" then I have to stop him from sending you graphic descriptions of things he can do to your insides and that's no fun for anyone so don't do that please.)

So when we have a space the new bond can fill both in keeping things functional so he has something to do and a space in our relationship so he's not standing on the sidelines looking in, he'll show. As it stands right now, that hasn't happened, so he's not here yet. That and I think I'm stretched rather thin when it comes to bonds, I need much more time with our fishes before I think I can handle more folks in here. So much on my mind, so little time.

But either way regardless. You have several glaring issues that are fairly obvious that you may not have noticed because you can't be objective in a situation you're involved in (true of everyone), and until you fix those, yeah, this doesn't sound like it'll work all that well.

Although I will note that I typically bond via my writing, simply writing from their perspective until they start commentating. They go from 'maybe MaDD doing shit' to 'oh hey soulbond' when they don't comment only on themselves but also on things I'm doing in meatspace. Albafica's a character when he's narrating his own life, he's a person when he demands More Salmon For Dinner; if that makes sense.

I doubt you'd get that far unless they genuinely did want the connection, because otherwise they wouldn't tell you stuff about themselves. Works for me, might work for you, who knows, please get your psychosis symptoms checked out first before touching this again and make sure they actually want to bond and it's actually viable before continuing and then try again I suppose?

A very long answer for a very long ask, but I like Helping, so. Hope that helped a bit.