Depends on how you look at it, really. From one perspective, they all come from Rhodri. From another, they’re something of a joint decision between someone who’s not quite ‘here’ yet but still able to influence things, and Rhodri. Finn may have been the only one who didn’t get his name from some character in writing or ‘fursona’ Rhodri had named shortly before his appearance, and his is more descriptive in nature, from after he arrived. He accepts it as his name here, while maintaining that he has another name, one that cannot be easily pronounced. Other than that.. everyone pretty much settled right into a name that had already been invented, however you want to look at it.

You mean, why aren’t any of us human? Good question! No idea. It’s also not that uncommon in our experience for systems to have at least some non-human members. We do not know why. Yet none of us can imagine picturing ourselves as human, and we definitely feel like we have tails, paws, fins, etc, depending on the person. Teo might be the one who has the biggest gap to close between what his body is like and what our physical body is like… he’s four-footed, after all. But all of us have some degree of adjustment to deal with. It’s more or less upsetting depending on who you’re talking about. For some of us, you’d definitely be able to call it some kind of dysphoria, for others, we just don’t care that much about what the world sees or how our physical body is different from our selves.

Yup! We didn’t all show up the day our body was born, after all. We all chose a day that was near-ish to when we feel like we really became a full person… or the day that everyone else realized that we had someone new! Some are a little more precise than others, of course. For example, Ransom didn’t really feel like it was all that important to pin down a date, at first. We knew it was sometime in the October-November area, and eventually he chose the date of the first Ninja Sex Party concert we attended in person, which was conveniently in November. Meanwhile, Finn’s is a fairly arbitrary guess based mostly on ‘spring’ and ‘this feels like a good date for it’. How important each of us feels our birthdays are differs too – Finn ignores his, mostly, Ransom puts a fairly low importance on his, Skye sometimes just forgets (his is right next to Christmas, after all, we have other things on the mind then) but Teo’s should probably be ranked along with national holidays…

We do, as different as any group of people sound, at least to ourselves, ‘inside’ here. As far as what you can hear, it’s harder. We’re all working with the same vocal cords, after all, and it’s not like any of us are voice actors. All we can do is try to sound as much like ourselves as we can. That’s more or less easy for some of us. We do all have different ‘quirks’ with the way we speak, though, voice characteristics aside, at least, assuming we’re not smoothing things out to seem like we’re all a single person, when you hear us! Finn has an accent and isn’t a fan of contractions, generally. Teo.. you.. would know if you heard him, he has a unique interpretation of the English language! Skye stammers slightly, but much less than he used to. And Ransom is very casual usually, and has to work hard to not swear our videos into oblivion! Since Rhodri is the one who spends the most time actually talking, honestly it’s more important to know how to pick out someone else than pick him out of the lineup.

This one actually is something we’ve been asked directly, before. The answer can be simple.. depending on who you are and how you’re interacting with us. Are you someone we know in physical space? You can probably bet on talking to Rhodri.. unless we know you well enough and one or more of the rest of us are comfortable talking to you. (At which point, you’re beyond asking this question, once we’re at that point, you’ll know who it is!) Are you someone who only sees us in cyberspace? Well out here on the internet, you probably just know, because you see us or see our name signed to it! Stuff like this, written for all of us, it’s agreed on by everyone, but it definitely goes through a Rhodri-filter. There’s sometimes some bleed-through, where a couple of us are sort of sharing… but barring a few unusual circumstances where Rhodri can’t handle the social pressures and Ransom takes the wheel, it’s a fairly safe assumption that if you don’t know, you can assume it’s Rhodri.

More naturally than it feels to describe it, honestly. We had to struggle a bit to come up with some kind of metaphor for you here, other systems have certainly had their own descriptions over the years, and it’s probably a bit different for everyone. For us, since Rhodri is always at least near the front (he might be a little bit of a control freak), a reasonable comparison might come to us from Star Trek (or well, any ship, maybe, but that’s what we know). Whoever is fronting is in the captain’s chair – they’re making the decisions, they’re the one doing the important communications – but regardless, Rhodri is at the helm. He’s steering the ship, and he could disobey orders.. that part is less like Star Trek! He’s also first in line for the captain’s chair, so that’s also.. not like our analogy, but nothing was going to be perfect. In reality, the decision about who is where just kind of happens, and there really isn’t a good way to explain that part. At least not that we can think of.

Nope! If you’re online, sure. We don’t hide it here. This is where we can each have anything like an individual life. In our day-to-day life, the vast majority of people we interact with do not know. We’re very good at hiding, Rhodri is really good at covering it up, even when someone else is peeking out. There are certain things that make it more difficult to hide each of us, and if you knew to really pay attention, you might notice.. but we doubt it, unless you already knew us well enough to know we’re plural! If you don’t know us and you happen to encounter someone other than Rhodri.. you still probably won’t know. We can all communicate with each other, and if something seems inconsistent later, well, most people would assume we’re just a weird guy, not that there’s more than one of us.

Offline, sure – online, most places, people know, really, so that’s not the question. But out in real life? Sure, some people do. If we know you and trust you enough, you’ll know. It means we don’t have to hide so hard with you, which is nice. It’s not usually super easy to get that trust, so the number of people who know is pretty small, really.