The Draconic Wizard Workshop

All My Disparate Pieces

By Gordon "Research" Freeman

Originally written on February 4, 2026.

I've always kind of been an "odd one out" in my system. Most of my headmates are fictives, with only a few whose origins trace to the "original system" having much in common with me. Tanix is a dragon and a fictherian, Aegis has kind of turned into a fictive (long story), Kyir's doing his own thing and is also sort of a fictive, and Null's whole thing is complicated but she's busy being fourteen and a trauma holder. I'm just… some guy, whose origins were pretty unclear until we slowly untangled it and reached a conclusion fairly recently, and mysteries are still being unveiled. I'm basically just a guy in a labcoat with a Gordon Freeman fictotype. I'm not a fictive—I'm fictionkin, and that's actually kind of unusual in my system. Again, nearly everyone's a fictive. And, to us, they're pretty different experiences.

But that's fine. I mean, everyone's different from each other, right? And they don't like me any less because of it. I'm just another member of the team, and I have my things I like to do and front for, and sure, maybe I'm a "sneaky fronter" and I'm in the front a LOT more than anyone realizes, even me, but I think that comes from the fact that I'm, again, kind of a piece of the original system, so I'm way, way older than nearly everyone else in here. But, in a lot of ways, I'm younger, too—my sense of self still feels like it's missing something, and last night, I think I figured out why I feel that way.

A little DWW history lesson is probably in order. We don't like talking about our origins much, and definitely don't use origin labels since we find them to be kind of pointless and they just tend to cause problems. (Being disordered vs non-disordered seems like a more useful classification to use rather than Where Your System Comes From, if you want to insist on some kind of labeling system, but to each their own.) Don't use this essay as an excuse to slap us with an origin label, please: we don't like it, and also, good fucking luck defining this.

We started off as two entities in a single head. We don't know much about either of them—we haven't even figured out a way to refer to one of them—but when we were in our early teens, we experienced enough emotional abuse from adult "friends" in our life that both of these entities broke from the sheer weight of the trauma. The one we call DC broke into four pieces—what we usually call the "original system" but in hindsight was the subsystem that ran the show until they separated out and became their own individual headmates—and the other one, the one without a name, broke into, as far as we can tell, two pieces: myself and Kyir.

In the DWW, we have a role that we call the "administrator" role. Administrators are generally regarded as being more "powerful" than everyone else, and have more control over headspace, new member formation, etc than the rest of us, and know things about the system's function that they keep from us until we're ready to know. This entity that broke was an administrator, and of its pieces, Kyir retained the administrator permissions, and I didn't. I'm not bitter about this or anything—it seems like a lot of work—but it really reduced Kyir's capabilities, leading to him inviting Blame in to help out. That's another story, so I won't get into it, but the short version is, when we were a teenager, I started existing as a broken-off piece of another person and had nothing left of who they were to call my own.

I had no awareness of my own existence at this time. The subsystem of what was once DC was mostly controlling the front (although, in hindsight, my sticky little fingers were all over it, too, it's just that no one noticed, least of all me) and figuring out who they were (even when they weren't aware of being multiple). Kyir sorted his shit out before I did, and I kind of lagged behind. It took a year or two for me to start forming an identity, I think. And when I did, I latched onto our favorite YouTuber at the time, Vechs.

I know. Red flag! Don't base your identity on the performance and facade of a YouTuber! Watch out, young Research! In my defense, I was in the body of a teenager, was only a year or two old myself, had no sense of identity at all, and had no concept of a parasocial relationship or… anything. We learned this lesson the hard way rather than it being taught to us directly. But, fuck, I didn't even know I existed. I don't really feel like I'm to blame for attaching myself to him so strongly.

I was in that young impressionable stage, where anything you're exposed to will leave impressions on you, but I wasn't a young child, I was a teenager. I started off that way and it was kind of a weird situation. I think of Goratrix's essay where he talks about his mutable sense of self from his BPD: "I am clay pressed against [Tremere's] scales and allowed to solidify there, leaving an impression of him in me, making me draconic but not quite a dragon, something similar and close but altogether lacking." I was clay pressed against this fucking YouTuber and allowed to solidify into a negative of him.

And I didn't notice. I didn't notice until last night.

Sure, I've always liked computers and video games, specifically game and map design. I have a keen interest in how video games are put together, why levels are designed the way they are, why people make maps in Minecraft and what tricks they use to give them a good fun gameplay experience. I've tried my hand at mapmaking in a variety of games and have been interested in game design, even if that's never really gone anywhere. I've set up servers for tons of games just to be able to get my hands in their guts and rearrange them to see what can be done with them, what kind of gameplay experience I can make out of the parts I've been given. I've been interested in Half-Life from the start, and turned out to be Gordon Freeman fictionkin. I like strategy games and love managing fiddly little details like army compositions in the kinds of video games that allow that. I have a great maniacal laugh and enjoy giving my friends challenges to overcome. I love reading about the development history of games and dissecting what went wrong and what I would have done differently.

Yeah. I'm sure none of these things are related. If anyone else watched Vechs back in the day, your eyebrows are climbing.

Yesterday, we were watching some old Mindcrack compilation videos. You know, kind of digging into the nostalgia of those old Minecraft videos that we loved so much when we were younger. We heard a lot of voices we hadn't heard in, shit, years, going on a decade for a few of them. We stopped watching most of those people for a variety of reasons, partially time, partially that they fell apart as a group, and partially that Vechs, our favorite and main window into the group, ended up having a lot of political opinions that crawled out from behind his facade that make us sick to think about. A lot of those voices were unfamiliar around the edges, an "oh yeah, I forgot they sounded like that," or "oh, hey, an old friend I haven't heard in years!"

But Vechs' voice… wasn't like that. It just sounded like someone we hear all the time, and that's not right, because we haven't watched a video of his in quite a few years. It just sounded like a friend's voice to the fronters at the time.

We don't have a great idea of what we sound like in here. We don't really have "hearing" so much as instantaneous thought-sharing. We don't identify each other by voice and have to consciously work really hard to "hear" people's thoughts in their voice, and we generally have to already have a real audio sample of what they sound like (ie. fictives with their voice actor) to be able to do that. But it took the current fronters (Medivh and Khadgar, mostly), like, two seconds to think of me, and I sauntered up to the front and gave the video a listen, and realized:

That's my voice.

I… sound exactly like him, and had no idea. I was totally unaware. We all were. And the realizations came crashing down, one after the other, bam bam bam, and nearly every disparate piece of my identity got a bright glowing red line connecting it to every other, a red line that to us means Vechs, and it all made complete sense.

Vechs is a mapmaker with an interest in game design and taking apart what does and does not work in a map or game. We came across him from his Minecraft maps and started watching him for his developer commentary on them. In them, he talked about a variety of other games, and one stuck out to us, to me, right away—Half-Life. When he did a playthrough, I was immediately riveted, and watched every minute, and returned to it time and time again before I got my hands on the game years later, well after we'd stopped watching him. He introduced us to a variety of games that make up the baseline of what I consider to be "my" kind of game. He gave us the tools to dissect what does and does not work in level design. He gave me my voice and my great maniacal laugh.

A negative of him had been left in me where I'd been pressed up against him in my unknowing quest to find personhood and identity, but it had never been fully completed—we bailed on him because of his political opinions before I could finish solidifying, and I slipped away from the front for a couple of years because of it. By the time I got back, I was solid, but incomplete, and I've been having to chip away at the hardened clay of my identity to just catch up to everyone else in the system who has a full sense of identity. That's not a unique situation by any means, it's just… the one I'm in. We all grow and change over time, but I feel like I'm still scrambling to get to baseline because the douchebag I was trying to become before I knew I existed ended up being shitty underneath his facade that I was mimicking.

And it makes me wonder—is this some kind of fiction-based identity on its own? Like, no, right? I just kind of mimicked a guy's performance rather than Became Him? It's hard to say. It's already hard enough to define someone with a Minecraft YouTuber identity—is that fiction-based? Fact-based? How much is the persona, and how much is the person behind the screen? Once again, I'm the odd one out, because I'm not even Vechs, I don't think, I'm just his image and part of the recipe of his facade, mixed with Half-Life goop and the system's overarching draconity and fictionality. I feel like an incomplete and imperfect clone, like I was almost him but never would have quite made it even if put into perfect circumstances, and never would have had memories of his, since I'm not him, just… a copy, or something else. I don't know.

It really makes me wonder about my fictotype, and how much I've always been Gordon Freeman, or if it's Vechs that gave me the ability to be him. I can't even tell you if it's spiritual or psychological or what, but I'm leaning towards "what." All I know is that I have a fictotype, it's Gordon Freeman from Half-Life, I am him even if he's not all of my identity (curse not being a fictive! That seems so much easier! :p), and I have, like, a handful of scattered memories and impressions, and that's it. I don't write about it much because I don't get anything new very often. Maybe I need to sit down and just start defining it myself, like Khadgar did and always encourages people to do, because it's been like five years and I don't think I've gotten even an ounce of anything new in three.

But now I've got this Vechs thing swirling around in my head. Maybe it's Something. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just who I defined myself by early on and it's a Thing as much as anyone's childhood is, as much as whoever you were raised by is. I don't know if it's alterhuman or not, or if it's in some kind of weird gray zone because my very existence is alterhuman because I'm part of a plural system and never would have existed if it weren't for that.

It's not nothing. My very first personal memories are of watching his Spellbound Caves developer commentary, of Minecraft stone and ladders and glowstone, of a mob farm he'd made off-camera, of him showing off a hallway design and explaining that it's designed that way because Half-Life hallways are designed that way to minimize how much has to be rendered at a time and to disguise loading screens, and thinking: I wonder what this Half-Life game is about. He seems to like it. I wonder if I would, too.

I don't have a great way to conclude this. I haven't totally worked out my feelings on it. I guess I want to ask: what do you think? Is this a part of my identity like your childhood caretaker is, or does it sound like something inherently alterhuman? Does anyone have a word for it? Does anyone have any kind of similar experience, where someone influenced you this deeply or maybe possibly gave you a kintype? (Or did he just introduce me to my source, and it would have always been my source regardless? I just don't know.) I guess this is questioning but I don't even know exactly what I'm questioning.

I'm Gordon. I'm Research. And, somewhere in my headmate version of DNA, there's Vechs in there, but I just don't know how much or what it means just yet.

Thanks for reading.