Hello everyone!

There was a Reddit topic a while ago where the OP was asking what everyone’s tulpas do the inner world as part of their morning routine. So, I made a write-up in the thread which was unfortunately missing replies from Bear and Steve since they were asleep. In addition, I had to cut it down quite a bit because otherwise the comment would have gotten super long.

However, for those few, but devoted readers (Yes, that means you!), I figured it’d be interesting to hear their replies as well along with the actual events in-between. So, here we go!

I found Mech and Colleen in the castle garden where they were busy tending to some of the plants. I walked up to them and greeted them.

“Hi you two, got time for a little interview thing I’m doing?”

Colleen looked up at me and smiled “That’ll be foine lad, just as long as we can keep workin’ yea?”

Mech looked a bit disappointed, but kept assisting her. (I don’t think he’s too into gardening, but gets roped into it by her anyway)

“Right, so.. just tell me about your typical morning routine.” I said and sat down at the nearby table that was grimy and had a multitude of gardening tools on it.

Mech was the first to answer “My mornings are mostly the same. If I am at work with you, I get up ahead of time and take a shower. I brush my teeth and then kiss Colleen goodbye before going to work, assuming she is awake. If she is asleep, I will not disturb her. In the mornings I have to myself, it varies more. Sometimes me and Colleen go out to experience breakfast in whatever places we can find. Other times we stay in the castle and make breakfast here.”

He looked over to Colleen that was busy digging something, the silence made her look up at the both of us.

“Oh! it’s me turn? OK, so .. me mornings are sorta the same as the big guy’s is. I get me arse up, I take a shower, I brush the wee ones and get on me way to work. Dependin’ of course on what the order demands of me. I’ll admit, I’ve skipped breakfast a lot lately. Sometimes I have enough time to go down to the kitchen where I get meself a sandwitch or two. I’m not too fussy about me breakfasts.”

Here I thanked both of them for their help and moved over the side of the castle where I walked into the Ballroom where Circe was sitting in the sofa, obviously relaxing.

“Hey, got a second for a small interview?” I asked her and smiled. She nodded and sat up a bit more straight.

“Yeah.. sure.. what’s it about?”

“Morning habits, what you do in the morning?” I said as I sat down next to her.

She drew a deep breath and sighed, that basically meant it was a topic she wasn’t too happy to discuss “My mornings? I fucking HATE mornings. I wake up late and I regret doing so, but I know I need to get up. Sometimes I put on a robe something, but most of the time I just wrap myself in the sheets. Still doesn’t make this castle any less cold and drafty. “

Here she looked around the room, as if to prove her right, the wind picked up outside, whistling a bit in the keyhole mechanism of the doors leading out to the patio.

Then she continued after a while “You know how it is, I go out into the kitchen and have a cup of strong coffee and stare at the wall. I really don’t like talking in the morning. If you try and talk with me, I’m going to take my cup of coffee and walk away until I don’t hear you anymore. After a while, I usually get into the shower and try and think of what I want to do with my day as I clean up. That’s it. Sometimes we eat breakfast together all of us in the castle kitchen.. but you already know about that.”

And here she paused and shrugged her shoulders apologetically “That’s it I guess.”

I thanked her and then I left for Mirror’s and Thor’s tavern that’s nestled far up in a mountain that’s cold most of the year. I imposed inside and saw Mirror was coming out of the kitchen.

“Hey, do you both have a second to answer a question for an interview I’m doing?”

Mirror came over and sat down opposite to me at the table.

“Fairy! It’s been a while, and yes.. of course we’ll help out.” she turned her head backwards towards the kitchen and yelled “Thor darling, we’ve got company, get your ass out here!”

And soon enough Thor stuck his head out of the doorway and smiled.

“Fairy! It is nice to see you my friend!” and he walked out of the kitchen and sat down at the table next to Mirror. “Oh the stories I have for you! Your little thing with Sæhrímnir has really stirred things up in Valhalla, hahaha!”

“Yes dear, but .. he’s here to interview us about something. Maybe later?” Mirror said with a smile towards him.

“Ah yes, you have questions?” Thor said, turning his attention to me again.

“Well.. it’s a simple question, what’s your morning routine like?” I replied.

Mirror looked a bit surprised for a bit and then looked to Thor “I don’t know, darling? We just do the usual right? Get up, share a meal, clean up, decide what to do with our day?”

Thor nodded back to her, but also added with a bit of a smirk “Indeed, but while you enjoy your hot showers, I strengthen my body the way the nature intended for us to bathe, in our frozen lake!”

Mirrors expression soured like milk on a hot day “We are not having this discussion again. I like what I like and you like what you like. While I have followed you in the past up there, I did not like it, never liked it and no matter what you say, I shall never like it.”

Thor grumbled back “Fine.. .. but I think it would be more healthy for you. I miss those days… “

At this point, Mirror gave him a smile “You could always join me in the shower…..”

Then they both stood up and they had that glow in their eyes, I laughed and wished them a nice shower as I left.

Since I know that Jane hates it when I just show up unannounced, I called her on her implant.

“Yeah?” she answered impatiently

“I need to interview you for a thing. Got a min?”

“I’m in a meeting, a looong one…” she replied with a voice that betrayed just how bored she was of it.

At this point I addressed Sarah (our omnipresent AI) “Sarah, is there anyone else in the city 08 world that’s a tulpa besides Jane?”

The ethereal voice rang out around me “No, the only tulpa present in the City 08 macrocosm is Jane at the moment.”

“Good, freeze that world for a bit.”

Jane laughed “Oh man, you really pulling out all the stops eh? Fine, I need a break anyway, this guy and his friends are really getting on my nerves anyway. So.. what do you wanna know?”

“Your morning routine basically, nice and simple.”

The line went silent for a bit as she was no doubt trying to formulate a good response. Eventually she replied “It’s all over the place and depends on what I’m doing. Sometimes it’s a hot dog on the stand on the corner, sometimes it’s a fancy brunch with a potential client. I don’t skip breakfast often though, gotta get those sexy carbs and protes man. Most of the time I get a shower, but some mornings it’s just a cup of hot coffee and then heading out with last nights clothes still on me.”

She paused a bit and chuckled to herself and added “Last week, I got up at noon to go some bar because a skittish guy was meeting me there about something he wanted done. Guy was a reg (their world’s name for anyone from the Russian bloc) and insisted on vodka shots because it’s tradition. Harsh morning that one. Barely had time to get to shit together. It’s a mixed bag man.”

“I see, so .. Regs are showing up in City 08 now?”

“Not really, it’s just this one dude. Been getting into stuff like that.” Jane said, no doubt referring to her experiences with my SO Niky’s tulpa Andrei whose a Russian.

“Alright, thanks for taking the time for this.”

“No sweat man, thanks for giving me a break.. so yeah. you can turn time back on now..”

She sighed and leaned back in her seat as time resumed around her in City 08. Also, while I sometimes can freeze time for short periods, I tend to try and avoid it as the natural state of time in our worlds is to resync with the other worlds. Over a while day, you won’t notice five minutes going missing because time moves a bit faster or a bit slower throughout the day to compensate. But let’s say there’s an hour missing? Then you might notice some weird shit happening.

Either way, I finished off the call with Jane and checked on Bear and Steve who were both asleep in their den. Bear was snoring loudly in his little bed by the window while Steve was half buried in her various bits of cloth and furs that she’s stolen over the years. I resolved to visit them later and called the Dark Hotel in Charlie’s world. A few signals later, someone answered “Dark Hotel, you’re speaking with Dean, how many I help you?”

Now, Dean is one of the trusted coworkers of Charlie at the hotel, he usually steps in whenever Charlie can’t be at the front desk. Since it was Saturday, it made sense.

“Oh, right, Hi Dean, this is Fairy, do you have Charlie anywhere around?”

“I’m afraid not Sir, it’s his day off.. so he’s probably at home. Try his phone there maybe?” Dean replied, with a bit of nervousness creeping into his voice. To him, I’m the owner of the hotel and my backstory paints me as a fairly wealthy man.

“I’ll do that, thanks for the tip, have a nice day!”

“You too Sir.. goodbye” he said as we ended the call.

I grumbled a bit and called Charlie’s cell instead (Every tulpa has a cellphone that’s imperceptible to anyone but other tulpas. They’re all set to vibrate) After a while, he answered.

“Yes Sir?” He said, while the sound in the background told me he was somewhere outside.

“Hi Charlie, do you have a moment? I’m conducting an interview that delves into tulpa morning routines. I’d really appreciate your input.”

A moment went by “Of course Sir, although I’m .. rather tied up at the moment.”

“Doing what?” I asked him with a voice that no doubt betrayed my curiosity.

“I’m following up on a thing from our situation we had earlier.”

(Long story short, I haven’t written it down yet, but Charlie had a bit of a problem with his government before, basically spy stuff)

“Can that wait a few minutes? I’ll pull you out immediately and put you right back in the second we’re done. Nobody will notice you’re gone.”

I focused on him and saw him in an alleyway outside of a main street, obviously studying people going by.

“Alright, I’m at an impasse anyway Sir. Go ahead.”

I teleported him into the castle kitchen and bid him to sit down by the table, I sat down on the opposite side.

“So.. the question is simple, what’s your morning routine? Tell us about it.”

He stroked his mustache a bit, pondering the question before he answered “My typical morning routine, well.. I tend to get up fairly early as my job at the hotel demands that, as you’re well aware of. I usually take a simple shower or a bath depending on my mood for the day and then tend to .. well.. the other hygiene aspects of a gentleman’s morning. I shan’t have to go into detail about those right?” he said, giving me a look that suggested it’d be a question best left unanswered.

I nodded as he continued “I make it to the hotel and there I usually grab a bite to eat in the kitchen while asking the cook about what plans he has for the day in terms of food. After that, we decide what our menu is and I arrange for the purchase of any ingredients that we might require. You know, some days it’s downright impossible to get some things due to how the weather’s been lately. Take fish for instance, you’d think that would be available all year round right? Well-

Here I interrupted him “While I could sit and listen to you talk about your job at the hotel all day, let’s stay on topic for now, I’m already going to be cutting this down a lot as is.”

“Right” he said as he laughed in a bit of an embarrassed way. “On topic then.. on my off days I usually go out for breakfast at this little café down by the docks, it’s rather empty in the morning which suits me fine. They have the best black tea I’ve ever tasted and the cook there refuses to divulge where he got it from, but it’s absolutely marvelous. His poached eggs on toast are also something of a curiosity since he does variate his recipes, but it always stays roughly the same.”

“That sounds really cool, I’d like to accompany you there sometime if you don’t mind.”

“Oh I definitely don’t. I find it rather interesting to see what spices the chef uses, I do believe he’s of Turkish origin, it’s hard to tell.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Maikhlm” Charlie said, which sort of to me sounded like “my keel” with a Spanish “ch” at the end. After some back and forth, I got the pronunciation right.

“Well, thank you for volunteering this info, I’ll let you get back to what you were doing. “

“Thank you Sir, have a nice day if we don’t see each other again today.”

“You too.. and .. uh.. good luck with your spy stuff I guess.” I said as I teleported him back into the alley he had been in before.

After that, I called Jeanette, dreading the worst.

“What the fuck do you want? Didn’t we have an agreement? You stay the fuck out of my life and I stay the fuck out of yours.” she hissed at me.

I sighed deeply and shook my head IRL. “Sorry, I’m .. I just wanted to interview you about what kind of morning routine you have. That’s it.”

“My morning routine?” she laughed sarcastically and then added “I catch rabbits and eat them alive while their mewling sounds make me laugh as they die slowly. Go fuck yourself. “

And then she hung up on me. To be fair, while Jeanette can shift between her human form and her feline form at will, I think she’s evolved past the need to hunt in the morning as a cat. Then again, considering what a total asshole she is, maybe this is the truth. I very much doubt it though.

As a tulpa, Jeanette is hard to deal with, because she’s always offensive and she always assumes everyone is out to get her in some way. Meanwhile, she has absolutely no concern for anyone else but herself and maybe her lover Swaro. Anyways, enough musing about that topic, until she comes around, I’ll try my best to leave her alone since that was our agreement.

I was happy though as I looked at my list and realized that I had one more name left to interview, which was Mrs Teacher. I called her on her phone and after a few signals she answered with a sort of sleepy voice.

“Ah. I .. hi, it’s me. It’s Fairy right?”

“Yes it is” I said smiling.

“Sorry, I was taking a nap in my favorite chair, what time is it?”

“A bit past noon.”

She yawned and stretched a bit in her chair, which I could see was inside of her house.

“Great, that means I didn’t sleep most of the day away. Splendid!” She straightened up a bit before she added “Right, so .. is everything alright with you?”

“Yeah, I’m interviewing everyone on their morning routines.. would you like to participate?”

“But of course!” she almost exploded and giggled. “Sorry, still trying to wake up over here.”

She got up a bit and walked around the room before sitting down in her chair again.

“What do you need to know?”

“How you get up in the morning, what you eat for breakfast, what things you do as part of your morning ritual sort of. “

She took a moment as well to think about her morning and then answered “When I wake up in the morning, I like to lie a bit in bed. Some mornings I get up early, others I stay in bed a bit longer and sleep in. I love a good soak in a really cold shower, it really freshens you up a lot! For breakfast, I like to visit the nearby market square and see what I can find that’s on offer for the day. Usually I find something good to take home with me and cook, but some mornings, the traders just don’t offer much in the way of fine goods. That’s when I see if I can’t find a restaurant or café as it were.

“One of these days, I’d like to come along with you, if you don’t mind.”

“Haha, not at all, I’ll give the grand tour if you’ve the time.” she said, smiling widely to herself mostly.

“So.. is the bit about cold water true?” I asked, not really believing her.

“Of course! You know that my species thrives on water, most of us prefer it as cold as possible since it really gets your body going. Warm water is.. well.. not really that pleasant to my kind.”

“That’s so weird, but .. yeah I guess to you, our warm water thing is equally strange I suppose.”

“That it is, you humans have the strangest things that you get up to sometimes.”

“So, another question, do your people brush their teeth?”

“Oh yes, although our brushes are a bit different from yours though. We may look similar, but we’re really very different.” she said with a bit of her teacher voice creeping into her statement.

(I’ve noticed that she does that whenever she’s restating something that she’s passionate about or has taught others about before)

“Well, I guess that’s that then, thank you for participating in this.”

“Oh it’s quite fine, I enjoy talking about mundane things like that sometimes. .. but now.. I do think I need a pot of tea to wake up.”

And with that, we both hung up and she no doubt headed down to her kitchen.

So, now on Sunday, I finally managed to get Steve and Bear to agree to a morning interview after breakfast. However, my interview was nearly spoiled by Niky’s tulpa Andrei, who managed to gross Steve out by talking about very graphic sex while she was having breakfast.

Those of you that are familiar with Steve know that she’s really private about sex and gets easily embarrassed by sex talk. So, Andrei said a few words that weren’t exactly super intelligent, and she basically just went back into her den after calling him an asshole.

With some coaxing and promises of making her a special breakfast next week, I got both her and Bear to agree to an interview in the castle kitchen.

I leaned in towards the table, looking at both of them “So.. what does your typical morning routine look like? If you’d both like to answer separately, that’s fine too.”

Steve shrugged as much as a fox could and started “My mornin’ .. uh.. yeh.. I guess.. I kinda wake up and dats it? I usually wake up Beah whose sleepin’ deeply. I tell ya, dat lil tyke can really get deep into his covahs ya know”

Bear made a face and half yawned out “I like to sleep.“

“Den I guess.. uh.. we go into da kitchen an’ get some breakfast.”

Bear just nodded and this time he actually yawned.

“So, you’re going back to bed after this aren’t you Bear?” I asked him, knowing he’d had a terrible nightmare that kept him up most of the night.

He nodded “I’m tired. But yes, in the morning, first we get up, then breakfast. Then outside, to pee.“

At this point, I realized something I hadn’t thought about. We were in a castle, floating around the various worlds, but .. the outside patio is just stone. And since Steve and Bear are animals, I know they don’t use the normal toilets.

“Wait, that’s an interesting question right there.. if you know, you want to answer it both of you. Where DO you guys go to pee anyway? Outside on the patio or .. somewhere else?”

Here, Steve looked really uncomfortable with my question, while Bear perked up a bit and started chuckling after seeing her reaction. After a while, she answered stammering “I-I.. uh.. I mean uh.. me and Beah we.. oh god..” She hid behind the table, her face flushed while Bear chuckled.

“Bear? Can you answer the question?” I said, turning to him while he was wildly grinning, clearly amused by the whole thing.

“Yes, we go outside, the big outsides to pee and .. other things. We use the doors. Sometimes, Steve uses the toilet.“

Seeing that Steve was now almost completely hiding under the table in shame, I decided not to press the question. But it was clear that Bear was referring to them both using the direct door to door teleporting system wherein you can think of a place and open any door and it’ll be a direct teleport to that place. It’s used very rarely by everyone, because it’s sort of OP, but.. in a sense, I could understand Steve and Bear using that method for quickly accessing a forested area that felt more natural to them than a toilet would be for us.

I nodded to them both “So, anything else that you do during your mornings? We humans do like our showers and brushing our teeth and fixing our hair or whatever, but you two, do you do any of that?”

Steve looked thoughtful for a moment and then jumped in “Yeh, sometimes I do like ta take a quick dip in da pool when it’s hard ta wake up in da mornin’, wattah has ta be real fukken warm tho.”

“And you Bear, do you take baths too?”

Bear frowned and shook his head, while crossing his arms “No. Don’t like baths.“

“I guess that’s why we rarely see you downstairs in the pool area.. so.. Bear, when was the last time you actually took a bath?”

Bear looked down into the table, rummaging through his memories no doubt. Then he nodded to himself and replied “Six months, I think. No, four months. Forgot that rainy night. Cold rain, horrible. Hated it.“

“Yer just scaed dat yer gonna drown, I keep tellin ya Beah, wattah ain’t ya enemy, an it’ll make ya stink less too!” Steve said, having come back out from underneath the table now that the topic had shifted past the topic she was embarrassed about.

“Don’t like the wet fur, takes too long to dry.” he mumbled back.

“You know Bear, if that’s a problem, I guess I could make a small chamber for you with hairdryer fans if you want them, you’d go in and they’d blow dry you almost instantly.” I said, never having thought about the problems of having fur drying slowly.

Bear looked contemplative for a moment and then looked up to me and nodded with a smile “Yes, we could try that. Thank you.“

“Alright, I’ll go down to the pool area and look for a good place to put your little blow dryer place then. So, anything else you’d both like to add?”

Both Bear and Steve sort of shrugged and with that, I ended the last interview.

And that wraps it all up once more. As you can see, sometimes just interviewing our collective is a process on its own, but there’s so many small things like gestures and attitudes that get lost in the translation of trying to jam it into just one Reddit post. That’s also usually why most of the things I interview everyone about tends to end up as blog posts rather than comments.

 

With that said though, these posts are pretty long and at some point, I feel like maybe it’d be better to simply start publishing most of our adventures as small books instead of blog posts. That way, those that hate poking at screens might have a physically printed book to hold instead. But, of course, that means that we’ll have less frequent posts which is not really that good either.

 

Anyways, it’s a thought of mine, if you have any questions or comments about that or the answers of everyone, please put them below. Thanks for reading!

 

/Wondrous Fairy