i never thought i'd get to even play this game (chunitum) in my life. maybe once or twice if i happened to go to japan but that was it. i was content with playing the few games i liked at round 1 (okay it was pretty much only groove coaster lol) but one day i found that the game i spent 10s of hours of my life driving to play after work was gone and i almost just.. gave up on it? nothing else felt as fun or as interesting in input and visuals so, why bother? but i decided to just see if there was somewhere else to play groove coaster ('cause god knows WWP doesn't hit the same) and by some miracle i happened to find soft landing, just two months after opening, and when i arrived it was just me and aether in the building if i remember correctly
i went around and tried everything that looked interesting (which, holy hell, i would've been so overwhelmed with all the cool stuff we have now LOL) and aether came up and started talking to me about "oh we put valk knobs in this one so it'll feel better" and i just nodded along not knowing what the fuck that meant, and he asked to play a set or two with me if i remember correctly
i remember thinking "wow, these games are pretty cool, it's kinda far though so i probably won't come too often" but then the whole pump crowd came in and i got invited to colorado apex by gumby, after asking him for the time
it felt so weird to be so openly accepted into a community instantly but it felt so nice. i didn't really think on it too hard though, god knows i had enough else going on in my life
i started getting more and more into chunithm over time (especially after profile versioning, with aether's one-version-a-week event) and ended up making a couple friends online who made otogaymers! and boy was i excited, "an arcade space where i can post con stuff and it's all queer people like me yayy!"
so when that fucking imploded and went to shit i got really disinterested in rhythm games as a whole. kinda just went back to the work/sleep cycle. buuut then someone, i dont really even remember who, invited me to chuni english (update: it was tsuki, discord search sucks, whatever)
fast forward to now and i'm sitting in my room crying over finally meeting the people i've talked to for so long that i literally only fucking met through repeated crazy luck. i didn't think any of this was possible. i didn't think something like this could ever happen with me included. watching the linked verse event happen in jp all i could think was "oh that was cool, i wish i could've been there to experience it" and i just got to?? somehow?? it's so insane to my little traumatized tiny brain i still can't even process everything
i've lived through nothing but hell my entire life. i moved halfway across the country at 7, losing what little friends i had back then (god knows i barely remember it now with all the memory loss from everything after) and ended up here in colorado knowing nobody. i only got to go to an actual school building for two years, before my parents pulled me out because the principal wouldn't let me skip a grade (i was a gifted kid!)
for those 6 years from 3rd grade to 9th, the start of my freshman year, i was completely isolated from anybody. all i had was the internet and you know how that goes! i got abused multiple times, groomed multiple times, but i just had to come back because i had *nothing else*. in mid 2017 i had enough. i was horribly sick with something (don't really remember what), thought about everything i'd been through and decided it was just too much. i remember sitting there sobbing with an empty pistol just pulling the trigger hoping it would somehow go off because my legs were too lethargic to go on a ladder in the garage to get a bullet.
if u couldn't guess somehow, it didn't go off. i put it away and pretended like everything was okay. i kept going, kept getting abused by people i thought i could trust, finding out i was trans late 2018 probably? it's hard to remember exactly when
i got told to stuff it. my partner at the time said she 'viewed me as her hero, and couldn't imagine her hero being a girl'. which, you know, horribly dumb thing to say, but when you're 13 and she's been the only person ever giving you affection you kind of just listen to anything. so i repressed it until i couldn't. i did the thing i fucking hate doing, that i've had to do too much, and deleted all of my accounts to start anew. and it was beautiful, but it didn't end the bad luck
,, after years and years of getting abused and groomed repeatedly by new different people i gave up on assuming my life could be anything more than the bare minimum. i got my IT job the day i turned 18. i worked, came home, slept, repeat. i resigned myself to just being Present and nothing more. i was to act as a stepping stone for people to reach new better things and i was okay with that. people would date me, i'd love them unconditionally, and i'd wave goodbye when they left for someone better. there are still so many names i can't hear without flinching.
i never belonged anywhere, even at home, with my family being straight up nazis and incredibly abusive even ignoring how harmful their beliefs were to me (thanks for telling me "mental health isn't even real" after i got out of the mental hospital for trying to kill myself!!)
but i started to try to be myself despite that. but as fucking stupid and dumb as we all are in chuni eng it made me realize i can be more than that! i can be good at things!
when i got invited to this back in april i was in such a horrible mental space. just moved out, didn't know anyone around me, moved an hour away from all the people i actually knew, working a dead-end retail job right after my partner flew back home but i still had some spark in me. i figured it would've just been like a standard arcade trip but there's some extra people and we go do a hard thing! woo! but after seeing just the sheer scale of everything, none of this felt real, up until the moment i picked kiera up from the airport and i really had the "holy shit this is actually happening" feeling hit
how could i have ever expected it would turn into this? i remember seeing the list of people invited and going "wait that's a LOT of people what the hell?" it's one thing to just have a small event like i thought but this was something so scary to me. all of these people are going to Perceive me! and i still am not certain if that was a good thing! but even despite my dysphoria and my hatred of being Physically Present i had the most fun i've ever had in my life. fucking Chili's man. i held off on playing linked tune just so i could play it with the people i talk to every single day and god damn it it was SO fucking hard to not cry while playing. like kiera all i could think about during the cutscene was just how insane it is that i even reached this point. happening to still be alive at this point, our round1 happening to remove the game i played, to random luck finding the arcade shortly after opening, to random luck talking to the one person who invited me to the larger colorado discord, to somehow being invited to chuni penguins and then chunithm english, and happening to be invited to the event despite being chuni english's #1 enemy (fuck yall <3)
i remember just crying to kiera and tsuki outside of the arcade about how i shouldn't even be here. i was supposed to die that day but i just happened to be sick enough that i couldn't do it. hell, i wasn't even supposed to live past birth, i was a month premature and had to be in NICU for a full week!! for all the awful horrible luck i've had in life this event finally made me feel like it was all worth it. every tear every sob led up to feeling like i belonged somewhere for the first time in my life, let alone somewhere that isn't just gonna implode within the year. i finally had the thought of "this is what everything was for".
obviously, if you're reading this you probably know me (since i'll only really be posting this in places i'm in, but if you're here from the smolpub feed hi!). i've been in a slump again with the game since i moved at the end of last year, mostly focusing other things since my controller has been too fucked up to use and i haven't had the mental to go stand alone in the basement. but now? after all of this i don't think i could stand NOT playing the game, not pushing myself to be even better for the next time we all get to meet, i wanna make y'all proud. i don't get my cab back until the end of the month but i'm gonna play on my dogshit tasoller anyway. training weights, right?
thank you selene for organizing this, dealing with the stress of planning an event somewhere you'd only been to one time, with all of us biting our nails having to deliver my roommate's cab to the arcade the day before we arrived, with trying to figure out how we could even make them match for linked verse with the network issues
thank you emmy and beer for making all of this even possible by hosting the server and being there to make quick changes and fixes when we needed, it entirely couldn't have been possible without you. thank you for giving me a way to play the game i hold so dear
thank you kiera and codex for creating the space that led to this event. even if you thought i was cheating. fuck yall i just have too much speed for my own good #rusher
thank you aether for opening up the arcade at the perfect fucking time for me to be able to follow this path of my life. through just chains of events you opening this arcade led to me being able to move out and escape my awful family. thank you.
thank you everyone for coming out here and being a part of this. i love you all so fucking much. thank you for giving me a place to belong even after everything that's happened to me.
~ mortis, azzy, vi
the random goat bunny robot thing that finally found a place to call home
૮꒰ ˶• ༝ •˶꒱ა
ending off with a quote from A Place Further Than the Universe:
When you go on a journey, there are things you learn for the first time: That this scenery is indispensable. That people change, the world changes, even when you're not looking. That there's no such thing as a "nothing" day. That your house has its own smell.
If you want to learn things, you've got to get moving. Then just keep moving until you see something you've never seen before. No matter how far you go, the world is so big... You'll definitely find something new. It's a little scary, but I know you can do it. Because.... People who feel the same way will find you right away.
<3