System Travel

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System travel is when a headmate is able to travel from their original system and appear in a new one. It can be either temporary or permanent.

This can be travel between systems within a single body or a headmate traveling to another body's system entirely.

The headmate may remain in their original system, but be able to visit the headspace of the other system and interact there, eventually returning to their original headspace.

Though when it comes to traveling to another body's system, generally both sides need to be willing to allow the travel to happen. There's disagreement over how system travel is possible - some systems prefer a metaphysical interpretation, while others prefer a communication/cooperation-based one. It all depends on personal beliefs and preferences, not everyone experiences system travel or travels the same way.

History
The term "system travel" in this regard has been around since as early as 2003, on a now-lost multiplicity site. "It said that sometimes it's possible to visit other people s inner worlds. When someone who isn't multiple visits, it has to be during sleep or a trance-like state because no one is there to take over and control the body." Dark Personalities had an unlinked heading for "Intersystem Travel" in 2001, which may have been system travel.

The multiplicity LiveJournal community first used the "traveling & visiting" tag in 2002, when a user asked about souls communicating outside of the system without using the body. One comment talks about a walk-in who left his host's body and entered a different body on a permanent basis. One 2005 post says that a soulbond "hopped, skipped, and jumped" between a series of bodies.

"Body hop" first appears in conversation in 2005. One reply uses "system hopping."

The modern plural community's concept of "system hopping" may have been introduced in 2015 and was quickly controversial. One RAMCOA survivor has claimed the term came from them and was not meant to be used broadly, only in a description of their personal experiences. A well-known syscourse account has recently said she found spiritual uses from 2015. The Lunastus Collective claim that the term system hopping was in use around 2007, defining it as "one system in one body, traveling either permanently or temporarily to a different system in a different body." They say they first saw it in soulbonding and fictionkin spaces and that it came up on a regular basis.

Related Terms
Headmates that permanently travel to a new system can be referred to as adoptives. Headmates that travel are not factive, due to disappearing from the original system.

Exomemories are memories that formed outside of a direct connection to the body of the system; traveling headmates commonly have them from their old home.