Nuime (soul artifacts thing)

[Kappa]

The setting pretty emphatically declines to let anyone permanently fuck up their soul this way. Or any other way, actually. Your soul is always able to adapt to changes in your self.

(edited in) I'm working on a post about soul extraction that I started writing before Lambda made her comment and I responded, so here are some miscellaneous comments transplanted from the beginning of it:

As I said on a previous page, Ezra, I am deeply, deeply reluctant to go for the pun ("baring your soul"/"soulbearer").

Forging is definitely the best I've got so far. It's not quite all the way there, but it at least reads as something I could see someone in the setting actually saying.

[Kappa]

Okay, so the soulforging process!

It starts out as somewhat like a form of meditation. You have to sit still and think hard about what you imagine your soul to be like, both in the sense of 'what kind of person am I' and 'what is my aesthetic, what might my soul look like'. Most people raised in this society will be able to muster a decent guess, but if you're not very self-aware you could be in trouble. All the while, you're also trying to reach for your soul in your thoughts. The correct method of reaching for your soul varies between people, and you don't find out what yours is until you combine it with thinking about your own soul in accurate enough terms to get the targeting right. Once you've found your soul, you will know you've done it, and if you fail the extraction process this time around and have to try again, the correct method of finding it will be the same.

Two examples of soul-reaching: Taliar tried visualizing looking for his soul in various external directions, possibly because most of his family got their soul artifacts reaching 'outward', but his soul turned out to be 'inward' instead, and finding it felt like suddenly discovering there was a piece of the sun coextensive with his body, there was absolutely no 'distance' involved at all. Nezhefena had to look much farther 'inward' than that; the right method for her was imagining a long tunnel that ran deep into her own mind, and when she found her soul at the end of it, it looked like a tiny shivering ball of shadows.

Once you've found your soul, the next step is to pull it out and externalize/materialize it into its physical form. This is hard in a different way. The difficulty of finding your soul is mostly about guessing the right combination of 'I am like this'/'my soul would look like this'/'this is how/where I should look for my soul' and not being discouraged when your first fifty tries don't work. The difficulty of bringing your soul out into the world is mostly about maintaining concentration and not letting your expectations interfere with reality. You have to imagine what your soul artifact is going to be like, and apply some appropriate metaphor to wherever you found your soul - Nezhefena imagined carrying hers back along the tunnel; Taliar imagined it pouring out of his body and into his hands - and while you're doing this you also have to keep thinking about what kind of a person you are.

For all the "think about who you are"/"think about what your soul would look like" components of this process, you don't necessarily have to have a complete picture, but you have to get at least something right on a sufficiently significant level, and you will fail almost immediately if you get anything wrong. For the finding step, you should be thinking about at least one fundamental personality trait that you actually do have (and none that you don't), and at least one aesthetic detail of your eventual artifact that is actually correct (and none that are wrong). Taliar had his personality down pretty well, and for his aesthetic detail he imagined silver light; Nezhefena thought about the way she relates to the emotion of fear, and for her aesthetic detail she imagined shadows. When you find your soul you will learn some more true aesthetic details about it by the way it manifests in your mind, but you won't get a complete picture until it's actually in your hands.

It's not quite this simple, but you could almost think of the externalization step as being an extended guessing game, where you keep trying to build a picture in your head of who you are and what your artifact is going to look like, and every time you add something to the picture that isn't accurate, you fail the process and have to start over. It's somewhat more complicated than that because as you build your picture, your soul will reveal itself to you in more detail, so you don't have to guess the entire thing from scratch by trial and error in order to succeed; and because while you're playing the guessing game, you also have to keep up the sustained mental effort of trying to pull your soul out into the world, and if you slip up on that you'll also fail and have to start over, so if you're not good at that part it can throw off your guesses because you might think you guessed wrong about a detail when actually you just lost your grip for a second.

When you're done - the whole thing can take anywhere from three to twelve hours, and some people have to take a break and come back later for another try - your soul will materialize into its physical form. At that point there won't be many surprises left, but some people find that the result looks different from how they imagined. In-universe, there are people who think that there's a fact of the matter about what your soul is going to look like and you're playing the guessing game to find out the answer, and people who think that there's a range of possibilities and your guesses determine where you fall inside that range, while guesses that don't fit are rejected. I haven't decided which of these interpretations is more ultimately correct, and it might be something that varies between people.

This post was starting to get insanely long, so I've split it in two. Part II: Youthful Soul Extraction is on its way.

[atheistcanuck]

I'm thinking that, though there is probably an "academic" term that academics use when writing papers about soul artifacts, people tend to think of their soul extraction process in different ways and use different terms when describing it after the fact based on their aesthetic. "Forging" is probably a fairly common metaphor as things go but I bet it's not the only one by a long shot.

[Kappa]

And now that I've described the process, the idea I have for making youthful soul extraction more harrowing goes like this:

If you try to artifactualize your soul while you're definitely below the age where it could possibly work - if you're under twelve, in other words - you simply won't be able to complete the finding step. There is not yet a correct way for you to reach for your soul, so no method works.

If you try it when you're between twelve and your personal youngest possible age of successful soul creation, you might succeed at finding your soul. Doing that will hurt, and you will have the (accurate!) feeling that you have harmed your soul with the contact; nor will you be able to sustain that contact - the exact sensation depends on your reaching method, but you'll generally feel like you reached a part of yourself you didn't know was there, touched it, harmed it in so doing, and were violently thrown back from it. The injury to your soul is likely to leave you with physical symptoms: you might experience brain fog, dizzy spells, fatigue, tremors - I haven't invented a whole list, but that's some of them. These symptoms will last a few days on average - maybe as little as one day if you only barely reached your soul, and as much as ten if you tried to start pulling on it. There will also be lingering implications for subsequent soul-reaching attempts, but I'll get to that later.

If you try it when you're above your personal youngest possible age of successful soul creation but not yet an adult - let's assume for the moment that this is your first try and your soul has not previously been injured by attempted contact - you'll be able to find your soul and work on bringing it out, but it will feel simultaneously very fragile and very difficult to move. You'll have to be both more delicate and more forceful in the mental effort of pulling on it - it'll take more effort to get it moving, but you'll also have to spend some attention on protecting it from that force, focusing on handling it carefully. If you slip up on the delicacy part, you'll sustain a mild soul injury and have to start over, and the injury will make it even more delicate the next time around. If you make a wrong guess or slip up on the pulling part, which is something literally everyone does at least a few times during the extraction process, you'll likewise sustain a mild soul injury. The difficulty and delicacy of soul extraction both start out pretty extreme, and gradually fade out more and more until somewhere around the point of adulthood, you no longer have to worry about it at all.

What soul injury does is more or less extend the period of time in which the previous paragraph applies, increase the amount of focus you need to put into careful handling of your soul, and make extraction attempts painful until the injury fades. The injury you get from reaching your soul before you're able to extract it is much worse than the ones you get while trying to extract it before you're fully grown, but even those little bumps and bruises can really add up.

If you get frustrated or impatient and try to just ignore the pain and drag your soul out whether it likes it or not, you're going to incur serious soul injury on the same level as a pre-youngest-extraction-age soul-finding attempt, complete with the being thrown away from it and the several days of obvious symptoms.

Reaching for your soul again while it's too badly injured - within a few weeks of a major injury, or if you accumulate too many minor ones - will come with a very clear feeling that this is a bad idea and you're going to fuck yourself up. If you ignore the feeling and try anyway, you'll get another major injury, same presentation as the other two ways of getting one.

In terms of extending the period of time in which that paragraph applies: you can think of it as though a major soul injury resets the fragility of your soul back to the point just before you became able to extract it, except that now that you've tried at least once, you get that feeling of foreboding to warn you off doing it again immediately. After a few weeks you'll be able to contact your soul without automatically causing further harm, and from there it'll become gradually easier and easier over the course of several years until finally the injury is completely gone and your soul is indistinguishable from one that was never injured. (Minor injuries set your recovery timeline back a bit, but don't push you back all the way, until you accumulate enough of them to add up to the level of a major one. The adding-up isn't exact with respect to time: you can be two years into recovery and accumulate fifty minor injuries that set you back a week each but by the fiftieth your soul is sore enough that it's like you had a major injury.)

I think that when Taliar made his soul artifact, he was not quite completely out of the adolescent phase, but there was only a tiny remaining trace of delicacy/difficulty and it barely had any effect on the process - he managed not to jar it badly enough to injure it. So around seventeen/eighteen is the developmental age of adulthood in souls.

Materializing an injured soul does not permanently affect it, but the injury will still be present for the same length of time that it would have taken to recover from it while your soul was still safely immaterial. Using a heavily injured soul artifact is painful and dangerous - it'll hurt, and if you strain it you might make the injury worse and prolong your recovery. The injury will also be obvious to anyone who looks at your soul, to a degree proportional to its severity. As you recover, the visible aspect will fade. The exact manifestation of injury in a soul depends on the exact manifestation of the soul, but it shares some points in common with how that soul manifests debasement, except that it gives off a sense of having been injured instead of a sense of being debased, and some of the exact visible details will differ.

I think I've manged to sell myself on this paradigm pretty well while figuring out how it would work.

In-universe, people mostly just do not touch their souls until they're at least twenty years old. That's two or three more years of safety margin than they need, but they don't exactly have a way to rigorously test it, and reaching for your soul at twenty is known to be absolutely safe, whereas doing it at seventeen is only expected to be probably safe.

[Kappa]

I think that in Nuimena there is probably a specific common verb that means exactly the thing I'm thinking of - something in the vicinity of 'externalize'/'materialize'/'bring out' - and it's used for [verb]ing your soul but is also just generally a common verb, and I need to figure out how I'm going to translate it into English, which has not needed to come up with a common verb for this specific thing because it's not a thing people on our world do with any frequency. On top of that they probably also speak of it in metaphors, of which 'forging' might reasonably be one.

I spent a while pacing back and forth thinking about translation, and I think I might have tentatively settled on "manifest" as the closest I can get in terms of being approximately the right meaning in approximately the right register.

[Kappa]

Further thoughts on Taliar's ability to cheat at soul power:

The combined exaltation of all of Taliar's friends' souls changes the size of the figurative bucket; the exaltation of Taliar's own soul changes how full the bucket is. So when he has a hundred friends contributing to his power, he doesn't become just one of a hundred equal pieces; instead, his exaltation works on a scale of a hundred rather than a scale of one. I was originally imagining it more the other way, but this way makes more sense. There are wibbly-wobbly vague effects depending on how well he knows someone, how invested in their personal development he is, and how much of his sense of self is wrapped up in them; for example, his parents have a lot more effect on the state of his soul than someone he met once for a couple of hours while on his neverending healing tour.

[Moriwen]

I like your thoughts on youthful soul extraction! They are indeed sufficient to deter a Faith.

More questions, because I am apparently super-obsessed with Nuime right now. Feel no obligation to answer all of them. Certainly I'm expecting that the answers to at least some are "I haven't thought about it yet."

- What is the tech level here? I haven't gotten a good sense of it.

- Taliar's artifact glows. We've seen one with shadows. "Some artifacts have also been known to" make sounds. What's the range of atmospheric emanations you can get, and what's the distribution like? (Is it "most everyone's glows, but if something else is particularly appropriate they can have that," is it "a sound gets you weird looks on the street," is it "anything's about as likely as anything else"? Could you have an artifact with a scent, or that made it really humid, or made people in the aura range feel like they were being watched?)

- You mentioned that dropping your artifact would be bad. Just in the obvious sense of "that's your soul and major vulnerability point and you just dropped it," or in some other way? Would dropping your artifact hard be painful?

- If you make an artifact and later decide you're not a fan of having your soul on display all the time, could you lock it in a safe at home rather than carrying it around with you?

- Are powers that affect you disproportionately more common than ones that affect other people, or vice versa? Stronger?

- If you have an aggressive power, are other people with artifacts more vulnerable (you can target the artifact) or less (they get some kind of a save from their artifact trying to defend them)?

- Is there a general protocol for "this person has an artifact and is using it to get up to mischief"? What if it's not "kill them now, minimize the fallout" levels of mischief?

- Are there professions that particularly seek out soulbearers to work for them? (Emergency services, special forces...?) Or is that too taboo for historical reasons?

- Does using your powers ever involve interacting physically with your artifact (e.g., "turn the bracelet around three times to activate your personal forcefield") or is it generally a pure mental action?

- Are there any local religions? Do they have views on all this soul business?

[Kappa]

The tech level is Vague Preindustrial Fantasy.

Artifact aesthetics generally have some sort of sight- or hearing-based theme. Environmental stuff like humidity and psychological stuff like a feeling of being watched are less like aesthetics and more like powers - the line isn't always perfectly clear-cut but there is in fact a line. Most people's aesthetics are mostly visual, but sounds aren't weird. Scent is a grey area but not out of the question; if it exists, though, it's rare enough that Taliar can't think of an example offhand.

Dropping your artifact is bad because there is not, by default, any special protection against losing your artifact. So the first thing. I don't think hitting your soul is damaging, but it might be a little jarring, not quite painful but definitely noticeable and not pleasant.

Nothing stops you in principle from locking your soul in a safe, but if someone steals the safe they have your soul, and most people can't wield their souls at range, so your soul when it's not within your reach is pretty much pure vulnerability.

I don't know quite what you mean about affecting you vs affecting other people.

Targeting someone's artifact to get to them definitely works, and many (but not all) people will be able to muster some kind of a save from their artifact trying to defend them, depending on who's attacking with what and who's defending.

Artifact Mischief Protocols are pretty individualized, but the general sketch is "outnumber them with preferably-more-powerful soulbearers and try to intimidate them into stopping if that looks likely, or stop them by force if intimidation doesn't work". If you break the law using an artifact you will get more and heavier attention than someone who breaks the law without one because the artifact makes you harder to stop, but your penalties will not in theory be different.

Generally speaking, emergency services don't have to look too hard for soulbearers; the sort of person who'd get powers that are really useful to emergency services is normally also the sort of person whose soul is exalted by working for emergency services. Special forces is... a different beast entirely.

You never have to fiddle physically with your artifact in specific ways order to accomplish specific effects. Sometimes you have to touch your artifact to use its more powerful abilities, but it's never more complicated than changing where you fall on a continuum of being in closer vs. less close physical contact with it.

I haven't thought about religions in much detail. Off the top of my head, I have a vague aesthetic that there used to be more of them before the Soul Wars destroyed all the cultures on the planet, and now things are more like a vaguely Barrayaran-ish set of superstitions and customs, but with more variation in the details between places and populations.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

If someone was blind and deaf, would that be likely to make their artifact have a scent?

[Kappa]

Possibly, yes.