Nuime (soul artifacts thing)

[Moriwen]

(Let me know if the questions are tiresome? I really really like Nuime but I don't want to pester you. :))

- Do artifact powers ever have downsides? Like, "you can heal people but only by absorbing some fraction of their injuries into yourself" or "you can wield fire but it makes you emotionally unbalanced the more you do it in a short period of time" or suchlike.

- Taliar's power has a three-days-or-so delay on getting powers appropriate to a new situation. How common is that sort of "takes a little while to produce results"? Do powers often have a charge time/maximum uses per day, or can you get worn out/out of "spell points", or can you generally just keep using your powers indefinitely?

- What's the general quality of life like? State of medical care, crime rates, homeless population? I don't know if I should be picturing "kinda bad, because recently wartorn" or "really good, because magic and also an Ezar and a Miles."

- Do you know instinctively what your artifact can do, or have to figure it out through trial and error, or some combination?

- Is there a standard way for soulbearers with babies/small children to deal with their offspring making grabby hands at their soul? (It's hard enough trying to keep toddlers from choking you with a normal necklace you're wearing...)

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I think the current standard for medical care is "Dawn-Shining Taliar."

[Kappa]

Artifact powers do not come standard with downsides of the described type. It's theoretically possible but you'd have to be... a bit weird... before your soul would consider that the most appropriate power to give you.

The three-day delay on getting powers appropriate to a new situation is specifically because the thing that's happening is getting new powers and that is a thing that soul artifacts do not do quickly. Charge times, maximum uses, spell points, etc. aren't really things.

Diakor made a really good start on all that infrastructure stuff and Esarkan has been taking it farther in the same direction. The generation growing up right now in Nuime would be shocked to experience the quality of life that was common two centuries ago. Also Maggie is correct about the current standard for medical care. He's not literally the only person with a healing power, but he's the only person who can blanket a city with it.

You tend to have an instinct for what you can do, but the details might surprise you. Taliar didn't find out about his lie detection until the first time someone lied to him while it was active.

Soulbearers with small children adopt various strategies. Maybe they wrap up their soul so it's safe from being touched, maybe they start wearing it in a less accessible fashion, maybe they leave it in a childproofed hiding place for the duration. I bet they make a point of teaching their children to be less grabby so they can start wearing their soul normally again.

[DanielH]

Am I reading it right that if you are between 12 and youngest extraction age, you can go visit your soul without injury as long as you “look, don’t touch”?

If you are able to manifest your soul but aren’t an adult, and you decide you would like to stop extracting your soul (it’s more difficult than you expected, your house catches fire, whatever), can you back out cleanly without injuring your soul or is it more a “once you pick it up you need to finish the process or get a minor injury” thing?

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.

Does that mean the same touching thing, or is that even if you try to just find it again?

You say that “literally everyone” slips up on pulling or makes a wrong guess, but also that Taliar managed not to jar his soul badly enough to injure it. Was Taliar’s doing that unprecedented, or was did he injure his soul but only a negligible amount, or what?

[Kappa]

I'm finding it difficult to articulate the answers to your questions. Taliar is a member of the category "literally everyone".

[DanielH]

I thought anybody too young slipping up automatically meant a soul injury, even if just a minor one?

[Kappa]

There is no absolute hard dividing line between "too young, always measurably injured by slipping up" and "not too young, never injured by slipping up".

[DanielH]

And my other questions: could e.g. Nezhefena go down the tunnel and look at her soul without touching it when she was 12, if she had been inclined to search, without injuring it? Can you stop the manifestation process without injuring your soul if you do it deliberately instead of by making a mistake?

And two new questions: how was this harder in the past? How does being fairy-ordered or mind controlled or whatever to do this fail to work?

[Kappa]

Does it help with the question about looking for your soul if I clarify that before you have ever successfully contacted your soul, the only way to know whether you're looking in the right direction at all is to make full contact for the first time? After you have done that, it is possible to imagine going partway along the tunnel-or-whatever (unless you're Taliar and have no distance available), but 'looking at your soul' and 'contacting your soul' are still... effectively the same action; you aren't actually looking at your actual soul until you're close enough that it counts as contact with all the consequences that entails.

If you stop the manifestation process by 'dropping' your soul, it's the same as dropping it by accident. If you instead carefully put it back where you found it, you risk dropping it by accident along the way or accidentally being too rough with it when you put it down, but it's possible to avoid injuring it further if you're careful enough.

In the past, you needed more than just one correct detail each about your personality and your soul's aesthetics in order to make contact with it, and the extraction process took longer and needed you to do more heavy lifting on the self-knowledge front.

If you try to reach for your soul without genuinely wanting to find it, you simply fail to make contact. If at any point during the extraction process you no longer genuinely want to manifest your soul, you 'drop' it immediately, indistinguishably from having made a wrong guess or lost concentration.

[DanielH]

Yes, that does help. Thank you.

Now I just need to catch up on backlog enough to get to the threads.