Dreamward Worldbuilding Info

[Alicorn]

Your soul is an insubstantial substrate for your mind that operates your body via interfacing with your brain. Bell clumsiness is a neurological/brain trait; it would be hard for a troporter to remove it from her original body, but if her cohabitor's body were used as the base and traits she wanted to keep (which wouldn't include that) were moved from her original to the shared instead of vice versa, she could get rid of it that way. You can move souls more than once but it's dangerous - you can only move an awake soul (you don't count as touching the sleeping soul in the same body), and the other occupant of the body will not automatically wake up - possibly ever. In Hubward, they dare try it because Crystal and Holly are always at least slightly awake even when not fronting, and know they need to take over when Book is removed. When your soul is eaten, if it's the last soul in your body, the body dies, and you cease to exist. If for some reason only one soul in a body is eaten the body can survive, although you again have the never waking up problem if the awake soul is the one eaten.

Souls are single indivisible "traits" and you can't move parts of them.

You can swap your eye colors or traits from differing parts of something that seems otherwise to be a single object.

It is not a good idea to spend a long period of time on bird legs.

[jalapeno_dude]

You posted an unfinished version of this story some time ago, right (a year, maybe)? I have strong recollections of reading it, at least through Book's bodyswap, and would be perturbed if they were incorrect...

[Alicorn]

Yeah, it's been incomplete for ages.

[Bluelantern]

Can you Troport with recently dead bodies?

I was thinking it sounds like a good idea to repurpose the parts that a cohabitor is going to discard.

[Alicorn]

You are not advised to take dead parts. If you want somebody's about-to-be-discarded eye color or hair texture or height or something you'd be smarter to get it before they go in to be moved.

[Bluelantern]

You are not advised to take dead parts. If you want somebody's about-to-be-discarded eye color or hair texture or height or something you'd be smarter to get it before they go in to be moved.

sounds like something interesting to do before cohabitation, albeit it might hard to... set up correctly in small places and limited technology.

[Alicorn]

My friend Zack programmed me a Nlaaki syllable generator, which you may poke. (Note that in the extant sandbox with Nlaaki speakers I'm rendering her Nlaaki utterances so that you have a chance of pronouncing them right, not in the formal concise orthography.)

[DanielH]

Can people be kept alive indefinitely by troporting away age, disease, etc, or by moving in with younger people? Either way, there are a lot of dead bodies around; are they cremated, or disposed of in some other way that doesn't resemble Earth graveyards enough for recognition?

[Alicorn]

You can in theory keep someone alive indefinitely with a combination of animal and human sacrifice, yes.

Spare bodies are burned. Bodies that die with people in them are also burned, but more ceremoniously.

[Kappa]

I wonder if there are any cultures where old people move in with young people in a continuous cycle, rather than young people cohabiting with one another. Would that work as a thing? Now I'm imagining a Dreamward Bell advocating for a shift in cultural norms... XD