I mean this literally - the CVR matches up souls with their previous owners. Specifically their previous owners: they don’t just send random souls to soulless people. How do they know which one goes where? The contracts can help them discover who might be in possession of them, but we know ownerless souls tend to be thrown together without order after a while. How do they discern the person they used to belong to?
I always thought devils would write little notes on the bottles . “Soul stolen on date at place” and so on. and devils keep paperwork on everything, so that probably helps.
I have that feeling that the pocket watch you earn when you join the CVR is good for more than just giving you the time. In a certain storyline (trying to avoid spoilers here), the watch is used in a non-disclosed way to restitute the soul to a woman.
There is also the possibility that the ownser of the soul might be able to tell if a certain soul is theirs or not.
I also have this speculation that the Embassy, being the bureaucracy-loving devils they are, might put a ‘serial code’ in those bottles, which appears in the respective contract and lets you identify the owner. But it’s just speculation.
I was sort of under the impression that infernal bureaucracy is not particularly efficient or effective. They seem like the type that will file souls alphabetically by color, and the next day a new manager will declare that the shade formerly called periwinkle-chartreuse will now be called chartreuse-periwinkle.
Souls can talk. On the sidegrade option for Brilliant Souls, it seems that the soul is telling you a secret when you free it, and possibly that you are negotiating with it for its own freedom.
So maybe you can just ask a soul who it belonged to? Or at the least, listen to its wailings and infer an address or something.
I’d agree, but if you just give them souls they say “it would be easier to identify the owners if we had the contracts” or something. They need the contracts for some reason.
The side-conversion of souls not necessarily imply that they are talking, just that something terrible happened when the bottles were opened. Now, it’s true that you can get a Silent Soul (implying that other souls are not silent), but the only sounds I’ve ever seen souls explicitly doing in game are moans. (I admitely didn’t went through all storylets, so I may be missing some instance of souls clearly talking.)
But the peculiar thing is that the Shepherd of Souls card does not require that you present the Committee with the same number of souls as contracts. The greatest reward is for 1000 Souls and 100 contracts. That one contract for every 10 Souls! I always thought that was peculiar.
[quote=Catherine Raymond]But the peculiar thing is that the Shepherd of Souls card does not require that you present the Committee with the same number of souls as contracts. The greatest reward is for 1000 Souls and 100 contracts. That one contract for every 10 Souls! I always thought that was peculiar.[/quote]That is indeed peculiar. Also, souls are traded every which where in London, but contracts are a lot harder to get. Seems to indicate to me that the Embassy is really interested a lot more in the contracts than the souls themselves. We still don’t know exactly what individual Devils do with the souls they’ve obtained (I’ve never figured out the Infernal Sommelier who actually seems to "drink" Brilliant Souls - is he a devil, or something else?), but the Embassy at least seems focused on cataloguing the contracts.
If I remember restoring an old character’s soul, my character was able to recognize his own soul when he saw it. So it could be a mix of following up on leads to try to find the right person, and then confirming with them before doing the restoration?
then how would this match up with your soul just showing up as one of the options in Opening a Bundle of Oddities? The committee clearly has a way of matching souls with people that does not require the soul or the person to actually come in contact with each other beforehand.
of the answers given, I do like the intimation that the contracts contain details about the nature of the soul extracted. Color, Brightness, Temperament, Gender, Age Upon Extraction; perhaps even some things that only devils can detect, like Flavor. Which could mean the committee either has devils on their side that are willing to disclose this information, or that they have their own ways of verifying it independent of infernal persons.
I’d like to remind you that you can swap 50 Brilliant Souls for 51 Tales of Terror!!, implying that souls are very much capable of communicating in one way or another. Which makes sense, if you know what they really are.
I’m fairly certain souls and their owners recognize eachother automatically if separated but then brought into eachother’s presence again, it’s probably some innate magic or somesuch.
The action has "Exchange" in the title, something that is not present for other side-conversion storylets (Memories of Light contains "swap"). I took this to mean that there are two parties making a deal, rather than the Tale of Terror being a side-effect. But I’ll admit it’s still ambiguous.
Considering that you can recognize your lost soul once you find it, that seems to help out with finding the owner.
The problem comes in when you consider the bigger picture. Hell has been around for a while and has claimed more than a few souls. Given the chaotic nature of the liberated infernal bureaucracy, it is more than likely that some have been outside of Hell for a surprising long time, either forgotten or aged like fine liquor.
Not to mention the implication that the devils have access to different times and places, meaning that there could easily be souls from the past, future, or sideways.
I like this too. Especially imagining the devils on their side. Brass Embassy sends a few devils to the CVR, so they can keep hunting souls. (Not every devil hunts the same soul repeatedly, but some do, or maybe they help the CVR to have something they can bother the masters about. Who knows with devils) Or there’s renegade devils running around. Cool either way.
edited by suinicide on 8/25/2016