Playing through early-game content with my alt, I came across this snippet from the Loquacious Vicar:
"From what you gather, it’s possible for a soul to be removed and then re-attached to a living body. As to a dead one, nobody wants to talk about it. Even the spirifer blanches and heads away when you mention it."
So what does happen when you try to attach a soul to a dead body?
Given what the Neath is like, in that being dead tends to be more of an inconvenience than anything else, I should imagine that when the original owner revives then you have the horrifying spectacle of a two-souled body.
Now I wonder what happens if the person coming back from the dead is soulless…
does he mean dead, or permanently dead, though?
Presumably dead dead. Attaching a soul to a temporarily dead body doesn’t seem to be too horrific a thing … although the two-souled body suggested by Teaspoon would be … hmmm … I’d don’t what it would be, beside being extraordinarily bizarre, of course.
Did any of them test it? Judging by the amount of people who just stop talking about it when it’s mentioned because it’s so horrible im starting to think that they have no actual idea what would happen, a removed soul doesn’t seem to do much, why would a soul in a dead body do anything special then?
Don’t forget the soul swapping the Campaigner did in Sunless Sea was relatively harmless but resulted in a change of personality.
In a way, souls seem pretty similar to amber and vital essence - like sponges. Attaching souls to dead body might be frowned upon because the soul would have a very abrupt transition between memories and not savory for the Judgments. Two souls in a body would probably make both of them too watered down to be, errr, of good quality, not to mention the weird personality split or some such disorder that can manifest.
My immediate thought when I read that was "zombies," really.
Or a situation in Dead Like Me where the soul is trapped and able to sense everything as the dead body goes through things dead bodies go through.
[quote=Lamia Lawless]My immediate thought when I read that was "zombies," really.
[/quote]
This. Pretty certain this was just intended as a joke about zombies, similar to the ‘spidery sort of man’ joke in Spite and the Batman reference in one of the info snippets. They might build some lore on it later, but for now I think we’re reading too much into it.
Oh, I had some more thoughts about this.
I was thinking about the Tomb Colonists and how some of them
choose Emergence over death. I’ve heard people refer to this as being "extremely illegal," as in, if the Judgements found out they would be furious about it.
So it may be the reason spirifers don’t talk about it is because it blatantly transgresses Law, which is something even some devils feel hesitant about.
I very much like the combined Law-transgressing-trapped-in-a-rotting-dead-body answer. It is both shuddersome and lore-ish.
if a dislocated soul could be reattached to a living body then what if that living body already had a soul, could it be possible to house dozens of distinct souls at once? could this be what causes multiple personality disorder in the neath?
i think that if the soul contains a persons emotions then if a soul was attached to a dead body then the dead person would have "emotions" to some degree, maybe becoming like a mindless zombie acting out on all of the souls vices
Pentecost apes can already host dozens, if not hundreds, of souls at once. Of course, no guarantee it effects humans the same way.
For reasons of personal OCD-ness, I’d like to think the limit would be fifty souls per Pentecost Ape, but that’s just me.
I think we need more information on the exact nature of the soul before determining what the effects would be. It’s loss does not appear to affect memory or ability, merely a sort of flattened affect. My first thought upon seeing this thread, however, was ‘vampires’. Of course, I did just finish watching all of Buffy and Angel with a friend of mine, so that assuredly influenced my opinion.
So two souls in one body - confusing, to be sure, perhaps a dissociative personality disorder?
Soul transplanted into DEAD body - decidedly uncomfortable, to be sure.
If a soul were attached to a body that already had it, I’d guess it would have extra protection from the sun.
Because it would be a pair-a-soul.
– Mal
Booo. (Thumbs up)
And I believe sunless sea stated that the founder of the empire of hands had hundreds of souls, but my memories are hazy, and in any case I’d consider that just him.
The First Emperor was said to have had a hundred souls, which were buried with him. You find considerably less than that when you raid the tomb.
Someone in The Pentecost Predicament says that Pentecost apes have found a way to put multiple souls in one body “without the usual unpleasantness”. No elaboration on what that is.
My first thought was two-souls in the Native American tradition, but that doesn’t fit Fallen London’s themes very well.
Honestly, I think it might change from species to species, since Pentecost Apes seem to do pretty well. Maybe in an average Londoner they would fight for dominance of the body - maybe the subject of an exceptional story sometime.
Presumably they mean attaching the soul to a permanently dead body, not just one that is temporarily dead (since that wouldn’t be too different from adding the soul to a living body, minus a possibly jarring temporary transition).
So that raises larger questions about what happens to dead-dead bodies. [spoiler]In one of the Exceptional Friend end-of-season stories, it’s hinted that dead-dead bodies persist - albeit on a horrific, very cramped island. Do their souls suffer with them, too? Or do their souls perish upon death?
If souls do remain attached through perma-death, wouldn’t it be better to have your soul moved to a new body pre-death, so that some part of you could escape that horror? Where is this island anyway? In a metaphysical place, or somewhere on the Unterzee? In what waters does the Boatman actually ply his ferry? He seems pretty friendly with several current occupants of Fallen London, so I’m inclined to think his route connects real, physical places.
Or is it only dead-dead souls that journey to this hellish island, while bodies decompose in the murk of the Neath, or dry up in some Tomb Colony catacomb? Are there any references to burials for dead-dead people in London? I suppose most of the Boatman’s pickups would be in the Tomb Colonies - where bodies clearly do decay and get turned into lovely candles. And the description of the Boatman’s destination made it seem like its occupants are rather vital - constantly struggling against one another. So maybe it is just the souls of the perma-dead that occupy it? But then again, Fallen London has only ever depicted souls as ghost-like wisps. At any rate, it seems it would be better to die on the Surface and have your soul blotted from the Earth than face those horrors below.[/spoiler]
So…yeah. I think Lamia is right - probably a zombie joke. The other questions it raises, though, are chilling.
edited by Ginneon Thursday on 12/9/2016
The dead-dead bodies question has been answered. To become closest to the church you need to watch a dead dead body for three days to make sure it is dead. So the bodies don’t go anywhere.