He's saying that you and I are both psychopathic murderers.
In other news: Journal thing.
What is a soul? This is the foremost question of Manipulation, one yet unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. Most mortals have but a finite span of life, and access to only a single soul - their own. Little research is done, or indeed, can be done while living on the mortal plane. I have gone further than most mortal manipulators I know in the pursuit of spiritual knowledge, sacrificing my childhood, my family and friends, my earthly homeland, tens of thousands of dollars and soon even my mortality all for the sake of my art. And yet, true understanding eludes me still. Even so, there are certain definite facts which I have uncovered in my research. By committing my knowledge to this record, I hope to clarify and condense what I know and chart out a new course for my research to take.
The first truth ever revealed to me about Manipulation was this: "If a soul is protected by a body, you must first establish some claim of ownership over it before you can manipulate it safely." This is the Rule of Ownership. Frankie, my familiar, had me recite it back to him at least once an hour when I was first learning how to work magic. I do not know why this is the case, nor what power made the Rule, but after hearing Frankie recount horror stories of former owners who disobeyed it, I am unwilling to do more than skirt it.
I suspect that the Rule of Ownership is due to Divine command. The Gods are powerful, and are said to call the souls of their dead worshipers to them in the outer planes. Frankie scoffs at this notion, and it may be that my jewish upbringing may have influenced by thoughts here, but my familiar is a spirit of chaos. He wouldn't obey divine law even if he knew which God commanded it and why. It's a matter of principle to him to disregard the will of lawful creatures. I suppose the only way to know for sure would be to find a God and ask them, if they'd be willing to tell the truth.
Regardless, it is the Rule of Ownership that lead Frankie to start me out working with disembodied souls and to move on from there. The very first spell I ever learned was one for 'condensing' disembodied souls into 'pearls'. Chanting, meditation and a pair of reagents, salt and cough medicine, are all required. The salt and syrup both go on my hands, which I hold over my head while I meditate. The salt is used in the traditional magical way (influencing spiritual energies) and I suspect that the cough medicine is there for the dextromethorphan, which suppresses coughs in humans and probably has a similar enough effect on souls. You wouldn't think those organic chemistry lectures from college would come up in magic, but, then again, you wouldn't think that I was secretly a witch with a talking cat either.
I've not yet memorized the chants for this, so my familiar still has to provide them. They seem to differ based on the most unusual factors - time of day, moon phase, the presence of absence of a dozen different things, how recently the soul was killed, who killed it, why and Frankie only knows what else. While Frankie pads around looking at me and feeding me chants, I grapple with the soul being condensed in my mind, reciting the words I'm given and trying to will the spirit into my hands. If successful, a pearl will form out of the salt and the soul will be trapped.
Unfortunately for me, souls are usually invisible and quickly decompose into what Frankie refers to as "Ambient Soul Energy." In essence, when something dies, the soul starts to dissolve and bits of it meld into the local aura. Which rather puts a damper on any lingering thoughts about an afterlife waiting for me, except through direct divine intervention. I'm not sure what happens when someone dies and comes back to life. Is their soul restored in full, forcefully plucked from the aura into which it went? Do the missing bits get regenerated by the spell, using aura or some other method? Or does the soul stay damaged, diminishing with each death until nothing remains to be revived? Something to look into.
One of my early misadventures involved me trying to capture a powerful demon that passed by as I sat on the banks of the Styx. I suspect it was an incubus, seeing as it tried to seduce me into letting me possess it by giving me some of the best orgasms I've ever had in my life. Our wills struggled for five hours - it trying to take over my body as I tried to force it into the salt. Frankie was of great assistance, hitting me every time I, ahem, got too distracted by the demon and keeping me focused. This same demon managed to mangle itself by possessing my tomato plants on three seperate occasions. The soul chopped itself to bits, allowing me to make use of it piecemail, one part eventually becoming my darling little pixie, Rufus, who is dead but shall not forever die.
The second spell I learned was one for putting souls into things. It requires that I dissolve the soul in a solution of 2 molarity ethenol and 4 molarity sulfuric acid, ie. 1 to 4 by weight. The soul dissolves in the acid, releasing what I'm currently assuming is hydrogen gas as it forms into a colourful solution. Evil souls yield a red solution, while good souls turn yellow. Not really sure what happens with the alcohol, since, by all rights, it should be producing either ethene or ether when I brew the insertion solution. Regardless, the solution (which I'm currently calling "spiritual sulfate", chemical formula of ★nSO4) is then poured onto whatever I want to put the soul into as I chant a spell that Frankie provides which, again, depends on all sorts of odd factors like the position of the tides, the phases of Saturn's moons and more obvious things like what I'm trying to imbue and what sort of soul I'm using.
The other two souls Frankie taught me aren't terribly enlightening. Dead useful, but they don't actually tell me much about the underlying mechanics of the soul. The first was a spell for claiming ownership of a soul. Apparently, the best way to do this at my skill level is to sleep on top of the soul and let my subconcious mind chase after it like a tidal wave of darkness while it flees from me on my motorcycle. Or to dream of chasing it through the woods near my house with a spear. Or, in the case of the incubus soul, to... well, nevermind about that, ok?
The other spell was an exorcism spell, which really isn't doing much for my supposed "delusional religiousiness" that Frankie keeps insisting I have. He also insists that "religiousiness" is a word. The spell works by brandishing a holy smybol at the target and chanting. If I'm successful, and the subject of the exorcism has the soul of an otherworldly being somwhere inside them, their soul bursts into flames and turns the subject's body into ash, leaving the soul free for me to condense. I notice that the spheres of the kabala feature heavily in the chants, which is even more suspicious.
Although just as combat focused as the exorcism spell, Doom Seed has proven highly illustrative of another interesting principle of manipulation - that plants, even mundane plants, are able to consume souls to fuel their growth. I knew previously from my work with pixies that they could only grow when provided with souls, but before I fully understood the properties of the Doom Seed spell, I had thought that this soul was merely to provide a soul to the resultant pixie. Not so, as it seems that part of the soul is consumed to fuel growth.
A somewhat more informative pair of spells would be the Inanimate Voice and Condensed Soul Conversation spells. The former causes nearby inanimate objects to gain a voice and to communicate, while the latter allows me to communicate with condensed souls. I discovered them both at the same time, while working on a spell to converse with spirits. The interesting part is that the inanimate voice spell does not require that I imbue the object with a soul - it appears that the temporary soul is drawn from the local aura of Ambient Soul Energy. Another key point is that it does not work on plants, which would seem to imply that plant life is not inanimate and that plants have souls or some analogue.
The keystone to this new theory is actually the spell I was most recently taught - a variant on the magic that's used in the Emerald Wand. I've dubbed it 'Floral Attack Order', although it isn't actually an order. Instead, it is a curse which targets an animate object (ie. one with a soul in it somewhere) and marks it as an enemy of the vegetable kingdom. Plants, even plants that weren't present when I cast the spell or plants that I knew nothing about will all attack the target. From this and the above, I can easily deduce that all of my plant magics do not opperate by commanding a plant as I previously thought, but by acting upon a subject: When enthralling a plant creature using the Emerald Wand, I am casting a spell on myself that inspires loyalty in the plant I'm trying to tame. When entangling someone with the wand or with a floral attack order, I am marking the target as an enemy and as someone for the plants to attack. When casting a Doom Seed, I am marking a soul as food, something for the Doom Plant to suck dry of spiritual power to fuel its growth.
Perhaps the final key to the puzzle is Soul Drain, a spell I learned from a succubus which allows me to kiss someone thereby drain the aura and then the soul from the victim. (This is the above mentioned 'skirting' of the rule of ownership - by continuing to kiss me, the owner of the soul provides implicit consent to the spell working. A dubious technicality, but enough to get around the Rule) In this spell, aura and soul are equivilent: they drain at the same rate, they are are equally potent in fortifying other souls and are otherwise the same. This leads me to suspect that Aura is made of the same essential stuff as a soul, save that it has been dissolved. Plants are typically soulless (which is why they don't move, speak or do things that soulled creatures do) and instead run off of Aura. Doom Seeds consume souls to produce Aura, which is in turn consumed by the plant. The 'soul' conferred upon an object during Inanimate Voice is made of Aura and soon returns to being Aura, as is the animating force in animated plants.
The chants that Frankie has me perform must all be based upon the Aura, and upon whatever factors influence it. The course of study from here on out is clear: I must practice and study and practice some more until I completely understand the chants required for manipulation spells. Only from there, will I be able to progress further.
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Topic: @)~~}~ Magia Exquisitis! ~{~~(@ (Read 119491 times)