Warrens has an overarching theme: the separation of Body and Soul. In real life, the Soul is an abstract, philosophical concept at best, but in the Warrens, each person's soul is an actual object that takes up physical space in the dungeon underworld.
We know for a fact that each soul "belongs" to a person. However, because anyone can mess with the menu options on anyone else's Soul Star, the exact nature of "ownership" is ambiguous. Before Second Shift, we had no reliable way of determining "ownership" for
exactly this reason.The first hint was the Hard Hats arena. Ciro changed battle modes, and directly after, she began bleeding from the mouth. Why would this happen? Changing battle modes hurts you?
As Yaos showed us, losing Soul Charge alone causes characters to bleed from the mouth/eyes/face/elsewhere. When Yaos and Riltia ran out of Soul Charge, they transformed into horrible monsters briefly referred to as "Willborn." We do not know what Willborn means yet except it's a variation of Illborn created from the following circumstances:
1) A character has Soul Charge and is still exploring the Warrens (i.e. they're not regular Illborn who are always drained of Charge before we meet them)
2) which they then somehow lose
3) causing them to instantly transform into a horrible abomination far worse than any ordinary Illborn faced in the Warrens
So we know Soul Charge and the structure of the body are linked, but this link is stronger in one direction. Example:
When Ciro originally died, he did not turn into a horrible abomination like Riltia did when she died. We can infer from this that merely dying does not cause Charge loss. However, when we encountered Riltia, right before saving her, we saw her soul was completely drained and garbled, indicating her soul had been drained some time after her death but before her transformation.
Now that Slog's alive, we have the final piece of the puzzle.
Long after our revival, we found the Asynchrony Catalyst in the Last Seraphim's Sanctuary. This, along with Slog's revival via Influx, means
we were revived because the Asynchrony Catalyst was in the slot.
Al implies he didn't do anything but put Ciro in the tube, and he doesn't know how the revival happened.
The Asynchrony Catalyst was already there when he arrived.
...So why was it there in the first place?
From all this, we can discern one thing: the link is stronger in the Soul->Body direction. Somehow, the LSS revives the bodies of dead characters
but only when a Soul Star is available. Characters deteriorate (suffer internal bleeding)
when their Soul Star loses power. When Soul Charge is completely depleted,
characters become Illborn or worse.We don't know why this happens yet, but we know one thing: in Warrens, your body is merely a hollow shell created (and potentially ruined) by your soul. Everything "you" are is in your Soul, and your soul retains its form across class changes, gender swaps, and revivals. Everything else - your body, powers, opinions - is perfectly malleable and irrelevant.
As a prize for completing this theory craft, the
Ardent Circuit's secondary form requires 50% less Soul Charge to use.
Poll
8 (16%)
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Topic: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome ??? (Read 3949812 times)