Soul Gem

A soul gem is an Animus that has been bound to a gem. Through the use of soul capturing technology, a soul gem can be used to haunt and charge items, animate undead or artificial constructs, or as an energy source. For this purpose, creatures' and peoples’ animi are usually trapped at the moment of death on a large scale, to power various Dalmer devices as well as their homes.
== Uses ==
Main Article: Re engineering
Soul gems are an essential component to successfully imbuing supplementary properties to an item or weapon in a process called Haunting and re engineering. The quality of the extracted soul affects the potency of the resulting haunting. Soul gems are made by the Dalmer on an industrial level, and have to be filled via soul capture. Another way to easily fill soul gems is the Soul Stealer technology, which is an implemented tool in all medbays that automatically trap souls into a gem if the patient dies on the table. A similar technology exists to perform brain scans on the recently deceased and the UC is placed in a soul gem.
The gem itself contains a Dalmer UC, if killed, the frame containing it undergoes corpselessness. This is to avoid the Dalmer corpse or artificial frame being captured by the enemy. Some weapons are made to destroy these gems however, which is why they are built to withstand as much damage as possible.
== Animi ==
Main Article: Animi
The Animi of a being is a feature of that entity, which is closely connected to both its animating consciousness and the form of its body. For this reason, the Ghosts/souls/spirits are called animus, and collectively form an Animi. All living things on Welt seem to have Animi, though those of more older and more intelligent creatures tend to be more powerful. When Dalmer die, they can randomly generate animus, a ghost, a soul, and/or a spirit. Soul gems are the most common method of trapping animi. Despite the name, ghosts and spirits can also be trapped using soul gem technology. Animi are easily trapped and can be utterly destroyed, when touched by their skull.
== Capturing Souls ==
Filling Soul Gems necessitates the use of the technology known as soul trapping. The technology, when used on an anthropomorphic target before its death, causes its Animus to be plucked and transferred into the lowest quality available soul gem in inventory. The necessary quality of the soul gem depends on the targets' age, memories and experience. If a Soul Gem is not filled with a soul of its respective size, other souls can leak into the soul gem while touching it. Light souls are considered safer for use than void Souls.
Soul stealer technology is portable, and as such soul hunter is a profession in Welt. Among the Dalmer, these hunters quotas are restricted and strictly enforced, to avoid the suspicion of the other races. This has become even more prevalent since the Bleakers controversy.
== Dalmer Animi extraction ==
When a Dalmer is slain or gravely hurt, it returns to the nearest medbay via warping to cured or in case of too much damage to be refitted into a new body, following which they return to their everyday lives. The Dalmer in medbays are placed in Fountainwater, a light blue liquid found in Welt, which heals small wounds and kills all harmful bacteria, and missing limbs will be replaced with prosthetics. 
Should the patient die, before or when warped to the medbay, it is brain scanned and soul trapped. The UC is then placed into a robotic frame, and the soul into a soul gem. It is then possible to infuse the animus into an item. Trapped souls retain consciousness within the soul gem.
== Usage ==
The precise nature of the soul is a potent form of energy. Most domestic utensils and power grids can make use of this energy, once refined in the form of soul gems. Using a soul gem gives a quantity of energy when used. A soul gem is single use, and any excess energy is expelled violently.
=== Extraction cults ===
Extraction cults are organizations whose cultists are devoted to ritually sacrificing victims, whose souls are stolen and placed in pearls at the moment of death. This process leaves the victim's body intact, and in fact, capable of regenerating after mortal wounds. It also reduces the willpower of the victim, allowing the cult to enslave the victim. The victims also had great endurance, being capable of doings tasks for far longer, and sustain more injury, than regular slaves can. 
However, the process is imperfect, and over time the body will decay painfully, resulting in a violent, feral, decrepit creature. 
The Bleakers used these cults to retrieve extra pearls, with little care for what they did to their victims.
=== Soul Mechanics ===
On the study of spontaneous evolutionary creature (SEC) souls
Every living being has a soul. A beings’ soul is intrinsically linked with its physical form, but exists independently of it. A soul is capable of acquiring energy from the physical world via its physical form. 
The Structure of a Soul: Every soul in the World consists of the same four fundamental elements:
* A consciousness; responsible for the thoughts and emotions of the being.
* A reservoir of life energy.
* A detailed plan for the physical form of the being.
* A bond linking it to the physical form of the being.
= The Mechanics of a Soul =
There are 18 different kinds of life energy, known as types. These types are irreducible. Multiple types of life energy can be found in a single soul’s reservoir simultaneously. The type of life energy is determined by the source it was acquired from. Different species are better suited to acquiring different types of life energy. 
A soul constantly emits trace amounts of life energy. This radiation is known as an aura, and changes depending on the state of the soul emitting it.
When a being’s bond between its soul and physical form is broken, typically from damage or degradation to the physical form, it ceases to be alive. Its soul then becomes a spirit. A spirit can continue to exist so long as its reservoir of life energy sustains it. Under normal circumstances, a bond between a spirit and a physical form cannot be created.
Creation: When a being is first created, its soul receives a relatively small amount of life energy that makes up their reservoir. For beings that are not evolutionary in their lifetime by nature, this is as much life energy as their soul will ever have. Creatures that evolve spontaneously in their lifetimes, however, are able to use their physical forms to acquire energy from the physical world and store it as life energy within their reservoir. This reservoir of life energy is the resource that spontaneous evolutionary creatures (SEC) use to do seemingly extraordinary things, such as perform attacks, change forms, or evolve. In doing so, they convert this life energy back into some physical manifestation.
A soul’s reservoir can only hold a finite amount of life energy, though in specific situations a soul can leverage an external energy source to perform feats normally beyond the limits of its finite capacity. 
A soul’s body plan defines how its physical form is structured, and how it can be further improved through the application of life energy. A body plan is composed of factors, which can fall into either of two categories: Species Factors and Individual Factors.
Individual factors cannot be passed to offspring and include the size of a particular SEC, whether it is shiny, and whether it can gigantamax. These factors are largely influenced by the consciousness of an individual soul.
Species factors can be passed to offspring during reproduction, and include how permanent changes to the physical form will be made, such as evolution, regional forms, and gender differences. These factors are only minorly influenced by the consciousness of an individual soul.
A new soul is created whenever beings reproduce. The fundamental elements of the beings are used to shape the fundamental elements of the new soul. 
Ramifications of soul theory:
With Soul Theory detailed, now we can attempt to use it to understand how many seemingly extraordinary phenomena of the world work within its structure.
Infinity Energy, as it has been branded, is actually life energy that has been extracted from the souls of beings. 
Artificially created SEC must have souls like every other SEC, and the body plan within that soul provides the means for reproduction despite an apparent lack of a biological mechanism for doing so. This ties into the cells and DNA that many SEC have, but others apparently do not. These biological structures are the result of the soul’s body plan, rather than dictators of how the body is structured.
The existence of free will, and dreams being sustenance providing / technologically manipulatable things, is explained by the consciousness portion of a soul.
Mega Stones must provide an external reservoir of life energy beyond what a soul can store on its own, allowing a SEC that can leverage that composition of life energy to temporarily achieve a superior form. The body plan for this new form is contained in the mega stone, which is how the same individual can mega evolve into different forms depending only on which stone is used. If the body plan was instead some latent aspect of an SEC’s soul, it will always mega evolve into the same form.
SEC Reproduction is actually just two souls creating a new soul. This explains how wildly different species can produce offspring together. Biology isn’t really a factor. A SEC Egg is just an extremely simple physical form. This minimizes the life energy required from the parents to create this new being. Because the egg is a physical form, it provides the new soul the means to gather energy from its surroundings. After it has gathered sufficient energy it can use this to “hatch” into a more capable form, which is really more like SEC evolution than the hatching of an animal’s egg.
It’s possible that the “bond between a trainer and a SEC” is actually some sort of tangible link between their souls via their auras. As the aura contains information about the state of the soul, this could provide a nonverbal means of communication about thoughts and emotions. It’s easy to see how this would make the duo more competent in battle.
Similarly, sensing of auras and manipulation of the energy emitted from souls makes sense. This would allow certain SEC’s to sense emotions and thoughts and identities, and provide the substance for moves like Aura Sphere.
The increase of an SEC’s strength with their level, seems to just be an abstraction of a SEC’s accumulation of life energy as they mature. The level cap is analogous to the maximum capacity of a soul’s life energy reservoir. Gaining experience from battle can be seen as the extraction of life energy from the soul of defeated opponents.
Evolution: An SEC evolving as its level increases is representative of an individual's gradual accumulation of life energy in their reservoir eventually being sufficient to achieve a superior form. The numerous other, more exotic, evolution methods all give the evolving SEC access to some new energy source or material that must be essential to the construction of their next form.
Move powering: As all life energy is one of 18 discrete varieties, ie the types, a species’ type(s) is just which varieties of energy predominantly fill their reservoir. The type of a move is the variety of life energy that is used to perform it. It seems probable that reservoirs can contain more than two types of life energy. 
Storage devices convert an SEC’s physical form into life energy (the reverse of when a SEC evolves, converting life energy into a physical form) preserving this alongside its soul to eject later. Since the warp charge, and subsequently the Public Storage System, are actually storing the sum total of an SEC’s being and consciousness,hence why various technologies are able to glean so much information about Mechanimals while they’re in this state.
SEC’s that seem to be multiple creatures, such as Exeggcute or Falinks, must actually be single souls with a consciousness that contains multiple identities and a discontinuous physical form. 
Items: SEC’s who seem to have “items” such as stones or clothing as part of their body are also cases of discontinuous form. There is no reason SEC’s body plans need to be entirely “biological” in nature, as evidenced by entirely mechanical SEC,
Ghost SEC’s are often described as possessing other objects and beings, or being reincarnations of spirits. It seems probable that this is actually a ghost SEC’s soul consuming the soul of another being, but preserving at least part of its consciousness (as in Yamask having human memories) or simply integrating an object into its physical form (Banette).
How is a souls' power determined?
It is supposed that not all brain scanning or anima extraction devices are capable of successfully creating power sources. For instance, we assume that anima have a 10% chance of manifesting which explains why harvesting is hazardous for all parties involved. This doesn't explain power levels. 
Perhaps memory and knowledge is a factor, more knowledgeable and cognisant individuals would provide more power. No, narratively it means that intellectuals are at constant risk of kidnapping by Bleakers. 
Quality of the energy based on its origin is a good counter to soul harvesting, since it could explain why other races or even animal brain scans are less efficient than brain scanning a Dalmer. By ranking, the quality of a soul gem as a power source is Dalmer, other race, non sapient organisms. 
* Tangent: some people have trouble being in sync with the aether web, this requires the usage of Synchrozine, a drug that corrects any discrepancies between what the cyborg perceives and reality. 
* Tangent: the curse of UC's is to have to sift through their memories and pick and choose what memories they have on them due to memory capacity issues. The memories are not deleted, but it implies personality changes based on what memories are kept. This means that, when connected, they have all their past and present memories, perfectly preserved from their point of view, this is a blessing and a curse.
** Tangent of Tangent: Memory fabricators are a risk in UC communities, and are hunted down actively. These fabricators can control people who don't have effective enough firewalls to keep out the hackers. Memory fabrication naturally doesn't work on biologicals but can on cyborgs and software using individuals. 
* Tangent: How does the sale of memories work? Is the permanent deletion of memories permitted?
====Philosopher stone====
What the other races call philosopher stones are in fact soul gems with the voice activated wishing technology enabled. The soul gem can grant wishes for material goods or temporary powers. Fake philosopher stones are the cornerstone of many a Dalmer artifact black market among the other races.
====Super train tornado====
A tornado wormhole that follows the Super train, due to its great speed and momentum. The tornado sucks souls from people. Roach dogs follow the storm to feed on the leftover life force.
====The reusable soul gem====
Usage of a reusable soul gem attracted the Dalmers attention, a race against time ensued between the agents of empire and the Bleakers for its recovery.
====Lightning attractor====
Activated by placing a grand or greater soul gem into a holder, which will then cause lightning to strike the rods, improving the quality and power capacity of the gem. Using these lightning attractors will attract hostiles if not protected by a barrier.
Category:Dalmer Technology
Category:Unfinished articles
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