shitposting rave 5: discount rejects from every genre

Mi?

 

-The doll lifts her eyepatch, revealing a hole in her porcelain head containing several morning glories.-

Spirits manifest in places when a soul is too attached to something in the material plane to depart. This is why houses become haunted, or sometimes specific belongings. Stuff that was important to someone in life remains attached to them after death.

Now, there used to be a dollmaker who lived in a huge manor in the middle of nowhere. The dollmaker made many, many dolls over the course of their life, the dolls gradually becoming more twisted as the dollmaker descended into madness. Now, the dolls have become possessed, containing pieces of the dollmaker’s soul. But since it has been many years since the dollmaker’s passing, and the manor has been reclaimed by nature. Now, when something is possessed that already contains life, that’s when weird stuff starts to happen. Even if the life is something simple like flowers or fungus, it gains a will of its own.

So, each of us dolls is animated by a piece of the dollmaker's soul, with personalities reflective of our creator’s state of mind when they made us, except amplified. And none of us can leave the decrepit manor while the dollmaker’s will remains too strong. Of course, if we were to stop containing life, those parts of the dollmaker’s soul inside of us would be forced to move on.

You can probably guess the implications of all this for yourself. The name’s Morning Glory, after the flowers growing in my head.

-Her artificial face somehow conveys an acute sense of fatigue upon finishing the explanation.-

 

That is actually oddly similar to the way spirits work here. Uh. In my universe. Except one of the things the soul needs to be attached to is the mind itself because otherwise it just kinda forgets what else it was attached to and usually has no other reasons not to move on.
Our souls are just what makes you you. And not an identical clone sharing the same memories and personality or something. It's just kind of a ball of magic that has or rather is a consciousness. I honestly don't understand most of the research but I think basically we know how they interact with their environment and their uh. Life cycle I guess and we can also do things like capture them and move them around but we don't know how they work internally speaking. Having a soul is important for any kind of magic that requires direct application of will because that's what gives you the interface with the surrounding thaumic field to do that. But also if you have enough brain to do the will thing but no soul that is actually pretty weird and usually means you're constructed and whoever coded you was kinda weird with ethics in a different way from the other AI-making people. Not that you would personally care because there wouldn't really be such a thing as "you" as a being.

Also I apologize for the run-on sentences and I think syntax weirdness. Speech: it's hard and especially so when whoever at Daraco maintains the drivers for communication processors just ends up introducing more bugs in their patches.

 

"Interesting," Aish looks between the three others in the rave. "In Faerie, our life-energy and memories are in our blood. Our magic, too, but that's pretty well covered under 'life energy.'"

They look at the other cat in the room. "And who are you?"

 

The scarier dolls like Wolfsbane and Carnation are a lot less humanoid looking. Wolfsbane looks sort of like a cross between a humanoid and a squid, and Carnation is several dolls within one another with each looking more twisted than the last. They like to hide in caves and in the dark because it is easier to sneak up on other dolls and shatter them that way.

 

"A solid strategy for any ambush predator," Aish muses. "But what's the point of destroying the other dolls? Do they get stronger by doing so?"

 

-Shudders- I'd rather not imagine that possibility. As far as I know, the more twisted dolls contain the dollmaker's grudges and negative emotions, and are entirely consumed by the strength of them.

 

...At least, that's what I think is the case. Carnation bears a strong resemblance to the dollmaker's mother in the photos...You don't think the strength of their grudge could be strong enough to bring back a soul at rest, could it?

 

Am mi.

 

"That's assuming the soul was ever at rest."

"So I see."