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Profiles for Verses with One "Soul"

Agnaa

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I'm working on profiles for a verse. In that verse, everything shares one "mind state", recycled whenever a being dies to be used in another incarnation. Every atom, animal, human, and god shares this one mind state. Most beings can't remember these past incarnations, but the gods can.

As another little tidbit, if the very last 10^91st incarnation dies, that mind state will return to the first atom, and the loop will begin again.

I'm kind of at a loss about how to treat this. There's a lot of distinct characters in the verse who I'd like to give their own profiles. But with type 4 Immortality like this we tend to consider different reincarnations to be the same profile, maybe just in a different key.

Any ideas on how to resolve this coherently?
 
I don't think we consider reincarnations as necessarily the same character. I think we usually only do so if the story really treats them as the same person, which is usually the case if the reincarnation retains memories of their past life.

Tbh we should probably add something in that regard to the immortality page, as otherwise everyone in a reincarnation system story would have type 4 immortality...


But for your verse I would simply mention the reincarnation idea on the profiles and otherwise treat each character as their own person.
 
Mmkay, so they'd each be separate profiles without type 4 immortality?
 
That's what I would do at least.

As said, maybe just mention the facts regarding that somewhere on the pages without classifying. That way everyone is satisfied.
 
Alright, that's fair.
 
I agree with DontTalk's suggestion

I guess this would give a lot of people soulhax immunity, since they don't have one most of the time
 
I guess this would give a lot of people soulhax immunity, since they don't have one most of the time

Sadly no, they all have one constantly. The "soul" just travels through time to reach everyone and everything necessary.
 
The pen or the sword said:
Huh so how would soul destruction work in this verse?
I guess everyone in past and future would simultanously be erased if the soul is destroyed.
 
Nope, none that I'm aware of, although there's still a few dozen pages I haven't read.

The closest things are all a bit of a reach:

  • They're called "mindstates" not souls, so maybe they shouldn't be equalized to them?
    • They're close enough so they probably should be anyway.
  • There's Arbiters in charge of things related to causality and paradoxes, so maybe they'd interfere and stop a soul from being destroyed?
    • This is a bit of a stretch in-verse, and would be outside help in almost all circumstances.
  • Among the gods, there's only one god capable of murder, and returning the mindstate to the pool to be reused, without his assistance other gods can't commit suicide or die.
    • This isn't really showing that the mindstates resist being destroyed, just that those beings can't die, especially since the mindstate gets recycled even when they die.
 
Hmm NGL alot of that sounds like a stretch to me as well. The last one sounds more like the god just has a special ability that none of the other gods in verse have.


Still sounds like a cool verse just wondering if we'd need to give this soul any special treatment when it comes to soul based hax/destruction
 
I'm not sure how relevant it would be, honestly.

There's an argument to be made that any soul destruction would destroy every atom in the universe, killing off the other fighter soon after. But maybe that could be solved by having the neutral universe not function off of those rules?
 
Well the fighters are usually tp'd to modern New York for the fight correct? Well afaik modern New York doesn't share souls with ever atom (At least we have no proof of such a thing) I think treating it as a nonfactor in debates would be the proper course of action here.
 
I guess.

But that just made me realize another issue. There is a time in the story where the reincarnation is used for immediate combat applicability. I can go into more detail, but tl;dr, only 3 characters in one of their two keys would have this sort of combat applicability.

One of the characters had reincarnated as a peasant, he killed the king, only for the king's aide to turn out to be one of the king's future incarnations, who immediately killed the peasant.

It does feel weird to consider it a complete nonfactor in debates when it has been used as a factor in the text, under certain conditions.
 
Okay, looks like I'll need to explain it a little more than that.

There's the Corporia, this is where atoms, animals, humans, etc. live. They don't remember their past lives.

Then there's the Etheria, this is where the arbiters live. They're essentially gods and they remember their past lives, including as every single one of the normal humans in Corporia.

However, Etherics can enter Corporia to settle disputes, essentially via dueling. They lose almost all of their godlike abilities, but they retain their knowledge and capacity to keep knowledge between lives, and can somewhat sense those they're in a dispute with.

That peasant/king situation happened between two Etherics having a dispute in Corporia.

In the grand scheme of things they're all the same person, but in this case there's a lot more continuity in memories/personality between the lives.
 
On one hand you've made it more clear on the other you've made it more complicated... Im not really sure how we'd use that in a vs battle scenario, he could reincarnate as someone in the area and continue the fight I suppose?
 
Yeah that's what I was thinking.

But it also makes me wonder if that would run into time issues with SBA. Since they don't get to choose who they reincarnate as, and they can reincarnate as anyone in Corporia across time, they could spend many lifetimes before they end up in the same area and time, able to continue the fight.
 
If there is only one soul, how can there be two Etherics? Wouldn't at least one of them have the memories of the other, due to being a future version? Or even both of them have each others memories due to things being a circle?
 
One of them does have the memories of the other, yes. Yet they still act independently, disagree, love, have different powers, etc.
 
Which then means that probably a good chunck of the time the Etherics that people eventually reincarnate as don't really care about their past lives' issues, right?

So, I guess it would be like a gamble on whether or not by the time you next reincarnate as an Etherics you still identify yourself enough with that life to care what happened. So on rare cases its battle appliciable type 4 and on others you are just being part of another persons knowledge.

At least that's what I think seems like the reasonable assumption for a battle.
 
I don't necessarily think that it being relevant in verse necessarily translates to being vbw applicable, not everything verse specific can be equalized. Jack Slash's secondary Thinker power that lets him subconsciously communicate with people's shards makes him literally unbeatable by capes (including people like Contessa) but just isn't used at all here, since people outside the verse don't have shards.
 
@DT Yeah, they're often so detached that they're willing to date their past selves.

I was only planning on listing Type 4 on profiles of Etherics that are in Corporia, since they don't seem to take on completely different identities as Etherics do when they die in Etheria. They're still recognizable to each other and to outside Etherics.

@Woki Wouldn't we assume that Jack Slash's power is usable on other verses with similar-enough superpower systems? It's not like we assume that Parahumans characters are immune to anti-superpower stuff from other verses, and we also don't assume that their stuff which works on superpowers fails to work on other verses' superpowers.

It mostly wouldn't work on magic/ki and the like.
 
Jack's thing is just even more specific than other people. It's less of a stretch to say that someone's power null turns off your powers than it is to say that Jack can subconsciously talk to everyone's powers because his shard's an information relay to the Entities. Most of the other Trumps have a much more direct effect, be it affecting people's biologies, shard biologies, the powers themselves after they come out, Jack just talks. Butcher XIV also usually can't possess people who kill her due to stuff like that.

Given your example is unlikely to even work out if we assumed it could, since they could respawn as anyone in that realm and the majority of people aren't going to be in that one on one fight, I don't think this would really be applicable even if we did equalize it like that.
 
Yeah fair. I'm not sure exactly what we count incap/KO timers in reference to, but if we count it in reference to the fighter being incapped/KO'd then the simple process of needing to be born and grow up would have them lose the fight under SBA.

I see your point for Jack but I feel like there might be a handful of other verses that are basically close enough for it to be equalized, but that's not a discussion for this thread.
 
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