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A short inquiry about soulstones, familiars and memories. - Printable Version

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A short inquiry about soulstones, familiars and memories. - Mavis - 09-04-2017

So after scouring the forums for definitive mention for my question and not finding exactly what I wanted, I decided to make this thread about asking for the validity and believability of something I wish to do with my character Yomi. 

Basically I seek to have her return to the village she and her liege lived in, to scour it for anything she did not bring along in her escape, and finding scriptures as well as a soulstone. Imprinted in this are the lieges memories and perhaps a tiny aspect of what she used to be, her personality/character. 

What I now wanted to know was if there was a lore-friendly, or atleast believable way to extract or somehow "paste" these memories into life, save a doll or a familiar which I'd portray with the Blizzaria minion. This creation would not be the actual person come to life, but rather something mimicking her based on those memories contained within the soulstone.

I found this concept an interesting idea to kickstart my characters journey as for now she was doing little more but wallow and loiter. To give her a goal and a journey, as well as a form of "reward". Along with this I would like to use this familiar as tool to provoke Yomi into action more often and to act as an "internal" source of motivation to get her out of her normal comfort zone, as well as a way for me to influence her growth and personality without having her act contradictory to her character. 

I am looking forward to any feedback I can get on this topic and want to thank you for taking time out of your day for reading and replying.


RE: A short inquiry about soulstones, familiars and memories. - Valence - 09-05-2017

Hello,

What you describe is exactly how soulstones work, which is as repositories of memories, and sometimes the persona of people that came and used the soulstone before the current user. It also has a certain kind of security/access if you will, because not everyone can access a soulstone content and powers, only the ones with the necessary basic knowledge of the art stored inside, or deemed worthy enough by the stone itself.

As for your idea with the minion, I'm at work and don't have access to material to paste her, but you might want to look at the Anima questline for Heavensward. It is exactly what you are after and the basic premise is to create a living weapon out of aether. This aether is condensed into soulstones and you basically spend your time upgrading the vessel (the weapon) and the soul (the soulstone), thus making the Anima always more sapient and growing everytime until she becomes a full fledged personality. 

In your case, the only difference is that you already have a persona to imprint on it, saving you a lot of the trouble seen in the Anima quest where the characters have to start from a blank state (so essentially skipping some of the first steps). Keep in mind though that what they do is cutting edge technology and prototypes here (with a lot of Allagan shenanigans and whatnot). But at the same time, Ardashir (the quest NPC giver) is financed by Rowena, and her aim is to sell replicas of the Anima to wealthy people. Ardashir is also eager to prove his lifetime work to be workable, and I don't see it impossible for this technic to slowly spread in very select milieus and be progressively more available to wealthy people.

As you will see if yo take a look at that questline in any case, it's a very long and arduous process requiring so many rare materials that it's not exactly given to anyone... but! What saves you here is that in your specific case what will mostly interest you is the very end of the questline, where the Anima/soulstone is transfered into a minion (the Anima minion). You can glance over the rest to be honest, which is more about the creation and upgrade of the soulstone/weapon itself.