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Questions/Question 524

Northly is going to begin asking Patho-Gen employees about exactly what their natural souls are and how they came to be natural souls. She is most interested in whether they were real individual animals (she hasn't encountered golem or terra types yet) at some stage and whether they had a choice in becoming their natural souls, or if they were, say, yanked from their worlds and shoved into the augmented's necks with no idea what happened to them.

She would be careful to couch her questions as cheerful curiosity, looking for the best way to serve Patho-Gen's needs. And to some extent that is what she's wanting to achieve with her answers, in that she would like to not be a part of an inter-dimensional ethics no-no.

What sort of answers can she expect? And if she actually gets answers, how reliable do those answers seem?

Many Patho-Gen employees won't have a clue about what Natural Souls are, in the sense of Northly's question. They will say "they are the souls of beasts, of course." If she asks if they're real animals... "... Yes?" will be her answer. They believe so, but they don't know for certain. ...It doesn't seem the rights of animals mean much to these people, and expressing grief toward this is a bit perplexing, and they're willing to bow their heads and acknowledge the unfortunate reality they're up against. Unfortunately, Karteria's people typically aren't so compassionate about the rights of animals... And many do believe the necessity of this action. The Augmented Ones are already proving that they can safely go out there, and that's phenomenal.

Asking someone a little more knowledgeable may yield this tidbit: no, Natural Souls are from natural phenomena of this world! Not from others. If traits are manifesting as a creature from another world, it isn't because the soul is that creature, but merely because its traits are manifesting in that way based on its categorical designation. (So if an Aves-type Final Fantasy character looks like a chocobo, it's not because it's a chocobo soul. It's the soul of a bird, yes, but it's manifesting in this particular fashion upon this particular individual!) Golem-types, Spectral-types, and Terra-types are all totally reasonable natural phenomena here; golems and specters exist, but they are difficult to see out with the naked eye. Easy to harness for transplant purposes, however!

There's something nice about Patho-Gen employees, in that they typically don't say things that they don't believe is true. These people are earnest; if they don't know something, they say as much. If they believe something to be true, they'll share unless told not to. These individuals seem very certain, and if they don't know something but think it to be true, they feel reasonably confident in their guess.