Questions/Question 235

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#1 wiki | comment Topics: Syntrofos, Golem, Katalyth, Technology, Imprinting Edit question: edit elanprime asked on Test Drive Meme - September 2025/Event FAQ at 2025-09-10 Answer date: 2025-09-13	hi, mods! i have a few questions -- 1) elan really wants to eat his phone. someone's phone. anybody's phone, really. what would happen if he tried? is it edible for golem types? will he (or his victim) get a new one if it turns out that the syntrofos is, in fact, a delicious snack? i'm sorry. i promise he will not try to eat the servitons. 2) a strange (?) imprinting question. let's say you have (necessarily) positive feelings about your imprint, as a distinct, autonomous person, but your natural soul is the type to be scared shitless by their natural soul (say, a predator/prey situation). can this interfere with the imprint in any way, ex., on account of how the natural souls would likely respond to each other? -- addendum, sorry!: 3) is one half of an imprinted pair instinctively aware of when their partner dies, or are they just "more affected" when they find out through word of mouth, etc., that their partner has died? i wasn't sure when reading the faq if intuiting the partner's death is exclusive to the pair bonding mechanic. (if it is, i will have a small, very-particular-to-my-character follow-up question.) thank you in advance! 🫶 Edited (i can type) 2025-09-11 11:05 pm (local)	1. Well. Provided that Elan can fit it into his mouth, either in whole or after smashing it up a bit, there's no one who can stop a determined Elan from eating someone's phone. It does come with an unexpected complication: Elan will probably die from this. Almost immediately after consumption, he'll be hit with a sense of absolute dread. This was a bad idea. And the feeling won't stop, only getting worse as the minutes pass. Depending on how intact the Syntrofos was to start with, it'll be somewhere between 15-30 minutes before he starts showing physical symptoms- that of acute arcane radiation poisoning. He's likely to automatically Shift in self-defense, to become covered in black boils, and to otherwise mutate. This is what happens when someone comes in physical contact with Katalyth. Being a Golem, and as the amount of Katalyth sequestered within a Syntrofos is miniscule, Elan has a greater chance of surviving this than were he another soul type. Allowing it to linger within him until it burns itself out still has a good chance of killing him anyway, but even if he survives he'll have an absolutely miserable, feral time of it regardless. Were he to cough up the Syntrofos quickly (ideally as soon as that dread started setting in), the effect on his health would be correspondingly reduced. He still won't feel great, but the poisoning will clear up faster. On replacing a eaten Syntrofos: should Patho-Gen be told the truth, they will be very upset with him. This is doubly true if he died and they've already had to intervene to revive him (in which case they might already have seen the evidence of a crushed up Syntrofos in him...). If he lies and says it broke, or he lost it, they'll reprimand him, and he'll have to pay for a replacement (price: 8000 numis) from them (if he has no money, it'll basically be loaned to him, and he will be pestered regularly to pay up), but he won't be otherwise penalized. (If he eats someone else's Syntrofos, his victim will be the one reprimanded for breaking it and have to... eat the costs. Unless it all comes out that it's Elan's snack-habit that caused this, in which case blame would be redirected back at him.) Even any old messages might be able to be imported to the new device, thanks to the wonders of the cloud! 2. Having opposing (in a sense) Natural Souls can interfere with the imprinting process- as it might put the prey-character more on edge than they otherwise would be, unconscious instinct telling them to avoid contact (and to recoil from the clear threat on experiencing it). Whether this is enough to altogether prevent imprinting is up to the players. The characters' own feelings could be enough to overcome this instinct, and the Natural Soul's fears are likely to reduce over time, soothed by the imprint's reassurance that this predator is somehow family. Or, the soul could be just too panicked and flood their host with the same emotion, enough to put a stop to any imprinting dreams. Some more mundane soothing (and a good deal more time) would probably be necessary in order for an imprint to take. So really, it could go either way, depending on how you wanted to play things out. Ex. Imprinted pairs are not automatically attuned to each other's deaths. It's only when the attachment has slipped into the depths of pair bonding that these emotional resonances occur (along with just being generally 'aware' of important fluctuations in their physical state).