Soul

Death holding a dead Jakkai's soul.

Souls in Slightly Damned are essentially the spiritual life force that every lifeform possesses; they appear to be a key component to maintaining balance in the world.

Description

Appearance

Souls, and life energy in general, can be stylized as green flames. On Medius, souls appear as blue-green ghosts of the person they were; once in the afterlife, they appear identical to their physical bodies. Souls in the afterlife keep traces of whatever killed them: Rhea bears a stab wound on her chest, Seymour Sinclair's face appears half-torn.

Workings

The soul of a Median is tied to whatever realm they are in, be it the living world of Medius or any of the realms in the Afterlife. In Medius, the body and soul are as one and as such any damage the body may sustain will carry over to the soul at the time of death. For while in the Afterlife, they are not affected by the mortal limitations of self-nourishment, ailments or other conditions that would impede them. Instead, what may simulate the experience of death would just cause their soul to be restored the following day in the Afterlife.

For a soul to reach the Afterlife, naturally the individual has to die and their soul would automatically go to where they are meant to according to the Great Book of Records. Sometimes though, for one reason or another, a soul will not automatically go to where they should be so Death would have to go and retrieve the soul to give them a proper judgement. Souls that do remain in Medius may start to haunt parts of Medius as ghosts.

When an Angel or Demon dies, their soul is returned to either Mother Gaia or Father Syndel so their life energy can be redistributed into any new Angel or Demon that is born.

Reincarnation

How souls are recycled.

While it would appear that souls are created from the time a Median is born into the living world, they may also be created through the process of recycling souls together to create a brand new soul. The process seems to involve Death, who after allowing souls to spend enough time in either Heaven or Hell, they take their souls and fuse them together. That soul will then be born into whatever form it happens to take, while presumably having small influences of their past selves to make up their new form.

Of course, because Death has not passed this ability to their substitute, the process of reincarnation cannot occur and as a result, the souls would remain in the Afterlife indefinitely. Based on what little information was given by Demons like Lakritz, it's possible that an overabundance of souls may end up destroying the Afterlife or make it uninhabitable if that's a cause for everyone to leave there. It is also possible that the absence of reincarnation is tied to the recent difficulty for people of all realms to have children.

Unusual Cases

While souls usually find their own way to the Afterlife, some may "slip through the cracks" and remain on Medius. Part of Death's job involves manually fetching those lost souls before they get loose, and guiding them to Judgment. Otherwise, they might remain on Medius as ghosts.

The Ascension ritual and its Counterreaction require a Median soul to act as an escort. A soul brought back to Medius will recover their body and vital functions. However, as they have already gone through Judgment, they gain the ability to see Death or their servants if they meet in Medius. Revived souls carry the remains of their sentence: those that were sent to Hell, like Rhea, are now affected by Demon-repelling magic such as the Holy Protection Enchantment used on Angel Emblems and weapons.