Update CX: The Void; Mechanics of Soul Trading
JB CX: The Void
Ragnarok Command Continental Defense Vessel Lofwyr
Leaning over the sink, Elsa scrubs her forearms in the limited space that she gets on the Ragnarok Command vessel. She really won't mind getting off here, but she's not walking around any longer smelling of the borrowed armor. She could turn off her olfactory sensors, but she'd rather not smell like a mix of ozone and other people's sweat.
Plus, taking a chance to clean herself up gives her the chance to contact her superiors. She checks that the shielding on her quibit module is holding strong, adjusts her internal power flows to cover up the fact that she's using it, and then opens communications with VoidCOM.
It's a short report, and to the point. VCOM will certainly be happy that the Rogue Council vessel is out of action. Not so happy it's in the hands of people who aren't them, but they'll take what victories they can get. Especially if she's on board.
A message comes back.
CptWynne: Good job. No change in status. And in response to your final question. Maybe. But if he's crazy, it's a productive and highly effective kind of crazy in almost all ways. Except for the mullet.
Elsa sighs, and dries off her hands. That's something. Something she's not entirely sure she wanted to hear, because if "being John Kessler" isn't enough to get you sent for psychiatric therapy, she's lost a bit of faith in the Union's mental healthcare system. And also its reputation for enforcing absolutist crushing conformity.
... unless all Iterators are secretly like that. Well. She shudders. That'd be a thing.
Atomic Rocket Cruiser Oppenheimer's Light
Henriette is moderately cross about having to take an Etherite hunk-of-junk into the Void. She's made plenty of objections, all of them valid. She objected-and still objects-to taking a noisy, unsubtle zeerust atomic rocketship (and "ship" was being rather literal) but was overruled. Largely because the Void Engineers "wouldn't have given them anything but a flying coffin," Donald had said. She's objected to taking a ship which means the 11 remaining White Tower units spend most of the time containing the overgrown plant life in the main hangar bay with flamethrowers. She's objected to a ship which had to have half its cargo capacity sacrificed for high-density reactor shielding and another 5% for a hastily built life support system that doesn't involve "breathing ether." She's objected to the fact that even with the high-density reactor shielding and her implants generating a low-power anti-radiation shield she has to take daily antirad meds just in case, and that she's been warned that she shouldn't attempt to have children without someone checking her for radiation damage. Not that she's planning to have any children. But it's the principle of the thing.
But she has to admit that it's a lot more comfortable to have her own room, with its own artificial gravity, and its own bed, and its own restroom, and-well, basically everything she might expect from a reasonable motel, instead of being holed up in a tiny life support capsule like a Void Engineer ship might rate.
Of course, this ship has a crew several times larger than a VE vessel would-more of that Etherite inefficiency-and they don't have living quarters but communal barracks. They're Bobs with basic technical training, though, so they don't mind. They also don't mind that they're not getting anti-radiation treatments because when you're a Bob, dying from cancer at middle age is considered "a long and storied career." She could have replaced them with robots as well, but that'd have taken resources, and a Progenitor asking for a few dozen Bobs wasn't anything special.
Henriette sighs and checks her ADEI. Replace all the primitive vacuum tube 'computers' on this piece of shit with proper electronics, check. Most of them are kitbashed things you can order in bulk from the NWO, not Iteration X dedicated quantum computers or the like, but they're EMP-hardened military grade devices with a bit more power of Sleeper computer systems-which is far more than she can say for the original electronics suite of this warship, which was just a joke.
And she remembers quite a bit about what happened in the Void-on Autocthonia. She's not going to fight those things without everything being in the best shape it can be. She walks to the bridge-also a nice benefit, she has to admit, artificial gravity instead of zero-G-and meets Elsa there. There are windows, like some sort of bad science fiction movie. Underneath them are panels and panels of dials. She's already tapped most of them to feed important information to MFDs that she's placed around, but she still finds the presence of such anachronisms aggravating. And she's fairly sure at least a few of them literally don't do anything. Etherites. So annoying.
"Hey." Elsa says, looking up from one of the MFDs. She's wearing a flight jacket over a Haldeman's skintight dark-blue interface suit, topped off with a deliberately crooked captain's hat that Henriette is sure was stolen from a locker here somewhere. It's definitely a look, Henriette concedes. "It looks like your fly-by-wire is working. It's nice to actually have something resembling a modern cockpit in here."
"Good." Henriette smiles. "Let's hope that it holds up against what we might encounter." Elsa is familiar. Not just from Moscow, but familiar in the sense that everything she does is totally fine. Unlike this stupid, wrong Etherite spaceship that seems like it never got past the 1950s. "Where'd you learn to fly?"
"The VEs put us all through a piloting program. Said everyone needs to be able to get the ship back home just in case everyone else is dead. We should get to where Harlan's spotted Jamelia's psi-signature." Harlan, in the QUEST, has managed to do some surprising sensor feats. Maybe there is something to what Jamelia's said, Henriette concedes.
"I wonder if Harlan's complaining about the accomodations in his tub as much as we're complaining about ours." Henriette wonders. The QUEST's single life support pod was one of the reasons Henriette didn't want to be on it. The second was because Kessler insisted that it'd be a waste of her talents. No, they're keeping her here because she's a rated pilot and the Oppenheimer's Light has a stable of small craft and is in dire need of repairs and upgrades. Project 2, "get more of the small craft of the Oppenheimer's Light functional" has been going... only moderately well. The drones work, but they're still dumb things which barely have the intelligence to be more than missiles. She's been working on the hangar but has been stymied by spare parts. Apparently Kessler took the drone bay quickly, but the plant life delayed Elsa enough that she didn't manage to get to the storage for vehicle weapons and parts until they were sabotaged and ruined beyond repair.
Its one functioning humanoid war machine at least has reasonable electronics. They were more Kessler's thing than hers, twin-sticks and foot-pedals with neurohelmet assistance versus full DNI controls, but she can't really blame him for not having a DNI on a design which was built in 1979. She can blame its designer for using dirty fission, but she has to take what she can get. There was no way she could requisition an Iteration X superfighter or a Void Engineer variable fighter anyways. Besides, Henriette thinks. She's the best pilot she knows. Even better than that stuck-up ice princess Ling Clarent who she barely beat to make the cut. If anyone can take a 15 meter tall outdated chunk of fission-powered scrap and make it dance, it's her. And its weapons-gamma ray lasers, guided nuclear bazookas-will fuck someone up, no matter who they are.
She can't get the other systems to work, she sighs. So probably no combining the whole into a 30 meter tall death machine like the linkages she's seen imply. Not yet. Hopefully it'll be enough.
Harlan's voice crackles on the comms, like if it was from an old-style radio. Henriette is certain that's intentional, and she hates it.
"There's something you might want to see. Check your sensors." Harlan says. "Something weird and in our way."
Henriette looks at the green 1940s-style display. "Etheric sonar" they called it, but it was just a hyperspatial mass displacement sensor. She checks it, and there's nothing. There's a blip on the edge-and the ship's telescopes are showing a gigantic vessel. Its prow is a massive, slightly curved shield. Behind it, there's a tapering honeycomb of hangar bays, tapering into a long thin shaft that is still hundreds of meters thick. Spikes and other protrusions jut out of the vessel, sensor booms or folded radiator systems or weapons. "That's no moon, is it?" Henriette asks Elsa. She's seen these before. Near Autocthonia. Next to it, managing to dwarf the unknown, is a station. Some sort of alien trading post, heavily dealing in and/or pretending to be cultural products of Earth. She doesn't know why. But it has to be that place, since there's the bright white "HOLLYWOOD" there, pristine despite the sheer amount of detritus surrounding the gas giant the station orbits.
"No." Elsa says. "That's... not good. It's an unfriendly alien vessel. Go to laser comms only! Henriette, can you stealth us?"
"I didn't test any of it out. It won't help against visuals either and that thing can mount a pretty massive phased array." Henriette says. "But fuck it. Field tests are the best sort of tests, right? Let's see if it works."
Elsa nods. "All right. Activating stealth systems. Cryo-arithmetic computers... online, control program self-sustaining. Hull temperature dropping to background temperatures. Active radar jamming up." She smiles. "They seem to be holding up. Good job."
Henriette tries to act like that was nothing special, but she really was worried. A kitbashed stealth system built out of spare odds and ends she's managed to grab from what must have been Singularitan technology is not something she wants to rely on-but maybe Jamelia has something about being able to work with what you have instead of what you want.
The Oppenheimer's Light drifts towards the station slowly, clever use of CoI-violating inertial dampeners allowing it to slightly steer itself. Elsa brings up one of the big MFDs, zooms in on the hive.
"She's here." Henriette realizes, looking at the bone-white machines there. Her not-sister is here. All of her. Supported by how many million tons of Autopolitan technology and uncountable numbers of expendable drones. The skeletal machines and birdlike fighter escorts swarming around searching for something are clearly not particularly expensive-mass produced units, probably fodder for a skilled pilot and a low-end fighter, let alone anyone who actually knows what they're doing in something even as reasonable as the Invincible Atomos-Beta-or at least she thinks that's the name of the combining "super robot"-but the DSS-equivalents are a lot more dangerous.
Her sister is a worse pilot but there's another dozen of them and this time she doesn't have a god behind her, nor does she have the expertise of some of Autocthonia's most amazing scientists.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
You have 2 ships and approximately 1/4th of a giant robot. You can see that the enemy mothership has a lot of drones and several of the units you've seen in Moscow. You need to go through them one way or the other. This way will be...
Fleet Action:
That Autopolitan Mothership? It's here. And it's blocking your way. You need to cripple it, at least enough that it might retreat, before you can actually look for Jamelia. To do so you:
[ ] Attack now. You can probably sneak something close in and nuke it a couple of times, and then run away. Hopefully it'll be wounded enough that it'll leave, which means you have some time to get through.
[ ] Find allies. You can do that by:
New Concept: Soul Pacts
Here in the Umbra, you can trade your souls. In fact, your soul is often the most valuable thing you have. "But isn't it bad to trade souls?" Ha ha ha. No. As I said way back, "demon" is a political term about the kinds of spirits you don't want to deal with. Soul trading otherwise is plenty valid. Void Engineers get alien biotech or cybernetics implanted in exchange for memories and emotions and other feelings (greys are great for this), and this is okay. Iterators, especially pre-99, would often get Autocthonian-derived augmentations built into their bodies as a blessing from Friend Computer. NWO psychics would unlock great powers from trading in dreams. Syndicate executives know the power of a good contract.
Soul trading is ethically neutral. In fact, some of the rare redemption stories for widderslaintes involve the widderslainte finding a being that will take their tainted soul despite how unpalatable it is, leaving them with no inverted Avatar and the ability to carry out a normal life-although with no ability to ever use Awakened magic again. This is not to say that all forms of soul trading are accepted-the Technocracy frowns on people trading parts of their soul to gain the ability to shoot fireballs or any other obvious Reality Deviance. But subdermal nanotech armor? Deployable plasma cannons? Superhuman abilities gained from alien DNA hybridization? All generally okay (some specific aliens/spirits are considered 'demons' due to their Nephandic allegiances and obviously not ok even if in Technoparadigm).
Soul trading is risky, however, because it can often lead to unwanted consequences. Eventually if you trade enough of your soul, you start losing your magic or enlightened science. There's various competing explanations. Choristers and Hermetics believe it's because your Avatar is attached to your soul and you're tearing apart the anchor which allows your Avatar to stay there. The Technocracy believes it's because the gifts given are so powerful, so useful, and so effortless that eventually it becomes difficult to maintain the determination that Genius requires. Sufficient sphere trading will damage your ability to gain Enlightenment.
Almost anything can be bought with soul trading. Although even Sphere knowledge is possible to acquire in this fashion, these spirit-granted Spheres are expensive, require a powerful spirit, and have special rules. More commonly magi acquire spirit charms, especially because by being static magic many of these effects are more resistant against Paradox than sphere magic.
Someone with Primal Utility 1 or Spirit 1 can see the exact value and amount of damage to their soul. Otherwise, you will have to take an educated guess.
The Necessity of Soul Trading
Why is this here? Because unless you know exactly what you're doing, and have a very good plan, you will probably have to soultrade. The sky's the limit-nothing prevents you from theoretically soul-trading yourself the equivalent of Forces 5 or whatever-but note that more powerful effects require more investment.
Also, you need to find people with the ability to give you the stuff you want for soul trading. Crashing Boom-Boom can't give you the ability to heal people, but she can give you extra dots of Pilot or massive cybernetic enhancements ("This isn't a war ordinary humans can win! This is the future!") Centurion, if he was here, couldn't give you massive cybernetic enhancements or spheres (because he's not that strong) but he could give you additional combat skills due to his war experience or the instinctive ability to hit the weakpoints of dangerous alien beasts.
Ragnarok Command Continental Defense Vessel Lofwyr
Leaning over the sink, Elsa scrubs her forearms in the limited space that she gets on the Ragnarok Command vessel. She really won't mind getting off here, but she's not walking around any longer smelling of the borrowed armor. She could turn off her olfactory sensors, but she'd rather not smell like a mix of ozone and other people's sweat.
Plus, taking a chance to clean herself up gives her the chance to contact her superiors. She checks that the shielding on her quibit module is holding strong, adjusts her internal power flows to cover up the fact that she's using it, and then opens communications with VoidCOM.
It's a short report, and to the point. VCOM will certainly be happy that the Rogue Council vessel is out of action. Not so happy it's in the hands of people who aren't them, but they'll take what victories they can get. Especially if she's on board.
A message comes back.
CptWynne: Good job. No change in status. And in response to your final question. Maybe. But if he's crazy, it's a productive and highly effective kind of crazy in almost all ways. Except for the mullet.
Elsa sighs, and dries off her hands. That's something. Something she's not entirely sure she wanted to hear, because if "being John Kessler" isn't enough to get you sent for psychiatric therapy, she's lost a bit of faith in the Union's mental healthcare system. And also its reputation for enforcing absolutist crushing conformity.
... unless all Iterators are secretly like that. Well. She shudders. That'd be a thing.
Atomic Rocket Cruiser Oppenheimer's Light
Henriette is moderately cross about having to take an Etherite hunk-of-junk into the Void. She's made plenty of objections, all of them valid. She objected-and still objects-to taking a noisy, unsubtle zeerust atomic rocketship (and "ship" was being rather literal) but was overruled. Largely because the Void Engineers "wouldn't have given them anything but a flying coffin," Donald had said. She's objected to taking a ship which means the 11 remaining White Tower units spend most of the time containing the overgrown plant life in the main hangar bay with flamethrowers. She's objected to a ship which had to have half its cargo capacity sacrificed for high-density reactor shielding and another 5% for a hastily built life support system that doesn't involve "breathing ether." She's objected to the fact that even with the high-density reactor shielding and her implants generating a low-power anti-radiation shield she has to take daily antirad meds just in case, and that she's been warned that she shouldn't attempt to have children without someone checking her for radiation damage. Not that she's planning to have any children. But it's the principle of the thing.
But she has to admit that it's a lot more comfortable to have her own room, with its own artificial gravity, and its own bed, and its own restroom, and-well, basically everything she might expect from a reasonable motel, instead of being holed up in a tiny life support capsule like a Void Engineer ship might rate.
Of course, this ship has a crew several times larger than a VE vessel would-more of that Etherite inefficiency-and they don't have living quarters but communal barracks. They're Bobs with basic technical training, though, so they don't mind. They also don't mind that they're not getting anti-radiation treatments because when you're a Bob, dying from cancer at middle age is considered "a long and storied career." She could have replaced them with robots as well, but that'd have taken resources, and a Progenitor asking for a few dozen Bobs wasn't anything special.
Henriette sighs and checks her ADEI. Replace all the primitive vacuum tube 'computers' on this piece of shit with proper electronics, check. Most of them are kitbashed things you can order in bulk from the NWO, not Iteration X dedicated quantum computers or the like, but they're EMP-hardened military grade devices with a bit more power of Sleeper computer systems-which is far more than she can say for the original electronics suite of this warship, which was just a joke.
And she remembers quite a bit about what happened in the Void-on Autocthonia. She's not going to fight those things without everything being in the best shape it can be. She walks to the bridge-also a nice benefit, she has to admit, artificial gravity instead of zero-G-and meets Elsa there. There are windows, like some sort of bad science fiction movie. Underneath them are panels and panels of dials. She's already tapped most of them to feed important information to MFDs that she's placed around, but she still finds the presence of such anachronisms aggravating. And she's fairly sure at least a few of them literally don't do anything. Etherites. So annoying.
"Hey." Elsa says, looking up from one of the MFDs. She's wearing a flight jacket over a Haldeman's skintight dark-blue interface suit, topped off with a deliberately crooked captain's hat that Henriette is sure was stolen from a locker here somewhere. It's definitely a look, Henriette concedes. "It looks like your fly-by-wire is working. It's nice to actually have something resembling a modern cockpit in here."
"Good." Henriette smiles. "Let's hope that it holds up against what we might encounter." Elsa is familiar. Not just from Moscow, but familiar in the sense that everything she does is totally fine. Unlike this stupid, wrong Etherite spaceship that seems like it never got past the 1950s. "Where'd you learn to fly?"
"The VEs put us all through a piloting program. Said everyone needs to be able to get the ship back home just in case everyone else is dead. We should get to where Harlan's spotted Jamelia's psi-signature." Harlan, in the QUEST, has managed to do some surprising sensor feats. Maybe there is something to what Jamelia's said, Henriette concedes.
"I wonder if Harlan's complaining about the accomodations in his tub as much as we're complaining about ours." Henriette wonders. The QUEST's single life support pod was one of the reasons Henriette didn't want to be on it. The second was because Kessler insisted that it'd be a waste of her talents. No, they're keeping her here because she's a rated pilot and the Oppenheimer's Light has a stable of small craft and is in dire need of repairs and upgrades. Project 2, "get more of the small craft of the Oppenheimer's Light functional" has been going... only moderately well. The drones work, but they're still dumb things which barely have the intelligence to be more than missiles. She's been working on the hangar but has been stymied by spare parts. Apparently Kessler took the drone bay quickly, but the plant life delayed Elsa enough that she didn't manage to get to the storage for vehicle weapons and parts until they were sabotaged and ruined beyond repair.
Its one functioning humanoid war machine at least has reasonable electronics. They were more Kessler's thing than hers, twin-sticks and foot-pedals with neurohelmet assistance versus full DNI controls, but she can't really blame him for not having a DNI on a design which was built in 1979. She can blame its designer for using dirty fission, but she has to take what she can get. There was no way she could requisition an Iteration X superfighter or a Void Engineer variable fighter anyways. Besides, Henriette thinks. She's the best pilot she knows. Even better than that stuck-up ice princess Ling Clarent who she barely beat to make the cut. If anyone can take a 15 meter tall outdated chunk of fission-powered scrap and make it dance, it's her. And its weapons-gamma ray lasers, guided nuclear bazookas-will fuck someone up, no matter who they are.
She can't get the other systems to work, she sighs. So probably no combining the whole into a 30 meter tall death machine like the linkages she's seen imply. Not yet. Hopefully it'll be enough.
Harlan's voice crackles on the comms, like if it was from an old-style radio. Henriette is certain that's intentional, and she hates it.
"There's something you might want to see. Check your sensors." Harlan says. "Something weird and in our way."
Henriette looks at the green 1940s-style display. "Etheric sonar" they called it, but it was just a hyperspatial mass displacement sensor. She checks it, and there's nothing. There's a blip on the edge-and the ship's telescopes are showing a gigantic vessel. Its prow is a massive, slightly curved shield. Behind it, there's a tapering honeycomb of hangar bays, tapering into a long thin shaft that is still hundreds of meters thick. Spikes and other protrusions jut out of the vessel, sensor booms or folded radiator systems or weapons. "That's no moon, is it?" Henriette asks Elsa. She's seen these before. Near Autocthonia. Next to it, managing to dwarf the unknown, is a station. Some sort of alien trading post, heavily dealing in and/or pretending to be cultural products of Earth. She doesn't know why. But it has to be that place, since there's the bright white "HOLLYWOOD" there, pristine despite the sheer amount of detritus surrounding the gas giant the station orbits.
"No." Elsa says. "That's... not good. It's an unfriendly alien vessel. Go to laser comms only! Henriette, can you stealth us?"
"I didn't test any of it out. It won't help against visuals either and that thing can mount a pretty massive phased array." Henriette says. "But fuck it. Field tests are the best sort of tests, right? Let's see if it works."
Elsa nods. "All right. Activating stealth systems. Cryo-arithmetic computers... online, control program self-sustaining. Hull temperature dropping to background temperatures. Active radar jamming up." She smiles. "They seem to be holding up. Good job."
Henriette tries to act like that was nothing special, but she really was worried. A kitbashed stealth system built out of spare odds and ends she's managed to grab from what must have been Singularitan technology is not something she wants to rely on-but maybe Jamelia has something about being able to work with what you have instead of what you want.
The Oppenheimer's Light drifts towards the station slowly, clever use of CoI-violating inertial dampeners allowing it to slightly steer itself. Elsa brings up one of the big MFDs, zooms in on the hive.
"She's here." Henriette realizes, looking at the bone-white machines there. Her not-sister is here. All of her. Supported by how many million tons of Autopolitan technology and uncountable numbers of expendable drones. The skeletal machines and birdlike fighter escorts swarming around searching for something are clearly not particularly expensive-mass produced units, probably fodder for a skilled pilot and a low-end fighter, let alone anyone who actually knows what they're doing in something even as reasonable as the Invincible Atomos-Beta-or at least she thinks that's the name of the combining "super robot"-but the DSS-equivalents are a lot more dangerous.
Her sister is a worse pilot but there's another dozen of them and this time she doesn't have a god behind her, nor does she have the expertise of some of Autocthonia's most amazing scientists.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
You have 2 ships and approximately 1/4th of a giant robot. You can see that the enemy mothership has a lot of drones and several of the units you've seen in Moscow. You need to go through them one way or the other. This way will be...
Fleet Action:
That Autopolitan Mothership? It's here. And it's blocking your way. You need to cripple it, at least enough that it might retreat, before you can actually look for Jamelia. To do so you:
[ ] Attack now. You can probably sneak something close in and nuke it a couple of times, and then run away. Hopefully it'll be wounded enough that it'll leave, which means you have some time to get through.
[ ] Find allies. You can do that by:
[ ] Going somewhere else (write-in)
[ ] Looking for aid in the detritus ring where incomplete scripts and box office bombs go to die.
[ ] Find additional equipment.[ ] Looking for aid in the detritus ring where incomplete scripts and box office bombs go to die.
[ ] Look in the ship graveyards in the ring for spare parts.
[ ] Retreat and find a nearby station to trade for equipment.
[ ] Write-in.
[ ] Some clever magic trick (write-in).[ ] Retreat and find a nearby station to trade for equipment.
[ ] Write-in.
New Concept: Soul Pacts
Here in the Umbra, you can trade your souls. In fact, your soul is often the most valuable thing you have. "But isn't it bad to trade souls?" Ha ha ha. No. As I said way back, "demon" is a political term about the kinds of spirits you don't want to deal with. Soul trading otherwise is plenty valid. Void Engineers get alien biotech or cybernetics implanted in exchange for memories and emotions and other feelings (greys are great for this), and this is okay. Iterators, especially pre-99, would often get Autocthonian-derived augmentations built into their bodies as a blessing from Friend Computer. NWO psychics would unlock great powers from trading in dreams. Syndicate executives know the power of a good contract.
Soul trading is ethically neutral. In fact, some of the rare redemption stories for widderslaintes involve the widderslainte finding a being that will take their tainted soul despite how unpalatable it is, leaving them with no inverted Avatar and the ability to carry out a normal life-although with no ability to ever use Awakened magic again. This is not to say that all forms of soul trading are accepted-the Technocracy frowns on people trading parts of their soul to gain the ability to shoot fireballs or any other obvious Reality Deviance. But subdermal nanotech armor? Deployable plasma cannons? Superhuman abilities gained from alien DNA hybridization? All generally okay (some specific aliens/spirits are considered 'demons' due to their Nephandic allegiances and obviously not ok even if in Technoparadigm).
Soul trading is risky, however, because it can often lead to unwanted consequences. Eventually if you trade enough of your soul, you start losing your magic or enlightened science. There's various competing explanations. Choristers and Hermetics believe it's because your Avatar is attached to your soul and you're tearing apart the anchor which allows your Avatar to stay there. The Technocracy believes it's because the gifts given are so powerful, so useful, and so effortless that eventually it becomes difficult to maintain the determination that Genius requires. Sufficient sphere trading will damage your ability to gain Enlightenment.
Almost anything can be bought with soul trading. Although even Sphere knowledge is possible to acquire in this fashion, these spirit-granted Spheres are expensive, require a powerful spirit, and have special rules. More commonly magi acquire spirit charms, especially because by being static magic many of these effects are more resistant against Paradox than sphere magic.
Someone with Primal Utility 1 or Spirit 1 can see the exact value and amount of damage to their soul. Otherwise, you will have to take an educated guess.
The Necessity of Soul Trading
Why is this here? Because unless you know exactly what you're doing, and have a very good plan, you will probably have to soultrade. The sky's the limit-nothing prevents you from theoretically soul-trading yourself the equivalent of Forces 5 or whatever-but note that more powerful effects require more investment.
Also, you need to find people with the ability to give you the stuff you want for soul trading. Crashing Boom-Boom can't give you the ability to heal people, but she can give you extra dots of Pilot or massive cybernetic enhancements ("This isn't a war ordinary humans can win! This is the future!") Centurion, if he was here, couldn't give you massive cybernetic enhancements or spheres (because he's not that strong) but he could give you additional combat skills due to his war experience or the instinctive ability to hit the weakpoints of dangerous alien beasts.
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