Soulcatcher
PRIORITY: Hot Resonance Engrams Located In Your Area
Assigned to: GreytideSkye
Soulcatcher
A Soulcatcher is a class of devices that hold chat rooms that literal ghosts can enter. todo: rephrase: Canonically speaking, they're not ghosts they're Resonance Engrams which are what the Algorithm thinks this spectral thing would say if it was this person. It's not a literal ghost but yes it's a literal ghost.
How do I participate?
I am an Observer /g Ghost who will not convey IC information I had in life

Click that to pull up a list of active Soulcatchers available to join. Select one. If you are not put in immediately, the owner has set the Soulcatcher to needing approval mode, so they've been given a pop-up with your current character slot's character name, asking to join. They can approve or disapprove.
Reasoning: The pop-up "John Deadguy wishes to join your soulcatcher" discloses to the soulcatcher host that John Deadguy is dead. Can we trust the playerbase to treat that as OOC knowledge and "ignore" it, or is that intrinsically a significant breach of Blackout_Policy?
Regardless, if John Deadguy then says anything they would have known at any point they were Alive, that's an obvious Blackout Policy breach.
Typically, the player joining could immediately change their soul name to appear differently in the soulcatcher, which they can do at any time they're already in the soulcatcher.
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The UI button for a Ghost to passively join a Soulcatcher.
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Pushing that button will pull up a list of available soulcatchers to join. Note that this doesn't indicate which are free to join, and which need approval to join. You'll just have to try them!
I want them in my head
Buy a NIF. Buy the Soulcatcher NIFsoft. Consider setting it to "save this NIFsoft for future shifts" too. Activate it to pull up the Soulcatcher control menu. Control it there. That is all you have to do. Observers can now join in.
You can set permissions such as:
- Ability to see outside: Enabled
- Ability to hear outside: Enabled
- Ability to see inside: Enabled
- Ability to hear inside: Enabled
- Ability to speak: Enabled
- Ability to emote: Enabled
- Ability to change name: Enabled
- Body Scan Needed: False
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The default Host UI for a soulcatcher. Note the buttons, including Approval is required to join. If that is green, you will receive a pop-up with a character name each time a ghost tries to join. If it is red, it will read "Approval is not required to join" and they will be able to join freely.
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The host view when you have a soul in your soulcatcher, and have expanded out all the views. Note that you can toggle each of those permissions individually, per soul, and you can Remove a soul, or use the paper airplane button to send that soul to a different room. This could be a room in a different Soulcatcher, e.g. one in your NIF or one in your other hand.
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How the visiting soul sees the Soulcatcher UI.
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This is how a soul in the room will look in the chat log, when they Say and when they Me.
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If the change names permission is enabled, the guest can change their name, or use the red button to reset their name to what it was when they were inserted into the Soulcatcher.
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The guest can always use this UI button in the upper left to leave, or this other UI button to open the Soulcatcher UI.
They are a corpse and I want to talk to them ICly
File:Soulcatcher Evoker.png Print or buy an Evoker. Looks like a gun. <Screenshot of one>. Right click a corpse OR a living person. They will be prompted to join your soulcatcher.
This is the only way for them to ICly speak as the person they used to be. As far as Blackout policy goes, nothing changes. They don't remember what killed them, they don't acknowledge anything they OOCly perceived while being a floaty ghost observer. It as if you had revived them on the spot... except their physical body's still kind of dead at the moment. When you do revive them, as long as they're basically revived instantly, they may remember what they have perceived from inside your soulcatcher, including your conversation. Blackout policywise, it is no different than reviving someone, then dragging them into another room. Like, if you eject someone from your soulcatcher then take another 20 minutes to revive them, they clearly remember nothing from when they were OOCly a floating ghost, but they might still remember the conversation and stuff from inside the Soulcatcher. TODO: yeah this section is a mess.
If they are a living person, their body will appear SSD, with the zZz icon and everything. Their consciousness will be in your evoker. There will not be a notification that they're dying if their body starts dying, so it's up to them to periodically check on their own body. If their body dies while they're in your evoker... well, their stream of consciousness hasn't been broken so they can remember everything they perceived. If you eject them from your soulcatcher (or they eject themselves) then... that... uh... yeah the moment you eject them is "their moment of death." They wouldn't remember what killed them or what led to their death, so I guess they wouldn't remember the soulcatcher conversation.
They can leave at any time by using the action button in the upper left that looks like a leave icon. This will put them back in their body if they are still alive or just have them do normal ghost observer stuff if they're not.
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Left-clicking on someone (even yourself!) dead or alive with an Evoker allows you to pick a room in the Evoker to send them to. It will only request that they join!
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This is the request that the person whose body (dead or alive) is being left clicked with an Evoker will see. They will have a second confirmation after this one.
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This is the living body of someone who has consented to having their soul temporarily put into an Evoker. They appear Catatonic when examined.
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As always, they can Leave the soulcatcher, at which point they will be reinserted into the body they left (if it is still valid!) instantly. If that body happens to be alive when they return to it, Blackout Policy says that they get to remember the conversations they had in the soulcatcher.
How to do a RSD transfer
For when the captain is now a simplemob and you are internally giggling your ass off.
This will not work without a soul who specifically was body scanned from a body using an Evoker.
aka: A faster way to get someone a new body when they become a plasmeme
aka: "I have a corpse that I scanned, and have their mind in my soulcatcher, and I want to put them in a different brain in a different body for some reason".
Ingredients:
- 1 severed brain.
- 2 dead bodies:
- * 1 of the person you want to insert, to scan and get their soul.
- * 1 to put the brain into and revive.
- 1 RSD Evoker.
- 1 RSD Phylactery.
- Research. You need two often neglected research topics: Neural Programming and Genetic Engineering. The former gives us the actual tools of the trade, the RSD Evoker and RSD Phylactery. And the latter gives us the SAD.
- Make a corpse. you need to prepare the target body. Ideally, this is a humonkey, made from a cube. It is VERY IMPORTANT!! that you do not use genetics machines or unstable mutagen to turn the monkey into a humonkey, the SAD will reject changing a person back to their original body if their genetics is AT ALL tampered. You MUST use Mutadone!!. Best practice is to cuff or cable tie the monkey so that they don't run off or attack someone, and surgery table them with a defibrillator nearby.
- Get the tools. Print the RSD evoker and RSD phylactery from a science or medical lathe. Gods willing, you have the techs and materials to do this.
- Get a brain. Ideally, you pull the brain out of the corpse you made, but any brain you can hold in your hand will do. (Maybe not the printed Positronic ones?)
- Put the Phylactery into the new brain. Remove the humonkey's brain via Organ Manipulation surgery on their head, but do not finish the surgery. Click the RSD phylactery onto the humonkey's removed brain. You are not to dispose of the brain, you NEED it. Return the brain to the humonkey and cautery the head to finish the surgery.
- Revive the humonkey.
- Fifth, Leftclick the RSD Evoker on the person who was turned into a simplemob or plasmeme. Wait for them to accept going into your evoker. You could have done this at any point prior, and had them watch from inside as you worked.
- Sixth, Rightclick the RSD Evoker on the humonkey.
- Seventh, SAD the body.
Ideally? All of this can be done in seconds or prepared beforehand and is faster than waiting on xenobiology or regular humonkey transfers. It can work on people who by all rights are soft-round removed.
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What a successfully RSD Phylactery'd brain looks like. From here, you insert it into a body.
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Using the Evoker, right-click a dead body with a Phylactery'd brain already inserted to get this popup, asking you which soul in the Evoker you wish to put into the body.
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Jim Tern has been successfully transplanted. Do note that he is the monkey now, and cannot exit the monkey and return to his old body. If he Ghosts out, he will have no body. Additionally, his old body will need to be killed and Phylactery'd in order to insert his soul in; it will not treat him magically better just because he used to occupy the body. This may be an oversight or bug, but is equally a stopgate to prevent shenanigans with quick body changes.
There's other soul-catcher things!
TODO: this.
There's:
- Poltergeist! It's an item you use in-hand to access the control panel. It can hold 1 ghost, and you can use it on an Item in the world to attach it. The ghost then emotes and speaks as that item, which lets lots of people hear them at once.
- Phylactery! It's an item you use on a brain that enables you to use an evoker to put a scanned-ghost into that brain instead of their normal brain. Somehow.
- NIF: lets you have a joinable room in your head. You can't transfer ghosts from an Evoker into the NIF room, or vice versa. Just... ask them to leave and join the other one.
- Evoker: the handheld gun thing.
- Uhhhh?