Does anything ever really die?
Bodies or vessels may be destroyed, minds may be
obliterated, and 'stable configurations of Forces' may
be disrupted, but nobody has ever split a Force
(although Vapula's sure that he's worked out the trick
this time). Of course, Forces may be recycled, and
often are, and the general consensus is that the act
of recycling means that Humpty Dumpty, indeed, may
never be put back together again. Something just gets
lost in the process.
Some people find it impossible to accept that.
Collectors come in many flavors, from every side of
the War. They have many motives for their obsession,
but all of them want somebody back, for whatever
reason (love is a common theme, but so is a thirst for
justice and/or revenge). Most Collectors never get
past the first, almost impossible step of somehow
managing to identify, locate and acquire a lost
entity's specific Forces, of course. Those that do
are faced with the hopeless task of isolating and
nurturing the strands of a specific soul to the point
where the lost entity is returned to the Symphony.
There's never been a documented success - but
Collectors are universally certain that they'll be the
first. If nothing else, it's something to do to fill
up the lonely years.
Needless to say, some ethereal pantheons are very
interested in this practice. Isis is probably the
most famous Collector: it is rumored that she has
nearly collected all of Osiris' Forces by now, and is
spending her free time practicing by trying to
reconstruct some of the Forgotten Gods. It's also
rumored that she's aided in this by the nearly-faded
Babylonian ethereal Marduk, who has managed to keep
the remains of his lost pantheon safe for thousands of
years.
Oddly, neither Heaven nor Hell forbids or even
discourages the practice of Collection (although it's
treated, at best, as a somewhat macabre hobby). This
may be due to the fact that the average Collector is
actually quite good at treating celestial damage. A
Collector, thanks to his or her specialized study, has
the equivalent of a variant of the Medicine skill,
which may only be used to help recover Soul Hits (add
the CD of a successful roll to the number of Soul
Hits recovered per week). While the Celestial Song of
Healing is faster, treatment by a Collector does not
cause disturbance: this is can be useful at times. In
short, there are pragmatic reasons to permit
Collectors to persist in their obsession.
Or, perhaps, Superiors permit the practice because one
never knows. Perhaps someone will succeed where
everyone else has failed, and bring someone back from
the ultimate death.
Everybody misses somebody.
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