Soul Cycles and the Naronian Afterlife

Sorry for the continued lack of updates. For those of you who aren't active on either Tumblr or PBK, my computer has been returned with replaced hardware parts, but the OS was evidently reinstalled improperly, and it will have to be done again (a USB with the OS and drivers will be sent to me some time next week, hopefully no later than Tuesday). After it comes, please allow me a few days to get my programs and files in order.

In the mean time, since I'm feeling kind of bad about the lack of updates and I don't want to get completely out of it, here's a mess of crap about the afterlife in the Naroniverse.

The Afterlife

Well... in Naroni, there is no one afterlife, as was mentioned during the Fun Times in Hell arc. To an extent, the individual chooses their own afterlife, sort of. To oversimplify somewhat, you go to the afterlife you believed in during your mortal life. Believe you're going to Heaven? You go to Heaven! Believe you're going to become one with the earth? You become one with the earth! Believe in an unconscious cessation of existence? You get an unconscious cessation of existence! Believe you'll be fabulously wealthy and good-looking and spend all your time getting laid at Disneyland? You get the idea.

Er... for a while, that is.

The Soul Cycle

The first thing to know about the Soul Cycle is that each cycle (for the Human Class, anyway--see next) is two hundred years long (for simplicity's sake, let's just assume that metaphysical years are more or less equal to conventional calendar years). Suppose Random Naroniverse Citizen lives to be fifty years old. This means that they've spent fifty years of their present Soul Cycle in the life stage, and that the remaining hundred and fifty will be spent in their afterlife. But once two hundred years have passed since the individual's birth, their afterlife ends and they are reborn to the physical world in a new body.

A reincarnated soul will have no conscious memory of its previous lives or afterlives (at least, as far as I've planned so far; I reserve the right to slightly retcon and have someone remember a previous life if it ever becomes convenient to the story), though some subconscious emotions and desires may linger from past forms. More on this in later sections.

The Soul Cycle is sort of a means of slowing the use of the mysterious forces of which souls are made--spiritual recycling, if you will. That's not to say that there are never new souls being made, because there have to be. Reproduction occurs exponentially, after all. So while the old souls are constantly being fitted to new bodies, new souls do have to spawn at a certain rate to keep up with the production of physical bodies, and for the most part, they do.

Though, emphasis, for the most part. More on this in a bit.

Soul Classes

Generally speaking, souls can be grouped into classes: Human, Mammalian, Avian/Reptilian, Amphibian/Ichthion, Fungal, Bacterial, Plant, Miscellaneous Tiny Organisms, etc. It is possible for a soul to shift classes, but it's a pretty rare occurrence, and a very gradual process. The classes all have a varying closeness to one another than makes some direct shifts impossible. For example, you're not going to go from being an amoeba soul to being a human soul without passing through a bunch of other classes first.

Within classes, however, species isn't an issue. If you're a Mammalian soul, you might start out as a horse, then become a cat, then a bear, etc. No biggie.

Soul Clusters

As a new cycle starts, souls tend to reincarnate in proximity to the souls they were close to during their previous life. These clusters of souls are not fixed for eternity--people come together and drift apart, after all--but there could very well be souls that have been clustered together since the beginning of time. These ties often carry over subconsciously from life to life. Take Sparron and Searle, for example. For all Sparron consciously does not think that continued association with Searle is a good idea, there is a part of him that just cannot help it, because unbeknownst to him, they've been dancing that dance for centuries. Teenage Rona's attachment to Aspen could also be rooted in this phenomenon.

Not to say that you're always going to fall in love with the same soul over and over again, but who knows? Maybe your spouse will be your platonic best friend in the next life, or vice versa. Or maybe you will get involved with the same soul time and time again, but I don't want to border too much on the cheesy here.

Also, some souls go through loner periods and therefore get placed in random clusters, where they might not fit in. Isidro and his mother were both chronic loners before being reborn in their current/most recent forms, though I doubt Isidro will be alone in his next life; Domingo is a new soul who would have lacked an established cluster.

Soul Crises

Every once in a while, reproduction gets ahead of itself and a body is born when there's no available soul to fill it. Let's call this a Soul Crisis.

Basically, the body and mind develop, but the individual will have an inherent lack of everything a soul provides--empathy, true emotion, a moral compass. Many of these individuals are outright evil--Remiel, for example, was the result of a Soul Crisis--but just because an organism is soulless does not necessarily make it malevolent.

As these individuals do not have souls, they are not reincarnated, or at least not in the way those with souls are. No one really knows what happens to them (read: I'm too lazy to decide that right now, nor do I want to box myself into any corners should it ever come up).

Soul Fragments

So, this will be coming up before the end of the '80s, sort of. There are certain roles on the earth that must constantly be filled, usually guardian-type roles in regards to magical and spiritual centers. If a person is chosen for one of these roles, then, at the end of their life, a part of their soul will remain tied to that role forever. The soul fragment will join the previous fulfillers of that role in the formation of a permanent, immortal--but not unchanging--consciousness.

As for the now incomplete soul, it will undergo the cycle as per usual, but souls take time to heal from such wounds. As such, expect the next several lifetimes to be tough on this particular soul. Searle Andronei might have donated a soul fragment at one point. Same with Sparron.

Limitations within the Human Class?

Absolutely none. Any soul can be reincarnated with any physical sex, any gender, any sexual orientation, any ethnicity, any class, any genetic phenotypes, any genetic mutations, any physical or mental conditions, in any geographical area. So bad news, Roderick--you were probably a peasant at some point.