IN> The nature of being (Re: Celestial procreation)

[Jonathan Lang]

One caveat: I _do_ think that the Celestial Forces used should have
something to do with the final product.  If you strip a celestial of
its Celestial Forces, it ceases to be a celestial - and unless it has
a vessel to retreat to, it ceases to be anything at all.  That is,
there's no such thing as a Seraph Remnant; there's only a Remnant that
used to be a Seraph.
So if a Superior takes a Celestial Force that used to be part of a
Seraph and uses it in the creation of a new celestial, there ought to
be at least a _bias_ toward the newborn being a Seraph or Balseraph.
This would imply that a being that loses its last Celestial Force
while in the Marches might possibly end up as an ethereal Figment,
regardless of what it used to be.

There's also a fine line between creating a new being and adding
Forces to an existing one.  Let's say that you have an Impudite who
gets whittled down to a single Celestial Force; that demon is _still_
an Impudite, and will remain so even if a Superior comes along and
attaches a bunch of Mirror Ghost Forces to him.  Conversely, if you
start with a one-Force Will'o'Wisp and bind Forces that were stripped
from a Celestial, the result will still be a human soul.

As I see it, a being is more than the collection of its Forces; in
addition, everyone - human, angel, demon, reliever, or ethereal - has
a "spark of life" that defines its fundamental nature.  That spark of
life is the difference between a Will'o'Wisp, a Reliever, or a
stripped-down Impudite: all of these could be described as a being
that has precisely one Force (specifically, a Celestial Force); but
they are very different creatures despite that.

There are four edge cases: Mirror Ghosts, Remnants, Figments, and Constructs.

(entering murky territory with respect to canon...)

A Mirror Ghost isn't a distinct entity; it is a Force that still
belongs to a human soul, but is currently separated from it; this is
what distinguishes a Celestial Mirror Ghost from a Will'o'Wisp.
Therefore, incorporating Mirror Ghosts into other beings implicitly
involves severing the relationship between the Mirror Ghost and the
human soul that it used to belong to.  This also means that conjoining
a bunch of Mirror Ghosts will _not_ result in a second soul; it will
merely result in a multi-Force Mirror Ghost.

Remnants no longer have identities of their own.  They continue to
exist as coherent Force-Patterns strictly because they have been bound
to a vessel; but they have no soul.  In this regard, they're more like
constructs than people.  A Remnant who is visiting the Marches is
similar to a Figment, except that the bindings to its vessel keep it
intact despite its lack of Celestial Forces, and may indeed prevent
the sort of acquisition of Celestial Forces that can turn a Figment
into an Ethereal spirit.  Finally, since a Remnant has no soul of its
own, it's well-suited to being joined to a being that has a soul: I
could easily see merging a ghost with a Remnant to produce a mummy,
although an Archangel might be able to make a Saint by using a Blessed
soul.  Still, this sort of Force-splicing appears to be frowned upon
by both sides of the War; I would expect that doing so would tend to
lead to a very confused and potentially unstable creature.

Figments are not ethereal spirits; they're loose collections of Forces
that maintain their integrity due to the dreamscape or domain that
they're in.  In this regard, they are very much the Ethereal Realm's
analog to Remnants.  Indeed, if you were to bind a Figment into a
vessel, the result would be a Remnant.  Why anyone would do this, I
don't know...

Finally, Constructs.  Like Remnants, these aren't beings so much as
Forces bound into a physical shell.  The difference come from what
does the binding: Remnants rely on the pre-existing connection between
what they used to be and the vessel that they are now bound to, while
constructs are held together by oath-like "principles", established
during their creation.  A construct is never going to be anything
other than a construct, although its Forces could be retrieved for
other uses.  Note that there's a fine line between a construct and a
living artifact: the former has never been anything but, while the
latter is essentially some other sort of being (usually an angel or
demon) with an artifact for a vessel.

-- 
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang