: A soul is different from a number. A ghost has an
: physical appearance, even though it is not physical.
: Imagine you make a a ghost solid, real - you've just
: made a spirit corporeal. And I just looked at her
: death sequence: she flinches in pain, her whole body
: glows and disintigrates a little, and then she
: explodes. Nothing like a Fetch soul effect.
Just as a number has a certain set of attributes, so does a soul, or a physical object. But they're different sets in each case. A ghost-as-pure-soul generally has no "physical" abilities at all. It may be apparently visible or tangible, but only by making the onlooker think they're seeing or touching something. Hence their not showing up on photographs and stuff.
To have an actual physical appearance, ghosts are traditionally supposed to have to embody themselves using an "ectoplasmic" form. That this form is separate and distinct from their actual souls is clear--they can materialize or dematerialize their bodies at will, and you can permanently dissipate them by laying the ghost to rest, but the soul is never destroyed by such actions. So ghosts have bodies--they're just weird ones. :-) And once a ghost is as strongly physical as Shiver--hit it with arrows and it leaves behind permanent blood splashes--you might as well not call it a ghost any more. It's just a regular living or undead being.
But I just reviewed Shiver's death, and you're definitely right on that. I remembered her coming apart into two parts and figured one would be the body and one the soul, but upon review there's no visual difference between them. She just turns into a pile of big white glowing spark-things, some of expand out in a ring and some of which shoot up, then fall back to Earth and explode.
: Where does it say that? I just looked in the History
: section, in Shiver's description, and in the Tramist's
: Mirror description - all seem to agree that nobody got
: close enough to Shiver to tell what the exact method
: of her ressurection was.
True--but the possibilities were listed. The Tramist's mirror section says "It might be an instrument casting or assisting Resurrection. It might cast or assist a spell to create powerful undead." And the Shiver section says 'Soulblighter either revived her or created an undead incarnation with Tramists Mirror." Whatever the *exact* method was, it was a matter of generating a physical form and sticking her spirit in it.
Having her be a superpowerful Shade variant makes sense, actually, given her apparently sharing their Airwalk ability (which she didn't have in TFL, to judge from her pictures.)
--SiliconDream
