My Greatest Experiment (Skelebros' Origin Story)

Souls: Composition

Souls are a very interesting thing to study. My experiments with DETERMINATION have brought me into close contact with both human and monster souls, and I feel I've come away much better informed as a result. I feel that you might find it useful to have some of the basics outlined here, just in case my continued research proves barren, and I don't find any alternative to... (shiver)... cutting everything that I am into pieces.

Every soul has three major parts: the soul's personal trait, the base, and the core. Since the base is so much more uniform among individuals, and as such easier to explain, I'll start with that.

Base

The base of the soul is a fluid that makes up the majority of a soul's mass, and is located underneath the soul's trait layer. The base is base-ically the same among all individuals of a species (see what I did there?), and has a similar function to blood in the physical body. It keeps the soul alive, and without it, the soul would dull and start to crack, eventually shattering completely.

In monsters, the base appears as a bronze colored liquid, and is made up of kindness, hope, and magic. The proportions of each can differ slightly from person to person, leading to the differences in physical properties.

Even the slightest differences in ratios can lead to a difference in a soul's appearance. A soul with more kindness, for example, appears larger. (This is where the saying "they have a big heart" comes from.) A soul with more hope glows more brightly, and the amount of magic in a soul—for reasons we don't understand—reacts with the other two substances to establish the coloration and trait of a soul. (This process of trait selection merits further research. But, as you can probably tell by reading this journal, I currently have my hands full.)

In humans, the base appears as a silver colored liquid, and it is made primarily of DETERMINATION, with trace amounts of magic. (Barely enough to be worth mentioning, but still present.) While we don't currently know much about DETERMINATION, what little research I've done has proved to be extremely educational.

In example, there was a long time where scientists thought that human souls were made of pure magic. (This was because of the extremely high Maiga readings they gave off—we had to invent an entirely new scale, just to accommodate them.) However, by mixing the bases of monster and human souls, I found that the substance wasn't magic, but instead served as a kind of... enzyme, or amplifier for it. The magic of the monster souls, combined with the mysterious substance in the human souls, gave off more energy than either of the substances did alone.

The best way I can describe DETERMINATION is by saying that it takes the energy of magic, and then... multiplies it. Exponentially. A good analogy would be... salt and water. Salt on its own isn't very conductive, and neither is water. When you put salt in water, though, the Na+ ions are released, and the water becomes extremely conductive. DETERMINATION does for magic what water does for Sodium ions. At that point, though, one can't strictly call the released energy "magic" anymore (in the same way that the salt and water solution isn't the same as pure salt, or pure water).

It seems humans used to be able to utilize this energy—it's why we lost the war—but have since lost the ability to do so. According to the readings of magic in the souls I've been given to study, the amount of pure magic in the human souls' base has been decreasing over generations. The first soul, which was collected nearly 200 years before the fourth (and perhaps 60 years or so after the war ended), had significantly more magic than the fourth, where it had all but disappeared.

While I can't isolate the cause for this decrease, I can say for certain that this decrease in magic is tied to the disability of humans to use their manifestations of magic. According to Asgore, the last human that he'd encountered that actually used their magic was the second human to have fallen down here. Since then, all the humans (even when in great peril), have been unable to manifest their magic, unless magic is passed to them by a monster's own magical attacks, which then increases the concentration of magic in their own soul... or they somehow manage to absorb a monster soul, thus gaining all of its magic power and amplifying it. That last process is purely theoretical—it's unheard of, a human absorbing a monster soul.