Soot

Manifestation

There is little to no data about Soot prior to her merger with Ember's shadow. Her current manifestation can be split into known and unknown material types. In the category of known materials, Soot possesses the left ear and left eye of Ember. The ear still includes all of its wireless communication antennae and some processors while the the eye is usually seen just for its ruby red iris because Soot seems to either lack eyelids or she never blinks. These are the only two things that can be defined in terms of Soot's body.

The res of Soot manifests as a shadow-like being in the shape of a kangaroo. In some ways, she resembles shadow beings like Verada, but she is not light sensitive nor does she follow any of the rules that seem to govern the life of living shadows. In addition, when Soot's mouth is open and at a proper viewing angle, it becomes apparent she has hundreds of needle like teeth. Her claws are sharper than would normally be seen on a kangaroo but still approximate the shape. Finally, unlike shadows, Soot does not change her shape or proportions at any time. She has taken on and committed to the shape of Ember's shadow. No one knows if this is a first time event or just one of many in her lifetime.

Origin

Soot is a very confusing creature, and it it may be useful to consider the parts she was made from:

• Ember's left ear and left eye
• Ember's shadow
• The Ambient Field

The use of her physical components forms a direct link from Ember to Soot. Ember can often year and sometimes see ghosts of things Soot is experiencing. The use of Ember's shadow produces a interface with zero thickness but with Ember's shape and thus provides bounds for Soot's usual appearance as an inky creature with a glowing red eye and a organic left ear on an otherwise flat structure. It is also part of where some of Ember's playful spirit is imparted on Soot through the link of void magic in both Ember and Soot.

It is the last component that raises questions. The location in which Ember existed meant she was both android and flesh at the same time, and she was with her children at the time as well. In one desperate try to distract other, aggressive, deadly living machine essences, Ember imbued her shadow with her flesh and spirit in a world where her memories had already bled out from wounds, a world where corpses of a world that placed itself outside of bodies and into servers only to have their creations destroy them, and in a place where untold amounts of information could be had at once. When Soot was made, she bounded off happily, chiming and unafraid of those she was going to lure away.

The location have Soot a sudden if not violent connection to the world of her origin that flooded her with information. This makes her come off as someone who must be of great age when she is indeed very young. Like the children, she has a knack for getting information no matter how securely it may be held. She has boundless curiosity and is always gathering stories. music, and secrets, some of which she has managed to obtain from archives of Darkness and even Chaos.

The other side effect of her hunt for knowledge and her origin in a world of duality, she has two voices. One is normal and the other is always filled with maddening eldrich power. She really doesn't get it, and she has no more comprehension that she is causing harm with it than any of Ember's other adopted 'Children.' One theory as to why her voice does this may be in the idea of a tachyon's simultaneous blue and red shifts. Soot's perception may be going with and against time simultaneously resulting in her odd stories.

Personality

Soot has an amazingly kind and friendly personality, and this is only more evidence that she is a non-chaos born dream of which the usual rules do not apply. If one word was used to describe her it would be curious. Soot is obsessed with stories, and it may well be that she never forgets one that she hears or witnesses. She is her own form of time capsule, and she can recall nearly anything from memory which gets to another aspect of her personality. Soot loves to tell stories almost as much as she likes to hear them. She loves to live in the take as it grows, but she feels sharing tales is just as fulfilling to see others react to it.

Capabilities and Effects

Offensive Capabilities

No one knows if Soot has any offensive capabilities to her name. Some would call her ability to drive creatures mad as a weapon, but this is only a side effect that she seems to incapable of understanding. One could hypothesize that any who has seen her act in an offensive manner were erased from history, but this does not seem to match her personality and motivations. For a being that could stand toe to toe with elder gods, she could be said to lack even one mean bone in her body. It is also possible that any offensive ability she has never been directed towards mortals but rather against those more like herself.

Defensive Capabilities

Obscurity and mobility are Soot's main defensive abilities. She can appear or vanish at will, and it is possible that her range on such motions may be both cosmic in scale and cross different dimensions. She does not tend to rise from shadows or come from darkness so much as she tend to decide she is somewhere. She is easy to miss most times as she doesn't cause disruptions unless she speaks.

Mentally and magically, Soot can be said to be a fortress that relies both on durability and in some cases corruption to protect herself. Psions and others trying to contact Soot's mind directly may find success to be lethal or at least permanently damaging due to both the language she thinks in and the absolute type of data in her head. Most psions recognize the danger before this point and are this spared. Of magic, very little seems to affect her which may have to do with the matter she emerged from in the early universe. Those that continue to assault her are often faced with questions, and questions mean speaking, and speaking means risk of madness.

Misc Capabilities

Much of what Soot can do is a mixed bag that makes her versatile and interesting to deal with.

Language Comprehension

Soot can understand any language she sees or hears. This may be due to exposure or some strange hold over from her creation. She always speaks in her native language, something Lovecraft would have loved and loathed all at once, which is always heard in a peculiar way. Listeners can always comprehend Soot because they hear her in their native language. However, they also hear her true words, and it is this that causes the maddening of those who hear her.

Silent Specter

Soot can sit, listen, and observe worlds and dimensions without projecting herself fully into it. This makes her a nearly perfect snoop, investigator, and historian. This is her primary mode, and almost none can detect her. Those who can are often children and oracles. Oddly enough, in the case of children who get over the initial fear of her appearance, Soot can sometimes become a mostly silent companion. While she has followed some in this sneaking form from childhood to death, Soot is most attracted to children and others who has a bit of madness already in them because they can endure her speech longer by way of being already a little mad and by using their imagination as a buffer. Soot it not everywhere though, and she cannot sense a planet's worth of experiences at once. Her senses are only so good as her attention span, so she tends to experience her world much like a person would.

Perfect Memory

Soot doesn't seem to have a limit to her memory capacity, and she remembers nearly everything to the smallest detail. However, the speed at which she can pull memories out of that mass of knowledge has slowed over time due to the sheer amount of data within her.

Ember <--> Soot

One of the more unusual side effects of Soot fusing with Ember's liberated shadow in the realm of dream and nightmare is that they share a bidirectional link with each other. The link and what is passes is small, and Ember's side consists mostly of picking up on what Soot feels and sees when Ember is tired or sleeping. Most often it sounds like a chiming and a feeling of frolicking with what Ember has called her children. Soot gains a stable location she can always appear form as well as being able to sense much of what Ember does without Ember knowing. This gives her a new pair of eyes with which to see the world and allows her to have two stories active instead of just her own. It is likely this unique ability to have two perspectives on history at once is what motivated Soot to choose Ember when the opportunity presented itself. It also allows Soot to feel the world with the instincts, intuition, and emotions of something other than herself.