BoM/TWS Message Forum

Well if that’s your attitude, then I do have a couple questions that have been kicking around in my head for a while, but I’ll remind you that you asked for it. :P I’ve been reading over magic resources in the wiki, and it’s made some old questions come back to the forefront for me, and a new one or two. So in the branch where Will corrupts Frank and Joe and learns all the known spells of the Libra, it was said that Will could use the 23rd spell to completely rewrite his imago to identically resemble another person if he really wanted to dedicate the effort to it. Later chapters expanded on that by Will managing to isolate and adapt the modify sigil to create one that modifies essentia. In the wiki, you directly state the properties of essentia, imago, and substantia in terms of if they can be modified, created, destroyed, altered, multiplied, or divided; you didn’t lay out the properties of anima in those terms, beyond stating that it can be divided.

So my question is, if Will, with the level of mastery he has over the Libra after returning from Cuthbert in that branch, could adapt that modify sigil to modify anima. And if he can, would it therefore be possible for him to extract somebody’s anima and modify it so that it resembles his own exactly? That question has been in the back of my mind for like a year now, because I was wondering if there was any way past the fact that people can only split their anima 6 ways. There’s a way around the limits of splitting essentia by giving yourself more than one to switch between, but that solution doesn’t work for anima. So I wondered if that might not be a way of bypassing the restriction, even if it would be inferior way of doing things.

My second question is also one I’ve been thinking about for a while, and is related to essentia. Essentia is divisible only so many ways before it collapses, so that made me wonder if the Libra could be used to kill somebody like that. So here’s an example. A person who posses the Libra has, say, 8 spare masks of people they don’t need anymore. And they have an enemy who they want to get rid of, but maybe this enemy has left town in such a way that they’ll be hard to track down. Is there any reason why they wouldn’t be able to break into the person’s house, steal their hairbrush, and use their hair and those masks that they no longer need to create enough mask golems to cause their essentia to collapse and presumably kill/incapacitate them?

And my final question is one I don’t think you’ll want to answer, but that I’m curious about anyway. It’s about substantia. We know that substantia can be extracted because the Still can extract it. But what would happen if only the sigil to extract substantia was activated? Considering that from my understanding, substantia holds everything else together, would a person just completely unravel if it was extracted?