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Moving on… Our main story tonight concerns Oathkeepers, everyone’s favorite Truth or Dare referee. And more specifically how their ability to spot the truth behind counter narrative statements doesn’t quite work how it should when it comes to seeing through the lies of the gods.
[In short, gods eat souls. Humanity is not at the top of the food chain naturally, gods use their influence both directly and indirectly to improve the efficiency and control over their human farms and according to leading Effini scientists the only way to reach the top is to see to it that the gods torn apart and to salt the minds of the humans they were feeding on to ensure no new ones take their place.]
Oathkeepers, with their ability to tell truth from lie and wildly corrupt organization, both stemming back to the direct intervention of their patron god are fundamentally one of the tools a pantheon might use to maintain control over their flock. Think of them as sheep dogs using their truth sense to guide the flock back where the pantheon wants them. This metaphor of course breaks down when they die and are omnomnom consumed by the very beings they served. That’s right, the godly version of Where The Red Fern Grows doesn’t end in tears but with a big feast! How’s that for casus belli?
Ahem, anyway, considering how frequently ‘Somebody Saw something they shouldn’t have and knows too much about the ecosystem/upcoming themed diner and we gotta maintain the company line in the face of damning and true testimony’ probably comes up Oathkeepers often will already have dogmatic responses ready. As it is literally one of the very few things they were founded to do.
For instance
If someone confronts you with visions of a presence they recognize as x god tearing apart the soul of his mothers’ cousin. Try saying… "What you saw wasn't *eating!* No no, it was a human soul becoming a part of something larger. My it's like two becoming one." *romantic sigh that somehow hints you should find a nice guy and settle down already* “But it…looked painful?” “Growth often is.”
Or "You'd rather there be no souls/gods?" Which relies on pretending the relationship between the two is at some benevolent middle ground and any deviation could throw the whole thing to ruin, instead of, you know, People Farms 2.0 TM ("People Farms, Soulful Diner and a Show to Die For.")
Or, my Very Favorite, because of the far reaching not at all terrifying rabbit hole it's logic sends you down, "Gods are like carrion birds in the forest, they play a vital role in maintaining the ecosystem." In other words 'When something dies in the forest it's very sad, but then that thing starts rotting, and we can't have that. Imagine if we had that Jon. Just corpses, no crows? Think what it would look like without gods? Would cities just be giant piles of rotting *soul corpses?* I can't even imagine the horror of a single soul corpse rotting or what that would do to the world.'
To which I say 'Solid fear mongering but you lost me when you assumed souls deteriorate anything like the complex balance of ecosystems that hitch a ride alongside human biology. I do have a few questions though.'
If we stop assuming that a dead body means the soul goes through the same process but whispy-er then… What does happen in an Effini soul ecosystem, with no gods, without Effini tech to mitigate the consequences? Do souls poof away if not captured? How complex does the material have to be before it starts serving a host? Even if it’s like ‘human baby brain at x stage of development’ level of complexity it’s bound to have happened at least once. Or is that what normally happens? Souls chill until a new baby pops up with a vacancy. All well and good but then what happens if the number gets unbalanced? More babies than souls? What happens to those empty vacancies? Do they poof in a soul of their own at some point? When? And what if hosted babies poof in their own soul before or even after the old soul latched on? I don’t know! I don’t even know which is more hypothetically horrifying!
Ahem! All this to say I have a *lot* of questions that nobody seems to have the answers for. But I do know one person who knows, or who could at least start to figure out, the answers to my questions and more. And I know that an, at points, *gratuitously* overwritten meme about the Sad Clown Reads the Devil of Disappointment’s Diary Show would get them to read it with their very own eyes. And if you’re thinking “Well Jon what are you going to do about it?” Then what are you doing? I’ve clearly already written this whole meme, you’ve already read most of it. In fact! There it’s done. Now this cursed knowledge has reached the author! And I can return to my blank white void of a home and plan new charities/churches based around bringing awareness to exploitative loopholes in peace, and you can stop reading this in my voice.
That’s all the time we have tonight! Thank you and we’ll see you next week!