Chronic Distortion

a broad diagnostic category that constitutes soul injuries. it’s a condition where people’s verselia has been screwed with due to distortion overexposure. newer souls are more susceptible to chronic distortion due to their still-strengthening constitution. it typically only happens when people spend too long in a distortion spike, or sustain injury from an image.

presence of any symptoms that cannot be attributed to any other sources and do not notably fluctuate in severity over the course of roughly 3 months is considered chronic distortion. time length can shorten if the symptoms are more severe and don’t show much decline.

symptoms:

• memory loss or memory distortion
  • memories are either completely lost or screwed with, either getting someone else's memories (if they were also present in the spike), having partial memory distortion, or memory implantation (new gibberish beamed into ur head)
• personality distortion.
  • someone might come out with new personality traits, sometimes swapping with or effecting other people in the spike if there’s someone nearby.
• language distortion
  • person can no longer speak or understand their native language, either partially or fully. might be stuck in distortion tongue.
  • could swap languages with another person to any degree. you could come out of a spike speaking egyptian arabic if there’s an egyptian-arabic-speaking person in there.
• discolouration.
  • hair and eye colours can sometimes get fucked with. this is basically just RVM but wilder.
• verselian signature distortions
  • all cases of chronic distortion will leave the person with some “error” in their versig.
• scarring
  • sometimes you can just get hit with certain marks/scars if you get a bad enough injury and your vers is getting frayed enough.

treatment is sometimes through oscillation exposure.

• getting pure vers of varying oscillations blasted through your 3 -real points while hooked up to a purification loop will slowly knock your shit back in order.
  • probing tests for locations of anomalies within the “signature” — a particular wavelength corresponds to a particular part of someone that’s been fucked with.
  • some type of abreaction will occur, and then at that specific oscillation, the person will receive a low level of input to slowly straighten out the fucked up verselia.
• some people that have been distorted have been known to keep their weird hair or eye colours.

rem actually has like no chronic distortion. if he wasn’t a progeny, he’d be really resistant to it cuz soralthim as a soul has been around the block many times.

how is rem anomalous?

• he’s a magnet for spikes.
• he’s never had any type of abreaction to any oscillation. the closest he’s come is having the odd crash out in a spike which is atypical, but not impossible.
  • he has the emotional outburst of the abreaction part down pat, but his will often be with some type of action, not just a sudden breakdown.
• emotional dampening is possible.
• he’s had no change to his language capabilities; has never reported suffering distortion tongue. (though this isn’t especially weird.)
  • can still speak fluent english. his greek is still complete shit.
• discolouration isn’t quite standard presentation for distortion. his also comes with accelerated hair growth and physical eye changes.
  • the actual presentation of the hair is pretty standard, but the accelerated growth isn’t.
  • he looks like he has cataracts, but he can see very well. sometimes better than the average person
  • his pupils appear normally round, but they constrict like a cat’s instead.
• his teeth have also been fucked with — his canines have been sharpened a bit.
• versig is very very muffled. no one can really hear it, even on the really high-grade shit.
  • distortion normally sounds distorted, staticky or generally warped in wild and wacky ways.
  • full-durational dampening has never been recorded.
• he tends to forget what happens in the spike (if he goes nuts), but he has had no other memory distortions that he’s aware of. (not unheard of)
• stigmata advances with the spikes.
  • thought it’s some type of verselian scarring (it is i guess?)
  • though the slow advancement boggled his previous supervisors a bit.

distortion tongue:
“Aaaah, what the fuck, I’ve got distortion tongue now. Ugh.”
Aaaah / wh / at / the / fu / ck / I / have / got / dis / tor / tion / ton / gue / now / ugh.
“Guwagh, fution tahw ckthe got I torton now disgue have, aaagh.”

• some words can get chopped into halves, or just into syllables.
• syllables get scrambled around wherever.
• some words can go backwards.