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 CD. 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 your 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.
• Verselian signature distortions
  • All cases of chronic distortion will leave the person with some “error” in their versig. This is the core of the disorder, most of the rest of the symptoms are just manifestations of this distortion.
  • A distorted versig reading is what would really confirm the diagnosis, but CD is commonly diagnosed without a versig reading needed. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
• 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 verselia 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.

*this is surreal, corporeal, and ethereal.

Narrative-specific crap

Rem actually has like no CD. 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 does not 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.
• He’s had no change to his language capabilities; has never reported suffering distortion tongue. (though this isn’t especially weird.)
• Discolouration isn’t quite standard presentation for distortion. However, his also comes with accelerated hair growth and physical eye changes which isn’t usual.
  • He looks like he has cataracts, but he can see very well.
  • 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. (This has no place on page, it’s just canon in my head).
• His 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. This is not strange, as repeated distortion spike exposure can make already-existing scars “grow”, but the “scar” that Rem has is very weird-looking for a verselian scarring. (Also not necessarily unheard of, but a perfectly symmetrical, black astroid is weird).

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

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