Parts (Wizards)

History

Before the Last Whisper, almost two billion years ago, all wizards were part of “The Whole”; a collective and shared consciousness made up by every creation of the Lords, including the bodies of the wizards. 



The Last Whisper broke this collective apart, reducing the individual bodies down to independent consciousnesses. This caused severe sensations of loneliness which eventually, after the battle for Mezchinhar, under the guidance of Lord Wizard Heshiva, led to the Wizard finding a way of creating a similar experience by splitting their own consciousness into separate parts.

Creation

To create or rebuild a part one other part has to be present. While the building of a completely new part needs another part to be continuously connected to the new part being built, rebuilding a part offers a little more freedom in that regard. 

To rebuild a part doesn't take as long as building a new one but it is still a lengthy process. 

The time it takes to build a part is dependent on: 



• How many other parts are already present? The time required grows exponentially with each part. 
• How long has it been since that part has been built/ has been rebuilt? And how old is the wizard themselves? The more memory has to be restored the longer it naturally takes. 

Factores like who is doing the building and where play minor roll, as skilled soulturner can hasten the process to an extend by taking shortcuts and manipulating the way memories are restored, leaving more of it in passive memory instead of restoring it to active memory, but fundamentally, the main amount of time is spend for the part to grow their consciousness and to catch up with the whole of them.  

The chambers of time are used primarily for important cases, especially for warrior parts that hold high positions in the Order. However, every wizard, in theory, can use them to rebuild their own parts without losing too much time. Use of the chambers has to be requested and can be denied however with no reason given (happens these days especially due to exceeded capacity). 

Parts are usually built by a wizard's soulturner. Many wizards learn to at least be able to rebuild their parts without the need for assistance, though it is always preferable to have separated oversight over the process. While there isn’t much risk of things going wrong when merely rebuilding a part, at least concerning the mind, the art of weaving izthra is a skill usually exclusively reserved to Soulturners and Archmages.

Personality

A wizard's parts all share the same personality traits of the wizard. However, to avoid the Carkevik effect, every part is designed carefully to express these traits and facets at different degrees. 

A wizards may be curious by nature, this means every part of him will be curious, however, it is not at all unusual to have that trait expressed very strongly in one part, for example a Scholar who is supposed to study and experiment, or a Warrior who is to investigate things, but very subdued in a Keeper that is only focused on dealing with logistics. 



The differences in how these traits are expressed are usually more pronounced in younger wizards than they are in older wizards as parts over time slowly start to settle into a more uniform external way of expression, handling situations as a whole whenever possible, instead of as facing them as separate parts.

If one part says they love something and another says they hate it, one of them is lying. 

A part's personality can not, unlike their appearance, be changed once they have been awoken for the first time. Doing so will either break the wizard in question or in the best case simply create another separate part.  

Example: A wizard if two rebuilds one part of themselves that used to be very quiet to be more assertive and changes the part’s configuration before rebuilding it. Once he does awaken this part he is now a wizard of three. He has created a new part and not rebuilt the one he wanted to. 

Consequently, the creation of new parts is a delicate matter. And major flaws will be permanent.

Emotions

Emotions are not shared between parts, just memories of the emotion. These memories can and often will cause the same emotion to be caused within other parts as well, but it is not one part's emotion being transferred to another. 



However, there is a form of deep connection between individual parts that is not directly emotional, but deeper. Moments of extreme emotional states can ripple through other parts even before the corresponding memories have synchronized. It is akin to the way each part will immediately know if any other part has died. 

This form of sensation always happens, whether or not the parts are connected or not.

Cohesion

Wizards, especially younger wizards, can experience some disharmonies amongst their parts. This usually occurs if there are internal conflicts over certain decisions (for example, a part expressing compassion more strongly than another). The cause for this is usually a wizard who does not quite know yet who he really is. 

At critical internal conflict it can come to dissociation, where one part, temporarily, may refer to the other parts of himself like they are someone else.

This level of internal conflict is almost impossibly rare for many older wizards who have long figured out exactly who they are and what they will do in any given situation.

Memories

Memories are constantly synchronised across all parts of a wizard. They are managed and archived accordingly during "sleep". 

Every part can remember every other part, however, there is a difference between active and passive memories. Active memories are the memories a part himself is experiencing. These memories are immediately available at all times unless they are deliberately archived. 

Passive memories are those of other parts. These memories are quickly accessed if these parts are present, however, if the part that has experienced these memories is temporarily unavailable (by disconnection or death) and these memories have not actively been witnessed by the part trying to remember them, it takes time to find these memories. It is perfectly possible for a wizard's part to have memories they aren't even actively aware of until made aware of it. 

Example: A Keeper may scan through a set of foreign language dictionaries while the Scholar is asleep or otherwise preoccupied and not actively watching the Keeper. If the Keeper then becomes unavailable, the Scholar will not intuitively know that they have already read these foreign language dictionaries. However, if they are prompted to think about it in any way, they will then find out that indeed they already have. 

The access to passive memories is relatively slow since these memories are generally heavily compressed to act as backup to restore any lost part if they should die. Every part stores the build details of every other part. 



Starting with three parts, there is the danger of severe memory loss and corruption in case of losing more than 50% of a wizard’s parts, due to the way memories are saved and the extreme compression of passive memories. Once over 50% is lost, the passive memories can no longer be restored sufficiently into the active memories of the lost parts. A wizard of four who loses three parts of himself is most likely going to break down completely, unable to function properly anymore, even carrying a chance of personality degradation, forgetting who they are.

Impressions

There seems to be a form of memory retention even if two parts are separated from each other. How or why this happens is not yet fully understood by Mezhinhar.

Appearance

Parts of a wizard don’t have to look anything alike in any way. It is common for many wizards to have a preferred “shape”, which not rarely aligns with the face and body given initially by their soulturner (if they get used to that appearance and consider it part of their identity). 

Many envoys however very frequently change their appearance. 

While superficial aspect (like skin, hair, eye color etc.) can be changed pretty much changed on the fly, larger structural changes can only be made when rebuilding a part (height, build, etc) 

Not having a uniform appearance can heighten the risk for young wizards to develop a sense of dissociation to their individual parts. Wizards can have very distinct sensations of not being “them” or “right” if they fail to connect their appearance to their bodies. Fortunately this is usually easily fixed.  Though there are some fully dedicated Envoys that struggle more than they should to remember who they actually are at times.

Carkevik Effect

Also called "Double Parting". This error occurs if the same part, with the exact same base settings and variables,is built and awoken twice while being connected to both. 

Since wizards have an intuitive sense of knowing whether or not any other part is still alive or not, double parting usually doesn't happen by accident anymore. 



A wizard can build the same part twice, even have the same part active and awake at the same time as long as they are not connected at the same time. However, this causes a strong sense of disorientation and overlapping memories, as every time one would connect to the other part again, cutting the duplicate off, the memories of that part would overlap those of the double, causing corrupted memories. 

The Carkevik effect happens immediately if the two parts are connected at the same time. It renders the entire wizard non functional in a state of error, the moment the memories try to synchronise. It is named after Lord Wizard Carkevik who was the first to learn of this effect the hard way when they first started building parts.