7 Times Rejoined and Legacy Players

[YianKutku]

I've been wondering about this and related topics as well. The obvious question is how a soul rejoining works: given that the Calamity apparently means everyone's souls on the Source got rejoined, and yet nobody mentioned feeling weird during that time five years ago. Specifically non-Eorzeans, whose interaction with the Calamity is mostly "the red moon descended then disappeared, and then lots of traumatized Eorzeans started showing up". (For Eorzeans, presumably the sheer terror of the Calamity plus whatever aether shenanigans caused the post-Calamity amnesia might be suitable handwaves.) Even as a non-Legacy player, we are clearly not merely five years old, so there should be some mechanism by which a soul can be grafted onto an existing one without the existing soul even noticing, as opposed to the lightshow when we joined with Ardbert.

And the other question, which you brought up, is how long each Calamity lasts, in cosmic terms. What is the "start" of the Calamity, and when does it "end"? It's likely that cosmologically, the Calamity "starts" when the barrier to the Shard breaks down and an uncontrolled aether transfer phenomenon occurs, but what does that mean in the case of the Seventh Calamity? Was it just during the very short period of Bahamut's rampage? Or did it start earlier, when Dalamud was in the process of falling? Both are possible due to time shenanigans between Source and Shard, but we don't know which case it is.

[Lukha]

and yet nobody mentioned feeling weird during that time five years ago.

Don't they? Early on in ARR when you first visit the Waking Sands, I remember at least one of the minor NPCs there complaining about having muddled or conflicting memories (Una Tayuun, I think?).

Though we don't really know what a rejoining would feel like, or if it would feel like anything at all. Maybe a regular person with average sensitivity to aether wouldn't even notice, but someone with high sensitivity would? Or the extra aether wouldn't even register for Eorzeans, given that we were told in the opening of ARR that there's so much ambient aether there that it sometimes makes foreigners ill when they first arrive (though I don't recall that ever coming up again, several rounds of foreigners arriving in Eorzea later...)? Maybe you just wake up one morning feeling better than normal, and just chalk it up to 'waking up on the right side of the bed'.

[YianKutku]

Don't they? Early on in ARR when you first visit the Waking Sands, I remember at least one of the minor NPCs there complaining about having muddled or conflicting memories (Una Tayuun, I think?).

Though we don't really know what a rejoining would feel like, or if it would feel like anything at all. Maybe a regular person with average sensitivity to aether wouldn't even notice, but someone with high sensitivity would? Or the extra aether wouldn't even register for Eorzeans, given that we were told in the opening of ARR that there's so much ambient aether there that it sometimes makes foreigners ill when they first arrive (though I don't recall that ever coming up again, several rounds of foreigners arriving in Eorzea later...)? Maybe you just wake up one morning feeling better than normal, and just chalk it up to 'waking up on the right side of the bed'.

Yeah, Una Tayuun was a former member of the Path of the Twelve, and so I think implied (or stated outright) to have the Echo. It's implied that her memory issues are due to the magical shenanigans involved in Louisoix's spells at Carteneau, which don't actually have any lore precedent other than "it was convenient for the plot", so I don't know if it's meant to be a major plot point for the future.

But mostly I was going off the short story with Alphinaud and Alisaie, where they only really reacted to watching Dalamud "disappear", and didn't feel anything other than regular emotions relevant to that event (joy at Dalamud's fall apparently being stopped, anxiety that something was still wrong). Only later, with Urianger's report and Eorzean refugees, did they learn that it was pretty much an actual Calamity.

The memory loss thing seemed to affect mostly only people at Carteneau, and some (apparently) random Eorzeans elsewhere, mostly determined by whether they had plot relevance either in 1.0 or ARR. (Can't be due to Echo shenanigans, given neither Arenvald nor Krile mentioned anything.) Which seems rather limited for the dev-stated case that everyone on the Source got a soul rejoining.

So I'm leaning more and more to the belief that if soul rejoining had any physical or mental effect, it probably was subtle enough to be drowned out by the general panic of "help we're in the middle of a Calamity".

Which brings to mind another question: what happened to the souls of everyone stuck inside Syrcus Tower after the Fourth Calamity?