I threw myself into the study of the soul transfer machine. Meva documented everything in a secret journal (Undisclosed location. Trust me, don’t even bother trying). When I first turned the machine on, we could feel it drawing power from the surrounding environment. If we used it too often, the surrounding trees would droop from exhaustion and the grass would lose its color. Though we didn't feel anything, it was my suspicion that the soul transfer machine could even be drawing its power from Meva and I.
With the use of some handmade baskets and some string, I was able to trap small spirds on which to experiment. We always had a few in cages along the back wall of our cabin, and took them outside when weather permitted. The first specimen I caught was an adult spird that looked healthy. We called him "Specimen A". I put him in one of the transfer machine’s claws, and had the other claw touching a rock. This was to emulate my first experience in the blank mines when I touched the purple fuzz-ball and went into the mountain.
I pushed the button to power the device, and it began to hum. Then, with a flip of a switch, Specimen A went suddenly limp, and the soul transfer machine cut its own power. Meva pushed her fingers through Specimen A’s feathers, feeling for a pulse. But there was none to be found.
We inspected the rock. I picked it up and held it up to my face. It was cooler than room temperature, but there were no visible signs that anything was different.
"If you are in there, little spird, hold on tight and we will bring you back to your body!" I said.
The claw of the machine was, once again, attached to the rock. The claw on Specimen A remained and we turned the machine on. With a flip of the switch, the spird sprang back to life. It's head snapped up, and it's feet clenched. We kept Speciman A in a cage just long enough to make sure there were no lasting side effects. Later that spring, we set Specimen A loose, and he built a nest in a tree that grew from what used to be our circular field.
It was not clear exactly what happened in the event of soul transfer. We were not sure if the soul got extracted from the body, and that caused the heart to stop, or if the soul transfer stopped the body’s heart, which released the soul to be transferred.
Meva and I spent many weeks trying to come up with an experiment that would give us clear results to our hypothesis.
Many other experiments were conducted, most of them mundane. I will not bore you with the details, but I will bore you with the results. We found that most living bodies could go without a soul for some amount of time. It may only be a few seconds, but none of the bodies could survive without a soul for longer than two minutes under normal room conditions. We tried a soul transfer in the winter on a hibernating hamstel, and its body survived after four minutes without a soul, but most did not survive that long of an ordeal. There were problems with the bodies we were using in that the stopped heart removed the ability to deliver oxygen to the subject’s brain. So some soul transfers were successful, but the brain damage of the body was often so great that the spird was incapable of flight, had no memory, or died some time later. We hated being the cause of these spird’s deaths, so we tried to return their souls to their bodies within two minutes.