THE BUYING OF INDULGENCES AND THE LESS

The poor, the regular folks. The 3rd Estate. At the end of all this is the common folk, who have no property, who have no cash reserves, but require spirit energy (elan) to enter Heck City, basically, just to sleep. But they require it for lots of other things too, since it functions as credit funds. Primarily, they buy indulgences to get their family and relatives out of the Cauldron sooner. But without assets, they take on debt to do all this, and doom themselves to a miserable afterlife. When they die, their own relatives must go into debt to get them out, etc.

It creates an ever growing ball of debt, but at the same time an ever growing ball of psychic energy and power, concentrated ever upward into the hands of the elite who control the various schools, seer collectives, and clubs, who battle amongst themselves for supremacy.

Many of them frequently get into situations where they simply cannot afford to sleep, because sleeping requires elan to dream, energy to enter Heck City. They do not physically tire too easily thanks to the enhanced gifts afforded by the symbiotic parasite inside them, but they still have to experience REM sleep to feel rested, and it is not uncommon for someone to rack up too much debt and be unable to get enough to sleep. So while legions of people all enter Heck City at the same time, all go to bed at the same time (in the domes, artificial suns rise and set at roughly the same time all over the planet, roughly synchronized, like trains), there is a sizeable group in any population who don't sleep and remain active at night. Being desperately poor, drug addicted etc, they can be extremely dangerous and predatory. As a class, they are referred to as The Less.

The less also comprise the bulk of the animal ecosystem. They're meat, (leading heaven to conclude that the Damned have degenerated to canibalism), they're fish. In fact, your economic strata usually determines what kind of animal you'll be. The rich become birds, the least of the less become pigs, or some other harvested, domesticated animal.

A lot of the time what can happen is that the person didn't pay the full deposit on their manumission, hoping to get the rest of the money together before they die, but wanting to put something down so they don't lose their choice of creature. If the money exchange is not complete, when they die and try to change what can happen is they don't complete, leaving them malformed and twisted. Half horse people, half pigs with hooves, half bird, half fish. Sometimes it works out enough that they can survive to live independently, but more often they become crippled. A poor family will have to take on the care of their half-imago relative until he finally dies again.