Alright, so, the zinc is an anode & therefore wants an electron- when it acquires one, it tells its fellow zinc atoms to pound salt and floats off into the water as a zinc-hydroxide.
If such a mechanism could be used with spirit energy- and that's the big if,
Beryllium.
Rare because it's usually consumed in the star it's forged in (atomic number of only 4), & it's a component in
Beryl, a base of several gemstones (notably Emeralds), but it isn't responsible for the color of the gem.
To make the studs, you've gotta take the garbage/castoff bits of Beryl gemstones, grindmup, & then re-compress them into the shape you need.
If you're fuckin fancy though, you'll use
Goshenite crystals.
Options for magic saturation:
A. The Beryl flakes/gases off as a new beryllium-magic alloy
B. The Beryl changes color, depending on the type of magic absorbed. Especially cool/useful with the solid goshenite crystals.
The gem value of goshenite is relatively low. However, goshenite can be colored yellow, green, pink, blue and in intermediate colors by irradiating it with high-energy particles. The resulting color depends on the content of Ca, Sc, Ti, V, Fe, and Co impurities.
One idea for those crystals.I'm thinking both. If it's no longer trapped in a crystal matrix, the Beryl/Goshenite just escapes as a gas.
This is important, as seating the goshenite in an enchanted object directly would just impair the object's functioning until the stud is saturated. (Wouldn't stop the functioning as that would be OP- limiting the inflow this way still allows functional stoppage with enough Beryl, but drastically increases the amount of effort to do so)
So instead you have to seat it in non-reactive/insulating metals. Better yet, in the case of goshenite crystals, seat the crystals inside of a shaped Beryl stud inside of a non-reactive setting. If the crystal takes a heavy-enough magical blow to saturate it, (as the charge would be distributed amongst the entire Beryl stud), the crushed&shaped part of the stud gasses off all at once and the solid crystal is left to fall out of the over-sized setting, protecting the user from accidental discharge upon blocking a physical attack.
Further, let's set the absorption to an exponent of the crystal's volume. So a speck holds hardly anything, a cubic inch would hold 6-8 medium fireballs, an epic 6-cubic-inch gem would hold thousands of middling spells or perhaps a few wizard-level castings.
Justify this as energy trying to crowd around the beryllium. In a small structure, there's hardly anything keeping the Be from reacting & flying off. But as the crystal gets larger, it wants to hold itself together more, and so more energy has to be lined up & jockeying for the Be before it can be wrestled free.
Problem arises: then the crystals would sublimate as well.
Trick to get around that: as the beryllium fills up, it gets more & more volatile. Smaller crystals can't cope quite so well, so for small arrays they'll wind up busting at ~85% saturation. The efficiency ramps up quick, so by the time they're rice-sized they're up to 95%. This way grain coarseness is important and small bits always go poof before large bits hmm
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So, if you're a wizard & you've got a stupid-large gem (let's say a cubic meter), using egg-size collection arrays to squeeze out that last tenth of a % can be a 100-billion-wizard-spells difference.
Different grits also serve as measures of total % absorbed of course, so each time an array is hit it'll off-gas at least a little of the fine powdery bits that make up the setting.
It's also very possible for the rice-sized bits to survive along with the large crystal if the threshold is just barely reached & the smaller pieces sublimate away.
How to make a stud that can absorb at least one middling spell?
If pressed & held together, goshenite forms a sort of psuedo-lattice that provides marginal absorptive capabilities. Different shapes are better, flaws detract from the total to some degree, but it gets a roughly 1:1 ratio of storage capacity to how much of the shape is realized. So a triangle is worth half a rhombus.
Best shape is the hexagonal prism, the natural shape of Goshenite.
For small pressed shapes, they hold up to 1/2 the charge a genuine crystal could, and the potential falls off rapidly.
Where crystals have an equation like... 1.25x
4, the pressed shapes are (5x)
1/2.
The world is filled with MILF, why haven't the gems all sublimated?I do not know.It's just too low-level to sublimate anything but pure Beryllium metal & single-molecule powder. Like voltage or something.
Strange behaviors of beryl/goshenite:
Affinity to magic, accounts for absorbing the spirit energy.
Affinity to itself, accounts for gems redistributing their energy according to their individual needs. Each individual particle fills according to its % total.
Hmm
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Magical Psuedo-lattices.
I'm not done tinkering with this, rewrote it a couple times, but gotta sleep.Merp.
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Topic: Adventuring Party OOC Thread - Adventures in Hiatus (Read 274001 times)