CLOK BBS

Yes this is a serious suggestion! The weather is freezing, and it would be great to provide a way to help others warm up. So my suggestion is based on a vibration pattern to heat the water, you create a small body of warm water that people can go into to warm up! It would just be a simple sphere suspended in the air so they would have to have swimming skill to go into it and stay in it I guess. Or we can say the center of the sphere is at ground level and the area of the sphere below ground level just doesn't fill in since you can't displace the matter there, so you have a hemisphere of warm water above ground that people can just walk into.

This would require channeling to maintain the sphere so it would be tiring. But it could potentially safe a life of someone freezing to death, and plus it would just be really cool to be able to do.

Have the option of using it without vibration pattern to make a regular, not warm, portable swimming pool. Because a portable swimming pool would just be awesome. Base it on the spherical shield pattern except this one is filled in.

You'd have to dry them off pretty quick when they got out. Being wet in the cold makes you lose energy faster. Cool idea though =)

Elemancers can dry people off with the AID verb, so that won't be a problem!

You're obsessed with water globes!

There's so much potential for water globes!

Here's another one, as I was walking with a poor freezing Nuum woman across the wilderness. It's similar to the hot spring spell. It combines hydro-vibration to create warm mist, and the shield pattern, or something similar to it. Just generate a large sphere of warm mist (not scalding steam, we don't want to burn people) centered on yourself like the shield pattern, and voila! Your party is kept warm!

And then the mist cools as the heat rapidly drains away, freezes around you and... Well, I trust I don't need to draw you a picture.

I think that poses an interesting elemancer lore question for me. The elements are supposed to dissipate rather quickly unless they "bond" with something (cloth, soil, etc). If water freezes it undergoes a change of state, but no other chemical change, however it has interacted with the "coldness" of the world. Is it therefore bonded and permanent? Or not so much? If it is stabilized by freezing, would be become unstable and dissipate again once thawed?

Isiaa: I'll argue against that. Take pyromancy as an example: Does the fire just burn itself out a plit second after it's conjured? No, because as an elemancer you are channeling to keep the fire's form. You don't stop maintaining the conjuration's form after you've initially conjured it, you are constantly maintining the form while you're channeling. One you stop, the conjuration dissipates. With a theoretical warm mist globe (yes Rias, another globe!), you have conjured it with the hydro-vibration pattern incorporated, so your conjuration is specifically that of warm mist, and even as the cold around it might cool it off and briefly freeze it, your active channeling retains the vibration and therefore the warmth. It would freeze after you stopped maintaining its pattern, except that it would just dissolve after active channeling anyway because that's what conjured elements do.

Qinweiqi: I think that would defeat the purpose of the Conjuration Dissipation Principle. A major point of that concept is so that people can't make their own mountains with geomancy and stuff like that, right? So if we say that freezing conjured water causes it to remain after channeling, what's to stop me from for instance, making my own ice castle? The GMs have stated they don't want stuff like that to be possible with elemancy. My theory, like what I stated above, would be that the water would resist freezing anyway, since it's conjured *and maintained* with the pattern of liquid water. Maybe it would freeze temporarily if the severity of the cold was enough, but the way I imagine it, the molecules would, because of the elemancer's active channeling, resist the freezing and vibrate enough to return back to a liquid state quickly. And lastly, cold is a temperature, not physical matter to which conjured matter can bond.

I see Elemancy as hacking natural laws. Normal water would freeze in cold conditions, nobody is telling it to do otherwise. With conjured water, the water particles continue to vibrate in order to maintain their liquid state, because the elemancer is telling them to and expending his own energy to do so. The elamancer doesn't conjure water and let the water act naturally from that point. The elemancer conjures watter in a very specific pattern, and channels his energy into maintaining that specific pattern despite what natural laws would otherwise have it change to. That's my theory on why you have to keep channeling in order to maintain conjured elements. You're constantly maintaining that pattern, and even as its environment causes it to change, your channeling is constantly causing it to go back to the way you conjured it before the environment can have any notable affect.

By that same logic, Orris, couldn't an aeromancer just as easily conjure warm air? I would expect pyromancy would be necessary to maintain the heat, based on the existence of cryomancy.

With the right patterns, yes! I'm not an aeromancer though, I'm a hydromancer, so that's why most of my ideas are based on water.

Does conjuration break the laws of conservation of energy? It was my understanding that a conjurer must release an amount of energy that is equal to the energy being used by their conjuration. Is this correct? I would assume they're not creating energy... but could be entirely wrong.

I only ask this because a heating a sphere of mist or water large enough to fit a group into (in otherwise freezing temperatures) for a sustained period (long enough to warm up) might require more significant energy expenditures than the body of an elemancer would be able to handle.

Acarin wrote:Does conjuration break the laws of conservation of energy?

Hehe, I love that question. I haven't the slightest clue, but reading it made me think, "Well, how much energy does it take to create water?"

I was thinking for maintaining vibrational energy alone and not for creating the matter itself. I assume it does not break the laws of conservation of matter by utilizing massive quantum fluctuations (not that this is possible, but short of pulling the matter from somewhere else this is the only explanation I can come up with).

Quantum fluctuations would also explain why the matter ceases to exist once the channel ends. It is actually "virtual" matter that has been given enough energy to temporarily come into existence. When it loses energy and cannot steal from something else, poof! I think this explains elemancy quite well. Even the patterns they use may just be probability matrices controlled by something analogous to diffraction slits (a very simplistic example). Any sufficiently explained magic...

Rias, want me to write "Quantum mechanics and principles of elemancy" as a textbook for sale in the University? Elemancers don't get enough physics.

Oh that would be marvelous! If I were an elemancer, I'd buy it.

Well, I think this is a major breakthrough in understanding the principles of elemancy. I'd like to publish it before I get scooped.

Please do.