Gotta love Daryla constantly putting herself in danger to help Lola control and refine her powers.
*skip a year and a half*
I also don't understand watching sportsball. Certainly my weakest pub quiz topic. Bread & Circuses, of course, goes back to the Romans, if not millenia before. Unfortunately, I think it's a symptom of a primate biological need to have an *other* to fight. Remember, civilization is all about *not* caving into instinct - not taking someone else's thing because you want it, not assaulting someone because they said something stupid or are sexual my desirable, etc. Think it was Margaret Mead who noted the most significant archaeological find was that earlier body found with a previously-broken leg - because that meant the person was helped and cared for while healing, not abandoned to die...
Some are better than others at civilized behavior - what we can sum up as *impulse control*.
While Lola has some knowledge of astronomy it obviously wasn't her best subject. While it's still a mystery how Kaenamor "ate" ALL the ambient and radiated energy from a couple of stars, nothing says that was millions of light years of energy. Kaenamor might have siphoned Palinor's equivalent of Alpha Centauri - which is "only" about four light years away. Palinor could have even had a small/dim dwarf star less than a light year away. It's possible there was something barely big enough to become a star (note: Jupiter has everything needed to be a star except enough mass to collapse and fuse, and it's only about 8 light hours away) within the same system. Something which didn't "instantly go out," but was close enough to be consumed in a single burst and where it's light would have all passed Palinor in a night. Or, it WAS something millions of years away! Who knows?
While your magic has a "scientific" structure with rules and service to things like conservation of energy, it's still breaking physics with one's mind. Assuming Lola's "liquifactiin" of tree stump and ground was some sort of forcing molecules apart (I used to teach a class on states of matter, and one demonstration was putting the small chunk of dry ice into a balloon, tying it shut, and noting at the end of class how sublimation of solid to gas spaced out the molecules and blew up the balloon, so we're talking physics I literally taught 6 year old here) doing such a large amount so quickly would require *far* more energy than ambient noonday sun in summer.
In fact, those numbers are available with five seconds on Google. Sunlight, at sea level, on a bright, cloudless day yields about 1000W/square meter. A human has roughly 2sqm of skin surface area. We'll account for Lola being small, clothed, and partly shadowed and say 50% of her skin is exposed, assume magic conversions is 100% efficient, and that gives her 1000w of energy to draw from.
Which we can compare to a microwave oven.
So we'll take an ice cube, toss it in the microwave and melt it - takes a bit over 30 seconds. For Lola to liquify a tree stump and square meters of ground in a few seconds she's outputting far more energy than she's taking in. Because it's magic and still breaking the laws of physics.
Of course speeding up molecules involves *heat* and one might expect other bleed of EM radiation. That's not happening, so we're seeing through some unknown (it's magic) process a wielder can generate orders of magnitude more output work from their input energy.
All of which circles around to, "if Kaenamor *ate* two stars to make the portals, we'll just consider it lucky he didn't vaporize the entire system and send out an energy wave which destroyed nearby star systems, because what he generated was probably a pulse of energy similar in scale to the most powerful thing our science has discovered - a black hole generating a gamma wave burst."
Addendum - my microwave analogy is bad, because a microwave isn't 100% energy efficient. So I worked in Joules.
Converting Watts to Joules is a simple equation J=WxT where T is Time-in-seconds.
Yay for online calculators!
56,500 J to heat a cup of "room temp" (20C/68F) water to boiling. Again, giving Lola 1000w of power as baseline, it should take her 56.5 seconds to boil a cup of tea. So, if you had a wielder hold a cup of tea and boil it in, say, five seconds, then, yes, that's an order of magnitude greater output work than input energy.
It's 630am. My OCD/autistic tendencies can please STOP thinking about energy conversions in your magic system and accept that you've come up with something self consistent, internally logical, with understandable rules, but that still cheerfully violates physics because IT'S MAGIC?!
So I decide to wind down with a another chapter or two of the Brandon Sanderson quadrilogy I'm on the final book of... And the damn plot takes a turn into matter-energy conversion with "God Metals," and now I have to accept I'll probably be dreaming of power ratios in magic systems, and it's very annoying.
This is what I get for not finishing my TTRPG notes of all the ways Battle Born powered armor works improperly underwater - tip: don't try to fire plasma weapons. That will just blow up your own gun. The smartest move for the PCs will be to try to all get grabbed by the kraken at the same time and everyone activate power generation (electrify the Suit), and internal baffling (pressurize interior of suit for protection against crushing damage). I'm hoping/assuming the party won't immediately figure that out.
Yeah, I didn't wan to call it out exactly, but Daryla putting herself forward like this is, as you note, a big deal. That's some dedication right there.
As for your science observations: I feel like getting too deep into any of this is only going to dig myself very, very big holes. :D
Gotta love Daryla constantly putting herself in danger to help Lola control and refine her powers.
*skip a year and a half*
I also don't understand watching sportsball. Certainly my weakest pub quiz topic. Bread & Circuses, of course, goes back to the Romans, if not millenia before. Unfortunately, I think it's a symptom of a primate biological need to have an *other* to fight. Remember, civilization is all about *not* caving into instinct - not taking someone else's thing because you want it, not assaulting someone because they said something stupid or are sexual my desirable, etc. Think it was Margaret Mead who noted the most significant archaeological find was that earlier body found with a previously-broken leg - because that meant the person was helped and cared for while healing, not abandoned to die...
Some are better than others at civilized behavior - what we can sum up as *impulse control*.
While Lola has some knowledge of astronomy it obviously wasn't her best subject. While it's still a mystery how Kaenamor "ate" ALL the ambient and radiated energy from a couple of stars, nothing says that was millions of light years of energy. Kaenamor might have siphoned Palinor's equivalent of Alpha Centauri - which is "only" about four light years away. Palinor could have even had a small/dim dwarf star less than a light year away. It's possible there was something barely big enough to become a star (note: Jupiter has everything needed to be a star except enough mass to collapse and fuse, and it's only about 8 light hours away) within the same system. Something which didn't "instantly go out," but was close enough to be consumed in a single burst and where it's light would have all passed Palinor in a night. Or, it WAS something millions of years away! Who knows?
While your magic has a "scientific" structure with rules and service to things like conservation of energy, it's still breaking physics with one's mind. Assuming Lola's "liquifactiin" of tree stump and ground was some sort of forcing molecules apart (I used to teach a class on states of matter, and one demonstration was putting the small chunk of dry ice into a balloon, tying it shut, and noting at the end of class how sublimation of solid to gas spaced out the molecules and blew up the balloon, so we're talking physics I literally taught 6 year old here) doing such a large amount so quickly would require *far* more energy than ambient noonday sun in summer.
In fact, those numbers are available with five seconds on Google. Sunlight, at sea level, on a bright, cloudless day yields about 1000W/square meter. A human has roughly 2sqm of skin surface area. We'll account for Lola being small, clothed, and partly shadowed and say 50% of her skin is exposed, assume magic conversions is 100% efficient, and that gives her 1000w of energy to draw from.
Which we can compare to a microwave oven.
So we'll take an ice cube, toss it in the microwave and melt it - takes a bit over 30 seconds. For Lola to liquify a tree stump and square meters of ground in a few seconds she's outputting far more energy than she's taking in. Because it's magic and still breaking the laws of physics.
Of course speeding up molecules involves *heat* and one might expect other bleed of EM radiation. That's not happening, so we're seeing through some unknown (it's magic) process a wielder can generate orders of magnitude more output work from their input energy.
All of which circles around to, "if Kaenamor *ate* two stars to make the portals, we'll just consider it lucky he didn't vaporize the entire system and send out an energy wave which destroyed nearby star systems, because what he generated was probably a pulse of energy similar in scale to the most powerful thing our science has discovered - a black hole generating a gamma wave burst."
Damn.
Addendum - my microwave analogy is bad, because a microwave isn't 100% energy efficient. So I worked in Joules.
Converting Watts to Joules is a simple equation J=WxT where T is Time-in-seconds.
Yay for online calculators!
56,500 J to heat a cup of "room temp" (20C/68F) water to boiling. Again, giving Lola 1000w of power as baseline, it should take her 56.5 seconds to boil a cup of tea. So, if you had a wielder hold a cup of tea and boil it in, say, five seconds, then, yes, that's an order of magnitude greater output work than input energy.
It's 630am. My OCD/autistic tendencies can please STOP thinking about energy conversions in your magic system and accept that you've come up with something self consistent, internally logical, with understandable rules, but that still cheerfully violates physics because IT'S MAGIC?!
Addendum to the addendum:
So I decide to wind down with a another chapter or two of the Brandon Sanderson quadrilogy I'm on the final book of... And the damn plot takes a turn into matter-energy conversion with "God Metals," and now I have to accept I'll probably be dreaming of power ratios in magic systems, and it's very annoying.
This is what I get for not finishing my TTRPG notes of all the ways Battle Born powered armor works improperly underwater - tip: don't try to fire plasma weapons. That will just blow up your own gun. The smartest move for the PCs will be to try to all get grabbed by the kraken at the same time and everyone activate power generation (electrify the Suit), and internal baffling (pressurize interior of suit for protection against crushing damage). I'm hoping/assuming the party won't immediately figure that out.
Yeah, I didn't wan to call it out exactly, but Daryla putting herself forward like this is, as you note, a big deal. That's some dedication right there.
As for your science observations: I feel like getting too deep into any of this is only going to dig myself very, very big holes. :D
Main thing: MAGIC!
You spent 20+ hours on MetaHuman creating a close approximation of your character as a form of procrastinating writing, too?!
Haha, quite. Though I did it a couple of years ago, so it's pretty easy to jump back in to grab a different angle/expression now. :)
Same--it was my pandemic project. 🤣