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Emiko looked around the new research outpost. It was fairly small by Starlight's standards but it could be expanded later if necessary. The station was a mere 2 kilometers in diameter and only the same amount wide making for an inner surface of about 12 square kilometers. For now it was mostly park land and some small farms. There was constant soft illumination through the transparent siding of the station's outer ring from the silver mist outside and fusion powered lights provided brighter illumination on a daily cycle. The strange mist didn't seem to be affected by gravity and was close to uniform in every direction they'd sent probes out for at least a few million kilometers. A magecrafter had come through and determined that the mist was probably harmless but none of them were currently available for follow-up tests so at least for now the team here would be relying on resonators and good old-fashioned physics.
"So the temperature won't change even though the state of matter does? I wonder if your sort of matter emits black body radiation." She runs a spectrographic scan. She also gets out a conductive thermometer and places it on the ice.
When 'Elemental Fire' is applied to them, they also begin to glow in a similar way. However, it does not follow the same curves for different wavelengths of light.
Griffie's matter emits something like blackbody radiation, but following different curves. It doesn't emit normal blackbody radiation at all. Furthermore, the light-emitting bit of Griffie's necklace mimics the visual-only component of the sort of glow you'd expect a hot object of Griffie's matter to emit.
Does the temperature measured by the thermometer or the light detected by the spectrograph change when Riley turns off the Earth field?
They do not change.
"Hmm, I wonder whether this could have useful applications for cooling systems. I think the water got cooler when I removed the fire field. In general the way phase shifts work seems really different. Hmm, I think the next test should be seeing if the water freezes again if I turn on both fields." She does that.
"Being able to turn the fire field off would be a good basis for a cooling system in my world if you could do it in an energy-efficient way, but when the fire field is already present it's pretty expensive to suppress it."
When the Earth and Fire fields are reintroduced to the Fire-less water sample, it freezes solid.
"That does seem like a potentially useful idea. Are there any other tests you'd suggest?" While she's waiting for an answer Riley tries to determine the rate of heat conduction from atomic matter to four-element matter.
Heat has to transform into Elemental Fire before it can heat four-element matter. This is technically possible, as Elemental Fire is very suggestible, but it’s very slow.
"I can't think of other cheap experiments off the top of my head, but I'm not an alchemist and I don't have experience working with field-suppression sorts of effects either."
"It seems like heat transfer from my matter to yours is too slow to be useful in most applications. It might still be worthwhile in edge cases where there isn't a safe place to radiate the heat to. Do you know what happens to metal without an Earth field? I wonder if it would dissolve or melt. If it melts that sounds like a very useful thing potentially."
"Oh, that does make sense. I guess the instant melting and rapid freezing can't really be applied to much else then, it would only work for things made of pure water or maybe a combination of water and air."
"That seems likely? It's pretty energy-intensive to suppress an extant elemental field, though, so nobody would really consider detailed investigations there to be practical enough for them to make it into the knowledge base I'm familiar with."
"That just makes me want to fiddle with it more, but it's not quite my job at the moment. Hmm, based on these tests I think all the big risks with your world are probably associated with the behavior of divine beings which is hard to test. Is there a good way to test that at all? Also is divine magic a separate thing at all? Also do you agree with that supposition?"
"Evil gods are the biggest risk that I can hope to approximately quantify. There's weirder and less well-documented stuff, like whoever or whatever it was that noticed that total divine warfare was annoying them and successfully forced a ceasefire. Speculated to be weird creatures living below the waters of the ocean who hate the gods and like bioengineering. But I digress. Divine magic usually refers to the magic that gods and nature give mort- regular people like myself. It’s similar to arcane magic, which you can learn with study, but it’s better at healing and worse at explosions. You could try quintessence study which would be necessary but not sufficient, gods are made of it and run on it and cutting it off or messing with it can be relevant to killing them. But accomplishing anything in the midst of total divine warfare is … not the sort of knowledge anyone sane would trust me with, I’m good at mental self-defense but not that good.”
"Yeah, that's basically our concern, I was asked here to determine whether it would be safe to let you travel and there's two parts to that. One part is figuring out what you need to live and the other part is figuring out whether providing that is extending an invitation for your scarier beings to follow you."