Everyone loves glowy gemstones

[Gagylpus he/him]

So the world I'm creating has an elemental magic system that is fairly typical. In a nutshell, the magic is an innate, hereditary power giving the user the ability to perceive, manipulate, create, or destroy one of the world's eight major elements: Fire, Earth, Life, Water, Air, Spirit, Light, and Dark. At a glance it resembles a cross between elemental bending in Avatar and channelling in the Wheel of Time. (I might make a post discussing the system in detail at some point, but for now it's only relevant that it exists.)
 
But I really liked the idea of a scientific or mechanical way to access magic that we see in Roshar's fabrials, and that is hinted to exist in southern Scadrial. So I started thinking about how something like that would work in my world, and this is what I came up with.
 
The basic premise is in utilizing elemental energy stored in gemstones (which obviously must glow when they are charged) by imbuing the energy into geometric symbols which have (more or less arbitrary) spiritual connections to the different effects the energy can produce. Now, don't look at me like that. Sanderson isn't the first author to use gemstones as magic batteries. The magic system I'm developing here is not a blatant rip-off of fabrials. It only looks that way.  I'm interested in what kinds of technology you, my friends, can come up with using this system. Airships? Railguns? Laundry machines? You tell me.
 
Now, in more detail: there's a strong connection between light or colour and the elemental energy that makes up this world. The spiritual character of different substances causes this energy to take on different elemental colours. Here's an overview of the different colour associations.
- Red: Hot gases and incandescent material undergoing combustion
- Orange: Metal, molten earth, charcoal
- Yellow: Minerals, salts, ceramics, soil
- Yellow-Green: Wood, hair, silk
- Green: Organic matter
- Green-Cyan: Oils, fats
- Cyan: Water, ice
- Azure: Heavy gases and vapours, steam
- Blue: Light atmospheric gases
- Violet: Rational mental phenomena
- Magenta: Vital psychological phenomena
- Rose: Emotional phenomena
- White: Visible light, elemental colour
Once elemental energy acquires colour, it is restricted to interact with the associated substances. Ambient elemental energy pervades the world and takes on colour according to nearby substances. Importantly, the substances within living beings are protected from interaction with elemental energy by a natural magic associated with all life.
 
Okay. So there's natural magic on this world which causes any transparent material, upon intense illumination by sunlight, to form into a reservoir for elemental energy. Further illumination causes the material to charge with elemental energy, with an elemental colour identical or at least similar to the colour of the material. Deformation of the material ruins its ability to store energy, so you need rigid, high-strength materials to create good reservoirs. Hence, gemstones. When a reservoir material is charged, it glows with the appropriate colour.
 
Certain arcane symbols can unlock the power of elemental energy, expending it to produce different effects. These symbols are all built upon a circle and are referred to as activation circles. (You may be feeling an FMA vibe right now. As an aside, I'm thinking the basic elements of the symbols will be circular arcs inscribed in the main circle, rather than straight lines.) When a high density of elemental energy, such as that stored in a reservoir, is brought near such a symbol, the energy begins to flow through the activation circle, expending it and releasing its power. (Electrical analogy: the reservoirs are capacitors and the activation circles are resistors.) The symbols are discovered by experimentation or from ancient texts in reference to the innate elemental magic system. It is pretty difficult to discover new symbols. Modifiers can further specify the behaviour of the activation circles in some ways.
 
Activation circles can be constructed from anything - they can be built from a material or carved into one, drawn on a surface with ink or chalk or whatever you like, formed from a shadow or a projection - as long as the symbol is there, there is some amount of elemental energy that will cause it to function. However, the circles function better if they are constructed from a material associated with the element, allowing the energy to flow through them easily. They function even better if they are made from specially prepared conduit materials, which are near-perfect conductors of elemental energy. (One of the kinds of activation circles can transform a material into a conduit for a certain colour of elemental energy; it so happens that this works especially well for copper, silver, and gold.)
 
So one could build elemental energy activation devices to access the various effects for the different colours of elemental energy. For simplicity I'm going to call devices, activation circles that are constructed from conduits and powered by reservoir gemstones, fabrials. This is just for fun and I'm not planning on publishing any time soon, so I can change the name later, haha.
 
Here is the list of the different possible activation circles:
Perception - the circle stretches the energy within it into a perception field that extends throughout the vicinity of the circle. The more energy placed within the circle, the greater the range. When elemental material is detected, some of the energy is pulled back into the circle. This will either cause the reservoir to light up, or it can be siphoned away by a conduit to power another circle. Modifiers can focus the perception field in a certain direction, or create a strongly focused perception field within the circle (which has some uses later on).
Attraction or Repulsion - the circle generates a force field, anchored on some elemental material at the center of the circle, that acts on similar elemental material in the vicinity of the circle. The reaction force on the anchor is equal, opposite, and collinear with the force on the outside material. Modifiers can focus the force field in a certain direction, or anchor the force field to the reservoir material within the circle rather than an elemental material. Energy is only expended when an actual force is being generated. The circle can be tuned to target a specific material by coupling it with an inside-focused perception circle containing a sample of the target material.
Heating or Cooling - the circle expends energy to add or remove heat to elemental material within the circle.
Bend Light - the analogous activation to Attraction or Repulsion for fabrials utilizing Light (white) energy, it can bend light towards or away from the circle.
Creation or Destruction - the circle converts elemental energy into elemental material, or vice versa. This is extremely energy-costly, as there is a high activation cost on top of the large amounts of energy that go into making physical material. (Though you still gain energy from destruction, there is a net loss in converting from material -> energy -> back to material.) Creation circles can be coupled with an inside-focused perception field to duplicate the sample material, otherwise they create the most representative material for energy of the given colour. Modifiers can help to constrain the structure of the created material. Possibly, creation and destruction circles could be combined into a single transmutation circle that transforms the material while mostly keeping its shape. (Such transmutations have to stay in the same element, however.)
Colouration - the circle expends energy to change the elemental colour of material within the circle. This is used to create conduit materials; it can also be used to protect material from interaction with elemental energy by supressing its elemental colour entirely.

There may be activation circles for interacting with living beings, related to the elements Life and Spirit, but by necessity they would be incredibly complex. I may need to come up with a secondary process for generating these interactions, maybe by somehow capturing the essence of a natural process and replicating it. I'd like to see fabrials that can do healing or emotional manipulation.

 

Alright. I believe that was sufficiently long. How does it look?