AltonicKeys

The Sandwich shrugs towards its questioners. "I doubt I'll eat my own creation any time soon." It holds the smaller sandwich up to "eye" level to admire. At this moment, a big dark cloud materialized above The Sandwich. Looking up, it yelped and accidentally tossed the smaller sandwich up. A bolt of lightning blasted The Sandwich, tossing up a cloud of smoke. When it settles, The Sandwich is left on the ground, devoid of small doughy arms and legs. Everyone witnesses it go into a coughing fit, presumably choking on something. The smaller sandwich is nowhere to be seen. And another moment later, The Sandwich (big one) is gone too, stolen without a word. Didn't quote everyone bc I'm on mobile and it's a pain

The Sandwich thanks you. It hops around, then stops to stare at the meat. After a moment, it takes two tiny chunks of bread out of itself, puts a shred of meat in between, sets it on the typical picnic blanket, and steps back. It's a sandwich. The Sandwich seems proud of its creation.

The Sandwich's arms and legs pop out. "Why I remember you! Yeah, I'd love to eat something! After like a thousand people tried devouring me, I kinda wonder what it's like. "

The clouds shift. A godray of light beams down through the open doorway in the sky. Another beam of light shines through elsewhere. Eventually the sky is speckled with various pillars of light. And though there's no rain in the bright clouds, everyone can hear thunderous booms from above. This time, not so menacing. It sounds more like... Confetti poppers? Yes. Little colored speckles float down from the sky. The clouds quickly rearrange to form words, clearly and sharply spelling "Happy Birthday !" Trumpets sound from somewhere? Fanfare is played, but it sounds vaguely like the "Happy Birthday" song. The Sandwich jumps down from Uninteligenius' hand. Using its legs. Its legs that stick out from the bottom of the Sandwich. It lands on the ground with a front flip, and flourishes its hands in triumph. Hands that it now. Though all four limbs are more like noodle stumps, without the horror of fingers or toes. The two pieces of bread flap up and down. The sound of the Sandwich's contents slapping against each other modulate into a voice: "Hey everyone! It's me! The Sandwich! Thank you so much for fighting over me all these years! It makes me feel looooved." It sounds disgusting. "Yesterday was my third birthday, because my creator was late in granting me sentience." Oops. The Sandwich hops around, still flapping. "I lose my gift of limbs tomorrow, my gift of speech the next day, and my gift of thought in three days. Hm." The Sandwich falls silent. It doesn't seem too pleased with losing all shreds of consciousness by Thursday. Oh well. Happy birthday Sandwich! I felt like making a special anniversary event because I really did not expect it to last this long. My child should have died off a long time ago. Um, last year I just did a fun little "Gazing into the sunset" thing and the year before I did not do anything. oh well. I'll do my best to keep up for the next few days, but I still have work so it'll be slow sometimes. Enjoy!

Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore a tan suit on the day he was to kill a king. Absolutely reprehensible. What has our nation's assassins come to.

Another cloudy night slowly grows into a violent roar. Rumblings of thunder light the sky. Never a visible bolt, only the looming threat. As the thunder claps, a rhythm can be made out, which slowly turns into discernible words. After a minute or so, everyone can clearly make out the last few words. "...Three days." The rumblings quickly cut off, and the clouds fall silent again. Not even an echo returns. It's unclear what the heavens above meant by this, and the rest of the message is lost. The implication is clear though. It's best if everyone prepares for the worst.

Granted. They flood the streets. You try to command them, but it's so crowded that they can only move about half an inch per hour. Not like they could move much faster if it was uncrowded though. They don't have legs, or any limbs really. They can only hope for the wind to help them. At least you have several tons of rubber cooking under the sun. The fumes will probably kill someone eventually. Whether this will be your target or a bystander is up to chance. I wish I can read the entirety of Hitchhiker's Guide without having to go back to understand stuff.

Oh damn, sorry to hear that. :/ All I can really say is to take it easy! As Tolkien probably didn't say, "A rushed book is forever bad, but a delayed book is good eventually"

ayy religious lore we love to see it I've been curious, is there any real-life inspiration you take? Specifically for the proper names of everything. I feel like there's a certain culture I want to associate with it, but I can't place my finger on it. Some of it feels very much like typical fantasy names, like European Aurthurian legend. And then some of it sounds, I dunno, very not-western. Have you been deliberately naming these things after something else or has it just been vibe-based?

(No yeah it was mad cliche I got sick of the OP main character plot armor shenanigans) Granted, you get green instead. The fruit is technically in the same family as an orange, but it's incredibly sour instead. Not even any trace of sweetness like in a yellow. And the skin is horribly bitter. The whole thing is really the opposite of sublime. Maybe you will call it superlime. I wish I could come up with better names for stuff

I agree with FRENZEE here. If Nomad's chain counts as "one continuous piece," then I don't see why armor wouldn't. If you have chainmail under some plate armor then it'd probably count. But it would need a huge amount of Light, and would be much harder to move in than Plate. Though I'd imagine it'd be better than normal armor, since Blades are lighter than usual. If you had like 10 bonded spren though, you can probably just have them manifest as a separate piece of armor each, and get a lot more mobility back. Of course you don't get the strength enhancements, and the visor probably can't turn transparent. But since you can just tell your spren to change the form of the helmet at will, it's basically the same. About having a Blade and armor from the same spren, I guess you could do that? The handle would probably have to be glued to a gauntlet though. But again, if having a Blade out already drains a moderate amount of Light, having full plate armor manifested at the same time would probably need about 10 times the amount, mass-wise. Better have a Bondsmith by your side then.

um. granted, in advance... (I did not enjoy the webtoon so this is gonna be at the bottom of my reading list) (No guarantee I'll enjoy it written out though) I wish I get the motivation to finish all my projects

Oh that's a lot more help in a couple of days than I was expecting to get! I'm pretty wishy washy with my terms. It's been a while since I've done much electrical engineering stuff so capacitors and batteries, potato potato. But it looks like I'll have to do a lot more research into the properties of electricity because I barely know how ionization works. I know, bare minimum requirement for lightning magic but whatever. And yeah, you're right, looks like I'm lucky with this one, since there's already some similar materials out there. I actually had no clue those were real things. Upon brief research on piezoelectricity, I'm surprised that crystals are involved. I've actually not considered the synthetic route too much, but I do really like how you proposed it. Not even a pure element or alloy, but something more complicated to make is a really fun idea. I've heard somewhere, something like "Aliens would have found the same elements that we have, but they just put them together differently, and that's what we need to find." and I love that concept. That "accidental" discovery that would be hailed as mystic is something I've thought about a lot, but maybe it can be something that inspired modern zap metal. I've been trying to think about how to slot this into normal electrical circuits. Maybe there's always one positive end and one negative end, no matter how you split it up? Kinda like magnets... But I'm not sure how to go about it. At the current moment, zap metal is just a homogeneous hunk, no prong things like normal circuit components. That's the logical solution yeah, but from a ranged, offensive standpoint that'd be hard to control. If you were at the receiving end of a zap, you can probably nudge the arc trajectory around yourself by pointing the south end of a magnet at the arc? But in order for the arc to get to you in the first place, you'd have to be lying on the ground or something... Maybe what I can do is have zap metal try to put positive magnet fields on a higher priority than the 'path of least resistance to the ground." So if there was a magnet hanging from the ceiling, positive pointed to the zap metal, the arc would travel towards the magnet first, and then target the ground? And if the arc reaches the magnet first, then it destroys the magnet and renders it a lump of non-magnetic metal? So then it can't just keep travelling to the same location. A rather poorly thought-out mechanic on my part, but I'll put some more time into it. No, you're totally right. I've been trying to make a 'plausible sci-fi' look cool, while trying to stay away from magic, but I guess it's a tricky rope to balance on. Thing is, I totally could just stop here and say "Everything else is just magic," but that feels like the lazy way out. I'm not going to try to explain all this in-story of course, but when zap stuff goes down, I want it to stay consistent, and make surface-level sense at the very least. But I'll try to stay away from the sub-atomics, because I'm sure the deeper I delve, the less sense it will make. Going back to that first problem you brought up, this has been a problem since day one. I can't do anything without a positive charge and a negative charge, cathode and an anode, etc. My first thought was that the energy released isn't actually real electricity, but a "magic abstraction" that mimics the original thing and shares a lot of behaviors, but lets me make it do whatever I want. My second thought was that this sounded lame and I should forget about it. eh. I just hope that I'm compensating enough with all these other dumb mechanics, if that makes any sense. And I haven't actually considered static electricity. That's actually a really good point, but I can really use that. I think in that regard, I can say "magic" and tone down the effects a tad, but that is 100% a mechanic I can get behind. You are right though, the more I dig into the physics, the harder it gets for me to dig myself back out. Especially since I never learned how to hold a shovel properly. I think the best course of action is to just address the biggest, most glaring issues. Everything else can be inexplicable magic I suppose. Oh well, can't win 'em all. achoo All in all, this was actually very helpful and eye-opening. Thank you everyone for the help, and thank you for the interest in zap metal! I'll try to do much more with this, and maybe even. Writing the actual story?! Gasp! I might be posting some updates about the system itself here, but I dunno. This whole thing now moves down on my priority list, purged from my mind, but I'll try to remember to keep working on it. But feel free to keep suggesting and giving feedback, it's always welcome! It'd certainly give me an excuse to be on this site more.

ok if any of y'all wanna peep this thing I just made, Any and all help appreciated!

I hit a wall in my funky little electromagic system and would love some help! This is kinda the natural evolution of an older thing I did, but more interesting and less "Cosmere influenced." It is very electrical, and can get physically technical. The problem is that I did not pay attention at all during high school physics, and not enough during chemistry. My goal is to have a magic system that's as grounded in reality as possible. It's much more sci-fi than fantasy tho. The basics: A metal found underground, tentatively called zap metal for now, can absorb different forms of low-powered energy (like low heat, or sound and light to an extent), and then discharge that in the form of electricity when met with high-power energy (like striking it (kinetic energy) or really high heat). A discharge would essentially be strong electrical arcing, which follows the same rules as normal electricity, but the lightning direction can be somewhat controlled. Slightly more complicated shenanigans: (It's a lot so you can just skim through it) The setting is somewhere around mid 1800s, early 1900s America. So around the time that electricity was being commercialized. Invention of the lightbulb and all that. Takes place probably in New York, Chicago or Boston (or at least some fictional equivalent). New Chicoston would be the continental hub of electromagic or whatever. The world hub of innovation but also crime and danger, because give a bunch of people access to bombs and they will use them. It's the best place in the world to invent stuff, full of powerful people? Great, they can invent bigger bombs and extort bigger guys. Other materials exist around the world that discharge heat, sound, light, etc, but in the forms of crystals, flowers, oil, yada yada. But they aren't really relevant to the main story, they'll barely be acknowledged. For now at least. It's just the next logical step in the system, but frankly I don't need them at all and I wouldn't miss them. If it's helpful to know, at this time no one is an expert, they're p much learning this stuff along with us. Story prob won't be all that serious, and it's not like zap metal and its origins is going to be investigated like crazy, but I just don't want any glaring holes in the system. It will spend a lot of time on screen though. And about the conflict, I want less political drama and more "these guys are just plain evil". The problems: Feel free to suggest solutions to any of these however you please, there are no bad answers. At the very least this will be a helpful brainstorm session. I like the charging mechanic, that's fairly fleshed out. I am having a lot of fun with the setting. But don't let these two things be hard requirements. The only thing I don't want is medieval fantasy magic. Any advice or feedback is welcome. Or just any questions, comments or concerns would also be cool. Really any interaction at all would be great. hm.

oh I remember.... It would be fun playing Gerald F Lame again, but he was kinda just a therapy guy. Barely any cult shenanigans and that's kinda on me... I don't remember anything from season one, apart from like the first week. what if I play the Flame (the cat) wouldn't that be sick

(Just realized what ORV stands for I am a fool. but uh no I read the webtoon and then dropped it. forgot why oooops) Granted. Every morning you wake up refreshed like a baby. But the night before. That's when the nightmare starts. Not actually nightmares but the bed is full of hot nails and so is the pillow. There are noises outside your window. Construction? Building a park? A dog park full of dogs anyways? More likely than you think. Also your throat is really dry. But you can't get water, because it's dark. And that's scary. Due to the evil monster I placed in your home. Good luck soldier. I wish for a really nice pot of pasta

Yes!!! Yes I do!!! Coke is just kinda sweet and sugary, Doc Pebba actually has a flavor associated with it! Same goes for Pepsi but less. but if I have the option I'd just go for root beer. TPBM should stop procrastinating with something...

Granted. They turn against you because you are not part of the narrative and thus you are a wrench in their plans. And then they turn against themselves because they're not supposed to be here either. I wish for laser eye beams like Cyclops from X-Men (but they're actual lasers and not stupid punch dimension energy) (being blind is a justifiable trade-off for laser eyes)

Kinda? I shift sitting positions every five minutes, prob because I am uncomfortable, but I have heard that not moving and stretching can lead to bad posture and later horrible back pain. So that's always in the back of my mind. TPBM is confused and doesn't know what to dooo

Alright. This curse will render you unable to form coherent sentences. However, whatever you say will be vaguely taunting and insulting. Got it? I think that's a little overboard, Thriller by Michael Jackson would work on them too.