I think "Eumonite" rolls off the toung much easier than "Eunomite" or "Eumotite"...

er... *ahem*... in Dev's version of the whole thing, you need an amount of ore proportional to the amount of energy which you wish to channel. So, bigger spells still need more ore.

I vote for Eumonite.

::STAMP:: Eumonite it is.

Onto bigger and better things. Temp and I were "discussing" the underlying mechanisms of eumonite's energy not long ago in the AIM chat, and there are two basic models we have.

1. Eumonite absorbs and stores energy from its surrounding environment, expending it when called upon by an ADML spell or whatever. This is detailed in my second post in this topic.

2. Eumonite receives and stores energy from a magic user, increasing the user's available energy capacity and thus the level of the spell.

In both models, note that the ore is not the source of magic energy, whether it draws from the environment or from the user. I think this has been established well enough by now.

So far, I've been working under the first model, because I wrote the story with that general assumption. After trying to figure things out for a while, however, I think I see a way to make the second model work also, perhaps even better, in the context of the story.

The main problem is when we approach our high-level spells, such as Resurrection. These spells take a lot of energy to cast, so under either model, it would take a little while to have enough energy ready in the eumonite. Pylos Epsilon is so important because it holds enough ore to cast many of these spells, without recharging, before it runs dry. Under the first model, eumonite would regain its energy automatically after each casting, and another Rez spell would be ready to go in x number of minutes (or however long it would take). Under the second model, though, eumonite would only regain enough energy to cast Rez if there was a user putting energy into it. I assume that this action is similar to casting a spell without ore (or perhaps, equivalent to casting a spell on the ore, which then retains the magic energy?); in that case, the user would be limited by how much energy he or she could put in at one time, have to wait, and it would probably take a while to store enough energy for a Rez spell. The Rez device plan that Kydran wants to implement would be casting these spells all over the place; the problem is, you would need an entire army of magic users just to keep the ore stocked!

Heh. Kinda funny that the story already includes an army of magic users, isn't it?

This makes Miriel's following of mages more legitimate, in my eyes. Not only does she get to experiment with magic, but Kydran gets the source of energy he needs to power the ore and take advantage of Epsilon's capacity. The human mages get to realize and understand the mysterious power dwelling within them. Everyone wins!

But not really. This situation is another iteration of the realization that occurs to Syne: "Wait a minute, this is slavery, and that's wrong!" Only this time, it would happen to Rheya. She would see that her "kind" are being exploited for their usefulness, and that would provide her with some major motivation for fighting with the party through to the end.

(A side note: the powers that be have virtually unanimously decided to get rid of the term "Techno-Wizard" and all its variants. If you guys like this new idea, I would then suggest our new term for "TW" have something to do with the fact that Pylos is using the mages for their energy.)

Wow...the light is shining on FoI today! hehe. But honestly, I like that idea. I'm not too sure if I follow up EXACTLY everything you just covered there, but I think I got the basic picture.

Getting rid of TW eh? Honestly I never liked the term...so I'm kinda glad to see it go. How about...Trance-Wizard? lol, jp. I'm not even gonna try with names...you guys have politely turned down my names by not saying anything mean about them, but by holding your tongues =)...or fingers...or...yeah.

EDIT: Kydran would let Pylos know the ore was called Eumonite, Chef. Now, the TW stuff SHOULD be called something Pylos-y. How about Pylotech? Or something along those lines? I dunno; as I said...yeah, me and making up names doesn't work.

I rather like that idea CheF. Who says they can't call something by different names.

Also, they would have to get the name Pylos from somewhere.