Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I realized after I looked at the quartz, that I hadn't asked him about the particulars of the quartz.  On Earth, quartz crystal goes by many names depending on the color of the crystal.  I had assumed, incorrectly, that it'd be the same here.  That doesn't seem to be the case, as I'm looking at varying degrees of colored quartz, ranging from an off-yellow to clear to milky to violet.  I'm not sure about what exact minerals cause the yellowish or milky colors, but violet quartz, or amethyst, is that color because of iron impurities.  

I had initially planned on just pulverizing all the quartz, but now I might want to reconsider.  The clear and milky quartz I feel should be fine to just pulverize to use for making glass, but the yellow and violet quartz I'm surprised are just tossed in here.  Thinking about it, I don't actually think I've seen any jewels worn by anyone who's visited the island.  I hadn't really realized that sort of thing was missing until just now.  I suppose if they don't value the different kinds of quartz, then it makes sense why they don't have different words for them, they're all basically the same material.

After I sort them, I should talk with Konkur to try to understand why crystals don't seem to be considered valuable.  They're already decently sorted, but there is some amount of mixing that has occurred.  I presume they were just piled as they were mined, so similar crystals ended up together.  That makes the process relatively easy, and I should only have to take a day or two to get them sorted.  Then another day or so to pulverize the pure and milky ones.

After I finished handling the quartz, I made my way up the mountain, to talk to Konkur, and potentially start helping with excavating the vein.  Normally, since it's winter, the mountain is completely snowed in, and we just avoid going up it.  However, Konkur's team didn't want to just do nothing during the season, so they dug the snow out on the upper portion of the mountain, and made it up to the cave.  Though it seems every week they have to spend an extra day of time just keeping the path clear on the way up and again on the way down, so they don't spend quite as much time mining as they would during other seasons.

I asked Konkur for more details about the quartz when I made it up the mountain, and why they didn't care what color it was.  He said that different colors of quartz are useful for identifying what metals might be in excess in the area, so they do care like how the purple quartz indicated there is iron, and the yellowish cloudy quartz was due to sulfur.  He said there are a few different yellow quartz causes, but it was fairly easy to determine that this was due to sulfur.

As I discussed further, I learned some interesting history of the relationship between crystals and the races on the mainland.  It seems that, besides the mana crystals, there are a few crystals that have different effects when exposed to mana, but generally they aren't considered useful.  Though crystals like gypsum and quartz don't have any really unique mana interactions, quartz seems to be mildly insulative to mana.  I'm just going out on a limb here to guess why gemstones don't seem to be popular, but if some crystals interact dangerously with mana it might be enough reason to not wear one.  If, for instance, a crystal could explode into shards when exposed to mana directly, it'd be dangerous to the wearer, and also might make anyone nearby nervous.  It'd be like wearing a hand grenade as a fashion statement.  Though that's just a guess.

He did list a few examples, though I couldn't really translate the dwarven name of most of the minerals to any sort of particular crystal image in my head based on his descriptions.  Though one did stand out somewhat, and I suspect it was fluorite.  That mineral seems to give off different effects on it's surface when it is different colors, which would mean different impurities seem to effect how it handles mana.  Not many colors have affects, but one seems to emit heat.  Another is simply considered "cursed", as people would die when exposed for too long.  Though the "curse" definitely sounds a lot like cancer, which makes me very nervous about ionizing radiation being emitted.

This opened up a whole new concern again that I had in the past about what exactly mana is.  I'd sort of put it in the back of my mind and forgot about it.  On the surface, it's easy to just say, living things use mana, rocks seem to block mana, the suns produce it, and mana crystals can be used as a battery for it.  The fact that most other chemistry seems normal seems to indicate that atoms haven't changed much, though the mana crystals are definitely new.  The fact that they grow octahedrally isn't normal.  I'm pretty sure the only earth crystals that were octahedrons didn't start that way, and only later formed octahedrons after being cleaved, though I don't know that for sure.

If that is the case, then there is something else going on that is new chemically, or maybe not chemically but magically.  Mana is very weird, it can seemingly make both materials and energy, though I haven't seen any evidence of a reverse situation yet, where mana is made from either of the other two.  I suppose it makes sense that if living creatures can utilize mana to make materials and energy, then there should be some natural occurring chemicals or materials that also do that. 

I guess outside of organics, crystalline materials are sort of similar in their inclusion of unnatural atoms within a larger chain of other atoms.  I asked Konkur if he knew of any "pure" crystals that produced effects when exposed to mana, but he didn't know what I meant by "pure".  I tried to explain to him that the colors of crystals are due to tiny amounts of other materials trapped within the crystals, and the iron trapped in the quartz is what turned it purple, and that the clear form is the "pure" form, but that didn't help him answer the question, as he had no way of knowing what the pure form of the other crystals was.

It was unfortunate that he didn't know that, because I'm starting to suspect certain behaviors for mana that might help to not only explain more of how it works, but also allow us to utilize it better if we could figure it out.  If, for instance, pure crystals don't produce any effects when exposed to mana, we could make certain assumptions about how mana behaves on a macro vs micro scale.  Though Konkur did say that quartz seems to be mildly mana insulative, insulative effects aren't necessarily interactions, they could simply be deflective on an atomic level.  For instance, if silicon tends to deflect mana in the general direction it received it at, then you'd get an apparently insulative property if mana behaves like a particle or a wave.

It'd be quite complicated to attempt to figure out exactly what is going on within the crystals though.  I'd first need to determine the base crystalline material, then figure out what inclusions do what within that structure, and finally figure out how to grow those particular crystals.  It could be incredibly valuable to do so, but it might also be dangerous, and it'd be quite complicated.  I'm actually quite nervous about going the way of Marie Curie due to some of my experiments.

After the discussion, I left with more questions than answers about crystalline material alongside a realization that separating the amethyst was basically pointless because I won't be able to do anything special with it.  Once melted down and reformed into glass, I doubt the amount of impurities will do much to color the glass even.  Though it might make it slightly lower quality as a result.

The excavation team still had three days on the mountain before returning to the city, so I decided to observe the working mine and help with excavation until then.  The mine's design was quite interesting.  I'm assuming it's dwarven in origin.  It consists of a spiral staircase going around the outside of a central hole.  When I asked about it, it seems that as the vein gets wider lower down, they have to cut a new staircase at that width, and take out the upper staircase portions from the top to prevent collapse.  Looking down from above, it just looks like a carved out cylinder surrounded by stairs that descend well over fifty feet.

The central width at this point is about twenty feet across, and features a treadwheel crane near the top to lift excavated material out of the hole.  According to Konkur, they're going to need to do a bunch of non-excavation work soon, as the vein has started to slant at an increasing angle as they've gotten deeper.  What they plan on doing is just continuing this spiral width until the vein is no longer within the area of the mine, then they'll dig horizontal shafts into the vein.  After that portion is excavated, they'll lower the spiral again, and continue making horizontal shafts.  Each time they do so though, the amount of non-vein material will increase.  In dwarven mines, after a certain point, they would cut a new horizontal shaft into the mountain, lay new minecart lines, and begin the process again from the new depth.

Well, it all depends on whether or not ores are found I suppose.  Right now they're still just excavating quartz and a small amount of gypsum.  With my help, they excavated almost triple what they normally do, but it's still all quartz that's being excavated right now.  Well, it's amethyst, and the color is becoming more vibrant, so I'm hoping that they'll run into an iron mineral soon.  I'm going to return with them to the village for their break, to talk with Zeb about the various construction ideas I'd had before.  Then I'll return to help with excavation when the mining team returns.  I'll bring extra food with me next time so I can stay for a longer period of time to work.