User blog:Echo 1/Elements You Should Not Give Your Characters

I was thinking about this for quite a while, and after a debate over skype on a character's ability to wield dark matter, I decided to create this guide of elements not to use in order to keep your characters and those around them safe and useful.

The list is very much in progress, so feel free to suggest other outrageous or useless powers in the comments.

This is kind of meant for humorous purposes, so don't get all raving mad over it.

1. Dark Matter
Many sci-fi authors these days tend to use dark matter as an excuse for nearly anything these days (I used to do that as well). It's basically become our generation's equivalent of lightning and nuclear power as a strange, exotic force that few people know much about.

In reality, however, dark matter would be nearly useless for your character to use. Why? Because it doesn't interact with the electromagnetic force, meaning it cannot touch or interact with the atoms that make up your character. It could be used to alter the mass of another being, but gravity can pull off the same results with less concentration and more versatility.

2. Antimatter
I think the best way to explain why this is a bad idea is simply to state Einstein's famous equation:

e=mc^2

Now, that means that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. When antimatter and standard matter interact, they annihilate each other. Violently. This causes both the matter and antimatter to be instantly transformed into energy.

Now, that might sound cool, as it causes big explosions, so it'd automatically be a cool element right? Wrong. Why? Well, let's clarify this. We'll do some simple math with this.

0.001kg (1 gram of antimatter) times (3x10^8) (light) = about 9x10^13 joules of energy.

For comparison, that explosion is stronger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast (which yielded 8x10^13 joules).

So, unless you want your character destroying himself or fighting from a very long ways away, antimatter is not a great choice of element.

3. Dark Energy
Similar to dark matter, dark energy is thought as a mystical source of power by most people today.

Bottom line: scientists aren't even sure what the heck this stuff does other than cause the universe to keep expanding, so it's kind of hard to use it. You could create concentrations of it inside someone and cause them to explode, but that'd be revolting and no Toa would do that. So it's kind of not a decent element.

Conclusion
Basically, the elements above are just too violent or too... strange to use in any setting.

Want to add more? Suggest powers/elements in the comments below and it might be added to the list!

Thanks for reading, hope you had fun.

--- Deus  Vult!   15:32, May 11, 2013 (UTC)