Ask A Delene

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Not quite as portal-safe as Aperture eh?

[Lambda]

How useful is this for cutting/carving materials that are otherwise too indestructible to work with?

[Adelene]

Somewhere between 'very' and 'absurdly'. Lurker's been known to carve out new caves for herself and her tribe by teleporting the stone away; fiddly shapes are harder and many applications need direct mage attention, but for just slicing a thing into pieces you could even automate it given reasonable tech.

[DanielH]

What about if the thing is magically indestructible, like a daeva?

[Adelene]

I'd have to work it out with individual authors; at that point you're looking at a question about the underlying physics more than a question about this sort of magic. It might be that daeva can't go through Lurker's portals (but they could still use non-portal teleporters that would send them all at once, probably), or that the portal doesn't completely close (for one that's deactivated) or wink out (for one that's broken), or daeva indestructibility extends to the enspelled item while they're going through the portal, or something.

[DanielH]

My guess was none of those. It feels like in that particular case the daeva should be pushed to one side or the other, as in the Aperture Science version, although the “not completely close” seemed second most likely in this case.

Would it be possible that the caster could choose what would happen in this case, if they knew about daeva (or whatever other indestructible thing) in advance?

[pedromvilar]

My guess would've been "making the portal temporarily indestructible"

[Adelene]

Would it be possible that the caster could choose what would happen in this case, if they knew about daeva (or whatever other indestructible thing) in advance?

Yes and no. When a spell breaks it's immediately gone, the caster doesn't get to decide anything about that. For a spell that closes by trigger, they might be able to set something up to give it a different behavior than the default, but it'd be an advanced application and probably require observing the indestructibility ahead of time.

[Ezra]

With all these threads discussing elves, I find myself wondering about Lurker. I think it would be very unkind to drop Lurker in amongst a lot of Quendi. But I wonder if Lurker would have interesting things to discuss with, for example, Tyelcormo who speaks to animals.

[Adelene]

I'd been thinking about dropping her on them, actually. Kappa has just about convinced meta!Lurker to allow me to have her translation necklace not translate their word for themselves as 'elf', in which case it'd be pretty viable right up to the point where osanwë interacts badly with her magic.

She would definitely be weirded out by someone being able to speak to animals, particularly as she's an obligate omnivore.