Daevinity Worldbuilding Info

[Alicorn]

I think it would depend on what limbo-thing exactly requires snow.

[Bluelantern]

Can Demons make straight up energy? Like creating light or heat? They seem to be created objects that are warm or cold, but I am not sure if they could bypass the need of matter.

[Alicorn]

Demons cannot directly create energy, just objects that contain/produce it.

[tau]

Seems like you could make air molecules at very high/very low temperatures if you wanted to heat/cool a room. Light would be harder, probably easier to just make a flashlight.

[cbhacking]

Sure, but that would increase the air pressure in the room. Not necessarily a bad thing, but still, a thing. Also, I'm not actually sure how effectively you could cool a room that way. Limited cooling, such as you do with air conditioning, should work at the "cost" of a constant outward breeze, but you couldn't easily chill all the air to liquid-gas temperatures; the thermal energy already present needs to go somewhere. On the other hand, simply filling the room (module small gas pockets, perhaps near the ceiling) with liquid helium should be possible, if a demon ever wanted to kill everybody in a room in some creative way.

The closest I can think of to an equivalent for light is to make something akin to glow-in-the-dark material in an already-excited state. That wouldn't technically constitute making light (photons) directly, but would be producing something that spontaneously created photons of predictable wavelengths and at predictable rates (though those rates would fall over time). It would be interesting to try and find a mixture of fluorescing materials that would produce white light for any meaningful period of time, though (the powder inside fluorescent lamps - the stuff that turns the UV light produced by the gas into visible basically-white light - works but exhausts all its energy very quickly so you'd just get a burst of white light).

[Lambda]

Is there any process besides matter/antimatter annihilation that converts mass directly to pure photons? (I suspect that antimatter would produce the wrong sort of wavelengths.)

[cbhacking]

Well, a good number of radioactive decays produce reduced mass plus gamma ray photons (the same kinds of wavelengths you get from annihilation, which is indeed the *wrong* sort of wavelengths). As for visible light, not that I know of. Radioluminescence produces light (Radium, for example), but not by direct conversion. Other than that, not that I'm aware of. Anything sufficiently hot produces photons, fairly commonly including visible light, due to blackbody radiation, but that's just the conversion of heat to light, not mass to light.

[Alicorn]

I imagine there's a lot of radioactive things in Hell, since demons don't get cancer or anything, but it's not suitable for use around mortals.

[cbhacking]

Huh. Is it possible to blind daeva, even temporarily? That's one of the common results of acute radiation sickness, along with other less-pretty effects (such as nausea or bleeding from some orifices). On the other hand, an elevated but not immediately disastrous dose - the kind of thing that, say, Marie Curie got - could presumably never build up to the point of harming a daeva. It makes sense that hell would be fairly radioactive if so, unless the heat for a lake of fire is either generated by some other mechanism or demons just continuously replenish the relevant heat source.

[Alicorn]

Daeva could be blinded briefly by, say, a flash of light they weren't adjusted to, but not by something like radiation sickness. I was thinking more or less Marie Curie minus the dying.