The New Theory of Umbral Physics
Enervate, also called black nerve, is a paraphysical phenomena similar to and distinct from other forms of energy or matter. Enervate exerts a number of forces on itself, collectively referred to as enervation or the three nerve forces.
Conceptually, the behavior of enervate is unified as absorption, manifesting in different forms. Most saliently, enervate attenuates energy, through its interaction with the electromagnetic field — this means absorbing light, cooling temperature, dampening sounds. But enervate can even absorb matter itself, so completely the notions of solidity break down.
There are many mechanisms and concepts to be understood to fully grapple with the behavior of enervate, and it will take many sections to cover even the breadth of it.
Part 1: Core Principles
We'll start at the barest fundamentals, with the most basic notions.
Enervate is five things and nothing else: two kinds of particles: umbra and scintilla, which generate three forces: cohesion, volatility, induction.
Umbra particles are massive — comparable to nucleons — and are defined by their adumbral weight. Adumbral weight is (mostly) conserved, in the way mass is conserved. (That is to say, only in rare circumstances and by expending or releasing massive amounts of energy can adumbral weight be created or destroyed. See the discussion of anti-stars and welkin, later on.)
With these notions defined, we can speak of the first equation, which illustrates adumbral cohesion. The force between two bodies with adumbral weights u, v is governed by this equation:
F = k_a * u * v / d2 * p(u, v)
(K_a is the cohesion constant, and d is of course, distance; but p(u,v) is, through an abuse of notion, the phase difference between the two umbral bodies; this will be discussed later)
The cohesion force is unique among the nerve forces for being the only one felt significantly over long distances, and umbra particles produce an analogue of radiation called adumbration across a broad, complex spectrum which can be detected from afar.
Anyway, a consequence of adumbral cohesion is that umbra particles tend to clump together into larger structures. These are not quite atoms nor molecules, though in some ways they are analogous to both. Thus we will refer to them as motes.
In practice, motes cannot grow indefinitely: they are held in check by the scintillae generated by the volatile force.
Scintilla particles, unlike their counterpart, have quite negligible mass, and no adumbral weight. Instead, they have a fulgent charge. Unlike adumbral weight, fulgent charges can be more freely created or destroyed, as long as an equal amount of anti-fulgent charge is created.
When umbra shifts to higher energy state (such as after absorbing electromagnetic radiation), it splits off a scintilla and gains anti-fulgent charge. This is the process of saturation.
As umbra saturates, a new force becomes relevant: fulgent volatility. The force between two fulgent charges f, g is governed by this equation:
F = k_f * f * g * -1 / d2 * p(f,g)
Due to the negative term, alike fulgent charges repel and opposing charges attract.
As a consequence, as motes in larger systems absorb energy, they gain an aura of scintillae that repels other motes. Even aside from the scintillae, the attraction between umbra is attenuated by their newly gained anti-fulgent charges repelling.
This accrual of anti-fulgent charge puts an upper bound on how many scintillae an umbra can produce — eventually the anti-fulgent charge will tear the mote apart.
Still, scintillae don't last forever. Because they are fulgent, orbiting an anti-fulgent mote, they eventually collide with it, returning to the umbra that created them (or perhaps a different one). The fulgent charge mutually annihilates the anti-fulgent charge, yielding an outburst of photons. Hence the name for this phenomena: scintillation.
Still, in reality most motes are continually bathed in photons. Consequently, they continually create and destroy scintillae.
One important thing to note is that though umbra absorbs photons, scintillae do not. This means that as a mote's saturation increases, the attenuation of light decreases.
It becomes meaningful, then, to speak of "states of enervate" — depending on the relative amount of saturation and scintillation happening, the density and dynamics of enervate will be different. We can imagine "solid" enervate composed mostly of umbra bound tightly together; "liquid" enervate where there is enough scintillae in the cracks that motes are constantly sliding around each other while still remaining relatively bound together, and finally "gaseous" enervate wherein there is so many scintillae that motes cannot get anywhere near each other, constantly repelling each other in a brownian mist.
This treatment is incomplete, however, because it's impossible to really speak of the states of enervate without explaining how enervate interacts with matter. But how do motes interact with matter?
The induction force is peculiar. In a sense, the properties it acts on can be distinguished as involving two different kinds of charge. Firstly, every particle has a certain polarity, but this only matters insofar as umbra and scintillae have one kind of polarity, and all matter has the opposing polarity. This matters because the induction force can only act between bodies of opposing polarities; bodies of the same polarity exert no induction force on each other.
The real driver of induction is the modal charge. It's not quite correct to say a particle has a certain modal charge — rather, at any given time, a particle has a certain modal charge. Modal charge is defined as a complex oscillation — imagine a value regularly undulating, not unlike a sine wave that dances from positive to negative and back again. The function that describes the modal pattern of a system is called that system's oscillation mode.
At any given point in time where the modal charge of two particles is m and n, the force between them is:
F = k_i * m * n / d2 * p(m, n)
The thing to notice about this equation is that it's positive if both charges are alike and negative if they differ.
This means, of course, that a modal charge attract alike modal charges — but what "alike" means is that the integral of the product of their modal oscillation functions diverges to positive infinity. In a word, the oscillation modes are said to resonate.
The resonance and anti-resonance of modal charges cannot quite be simplified and modeled as though it behaves like the attraction and repulsion of static charges on a long enough scale. The space of modal charges is rich and complex, and most notably, the integral of the each atom's oscillation mode grows faster the larger that atom's atomic number.
This fact leads to the infamously confusing effect of 'element preference' wherein enervate seems more attracted to bodies composed of heavier elements, even when their mass is the same. Heavier atoms have an oscillation mode of greater amplitude yet similar harmonics as lighter atoms — meaning if your positive peaks line up with the positive peaks of the fundamental harmonics shared by every atom — (or put more simply, if you resonate with matter in general) — you will resonate harder with heavier atoms.
Of course, this depends on a thus far unstated fact: each kind of matter has a fixed oscillation mode. And this is true of matter, but it is not true of enervate: whenever enervate saturates, its characteristic function is perturbated slightly, in a way influenced by those around it. Since most enervate has uncorrelated oscillation modes, this generally results in oscillation modulated by random noise. But if a mote finds itself surrounded by motes with similar oscillation, they will sync together over time.
A last thing to note is that the conservation properties of modal charge. In a certain sense, every particle has a net modal charge of 0 — integrating the curve, the troughs balance out the peaks, no matter how complex the waveform. Still, there is a sense in which "complex" modal charges require more energy to produce — see the discussion of impact theory and the i-factor, later on.
There's one last variable to comment on, with regard to the induction force, and it may be the most complex: the phase index.
By now you will have noticed how in enervation equations, the familiar "d2" term is coupled with a so far undefined "p(x,y)" term. p(x,y) is a kind of metric that measures the so-called "phase difference" between the two particles.
The short, simple, and wrong way to explain it is to say that the phase index of a particle is just new orthogonal spatial dimension. It's not quite so, because the phase difference cannot be computed by simply subtracting the indices. Such a computation is only correct if the oscillations are already resonant. If they are aresonant or anti-resonant, the true result diverges greatly. A more helpful heuristic is to say that in phase-attenuated interactions, non-resonant bodies are influenced as if their phase index were inverted relative to each other.
If we were to repair the dimensional analogy, then, it is as if enervate is allowed to move along a fourth spatial axis, and different kinds of enervate are allowed to move into different fourth dimension — but neither is this simply an infinite-dimensional space, because it is impossible for enervate to be present in two different dimensions at once.
But this raises the question: how does enervate move along its phase axis? Besides being drawn by other enervate, whenever umbra emits a scintilla, it results in a slight increase in phase index. For this reason, saturated enervate seems to grow translucent, as its "phasing out" decreases the likelihood that photons will interact with an umbra particle.
Finally, only enervate can freely increase phase index — due to its polarity, matter experiences phase grounding, confining it to phase index 0. Phase grounding isn't absolute — it's simply a force that can be countered — but it's rare that matter finds any state other than phase index 0 to be the most stable.
There's a more direct exception, though, where matter sheds the shackles of phase grounding completely.
You see, when induction brings enervate into contact with matter, three interactions are possible.
The simplest is imbuement: the enervate gloms onto the matter, behaving not unlikely a physical substance glued to it.
Another possibility, theoretically simple but in practices endlessly complex, is amalgamation. Here, enervate intercedes between two atoms, forming an "umbral bond" which allows for entirely new chemical possibilities. This is only possible if the nerve motes are smaller than the atoms.
But what if the motes are much larger? The third possibility is enshrouding. When enervate enshrouds matter, the atoms become "phase locked" with the umbra. This means that when the umbra phase shifts, the atoms are dragged alongside it. In a sense, this allows enervate to create "ghost" matter. Indeed, the popular way to understand phase locking is as a continuation of enervate's absorption motif: it is attenuating the normal force!
Outside of exceptionally cold and dark environments, the results are much less clean and more violent than simple "ghost matter". If there is not enough enervate to enshroud all of it (or the motes have the wrong sizes or shapes) then only parts of an object are enshrouded, severing and dislocating them from the whole: this is responsible for the phenomena of deliquence, spoken of as ability of black nerve to corrupt matter with "cold heat", "pressureless compression", and "inert dissolution."
// talk about how induction force is complex valued?
// part 2: emergent behaviors (small scale)
// alpha/beta/gamma/delta taxonomy
// affinitity distillation; elemental enervate
// implications for biology?
// aura
// lines of force? enervate signalling?
// part 3: emergent behaviors (broad scale
// - umbragenesis and antistars
// welkin?
// - telluric emissions
// the aethershade
// - enervate weather: wispfalls, riftstorms
// - heavensearing, "boom snow"
// - geology: rapture, iron spikes
// part 4: enervate technology
// so much shit lol