SM ARCSYS: Alchemy

Alchemy: a wonderfully quaint precursor to modern chemistry. Also, with arcane field effects, a form of magically-powered fission and fusion, capable of changing basic chemical elements into other elements. While modern alchemy makes transforming lead into gold possible, it also makes it possible to spark megaton-level detonations with otherwise non-fissile material...

An Alchemical Overview
The original form of the study of alchemy varied slightly from region to region, but there were commonalities between the takes: transmutation of one metal to another, the perfection of the human of the human body (and or universal curative), and the creation of the philosopher's stone.

In the history of the world that we've grown up with, the alchemy of natural philosophy gave way to the chemistry of natural sciences. Atomic theory itself is an evolution of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophy of atomism. Over the course of trial and error and error and error, more was learned and passed on about the natural world. Accelerating and separating during the Scientific Revolution, the impossibilities of the goals and objectives of ancient alchemy became clear.

Or did they...?

The Atomic Alchemy
Alchemy didn't entirely go away, but it did adapt with the times. Transmuting one substance into another was found as possible means of generating a great deal of heat with very little fuel. Done all at once, it was an explosive affair – enough that bombs were built and actually used in war. None of this used magic, though atomic theory used by Einstein, Oppenheimer and company was so complex it may as well have been.

There were promises of generating heat without the use of fossil fuels, and nuclear reactors were born – also using fission, but at a much slower, heat-generating rate.

When the fission bombs weren't enough, fusion bombs were invented, in this case using a fission reaction to spark a fusion reaction – and a far larger release of energy. While all of this was focused on the reaction itself rather than creating a usable product, new elements were being created, either by cracking apart large atoms into smaller ones, or smashing small ones together to create slightly larger ones.

This was technical alchemy, real and achieved in your lifetime, but not useful beyond a few very specialized tasks (and unspeakably hazardous when accomplishing those tasks).

The discovery of the arcane changed that.

Modern Arcane Alchemy
Arcane Productive Atomics (APA) is the modern insiders' term for Alchemy. That separation is necessary more for the politics of controlling the information on technique and careful limitations of the practice. When laboratories are requesting funds, "alchemy" still has that quaint flavor while APA reminds people that early "alchemical testing" was conducted in Yucca Flat...

The extraordinary power of magic can be shaped to have particular effects, and the transformation of elements is one of them. It is fortunate that magic wasn't discovered back in the days of yore or they would've blown themselves to kingdom come attempting to turn lead into gold. Who knows, maybe that's why we can't find definitive physical evidence of Atlantis: because they vaporized themselves...

A High-level View of the Process
First, what does it even mean to turn lead into gold? Lead (Pb/82) is a soft metal that is abundant in the crust of the planet. The physical properties are extremely similar in per-ounce weight and softness to gold (Au/79), another soft metal that is considerably rarer at "easy-to-reach" areas of the planet's crust. It was the physical similarities that sparked imaginations that alchemy was just a spell away...

In order to get from an atomic weight of 82 to 79, that's subtractive: where an approximate atomic weight of "3" needs to be subtracted. This, technically, is nuclear fission. On a clean break, that leaves a leftover of lithium (Li/3). This soft, silvery-white alkali metal is both highly reactive and flammable. If the reaction has "dirty" breaks, it'll result in traces of hydrogen and helium, and potentially others.

For a modern APA alchemist, there's a market for both the gold and the lithium.

Likewise, they could transform Tin (Sn/50) to Silver (Ag/47) with [almost] the same process – and get the same lithium byproduct. Note the differences in the atomic weight and their relative positions on the periodic table (they are neighbors in the carbon group).

The Inverse Process
If "regular" APA was a subtractive process, there was a corollary additive process. This took smaller elements and combined them in a form of arcane-facilitated atomic fusion.

Take the lithium byproducts of gold and silver production. There's a market for that already, from batteries to medicine, but given magic itself, say those particular markets dry up. The Li/3 could be combined with itself, turning it into pure Carbon (C/6).

Now, changing that from a black dust into pure diamond could be achieved with standard chemistry of the day, but also be performed with a completely different kind of magic called "transmutation." In that case, transmutation is a much lower-energy process can transform any element into another form, substance or compound (that doesn't actually change the atomic weight of the individual components).

Deactivation: the Complementary Process
Perhaps even more useful than producing gold is the APA process of deactivation. This is opposite of radio activation, or the process of making something radioactive.

Strange things happen when naturally radioactive nucleotides are deactivated, and they're not all good. However, in the normal course of medicine and industry, radioactivated contamination is a common sideeffect. Using alchemical deactivation, such contaminated materials can be neutrailized and rendered safe in a non-destructive process.

Risks of Performing Alchemy
This is the ultimate high-risk, high-gain venture and a few words need to be shared before we look at the safer techniques for nuclear transformation.

First of all, there are hazards to the process. Even tiny percentages of a gram can release a tremendous amount of energy whether using subtractive or additive processes.

Second, the field effects need to be attenuated and polarized. What does this mean? Attenuation is setting the arcane energy to what it will do within a given sphere. Say you're going to chip off 3 neutrons from the nucleus of a lead atom, attenuation is the strength and shape of the pulse that knocks three off instead of 1, 2, 4 or 5.

Polarization is focusing of the arcane field to the lead, rather than everything in the sample area, thus preventing a runaway disintegration/reduction of the entire target. This, for example, would turn the target lead into gold, but without polarization would also be turning that gold into Osmium, the Osmium into Tanatalum, the Tantalum into Ytterbium and so on (depending on the energy level used). A few words on containment: make sure you have it. An uncontained process will leak energy, possibly in a cascade which would be catastrophic (as in vaporizing the laboratory). While the damage would be limited in that the actuating apparatus would be destroyed in the process, a large enough pulse could activate enough target sample that the reaction occurs even as it's propelled on the edge of a shock wave. Sample purity: while the exact effects of impurities depend on the technique, most techniques are sensitive in at least some degree. The risks should be thoroughly understood before proceeding.
 * NOTE: A runaway reduction may result in explosion due to the mixture of incompatible elements that didn't previously exist. This may result in the death of the practitioner.
 * NOTE: an overpulse, or saturation of a sample with more arcane energy than sample material to receive it, may result containment breach. A containment breach may result in cascading atomic disintegration until the energy is absorbed by matter within the energy's path. Disintegration is a non-hyperbolic description and may result in the death of the practitioner.
 * NOTE: With proper containment and paced conversion rates, there should be no loss of Fun-4 energies. In other words: there should be no net loss of mass, nor any resulting sample irradiation. Improper techniques, however, may result in the death of the practitioner (and everybody else in what will likely be a wide blast radius).
 * The lowest energy and otherwise safest method on the fission itself, what is otherwise an extremely efficient form of alchemy, has an extreme sensitivity to impurities (to the point that the field would cause a crack-effect on the impurities at an atomic level, cracking the atoms and releasing energy in the process). Depending on the strength and saturation of the initial impulse, this would result in cracking a correlating amount of impurities within the field.
 * The speed of that impulse, against the saturation power into the sample, would determine the exact percentage of energy release. Let's look at a comparison: say a reaction targets a lead seam in a subterranean cave. A standard technique is used on a very "dirty" sample, resulting in critical failure.
 * If a high-power, high-saturation impulse is utilized, that guarantees a minimum transformation (as the chain-reaction effect will continue regardless of turbulence). A 50% matter conversion rate could easily happen for the entirety of the impurities within the initial field.
 * As a point of reference, the original World War II atomic bombs compared at about 3% conversion of the target fissile material.
 * In short, wherever this operation was would be the site of a future highly-irradiated, likely irregularly-shaped hole in the earth (or freshly carved, very-deep sea)...