Turning medieval-style "elemental" effects into modern scientific ones

I'm building a near-future world on top of someone else's older world with not-entirely-well-thought-out "elemental" magic. I'm willing to use "because magic!" arbitrarily to answer questions of how effects happen, but I'm looking for scientific answers to what might actually be going on in the world as a result. I'm hoping that by having a small set of known-possible rules-of-physics-breaking effects, I can come up with new and interesting modern uses of these powers. While technically there are three different elemental effects here, I'd like to have as small a set as possible, and hopefully there will be overlap between the supposedly-different powers.

The "elemental" effects in question have been identified solely by observation in a standard Earth environment and on reasonably ordinary objects, so physical explanations that would cause the "elemental" effects as a side effect or easy-to-mistake alternate explanation-- e.g., "fire" actually being spontaneous combustion of objects subject to abrupt extreme heat-- are just fine, and probably even more interesting.

The "elemental" powers are historically used almost exclusively for combat, hence the offensive or weapon-focused descriptions. Users of the power can control fire, ice, and lightning. The effects that we see fall into some fairly constrained ranges.

Fire effects: Up to a 10-m radius sphere of flame that only lasts briefly; the smallest effect we see is a 10 cm sphere that sticks around long enough to use as a fidget toy. Also the traditional "flaming sword" effect, on weapons that are not specially designed for it.

Lightning effects: 10-m radius sphere of painful but not instantly deadly small "lightning"; 5-m distance fairly serious lightning bolt; most confusingly, a several-minute short-range lightning/sparking effect on a dagger.

Cold effects: 10-m radius sphere of cold at something between liquid nitrogen and frozen water temperatures, lasting about a minute; several-minute continuous effect on a dagger, holding it at "cold enough to cause immediate damage". (Extra bonus points if you can come up with an explanation that would let the dagger be just fine with this treatment being used on it repeatedly while hitting things. See: not entirely well-thought-out elemental system.)

posted almost 6 years ago

Hufflehobbit‭

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