Musings on a Femtodragon
Written by Jason Fuesting, Illustrated by Cedar Sanderson
This all started when I was challenged to make an even smaller chainmaille dragon. I made three sizes, and jokingly dubbed them in relationship to a 'real' dragon. So the Microdragon (the size currently in my shop, and roughly 4 inches long) is 10^-6 smaller than a regular dragon, the Nanodragon at roughly 2 inches is 10^-9 smaller, the Picodragon is 10^-12...
From right to left: Micro, Nano, Pico
And the Femtodragon is 10^-15 which compared to a femtometer is, well, that's about the size of a single atom. My friend Jason who was deep in physics homework and needed to do a SAN roll, saw the little guy and informed me that he was a femtodragon, and his name was Planck. The rest of this came from his musings on the idea of a very, very, very small dragon.
This is Planck. Planck is a femtodragon.
Musings on the femtodragon
You know, Planck's breath weapon would have to be a pure beam of high energy photons. Maybe even up to the gamma end of things. Just started into quantum mechanics, so this is all off the top of my head.
No, I am not a cute little thing! Rowr!
Fuck your armor, this is gamma rays, bitches! Unless you're wearing several meters centimeters of lead anyway (1 cm of lead reduces gamma exposure by 50% for a given energy length... so 10cm reduces exposure to 0.12% You're still getting exposed... just by a very small amount, so unless you're wearing a girdle of storm giant strength... and even then...).
What's the appropriate breath weapon for a femtodragon if not something else that operates on the same scale?
I mean, gamma rays are bad... but "Pure stream of anti-quarks" is a bit OP.
Now I'm stuck wondering what a anti-quark breath weapon would look like. Nothing good, I can assure you.
Planck! Not the couch!
Because "Fuck your smallest components of matter... and also your couch.” Well, it wouldn't be like an anti-matter breathweapon... no sudden "FOOM!" as the A/M liberated all the rest energy of everything it came in contact with... it would just eat whatever quarks it was opposite of... which would have... unpredictable side effects.
I mean, think about it, if 99.99999% matter we know of is composed of 3 quarks, depending on which quark you chose to poof... I mean, you could literally eat 1/3 the mass or 2/3 the mass out of something and convert it to energy. The "waste" products would probably try to recombine into new matter if they could...
It'd damn near literally be a disintegration beam... that also released massive amounts of radiation in the gamma spectrum too.
So yeah, your target dies horribly, and anyone standing in an X meter radius gets to enjoy either fast acting radiation death... or a certain case of horrific cancer if they manage to get away.
Like I said... “it's overpowered."
Not that dying by massive sunburn or the like is much better... but hey, on the plus side, it's a really small dragon, so you have two possibilities... Either it's a ray/beam style breath weapon... in which case it's *very* narrow... or it's a cone, which would approximate the inverse square law... and since he's small, the power available would be similarly small... thus it would be very short range.
Planck versus the giant Boot.
So yeah... taking that into account... well, femtodragon's breath weapon of anti-quarks would act like a infinitesimally small blade that would make vorpal weapons look like butter knives... and probably give you cancer to boot.
Suddenly I'm liking the anti-quark breathweapon.
Note to self, do not piss off femtodragon.
Keep in mind, I glossed over a fair amount of quantum mechanics (mostly because I haven't learned it)
So what I said was just a gross approximation. Though to be fair, if asked "How bad could it be?" Answering "BAD!" is a good enough approximation for most people.
And this is why we don't cross the streams, Ray.
