Editing Elemental (section)

==Uses==
Elementals can be [[Summoning|summoned]] just as any other creature could and used to that effect as minions.<ref name=":3">“Okay,” Ty said.  He sprung to his feet, moving out of my field of vision.  “Elemental?  Ghosts?”<br><br>“Wind elemental,” Alexis said.  “Anything else is going to be awfully hard to explain.”<br><br>“Got it.”<br><br>“I’ll get the supplies,” Tiff said.  “Myrrh?”<br><br>“Myrrh works,” Ty replied.<br><br>“We’re low on myrrh,” Alexis said, adding her two cents.  “Incense works too.”<br><br>“Got both,” Tiff said.<br>[...]<br>He finished drawing with chalk, and spoke, “''Sylph Elatus''.”<br><br>The air distorted, a slight fog, a movement of dust, tracing the vague outline of a young boy. The boy darted forward as Tiff opened the library door by hand. - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/09/27 Excerpt] from [[Malfeasance 11.8]]</ref> They can be used as a power source for rituals.<ref name=":2" /> Like a [[ghost]], they can be bound into objects, which helps to stabilize them in the material world.<ref>I reached for my hatchet, touching the handle.“Bound spirit?” he asked.  “Wraith?  Ghost?  Elemental?  I’m actually pretty good at dealing with those.  I’m kind of shit when it comes to fighting, but if you try using that, then you’re going to be down one trinket, and that looks like pretty intricate work.” - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/02/25 Excerpt] from [[Breach 3.5]]</ref><ref>Elementalism: The practice of those who deal with the forces of nature, from calling down lightning to creating fire at their fingertips. Conjure spirits of certain elements.  Spirits are otherworldly and do not fit easily into the material world, and thus need vessels to be crafted and to operate from.  While they become weak points of a sort, both strategically and as a target that can be sundered or stolen away on the battlefield, the vessels often offer minor benefits to those who bear them. - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X7moMQUSO72u1Hkswewy15YqF8b-c1ocpxAXiLe8WRQ/edit Pact Dice doc by Wildbow]</ref> They can be used to animate a [[vessel]], for example the [[Terracotta Soldier]].

=== Constituents ===
Those tied to elements who cultivate and [[power|empower]] it when able, while generally short lived a few example can exist for centuries.<ref>Constituents are denizens of the Elemental, often briefly-lived Others who dwell in Storms and close to ongoing elemental disasters.  They tend to be silent (in a manner of speaking- they may be accompanied by the sound of crackling, whooshing, or by roiling noises) or relatively soft-spoken, and move with a focused determination for the minutes or hours they live.  They appear as distorted and broken humans (most often), animals (uncommon) or abstract forms (rarely), often fragmented with the fragments connected by one or more elements.  This distortion is in part because they are horror-adjacent, existing in the midst of what is essentially a realm-based distortion, the Storm.<br><br>As agents of the Storm [or the ongoing elemental incident, but we'll use Storm for brevity], Constituents manifest with a full but sometimes dull or single-minded awareness, undertaking actions that, when poring over wreckage, might be explained away as human error or accident.  Secured flammables may be unsecured, damming measures unhitched.  In many of these things, it is a question of very minor sabotages for maximum gain, where exaggeration of the Storm's effects are the sought-after 'gain'.  They also oppose those who would disrupt or take away from the Storm, and are often a Storm-Chaser's biggest and/or most common opposition.  They can be found in the midst of the storm, or ahead of its path.  If the Storm is sure to destroy everything in its path, they may take no issue with showing themselves to people or forcing people into the Storm's way.<br><br>Perhaps most dangerous to practice and practitioner, however, is that the Constituents will effectively 'sacrifice' ongoing practice, magic items, and Others to the Storm.  This can take a number of forms.  A demesne dragged underground in an ongoing series of landslides is a great deal of potential power that has to go somewhere.  A trove of magic items dragged into roiling sea and buried in silt may be sent to the Abyss, with the Abyss effectively 'paying for' the gift by feeding power to the Storm and constituents.  Bound Others may be co-opted by a Frost Storm, bound in ice instead, and this may potentially create more Constituents, though practitioners are still working out the process and verifying the theory.  Successful transmutation of one practice's power to something Elemental can add hours or days to the ongoing Storm, or turn a non-Storm event into a Storm.<br><br>Constituents may achieve more awareness with more sacrifices or more ability to feed more things to the Storm, and it's possible that they may recur, exist more independently of the Storm or other elemental disasters, or even become the nascent locus of a future Storm.  This can be the result of things like the aforementioned sacrifice to the Abyss, becoming part bogeyman, or a result of a great deal of power and clarification.  Recurring Constituents can hold onto a specific element, even in off-type storms (a Constituent of Electricity tearing down power lines amid a Frost Storm) or hold onto another identity, changing their element appropriately (A Constituent that always appears with a rose-like pattern to a mask, long limbs, and a black dress, backed by roiling smoke on one occasion, sandstorm on another). - Wildbow on Discord</ref> They are some of the most common elementals for practitioners to interact with but this doesn't mean they're the most common elemental.<ref>Constituents were a regular concern of elementalists, those practitioners who dealt with elementals.  They appeared most commonly with a Storm, but an elementalist or more powerful elemental could make them more lasting, or they could occasionally find some human-shaped vessel to occupy for a little while.  The majority of non-stable Others seemed to exist as [[pattern]]s or shapes that needed some outside source of power to keep going, like ghouls needed some proportion of life and death, or incarnations encouraged whatever their universal human constant was and then drank of that idea.  Constituents, by contrast, were ''power,'' and fought constantly to find that form and pattern.<br><br>Elementals tended to be fleeting, existing as points where more abstract energies met reality.  Fire springing to life, earth moving, water surging, wind blowing where there’d been nothing before.  They could mark the leap from spirit to ''real'', and had a long history of interacting with man, especially in those dangerous domains like natural disasters or poorly understood technology.  Constituents weren’t the most common kind of elemental, but they were the most common kind a practitioner would deal with, because the usual elemental would burn themselves out in however long it took to freeze a car and its inhabitants in winter or give more direction to a rockslide that was hitting a town.  Constituents at least stuck around for a few hours, instead of minutes. - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2021/11/09 Excerpt] from [[Playing a Part 15.4]]</ref>

===Rudiment===
...<!--Elementals are classified into loose categories, including the common Constituents, who resemble people, albeit drawn out, which reflect humanity's grip on the elements.  In the other direction, there are Rudiments (or Rudis, in some vernacular), who may have a jumble of features, typically evoking the damage done by the untamed elements; limbs formed of mangled machinery, bones, damaged trees or earth, often with exposed weak points.  Raw, wild, and vicious, they aren't normally visible to non-practitioners, and will hone in on areas where it takes minimal effort to evoke disaster, hoping to stir up an event that lets them multiply and rapidly advance their capabilities or grow.  Those trained in elemental practices will often ward off or have alarms set on vulnerable areas, and these events are tracked and capitalized on by Storm Chasers, between major storms.
At the moment of catalysis, the Rudiment or Rudiments, normally no larger than a person or animal, will tend to throw themselves at the most concentrated points of the disaster in progress; they will swell in size, grow additional features, and tend to have a link to and control of the other rudiments, constituents, and other elementals or elemental-laced Others (such as elemental wraiths) birthed from the event.  In the process, the disaster tends to become a chain reaction of related disasters (an explosion and fire at a warehouse leading to one at the adjacent shipyard).  There is a hierarchy and subcategorization of advanced rudiments pulling on the 'rudis' root: rudere (roarers), irrupters (burst/break open), ructions (destroyers), and the very advanced ryudra (relating to the rigvedic goddess) and rudites (from 'erudite'). 
As with other elementals, it is common for a rudiment to advance and grow to a stage where they cannot sustain themselves, and burn out more quickly as a result, but they can do a fair amount of damage in the process.

<ref>Elemental Others come in a variety of forms.  At the low and common level are Constituents, who resemble humans in silhouette, but vestigial (see Hollow) and connected by a singular elemental force, Rudiments, who take more bestial or loose forms made of elementally touched debris and wreckage (such as warped metal and shattered wood), and their various offshoots.  These Others are what people tend to mean when referring to ‘Elementals’.   They usually emerge from Storms and micro-Storm events, urban and human touched for Constituents and wild and natural for Rudiments, though not as a hard and fast rule, however; Rudiments can emerge from a disaster in the middle of a city.<br>[...]<br>In this way, a warehouse gas leak can become an explosion and building collapse, with lesser Constituents and Rudiments born from the unfolding disasters, while the ones who were there for the event rapidly evolve.  - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LZFjFfwxLK1UWS59EY5js8ORYAlQLvLzBmkcqdpTp_0/edit#heading=h.wvvgke36ql47 PACT DICE: Elemental]</ref>
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