But, a nuclear power plant is an object. How exactly would applying sharpness to it work?
It's a
cutting edge nuclear power plant.
Even better, how would mold to symbolize corruption apply to gold which is incorruptible? Turn it into lead, the anti-gold?
No, turn the gold into a corrupting vector. People turning evil for gold is a common story, and for good reason. A festering pile of wealth that seeks to expand to the detriment of the owner's life sounds
exactly like the sort of thing that could occur.
Or how would a statue of Jesus apply to a statue of Satan?
False Messiah overtones there, especially since "No Idols" is kind of one of the ten commandments.
What would aerogel and sharpness result in?
The mother of all paper cuts, if nothing else.
That's what I was thinking. The only exception I can think of is if you were going to use the object as a reagent in a second ritual, then the object does matter, as the method would have an effect.
Well, it's more like... Imagine an orange enchanted with a blessing that ensures your quiver will never run empty when you need it. This could just emit a field of luck that ensures that you'll never waste arrows, or it could go the other way and spontaneously generate one whenever you aren't looking, so long as it's been placed in a quiver.
In such a case, the subject and the effect are connected, even if the lines of the enchantment have to twist themselves a fairly silly amount to do so.
Now, using enchanted items as reagents for a greater enchantment is, I surmise, much the same as constructing something metaphorically, with an emphasis on the metaphor. Rather than the basic technique of literal metaphorical language (These shoes are as swift as the eagle from which this feather was taken, and as supple as the scales of this snake), it becomes (The greaves of this armor bear the swiftness of the Boots of Seven Leagues, and the sturdiness of Adamantine-ringed diamonds).
So the Greaves would have several traits (Swfitness of Seven League Boots, Hardness of Adamantine), except then those traits themselves would have to be defined (Seven League Boots - Swift as an Eagle, And you walk as the Crow Flies) (Adamantine - Diamond Iron, a metal which represents sturdiness and a resistance to changes others would force upon it).
Cut back to the orange for a second. Its enchantment (Arrows somehow) would obviously be a reagent, but then you'd have to take more than just the enchantment from it, as a nod to the item as a whole. A requirement for specific placing (such as the orange in the quiver), or a certain zest to the piece that you can't quite put your finger on...
Blood contains stories that perhaps you don't know the whole of, and these have underlying effects which aren't immediately obvious. Let's call this Flux, because the enchantment is not steady to its intended purpose. Therefore, because using an enchantment as a reagent adds the story of the enchantment to the new story you're trying to tell, a lot of the fiddly details of the derivative are going to accompany the piece. If that orange can only be held by a child, and the Bow of Sublime Archery it's been worked into is picked up by a man, you're going to be suppressing part of the enchantment, and it won't operate at full capacity.
So Flux would be... extenuating circumstances. The higher the flux, the more situational the piece. Vague flux is the worst sort of Flux, because you aren't quite sure how to account for it. Thus, when using an Item as a Reagent, you must not only account for every implication of the ritual, but every implication of the reagent: kind of like normal reagents, except they start off much more complex. Otherwise it gets Flux, because you've forgotten some implied things about it and now you're not quite sure how reliable it is.
Or, to put it another way, if each reagent has a certain amount of complexity, and the total complexity you must account for is "Difficulty", then the only thing stopping you from using enchanted items to make enchanted items to make enchanted items is that you keep kicking up the complexity until it's almost guaranteed that you'll forget something and end up using it the wrong way, unless it's very straightforward. Like, "A Sword" straightforward.
I'm not sure if I even
answered a question here. *Stumbles back off into the internet*
