A Unitarian Question: When a Changeling wants to Measure Something, What do they Measure it In? · 11:01pm Jul 24th, 2020
So, I had a thought.
As near as I've been able to tell, it's popular fanon across the fandom that Changelings absorb, store, and use 'love' energy within their forms.
The question then is, how would they measure that? What units might they use?
In particular, I'm using a model where it's not merely love energy they're absorbing, but emotional energy... and love just offers the most of it, which gave that energy the popular name of "love", however inaccurate/misleading it might be.
Thus, the only thing I was able to come up with to call the unit used to measure this emotional energy is "love units", but that sounds way, way too clunky for an entire civilization.
I mean, I'd be okay with something like the "watts" and "watthours" we see in electricity- I've often ended up attributing the units 'thaum' and 'thaum-second' to regular magical potential (where the 'thaum' is a flow rate, like watts, reference for the definition- and so size of the unit- may vary from story to story).
And unfortunately, I'm not going to make it simple and use the Thaum again. In my model, while a Changeling is capable of converting this emotional energy into thaumic energy, the inverse is not true, and it's a 1:1 conversion rate no matter how quickly they use it- so I imagine they'd just do that conversion in real-time, when it's needed, and store it in the life-sustaining emotional energy form.
As a result, they'd use emotional energy units, rather than thaumic energy units, to describe power flows, buffers, reserves, and so on...
Any ideas what they'd call those emotional energy units?
Reminder, the unit can be related to love and/or sound like it's measuring love, even though it's not, because the emotional energy itself is often (incorrectly) christened 'love' anyways.
This is a good question that I didn't even think of and I am writing a changeling story. But I guess I would go with liquid ounce since the love in my story is generally converted into a honey like substance for distribution and consumption amongst the Hive.
Beats
Ex
142b or beats of love
You may want to research the Latin meaning for "love". If memory serves, there are over thirty different specific terms. All the way from the love you feel for a bondmate, to the love a grandparent has for a grandchild. We cover all these distinctions with the word love, and then try to explain it (often while drunk).
Good luck,
liters
Perhaps pony-second (the amount of emotional energy produced by the average pony in normal circumstances over the course of one second) or Cadance-second (similar, but with the Princess of Food rather than an average pony)?
5321052
Making the unit "ponies"... Now, that's an interesting take.
Though of course, there comes the small problem for that definition: Different emotions... produce different amounts. So any given pony will produce a different amount than a different pony, and that production will vary through the day as their emotional state changes...
For which they could just define a "pony" of emotional energy to be the amount consumed by 1 idle drone... and as such, a "pony-second" would be the amount consumed by 1 idle drone in just 1 second.
I think I like that one.
Amorites?
You could also try to think of names from MLP history, or things that could be from their history. I know a few people have tried using Merlins and Flamels as various units (think watts vs joules).
I do really like the idea of taking it all full-circle and making it some variant of horsepower...
It's even funnier, if I recall correctly, because whoever created that particular unit of measurement actually figured out how much weight a pony could lift (via walking forward, and having it lift a weight hung from a pulley) and then added some number to it since "horses were stronger." Turns out the number was too small, but having it be a real-world reference would be hilarious.
I mean, it would obviously be a callout to horsepower (on top of being that wonderful mix of funny and morbid that only comes from the species that fanonically refers to Cadance as the 'Princess of Food'), but it turns out that was a pony reference all along...
5325353
Using "horsepower". I like this idea.
But if we use that for power, what's energy? "Horsepower-second" sounds awkward, and "horsepower-hour" sounds ridiculous.