What happens if you ingest Meta-Alloys?
- Thread starter RELSPI
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I was hoping a barnacle would grow in my throat and make me choke to death on a mixture of caustic ooze and my own blood, but that's almost as good.
I mean yeah if that's what does it for you, sure... But I've had acid indigestion before and it's mot fun...
'Caustic' describes corrosion by a strong base or alkali, rather than acid. I concede your point, though.
To quote the in-game description of meta-alloys:
The relevant part is in bold. Meta-alloys are not magic, and they not made of any super-weird alien elements - there's no such thing as "alien elements". They are simply ordinary metals that have been molecularly engineered at the nanoscale to give them unusual properties. Destroy that nanoscale structure by heating - or, one can logically infer, by dissolving it in acid - and the meta-alloys become a mixture of ordinary, regular metallic elements.
When you ingest a piece of ordinary metal, that metal hits the acids in your stomach and dissolves. How much this happens depends on exactly which metals we're talking about. Things like iron, zinc and aluminium will dissolve readily; copper, nickel and tungsten less so, and silver and gold basically won't dissolve at all. What happens to the dissolved metal after this is usually not pleasant; the human body is not designed to cope with most things that qualify as "metals". They end up in the bloodstream, where most of them are toxic; some get filtered out by the liver and kidneys, others - the "heavy metals" like lead and mercury - tend to accumulate in fatty tissues and/or irreversibly interfere with human biochemistry. Death by heavy metal poisoning would be the expected fate of a habitual metal-eater.
Meta-alloys are, chemically, no different to regular alloys and metals in this regard. What happens would depend on exactly what metals the meta-alloy is made of (and I don't think we've ever been told a precise chemical composition, so your guess is as good as mine), but nothing special or magical ought to happen to you that wouldn't happen if you ingested a piece of ordinary metal.
The relevant part is in bold. Meta-alloys are not magic, and they not made of any super-weird alien elements - there's no such thing as "alien elements". They are simply ordinary metals that have been molecularly engineered at the nanoscale to give them unusual properties. Destroy that nanoscale structure by heating - or, one can logically infer, by dissolving it in acid - and the meta-alloys become a mixture of ordinary, regular metallic elements.
When you ingest a piece of ordinary metal, that metal hits the acids in your stomach and dissolves. How much this happens depends on exactly which metals we're talking about. Things like iron, zinc and aluminium will dissolve readily; copper, nickel and tungsten less so, and silver and gold basically won't dissolve at all. What happens to the dissolved metal after this is usually not pleasant; the human body is not designed to cope with most things that qualify as "metals". They end up in the bloodstream, where most of them are toxic; some get filtered out by the liver and kidneys, others - the "heavy metals" like lead and mercury - tend to accumulate in fatty tissues and/or irreversibly interfere with human biochemistry. Death by heavy metal poisoning would be the expected fate of a habitual metal-eater.
Meta-alloys are, chemically, no different to regular alloys and metals in this regard. What happens would depend on exactly what metals the meta-alloy is made of (and I don't think we've ever been told a precise chemical composition, so your guess is as good as mine), but nothing special or magical ought to happen to you that wouldn't happen if you ingested a piece of ordinary metal.
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