[Magic] Rebuilding Diamonds

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by MagicalMeddler

Does it? "This spell totally rebuilds any object from as little as a fragment." It does not say, "The spell draws in all the old materials of the object to reform it, because the spell finds it easier to reach across the universe, even into suns and black holes, to recycle the scattered atoms of the starship you're trying to fix."

When I suggested it destroying the rest of the item's remains, I wasn't arguing "this is the way the spell was intended to work from the beginning," but rather "here's a potential fix for it." Honestly, my guess is that the designers of the original spell were just thinking "this lets you repair on object from just a portion of it, rather than needing the whole thing," without any consideration of "this is what happens if multiple portions of the broken object have the spell cast on them separately." It's sort of like how, in some magic systems, there can be two or more levels of "bring back from the dead" spells - a low-level one requires a mostly-intact corpse, while a high-level one can bring someone back from a shard of fingerbone - but you generally can't use the latter spell to split someone in half and then cast it twice to clone them! Repair is akin to the lesser spell, Rebuild to the greater one. Not being able to clone someone is easy to justify as a case of "they only have one soul to bring back, and it's really the soul that has the blueprint to rebuild the body" or similar. Objects are harder to justify it not working to make duplicates, unless the metaphysics of your setting has objects having a soul of sorts (which can open a whole other can of worms).