How can an individual provide a higher quality of energy the more depleted it becomes?

Question

Spells requires a certain amount of orgone for use in order to have an effect. The more powerful a spell is, the more it requires of its user. Most witches have a orgone level of under 100, with the most advanced spells being high than that. This means that high class spells requires more orgone than one individual witch possess, and must siphon power from other sources. Drow males possess hundreds of times more orgone than females, but are incapable of using magic due to reasons. Special runes can be used by witches to draw power from male counterparts, adding their orgone to their own to meet the requirements of a spell.

For siphoning to work, it requires willing participants,. Who are trained at opening up their energy pathways and allow the witch to draw power from them. However, there exists a specially crafted dark rune that, when infused to a victim, turns the body into a prison by encapacitating them. This rune allows the witch to siphon orgone by force, violating the rule. This method rips and tears at the victim's soul, drawing out energy while inflicting extreme agony for extended periods of time. It also bypasses safety procedures normally built into other runes, allowing the witch to completely drain the victim dry, killing them.

What is strange is how this rune draws orgone out of the victim. The potency of the power increase inversely with how much is left. The last few "drops" before death can produce a much higher quality of power, allowing for the most powerful of spells. This creates a system that can be continuously reapplied, torturing the individual to the point of death to provide the best quality of orgone, and allowing them to heal in order for the process to start again.

How can this be the case?

Answer 1

Ok, I MAY have gotten a little carried away, so I'll TL;DR first:
Orgone forms into "shells" with the most powerful at the center and the weakest on the surface. All the orgone from the outermost shell must be depleted before the next shell can be accessed.

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Orgone is not just some mysterious substance than is somehow contained within a person's soul. It is their soul. It is their life force, their essence, their very being.

Orgone is a substance from a different plane of existence. Spatially, this plane matches the physical plane 1 to 1, but contains no matter, only orgone. The vast majority of orgone is loose and free floating, but a small portion of it will become tightly bound to a physical body, giving it life and consciousness. Conceptually, it is thought of as being pure white, or even made of light itself, but this cannot be confirmed as nobody has ever seen it (though some fanatics have claimed to). Through training and meditation a practitioner can cause more orgone to bind to them and/or transfer some of their orgone to another.

Only orgone that has bound itself to a physical being may be interacted with. Spells are cast by drawing orgone out of a soul, temporarily bringing it into the physical plane. Once released, it quickly dissipates back to its plane and, now unbound, becomes inert, but able to bind to a new entity.

The power in each "drop" of orgone varies greatly, from barely noticeable to nearly infinite, with the majority falling somewhere in the middle. The geometry of bound orgone is unknown, but extensive experiments and studies have all indicated that it self organizes into layers, or shells, with the most powerful particles at the center and the weakest on the surface. When drawing orgone into the physical plane the outermost shell must be depleted before the next shell can be accessed.

It is uncertain what exactly happens to a being's orgones when they die. Based on scientific observations alone, it appears that the orgones must be bound to a single physical entity in order to remain together and will disperse upon death. Many, however, believe they remain bound together, maintaining their consciousness and, without a physical form to be channeled through, unable to be pulled into the physical plane and separated ever again. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these non-physical beings from the other side may have limited ability to interact with the physical plane.

If this is true, then a being will pass to the other side with whatever remaining orgone they had at their time of their death. This makes fully drawing a being's orgone especially heinous, as it not only ends their life, but also permanently erases their existence.

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Answer 2

It sounds like distillation. The higher concentration of distillate you want, the less volume you get because you are discarding a lot of the solvent.

Think of alcohol based solution, like whiskeys. You discard most of the water and keep the alcohol.

Answer 3

The reason for this is the very reason orgone exists in the body at all.

The body uses orgone in low levels to keep a variety of bodily functions going: it helps tissue heal faster by accelerating time locally, it helps food digest by compacting space, and so on. If orgone exists in the universe, it only makes sense that evolution has learned to make some use of it.

The force of the orgone is modulated by two hormones, anorganone and organonole. The former tempers the effect of the orgone and the latter acts as a catalyst. Both take a long time to produce, but the body stores some reserves.

During times of stress, the body releases high amounts of organonole. Near death, all reserves are depleted in a last ditch attempt to help the orgone-based process keep the body alive.

The problem is that only free orgone, after it has been mixed with anorganone or organonole is stable enough to be harvested. Therefore, the witches need to coax the body into making the mixture first. Luckily, a variety of methods is available, so long as the witch is not overly squeamish.

Answer 4

The quality or purity of the orgone could be related to the soul's will to live. Simply forcing out small quantities of orgone is inconsequential to the soul itself because it can regenerate over time. However, when forcible taking large quantities at once, the soul enters a life or death situation. This empowers the soul to fight back and results in a higher quality of orgone as the soul hangs on to its last drops of life.

This would also fit well with torturing methods. If a soul can be tricked into thinking it is on its last leg when only drawing small quantities, it may be possible to draw more, higher quality orgone out. Emotional and spiritual torture might be just as effective as physical torture.

Alternatively, a wear and tear approach might work. Perhaps using the "top" layer of orgone over and over decreases its effectiveness. Thus, a witch has to push someone to the edge of death (which is not a typical state) to get the more pure, unused orgone. This could mean that witches would seek out and possibly fight over untouched souls - creating more small scale, proxy battles.

Answer 5

Orgone is simply more effective when isolated... kind of a reverse critical mass.

The more orgone is around the more it reacts with other orgone in the area, and the less effective/powerful/pure/whatever/you/want/to/call/it it becomes. But an isolated drop is very stable/effective/efficient/etc.

So why don't they just draw off tiny drips all the time to make super efficient use of this limited resource? Because a given quantity of orgone is locked into it's state at the time it is separated from a living being. This reasoning by itself would also mean that the first N% of the orgone from a male would be considerably less effective than the first drop of orgone from a female, which probably isn't what you're going for.

So would a Drow hermaphrodite be ridiculously powerful, or a hopeless cripple?

Proposition: Both males and females have the same amount of orgone at birth. Because females can manipulate their own orgone from birth (even if they don't know how to accomplish much without the proper training), their own supply of orgone becomes less and less smooth/effcient/pure as they get older. Milk in a churn, where girls' emotions "churn the milk" until they learn either to separate their emotions from their orgone manipulation, or learn to control their emotions (to a Vulcan-esque degree) But a drow male's orgone is as a still pond from birth till death.

A consequence of this would be that their society would try to train girls at an early an age as possible to stop messing up their own orgone so they'd be as strong as they could possibly be (1/100th the power of a male instead of 1/1000th for example). A great deal of witch research might be spent on finding ways to help stabilize drow girls as early as possible to make them as powerful as possible later in life. Long term emotion suppression spells cast on drow girls at birth, and maintained until they can control themselves. Side effect: Crap emotional maturity.

And if you go the "emotion control" = "stop churning the butter", then rival drow witches would go out of their way to stir up emotions in one another... not necessarily anger, but that might be easiest.

Now you've got "emotionless" catty bitches being awful to each other until one of them LOSES THEIR SHIT!!!

Another consequence would be that if your evil witch[es] could get their claws on newborn girls, they'd be almost as powerful a resource as a male at any age. Evil witches are EVIL.

Answer 6

There are actually two kinds of orgone.

One is the common sort, easily accessed because loosely bound to the living organism. This is the kind that can be used for ordinary spellcasting.

The second sort is very tightly bound; it might even be thought of as life energy itself -- drawing too much of it, as noted, results in death of the subject.

Any orgone drawing draws on both, but the loosely bound "ordinary" orgone makes up the bulk of what's produced at first -- but as more and more is drawn, and less and less "ordinary" orgone is avaialble, a progressively higher proportion of the "life" orgone is drawn with it; near the end, there is almost nothing left to draw but the life orgone, so the resulting orgone is nearly pure in this sort.

And that's important because the life orgone is many times more powerful.

Answer 7

From a previous question of yours related to orgone-based casting:

Orgone is the measure of a person's connection with the cosmos. It is the conduit through which the power of the cosmos flows, focused through a sorcerer's will. Ritual practicioners must draw on this reserve of power in their souls to make a magic spell work

That little bit of description seems to indicate that there are at least three parts to the orgone equation: The personal connection to it, one's will, and one's soul. It also leads to the inference that a person has a pool of personal orgone that they have developed through their connection that they can access readily.

The standard siphoning procedures works with the person and their connection. It taps into the donor's personal store of orgone, and draws it out. Because it is basically consensual and safe, it only really gets the readily available stuff. The safety measures prevent death and pain, and really going any deeper into the male donor than conventionally safe. It is applied to the person's physical self.

Counterpoint, the Dark Siphon rune is applied not to the person physical self, but to either their soul directly or to their actual connection to the cosmos. Most likely the soul though. Yes, it is applied to the skin, but that is only the physical medium.

By applying the rune to the soul directly, your will can more easily override theirs which can easily cause the incapacitating effect from the question. And when you pull on the rune for orgone? Well you are pulling on their soul, so not only are you pulling at and possibly breaking off parts of their soul, but you are siphoning their orgone from the middle, between the cosmos and their personal pool of the stuff.

And while a person's orgone is good ... pure orgone from the fabric of the cosmos is the best stuff. As the victim is drained closer to death, the mix of personal to cosmic orgone changes to be more cosmic orgone. If you drain someone to death, then for that last fraction of time, you have a tap to the cosmos itself. But that connection dies with the person that you have just drained to death.

And the pain? Well that is because you are meddling with something that people are not aware of and should not be aware of -- their connection to the cosmos itself and their soul. These are not things to tamper with in the best of circumstances. Now it is not just being tampered with, but actively attacked and pulled at. And the physical body probably doesn't have the correct way to translate it or adapt to it, so it will be painful. Forever.

TL;DR: The Dark Rune works by pulling on the soul, getting orgone from both ends of the connection to the cosmos