Introduction
Invented in the year 255 by
Proffessor Ghufran Kamau of the Order of Falcon Wizards, the Paint Prism takes white paint and blood and alchemically produces paints of all colors of the rainbow. Ghufran figured out how to manufacture it quickly and cheaply, and distribute it en masse, revitalizing the art, cultural and architectural scenes of the city. The realization that magic could be packaged and shared with everyone, as technology, sparked a Rennaisance for the Fountaineers.
History
Ghufran Kamau, a Professor of Special Effects in the Citadel of Fountain, would spend half her weekends distilling paints of myriad colors from white paint with her magic, and the other half often too tired to actually paint. She had joined the staff on year 254 and had all her weekday times consumed by lectures and cleaning up after laboratory explosions caused by her students. Ghufran wanted a way to speed up the distilling of the paints, something that would allow any painter to just start with white paint and within minutes be drawing on canvas. The
Sumirite brooch given to her on her anniversary of becoming a Professor provided inspiration.
The Paint Prism palettes were manufactured in the thousands and spread all over the city through schools. The ease of use by anyone, even children with no magical ability, and the ease of manufacture inspired the students at the Citadel to investigate how many more of their daily rituals improved by magic could be distilled into simple devices they could send home to their families, though it did lead to a marked increase in the number of phone calls from confused grandmothers to their grandchildren asking how to operate the latest Sumirite doodad they had received. Wizards had started taking the first steps to making magic accessible and available to all, ushering in the Rennaisance for Fountain.
The Rennaisance spread to Drain as well, as that's where Sumirite naturally grew from the earth and had been slowly being eroded and brought by the waters of Moontides to Fountain. The storage and technological capacities of Sumirite pushed the people of Drain to start a huge mining operation for Sumirite all over the South Pole. The Paint Prism indirectly led to the industrialization of Drain and their huge adoption of the Sumirite crystals in day-to-day lives.
Mechanics and Inner Workings
The initial design was a paint palette, with two dips at one end, with a small groove jutting out of each dip and combining into one groove, forming a Y shape. The two dips were meant to be filled with black and white paint respectively, and the meeting point of the Y grooves had a valve allowing the user to control how much of each paint would enter the final mixture, thereby controlling the brightness of the resulting dyes. The leg of the Y went through the middle of the palette, where the Sumirite prism was fitted. The prism itself had a receptor at the top with a pin, allowing users to submit a pinprick of blood. The prism, fueled by the blood and the stored magic spell inside, would distill the white paint and mix in the black paint to produce all 7 shades of the rainbow. Each shade of dye would then exit the prism through a different groove in the palette and get deposited in its own dip at the bottom of the palette, ready for the canvas.
Since the initial invention and rollout, the Paint Prism has been redesigned and repurposed in many ways. People quickly figured out they could put paint of any specific dye in one of the dips at the top, and mix it with either white or black dye to get different shades of the same color. Engineers figured out how to build larger Paint Prisms and build dye factories around them, so people could also buy specific dyes or shades in bulk. This quickly led to concrete urbanization throughout the cities, as more and more people moved to live in colorful concrete homes rather than stay in simpler brick or thatch based nests or dens.
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