Augmentarium Breakthrough - Biometal

Biometal – The Living Alloy of Huevara

Biometal is neither forged nor mined; it is grown.

It begins as a single seed no larger than a child’s thumbnail: a droplet of liquid silver wrapped in a sheath of blackened bronze that looks, at first glance, like burnt bark. When planted in nutrient-rich soil (or, in Brackenwalk’s case, the living flesh of a willing host), the seed drinks light, memory, and emotion the way a plant drinks water. Over months and years it puts out hair-fine roots of a mithril like metal that seek out heat and moon light, while its surface sprouts delicate petals of flexible steel that harden into overlapping scales or soften into velvet-smooth plating as needed.

The metal is warm to the touch, roughly blood temperature, and carries a faint pulse that matches the grower’s heartbeat. When the bearer laughs, microscopic pores along the petals open and release a scent like ozone after rain; when the bearer bleeds, the wound weeps liquid mercury that cools into perfect mirror-bright beads before sinking back into the alloy. Biometal grows slowly but continuously (adding new joints, lengthening bones, even blooming decorative “flowers” that of a mirrored glass and wire image when its host is particularly joyful). It is self-repairing, corrosion-proof, and seems to learn: limbs shaped for sprinting develop spring-steel tendons, while those meant for delicate work sprout near-microscopic manipulator filaments.

The alloy bonds on a cellular level. Once rooted, it cannot be removed without killing both host and metal. It is also, to the quiet alarm of some Prismatics, mildly telepathic; it remembers events of high emotional reaction and will occasionally replay those memories as faint, silvery images on its surface when the bonded host thinks of them, appearing as living tattos.

Though Biometal is currently being grown, researched, and experimented with in laboratories and private workshops across every district of Huetopia, living samples remain extraordinarily rare and are among the most strictly regulated substances in the city. No amount of wealth or favor can purchase even a single gram on the open market; every seed, cutting, and mature specimen is catalogued, tracked, and guarded by the Glasshold Consortium itself, for the Hues understand that a metal which grows with love and memory is nourished by wonder is far too dangerous (and far too precious) to be treated as mere merchandise.