Well, it's probably not quantum but it sounds nice.
Can vis be split into something smaller than a pawn? After all, a pawn is just a hermetic measure of quantity. Could Vis in the wild exist as halves or thirds of a pawn?
If I have a bucket of water containing a pawn of aquam vis, could I split it into two half buckets of water, each with a half pawn of vis?
Could I split a pawn of Rego and a Pawn of Aquam then combine the 4 parts into two lots of Rego Aquam vis?
Could there be non-hermetic traditions which use other units of measurement?
I can see a variant of Mercurian Magic
Lesser Vis (Major, hermetic)
You use vis by the half-pawn rather than by the pawn. To you a half pawn of vis has the same effect as a pawn to other magi.
This means that in a ritual you only use half the vis a normal magus would.
When enchanting an item each half-pawn gives 10 levels of effect.
When casting spells each half-pawn gives an extra 2 Penetration.
Your maximum vis use in a season is limited to your magic theory score.
I can't see this virtue being too overpowered for a major as it doesn't let you use the equivalent of more vis.
All it does is save vis, which in most scenarios won't be a factor. However in a vis-poor saga this will be handy - especially for a verditius.
Yup, they can be divided. The pawn convention is just that, a convention. It is the minumum unit of vis usable by hermetic magic. It is like money: you might have individual cents, but unless you have them in 5 cent units, the drinks machine will refuse to accept them. THe drinks machine is hermetic magic here
There are already other traditions that use different fractions of vis. The magicians of soqotra, from rival magic, use 10ths of pawn, for example. I see no problem with vis being found in smaller than a pawn fractions.
The idea of mixing them up I do not think would be very common (I hate vis transfer with a passion, BTW, since IMO turns magic into chemistry, not magic anymore), even if you can introduce te+Fo specific vis in your saga. We have it in our saga and it works well enough. A flame that can only be used for intellego ignem, for example, refusing to be used for any other purpose. Makes vis more special if it is limited in scope.
Mixing 2 halves of different types of vis into a single pawn is something I do not see very well (lazyness on my part, mostly), but mixing 2 halves to be used for a Te+Fo spell that uses both that technique of the half and the form of the other half is something I would look forward to do. Funny it never occurred to us. Thanks for pointing it out.
On of the early covenants in the game had a vis source that was fifty pairs of bat wings equalling one pawn of Animal, so there's clearly vis in quantities smaller than a pawn.
And someone else has mentioned the Soqotrans and the Spark. They have a sort of brute-force approach to spellcasting that requires vis every single time, just not very much, and they are rich with vis because they all have a personal vis source of lavish size.
