Thread:Garr9988/@comment-5782071-20170715215246/@comment-1674153-20170716221356

The emotional capability of any animal is heavily contested, given a creature's biological composition and even the general populace's ability to anthromorphize it, but under the right circumstances I see no reason why an animal couldn't offer the same chemical synapses to provide the emotional jumping point for an artifact to be created. To ignore an animal's consciousness fails to recognize them as anything other than machines. They react, they form bonds, they have senses of self.

That said, would a human be able to use an artifact imbued with an emotional reaction only understood by an animal that doesn't share a similar enough brain? Would our neural network be able to process such an emotionally imprinted item effectively? Or would it simply be ineffective, in the way that someone who never lies would never drown by Alfred Dreyfus' sword hilt? The pilot suggested that artifacts tend to be drawn towards those most similar to their original holders, which is why Lucrezia Borgia's Comb worked so effectively for Lorna. By that same token, would an artifact created by a bird ever be useable by a human being?

Now, that is not to say that pain and fear is not a very unifying concept, especially during a world-wide cataclysm event, and the sharing of pain and fear is personally how I imagine the elephant trunk artifact works so well. There is potential for the terror of an extinction making an artifact. That said, you run into a whole different set of problems when you try to make an artifact out of a rock, especially one that crashed into the Earth. Natural erosion over 65 millions years will grind so many things to dust, nevermind something that burned and fractured upon entering the atmosphere or exploded when it hit the ground. If it's below ground, possibly a different story, especially because that allows you to pull the artifact during any time by some convienent dig, but then you have geothermic pressure to contend with. I know you're looking at a fragment for this, but there's a difference between a fragment and a grain of beach sand.