This could end up pissing off the makes of Avatar.
I'll approach it a bit differently.
Pulling Element: Spirit, Air, Water.
- Acceptance, relaxation, harmony.
Pushing Elements. Earth, Fire
- Authority, determination, focus,
I'd expect that Fire elementals would be highly resistant to high temperature extremes, due to the flames that they generate.
Earth/Fire: Magma
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.
Damm it, I make fun of people with bad grammar!
I'm going to preface this by says, I have not read all the other posts. It's 1:00 AM and I have neither the time nor the inclination.
So, Earth, Fire, Wind, Water? Lightening?
Water: Water is also used to cut metal in some milling machines. The effective range appeared to be about 1/4", whenever I saw it, (maybe far less), but hey this is magic right?
Water is also present in the human body. What if you suddenly removed all of the water from someone's blood? Or tried to make it run in every direction at once?
If you can cause water to separate from itself, then you're left with hydrogen and oxygen, which combine violently.
Water refracts light, so you could probably use it as a lens to start a fire as though it were a magnifying glass. Water does not compress very well. Water, unlike other liquids, increases in size when it freezes.
If you could make a tower of water hold together, then you could have a swimming pool that you enter by jumping off the ground and swimming up. By the same token, you could jump/flop from one swimming pool tower to another, as long as you made sure not to hit the ground and die.
Water weighs 6 lbs/gal (I think). You can expect to use a gallon of water per day of backpacking. It wouldn't be hard to kill someone by sending them into the woods, carrying 20 lbs in water, then making it all evaporate before it can be drunk.
Water, in pure elemental form, does not conduct electricity. (or so I've heard)
Wind: Ultimate Kite Flying Championship.
If you dig a trench that leads to the base of a campfire, you'll create a jetstream that feeds a larger campfire well.
In theory, wind could be used to keep a floor in place, even if it was a floor made of carpets.
Wind can disrupt verbal communication.
Wind, if you considered it to be moving gas, can refract light if it strikes a solid object moving quickly enough. An explosion does this, and it's mostly just expanding gas.
Fire: Fire, or the precise application of heat, has tons of industrial uses. More importantly, if you can imbue fire spells in food, you might be able to create a self-cooking hamburger.
Fire can be used to remove oxygen from an environment. Fire, in small doses, can keep someone's seat warm while they're away.
Fire magic can help the pretentious mage to play golf in the nude in a land of ice.
Fire magic, incense, and steam can make a smoke machine in any age.
A very brief exposure to fire can probably be used to exfoliate the skin, and clear away the outer layer of dead skin cells. ...also hair and eyes?
Fire can be enchanted into hot sauce to make it fire sauce for real.
Fire can be enchanted into wood to make buildings self-sabotaging.
Earth: by causing minor tremors in mountainsides, you could trigger avalanches—either to crush people to death, or to prevent larger ones.
You could change the hardness of sand, to make your "paid entry" beach more enjoyable than a competitors.
You could make sand castles that withstand the mean kids who take you beach balls and spit in your eyes.
You could make clay whenever you wanted to get your sculpting on.
You could create an earthen maze overnight for children's parties.
You could make the dust on the road less dusty, so it doesn't get on your clothes when a wagon comes by.
You can make a mud pit whenever you want to do some mud wrestling.
You can make a health club, which uses medicinal mud and elephant feces to keep the skin looking young—which of course doesn't work, but it sounds expensive, so people are willing to believe it should be.
You can make a killing in the mining business—or just kill people who are in the mining business. All of them.
You can set up a series of mud huts overnight, fill them with homeless people from different ethnicities, and then conduct scams/tours for rich nobility who fancy themselves as philanthropers. Every gold piece changes a life, you'll say—your life.
You can sell people dirt and claim it's a "bare bones" fire extinguisher.
If you ever want to play a good prank on someone, you can fill their entire home with earth, and the plunge it into a sinkhole, and then throw them in—screaming—after it.
That's all that comes to me at the moment. Basically, if you want alternate uses, pretend you're this guy for a few days and it'll come to you.
This is Schroedinger's quote. Until you get to the end, you don't know if it'll be enlightening or stupid. Ready? 42-helping others=workI have an example from the story I am trying to write where lightning-based magic is used to give metal objects a an electric charge which can be used to create crude electrical currents flowing from the caster. The Magic Knight uses a sword that, when given an electric charge, can function as a stun-baton of sorts and is found to be effective in dealing with armored knights.
Fire-based magic can be used to dry clothes, cook food, and cauterize wounds, but due to the nature of magic being Cast from Hit Points and "Magic A" Is "Magic A", it is rarely used for more mundane tasks.
Both lightning and fire-based magics are used by The Empire (the protagonists) and The Magocracy for interrogation and both have magic users in their armies (the later is around 33-50% magic users, The Empire is less than 10% magic users, though after the Time Skip, it is around 25%, with half of those being Magic Kights).
:3Just a worthy point, but to control electricity you might have some control over magnetism, and with enough control over that you could potentially alter atoms at will and then do ANYTHING.
Grated, it is unlikely any lighting-elemental will have that much control, but control over lightning and electricity could segue into control over magnetism (and possibly light, as it is electromagnetic radiation.)
@zandor 6017,Yeah, pure water doesn’t conduct electricity very well, but chemically-treated or salty water does. Seeing as human skin is covered in a thin layer of oils and salt from sweat, however, immersing yourself in pure water won't protect you from electricity any better than normal water will.
Pure water on its own MIGHT work but I wouldn’t try it.
edited 5th May '11 12:40:18 AM by doorhandle
- Make sicknasty bows!
- Instant Armor!
- Regenerating ablative walls!
- Hide thyself in forests really easy!
- Trip wires!
- Entangle people!
- Genetically engineer attack trees!
- Transport via Treebuchet!
- Use trees as clubs!
- Grow huge crops!
- Chip away at rocks!
- Make your wood grow!
Also, wood was one of the basic elements in Chinese myth, possibly replacing earth.
edited 5th May '11 12:48:52 AM by doorhandle

Ayesss.
Air, and Water: Lightening.
Water and Air: Invisibility by changing the surrounding medium's refraction.
Spirit, Earth, Water and Fire: Golem (animated clay giant from Jewish folklore that was used to defend jews from rioting villagers)