Is there an AAA that owns it now?

All will be revealed in Corp Guide.

I could use the info today, for my Northern Gateway campaign here on DS.

Please? Pretty please? With sugar on top?

Well...okay, it's not like it's a terrible secret after Year of the Comet or anything.

IIRC it's Universal Omnitech.
And it's confirmed by Nath's corporate index.

Thank you, gentlemen. Heh. I even have YotC with me. It would have taken a long time to get around to searching through it, though.

Hard nanotech exists.

DeBeers might be the biggest diamond fabrication company, but nobody should bother mining them any more... unless the mined ones are better for magic, or something.

Modern mining methods totally ruin the usability of any telesma. You'd have to mine them "by hand". There's a couple places you can do that (African beaches where kimberlite was washed downriver and then up onto the beach) but they are already mines today; by 2050, there may not be any (known) such sites left. You'd probably have to go to the sea bed or some such.

Sure, but modern nanotech makes modern mining obsolete (for gems anyway -- you can't manufacture metals out of air).

So I guess DeBeers still does exist, and still does oppress a population of poor miners, who must do their thing by hand in order for the gemstones to have any mystical value.

The big dirty secret was that where there were diamonds there (sometimes) was natural Orichalcum. They are probably a big supplier of Orichalcum in 2070. You might want to read up on the Orichalcum Rush.

Will do. What book?

Year of the Comet has most the info.

Are you implying that natural orichalcum existed before the YotC? Correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge natural orichalcum only appeared in '61 around the time Haley's Comet came by and the known veins all but dried up after the comet passed. I don't know if thats enough to keep DeBeers in business all those years (mid-90's to 2070's) in the setting of nanotech diamonds.

No I'm saying that they had a lot of land that they mined diamonds from. Then YoTC hit and low and behold those areas spontaneously had orichalcum as well. It meant that all the "played out mines" and slag heaps from the mines all of a sudden had value again. The book talks about people going back through all the waste sites to get the orichalcum that was suddenly in the mine byproducts.

It meant that they had land that was worth a lot, then worth a little and then worth a lot again. Wuxing figured it out and brought a ton of their "empty" mines in barren areas of Africa for pennies in the Rush. And they didn't have enough money to survive. Its why they got bought out.

I thought we went over this.

In Year of the Comet, page 84, mention is made of "at least five other[ Awakened Minerals] which are even rarer than orichalcum itself."

Any clues to the nature and/or whereabouts of these?

Exotic reagents? Natural neptunium radicals?