Mistings with jobs!!!

[theuntaintedchild]

I work at a school and while at work I frequently find myself thinking "if only I could get these kids more interested in the subjects they are studying". Science for example is an exceptionally interesting subject that it seems some students just don't share my appreciation for. That's when I came up with an amazing idea. What if I burned brass and rioted their curiosity. Suddenly I'd have a classroom full of students who actually wanted to learn everything I needed to teach them. And if my classroom aid was a Soother they could be burning zinc in the back of the classroom, dampening their rambunctiousness...osity?

 

So here's the game, If you could apply a single allomantic ability (i.e. you're a misting) to a job what do you think the best combos of allomantic abilities and jobs would be. 

[WayneSpren]

Zincmind for scientists would help them come up with better ideas.

You could burn zinc as a comedian and raise their sense of humor.

Lashings could be used to move heavy things.

[Irkutsk]

Pewter for any manual labor, ever.

Cadmium as a night guard, or any other job that requires a lot of waiting. You could speed through it in an instant.

I wonder if it would be illegal to hire a rioter to riot hunger in passerby near your restaurant... It seems like there is a lot of potential for shady business practices with Zinc and Brass.

One thing I really hope happens as the tech level becomes more advanced in the books is power plants powered by steel and iron mistings. Rather than have a giant coal plant that burns tons of coal a day, you could hire a couple of coinshots to push on a turbine and supply them with a tiny vial of steel shavings. Clean, cost effective energy, especially if they can ever get mechanical Allomancy properly sorted out.

[theuntaintedchild]

Pewter for any manual labor, ever.

Cadmium as a night guard, or any other job that requires a lot of waiting. You could speed through it in an instant.

I wonder if it would be illegal to hire a rioter to riot hunger in passerby near your restaurant... It seems like there is a lot of potential for shady business practices with Zinc and Brass.

One thing I really hope happens as the tech level becomes more advanced in the books is power plants powered by steel and iron mistings. Rather than have a giant coal plant that burns tons of coal a day, you could hire a couple of coinshots to push on a turbine and supply them with a tiny vial of steel shavings. Clean, cost effective energy, especially if they can ever get mechanical Allomancy properly sorted out.

That would be a cool thing to see as the tech level becomes more advanced. It would definitely add to the worldbuilding. If you've never seen the cartoon "The Legend of Korra" they do a similar thing in a scene where one of the characters uses his powers at a powerplant in order to make a little extra cash. It's a neat little touch I think adds to the plausibility of how the world would function.  

[Yata]

Cadmium as a night guard, or any other job that requires a lot of waiting. You could speed through it in an instant.

You will be the worst night guard ever 

[Irkutsk]

You will be the worst night guard ever

How so? With a bubble I can wait through the entire night parked in front of a door in a few minutes. If anyone tries to shoot me the bubble should deflect it and I will notice, and if anyone tries to engage in hand-to-hand combat thy have to enter the bubble.

Granted it might be better with some Pewter or Gold Feruchemy, but it's not bad alone.

Edited February 8, 2016 by Irkutsk

[Yata]

Well if you guard something very small, it's ok.

[Uilos]

Cadmium bubbles slow down time for you, but make the world outside the bubble go by fast. A thief could dart in and out and you'd not be able to react in time. Now, Bendalloy could work, but that means but hours to you would be minutes. Bronze Twinborns would be great guards. Both able to notice allomantic pulses, plus store Wakefulness. Guard is on point.

[Oversleep]

Basically any performer would make a good use of Allomantic external mental metals.
Physical metals:
Allomantic tin for ninjas, Feruchemical tin for snipers. Both pewters for any sort of physical activities.
Allomantic iron for sailors (it has so many uses that I don't even). Feruchemical iron for traceurs (or free runners. I am not sure of terminology). Allomantic steel for couriers to use on train rails or spikeways.

Mental metals:
Feruchemical zinc is almost always useful.
Feruchemical brass for travelers - store heat while in hot regions and then tap it while going on the expedition to the North Pole.

Internal mental metals have no use except by interaction with other Allomancers, so any kind of police forces or special forces and criminals.
Feruchemical copper is useful to all scientists. Feruchemical bronze for students, store during holidays, tap to learn/party during semester. Feruchemical bronze is my favourite, to be honest. There are a ton of situations during the day when you can store and there are a ton of situations when being able to not sleep for three days straight with no drawback would be useful.

Temporal metals:

Feruchemical gold is useful for everyone, but more so for people whose job has some risk in it. Then when something bad happens they have gold to live through it.
Feruchemical electrum for all lazy people. Store it when you have nothing to do and tap it to counter your laziness when you have to do something (that would be very useful for me since I'm prone to procrastination).

Allomantic cadmium... I don't know, you missed your train/flight and the next one is in 17 hours? Go visit a Pulser. Also could be used to synch up when you have jet lag.

Feruchemical cadmium - situation similar to Allomantic pewter, you can do a lot of physical activity while always being properly oxidated. Also for people dealing with water to use in dire situations.
Allomantic bendalloy is very useful - ask Wayne. Being able to catch a break out of regular time vould be used in almost any situation. Running to catch a bus and you're out of breath? Burn bendalloy and recover for a moment and then resume running with fresh strength.
Feruchemical bendalloy for all the travelers and backpackers and who knows what else. Eat and drink a lot, then don't bother with carrying supplies.
 

Enhancement metals:

Don't know about Feruchemical applications.

Allomantic aluminum and duraluminum is useless.
Allomantic chromium - similar to copper and bronze, useful mostly against other Allomancers.
Allomantic nicrosil - useful only when cooperating with other Allomancers and also can be used similarly to chromium.

Should we change the topic to "Metalborn jobs"? Since Feruchemy also has a lot of potential.

[Irkutsk]

Cadmium bubbles slow down time for you, but make the world outside the bubble go by fast. A thief could dart in and out and you'd not be able to react in time. Now, Bendalloy could work, but that means but hours to you would be minutes. Bronze Twinborns would be great guards. Both able to notice allomantic pulses, plus store Wakefulness. Guard is on point.

If you park yourself in front of the only door with a cadmium-bubble up, they have no way to get inside without passing through your bubble.

Granted, it's more useful for the guard than the thing being guarded. I'm just trying to show that cadmium is good for something.

[KOOZ]

Allomantic chromium - security checkpoints e.g. nightclubs, airports.

 

Now, a tricky one, allomantic gold might actually be useful for psychologists - from the books, it seems gold highlights the most important decisions in one's life, thus if there are serious problems with a person, it might highlight alternative pathways which may allow for some insightful deductions. 

 

Allomantic bendalloy can be very useful in medicine and sports - any long-term serious injuries can be healed much faster. 

Also, speeding up harvests (a little) or brewing various drinks could be a possibility.

 

Allomantic cadmium could also be crucial in medicine - e.g. it can be used to spring a containment field and deliver supplies to folks who are seriously hurt and cannot afford transportation. 

 

Also, with allomantic electrum, I think the betting industry and any "guess the question and win money" shows will have a huge head-ache - even if you see only a couple of seconds in the future, it is easy to place online bets or see the correct answer in a show (phone a friend option would be perfect).

[Plaeggs]

 

Now, a tricky one, allomantic gold might actually be useful for psychologists - from the books, it seems gold highlights the most important decisions in one's life, thus if there are serious problems with a person, it might highlight alternative pathways which may allow for some insightful deductions. 

 

Do you mean Malatium? Gold is only for yourself. YOu wouldn't be able to see your patients' shadows.

[KOOZ]

Do you mean Malatium? Gold is only for yourself. YOu wouldn't be able to see your patients' shadows.

Ahhh, you're right, got too carried away with that one - was thinking of malatium application there. Gold only good for introspection of the lucky few that would have it. I guess if the patient if a gold misting/mistborn, this scenario could work. 

[natc]

If you park yourself in front of the only door with a cadmium-bubble up, they have no way to get inside without passing through your bubble.

Granted, it's more useful for the guard than the thing being guarded. I'm just trying to show that cadmium is good for something.

Then someone busts through the wall and takes off with the object

[Stormgate]

Electrum Feruchemy? Whichever one is determination. You spend a few weeks kinda emo, then you get a level of determination rivaled only by mother bears defending young. Unstoppable soldier, police officer, detective, really any job that requires a lot of effort on your part.

Either of the external physical metals/chromium and nicrosil for testing people in sporting events for metals (Hmm...what effect do steroids have on internal physical Allomancy?) While I'm sure they will have games that revolve around the use of Allomancy, similar to a game on Legend of Korra, there will doubtless be events where the Metallic Arts are forbidden, requiring careful detection for steel, iron, tin, pewter, electrum, bendalloy, and cadmium. Everything else is fairly useless for most events. Metalminds, with the possible exception of goldminds, would be forbidden.

I'm noticing how much we reference Legend of Korra. It actually does many aspects of what Sanderson is trying to do quite well. The Airbenders are actually quite similar to the Terris. Actually, it's weird how close they are to each other.

[natc]

You came across an abandoned electrummind and spike with a note addressed to the human who finds it.

Your predecessor's act of self-sacrificial kindness fills you with determination.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I think it's more that Korra did a good job covering what would happen in an industrial revolution with superpowers.

Edited February 9, 2016 by natc

[KOOZ]

Not to flog a dead horse, but... the uselessness of alomantic gold has been Kelsier-certified, and ars arcanum puts aluminium and duralumin mistings straight into gnat category - thus coming up with any useful applications for such mistings is a challenge.

 

Ultimately, I think gold mistings could find a use in our society - for instance, in research and advertising. Have you seen how many "before and after" ads there are (take common example - weight) - imagine people could say, aha, we have a magic means of verifying what the alternative could be. In that case, if people are extremely obese/have serious illness, etc, by trying a regimen/drug/treatment, they could be drastically changed and if there are any side effects, a gold misting can look and see what the alternative could be and testify to the difference. Of course, this can also lead to some rather dark places - e.g. extreme experimentation, etc, etc. Then the question is, does gold provide only a single instance of a significant choice, or there can be multiple ones (e.g. Rashek only had one major choice in terms of becoming or rejecting to be the Lord Ruler, what happened if he was alive for the second cycle and was very tempted to give up the power because he was bored/irritated/Ruined, but barely manages to hold on - what will gold show then?)? Also, how much info can you glean from your alternative self apart from physical appearance? Mental state? Memories? Etc. (There was this passage with Vin, but I feel it was not much explored overall.)

 

The gnats are more fun in that, by default, they are allomantically useless, for they need another metal to interact with. However, there could be a very impractical solution - if one of the mistings wanted to reduce his weight a little bit and very suddenly, he or she could stuff themselves with aluminium (yea, I think no more than 200-400 g/person) and then, puff, burn it. Ahem. Voila. The only scenario I can think of where it miiight be useful is in air balloons when everyone aboard burns their metals, but even then, this should be a tiny and rather useless change. Or solving the cliffhanger at the end of the Italian Job.

Can anybody think of a practical application to this sudden, by tiny, weight loss involving n number of people? Anyone?

[Kingsdaughter613]

Aluminum gnats are not useful on Scadrial - mostly. (I have a theory that attempting to spike an aluminum savant who is burning aluminum would cause the spike to malfunction.) once we hit era 3 though, all bets are off. Lashed by storm light? Burn aluminum. Someone is trying to use aons on you? Burn aluminum. Aluminum savants can dispell unwanted investiture, and aluminum itself is immune to it. Can you just picture Wax on Roshar with an aluminum gun? Double bonus for alomancy being fairly easy to transfer off world.

On a related note, chromium will also be useful in the space age. You can now upset investiture on all other shard worlds. Imagine using chromium on Nalthis... I wonder what would happen...

[Stormgate]

What would happen if someone burning aluminum was Pushed or Pulled by emotional Allomancy?

[Kingsdaughter613]

If it was an aluminum savant, they would probably not be effected. How one goes about becoming an aluminum savant is a better question, as burning aluminum destroys all the aluminum you have in you. It's definitely useful on Threnody, but the rest is extrapolation on my part. My guess is that someone who is burning aluminum cannot be DIRECTLY affected by outside investiture. Indirectly, is another story. Still, it would require a very good sense of timing... I would like to see an aluminum gnat as a main character in the space age Mistborn series.

As an aside, I wonder if a twinborn with alomantic duralumin could compound their feruchemy by using duralumin while tapping their metalmind.

[+hwiles]

Three words:

 

Cadmium investment banking.  (Cadmium costs around 1$ per pound!)

 

1.  Invest all money in guaranteed government bonds

2.  Jump 100 years forward burning cadmium

3.  Mourn your loved ones

4.  Profit

[KnightGradient]

There's one thing you guys are forgetting; feruchemical chromium. If you're a gambler, you'd probably have to hide the chromium in your ring or something, but its literally stored luck. If you do an job with a fair amount of luck involved, spend your time off storing it. You'll trip on your shoelaces and whatnot, but then you make bank.

[Oversleep]

There's one thing you guys are forgetting; feruchemical chromium. If you're a gambler, you'd probably have to hide the chromium in your ring or something, but its literally stored luck. If you do an job with a fair amount of luck involved, spend your time off storing it. You'll trip on your shoelaces and whatnot, but then you make bank.

I suspect that there may be Coinshots or Lurchers in casinos checking if people doesn't have metalminds on them...

[KidWayne]

As an account & auditor (not affiliated with the IRS), I'd find the following very helpful (as would any office worker that had to meet a lot of deadlines):

• F. Steel (stores speed) - to type, file, and sort really fast

• F. Zinc (stores mental speed) - to facilitate the physical speed, and to work through conceptually difficult things (like when I have to create a new process, program macros, write formulas for or preform complex circular calculations, do VB/XML coding, do financial statements for structurally complex companies, etc.)

• A. Iron (pulls nearby metal to you) - for when I can't find my keys, my phone, staple puller, ruler, stapler, or paper clips (or to be able to detect staples and paper clips before I try to scan or copy a stack of paper).

• F. Copper (stores memory) - for remembering rarely used but important information (tax regulations for trust accounts, obscure compliance regulations, accounting rules, higher level statistics - and the required calculus - for audit samples, etc.) and passing professional certification exams (e.g. CPA, CIA, CFA, et al).

• F. Bronze (stores wakefulness) - because I'm not a morning person

• F. Chromium (stores fortune) - for finding stuff in audits that people try to hide

• F. Duralumin (stores connection) - to establish trust in audit clients and co-workers (internal office politics) and dispel fear of auditors in general.

• A. Brass (soothes emotions) - same as F. Duralumin above.

• A. Zinc (riots emotions) - same as F. Duralumin above.

• A. Bronze & Copper (hides/detects allomancy) - to hide or detect allomancy (and possibly feruchemy) in co-workers or clients.

• F. Electrum (stores determination) - for meeting deadlines or dealing with stubborn people and staying focus when doing repetitive or boring tasks

• F. Cadmium (stores breath) - to enable a snarky response for the occasions when someone says, "don't hold your breath..."

BUT MOST OF ALL:

• A. Bendalloy (a.k.a. Cerrobend, speeds up time around the allomancer) - To get extra time to complete projects and or just to create some personal time following the long 10+ hour days. After all, time is money and if you can make more of one you get more of the other.

---

@ hwiles- You win this topic; that's the best idea ever. I have often had this thought when I imagine time travel, but I never put it together that a slider with a lot of metal could totally do this. Hell, you could do this with a regular old savings account and do pretty well, or you could pop in and out and make small speculative investments in newer tech and really amp up your gains. Brilliant!

The only problem with this is that it would probably only work once. When you filed your taxes and reported the realized gain on investment, the government (or the bank) would probably see that the basis/book value was unrealistic or way too old and catch on to what you did. Then there would be a law passed that either seized 100% of the return on investment after 70 years or froze the account at year 70 (in the real world, the government forces you to take mandatory withdrawals from your retirement savings accounts in the year that you reach age 70 & 1/2 (the minimum withdrawal for a given year is computed based on your total savings and your remaining life expectancy). That's after a fraud investigation determined that you are actually who you say you are and that you have a legitimate ability to be 100+ years old...

 

EDIT: Because double-posting is a no-no and I wanted to respond to hwiles. Sorry for the long post...

Edited February 12, 2016 by KidWayne

[+hwiles]

KidWayne:  Love the addition, you're almost certainly right that this would only work once, so let's make it count:

 

I left out some back-of-the-envelope calculations before-

 

Given:

• 1 nugget of bendalloy compresses 2 minutes into approximately 15 seconds according the the coppermind
• In BoM Wayne makes a bubble with a radius of 5ft
• We have WoBs that multiple overlapping bubbles multiply the temporal effects and cadmium bubbles exactly cancel out bendalloy bubbles
• Thus, cadmium slows time down for the user by roughly a factor of 8

Assumptions:

• Let's say 1 nugget of bendalloy is about 1 cubic centimeter (which seems pretty big to me) that should be about 8 grams
• I don't know how fast mistings use cadmium, let's just say it's the same rate as bendalloy for simplicity
• Thus bendalloy, and therefore cadmium, get burned at about 4 grams/minute (as felt by the user)
• If we have people squat on the ground closely packed they'll each take up something like 2 square feet
• For simplicity, let's say all Pulsers' bubbles are roughly the same size
• All Pulsers have $5,000 in liquid assets they're willing to put toward this cause
• Cadmium costs $2 per kilogram

 

Scenario:

A bunch of 18 year old pulsers sit tightly packed in a circle with a radius of 2.5ft, so if any one of them puts up a bubble all of the others will be in it.  They pool their money into a brokerage account, let's say that, long-term, they can expect something like 8% average annual return (which I think sounds reasonable?).  They realize they IRS will be coming after them once they're 70.5, so to avoid the worst legal problems they agree to stop time traveling after 52 years.

 

Calculations:

 

pi()*2.5² = 19.6 Let's call that 20 square feet of sitting space for our pulsers, giving us room for 10 of them

10^8 = 100,000,000

our pulsers can therefore slow time for themselves by a factor of a billion

525,600 minutes in a year * 52 years = rounds to 27,000,000 minutes they need to pass

27,000,000/100,000,000 = 0.27 minutes = 16 seconds

4 grams of cadmium /minute = 0.067 grams/second

Each pulser only needs about 1 grams of cadmium

 

So 10 pulsers pulsing together for 16 seconds jumps them 52 years into the future. Neat.  Now, how much money do they make?

 

Total = Starting capital * (1+ average yearly return) ^ years passed

Total = $50,000 * (1.08)^52 = $2,700,000 or $270,000 per person (before any taxes or fees of course)

Total expenses = $2/1000 grams * 1 gram = $0.02 (lol)

 

tldr:

*******************************************************************************************

10 pulsers crammed next to each other can jump 52 years forward by turning on their bubbles for about 16 seconds and make a lot of money.

*******************************************************************************************

 

Edit:  Embarrassingly bad math earlier, think it's fixed now, but again, these are back of the envelope calculations, so it's meant to be a little hand-wavy

Edited February 13, 2016 by hwiles