I'm confused by Lerasium

[Merrickz]

Q1) When you burn a Lerasium + Metal Alloy it creates a misting. Why not just purify the bead to pure Lerasium and make a full Mistborn?

Q2) Does the size of the Lerasium bead denote how strong they will be e.g. 5g Bead creates a Mistborn and 10g Bead creates a Mistborn twice as powerful?

Q3) If you are a misting and burn a Lerasium + Metal Alloy do you gain a second power or can you not burn the metal?

If anyone has any answers or theories or even just wild speculation it would be much appreciated, this has been bugging me for a while. 

[Oversleep]

1 hour ago, Merrickz said:

Q1) When you burn a Lerasium + Metal Alloy it creates a misting. Why not just purify the bead to pure Lerasium and make a full Mistborn?

It's probably possible to separate lerasium from the alloy.

1 hour ago, Merrickz said:

Q2) Does the size of the Lerasium bead denote how strong they will be e.g. 5g Bead creates a Mistborn and 10g Bead creates a Mistborn twice as powerful?

Yes. If you burn more lerasium you become more powerful.

1 hour ago, Merrickz said:

Q3) If you are a misting and burn a Lerasium + Metal Alloy do you gain a second power or can you not burn the metal?

You gain a second power.

[+hwiles]

1. Lerasium appears to permanently increase your Connection to Preservation (Harmony); there are realmatic consequences to this that, in some cases (possibly Hoid's), could be very negative. It's speculated that using Lerasium to gain access to 1 or several individual powers would increase your Connection less than getting all of them. Plus, you could theoretically make yourself a hyper-powered multi-power misting, which could be better in some cases than a super-powered mistborn; this depends heacily on what lerasium's alloying ratios are though, which are unknown. If the steel-lerasium alloy is 99% steel, then you could use 1g of lerasium to make 100 1g steel-granting beads.

2. What @Oversleep said.

3. See 2.

[Yata]

I will answer only to the 1) as the others already covered greatly the other two:

- FIrst of all, yeah pure Lerasium seems a better investiment than his alloys but it's ok after all the effects don't have (and they arean't) balanced.

- Secondly, if there could be differences in Mistborn's Allomancy and Mistborn's Allomancy that could make the first one better than a second one in some specific contexts (I made a topic about the Safety of both some time ago, for example)

- Third, as Hwiles said, with a set amount of Lerasium you could give you the power of a Lerasium Mistborn or make an alloy who will give a stronger Misting power with the same amount of amount of Lerasium avaliable (for example, imagine to take a Lerasium bead and turn it into a Brass-Lerasium alloy. You will gain a Soother power far beyond Elend one. Maybe a TLR's level...quite cool).

-Fourth, you could managing better little amount of Lerasium. With a single bead you could turn a guy into a Lerasium Mistborn, guy guy into regular Mistborn, but maybe craft 4 Misting....again in some context it could be better.

Regard the point 3 and 4, I think an alloy have a good amount of the base metal in it (for example Steel is 55 iron/25 carbon, Electrum is 45 gold/55 Silver and Durallumin is 96% Alluminium) so you could not really go too further than "from an X amount of Lerasium I could get 2X amount of Lerasium alloy"