Regenerating Shardplate

[Yellow Cremling]

Here's the scenario:

A Shardbearer falls on the battlefield. His plate is so beat up that only two reasonable-sized pieces remain. For the sake of this question, let's say they're identical. Two gauntlets, perhaps. Two people come up, see the Plate, take the gauntlets and go away. Each then tries to regenerate the Plate from their gauntlet. Do you create two sets of Plate? Does some spren randomly choose one of the gauntlets to favor?

[Calderis]

It becomes a battle. When a Plate regenerates from a fragment, any existing pieces of the plate elsewhere crumble away. 

If two people were attempting this, it would end up being stupidly expensive and one person would have nothing to show for it. 

Edit: relevant section from tWoK after the Tower. 

Quote

He flexed his left hand as he rode; it was now encased by a blue-painted Shardplate gauntlet borrowed from Adolin. It would take days to regrow Dalinar’s own gauntlet. Longer, if the Parshendi tried to grow a full suit from the one he had left. They would fail, so long as Dalinar’s armorers fed Stormlight to his suit. The abandoned gauntlet would degrade and crumble to dust, a new one growing for Dalinar.

 

Edited September 2, 2018 by Calderis

[CrazyRioter]

There's probably lots of other factors involved like which starts soonest, or who feeds the Plate the most stormlight the fastest. I doubt you could get two sets of Plate out of it.

[Weltall]

Yeah, all the evidence is that assuming equal quantities of Stormlight being fed to the fragments, the largest wins. This should work in reverse, so as long as one person feeds more stormlight to an equally sized piece, they'll get priority and will eventually regenerate the full suit. Under some kind of crazy laboratory condition where equal quantities of Stormlight are provided to equally sized pieces at an equal rate, my guess is that you'd flip a coin to see which one regenerated.

Possible support for this, though it's not certain given that we don't know how Shardplate functions yet: Brandon has said that someone perfectly bisected with access to sufficiently powerful healing would have their soul randomly jump to one half or the other and heal from there.