Tamriel Wolfsbaine

I think a lack of bullet time is good for zinc. We can only imagine and speculate on what it might or what it must feel like to think that fast. How do you comprehend the idea that there is a power that allows you to comprehend nearly instantly. Infact intuitive leaps is more what I would describe it as. The world is happening near real time but you process and time out there most accurate move in an instant. As a kid deciding you want to jump across the creek you don't have to sit down and math out the physics of the jump. You simply know that you need to jump moderately hard or that you need to jump really hard. I think that zinc is closer to that than bullet time. I can't imagine thinking at a speed fast enough for me to double my thought in the same time... if I am consciously thinking about two or three times the stuff it would be really really difficult to not hate life as I think I would feel painfully slow. Thus I prefer to think of it as intuitive leaps. You process so much faster and the subconscious filters through the the algorithms faster and faster. Thinking about if I were running through a critical situation with a patient and we are considering all of the signs and symptoms. I don't think that zinc would force me to go through all of the exact same thought processes if it did then I would be frozen in time to get a critical decision made in a few seconds. In fact, in critical situations the flow of time and experiencing the urgency of the situation is part of what allows us to make choices. I like to think of zinc as less of me running through the algorithm consciously and more of my subconscious processing power being ramped up so much that intuitive leaps are able to be had. I like it to be more akin to just knowing. Ken Jennings is the example Brandon gives and I don't think Ken Jennings ever had to think about what he knows or not. Its just there and his mind pulls it to the forefront in what seems like an instant. The same processing process is happening but his wiring lets it happen faster. Maybe I am the only person who thought of zinc like flipping through the file cabinet super fast... but I think now it is knowing where that file is kept without needing to flip through it. How does that make sense for storing and tapping? I honestly don't know. But I think the magic of supercomprehension and superprocessing is incomprehensible and unprocessable. I have never thought at double speed. But I have had experiences of just knowing. Although maybe that is coppers thing more than zincs. I also don't think zinc will allow a 6th grader to suddenly become a doctor. I think zinc allows a 6th grader to process what he has learned in an instant but I don't think it allows you to know things you never knew you never knew. How do I differentiate zinc and copper then? I think of copper more like a file cabinet. I think copper will always have those memories as you put them. Maybe if your memory is full it takes more.work for.the processor. Maybe not. Crazy little example of nothing... my wife has this friend who is 95 years old. She has never forgotten a number. She can tell you instantly the birthday of anyone she has ever heard. She can't tell you what color car you drive but remembers your car by the license plate... Is this more akin to zinc or to copper? I think she would love copper as a power because she is always complaining that she just doesn't want to remember anymore. She expresses that she wants to forget as remembering it all makes her tired. Don't get me started on my thoughts of chromium. I think that is the same thing. You just know what is right. So you do it and it works out.... likewise, when storing you still know what is right and it never works out. All similar outcomes through seperate means.

I think I may have not illustrated the idea very well... hence the importance of imagery. I am not looking to break physics. I am not looking to turn a guy who has never worked out a day in his life into a fighter like Kaladin, nor am I hoping to break physics more than awakening already does. I'm trying to use copper to create a false set of imagery in the form of someone who suddenly truly envisions themselves as doing those things and that allowing the awakening to do them. You example of watching hema at 1.25x speed is a much better illustration of what I have in mind than picturing someone with a cape that allows flight or anything. This is more along the lines of making psuedo awakened power suits. I know I spout off about different visualizations a bunch. This one is 2 long long ropes, spliced together in the center about the length of a persons torso making a long X, each rope wrapping around the awakeners limbs with some extra length (maybe a total of two or three times the reach of legs or arms). You could totally splice in other rope to fit in where your head would be and now you have checked off one of the boxes for good awakening. Something in roughly the shape of a human. Your imagery will allow each of the lengths of rope to act as a limb. I personally think that material choice is vital to functionality... a 1/4inch thick rope will work better at lifting and throwing things than a strand of dental floss. (1/4 inch hemp rope can hold 500+lbs). Now you wrap yourself in this rope harness and awaken it to fight like you or whatever... to give you strength or act as your hands. You have access to far more reach (seen by Vasher with his sleeves I believe). We know that when Vasher awakened some random clothes they fought for him effectively so why wouldn't this even if it was wrapped around you? Mostly my question was trying to use copper to get around being trained up in it. If you were any profession other than professional soldier but you could spend your nights watching some legit fighters and built up a portfolio of memories... then somehow altered your mind to believe that you did these things... then your visualization of how you want that power suit to work would leave you better off than if you were to awaken it to fight as you and you had spent your life in a non combat related profession. I dont think I would want to trust my life with this and no training at all either. But if the command protect me allows a cloak to snatch arrows out of the air... how long did Vivenna train for that? Did she visualize that very scenario? I dont think so. Something about the awakening process allows the object to work, so long as it is within the materials capability, better than the person would do... It seems to execute its mission flawlessly. I dont remember seeing an awakening that has taken hold fail to work while still whole. Thus if your visualization is that of the perfect fighter and warrior then wouldnt it perform that way? Not saying to enhance it beyond its physical capabilities as a material. I think that envisioning you being faster would probably work so long as the material can do that thing as well. I dont think that a piece of rope is ever going to really break the sound barrier unless specifically designed to do so... maybe whip shaped arms? But then you wont generate enough force to do anything with it. Even just having a rope to hold your weapon and act as your arm an extra 2 feet in front of you would honestly be pretty terrifying to face. Getting past that would not be easy. It would be even harder with no brain to work it. Back to the example of Vivenna's cloak catching an arrow mid flight. Could an attacker even feign their way into range against awakened clothing? Feigning works so well against humans because the reaction speed is limited by being human... Awakened objects dont seem to have that limitation. I know there are some humans who can catch arrows mid flight but Vivenna's cloak caught that arrow. A cloak awakened by a princess, not awakened by Taln or anything, it was awakened by a girl who had been with her powers for all of a couple chapters. The idea of the side kick to the knee or the jab to the face. The longest weapon against the closest target. Some truly direct attacks with double or triple length arms could be insane. No need to study grappling for this either... no one trains to grapple against living rope. This is just me trying to see if anyone else thinks copper compounding could allow a non-fighter to awaken objects as effective at fighting as Vasher. Almost like forging yourself to be a highly trained fighter and it working. Instead this is done through copper and tricking oneself to believe that they are a highly trained fighter before awakening their power suit.

I voted Lerasium simply because it does give a power. But even that is a side effect. The whole RAFO thing doesn't convince me either. Sure atium could be more powerful than lerasium but... If you put 2 pieces of metal in front of me and told me one would make me a mistborn as a side effect to what it really does, which we don't know, and was a part of Preservation... and the other was a part of Ruin and also had no knowledge of what it did and the potential side effects, well I'm going to choose the piece of metal that belonged to the shard of Preservation instead of Ruin. Sure it is a selfish choice, but I don't want to be turned into a monster or turned into a big pile of mush. What we know of God metals in allomancy and feruchemy is that we know almost nothing of God metals in allomancy and feruchemy haha. We have seen one grant the ability to become mistborn and heal a pretty gruesome wound. We have seen one that explodes everytime it gets wet. I just don't want to be the guinea pig to find out. I won't judge atium to the point of saying it doesn't have any potential but in this moment right now... I choose lerasium everytime. I know I will become a lerasium mistborn and that is more than enough for me. Knowledge is cool. But what if you burn that metal and get the answer to everything just as your body turns to Ruin and you perish? The shards intent is a pretty big deal I think and that is a risky risky move playing with the body of someone who wants to see everything destroyed. That is the biggest difference in the Scadrial and Roshar conflicts we have seen. Odium is a big bad and is spooky with his hate and such... but Ruin. Ruin didnt care about anything. His only desire was for Scadrial to be consumed and everyone on it. The apocalypse that Scadrial faced was a much different beast than the one Roshar faces and I think that says a lot about how much you can trust Ruins intent. His entire magic system is based around mutilating people until he can control them, then use them as puppets of destruction... and once they kill everything he would have most likely discarded them as well.

More shower thoughts of awakening and synergies. Copper feruchemy. I used to think that zinc was the better option for synergy with awakening as you might be able to think through a lot more of a command for visualization. But now I am leaning more towards copper. Mostly in this... Is it possible to day dream and store memories in copper. Visualization of being heroic and pulling off some amazing feats. Then... store the memory of you day dreaming. These heroic feats could become your reality. The commands involving "as my" leave a lot of room for flexibility in what awakened materials can do and copper Ferring's may have an edge in this. If copper compounding could make these fake visualizations more vivid and realistic then it would only be more potent. If you combined that with identity alteration it may prove even more potent, but for now I am mostly curious if a copper Ferring who has leaned into the ability to become the most pathological of liars ever... to the point where they have zero clue they are lying because they simply store all memories of creating these memories... Wouldn't they be able to craft up a set of lengthened limbs that fight for him better than he can fight himself? I know we don't know exactly what copper compounding does. In the MAG one of the stunts is referred to as "stitched memories" where you store multiple eye witness accounts of an event and then compound them to give a vivid and more accurate view of the scene. Obviously lies in this case could ruin the copper compounders vision but what if they were the ones telling the lies to themselves and were able to turn that into the visualization they use? Dream up and vividly describe an epic training sequence and a fight scene or two from a fighter... even one with false awakened ropes... then store all of those memories. Store your memories of making up those memories and then tap them or compound them into your mind while storing all memories of yourself compounding or tapping those memories. Now the memories exist in your mind as if they were real and you don't remember fabricating the entire lie. When you go to use that awakening command and have the perfect visualization your intent would not be plagued by any deceit or ill intent because you genuinely believe that these super vivid memories are of yourself doing these things. For a bonus, if a copper Ferring had great artistic abilities or described all of these things as happening from first person it would amplify that imagery even more.

Great ape is a great way of picturing the running style! I really don't know how much faster you could get going... I just assume that if you allowed the legs to move the same speed and doubled the stride length you would end up with roughly doubling the speed. As far as iron usages I mostly just mean to get into a rhythm of being two or three times heavier than you typically are as the ropes load up and then stop tapping any weight at all as you start the launch. Perhaps the air resistance would slow you some but I think the net result would be more acceleration than not. Perhaps the ability to move your limbs to give input to the awakened ropes would be more of a limiting factor if you move too quickly. But the freedom of being able to run over nearly all terrain as fast as the ropes can carry you with the added benefit of the awakened objects sparing your body while doing it seems like it could easily outshine and outclass the stride and speed of other arts. I don't know that it would be able to completely compete with something like plate in strength... but in terms of mobility and maneuverability it could be pretty dangerous. Add on the added benefit of doubling or tripling reach when fighting seems pretty great to me. Awakening is limited by the imagination. The more people start to think differently and adopt commands closer to what Vasher was using in the "act as my..." I think that it could make for some of the most bonkers looking tactics.

I was thinking about that a bit too. Picturing the balance that may or may not be needed to make this work. I think for long distance traveling it may even be more beneficial to adopt more of a 4 limbed run. It would probably look really doofy but I think the mobility and flexibility of rope limbs could really allow you to move pretty well. If combining powers and someone were to acquire a form of F-iron do you think that being heavier with longer limbs would be more beneficial or being lighter? I guess if the ropes are strong enough you could really get a stride going if you time being heavier with each kick and then storing quickly after to use the idea of preservation of momentum to your advantage.

So I was totally nerding out with a shower thought this morning about those sweet jumping stilts and my brain got onto the "how would this work with awakening" thought. Those stilts are heavy, ridged and bulky. But what if ropes were to replace them? A few of Vasher's commands that we see on screen involve lengthening his limbs and having the cloth / ropes act as extensions of natural movements. If you had ropes wrapped around your legs that you could some how command to give strength and lengthen out based on your effort input how could this work? Say you start sprinting and the ropes start to lengthen a bit more each step. Could you end up with a stride 2-3x or even more the length of your typical stride? Would this increase your typical ground speed by an equal amount? Being ropes and awakened I don't think they need to remain perfectly ridged like stilts. They could likely act as a new joint entirely and lengthen the stride disproportionately from the new length of the legs. But if this combined with your natural sprinting form and not suffer the limitations of the real life jumping stilts I feel like it could probably create the fastest non ferring sprinter in the cosmere. To elevate the thought further, the ropes could be split into longer finger like lengths to allow for sprinting and gliding over nearly any surface. You could sprint through the trees and if you extended this same idea and thought to ropes on your arms as well you could be swinging and sprinting through thick cover or scaling mountain hikes at breakneck speed. That said I think there would be other limiting factors. How well would the awakener handle the inertia of high maneuverability at double or triple normal speeds? Perhaps awakening your clothing to tighten and brace you you could replicate the flight suit mechanics that fighter jet pilots use to keep the blood flowing right.

I am a huge fan of the slow fall imagery of F iron but I don't enjoy flying mechanics. I am trying to think of other slow fall mechanic possibilities and was curious of you think it would be possible for an edgedancer or dustbringer to use abrasion to increase the friction on their skin or clothes enough to cause a slow fall sort of effect. Perhaps it would be painful? But they have stormlight to autoheal through any real damage. In the same realm... can they reduce the friction to almost nothing... could you make enough of an impact with no friction possible to die from a fall or could they hit the ground and slide away slowly letting up and slowing themselves down?

Am I a bad guy thinking OB was the worst 45 hours of my life? There were glimpses of greatness in it but overall it was way too slow for my liking and I never felt like anyone was in danger... ever. Now BoM is a great book and the train scenes were some of my favorite in all of the cosmere. The amount of character building we saw and the introduction to primer cubes were some of my all time favorites. All that said my answer is still Warbreaker. For any literary issues it may have... that world fascinated me. The magic is my favorite in the cosmere, mainly for portability of the breaths and the possibility of it working in tandem with other systems in the future. Seeing the Returned die at the end was also a point in the basket for it. It just isn't fun reading about people who can heal through everything. The danger was always real in Warbreaker and I don't feel that in other cosmere books. Make no mistake I am so attached to my characters that I can't help but try to fit F gold into every build... but to read the stories healing on the level we see in the cosmere just makes fightscenes fall flat. Even Miles vs Wax... when Miles gets shot in the face and it heals back before it can even get messy is a cool moment in a scene but the rest of the scene loses so much of its potential as you quickly realize that Wax will never get hit or killed and despite landing every shot he takes Miles will simply never die. Fun in theory as you meet the unstoppable force vs the immovable object but other than an excuse to fill 5 pages with cool new ideas on how to use steel it falls flat when neither character is in danger.

So perhaps the most terrifying item to loadout with would be a needle and thread tucked into the pocket of your awakened clothing with the command to stitch them back together when cut. Even as your enemies are cutting down your awakened army the flanking, repaired cloth soldiers would eventually be put back together. Like a really slow version of F gold for your awakened constructs haha. On a more serious note... I think that more than even trying ropes together is to unwrap a bit of them! If the rope is 3 smaller lengths spliced or wrapped together and you tied some sort of stopping point for them to unravel about a foot or so up your length of rope you could include in your visualization them unwrapping themselves and using those lengths as 3 long finger to even further ensnare your enemies. If you get those dexterous enough your awakened rope could end up doing serious work for you... wrap up a heavy rock and turn themselves into loaded monkey fists or be delicate enough to handle precision jobs with longer fingers... you could even work this command and fashion your length of rope with multiple tiers of fingers... each finger can split into fingers etc. A large piece of rope might be able to open itself into small enough strands to become a lock picking tool as well. The potential for one rope to be able to carry in all the groceries, act as a key and open up the door to your home all at once... Honestly... awakened constructs could be the most hideous looking scraps of randomness ever and still be the most functional. Who needs robots when you could braid and wrap thick ropes into a rough human shape with the ability to transform and unravel their arms and hands to do whatever you need.

I don't know the answer to that one. If awakened objects work off of some sort sense of their own similar to life sense or other invested senses i think that the visualization for a blind person could work in a way... The "act as my legs" should work for that visualization even if a blind person doesn't know what legs look like. Perhaps blind people would not be limited with awakening commands involving the way they move and "see" themselves moving. I also imagine an awakener with access to other enhanced senses would be able to include those, in a way, to their awakening. We already know that there are awakened objects that can detect movement to the point of catching shots at the back. I don't know the exact mechanism for how the objects see but there is obviously something going on there that makes their ability to sense the world around them acute and accurate enough to catch fast moving projectiles... how many people can catch an arrow out of thin air? I always liked the idea of Awakening something with a command to grant the ability to sense the world in the way that awakened objects can. A blindfold that grants a sort of 6th sense that is 360 degrees and can pick up on all movement would be awesome! Possibly even worth giving up real sight for temporarily.

I agree with @Treamayne that the skill and practice of the awakener is important. Likely the ability to visualize how well you want something to work is a large limiting factor. I think that is a large part of why Vasher has developed and chosen to use so many commands including the idea "as mine". Whether they be additions to his arms or his legs or even his whole body at once... It is far easier to nail down the visualization of something that you already do all the time. Although this idea makes me wonder if someone with TV who binge watches a ton of bruce lee could command a jumpsuit to act and fight like Bruce Lee... Which leads to the potential of giving further super powers to awakened objects as visual effects get better in cosmere wide cinema haha. Mistborn spoiler: I also think that material can only do what material can do. Dont expect a cord with 100lb tensile strength to hurl 200 lb boulders. Thankfully we have cordage that really really stacks in weight. Further, imagine future awakeners who hit the 9th heightening and the damage they could do with a set of extra long doc ock arms made of steel cable. I think the amount of breaths plays the smallest roll in this. The breaths will naturally balance out the materials ability to make your visualization come to life.

Well the specification of 1 breath makes this difficult to say. I don't know that there is any command that allows cloth to do anything with a single breath only. We see Zahel use awakening to fight Kaladin and Kaladin does use Syl to cut the cloths. He says they are still wriggling around on the floor post cut. So certainly not all of the breath is lost. I imagine that you would lose some of the breath with each strike. Similarly to metalminds being able to withstand an amount of hits before being destroyed as well. How much? I don't know that we will ever get the numbers. But Brandon suggests that they are... however, he writes all of the action scenes before calculating the amount of stormlight or breaths or metals that are needed to make them suspenseful.

I didn't think about potentially forging. Can you forge a human who was soulcast into metal to "never have been soulcast" and then turn them lifeless with 1 breath and have it stick the next day? How does forging work in that regard? Would anything that happens while it is in its forged state be lost when it reverts? If you had a broken leg and attempted to forge yourself back before the broken leg and while in that state you tapped a bunch of gold... would your leg be healed when your forging wears off or would you go back to having a broken leg and simply wasted the stored health of a gold mind? So basically the breaths act as the muscle and connective tissue holding the mass together and giving it mobility. As @alder24 has pointed out in the past armor wearing lifeless may be better than the phantoms because they have the muscle mass and connective tissue to power themselves and wear the armor. Bones can't move on their own they need breath to give them mobility. However, I am curious if breath could be infused into the lifeless in a way to keep it retrievable to allow them the strength to move around faster and be stronger in a suit of heavy heavy armor... Perhaps having cloth and or rope... or even leather holding joints of a suit of armor together being awakened to give it strength would do this better... Having breath be retrievable is a big deal when thinking about a pet class archetype.... which I really view the awakener as being. Buffing themselves at a higher cost but able to bring forth a bunch of pets and items that, when used together, would really dominate the action economy of a scene.

Thanks guys. I forgot those WoBs exact phrasing. I guess the best bet is still to just coat the lifeless in wax... have them move around a bit to figure out the joints needed, and then soulcast the wax into near seamless armor.