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Where are the Nicrobursts in Era 2?


robardin

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@Isilel There is in-text evidence of Seekers being a part of the police force, this is in Bilming, TLM ch 28.

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Wax gestured into the room with the others, and Death walked past the stunned constables, though one—bearing the shoulder patch of a Seeker—managed to pull out a gun.

There is a Chip, a coinshot constable in SoS ch 19:

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“Well, the mansion seems a good enough center from which to operate,” Aradel said. “Chip, you and the messengers run to the other constables general and ask them to meet me at the governor’s mansion with their officers. We’ll coordinate the city lockdown from there. Everyone else, let’s double-time it that way. If His Grace wants to talk to the people, I want a nice thick barrier of police bodies between him and his constituents, understand?”

The group bustled into motion, the bell ringers setting out in front, the messengers scattering—one even taking to the skies; Chip was one of the Coinshots. The rest of the constables fell into a march. An uneven one—they weren’t soldiers—but no less resolute.

he wasn't one of the contractors as those were dismissed earlier, ch 15:

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Aradel stood with one booted foot up on the short wall around the rooftop as he took the reports. Mist curled around each Coinshot in a distinct vortex; it responded to the use of Allomancy. Finally, Aradel dismissed the two. They weren’t true constables—more contractors. Their loyalties would be to their houses. Or in some cases to their pocketbooks.

As they left—jumping off the building—the constable-general turned to the waiting lieutenants. “Get the men ready to clear out the pubs,” he said softly.

I'm quite sure Metalborn were present in a police force, just they didn't mention them that often, as our main heroes were needed to be useful, not police.

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Thanks for the exhaustive research! I have completely missed these references - though to be fair, they are very much "blink and you miss it", rather than an organic part of the worldbuilding and narrative.

MHO

13 hours ago, alder24 said:

I'm quite sure Metalborn were present in a police force, just they didn't mention them that often, as our main heroes were needed to be useful, not police.

 

This is where I fundamentally disagree. If nearly everybody else on their side has to be stupid and useless, or just always conveniently absent when things go down, for the heroes to shine, it weakens the story and the characters for me. IMHO, if police/security Metalborn had been present where it made sense and displayed basic competence, but it  just wasn't enough for these new challenges, it would have better showcased the skill and heroism of the protagonists than them just always being the only powered non-criminal  people on the scene and therefore the only ones capable of dealing with powered opposition by default. This "comic superhero" approach also leads to said challenges being very obviously and artificially constructed around the main characters capabilities. For instance, all adversaries in the Second Era "kinda forgot" that Tin Metalborn and Seekers are superior lookouts and intruder detectors, so that the heroes could sneak around their secret facilities unhindered.

Oh and returning to the Nicrobursts, it occurred to me that the pair of Set's emotional allomancers in SoS shouldn't have been able to affect a crowd of thousands. IIRC Breeze needed teams of allomancers working under him for something like that back in Era 1. So, maybe there should have been a Nicroburst sitting with them in that carriage.

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1 hour ago, Isilel said:

Thanks for the exhaustive research!

I'm not sure if that's sarcasm or honesty :P I've done no research, I've just stumbled across those 2 when searching for quotes for some other topic. Plus I think there was a leecher mention in this topic earlier.

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

This is where I fundamentally disagree. If nearly everybody else on their side has to be stupid and useless, or just always conveniently absent when things go down, for the heroes to shine, it weakens the story and the characters for me. IMHO, if police/security Metalborn had been present where it made sense and displayed basic competence, but it  just wasn't enough for these new challenges, it would have better showcased the skill and heroism of the protagonists than them just always being the only powered non-criminal  people on the scene and therefore the only ones capable of dealing with powered opposition by default. This "comic superhero" approach also leads to said challenges being very obviously and artificially constructed around the main characters capabilities.

Your point is addressed in books. Police force in the city is severely understaffed, not ready to deal with problems of the magnitude like Vanishers. As Marasi stated in AoL, there are only 600 officers in their octant, which gives you 4800 officers for a city of 5 million. In comparison, London has a population of 9 million people, and the London police force has 35000 police officers. That's just incomparable to Elendel. For another comparison, London's population in 1890 was 5.5 mil, the police force at that time had 14000 officers, almost 3.5 times more than Elendel with almost the same population. Elendel police force is stretched to its limits, severely understaffed. And then keep in mind that many of those 600 officers are working in offices, by their desk, not on the field, you also have day and night shifts. That leaves even less officers present on streets at any given moment. Elendel city is 6 km in radius (more if you count docks and area outside of the last circular road), that's the area of 113 km2, 14 km2 per octant. Each octant has hundreds of small and narrow streets, tall buildings and only 200 officers per shift to patrol all of that. 

That was the whole point of AoL. Police are incapable of dealing with Vanishers and other organized crime networks, that Wax can't abandon his duty and focus on his family, that the city needs him, Harmony needs him. Police have to be incapable of dealing with Metalborn criminals because of how limited in numbers they were. And there is more than one crime happening in the city at any given time, many officers are already engaged in their own pursuit, their own investigations etc. 

Among barely 5000 officers, there would be only a few Metalborns, dozens at best. All of them would be already assigned to other, pressing duties, or their private investigations. Elendel police has no team for dealing with Metalborn criminals, because they’d never met an organized crime network working like Vanishers or Set, with so many Metalborns among their ranks. That was THE point of the story, of how unprepare the police force was to deal with them. That's why Wax was needed, because he has irreplaceable experience of dealing with Metalborn criminals in Roughs, something that the current police force is just lacking.

 

AoL ch 4

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“Let’s say six per three thousand,” she said. “Gives us an easy number to work with. One lawman per five hundred people.”
“What is the point of this?” Lord Harms asked sufferingly.
The population of our octant is around six hundred thousand,” she explained. “By the same ratio Lord Ladrian described, we should have roughly twelve hundred constables. But we don’t. It’s somewhere closer to six hundred, last I looked over the numbers. So, Lord Ladrian, your ‘savage’ wildlands actually had double the number of lawmen watching over it as we have here in the city.”
“Huh,” he said. Odd information for a young woman of means to have.
“I’m not trying to diminish your accomplishments,” she said quickly. “You more likely had a higher percentage of lawbreakers as well, since the reputation of the Roughs draws that type. But I think it’s a matter of perception. As you said, out of the city, people expect to get away with their crimes.
“Here, they are more circumspect—and many of the crimes are smaller in scope. Instead of the bank getting robbed, you get a dozen people being robbed on their way home at night. The nature of the urban environment makes it easier to hide if you keep your crimes below a certain level of visibility. But I wouldn’t say life is really safer in the city, despite what people think.
“I’ll bet more people are murdered here, by percentage of the population, than out in the Roughs. There is so much more going on in the City, however, that people pay less attention to it. By contrast, when a man is murdered in a small town, it’s a very disruptive event—even if it’s the only murder that’s happened in years.
“And all of this isn’t even counting the fact that much of the wealth in the world is concentrated in a few places inside the city. Wealth draws men looking for opportunity. There are a whole host of reasons why the City is more dangerous than the Roughs. It’s just that we pretend that it isn’t.”

 

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

For instance, all adversaries in the Second Era "kinda forgot" that Tin Metalborn and Seekers are superior lookouts and intruder detectors, so that the heroes could sneak around their secret facilities unhindered.

You have a valid point here. 

2 hours ago, Isilel said:

Oh and returning to the Nicrobursts, it occurred to me that the pair of Set's emotional allomancers in SoS shouldn't have been able to affect a crowd of thousands. IIRC Breeze needed teams of allomancers working under him for something like that back in Era 1. So, maybe there should have been a Nicroburst sitting with them in that carriage.

That can be the case or not. Crowd mentality, just control emotions of a small portion of the crowd and rest will feel it and act in a similar way. The whole city was already angry, boiling with emotions, there was very little needed to push them over, just drop a small pebble to kickstart an avalanche.

SoS ch 25:

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A pudgy woman sat on the bench within, wearing a lavish gown of three silken layers. A man beside her sat with a hand on her wrist, his eyes closed, his suit very stylish and modern. The handgun Marasi leveled at them was, on the other hand, quite traditional. And quite functional.
The woman blinked, breaking her concentration to regard Marasi with a look of horror. She nudged the man, who opened his eyes, startled. One Soother and one Rioter, Marasi would guess.

But that can be true, there were only 2 people inside the carriage holding each other. The woman was confirmed to be a Soother, rioting emotions as for now was not observed. However nicrosil works like duralumin, one powerful burst of Allomancy, in this case it was felt as a constant soothing of their emotions, not a powerful burst. Those were likely just Soother and Rioter affecting only a small portion of the crowd, that would pull the rest of the mob with their emotions and actions.

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