Another Kandra with a medallion thought

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

I read some thoughts on Kandra and healing with Feruchemical gold.  I was under the impression that bones weren't a part of the kandra and they couldn't use it.  

If they can forge some sort of strong identity or connection to a set of bones enough to use Feruchemical gold what is stopping a Kandra from using the same strong identity or connection to a true body and using something like Feruchemical iron to allow them to carry around a ludicrously heavy set of truebody bones?

Edited April 30, 2023 by Tamriel Wolfsbaine

[Underwater_Worldhopper]

In short, they could. They could probably do it without any extra help by just digesting more mass and applying it as muscles, but if they wanted to be discrete about it, they could totally use F-Iron. Really the main hurdle becomes getting bones that don't have prior connections, so something like a True Body, because we can reasonably say that as it stands now, a Kandra could probably use their Self-Perception hack to consider their bones to be a part of them, enough to be affected by F-Gold

[alder24]

6 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

If they can forge some sort of strong identity or connection to a set of bones enough to use Feruchemical gold what is stopping a Kandra from using the same strong identity or connection to a true body and using something like Feruchemical iron to allow them to carry around a ludicrously heavy set of truebody bones?

Ok, they can, but I fail to see the reason why? Why would Kandra want to have ludicrously heavy bones?

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

Ok, they can, but I fail to see the reason why? Why would Kandra want to have ludicrously heavy bones?

For the most dumb of reasons.  

A kandra who embraces copper... fully.  

Blessing of presence which is copper.  Then they obtain the ability to compound it as well.  

Super brains and perfect memories.  

Why stop there?  Make a true body that is entirely copper and fill it to the brim with storage to make a nice anti investiture being.  The bones could block shardblades due to densely packed metalminds as well as being a coppercloud being able to do funny things to others who would want to attack the kandra with investiture. 

Copper weighs a lot.  Without hurting their own mobility I imagine some materials for truebodies would need to lightened up. 

There are other options to give similar effects and they would honestly take a lot less time and effort but your kandra wouldn't be fully on the copper theme anymore.  

A kandra with no access to lerasium or other spikes could still gain access to feruchemical metals that we have seen as medallions. 

I figure a world hopping kandra would gain a ton of benefit from medallions with iron, copper, brass, duralumin and any other power possible.  I imagine a kandra really wouldn't have to worry about the >3 powers at once thing as they could internally store the medallions and switch a connection to them back and forth at will. 

A skeleton of mostly aluminum would grant the anti investiture bit and block the shardblades.  And if aluminum happens to have a small aoe to it the aluminum could protect the other metals. 

I won't lie so much of this thought process came from me seeing cumai blades and the fact that they can make copper damascus.  I am sure that with the same techniques they could potentially make a truebody where every bone is made of some sweet damascus pattern filled with relevant metals to the medallions said kandra has obtained while the bulk of the material is aluminum.  

No matter what metals are used. Metal truebodies would be heavy heavy. Given iron is a common one in the medallion world it would only be a large benefit if a kandra could store the weight of their truebody.  

Perhaps that would be easier if their body was all metalminds with their own identity present.  But we see aluminum doing weird things to all investiture and perhaps it wouldn't be able to be stored anyways.

I am skeptical on this idea.  

Just as I am skeptical about the gold being able to heal bones.  

Would Feruchemical gold repair bent and broken metal bones? Would it piece back together shattered crystal bones?  Or is that a hack for only actual bone?  Can a kandra cause old bones to once again function and start reproducing blood cells?  

[alder24]

4 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

A kandra who embraces copper... fully.  

Why copper? From all metals you chose copper? And you want to compound it? There are literally 15 more useful metals for Kandra than copper, because the Blessing of Presence already gives them incredible memory.

And the Blessing of Presence is copper spikes but they don't give him A-copper or any other metallic ability! It's just a Blessing. He would need another, different spike, separate from copper to grant this (a bronze spike). Plus another spike that grants copper feruchemy (brass), and another one to give iron feruchemy (pewter). In total, 5 spikes. That's of course using standard ways of acquiring powers, which for now is the only one they know, which might not work like for humans, but lets assume it would work for Kandra the same way (no Trellium).

Medallions are more restrictive than normal Feruchemy, and they have an identity of their own. I wouldn't be surprised at all if you can't compound with medallions in the current form. If in Hemalurgy identity prevents compounding, than medallions with self-identity should also prevent this.

Spoiler

Calderis

Does the nicrosil portion of the medallions function identitically to how a Soulbearer Ferring would use Nicrosil? 

Brandon Sanderson

Not exactly. The medallion is a little more restrictive, for one thing.

Skyward Pre-Release AMA (Oct. 31, 2018)

 

21 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

No matter what metals are used. Metal truebodies would be heavy heavy. Given iron is a common one in the medallion world it would only be a large benefit if a kandra could store the weight of their truebody.  

90 kg for a fully copper human skeleton. Heavy.

25 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Just as I am skeptical about the gold being able to heal bones.  

Would Feruchemical gold repair bent and broken metal bones? Would it piece back together shattered crystal bones?  Or is that a hack for only actual bone?  Can a kandra cause old bones to once again function and start reproducing blood cells? 

It might not be possible for Kandra to heal bones. F-gold is storing health, your body's health. Kandra's body can't produce bones. hair or carapace. They have to take it from somewhere else. This means that their body has no health to store regarding bones/hair, and might not be able to heal those parts even if they have the right self-perception. Kandra are limited by what their body can naturally produce.

But on the other hand, if a human can heal into a Parshendi, full with carapace and gemheart, despite the fact that the human body can't produce those things, then why can't Kandra heal their bones with the right self-perception?

[Underwater_Worldhopper]

26 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Just as I am skeptical about the gold being able to heskeptical  

Would Feruchemical gold repair bent and broken metal bones? Would it piece back together shattered crystal bones?  Or is that a hack for only actual bone?

SA Spoliers, RoW

Spoiler

It should be able to, yes. It all comes down to Self-Perception. In SA, Kaladin's Slave Brands don't come off with Stormlight healing because he feels he deserves them for failing to protect the people that died under his leadership. Except they do come off, when he says the Fourth Ideal of the Windrunners, which forces him to accept that there will always be those he can't save, no matter how hard he tries, whereupon the Slave Brands evaporate off his forehead. In the same way, if a Kandra views their metal bones as a true part of them, and there are no prior Connections or Identity issues muddling things up, they should be able fix their True Body bones, be they crystal or metal or anything else. There is the lingering Identity of the metal itself (Kind of like how all things resist Soulcasting to a degree since they have base perceptions about themselves and their purposes) but this would likely be overpowered by the Kandra's own Identity provided they apply their Self-Perception correctly and for a long period of time.

 

2 hours ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Can a kandra cause old bones to once again function and start reproducing blood cells?  

Probably not. It's a sort of weird inversion, where inorganic bones would be easy to manipulate with Healing since they have no previous Identity or Connections, whereas any actual bones the Kandra would be using would necessarily have both. Animal bones could be an exception since animals have simpler Spiritwebs and thus less Connections and Identity, but even then, there's the problem of the bones being dead before they're used by the Kandra and the DNA of the bones conflicting with that of the Kandra

[Underwater_Worldhopper]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

It might not be possible for Kandra to heal bones. F-gold is storing health, your body's health. Kandra's body can't produce bones. hair or carapace. They have to take it from somewhere else. This means that their body has no health to store regarding bones/hair, and might not be able to heal those parts even if they have the right self-perception. Kandra are limited by what their body can naturally produce.

Gold Healing isn't necessary limited to what you put in, is it? I assume a Bloodmaker Kandra could use an Unkeyed Goldmind prepared by a human just as well as a human Bloodmaker. Wayne stores health by going around sick as though by the flu, but then uses that health to heal bullet wounds, which are a totally different kind of injury, but it still works

[alder24]

36 minutes ago, Underwater_Worldhopper said:

Gold Healing isn't necessary limited to what you put in, is it? I assume a Bloodmaker Kandra could use an Unkeyed Goldmind prepared by a human just as well as a human Bloodmaker. Wayne stores health by going around sick as though by the flu, but then uses that health to heal bullet wounds, which are a totally different kind of injury, but it still works

In this case I was talking about what a body can naturally do. Human body can fix a bullet wound, grow a tissue or patch a bone - you're storing general health, which is later used to fasten natural processes of your body to heal all wounds. But Kandra's body can't grow a bone, so no matter of healing - there are no natural mechanisms in their body that grow a bone, their body just can't grow bone nor metal nor crystal. But of course, my next paragraph was refuting this idea.