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Double mistings


Bean

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In the mistborn books it is explicitly stated (though sometimes that doesn't mean as much as you would think) that an allomancer (without hemalurgy) can be able to burn 1 metal, or all of them. While they may be wrong i'm inclined to believe them for the most part on this point. It seems unlikely that after 1300 years, if a person could be born and be able to burn EXACTLY 2 metal, nobody would have been.

 

But that only addresses the issue of genetically acquired allomancy. Lerasium can be alloyed with metals then used to create mistings. If someone consumed lerasium/iron then lerasium/steel I see no reason they shouldn't be able to burn both metals. Brandon has said (I think) that you don't technically burn lerasium and that anyone can use it.

 

Wild Conjecture Time!!!

 

If true, this might be useful. If one bead of lerasium is enough preservation to grant all allomantic powers in one go, it makes sense that it might be possible with the same amount of lerasium to grant all allomantic powers one at a time. You just make 16 lerasium alloys and take them then you are a mistborn. BAM.

 

Wait a second... Why did I want to be able to burn aluminum? I don't want that. Cadmium? It could be ok, but I would rather make my friend here a thug to watch my back.

 

In short since you may not really want all of the powers pick and choose, then by some friends with allomancy. It worked for the lord ruler.

 

Magic system hacked.

 

Of course since Hoid has the last remaining bead there currently is and Sazed seems unlikely to cough any up it's more or less a moot point.

 

It's interesting sometimes to think of how we might have been lied to by these books. how much of what they tell us is correct and how much is misconceptions held in world?

Edited by Bean
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I've always wanted to know what Hoid is up to with that bead. If it is true that an alloy of lerasium and whatever metal can make a person a misting, how much lerasium is required? A certain percentage of the metal? What about weight? would .1g of lerasium give the same potency as .5g or 1g of lerasium in a mistling?

How much lerasium exactly is 1 bead? How much does it weigh? (anybody ever ask Brandon that?)

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The question is, is lerasium induced allomancy an additive or an overwrite?  I am inclined to think of it as an overwrite.  Thus, if I were to burn the appropriate pewter-lerasium alloy, BOOM, I'm a thug. Now I burn the tin-lerasium alloy, BOOM, I'm a tineye not a tin and pewter allomancer.

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The MAG (I know I know, reliability etc) treats it the way Shardlet is suggesting. I do not know if that is because Brandon told them it worked that way or if they just made it that way for the game.

 

Kadrok and I and a few others had a discussion about this and other lerasium stuff and savants over on the crafty boards a while back.

http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/index.php?topic=7467.0

 

The stunt and advancements related stuff is obviously MAG specific and not relevant but some of the rest is.

 

Personally, while it is somewhat dissapointing, I think that burning any type of lerasium overwrites the allomancy related part of your sDNA, so burning a lerasium-tin alloy after burning full lerasium might be a truly terrible idea.

 

Edit: adjustment to the last thing I said in this post. I think that it is only the case when lerasium is alloyed with a metal that you cannot burn, this would apply to full lerasium turning people into mistborn too.

Edited by lord Claincy Ffnord
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Possibly shardlet. The reason I am not of that school of thought is that Lerasium is in fact part of preservation. therefore everytime you consume lerasium you gain more preservation. So if the second alloy overwrites the first completely with no power increase, did you not gain more of preservations power? We have WoB that becoming a Lerasium Savant is essentially ascension. To me this means that with every bit of preservation you consume your spiritweb is more and more attuned to that power and you get stronger.

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Possibly shardlet. The reason I am not of that school of thought is that Lerasium is in fact part of preservation. therefore everytime you consume lerasium you gain more preservation. So if the second alloy overwrites the first completely with no power increase, did you not gain more of preservations power? We have WoB that becoming a Lerasium Savant is essentially ascension. To me this means that with every bit of preservation you consume your spiritweb is more and more attuned to that power and you get stronger.

I think becoming a Lerasium savant as such is more related to the main effect that can be gained from lerasium not the sDNA modifying side effect. You can still get whatever the real power of lerasium is through multiple burnings. Being a side effect there is no reason that the sDNA rewriting has any need to be additive.

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Possibly shardlet. The reason I am not of that school of thought is that Lerasium is in fact part of preservation. therefore everytime you consume lerasium you gain more preservation. So if the second alloy overwrites the first completely with no power increase, did you not gain more of preservations power? We have WoB that becoming a Lerasium Savant is essentially ascension. To me this means that with every bit of preservation you consume your spiritweb is more and more attuned to that power and you get stronger.

 

Not necessarily. Maybe the re-write itself costs energy, so the extra "power" you get goes to eliminating the first power so it can give you the second. Perhaps a second burn is significantly less efficient than the first, explaining why you get reduced efficacy from multiple burns.

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Personally, while it is somewhat dissapointing, I think that burning any type of lerasium overwrites the allomancy related part of your sDNA, so burning a lerasium-tin alloy after burning full lerasium might be a truly terrible idea.

Sems like the perfect way to get rid of an Mistborn woud be to fed them a Lerasium-Aluminium alloy, or it woud be if Lerasium was somewhat more common.

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Sems like the perfect way to get rid of an Mistborn woud be to fed them a Lerasium-Aluminium alloy, or it woud be if Lerasium was somewhat more common.

I'm inclined to think that in the case of a Mistborn, it either does nothing to their powers (though still functions with Lerasium's mysterious primary function), or it increases the part of their powers that make up the non-Lerasium part of the alloy (so in your example, the Mistborn remains a Mistborn, but burns Aluminium better...)

 

In fact, I wrote a lengthy post on just this topic earlier today on our MAG board (hence the references to stunts and power rating), including Brandon references:

 

 

I can't see how burning Lerasium, which has the effect of rewriting your spirit web to increase your connection to Preservation would eliminate a bunch of your powers. I'm going to drop some annotations here:

 

"Preservation’s touch on people differs. Some have more, some have less. This doesn’t make them better or worse people—indeed, some most touched by Preservation have been among the worst people in the world. As Ruin later points out, there is a difference between being evil and being destructive.

Regardless, if a person can get more Preservation into them, they become better Allomancers. Hence Elend becoming a Mistborn. Like all people, he had the potential within him—it was just too small of a potential to be awakened through normal means. That little jolt of Preservation’s body, however, expanded and awakened his Allomancy.

As a tidbit, that was a side effect of what that bead of metal did. It wasn’t the main purpose of the bead, and if another Allomancer were to burn it, it would do something else. "

Source: http://brandonsanderson.com/annotation- ... rty-eight/

A Mistborn burning a Lerasium alloy and losing most of his power seems inconsistent with this description of what Lerasium does. You could argue that the power is equivalent, just more focused, but I plainly think this is wrong as I will illustrate with this example:

Barry the Mistborn specializes in Pewter and Tin, and has managed to develop both his strength and skill in those metals to an incredible level (He's at a rating 7 in both metals with several stunts). He learns of a seemingly magical metal, which is said to increase one's connection to the very source of Allomancy, and is offered an Alloy of this metal which will focus the connection in a very particular way. After much deliberation he decides on Pewter, thinking it will be easy enough to increase his strength with Tin on his own (thanks to Tin's lower burn rate). He burns a Pewter-Lerasium alloy. Something is wrong! His powers have all gone, except Pewter! And it is only marginally stronger (as per the Lerasium rules, it increases to 8 and he gains two stunts). Barry cries out, "I was told this metal would increase my connection! You've lied to me!"

I think Barry's conclusion is quite reasonable. Gaining 1 rank and 2 stunts is not equivalent to having access to every other metal, especially not at the cost of the 3 extra ranks and stunts in another metal. Nor would a gain of 3 ranks and 2 stunts if he were a base Mistborn. After all, given enough time Barry could have presumably gained that rank and those stunts on his own. Having a Lerasium alloy act in this way seems to result in a loss, which makes the essence of Lerasium, when alloyed and used in Preservation's system, seem more like something you'd expect to emanate from Ruin.

For this reason, I hold the position that a Mistborn burning a Lerasium alloy would gain in power without their other powers being wiped away.

Since then I have become more inclined to agree with Claincy that the alloy would do something different for an Allomancer, much as Brandon suggested when he said: "As a tidbit, that was a side effect of what that bead of metal did. It wasn’t the main purpose of the bead, and if another Allomancer were to burn it, it would do something else."

 

"Stop quoting yourself Kadrok, no one thinks it's cool."

-Serneau Wardwick

Edited by Kadrok
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I'm inclined to think that in the case of a Mistborn, it either does nothing to their powers (though still functions with Lerasium's mysterious primary function), or it increases the part of their powers that make up the non-Lerasium part of the alloy (so in your example, the Mistborn remains a Mistborn, but burns Aluminium better...)

 

The underlying premise of your idea is that the system must remain perfectly efficient, and every burn has to be a sheer advantage for you, a premise I don't think is supported.

 

Even though you say "increasing one trait once isn't worth the rest", you don't know that, because you don't know how much energy it takes. Perhaps using a lerasium alloy and re-writing your sDNA to increase Pewter requires so much energy due to inefficiency, so remarkably more than just the base energy required to increase a stat on its own, that at the end you are, technically, closer to Preservation.

 

I'm also slightly confused... are you suggesting that this is what you think happens in the actual books, or are you arguing for what would happen in the game?

 

I look at the phrase, "re-writes your spiritual DNA". It's a bit of metal powered by a mindless God. I think asking it to look at your current sDNA and make decisions to incorporate what it finds there to ensure optimization is something that would require intelligence behind it, intelligence we know is busy elsewhere.

 

If you've got a CD with an executable file designed to re-write parts of your computer to make it faster, but there are parts it would re-write that you want to keep, you can't expect the CD on its own to figure that out. Now, it's been implied that this is only the default use of Lerasium; hypothetically, if you got good at burning the lerasium-pewter alloy, you'd be able to use your own intelligence to take control of the process and refine how it works, so in theory you're correct, this is entirely possible. I just don't think you can make the case that it's the automatic, default option.

 

In conclusion. Leras programmed lerasium to format the entire part of your spiritweb responsible for allomancy, and then build one specific pattern in its place. The alloys are known (suspected?) to adjust this process with sixteen other specific builds. In theory, if you get good at buring lerasium or its alloys, you should be able to figure out how to take control of the program and build your spiritweb itself, but you don't do so by default, any more than people can naturally modulate their Ironpulls as well as you can after years of practice.

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Darnam, you believe that lerasium, the power of preservation itself, destroys part of your spiritweb then replaces it. I can see why you are saying that. Your CD analogy is well thought out and reasonable. I understand that you feel that there doesn't need to be a gain in burning lerasium. 

 

I disagree. Here is why:

 

1) The Intent of the power of preservation itself would, I think, prevent this from happening. This seems weak I know, but in overwriting it destroys part of your spiritweb then replaces it.

 

2) You state that the reason there might not be net gain is that part of the power is used to over write other power.

Not necessarily. Maybe the re-write itself costs energy, so the extra "power" you get goes to eliminating the first power so it can give you the second. Perhaps a second burn is significantly less efficient than the first, explaining why you get reduced efficacy from multiple burns.

Even ignoring intent, why would preservation's power get rid of preservation's power? It doesn't seem reasonable.

 

3) Probably the greatest reason, Brandon Sanderson is the one who makes the rules and I don't think he would nerf lerasium. He built it up to this amazing substance, then made it so rare that can't become overpowered. No way he would nerf it.

 

In short I appreciate the reasoned arguments you've made, while completely disagreeing with every one.

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1) The Intent of the power of preservation itself would, I think, prevent this from happening. This seems weak I know, but in overwriting it destroys part of your spiritweb then replaces it.

 

2) You state that the reason there might not be net gain is that part of the power is used to over write other power.

Even ignoring intent, why would preservation's power get rid of preservation's power? It doesn't seem reasonable.

 

3) Probably the greatest reason, Brandon Sanderson is the one who makes the rules and I don't think he would nerf lerasium. He built it up to this amazing substance, then made it so rare that can't become overpowered. No way he would nerf it.

 

In short I appreciate the reasoned arguments you've made, while completely disagreeing with every one.

 

For both 1 and 2: Allomantic aluminum. It destroys the physical metal itself, and the catalyst inside which would start an Investiture. Thus we've got precedent that there's something in Allomancy, Preservation's own system, that does destroy things and does run counter to the power of Preservation.

 

3: You're ascribing Intents to the author and I don't think you have the authority to. I personally believe he's a good enough author to realize that weaknesses make anything (heroes, powers, worlds) more interesting. Not to mention, lerasium isn't nerfed just because it's difficult. By my reasoning, it is possible to use lerasium to do all the things everyone thinks it can, you just have to know what you're doing. I'm saying that what you all want would require there to be an active intelligence behind the power, which is a thing Mr. Sanderson has already "nerfed" when Preservation sacrificed his mind to trap Ruin. Preservation set up things to help humans (like lerasium, like the mists) but we saw from the mists they run on default instructions; they don't have complicated heuristics to deal with changing circumstances, and so they strike down the elderly, the young and the infirm, killing how many thousands of people. Which again, to reference you first two points, doesn't "sound" like something of Preservation, proving the point that Intents aren't absolute standards, they're simply very strong guidelines.

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1) The Intent of the power of preservation itself would, I think, prevent this from happening. This seems weak I know, but in overwriting it destroys part of your spiritweb then replaces it.

I would look at it more as taking what is there and arranging it to fit a specific pattern. I don't view it as actually destroying or creating anything, just reshaping it.

 

@Darnam,

Just a note on the mists. To my memory Ruin strengthened the mists back in Alendi's time, making them far more dangerous and forming the threat of the deepness. I would guess that he strengthened them again in the Hero of Ages period and that without that it would very rarely have caused any deaths. On the flipside it would probably also have snapped fewer allomancers. I could be wrong here, but I *think* Preservation was a little more careful when he set up the mists, he just didn't count on Ruin's influence.

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Ruin did strengthen the mists, but I always thought that all he did was make them stay longer during the day. The people the mists snapped needed to be hit hard in order to snap and so some would die from how hard it was. No way around it. I could be wrong on this though.

 

On the multiple larasium/alloy burnings I think I'm right. You are correct that I am going into this with very little to back me up. But I think I'll stick to my guns till we get WoB. 

 

Tell you what, if I'm wrong I'll eat your hat Darnam. Kurk, if you would bookmark this. Hey this makes you pretty much an obligator Kurk! That's pretty much what they did right?

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Tell you what, if I'm wrong I'll eat your hat Darnam. Kurk, if you would bookmark this. Hey this makes you pretty much an obligator Kurk! That's pretty much what they did right?

 

You're right, actually...  :huh:

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Ruin did strengthen the mists, but I always thought that all he did was make them stay longer during the day. The people the mists snapped needed to be hit hard in order to snap and so some would die from how hard it was. No way around it. I could be wrong on this though.

 

On the multiple larasium/alloy burnings I think I'm right. You are correct that I am going into this with very little to back me up. But I think I'll stick to my guns till we get WoB. 

 

Tell you what, if I'm wrong I'll eat your hat Darnam. Kurk, if you would bookmark this. Hey this makes you pretty much an obligator Kurk! That's pretty much what they did right?

I figured that he definitely made them stay longer in the day, blocking the sunlight and preventing crops from growing etc. I know it has to be rough for them to snap, it was kind of the whole point ;) All the same I am unsure that preservation initially planned for the mists not to be as commonly lethal as they are during the time of hero of ages. Perhaps partly just due to not targeting those who would likely not survive the ordeal. It is possible that the casualties were always going to be the case and it was just a compromise Preservation made, but I don't know that preservation would have been capable of that by that stage.

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Well Darnam, you have me convinced.

I would really like to see a way to awaken your "paired" metal. So many of them feel incomplete, while full on mistborn is just overkill. Tin/pewter, iron/steel, cadmium/bendalloy timelords, chromium/nicrosil wreaking havoc, aluminum/duralumin reaching ironic heights of uselessness...

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1) The Intent of the power of preservation itself would, I think, prevent this from happening. This seems weak I know, but in overwriting it destroys part of your spiritweb then replaces it.

 

Your first reason seems fundamentally flawed to me.  Any change to your sDNA is not preserving you, it is changing you.  Preservation's intent in it's purest form is stasis.  No progression, no retrogression.  

 

Here is a quote of interest for this topic at large:

 

 

 

17th Shard: If a Mistborn burnlerasium, as in, not just ingests it, what effect would it grant Allomantically?

Brandon: That is a RAFO. It would do something, but the thing you've gotta remember is that, when ingesting lerasium for the first time and gaining the powers, your body is actually burning it. Think of lerasium as a metal anyone can burn. Does that make sense?

17th Shard: It does.

Brandon: By burning it you gain access to those powers. It rewrites your spiritual DNA, and there are ways to do really cool things with lerasiumthat I don't see how anyone would know. Were most Mistborn to just burn it, it would rewrite their genetic code to increase their power as an Allomancer.

 

The key thing about this quote I want to point out  is that 1) we are talking about a default burn (like Elend's burn); and, 2) In the last line, Brandon says, "Were most Mistborn to just burn it..." (emphasis added).  This suggests to me that there is a cap to allomantic strength and that Lerasium brings you to that cap (evidenced by the term 'most').  

 

The term rewrite suggests strongly to me that it is out with the old and in with the new.

 

Now, none of that takes into account intent.  I would suggest that what Bean suggests is not necessarily outside of the realm of possibility, but I would need some evidence before I got on board.

 

Edit: since we are all speaking from memory on the mists, I'm pretty sure that Brandon indicated that the mists reverted to a default programming state which caused them to start snapping people and coming out longer and longer.  The longer the mists are out, the harder it is for people to stay out of them.  Also, the mists were snapping people who had not been through sufficient trauma in life to snap them as well as those with deeper buried allomantic potential.  The deaths were largely among the very old, the very young, and those who were ill.  In other words, the weakest and least likely to survive a thrashing.

Edited by Shardlet
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Edit: since we are all speaking from memory on the mists, I'm pretty sure that Brandon indicated that the mists reverted to a default programming state which caused them to start snapping people and coming out longer and longer.  The longer the mists are out, the harder it is for people to stay out of them.  Also, the mists were snapping people who had not been through sufficient trauma in life to snap them as well as those with deeper buried allomantic potential.  The deaths were largely among the very old, the very young, and those who were ill.  In other words, the weakest and least likely to survive a thrashing.

 

I don't think anyone was disputing or even questioning the point about who died when the mists struck. The question was: "When Preservation initially set up the mists did they attack people like that who were unlikely to survive it as much as they do in HoA".

 

Preservation would definitely be aware that this would happen if he had set it up as it is in Hero of Ages in the beginning. He would have to be a fool not to, but did he just consider the people who would die from that collateral damage? That doesn't seem to fit that well given that he was mentally incapable of even attacking ruin with the intent to destroy. I'm not saying it isn't possible that the strengths and targets of the mists attacks are exactly the same as preservation made them, but it wouldn't surprise me if Ruin had strengthened them in that regard to make them seem more threatening.

 

I think we can safely say that Ruin did cause the mists to come later and later in the day. I strongly disagree that the mists staying out later and later was done by preservation, or if it was then there was a limit beyond which this would not occur, simply because if the mists continued to stay later it would eventually effectively wipe almost all life from the planet. Preservation would not and in fact could not do that.

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I would like to say we are all assuming the consumer of the lerasium knows as much as we do. What if they know how to manipulate lerasium to rewrite his spiritweb in a different way than the default setting.

Then it's possible that lerasium does have a "re-write your own spiritweb however you'd like" option, or that he'd know that lerasium still can't give anyone two powers. Just because we know it can do more than we realize doesn't mean it can do literally anything; perhaps there's something fundamental to a spiritweb that means a stable construction of any two powers is simply impossible.

My nephew has some legos, and he's not terribly good at building stuff with them. I'm much better than he is and I can build taller buildings, more complicated structures, because I know what I'm doing. I still can't make a piece hover in the air without support, because however skilled I am, there are still things that are impossible.

That said, we've seen that hemalurgy can break the rules. So it's possible, plausible even, just far from a guarantee.

I'm personally gonna say no. I think that after a thousand years, if it were possible, a few genetic mutations would have made the occasional double-misting, and it never once did. To me, that says impossible, but I'll admit that's simply a feeling.

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Brandon did imply that Lerasium could be used for other things if the user knows what they are doing. I've always thought this meant  consuming the lerasium in a specific way or preparing it somehow to change what it does.

 

 

...perhaps there's something fundamental to a spiritweb that means a stable construction of any two powers is simply impossible.

I like how you phrased that.

 

 

 

 

I'm personally gonna say no. I think that after a thousand years, if it were possible, a few genetic mutations would have made the occasional double-misting, and it never once did. To me, that says impossible, but I'll admit that's simply a feeling.

The original thought on the thread was that it would require a specific effort to gain exactly 2 powers. You used the example of hemalurgy. This shows people making a effort to gain specific powers. That's all I'm trying here. I agree it would probably never happen naturally, but through a conscious effort and with an understanding of allomancy/realmatics/the mind of Brandon surpassing any of ours, I believe it could happen. Someone should ask this at a signing. Can we put this on the list?

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